Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Page 8 of 14

Managing Chaos

March 30, 2023 /

It’s been a while since I posted, and directly related to the way my world seemed to spin out of control in February and March.

As well as closing down one project, and starting another, I was asked to help manage the response to an RFP. It didn’t sound much, but these things never do. Suddenly I found myself juggling three projects across three time zones and trying not to double or triple book meetings. It’s all very well to suggest using an online calendar, or paper to manage this all, but the overhead is horrible. I know, I tried both and I wanted a simpler option.

I’ve written about the Obsidian application several times on this blog, and no surprise, we’re going there again. One of the three projects I mentioned is tracking the progress of several thousand line items on a shared Excel spreadsheet. I got a handle on my piece of that by building a quick tracking board using the Obsidian Kanban plugin. I have about twenty distinct items in flight at any one time and finally I know the status of each one.

The calendar was a little harder. Eventually, I went really basic. Using the Obsidian Canvas feature, I built a column for each day of the week, then added a note for each meeting with the time, description, and a color code for the type – client or personal. Because Obsidian synchronizes seamlessly across all my devices, it’s a quick glance to see if a specific date and time are free.

For the moment, I think the chaos is under control. One of those three projects finishes at the end of March so the need for coordination should become less. Except you know how it is with chaos. It’s never completely tamed.

He said. She asked

February 1, 2023 /

Last night I was part-way through a book, racing to the end, when suddenly I was out of the story, looking at the room around me, and wondering what happened.

When I looked back at the story, the actual words on the page, the author had written one of those dialog statements that reads like a question and tagged it at the end with “she asked.”

Back when I was a newer writer, I added all manner of tags at the end of dialog. You know the sort of thing – Mark demanded, she whispered – I’m fairly certain I never wrote he ejaculated. Even to my novice mind, that never seemed quite right.

And then I discovered Elmore Leonard.

Pick up any of his books and open it to a random page. The chances are you’ll find whole blocks of dialog – sometimes pages – where the speech attribution, if any, reads: Chili said, or she said. I’ve read and studied Elmore Leonard’s books and never in those blocks of dialog are you in any doubt as to who is speaking. I learned a huge amount from that study.

It took a while, but I did get back into that story, and it ended as I hoped. I just wish she’d said instead of asked!

An Obvious Solution

January 18, 2023 /

I did quite a lot of driving in the first half of January, and that enabled me to catch up on some of the podcast backlog.
One of those podcasts was Joanna Penn’s interview with Dan Padavona.
Over the years I’ve read a lot of books about attaining your goals – from Napoleon Hill through Catherine Ponder and Brian Tracy. I won’t go into the details, but they all talk about visualizing your goals as a beginning action each day.
Easy to state. Not so easy in practice.
I don’t have children in the house any more, but I do have a cat and two dogs and the moment you’re awake and up, they expect your complete focus and attention, for breakfast if nothing else. Maybe I;m too literal, but that apparent conflict has always bothered me.
Now, back to the podcast, where Dan Padavona makes the comment about sitting down to review and visualize his goals before starting to write each day. Not necessarily first thing in the morning.
Well duh!
And there was my answer.

Planning for 2023

December 27, 2022 /

When I began jotting my thoughts down for 2023, one of the things that struck me was how similar the list was for 2022, and that made me pause.

A lot of the personal items were house maintenance projects, like replacing air-conditioning units. In 2022, they fell into the “nice to get to” category. For 2023, they’ve mostly moved into the “need to schedule” category.

From a writing perspective, that took a little more thought. As I mentioned my word count fell off a cliff in July and derailed my goals. There was also another factor in that the initial plan was to write mostly long fiction – more Jacob and Miriam stories, and a trilogy I’ve had rolling around in my head for a long time. Instead, I got distracted into short fiction, and short fiction I found hard. With the benefits of hindsight, I should have reviewed everything in the middle of the year, and reset. Easy to make these decision after the event.

