Back on Track

So I got my computer back on Monday, only to find that the promised backup of all my data that was to have been done before the nitwits at Furture Shop reformatted and reinstalled everything on my computer wasn't done.

What limited bakcups I had did not cover everything I had, and it looked as though I had lost all my photos, two novels and everything I've ever written for CONFRONT Magazine. Needless to say I wasn't impressed.

It took me complaining to two different managers and telling customers coming to the repair counter at Future Shop to take their computers elsewhere - and why - before they agreed to do anything to help me.

Finally after an hour-long pissing contest with the idiots in charge of computer repairs at Future Shop before they finally acquiesced and did a data recovery - for free, and in under two hours - of the files I lost.

I recovered everything, thank God.

So, moving on.

This week I finished writing the seventh chapter of the third book of The Omniverse, 'The Aeons War' and last night I hit a wall while trying to start chapter eight. Well, I hit a couple of walls. I don't like the flow of chapter six (which relates directly to chapter eight) so I'll be going back and giving it a rewrite before going forward with chapter eight.

However, 'Aeons War' has been taking most of my writing attention of late, and I am trying to get another e-book out before the end of the ear, namely 'Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind'. So, I'm going to take a break from one to work on the other. I've discovered I've got a little bit of a rewrite to do on certain chapters of 'Nevermind', and so I'm going to start working on that for a while.

What about 'Through Darkness and Stars', you ask? I know a lot of you have read 'The Unearthing' and are anxious for the follow-up. As I've said, I am waiting on some legal work related to The Omniverse and specifically to 'Darkness' to work through; once it's done, I will be launching 'Darkness'. However, before the end of the month I promise to release a preview chapter or two, which you will be able to link to from the link bar on the left.

That's it for now--right now I've got places to go, things to see and people to do, so I'll post again soon.

My Vault in Limbo

Limbo is neither a graveyard nor a gaol. It is a place of waiting. In Christian myth, Limbo is where the souls of the unbaptized babies go. Tainted by Original Sin, the sin of desiring knowledge of Good and Evil, yet innocent of actual transgression, these creatures are not pure enough to enter God’s presence, nor tainted enough to be exiled in Hell.

Where am I going with this, you may wonder.

I believe Limbo, as described above perfectly describes the condition of all the stories, either lost or incomplete, from all the storytellers, poets, bards, minstrels, writers and dreamers of the world. Each storyteller has a vault there, where we each keep our own lost and abandoned tales.

Throughout our lives we continue to fill this vault. Sometimes, we withdraw stories from within, bring them to life anew or reinvent them. More often than not, we consign stories to this place, and leave them here.

But I don’t believe anyone ever forgets a story that they send here.

Whenever I send a project here, I take the time to go through the inventory of my vault in Limbo. Everything I ever wrote is here. The high flying adventures of Captain Jock Stone and the crew of his best friend’s spaceship; the story of mutated children of a government experiment escaping and evolving into something else; the man who steals a time machine in an attempt to change his destiny; the tortured, unromantic life of street-urchin vampires. They were among the first residents of my vault. They came here in the decade between my thirteenth and twenty-third birthdays, and more and more have joined their ranks in the decade and a half since.

Three and a half years of poor sales have seen my publishers decide to pull “The Unearthing” from production. That means that the other four volumes of the story, “Through Darkness and Stars”, “The Aeons War”, “The Destroyer of Worlds” and “Artifacts of Forgotten Gods” have been shipped there, as well.

I was certain that the “Nevermind” screenplay would soon be counted among the residents of this vault. I was so convinced, in fact, that I had begun my grim tour of its contents. Several weeks had passed, during which time I heard nothing from the filmmaker to whom “Nevermind” was to have been optioned. Like so much of my work since I was laid off from my old job in 2006, I found that the project was running out of steam: self-doubt eclipsed my ability to write; anxiety and worry usurped my imagination. I couldn’t maintain my writing.

Likewise, my work with CONFRONT Magazine and my ongoing work with Anglo rights groups in Quebec began taking up more and more of my free time. I wasn’t sleeping properly (no surprise there) and I was continually exhausted at and by my job.

Since 2006, several projects have gone into my vault: a fiction piece about the events leading up to and the aftermath of a school shooting; a retelling of the Frankenstein’s Monster story; the constantly-promised revival of “Crossroads”, which keeps rolling over and going back into hibernation after every unsuccessful attempt to revive it; a story about a daughter who seduces her father, just to see if she can; a “ghost ship” story set in space; a military coup d’etat in the United States; a spy story about a plot to bankrupt Cuba, and several others that never made it past page One.

