Photographic Addition

Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm 1:2.8 Pro lens.

As my regular readers are aware, photography is a bit of a thing for me. As in, I did my first degree in photography many years ago, more than I care to remember, but not completed for various reasons. I take a lot of pictures of the models I make, and other subjects that interest me too. And of course, it's useful for taking pictures for blog posts.

Quelle surprise.

For Christmas my beloved surprised me with Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm 1:2.8 Pro lens. I've been coveting one of these since I got my micro-four-thirds OM-D E-M5:M2 camera back here. As Susan said to me, this lens provides me with my favourite angle of view that I used to have back in the day when I ran my Pentax MX-5 with a SMC 15mm F3.5.

Here are both cameras and their lenses.

Pentax 35mm film camera next to an Olympus micro-four-thirds digital camera.

The Pentax I bought in January 1982, my Olympus I was given in February 2016. What is surprising or not, is the similarity in size, given that 34 years, 40 if you take into consideration that the MX-5 was released in 1976, between the two cameras.

So size, really comes down to ergonomics.

And while my E-M5:M2 is not a large camera per se, it is larger than Susan's E-PL6 micro-four-thirds rangefinder model.

Wargaming

An elegant wargamer from a more civilized age.  Oh and I just found this too.

Says it all, though and now you know why I can't find the time to play as many games as I would like; that's a joke by the way, just in case you want to say that games don't take nine hours to play.

En Passant

I have been a bit distracted by a combination of work and life.  Last weekend was full on archery with Saturday mornings practice being followed a whole day of shooting on Monday, which can be read on my other blog when I post it up.

I was also very busy time at my job, which left me feeling drained.  So, after work on Wednesday, I walked over to Orcs Nest and bought the latest copy of Miniature Wargames & Battlegames magazine, and at the same time bought a Star Wars X-Wing Punisher miniature (Imperial super bomber), which was appropriate as it was May the Fourth.

I don't really do the Star Wars Day thing, mostly because I forget and in this case far too focused on work.

When I got home I read on Twitter that Gene Wolfe had equated the term Sci-Fi as equivalent to a racial slur beginning with the letter N.  I'm boggled by this, and you really couldn't make this shit up and have anyone believe you if you wrote it.  I'm not as old as Gene Wolfe, but I'm old enough to be older than a large portion of SF fandom and I can't see the point of getting wound up by the term Sci-Fi, which was coined by Forrest J Ackerman in 1954, which was before I was born, so it's been around a long, long time.

Some people get sniffy about using Sci-Fi and some even prefer to use the term Speculative Fiction over Science Fiction, but at the end of the day it's down to personal choice, and I don't think that anyone has a leg to stand on if they compare the term Sci-Fi with a racial slur; at best it's over egging the argument, at worst it's downright offensive.

Colour me miffed.

Thursday was shopping and today I just took it easy and opened my new Star Wars miniature and re-organized how I numbered both my Imperial and Rebel Forces.  These things are important you know!  Anyway, it was fun unpacking all the bits & pieces, fitting the flight dial together and sorting out all the tokens and packing them away in order for when I next get to play.

So another week with no writing done – well apart from doing blog entries and compiling stuff for another article for Galactic Journey's blog.

Hobbies

As you can see I've tweaked the format of my blog and moved things around a bit.  Let me know what you think, especially if I've made hash of it.  This was done mostly because the Labels section is rather long and I wanted people to be able to find things without too much scrolling down the page to find things.

Just a reminder: I have other blogs, but only the modelling one is being kept up to date. 

Unlike, for instance, Myke Cole or Larry Correia who occasionally put hobby related stuff on their writing blogs, I started blogging about my hobby stuff before creating this blog.  So this is a place where I can talk about my writing and what I read.  However, I will occasionally post hobby stuff here because the blog is about what I do.

So expect pieces on archery, cycling, photography and links to model making etc.  It's the way I roll.

