Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Mid Year Reset

June 30, 2025 /

This past week has involved quite a lot of reflection and introspection. I touched on some of the writing challenges at the end of May and while the reset gave me a lot of momentum during June, I am still a long way behind the 2025 goals I set myself at the beginning of the year.

My current work in progress was intended to be a novella but looking at it last night, I’m thinking it might end up being a novel. This isn’t uncommon and one of the things I’ve learned since beginning to write seriously is that the story will be as long as it needs to be. That plays into my thoughts for the rest of the year, especially as my next project is likely to be another novella or maybe a novel!

One area I am recognizing as setting myself up for failure is in the area of daily word count. I’ve hit that daily goal only five times so far this year, and every time I miss I put pressure on myself for the next day. One thing I did in the June reset was to lower my word count expectations to a minimum of 250 words a day. That’s worked quite well and I’ve been surprised at the number of times I’ve exceeded that count, which plays into the reset thoughts.

There are five additional writing projects I wanted to get to this year, and clearly at my current production levels, they won’t happen. I am confident about two of them given the word count I achieved through June. And if I get on a roll, I know there are projects in the queue.

What Posterity?

June 24, 2025 /

This past weekend while sorting through some cabinets in my office, I came across a folder of papers about an inch or so thick. I didn’t immediately recall what was in the folder so I flipped it open to the first section and found a four page printout of the Lester Dent short story formula from the Pulp Era. Dent is probably best known for his Doc Savage novels of which he wrote all but twenty of the 181 novels. I’ve never found a count of the short stories he wrote but I have no doubt they run into the hundreds.

I put the Lester Dent formula aside, (you can find it online here), and found the mindmap for a short story I wrote several years ago. As I scanned the map, I realized it bore hardly any relation to the actual story.

After that, about two thirds of the remaining pages were notes, thoughts, and ideas for the story that became The Head of the Serpent. I thumbed through the notes and again, was aware how the story as I first conceived it changed dramatically to the published item. The published story is tighter, faster paced, and focuses more on Sarah and David, the two main characters. As I pulled the pages out of the folder, it crossed my mind I should keep the notes, and in parallel, came the question. Why?

When I become incapable of writing, or leave this world, who is going to care? I’m not Hemingway, Conan-Doyle, or King. At this point I can’t yet compare myself to the writers I admire and devour at every opportunity – Kristin Kathryn Rusch, Nora Roberts, Dean Wesley Smith. I’d rather be remembered, if at all for the finished stories, not the random scribblings that came before.

So the notes went into the shredder and I’ll let someone else worry about posterity.

Maybe not so Shiny

June 17, 2025 /

Two or three weeks back I wrote about Bases, the new shiny feature in Obsidian. Since then I’ve done some investigation and prototyping to see what it can do and very quickly ran into what for me is a potential showstopper.

As far as I can tell, all the views and displays you build within Bases are driven by the properties you assign to a note, or by tags. Because I built a lot of my notes for use with Dataview, I made extensive use of the custom data element – text followed by a double colon, and built a lot of my templates around those custom data elements.

Some of those custom data elements are easy to translate to properties and takes minimal effort. Others like my book catalog, which runs to nearly two hundred documents, need not just the template changed (the easy part), but migration of all those entries. Based on some of my initial tinkering that’s at least a half day just for the books folder. After that I have to update all the Dataview Queries or rebuild them in Bases.

My inclination at the moment is to leave things as they are and wait for Bases to evolve and give me a compelling reason to invest that migration time.

Dipping into AI

June 9, 2025 /

If you follow Joanna Penn through her podcasts, videos, or books, you’ll know she’s a huge advocate of using AI tools to help her business. I’ve shied away from AI in my writing and publishing processes but began to rethink that after my sister mentioned how she used Claude to help with descriptions of some of the tapestries displayed in the recent Heallreaf exhibition.

As I had been struggling with getting the right sales copy for one of my stories, I thought, why not give it a try. I signed up with Claude.ai from Anthropic, and selected the free plan. There are two other plans available: the Pro Plan at $17.00 a month and the Max plan which start at $100.00 a month. Once you’re signed up, Claude asks for your name, and your area of interest, offering coding, writing, business and strategy and number of other options.

After that you see a text box with Claude asking how it can help you. I typed in that I wanted sales copy for a novel added the genre and a couple of bullet points. What came back was okay, so I refined it a little more, then again, and a fourth time. I expected the iterations as Joanna Penn talks about adding specificity to your queries to get better results.

