"Land's End" Review

Just a very quick post to say that "Land's End" (Inkermen Press, 2008) has finally received a review:
http://newmysticsreviews.blogspot.com/2009/05/by-not-so-beautiful-sea-review-of.html

"Lucy Ann Wade starts off the stories with her take on the Calypso and Odysseus episode from The Odyssey (“Calypso”), doing so with great success as she explores the always treacherous nexus of naiveté and sexual lust. The “do as I say, not as I do” two-facedness of Calypso’s fellow Naiads made them read like a pack of modern high-school girls and not the far-off subjects of what is often (wrongly) seen as an irrelevant and antiquated tale."

Not too bad at all.

I started working on a new story yesterday, as well as adding to Chpt. 23 of IV. I'm hopefully going to be in a position where I can send off a few more submissions in the near future, so look out slush piles of the world! You have been warned.

Edinburgh Here I Come!

Before I start: Congrats Phil for your "Experiment" at the Accidental Festival. Hope it went well!

Am bored of Twitter already. I just don't have anything to say that anyone would be interested to read. "Brushing my hair", "At work", "Sneezing due to hayfever" - hardly makes riveting reading, right? Plus, I still don't get it. I mean, at least with the status update on Facebook you can reply to it, and have a bit of a conversation. But Twitter, well it's just micro-blogging, but without the feedback, right? Oh, I guess there's that "@" thing, but they don't show up unless you manage to catch them on your home page before they disappear into infinity. It's not like Facebook, where they get saved nice and neatly under the original posting. Perhaps I'm using it wrong. I don't know. Maybe someone with more "Twitter" knowledge will clue me in.

Oh, I'm such a luddite!

I've had a nice long break from writing, but I think I'm in the right mind set to actually enjoy it again. It's been bloody torture these past months - I've had to resort to crude similes just to get the bastard text out. It's not good, funny or clever, but I'm hoping in the edit that'll all get sorted out.

Off to Edinburgh at the beginning of August to see Robin's show. We're definitely going now, as we're booking our accommodation tonight. It's a little bit expensive, but I thought it would be; it's peak time, and normal hotels around the country are £40-70 a night at off-peak times, so paying £50 a night during the Fringe is actually a bargain. Yeah, it's standard student accommodation, but it's ensuite and comes with breakfast, so can't complain. We're going from 6th - 12th, as that's the only time we can have off work. Will try to blog each day whilst I'm there and fill you in on the happenings!

Right, off to the library now to do some real work...

Film Geekdom

Interesting Film and TV news:

1) New Ghostbusters. I'm glad it's not going to be a remake of the original starring Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan, et al, so I'm glad it's going to be a ghostbusters film with the originals in it, and hope they're getting back together to fight a new baddie. The "passing the torch" thing, well, I just don't want them to continue the franchise if the originals don't have anything to do with it. Especially as it'll probably be Zac Efron playing the grown-up Oscar. And I'm a little bit anti the 'all girl' ghostbusters idea Dan Akyroyd mentions, simply because Hollywood seems to believe that if a film has several female leads, then it has to a) be a love story b) involve a cat fight and c) involve said girls in their underwear/some pervy costume at some point during the film. Not really want I'd want from a Ghostbusters movie.

2) They are remaking Footloose starring a guy from Gossip Girl and possibly Hannah Montana. Eek.

I just don't think they can get away with doing a straight remake any more. Star Trek was great, and what they did was create an alternative dimension to set it in, therefore not shitting over the former TV show and films. I think Footloose 2009 will be a standard remake, but why? Is there any need to remake the classic that was pretty much perfect?

I have another pet peeve, and that's when sequels are basically remakes of the original, but with a different (less attractive/talented) lead and sometimes different location (Poison Ivy II, S Darko, The Rage) - especially when the events in the first film were so extraordinary that no way would that happen again.

I watched Dollhouse last night, and it was really intriguing. It doesn't have the same pizzazz that Buffy had - it's more grown-up, less wit and more action (well the first episode anyway), but I enjoyed it and will be watching it again. It posed more questions than it answered, which is a pretty good start to a series, so we'll see how it progresses. I've just got to remember that it's on, as the Sci Fi Channel isn't in my "On Demand" services I don't think.

I don't normally watch TV, so it's gonna be an experience having to tune into something every week and waiting patiently for the next episode. I used to watch The Big Bang Theory, but I think the schedulers moved its time at some point, and then I had no idea when it was on, so subsequently missed it. Am waiting for the second series to come out on DVD, and will watch it all that way instead. The future is "TV On Demand", definitely. Not sure what that will mean with regards to TV writing, etc. It'll be a nightmare, no doubt.

Better

Right, am feeling better today. Had a bit of a mini nervous breakdown yesterday, where I could feel the stress building up and taking over, and didn't know how to stop it. I even had a fleeting thought that maybe I should just stop trying to be a writer and focus on something else instead, but that's all gone now.

So I went to the library after work and wrote a little bit of Inter Vivos - only about 200 words or so - and only focused on that, not on the other projects that are making me flip out. And then I felt better. And then I went to watch Star Trek, which was brilliant, so I'm all alright now.

Just goes to show you how quickly a mood can change though, right - from walking to the library feeling like I was mentally hyperventaliating to leaving the library feeling much calmer and happier.