40 Yards: A Palpable Hit

Back here I was bemoaning the fact I wasn't hitting the target in archery at 30 yards.  Above is a picture of last week's archery practice where I managed on more than one occasion to hit the butt at 40 yards with all six arrows, though as can be seen here not yet getting groups.  Most of the ends, which is what loosing six arrows is called, I only managed to get four or five arrows onto the butt on a regular basis but that's a big improvement from mostly missing or not reaching the distance.

The improvement is down to two things.

First my beloved upped the poundage of my bow through a technical process called tillering.  I've gone from 14 pounds to 16 and now up to 18, which is the maximum that the limbs can be adjusted to at my draw length.  So in another three months I will most likely be getting new limbs, but I'm taking things slow and easy because of my rheumatoid arthritis.  My technique has to be right otherwise I might cause an inflammation in my joints, but compared to Aikido or Iaido, archery is a low impact sport.

Secondly, I've been going most weeks since the end of November to archery classes and practice really does make perfect.  Though I still have to remember to keep my up, fingers under the chin, and the string must touch the nose.  Not to forget posture, posture and posture.  I'm having a lot of fun doing this and it takes my mind off the novel and getting my second rejection.

Apart from archery we have been celebrating my birthday and our tenth wedding anniversary.  We had 46 friends turn up to help us celebrate to eat, drink and be merry.  I must admit that by Sunday I was feeling a bit like a zombie from not sleeping too well after so much excitement and rich food.

I've been spending quite a bit of time re-reading Mastering the Olympus Olympus OMD E-M5 Mark II, by Darrel Young & James Johnson, after confusing myself with programming my camera and then not being able to get it back into hi-res mode.  There were three days of high anxiety where I feared I'd managed to "brick" it.  Fortunately, with a little help from an Olympus camera technician and going through the book I worked out how to fix my problem.  I've now demonstrated the menu button sequence to my friends and every single one has gone WTF over the logic of setting up the hi-res function.

As an aside I re-read the online review DP Review where they say,

"All of this isn't helped by Olympus's trend of adding more and more extra features without fully integrating them.  For instance, the high res mode offers a choice of delays before you start exposure, but this isn't controlled using the part of the menu that adds a delay for standard shooting."

I now understand truly, fully, deeply what those words mean, but I still wouldn't trade my new camera in for any other model because while it's a complicated little beast it is stunningly good.

So that's it for another week.  Have a good one.

NB: You can see me shooting here.

PicoCon 33

I can't remember the first PicoCon that I attended, but it was a long time ago in a different part of my life.  You can read my account of last year's convention here, and the year before here.  This year's the guests of honour at PicoCon 33 were Paul Cornell, returning for a second time, Carrie Hope Fletcher, and Michelle Paver.

A moment of stillness. E-M5:M2 with M. Zuiko 14-42 at 42mm, F5.6, ISO 1600, 1/13th of a sec, crop 1028 x 1207 pixels from 4608 x 3456.

Paul Cornell started the day off with his talk about his recent work: two new novels coming out this year and a third on the way.  He also mentioned his work on the TV show Elementary and his Age of Warcraft graphic novel.  He was still recovering from returning from Los Angeles and clearly still running on caffeine and adrenaline, because three of the four shots I took of him his hands are a blur of motion.

Wearing a cardigan to die for.  Details as before but taken at 1/15th of a sec, crop 788 x 951 pixels.

Next up was Carrie H. Fletcher who I'd never heard of who spoke about her time as an actress and her upcoming novel On the Other Side.

The only non-blurred shot I have.  Exposure details again as before but cropped to 801 x 638 pixels.

The final talk of the morning was by Michelle Paver who was quite stunning.  She talked about writing her historical novels and ghost stories and how she travels to far-off lands and lives with the local people as research.  Absolutely fascinating and her talk about doing research impressed me so much that I bought a copy of Dark Matter, a ghost story set in the Arctic in 1937.