Those thoughts coalesced around the same time I was reading some of Mark McGuinness’s work on being a 21st Century Creative, where he talks about a project focus rather than something more granular. The more I read, it became obvious I’ve let myself become too focused on the number of words written instead of the end product – a short story, novella, or novel. In 2023, I’m going to shift the emphasis. The writing plan, including keeping a more regular schedule with this blog, is to complete six projects in 2023. I’ll still track word count, and if I succeed, it will be about double the actual words for this year, and end up about 60% of what I planned for 2022.

And the projects? I know the first one, and have already made a start. There are placeholders for the rest, but they aren’t cast in stone.

I’ll let you know how it goes , and in the meantime, I hope everyone has a safe and prosperous New Year.

2022 – Sad, Bad, and Good

December 8, 2022 /

My original thought for this looking back on 2022 blog was Good, Bad and Sad., but that means finishing on a low note, and overall that isn’t my intention for 2022. So let’s begin with the sad.

At the end of July, one of my best friends passed away. Chris had been battling cancer for many years, and seemed to have everything under control until the day after her son’s wedding, her heart decided otherwise. Through all her travails. I never saw Chris anything but upbeat and positive. Like everyone else who knew her, I will miss her smiles and infectious laughter.

Bad really falls into two categories. There’s life-bad and bad-to-good. On life-bad my writing fell off a cliff in July and really only picked up in November. Of course that totally derailed my writing goals for 2022 and has made me reconsider what’s really achievable each year. More on that when I look at 2023.

Bad-to-good covers my day-job world. In late September we signed a contract extension with our current client through the end of 2023. Just before Thanksgiving here in the US, the company decided we should be full-time employees or we were gone. I’ve been humbled by the number of people who suggested options when they knew I might be available in January, and now I have a contract that covers all of 2023, which is a good segue into the good part of 2022.

On the writing front, even though I won’t reach all my goals for 2022, I did publish five story collections and converted Thieves in the Temple to AI Audio as I mentioned previously.

Finally, at the beginning of this month (December), my daughter got married and I had the privilege of walking her down the aisle.

Overall a good year.

Thoughts on AI Audio

October 18, 2022 /

The use of an artificial intelligence voice to produce an audio version of a work of fiction or non-fiction has been around for quite a while now. Early versions were clearly early versions. The voices were monotone and robotic sounding and not really suited to the nuances and inflexions of a fiction story.

Time has passed, and the quality and ability of the AI voice to sound more human has improved in leaps and bounds. Joanna Penn provides regular updates on her podcasts (The Creative Penn Podcast: Writing, Publishing, Book Marketing, Making A Living With Your Writing | The Creative Penn), and earlier in the summer, she spoke about a new, and currently free, service on Google Play that takes your text manuscript and converts it to audio, with the option to select one of several AI voices.

As an experiment, in June, I put Thieves in the Temple through the process and added it to my Google Catalog along with the eBooks (Thieves in the Temple by Richard Freeborn – Audiobooks on Google Play). The quality wasn’t bad, so I priced the audio the same as the paperback, and added a notation it’s AI narrated. I intended to put a proper cover on it, like the eBook and paperback versions, but something bright and shiny distracted me, and I never got around to it.

And I’ve sold copies! That surprised me as I’ve done no marketing or promotion, just added it to the catalog and left it there. It’s now my top seller on Google!

Who knew?

Meeting a Book Club

October 5, 2022 /

A few months ago, a friend asked if I’d come to her book club and talk about Thieves in the Temple.

Of course, I said yes, and last night (October 4th), arrived with a bottle of Pinot Noir and a certain level of nervousness as the six members of the book club congregated with more copies of the book than I’ve ever seen in the same place.

I wasn’t sure what to expect but the first question put me at ease – how did the Judeans get to Babylon? After that I relaxed, and everything flowed until one lady asked: We know who took the fall, but who was really behind it?

What?