Never in my life have I gone through the kind of creative agony that I faced from 2006 to 2008. Five months in, I have to admit that 2009 hasn’t been much easier. I had plans to publish two novels; I was supposed to have had one or both of them ready to go, by now. Unfortunately, “Through Darkness and Stars” is on indefinite hold (though I hope to revive it as an ebook) and “Nevermind” got side-tracked into the aforementioned screenplay project.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

However, this past week I heard back from my filmmaker partner-to-be. We have settled on a draft agreement for the option to produce “Nevermind”, and I am back at work on the project, crafting a beat sheet while continuing to peck away at the screenplay. I’m still keeping a light load with CONFRONT so I can concentrate on the script, and if things go well, I’ll hopefully be done with it before the fall.

I will continue to post my regular, if intermittent, updates to this weblog, Twitter and elsewhere. Best thing would be for you, readers, to subscribe to the RSS feed; that’s your best tool, I think, to keep track of those updates.

Until next time!

The long awaited update on everything, well almost.

So, this was to have been a very busy weekend for me, originally. Certainly, it was to have been a better one.

CONFRONT Magazine was supposed to have a staff meeting / house party, hosted by Angel and me. I would have gone to the Cafe for a day, as usual, to work on and hopefully finish the second act of the screenplay adaptation of Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind. I was also supposed to finish going over the option agreement and draft up a list of my proposed conditions, and I was supposed to finish transcribing my interview recordings with Empire Isis, for CONFRONT Magazine, as well.

Yeah, none of that happened.

At some point in the last seven days, I got infected with a particularly nasty strain of the flu. Since Thursday I've been sick, with Friday and Saturday being particularly hellish. I'm still sick, still not feeling well, still need at least another day's bedrest, but tomorrow I've got to be back at work, at the paying job.

The problem with the paying job right now, is that I'm STILL the only fucking person there who has full knowledge of the general operations software now running our sales and sales finance departments. For the last three months I've come in no matter what, because there's never been time to train anyone else (Christ knows why no one else was trained when I was--that was a colossal error in judgment). Now in all that time, I've thrown my back out three times and alternately I've been progressively sick, sicker and sickest. Still, I've dragged myself in to work. The one time I tried to show initiative and advance the training myself, I was reprimanded for "acting unilaterally". I stayed home one day the last time I was sick and spent most of the day asleep--except for the two times people had to call me because they couldn't figure anything out despite the detailed instructions I had written months ago, as a precaution.

But, I digress.

I've not managed to get anything done this weekend other than cough, sneeze, blow my noze hack up scary looking shit, freeze, be too warm, sleep fitfully and pop cold tablets that did sweet fuck all. The one time I did manage to try and focus on getting work done, I was in too much pain to maintain.

And tomorrow I'm supposed to go in to work?

I need sleep.

More soon...

Report to the Reader(s)

So, I should have written this update a week ago, but I've been busy. I'm putting all other projects on hold right now, you see, in order to concentrate on adapting Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind for the screen.

I'm talking with someone about the screenplay...hopefully about to settle the contractual details. As soon as I've something to present, I'll be looking for someone to start hyping the project up (and helping me wade through the various Canadian and Quebec grant applications, and the like. It is my intention to help see the movie made.

Everyone knows I'm a huge sci-fi geek at heart, and to be honest that is what I would like to ultimately do: see a Genre story of mine up on the screen. Not necessarily "The Unearthing"; in fact I'd rather see an entirely different Genre project of mine put onscreen.

I've been having marathon writing sessions at the Cafe, and trying to squeeze in writing every night. Tonight's the first time this week I'm not going to at least scratch out a few lines before bed. I've wanted to update the weblog for quite some time! The only reason I'm managing to get to it now is because I know damn well that tomorrow I'll be gone writing.

However, last week I killed myself wiping out on ice and sluge on Metro stairs. In the process I really, really sprained my ankle...and threw my back out. So, going to work and commuting by bus and metro, most of the time as a Human sardine, I've been in all kinds of pain. Well, I started taking something new for my back (and as I refuse to endorse a pharmaceutical I will not name any brand or chemical name) and that helped almost immediately. Sadly, my ankle, which had had little attention paid to it all week because of my back, has decided to make up for lost time. I'm hobbling.

But the screenplay, in spit of the adversity attending its birth, is coming along well!