Then it was time for lunch and a chance to hang out with some old friends in the Student bar before going back for a panel where the authors took questions about various aspects of their work.

Group shot.  All details as before, shot cropped to 1700 x 622 pixels.

Finally, I should mention my friend Chad Dixon who recorded everything on Periscope under @lapswood8.  So that's it for another week.

Photography

Picture of new camera taken with old. Lumix G.Vario 14-45mm at 45mm, F5.6, 1/10th of a sec, ISO 1600, 4000 x 3000 cropped to 1200 x 668 pixels.

I enjoy taking pictures and for my birthday, a significant double digit year, my wife bought me a new Olympus OMD E-M5 Mark 2 and she also got me a M.Zuiko  ED 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 to go with it too.

Picture of old camera taken with new.  Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42 at 42mm, F5.6, 1/10th of a sec, ISO 1600, 4608 x 3456 cropped to 1200 x 663 pixels.

For the last four and a bit years I've been using a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF-1.  When I upgraded back in 2011 it was a big thing for me, as I accounted here, which has served me well in getting me fully up to speed with the digital age.

Both are micro four thirds cameras but the Olympus is 16 megapixels while the Panasonic is only 12 megapixels.  You can compare the quality of the two close-up shots for yourselves.  However, this isn't a completely fair test to either camera because what I'd need to do is take two pictures with each, swapping the lenses around because the glass in front of a sensor can make a big difference.  I'd also want to mount both cameras on a tripod too.

Crop 950 x 730 pixels.

Cropped to 750 x 729 pixels.

However, that said, the Olympus picture of the Panasonic camera looks better, though you have to take my word on that as I'm comparing the RAW files and what you're seeing here are the cropped JPEGs.

The biggest thing about the E-M5:M2 also has the facility to have it take multiple pictures and produce a 40 megapixel shot, a feature I'm looking forward to using in the future.  It is also an order of magnitude more sophisticated than the DMC GF-1.  To such an extent that I would consider the Olympus to be a computer that takes pictures because of the programmability of the camera functions.

So tomorrow I will be testing it at PicoCon.  Expect a report with pictures soon.

Just Another Week Blah Blah

The blah, blah, being where the heck has it gone.  I'm sure it was only yesterday that I posted last weeks blog only to find that was ten days ago.  Still no news from the agent, but I don't expect to hear from him for another week or so.

In the meantime, Susan and I have been re-watching Dark Angel the James Cameron TV series from 2000.  Season one is really good, every episode working for a living with little or no padding of note.  The second season is still good but reverts to standard TV show tropes of having a Halloween show that really doesn't add much.  Saying that the second half of season becomes tighter and overall I'd say if you haven't caught this show it's well worth watching.

Writing wise I've been plugging away on the second draft of Ghost Dog.  Over the last ten days I've sorted through and revised 23,500 words, which isn't bad, and this takes me up to 63,848 out of the running total of 95,317 words.  So the end is in sight.  My plan, after finishing, is to let it rest while working through the Beta reader comments on Strike Dog.  So I have plenty of work on my plate.

I've also finished my Elementary Introduction to Archery course and was given a Certificate of Merit, which means when I go next week I will be standing on the grown-ups shooting line.  I've been really enjoying learning how to shoot a bow and the bug has really bitten i.e: thinking about how to improve my form and, more to the point, wanting to go shoot some more arrows.

And yes, one day, in a yet to be written story, there will be shooting of arrows (actually as my Beta readers will attest there's already been a scene referring to the shooting of arrows already) so I will now be able to write a convincing description of shooting arrows when the time comes.

As always, thank you for reading and catch you all later.

Busy Bee

Before and after loosing – fly free arrow and wiggle your feathers at me.

And the week has just flown by with us going to two Xmas parties, a barbecue, and a friend coming around for dinner which is my excuse for posting this so late.  However, to my surprise, I managed to edit 8,938 words in between all the fun activities which includes my archery beginners course.

