Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

It’s Important

November 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m sure I’m like most of you. I’m done with the US Election. We’ve had months, although it seems like years, of nothing but personal and negative attacks from both sides whenever you turn on the television, or look at any media. I don’t live in a swing state and I can only imagine how much worse it is there.

As I write this, tomorrow is election day. I’m no clearer in my mind on which of the major candidates to vote for. I’m not a one-issue voter, and it might be easier if I were. Both have some good policy ideas. Both are deficient in areas I consider important.

I did consider not voting this year, but to paraphrase my father. If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the result. And I do like to complain about our politicians and Government!

Regardless of who you support, or regard as the lesser of several evils, please make sure to go out and vote tomorrow.

A Long Time Coming

October 28, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This past weekend, I finished the copy edit read through of a novella titled The Head of the Serpent. It will be the first of a trilogy, and the second is already well under way.

Nothing special, you might think, except this one is different. I first had the idea for this story over thirty years ago, before I even moved to the United States. In that first iteration the story was driven by political events at the time.

As with life, there is change. What seemed new and shiny at one time soon became old news. Over the years I’ve put the idea aside, picked it up, made changes and set it down again.

In September, I picked up the idea again, shook my head at some of those early chapters and removed all the “big” world events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan – and tightened it down to the characters in the story. They have always been consistent, although their backgrounds have changed.

After all this time, you’d expect the story to write itself, and in many ways it did, although there were still a few incidents that took me by surprise as the story unfolded.

The goal is to finish putting the copy edits into the manuscript, and publish by the weekend. This one has been a long time in the making, but I’m pleased it’s finally here.

Come on Microsoft

October 21, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Over the past few months I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook on the Mac as my main email program for a project I’m working.

It took a while for me to re-familiarize myself with the program as I’ve mainly used Apple Mail for the past few years. It’s worked well for me but I haven’t had to worry too much about calendars and scheduling meetings.

This project changed all that and there I was neck deep back in Outlook, scheduling meetings and making updates.

One thing I noticed. When I updated a meeting invitation to add a new person, or remove someone, every attendee got a meeting update. That wasn’t how I remembered it. There used to be a question asking if you wanted to update all or just changed attendees.

I assumed with Office 365 an the new user interface there was a setting I was missing, and once I found that setting, the question would reappear.

Except I couldn’t find the setting, and my meeting attendees started to grumble about all the emails.

I asked one of my colleagues about it. We went back and forth and scratched our heads, and she asked someone else and we had an answer. That feature doesn’t exist on the Mac version of Outlook, but you get it on the Web version.

What!

I felt like I’d stepped back to the 1990’s.

On one level I kinda get it. As a developer, do I want to work on thirty year old email software or the cool code they’re writing at SpaceX to capture and reuse launch boosters?

I’ve experienced similar situations in the past, and I know it’s a challenge to ask a developer to work on legacy code, but a feature miss like this that’s so disruptive across multiple organizations, is disappointing.

One Small Step

October 14, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This past Sunday, I happened to catch a headline that SpaceX were planning to launch the fifth test flight for Starship.

When I saw the headline, it was about halfway through the launch window, so I flipped over the the SpaceX site to see what was happening. It was the first time I’d seen the real time video feed of re-entry using Starlink terminals on the capsule, and it was impressive. There was imagery all the way from re-entry to splashdown, even through the traditional “communications blackout”

Even more impressive was the capture of the Super Heavy booster. I missed seeing it real time, but watched the re-play several times as the booster plummeted down, the rockets fired and it drifted down and was snared by the chopstick arms on the gantry.

There were so many things that could have gone wrong on this initial attempt, but the capture was executed perfectly.

Each test flight is one small step to achieve the ultimate goal of using Starship to send people to the Moon and Mars, and bring them back.

I am of an age now where my participation in such a mission is a non-starter, but I sure hope I’m around to see it happen.

Aligning Timelines

October 7, 2024 /

This past weekend, I was looking at some of the Scrivener projects I haven’t touched in a while. Some were easy to deal with based on the project name alone. Others not so much.

What did I mean with a project named Disciple? It took a while to bring up on my screen as Scrivener needed to convert from an older version before displaying the contents. That alone, gives you some idea how long it is since those files got looked at. Not surprisingly, the story was about the disciples of Jesus, after the crucifixion and resurrection.

And I wrote it as a screenplay, which isn’t a format I’ve used for several years. There were some good scenes in there, and maybe one day I’ll go back to the idea, more likely as a novel.

The next file was more interesting. It’s a historical novel set in South America during the wars for independence from Spain in the early 1800’s. As I read through the notes and story fragments, it all came back to me. For some reason, I’ve never had a clear vision of the different timelines in my head – the story timeline and the historical sequence of events. That’s not been a problem with my stories set in Ancient Babylon, but there were some pivotal events during those wars for independence that obviously have to be covered in the right order – not least Simon Bolivar’s crossing of the Andes in June and July 1819.

