I spent Monday and Tuesday working on a short story submission. The workshop that I went to last week at the Barbican on horror was the last one a series run by Good Bad Books over the summer -- I hadn't known about it till the last one, otherwise I would have been to all of them -- and they were taking submissions from attendees for a chapbook of work.
However, the submission date was Wednesday which basically gave me two days to write and edit something. I could have simply pulled an idea off the shelf, or even taking a preexisting piece. But I wanted to do something based on the exercises in the workshop, so I was essentially almost working from a fragment which was never really intended to be a full story.
I got it done. Submissions had to be less than 1000 words, and mine was about 750. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. And it got accepted, so I'll get a couple of copies at the event they're holding this week (tickets still available!)
It's a horror story about a man on a train, a small child, and some plastic dinosaurs. You might enjoy it.
Yesterday we went over the the Isle of Sheppey -- which, it turns out, was named by the Romans who called it "Island of Sheep" -- for Flood III, a walking tour combined with writing workshop. It was part of a series of workshops run by the Fieldnotes group across southern England aiming to explore creative practice situated in place, and there is definitely something interesting and inspiring about moving from location to location while exploring some prompts for creative work.
We ended in the best possible fashion: a cup of tea and slice of cake at the Criterion Bluetown Heritage Centre. This is a brilliant small museum and music hall which is doing a huge amount to preserve the history of Sheppey and Bluetown in particular. Once a cramped working class district created to serve the docks, Bluetown housed thousands of people thanks to the adjacent docks, which made workers live within a mile. Now there are only about 200 people living in Bluetown. It's fascinating -- and outside of the island (and even on it) a lot of this history is invisible.
This week also saw the arrival of two new bits of technology. The first was a 2TB internal SSD, which I fitted into my ThinkPad X1 Carbon – which means it now has 32GB RAM and enough storage to last quite a while. It's mainly a Linux machine these days which means it is massively over-specced, but the performance is really good and I like using it. That keyboard!
The second arrival was a Keyboard Folio for my Remarkable 2 tablet. I recently started using this again after a long hiatus (I'll write something about this on Technovia soon), but I'm really enjoying it and the Keyboard Folio means I can use it as a little distraction-free device for getting words written in draft.
I'm considering writing a monthly old-school tech column. Not business focused (lord knows there's enough of that). But something more in line with Jerry Pournelle's Byte stuff, which was mostly just about the tech travails he had encountered that month. I've actually got enough for one this month, so might kick it off this week.
The three things which most caught my attention
- Rupert Murdoch "retired" (hint: he's not retired) and Mic Wright wrote the best thing you will read about him. Includes the line "When Murdoch is finally pronounced dead — perhaps for tax reasons…"
- Apple publicly states it's all in favour of right to repair, while undermining it through whatever technical and legal means it has to hand. This company really does not deserve your money. It sure as heck isn't getting any more of mine.
- This one came via Cory too, and it's a beaut: the B612 font, which is used in Airbus cockpits and designed for legibility, is actually open source and free to use. Mmmmm, fonts. You can download it. It's nice.
Things I have been writing
After finishing off the story for the workshop I did some more work fleshing out the world of the wolves that I mentioned last week. I think there is something in this.
Things I have been reading
My pile of books grows ever larger. Arrived this week was something new by Gary GIbson (Europa Deep), Stephen Baxter (Creation Node), and I haven't even finished Neal Asher's War Bodies, which is working really hard not to keep me reading.
All that's on top of a bunch of non-fiction: Danny Cipriani's autobiography and Tiago Forte's The PARA Method. I have much reading to do.