This week I was shooting at 30 yards and not hitting the target reliably.  I therefore failed to score the required 200 points in 36 arrows to progress to 40 yards which is a relief.  I'm doing this primarily for fun but the club obviously wants people to shoot at events and is therefore quite competitive.  I have neither the inclination (will/strength of mind) nor the competitive spirit (winning is not important to me) to take my archery seriously enough to enter matches.

Still, as a learning experience it's great.

Also, it will encourage to work on my fitness (mostly flexibility and posture) and, arguably it's research for when I need to include archery in story, because it gives me a much more realistic understanding of the reality of loosing arrows and the kind of distances that one can realistically shoot at given the lead one needs to hit a moving target.

Since the last blog we've watched Terminator Genisys which I thought was probably the best sequel to the first two movies so far.  However, it's not quite as good as the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.   As usual, I'm perplexed by the inability of reviewers to cope with SF ideas like time travel which seems to confuse them (I speak of the mainstream news website in general).

After that we watched The Clone Wars: The Lost Missions.  A series, along with the John Williams scores that I enjoy listening to, which in my mind largely redeems the prequel movies.  Then we watched season one of Star Wars Rebels, I guess you're sensing a theme here (the force is strong with you) and last night Star Wars: A New Hope.  I'm sure you can guess what we're watching this evening and tomorrow night.

Wednesday we're going to go and see Star Wars: The Force Awakens and have booked our tickets at our local Vue Cinema, so we're all set.

Finally, I finished reading the third of the Diana Rowland White Trash Zombie books – White Trash Zombie Apocalypse.  While this series may not be hardcore zombie fare, I found the central protagonist engaging and the developments and themes within the story satisfying with good pacing and exciting plot reversals and try/fail cycles.  In short well crafted stories.

So that's it for another week.  I'll be posting a Xmas blog on Thursday, see you on the bounce.

Fractured Time and the Dichotomous Mind

Been dreaming about Archery all week because I've started a beginners course.

This week has been a tad chaotic, having flown by so quick I wonder what happened during the time I was awake.

Monday and Tuesday were fine, as in I was finishing off the out loud read through of Bad Dog and applying salve in the form of missing particles (a, an, of etc.) and the occasional additional comma or deletion depending on how the words sounded prior to sending it off.  Then, my partner had some sad news to deal with.  Her half-sister emailed her that their father had died after a heart attack.  So that was a bit of a downer.

Next I had to deal with the NHS.  Not as a patient this time but as a potential employee enrolled for bank work – the NHS equivalent of a zero hour contract.

So a lot of my time this week was spent filling in forms, online questionnaires, getting references, background checks, and occupation health clearance too.  This also involved me having to travel across London on Wednesday to visit the Trusts HR department where I had to fill in more forms, because the electronic copy I sent them had to be be printed out by me (don't ask me why they couldn't have printed it out, I'm sure there's a reasonable answer somewhere but not one that I'm privy too).

Of course this doesn't mean I've started work or anything, only that I might work at some future time as yet unspecified.  Not something I imagined I would be doing, but working one or two days a week would get me out the flat, and be good for me.

Anyway, we'd finished watching Agents of SHIELD season two which we both really enjoyed and need something else to watch that wasn't too hard and would be a distraction from the bad news.  Susan had bought Outlander by Diana Gabaldon and we sat down and, much to my surprise, we were sucked in.  So we've been mainlining the first season and hear that there's a second in the making.

Anyway by Friday I was shattered and didn't get anything done and I'm writing this blog entry late.  Still, I did restart work on Ghost Dog, but only managed to read through and revise 15,895 words, after having to go back and start from the beginning again because I'd lost track of the story.

Finished the week by having a quiet weekend by ourselves.

Thanksgiving

Me in red on far right.