It didn’t take much reading through my notes to realize the story and historical timelines were out of sync. It’s not an immediate problem as I have several stories I want to write before I come back to this one, and reading through gave me ideas for another story in the same historical period.

This makes it all the more important that when I do start the writing, both timelines are in alignment. So, I opened up Aeon Timeline and started dropping events and dates into a new Aeon project. Ten minutes in, I started reorganizing the story events. Those small changes have made the story move faster, and now I’m rethinking my 2025 production plan.

A Production Backlog

October 1, 2024 /

Over the past few years my production cycle – that’s the work I do between finishing the story and pressing the publish button Amazon, Kobo etc. – has been pretty ad-hoc. As I finish a story, I think about editing, covers, and sales copy.
That wasn’t really a problem when I was publishing a novel a year.

This year it’s been two novels, and I have on my desk a novella and a short story collection waiting to finish that production cycle, with another novella planned to finish by the end of October, and a third one by Christmas.

Those two published titles I mentioned last week still aren’t published!

I had an inkling this might be a problem when the manuscript for The Corpse in the Courtyard sat gathering dust for nearly two months before I got to the final read through.

It’s a problem I’m glad to have. It means I’m starting to hit some of the word count and project goals I’m aiming for. It also means my production schedule needs more planning than just an ad-hoc set of activities.

More of the Same

September 23, 2024 /

This last week has been fairly quiet. I wrote most of a Jacob short story with no real idea who the killer was, or how it ended. That was until late last night. I have to make some changes for consistency but nothing too heavy. My expectation is to finish the story tonight or tomorrow.

There’s been a lot of publishing energy going on as well. I’m about a third of the way through the final read on a novella. The cover and sales copy are all done so publishing will be soon after I get the corrections put into the manuscript. In parallel, I found several stories with the same protagonist. I finished the cover and sales copy yesterday.

The introduction is next on my to-do list after the Jacob story. By the end of the month, I should have two more titles available.

A One Year Streak

September 16, 2024 /

I wrote earlier in the year about how 2023 was a lean year for writing. What I didn’t add at the time was one of the activities I put in place to improve my word count.

I’d been reading Julia Cameron’s book Write For Life, and as she does in all her books, she advocated Morning Pages. I tried Morning Pages several years ago, struggled with writing three of 8.5 x 11 pages in a timely manner every day, and let it drop.

Last September, I was ready to try anything to get back into a regular writing rhythm, so I sat down and set a goal of three pages within thirty to forty-five minutes. It has now been a full year, and I haven’t missed a day. There have been days where I only managed one page, usually because of a time crunch, and occasionally because instead of letting go and just writing, I tried to force words onto the page.

Most days, I stay within the time limits I set myself. Some days, I find myself looking blankly at the page, and not quite sure where the thought or idea was going? I don’t think that’s a symptom of age as I’ve always been a bit like that.

Has it helped my actual writing? I have to say an unqualified yes. I blew past the 2023 word count in early June, and found Pages a useful place to work out questions or issues I have with a story. It’s not outlining, more a discussion with myself about what I want to happen next. This might be a page or more of discovery, or a dozen bullet points on ordering events across the next three or four chapters. Sometimes what goes into the actual story is close to those musings. Other times, they trigger something and I’m off in a different direction. Either way the process has helped my writing.

Julia Cameron recommends a weekly review and the first question is “how many days did you do Morning Pages this week?” There’s an implied expectation that at some point you will miss a day of Morning Pages. Last September I expected a miss to happen. So far it hasn’t and I hope to say the same this time next year when Morning Pages has become a two-year streak.

Rethinking Plans

September 10, 2024 /

This week was supposed to be a vacation week, and in some ways it still is.
I had planned maintenance work around the house and two or three rounds of golf. Or maybe only one if I play as badly as I have done the past few times I’ve been out.
All that changed over the weekend. It has been wet and miserable here, and everything was damp. And, as I learned to my cost while walking the dog, slippery.
My right foot skidded on a curb. My left ankle rolled and there I was lying on the ground with the dog looking at me, and wondering why I was down at her level.
The ankle hurt, and swelled up nicely, and a day later, still swollen but with some beautiful colored bruising, I was at the Urgent Care for an examination and x-rays. I left with a support boot, a referral to the orthopedic doctor, and a suspected broken bone.
Over the last two or three days, it hasn’t felt broken, but any walking without the boot quickly becomes uncomfortable.
Hence the rethinking of plans.
There’ll be no golf this week, but I should get to some of the small maintenance items I’ve been avoiding for a while. I think I’d have preferred the golf!

« Older posts

© 2024 Richard Freeborn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