Work: The REAL enemy of productivity

So for the last few weeks I have been working on stuff for CONFRONT Magazine, most notably a piece on the Andy Warhol Live exhibit, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. That involved a lot of my writing time, and required multiple trips to the museum. However, I'm quite pleased with the end result of my labours, which will be going live on Thursday at CONFRONT Magazine.

Also this week, I have been listening to the new Guns & Roses album, also for CONFRONT, for this week's Views and Reviews column. I am a fan of G&R, but I have to say that the latest CD is a letdown. Of course, you'll just have to go to CONFRONT on Thursday to find out my full opinion.

Alas, my work for CONFRONT hasn't been the only drain on my free writing time of late. Last weekend I had a corporate retreat to go to, and though I had one hell of a good time, I did not get my weekly fix of Cagibi lattes and excellent writing atmosphere.

These events have conspired against me to stall my creative efforts, though I can honestly say that sometimes nothing is more important than getting out from behind the desk and getting back to living life. However, it means that my rewrite of Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind and my work on the tentatively-titled Length of Love have been stalled.

All this is especially frustrating, because I had wanted to be done with Nevermind before the end of the year (Which is looking less and less likely) so that I could start shopping it around to agents and publishers in early 2009. Douglas Adams once said he loved the wooshing sound deadlines made as they zipped by. I imagine I should take that concept to heart, but still. It's been four years since I finished the initial draft of Nevermind and I hate how much time has slipped past from that first writing to now.

Equally frustrating, I've been stalled with Length of Love. Granted, I've not had much to say about the project, but that's because it is still in its first draft stage, and the subject matter is bound to be so controversial that I don't want to share with others until I've gotten the initial writing done. That's me suffering for my writing idiosyncracies I suppose.

I would also like to send up another flare about beta readers. I am still looking for people who would be interested in reading the final revision of The Darkness and the Stars, which is the follow-up to The Unearthing. As I've said previously, I'm looking as much for the opinions of readers as I am the opinions of my fellow writers. The story takes place 18 months after the close of The Unearthing, and is not so much a sequel as it is the continuation of the story. If anyone is interested, please email me or post a reply to this entry. The only requirement is having read The Unearthing already. As it is available as a free PDF format ebook from this and many other sites, I don't think I'm asking for too much--plus, you get to read not one, but two books free of charge.

Anyway, I'm off to get shut-eye. I still have to get up for the paying job in a few.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Questionable Content and Other Sundry Notions

So one of the biggest productivity-killers I've encountered of late has been the amusing and endearing webcomic, Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques. It's a wonderful ongoing comedy about twentysomethings in college, hanging out, having coffee, listening to hipster music and contemplating life, sex, love and pop culture. The website is here, but if you're new to the comic, you should probably start reading from the beginning, here.

I guess what I like best about this story is that it reminds me in many respects of Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind, my own novel about twentysomething lovelorns growing up and hanging out. I think Jacques nails the sentimentality and the poignancy better than I did, however, and I really think his work deserves to be read. Please check it out; I think you'll enjoy!

***

On to other topics, this weekend I completed the third rewrite of The Darkness and the Stars, which is the follow-up volume to The Unearthing. I am currently recruiting beta readers to go over the "finished" story and let me know their thoughts. For fans of The Unearthing, this is your chance to read the next part of the story before anyone else; it is also an opportunity to provide feedback to the author, and possibly help shape the final version of the novel.

I am also looking for beta-readers for another project some of you may be familiar with, called Crossroads. The latter story is technically "finished", having debuted eight years ago on the Jumpgate web portal. However, I feel it needs a bit of polish. It has proven beyond my capacity to see where to tweak it, so I'm offering it up for book-doctoring. I know it needs some work, I just don't know where.

If you're interested in helping with either project, you can either reply to this post or email me. Don't be concerned if you're not a writer; what's more important is that you be a reader. It is a reader's opinion I need.

***

Also in the "ME" news, I will be going back over Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind as my next project. Following the suggestions of one of it's beta readers, I will be doing the final revision of that story by starting with the last chapter and working backwards. Likely, Nevermind will be the next story I submit for publication. I'll be shortly in the market for an agent/publicist to help with that.

Well, that's it for this post. Glad to be writing about writing again...I'm sick of that beady-eyed fat fuck Stephen Harper. God help us, we have at least another two years of his shit to live through.

First Round of Updates Done

As you may have noticed, the first round of updates to the look of this weblog are done. There are new links, outdated links are gone, the site has been retooled somewhat, and I've added a list of blogs I read and things from the Internet Tubes that I like.

I will, eventually, be migrating my "Chronicles of an Independent Author" to its own blog, and cross-posting from there to here, as I do want the Kspace Universe to remain my primary weblog.