It’s a while since I really looked at Thieves in the Temple, but as we talked further, I realized she was right. The people in the climax were pawns, not the people really behind what happened. As I drove away later, the thought wouldn’t go away, and a glimmer of an idea came to me.

It was still there this morning.

I don’t think it’s a Jacob story, but it does fit in with some other ideas I’ve been fleshing out, and it actually brought some of them more into focus. I’ve tentatively slotted it in my head for after Death at a Wedding and Murder of a Dead Man, but who knows what bright shiny object might come up before then.

And a huge thank you to the Pine Nuts Book Club for inviting me.

Harvest Time

August 26, 2022 /

Two years ago, I grew a pair of habanero pepper plants as an experiment to see what happened. To say it was a success would be an understatement. I still have three quart storage bags in my freezer. After all, there’s only so much marinade and pepper jelly you can make and give away at any one time.

Since then, my nephew has caught the agricultural bug, and he has much more space for his crops. This year we’ve been getting regularly deliveries of corn, okra, and several varieties of hot peppers including a wicked item called the ghost chili.

On the Scoville Heat Unit rating jalapenos are 2,500 to 8,000, habaneros about 100,000 and the ghost chili about a million! Even with an unbroken skin on the pepper, they’re the peppers you handle with gloves – or a full bio-hazard suit. My sister-in-law claims to like her pepper jelly hot, but I suspect these may be too much for her, We’ll see.

On a total change of subject, the current edition of Asimov’s has the first part of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s new Diving novel – The Court Martial of the Renegat Renegades. Everything in the house stopped while I binge read that first installment, and now I have to wait until the November/December issue of Asimov’s for the next part. If you’ve read any of Kris’s Diving series, especially The Renegat, you’ll want to grab this, both in Asimov’s, and when the actual book becomes available. I know I will

Life Rolls

August 4, 2022 /

Life rolls happen when you least expect them.

Or, rather they do in my case. And when they happen they consume everything you have to the exclusion of everything else. I had one of those in July when I received photo from the manager of our rental property showing a hole in the kitchen ceiling. Somewhere else in the building, someone’s AC unit had popped a pipe and distributed water everywhere.

That meant an unplanned visit, and even though the building management made the repairs, we still had to coordinate the repairs, the painter, and clean up – as well as continuing the day job.

Needless to say, something had to suffer, and it was my writing. July recorded the lowest monthly word count since I started keeping track, and I’m now about 20,000 words behind where I was at this time last year.

Until last night, I’d written barely anything in August either, but I did manage to jot down some thoughts and ideas on Death at a Wedding, that today went into the story. It wasn’t as many words as I hoped but at least I climbed back onto the wagon, and it feels pretty good so far.

I need to adjust my plans for the rest of the third quarter, but hopefully it will work out. And hopefully no more life rolls!

Half Year Recap

July 10, 2022 /

It seems a little hard to believe that not only are we finished with the first half of 2022, but as I write this, we’re already a third of the way through July!

Before I look at the first six months, I want to point everyone to the James Webb Space Telescope site here The image includes the star HD147980, and a number of other stars, recognizable by the diffraction spikes. Every other object in the image is a galaxy! It’s a sobering reminder of the scale of the universe, and how miniscule we humans are by comparison.

Turning back to the more mundane, the year began well, both from a writing and publishing perspective. As I’ve mentioned previously I published four collections, and separately submitted several stories. Unfortunately, progress on the next Jacob and Miriam novel has been moving slowly, and I think some of that frustration led to pretty much a writing halt in June. I did finish a couple of short stories, but it was an effort.

July began pretty much the same as June, and over this weekend, I sat down and gave some thought as to why. Blaming it on critical voice is an easy, and not very satisfactory answer. The real question is what caused me to let critical voice seize control like that? I have some ideas about that, and some of it goes back to the decisions I made around writing goals for 2022 back a tthe turn of the year. My next step is to revisit, and maybe revise those goals for the second half.

I’ll keep you posted.

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