I hope that all my American readers had a good Thanksgiving.  We celebrate it too and this year we had a full house with six sitting at the table for turkey and all the trimmings.  On Friday we repeated the meal with a friend from work, and on Saturday we drove to Cambridge to celebrate Thanksgiving again with our friends Kate & Malcolm.  So I'm totally turkeyed out and slightly behind on where I wanted to be with my writing this week.

Oh and I've been to my first archery lesson which is something my partner has been talking about taking me too for a while.  She's been shooting for a few years and started off with a nice aubergine coloured riser (modern bows are modular and have arms and a riser) and then found a Cadillac pink riser that she fell in love with and had to have.  As a result she had a the makings of a spare bow which is now mine (I love the aubergine riser because it's the same colour I chose for my iaito saya when I used to do Iaido).

So I went and I loosed four dozen arrows over the course of a couple of hours at the Greenwood Osterley Archers club.  It's the first of six lessons and it means next year when Susan goes off for a days shooting I can go along with her and join in the fun.  I must admit my neck and shoulders ached a lot this morning and I had to have a hot bath to get comfortable.

So work this week has been on doing one final read through of Bad Dog and I've done 41,146 words of 87,376 words.  So Monday is going to be a bit of a slog.

Late WIP Update 10th Apr 2015

The above illustration is apropos of my previous posting about Cordwainer Smith, this being the magazine where I read The Lady Who Sailed the Soul all those years ago.  The image on the cover enthralled me, and I found it while reading this blog, which is doing something rather interesting by posting commentary on old SF magazine stories, from the late fifties onwards, as if they were being read in real time.  

Quite nostalgic.

I've been away at the British National SF Eastercon, Dysprosium, and I will be writing a report soon.  

In the mean time I've spent my time entertaining friends and winding down after four days of fun, and having to deal with three to four hundred emails that were waiting for me.  It seems that there has been another explosion of fannish outrage on the internet while I was gone, which can best be summed up by reading Peter Watts' blog.

As for me I've been having far too much fun, see above.

My only concerns were would I be able to finish the first revision of my second novel before going to the convention.  The answer is yes.  I managed to do a rough edit of the remaining 36,000 words of Strike Dog by late Thursday night.  So last week was a productive one, and I for one can't ask for more than that.

Today I rode my refurbished Riese & Müller Birdy folding bicycle around my housing estate, which enabled me to check the brakes worked, and that the new chain was seated properly; as in it wasn't going to go spoing on me as it split into two parts while riding somewhere.  So all excited at the prospect of fun summer cycling.

Work in Progress: 25th Feb 2015

Well here I am again writing a log of another weeks worth of writing and the progress I'm making in completing a publishable novel.  Yesterday I sent my Alpha reader the first absolutely brand spanking new chapter full of words she has never read before.  There's a bit of a standing joke in the flat that not only is the hero of my novel stuck reliving the same day over-and-over again, but that my Alpha reader is re-reading the same novel over-and-over again.

Oh how the long winter nights just fly by when you're having fun.

Looking at my running total for the week I see I've written a total of 4,361 words, just shy of double the number I wrote last week, and this brings the current running total for the novel to 87,266.  I note that yesterday I wrote 1,038 words to finish the new chapter.  I might well have written more this week if I hadn't felt so ghastly on Monday, having had some problems with my pain management over the weekend.  Still I had a great weekend in Brighton and got to go with my Godson and his sister to Brighton Modelworld.

It doesn't get much better than that.

Oh I forgot we also saw The LEGO Movie with the kids.  So yes it does get better than that, even if I thought the movie wasn't quite as good as it thought it was,  and did I mention we also played a game of Star Wars:X-Wing with the kids too?  Therefore we got to spend quality time with them.  So everything is awesome (warning dangerous earworm tune).

Catch you all on the bounce.