What I ended up with was just over a hundred words of pretty good sales copy.

Encouraged, I tried again with the ideas I have for the next Jacob and Miriam story. Using what I’d learned previously, I was able to be quite detailed with the initial request, and got a good response. Further tweaking got me closer to what I had in mind, and then I hit the daily limit for the free account.

At the moment I don’t think I’ll be upgrading to the Pro account although some of the Pro features, like Projects do look interesting and bear further investigation.

Looking Back at May

June 2, 2025 /

I got to Sunday, and June 1st with a sigh of relief. I had set myself some fairly aggressive writing goals for May after a reset at the end of April, and didn’t make any of them.

I realized this was happening about ten days ago when the short story I’d been working never quite reached the end. Partly that was because I was practicing a specific craft technique, but mostly because after a fairly solid start at the beginning of the month, the writing just didn’t happen.

Once I sat down and thought about it, the reason was pretty clear. A project I was helping out with for my day job, became mine full-time so I was in total catch up and understand mode as well as herding the cats on my original projects. My usual writing time is later in the evening when the house is quiet, except by that time my brain was a mushy mess and the last thing I wanted to think about was writing fiction.

I wasn’t happy about that, so I sat down again revisited some classes and thought more about what my day looked like, and because of timezones and client schedules, I realized I had a block of time very early in the morning, anda class recommendation was to set yourself a minimum, say 250 words.

Given I haven’t been writing anything close to that on a daily basis, and it was making me cranky, I decided to give it a go – 250 words before I even look at the work computer.

Today is day eight. Not the longest of streaks but I’ve also found that I do have energy to revisit the manuscript later at night. Mostly it’s only been a hundred words or so but there have been times where another two or three hundred words have popped up.

I’m not predicting how long this streak will run but eight days is my longest consecutive writing streak so far this year. We’ll see how I’m doing next Monday.

Bright and Shiny

June 2, 2025 /

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted here, and there’s been a lot happening in my world. Some of it I’ll cover in a May retrospective next week. Some of it won’t get covered either because I’m not ready to talk about it yet, or because there are other people involved and they don’t need my comments, perceptions, or thoughts on a subject where, at best I have half the story.

So, what is bright and shiny this week. Obsidian Bases. What?

if you’re part of the early access program with Obsidian, release 1.9.1 includes a new core plugin called Bases. It allows you to turn your vault of notes into a database. My first thought was, so what. I have the Dataview plugin that allows me to write queries on all the notes in the vault and build results for display.

That’s true but when I looked at how the Base syntax is structured and some of the functionality in the road map, I came more excited. The Obsidian development team fleshed out and improved the original Canvas concept really quickly to the point where I use canvas a lot of time. I expect they’ll do the same with Bases over the next few months and in the meantime I’ll tinker around and see what it can do.

Dictating the Story

May 5, 2025 /

Over the past few years I’ve dabbled with dictating parts of a story, usually with varying degrees of success. I’ve been nowhere near as productive with it as Kevin J. Anderson, who has used dictation to write his novels for many years. He even wrote a book about it On Being a Dictator – WordFire Shop

Part of the challenge, as Kevin discusses in the book is that it takes time to become comfortable with the process. The last time I tried dictating was about two years ago. I began to make some good progress then hit the challenge of having to transcribe several hundred words of audio. I found myself spending as much time, or more, transcribing as I was writing new words. Not an ideal solution and not long after that I put the recorder away to gather dust.

This past week or so, the idea of dictation nudged at my mind. I still had the same concern of transcribing several hundred words but now the text to speech capabilities have improved dramatically that I figured it was worth another try.

Typically, the first challenge was the recorder. I know it’s somewhere but not anywhere I can find it, despite turning my office upside down twice and scouring through my car, which is where the recorder was usually left.

Still no luck, so I turned to my trusty friend Amazon. The digital recorder options there range from $30.00 to $300.00, with an interesting discovery that most of them include a speech to text capability. I hesitated on the Buy button because you can guarantee that the morning the new recorder arrives, I’ll find the old one!

Instead, I had a quick look at the Voice Memo app on my iphone – recordings only limited by the space left on your iphone, and wait – what’s this? speech to text translation. I took it for a quick test drive and the translation was acceptable. Syncing of the audio was easy – right there into iCloud. The transcription was a little more involved as you have to copy the transcript into a Files folder that’s connected to iCloud – not the end of the world, but not as easy as sharing via AirDrop – maybe in the next iteration.