I'm still open to any suggestions you may have on ways to improve this weblog further; links you'd like to see, features you'd enjoy seeing, questions, comments, observations...anything.

I'm still writing; I peg away a couple of pages a day during my lunch hour on my current new project, I spend the weekends dithering with "The Darkness And The Stars", the forthcoming follow-up to "The Unearthing". Likewise, "Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind" is insisting that I start to pay attention to it, and "Crossroads" is going to [eventually] return from the dead, no pun intended...

I'm not one to write about works-in-progress, and I'm not here to talk at you about proper writing technique, seven ways to improve your grammar, the importance of character development or how to write an effective, exciting and erotic sex scene. I'm of the opinion that one either can or cannot write well, and the focus of this weblog has always been a chronicle of the things I am trying to get my work read by as many people as possible, with the eventual goal of maybe making more than a buck or two while doing it.

Unfortunately, that does leave for some lag time between posts, and then a burst of several posts in a short period of time before another large lag. Those of you who have borne with me so far, thank you. Those of you new to the process, feel free to browse the archives; the Chronicles of an Independent Author are there to be read, so feel free to do so.

Also, in the interests of value-added blogging, please feel free to suggest content or content ideas. What can I bring to you, dear reader, to make your experience more enjoyable?

Everyone who suggests something will get a free copy of The Unearthing ebook.

Weblog Retooling...

I'm beginning to plot out a reorganization of this weblog's layout. I'm hoping that, sometime this weekend or next, I will have completed this concept map, and will then implement the changes.

Because of the ease of use of Blogger software, that should only take three or five hours of my life.

WHAT WILL CHANGE: the links. Namely, I will be removing any and all links that are no longer relevant to the Kspace Universe. The links to "The Unearthing" will remain, and will be joined by permalinks to CONFRONT Magazine and to PHYTE. The Chronicles of an Independent Author will remain, though I will eventually be retooling the look of that, as well, by turning it into a full sub-blog of Kspace Universe. I will be adding links to various things Facebook and Twitter, as well as links to my favourite haunts of the Internet. The reference guide for writers will be truncated and later incorporated into "Chronicles", where it more properly belongs.

The gold-on-black motif will remain the same, though I may lay things out differently. And I will be creating a labels list and other doo-hickeys, as time goes on. Likewise, I am open to any suggestions you, the reader, may have, with regards to layout, linkage, widgets or content. Please provide links and show your work.

That's all for now; I'm off to try and sleep.

News About Me And My Writing

So there's a whole lot of little things going on right now...first, my review of the new Alanis Morissette CD for Confront Magazine was until recently being referenced on the Wikipedia page for the new album, so that was fun--while it lasted.

Second, I'm up for a job as a reporter for CJAD 800 AM Radio here in Montreal, so that's tres cool. It's not that I'm unhappy at the newspaper; in fact I love my job. However, I would like to get in on the journalism side of things; unfortunately my spelling and grammar in French aren't good enough for me to get a job as a reporter with the paper.

Also going on, my interview with Craig Chaney of the Metal band Evergreen Terrace has been posted over on Confront Magazine; it was a fun conversation and I'm glad to finally be able to share it with the readers.

The latest stats for The Unearthing are pretty good; roughly 1750 downloads since the free ebook download went live in March. Ugh...I've got to do so much housecleaning on this and my sister site for the novel; update the links and such, as Chapters Indigo are now selling it here in Canada for the US list price instead of the 30% markup it used to be selling for. My publisher has had a falling out with Amazon.com over the latter's ridiculous demands...that's something else I've got to get around to. But, if you haven't already bought the book odds are you won't. If you have bought it you don't need to buy another, and if you do want to buy it, the links on the left all still work in the meantime, so that's on the low-priority list.

...I smell a small lecture about the above paragraph wending its way from the keyboard of my personal Jimminy Cricket...

CONFRONT Magazine is also branching out, musically speaking. In association with MAP Music (Musicians Against Parkinson's) CONFRONT Presents will be hosting an awareness concert to benefit people living with Parkinson's Disease. The event is August 23rd, at Club Soda here in Montreal. The line-up for the show includes Arthur Kall, Monday Rose, Polar Eyes, La Confrerie, and The New Cities, as well as presentations by musician and MAP Music founder Robbie Tucker and Canadian Pairs Bronze medalist, Craig Buntin.

I guess that's the most immediately relevant stuff. So, for want of a better concluding paragraph for this post, let me just say