Another Time, Another Place

Which is my way of paraphrasing "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away," and leading into our recent re-watching of all six Star Wars films.  I still remember seeing the original black posters with the words Star Wars on railway billboards and wondering what it was all about?  Then finding out more, and being enthralled by a display in a local record shop that had devoted an entire window to the John Williams Star Wars album with the tantalizing shots from the movie on the inside of the double album sleeve.  Then watching the opening scene for the first time and I was blown away, and I remember going to see the film 21 times.  I was obsessed.

Even back then, when I was a lot younger and certainly far more naive than I am now, I knew there were plot holes in the original movie that one can fly the Death Star through, but they weren't important in the bigger scheme of things, because Star Wars was an epic tale in the traditional story telling style; as discussed in the book The Seven Basic plots by Christopher Booker, which I cunningly reviewed in my last post here.

Lucas has been quoted as saying that the inspiration behind StarWars comes from reading Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces about the existence of a mono-myth that crosses all cultures.  This book treats traditional story telling from the perspective of comparative mythology, but Campbell like Booker uses discredited Freudian & Jungian theories, which I find troubling.  Also Campbell largely disregards the feminine in favour of the masculine narrative.

But enough of discussing that academic pontification, otherwise I'll drain all the fun out of one of my favourite movies.

We sat down and watched a movie a night and I found myself enjoying the prequels as much as the originals, which was slightly surprising given my previously held feelings on them.  However, on reflection I think that back in 1999, when The Phantom Menace came out, the expectation and hype meant that the no matter how good the film was it wasn't going to meet people's expectations.  Now time has passed it no longer feels disappointing to watch.  Yes I agree Jar-Jar sucks, but he's there for much the same reason the Ewoks were in Return of the Jedi, and I'm reminded of what I say to old die-hard Dr Who fans who complain about New Who – it's not for you, it's for the youngsters who have never seen it before.

So I still like The Empire Strikes Back most of all, but without A New Hope we would never have had it, so the first is probably still the best.  Then in order of enjoyment I think Revenge of the Sith, followed by Attack of the Clones, Return of the Jedi and then The Phantom Menace.  However it has to be said that The Phantom Menace is totally lush, and the extended Pod Race and the death of Qui-Gon Jinn at the end of what was the first epic light sabre battle ever means that just because I've listed it last doesn't means it hasn't got its good points.

Now there is another... trilogy.

You bet I'm stoked about the new film coming at Xmas, which is also a long time and very far away as I write this.  For me it's a fulfillment of the original promise made by Lucas that there would be nine films; a trilogy of trilogies.  So excited that not only did we re-watch the movies, but we've been playing a great little games called Star Wars: X-Wing where you get to pilot the fighters around one's dining room table while listening to the music and quoting lines from the movies.

And of course Randall Munroe of XKCD makes a good point.

Happy New Year: Reflecting on Year 2

My surprise Xmas present from my partner – a folding bicycle. It's very red.

Last year was a one where my achievements exceeded my original expectations.  This year not so much.

I began the year working on The Bureau, my fourth novel, but then switched over to re-writing Bad Dog, which l ended up doing three times.  This makes it very hard for me to actually calculate the mount of work I've done this year.  The three drafts were 87,999, 88,908 and 81,804 words each, which comes to a total of 258,711 words, but looking at the original draft and the end draft totals, the amount of actual words written comes to either about 10,000 words, or according to my calculations a total of about 31,478 words changed.

My fourth novel has, as a result of all the re-writes, rather suffered with me only managing to write just under 30,000? words, bringing its running total up to 47,788 words.  The bottom line is that re-writing doesn't give me the feeling of satisfaction I got from writing three first drafts last year.

I also wrote two short stories, which came to 2,806 words.

But blog posts are writing and this year I posted 62 pieces here, which amounted to 23,201 words, and 45 posts on my other blog, which amounted to 12,259 words.

And of course I wrote four magazine articles, and a piece for a games publisher, which came to a total of 11,166 words.

Grand total: It could be as high as 337,543 or as low as 110,910 words.