Anyhow, I'm going to take it slowly over the next few days and try not to pressure myself too much.

I think I do definitely need that holiday now!

Twigging Out

I can't do it, I can't write, I'm absolutely terrible, and no matter how hard I try it just comes out as crap!

Words of Wisdom

Have just been reading Neil Gaiman's latest blog post (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html) in which he says:

"Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. "

I'm really glad he addressed this in his post, from the point of view that you do only tend to hear about writers who work like machines, who write, say 5000 a day every day. In fact, I've just been reading Writing magazine (aimed at retiree writers by the looks of it) and all the interviews with authors in there are all "I write X number of words a day" etc and no one tells you how difficult it is sometimes, how your brain feels fried and you feel like what you've written is utter drivel and that you must have serious problems of self-delusion to think that you're ever going to get published...
So that's why it's nice for a 'proper' writer to recognise this fact that writers aren't robots. I should add that there is a distinction however between the words not coming and simply "putting it off", which is often hard to distinguish and both can be self-perpetulating.
I think I need a holiday.

Twitter

Hello all,
Just a quick post to say that I have now got myself one of those Twitter accounts, though I'm really not sure how it all works.
Anyway, if you want to follow my feeble efforts at Twittering, Tweeting, or whatever the right verb is, then you can do so!

https://twitter.com/LucyAnnWade

Pirates and Procrastination

Over the weekend, I managed to do no writing whatsoever; however I did renounce Satan and become a Godmother, so I wasn't being a total layabout. It was quite nice to take time off, even though I did get grilled by everyone at the baptism about when am I planning on having kids. Aaargh!

Hannah, Robin and Phil are all doing really well at the moment with their separate creative endeavours. It's nice to be inspired by people that I actually know. I'm hoping to go up to Edinburgh to see Broken Holmes, if I can get the time off. It's going to be great.

My mind is buzzing with all the different stuff that I started working on, which isn't good, because I don't have time to do all of them, and really need to crack on with IV. I've been working on the plot for my pirate story; basically, an upper class English woman is kidnapped by pirates on her way through the Caribbean to be married. She is captured by Fat Red, a grotesque female pirate captain, and gradually becomes submerged in her world. A little bit like a sinister "Desperately Seeking Susan" - no on second thoughts, nothing like that at all! The mood and feel to the story is more grungy-rock than 80s pop.

What else? I have half a plot for my space story, and the beginning and end of my monster story. Does anyone else find middles hard?

I'm going to have to forget about the stories for the time being, as I do need to finish IV, else it's never going to get done, and I'm never going to be able to write anything else. Single-minded obsession is what is needed; no more of this multi-tasking nonsense.

*pic from Ophelia's Art: http://www.cafepress.com/opheliasart.153104524

Cyclops

My left eye hurts right now from the eye ointment I'm using to purge my eye of my Berlin sty. Closing my eye helps a little bit, but when I open it again, everything is blurry.

So, I'm sitting at my desk, hair slightly falling over my face, and typing this with one eye closed. I've just drank some camomile, honey and vanilla tea, and I'm counting down the minutes until lunch.

Aside from the eye thing, just a typical day.

I found out that UA Fanthorpe died recently. I studied her work for my English Lit A-Level, and her poems are some of the only poetry I can stomach. Her poems about the buried rivers in London, the parson's response to Coleridge, and the Mary Rose poems still continue to inspire me, even though they are all but semi-forgotten lines and whispered ideas now at the back of my head. I saw her once at a conference we were dragged to at school, where she read her work and answered questions. She was truly remarkable, and that was the first time I realised that to be a poet you didn't have to be a dead male. If you haven't read any of her works, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Off on my travels later, so am planning on doing some writing on the train, so long as it's not too crowded. I'm thinking of having some time off soon to concentrate a bit more on my work, but it's a bit tricky at the minute. Anyhow, I'll keep you posted on how things are going, as always! *Squinty.

A Dystopian Jane Eyre, with Cyborgs

I'm trying to work out what Inter Vivos is about, in prep for editing it and trying to pitch it to publishers and agents. I know what the story is, of course, but what are the themes I want to bring out? What is the central conflict and message? Perhaps when it's finished (draft 2b) and I read through it I'll have more of an idea. I'm kinda thinking it's a biopunk bildungsroman sort of story, and I think I might be treading on some new ground there a little bit (think Jane Eyre with cyborgs, and you get the idea).

Have started another short story - I'm starting to wonder whether this is productive procrastination - this time for an anthology that I'm hoping to get accepted for. Deadline is in September, so I figure, if I start now, then I'll hopefully be finished by then. My story is about pirates, which is a condition of the anthology, and I have created this wonderful grotesque female pirate - I'm thinking of Claire from Der Besuch Der Alten Dame with a bit of "Fevvers" from Nights at the Circus thrown in - this huge, repulsive, but larger than life woman as a very unconventional anti-heroine. Anyway, I'm trying to decide how (stylistically) to tell the story, but have made a crack at it anyway.

Starting short stories isn't the problem. Finishing them is. I do suffer from The Fear quite a lot; what if this promising story with these intriguing characters is made crap half way through by some stupid plot device I've thrown in? Urgh.

OK, will aim to finish off one short story by next Monday. Can she do it? Stay tuned to find out...