Nail Your Novel 1

I bought a copy of Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris to read because of the promise on the cover to discuss why writers abandon books and how you can draft, fix and finish with confidence.  This book does what it says, and not only that but it's a concise short read.  I finished it in about two hours and was driven to go and put the advice on writing synopses into practice.  As a result, I spent the rest of my Sunday working and ended up writing for about eight hours in fact.

Then Monday I rewrote my covering letter, tailoring it for another submission and then sent my novel off.  So, highly recommended.

Other than the above my week has been taken up with my job, which I'm enjoying but the work demands quite a lot from me emotionally.  Besides that it has been my birthday and my beloved bought me a new camera.  I'm very excited with my new swish bit of kit.  I'm so excited by getting it I plan to do a piece on photography for this blog too.

We watched season three of Defiance, its last, and again it managed to be better than it had any right to be.  The show runners seem to have taken a leaf out of GRRMs book and the season started with the excess characters being killed off so they could concentrate on finishing the stories of the main protagonists.  I even ended up liking Nolan who up to this point I felt a bit so, so about.

We also saw The Martian.  I mentioned reading the book here.  The film is very good, but the book has more details, which is usually the case and not meant as a criticism.  It also breaks the Hollywood superstition that films with Mars in the title bomb at the box office; they seem incapable of realizing that films bomb because don't appeal for any number of different reasons, but titles are only one of them.

We've just started watching True Detective and I will comment more when I've finished.  I will say it's intense, like watching The Wire or Generation Kill.  Off to PicoCon tomorrow and I plan on taking my new camera with me to test out.