Using 210 days as a baseline the latter figure looks abysmal, but as my partner reminded me (ironically I may add) that using measures of one thing as performance indicators of another is not good practice.  So being mindful of said observation I will just say that his year has been one of consolidation.

Finally I would like to wish you all a Happy New Year and thank you again for reading, your support and comments are truly welcome.

Log 2014 Dec 7th: Catch Up

 

Last week we were in Cambridge at a Thanksgiving party hosted by our friends Kate & Malcolm, what with our own Thanksgiving meal excesses on the Thursday I seem to have been derailed in posting last weeks blog in a timely manner.

I have a lot to talk about, but this last week has been hectic with one thing and another, so all I'll mention in passing is that I gave a talk on cognitive behavioural therapy at Carshalton High School for Girls for the students in A2 psychology, which went down very well – tweets were sent out by the school too, and I received a lovely box of chocolates and a gift card from the students.  So I was well chuffed.  I later learnt that one of the students has decided to change her degree option to psychology too.

Over on my other blog you will see a post about the demo game I ran at Dragonmeet yesterday for which I spent most of the week painting miniatures to get them ready for the day.  Afterwards we went off to Ilford for another party with our long time friends Brian & Caroline, which was most excellent.

Archery

I forgot to take a camera with me, so no picture of my partner firing a longbow at an archery competition.  I went to offer moral support, and cheer etc.  My plan was to read a book, but I got caught up in watching everyone shooting.

This week I managed to finish the rewrites for the the twelve chapters in act two of my novel Bad Dog.  So far the first two acts have taken me nine weeks, which feels like far too long, but like most things in life, things go at the speed they go.  On the other hand I do feel as if I've got my writing mojo back, in so far as I've started to dream about writing stories, and yes I make notes, which feels good.

I'm running late today, from watching the archery, so I shall cut this post short, wish you all well, and catch you on the bounce.

Blood Ties

A bit late writing this week due to spending Saturday demoing a game called Ogre at the London Dragonmeet games convention all day, and Sunday was taken by entertaining two dear friends who we have not seen in a while.  Last week I had an indulgent catch up with lots of reading and trying to put the internet to rights.  Along with getting lost on TV Tropes for three days researching story tropes.  That link carries a memetic warning; you will spend more hours there than you intend to.  Consider yourself warned.

This week we've been watching Blood Ties, which was based on Tanya Huff's Blood series that started with Blood Price.  Anyway, the TV show runs to twenty two episodes over two short seasons.  For reasons best known to the TV executives the third series was cancelled, probably because there wasn't enough sex.  It's one of those shows that we loved for the relationship between the characters and the dialogue sparkles when the three main characters are kicking against each other.

On the reading front I have been carrying on with Chris Moriarty's Spin State, which due to the above excuses I've still not finished.  So I will come back again to it when I have.

Writing Log 130421

Been a busy week for other stuff.  In this case going to the RAF museum at Hendon on Thursday, and Salute at the ExCeL Centre on Saturday, which has impacted on my writing this week.  Not just because of the time taken out from writing, but rather by how exhausted I felt after the long day walking around on Thursday.

Still mustn't grumble, could be worse.

So progress this week on Strike Dog was 6209 words for the week and a running total of 13,621.  Still way ahead of the situation I was in during the first draft of Bad Dog where after two weeks I had only written 7316 words in total.  I find it useful now to compare my progress, because I find my moods have been a bit down about my work.  This was especially bad on Friday when I was in so much pain from all the walking I did the day before.

However, on Saturday when I was at Salute, the South London Warlords annual wargames show, a couple of friends of mine were also complaining of being in pain.  Having them tell me this actually helped me to put things into perspective about my own pain.  Sometimes it is just so damn difficult to keep an objective perspective on something that is so subjective.

Anyway, pain is natures way of telling you that you are still alive.  The alternative, is as the say, worse.