Apple Has Arrived

Image: The Link

Bit of a mis-match, jigsaw piece kind of day. Nothing seemed right, everything seemed odd, bits of my life felt like they were being force-squeezed in order to fit together. I spent a lot of the day wishing I could go to sleep and wake up today (Tuesday) or simply press the fast forward button.

There was, however, an attempted delivery of my new iPhone 4 in the morning—typical it had to come while I was at work and would have to wait 24 hours. I chanced my arm on the way home and popped into the Post Office—it was there—I was able to sign for it once I’d proved who I was and off I went.

I played with it in the evening, downloaded the apps I knew I would need to be able to get my plans for new marketing strategies kicked off and going. It really is quite an exciting piece of technology and I can see why people get so worked up about the Apple range of products.

Apple products are now playing a direct influencing role in the creative side of my work, something I didn’t plan on happening until much later. A large part of this is due to benefits realised at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival. The next stage is the Mac Mini, which I’ve been pricing out. The hard drive on my PC looks set to collapse if I believe the pop ups to be true, so I may need to make the switch soon. It’s an exciting thought.

Interesting feedback from Devon Ellington after yesterday’s post: she hit the nail on the head with the only piece of information I hadn’t given over in the blog, which is that I am only considering moving the murder to the start because I feel the story takes too long to get going. The story builds up nicely, there are clues and hints throughout, but the tension doesn’t really get going until after the murder, which is when the reader is forced to start asking serious questions about the protagonist.

I’ve definitely got a lot of serious questions to ask myself: what impact do I want this novella to have? What feels most natural to the story? What genre do I want/should the story be pitched in? All fascinating and interesting questions, none of which, though, are show stoppers to completing the manuscript’s final polish. Just as well, because I carried on with it late into the night.

I thought I’d explain why I’ve chosen the workshops I outlined in an earlier post at this year’s Muse Conference in more detail. There IS a logic to them all…

Are Your Characters Alive? with Ann Hite is an area of writing I want to look at in more detail. I want to see if there are new ways of really getting under the skin of my characters in order to improve my work, and I’m hoping this can help me do it.

Book Trailers – A commercial For Your Book with Delilah Stephans has been selected just to network and learn from other people who are interested in this form of marketing, any new software I should consider, methods I can employ and anything new I might be able to use to make my vids more professional and exciting.

Dialogue Workshop taught by Devon Ellington is a course I’ve done before and it was immensely useful. Devon’s courses are full-on exciting and challenging and all the individual daily tasks come to a great conclusion at the end of the week (though you don’t always see them coming). Last time I did this course was two years ago and I came away with seven new pieces of short fiction.

Flash Fiction with Jim Harrington is an area of fiction writing I thought I could do with some specific training in. I’m gong into this one very open minded and am hoping it will be challenging and not a “passing on of information” I can get on the Internet.

Plot Your Novel in 15 Minutes or Less! with Claudia Suzanne is a two day course, which is why I squeezed it in. I figured it might help in how I view my work before and after it’s written.

Story Building Workshop with Devon Ellington I’m trusting to be as productive and of the same teaching approach as with Devon’s other course, which is why I’m taking it for the first time. Really looking forward to this one as it will be brand new to me and Devon’s a great teacher!

Meet Rachelle Gardner – Literary agent is just an hour chat I thought I would squeeze in out of interest. Many of the chats are too late for me due to the time zone difference but this one seemed worthwhile. A couple of the other workshops also have chats but I’m not sure if I’ll be at them or not yet.

Peace out!