Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Month: March 2020

Tsundoku

March 24, 2020 /

No, it’s not a game where you get the numbers in the right boxes. Apparently, and I have my sister to thank for this, Tsundoku is a Japanese word that describes piling up books to save for later – even if you never get round to reading them.

Guilty!

A literal translation is “to pile up reading,” and as I look over at my bookshelves, I can see multiple examples. Some I can give myself a pass on, after all, most people won’t read a Bible Commentary from end-to-end.

Others? Well, there’s quite a stack of non-fiction, for which I blame Amazon. It used to be that using a credit card didn’t feel like spending money. Now, when I can use the points from that credit card to fund my book-buying habits, there’s no stopping me.

I prefer most of my non-fiction in hard copy, and for the moment, Amazon is still delivering. Goodness know what will happen if I have to move everything to digital because the new iPad Pro only goes up to 1Tb of storage!

A Quiet Week

March 10, 2020 /

There’s not much to report this week. I did complete my weekly short story which ended up with a little more of a supernatural theme than I intended, or expected.

Apart from that, I started the next phase of laying decking down the attic space. The goal is to move everything from my storage unit into the attic. I suspect part of that exercise will involve substantial donations to Goodwill!

February Recap

March 3, 2020 /

As I mentioned last week, February was a bit of a mixed month. I did complete and submit my short story a week. so that’s four more in inventory. Mostly I got the stories in with some time to spare.

This past weekend though, I was definitely leveraging the time difference from Central to Pacific to make that midnight (Pacific) deadline. That was partly my own fault as I was well into the story on Thursday until I realized I was telling the story of a secondary character, but through the eyes of my viewpoint character.

Talk about draining the energy out of the story.

So on Friday morning it was back to the drawing board and redrafting just over 2,000 words so they’re from the new viewpoint, and much closer to the action. I think it worked better.

There wasn’t such good progress on the novel. That seems to have stalled a little at the moment, but I did go through what I’ve already written and tidied up the timeline. I also rethought some of the scenes and moved them around so the overall timeline is reduced by a day. Poor Jacob will be run ragged by the end 🙂

No real progress on getting more of my short story backlog up onto Amazon, Kobo, and Apple although I finally got Angels Without Faces up on the iBooks store. And wasn’t that a challenge! Sign this, acknowledge that, and approve something else. Then you have to download the iTunes Producer app, load the manuscript into Producer, and then submit to Apple.

I think there might be a market for a workbook to help folks through that process. I put it on the “Projects to think about” list and will come back to it.

March has started well, so fingers crossed it stays that way!

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