I’m about half way through a short story, and as I have the rest of it pretty clear in my mind, I’m going to see how dictation works for the next 1,500 to 2,000 words.

Stay tuned.

Tracking Timelines

April 30, 2025 /

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading some books on a couple of topics that might turn into stories. It’s still early days yet but I’m already seeing the need for a timeline of some sort to track the sequence of events.

The first topic is the English Civil War, or more correctly, as I’ve learned, the British Civil War. For this tracking it made sense to use Aeon Timeline. I’ve owned the software for several years and for tracking people, battles, and events, and the relationships between them, it’s ideal for this level of detail

The second topic is more nebulous. I have a couple of dates and some events but I’m not sure yet how they are related, or even if they are or should be. While I have a pretty clear idea where I’m going with et British Civil War idea, I’m not so sure about this second one, and Aeon is clearly overkill.

What I need is something really simple, and not surprisingly an article about Obsidian gave me the answer. I set up notes with the title being the date and a very short description. In the body of the note I link to another note that describes the topic. Within that note I can now display a table of all linked items in date order and I have a lightweight timeline I can add to easily.

The Little Things

April 23, 2025 /

I’m currently reading the first volume of Ronald Hutton’s excellent biography of Oliver Cromwell. One of the many things that make this book stand out, not just from other Cromwell biographies, but also biographies of other famous people, is how Hutton balances accepted narrative against the documented evidence. Much of what has been written about Oliver Cromwell, especially after the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, either makes Cromwell out to be a saint, or an agent of the devil.

As with most people, I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between, and that is where Hutton takes us.

The reason for mentioning this is that Hutton intersperses the dry narrative with almost fiction like descriptions of the countryside and lands that Cromwell rode through during his time as a cavalry commander in the Parliamentary Armies. The battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642) is covered in some depth as are the battles of Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) and Naseby (June 14, 1645). It’s Hutton’s description of Marston Moor that caught my attention, and triggered this piece.

The first thing you’d notice, Hutton tells us, is likely the smell. Thousands of unwashed men and horses standing for twelve or more hours, sweating and answering calls of nature and enveloped in powder smoke from the cannon fire. Powder smoke and deposits that get in the eyes, nose, and mouth, and when swallowed act as a powerful and fast acting laxative.

I don’t write many battle scenes, although there’s a couple of projects coming up where that’s likely to change. The points Hutton describes would never have occurred to me to include in the narrative of a battle scene. And it’s not just the British Civil War, think about the Confederate Brigades waiting to charge Cemetery Ridge on the third day of Gettysburg, and breathing the smoke from over 150 cannon bombarding the Union positions for two hours.

It’s these little pieces of information, unpleasant though they may be, that help bring our writing alive and keep the reader engaged. I’ll certainly bear them in mind when I write the next battle scene.

Checking Reality

April 8, 2025 /

This wasn’t the blog I intended to write this week, but circumstances triggered a thought process and so here we are.

I was reading a book on investment strategies this week and came across an interesting strategy call the All Seasons Portfolio. I hadn’t heard of it before so I did some research. All Seasons is a simplified version of Ray Dalio’s All Weather portfolio with the idea you allocate your portfolio as

  • 30% Stocks
  • 40% Long Term Bonds (over 20 years)
  • 15% Short Term Bonds (3 – 7 years)
  • 7.5% Gold
  • 7.5% Commodity Index

You can replicate this distribution fairly easily using ETF’s. The article recommended a specific ETF for each category (VTIP, TLT, IEI, GLD, and GSG), and rebalancing on an annual basis. As I am looking for a place to invest some liquid funds, I decided to check it out.

The first step was to find a date when all five of the recommended ETF’s were trading and that came out to be late 2012, so I picked December 1 as the start date. It took a little effort but with the help of Yahoo Finance, I was able to get the closing prices for each ETF on December 1 (or the nearest date) from 2012 to 2024 and put them into a spreadsheet.

After that, it was a simple exercise to determine my hypothetical investment capital of $5,000, calculate the allocations, and annual rebalancing. It probably took me an hour or so to get it all put together, and the results surprised me. On December 2, 2024, the value of the portfolio was $2,320.26, a loss of 54%.

Can’t be right. I checked my logic and checked my calculations and had someone else look them over as well. They agreed my logic and calculations looked correct, and so Wow!

We are always reminded to fact check and reality check politicians. This exercise reminded me how important it is to reality check investment recommendations as well.

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