Mick Davidson: Words & Pictures
  • Home
  • Captain's Blog
  • It's All About Inspiration
    • It's All About You Guidelines
  • Writing
    • Poetry
    • Reviews
    • Stories
    • Travel
    • Twitter Verse
  • Photography
    • Travel >
      • Australia >
        • Melbourne, 2012/13
        • Melbourne, 2013/14
      • France
      • Latin America
      • Luxembourg
      • Netherland >
        • Groningen
        • Limburg
        • Zeeland
      • Spain >
        • Alhambra
    • In Concert >
      • Celebr80s Party
      • Sultans of Slide
      • Tio Gringo
      • Blues Festival 2010
    • All Sorts of Treasures >
      • RuneFest 2103
  • Bio
  • Contact

May 27th, 2012

5/27/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
Sex, Death and Trains: All Yours For Nothing (still!)*

*Terms and Conditions apply: you can get a free copy of my first novel, The Darkness Beneath, by following this link - but hurry! Only the first 100 people to sign up can claim a free copy.


I Should Have Been A Dentist
No really, I should have been. Because pulling teeth is exactly what writing can be like at time. That and carving granite with a teaspoon.

A few weeks ago I decided that the last chapter of The Girl Who Dreamt of Water should have one final dream sequence that ties all the various strands and people together and allows them to come to terms with difficulties they've had and accept the things they'd not been able to accept before the final chapter pulled into the station. It would also allow me to have a really good time writing something that might be considered a little on the fantsatic side (my favourite form of writing).

But although you can see there's clearly a reason to do this, actually finding even half an idea to write about is a whole other thing. After some head bashing and wandering around with a large empty space in my imagination, I finally came up with .5 of an idea (variable by +/- 10%).

I was very happy with this until I started writing it and realised that all I had really was two sentences. And so began the long, long climb up from the bottomless pit of dispair into the land of the clueless.

This resulted in a the creation of a few short paragraphs that seemed to be repeating themselves.

So I swapped character in the hope that new blood would fire up the imagination engine and swing the floodgates of ideas open and allow a river of words to drip, flow and cascade out of my mind and onto the page. (let me know if any of these trips the 'Flowery' gauge...)

Instead, each word has had to be scraped out of my skull one by one by one. 

So, perhaps the problem/answer is:
A) I'm worrying too much about what I'm writing and this constant critique is getting in the way.
B) What I'm writing is crap and therefore...
C) It's a good idea, but I haven't quite hit my stride and need to keep going until I do.

I've no idea which is right myself, but I'm going with C my friend, 'cause I often find, that flying blind, will get you there in the end. 

Which is fine, but I am scared that B might be true and I sure as hell don't want to spend the few hours I manage to spend writing, writing rubbish. I'm expecting the dream sequence to top out at about 5-6k words - which is an awful lot of words to delete, especially as they are an awful lot of words that took an awful lot of writing in the first place. 

I'd be pleased to know how you deal with this sort of problem.

Euro Derision
Whilst a lot of us are quietly freaking out about the meltdown of the global economy, there is something that we should worry about more. And that is why the UK has once more failed to make it into the top ten of the Eurovision song contest. That said, we improved on last year's position by finishing second to last this time.

The reason why we fail is because we choose the most complete and utter shyte as our song. You can't blame Engelbert, he sang magnificently, but if you're drinking shit, your burps are always going to stink. 

And why am I bovvered by this? It's very simple. Various Britains have been responsible of writing some of the best pop tunes ever, and the general public have acknowledged this by buying these song in their millions.

So why is it that a country jammed full of top song-writing talent (Beatles, Bowie, Bolan, the Floyd, Kinks, New Order, Stones, Muse, Massive Attack to name but a few) can only be inspired to write the most bland, turgid and insipid MOR crap? 

Clearly someone's playing safe here, and it's failing big time. It's about time the real songwriters in the UK ripped the task from the cold, dead fingers the losers who currently organise it, and take one giant leap away from the cesspool. 

I don't care if we don't win, but I do care that we take pride in our magnificent songwriting tradition and give it our best shot.

Cheers

0 Comments

Ego Versus Passion: The Big Fight

5/20/2012

2 Comments

 
Picture
Sex, Death and Trains: All Yours For Nothing (still!)*

*Terms and Conditions apply: you can get a free copy of my first novel, The Darkness Beneath, by following this link - but hurry! Only the first 100 people to sign up can claim a free copy.

Read All About Me, Read All About Me
Yes, when you've finished here and found yourself not sated, you can pop over to Raebeth McGees writing blog spot where there's a rather excellent interview with me (amazingly...)

I Know Nothing (But Fortunately Someone Else Knows Rather More)
I've recently hooked up with the chaps at 90 Days on Twitter (@90daysnovel). In a nutshell these are two brothers who together are writing a novel in, um, 90 days. As they say on their website:

"The challenge is to write, edit, format and publish an entire novel in just 90 days."

Which is a good thing in itself, but what I hadn't expected to find when I visited their site is all the excellent info they've published about indie authoring. It's must-read for all indie authors - and I'm someone who is loathe to use such a term (and especially loathe the double quotes that always hang around such expressions).

The question is, how on earth do they manage to write such in-depth reports AND continue with their novel? Do they never sleep?


Death By Taxes
Well, last Tuesday came and went and I'm still alive. Yes, I did visit the tax office but the people I saw there are just as anxious as I to come to a mutually acceptable and affordable solution. Although the outcome was fairly positive, it is the least worst possibility, so there will still be plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth, crying into my empty wallet and pining for all the goods I can see but no longer own. We're still waiting for the solution to migrate from possibility to actuality (via the gift of print), but this should happen this coming week.

In the upside I'm just about to start some freelance writing work which should help me pay the additional tax burden and allow me to update my CV with a new area of writing, Research and Development, for a company that is involved with the security of set top boxes. I can't tell you anything about the work, but some of it is so confidential I'll have to do the work in their office as it's not allowed to be leave the building, and definitely not via leaky old emails.


Dream Scene - Necessity Or Ego Massage?

I've just finished re-editing the final chapter of The Girl Who Dreamt Of Water, and only have one new section to write now (though there's still plenty of editing and re-writing to do). The main point of this section is to allow the two main characters to subconscioulsy examine and assimilate all the info they've recently aquired in the Big Fight scene, while spending the night in a cell in the local police station. 

The scene ties up all the loose ends of their thoughts and allows them to reach a new point in their relationship. Sorry to be vague, but I'm not going to spoil the ending for the sake of clarity. (Though I am looking for readers, so if you are busting a gut to know, please let get in contact.)

But there is another side to writing this, and that is that it will give me the opportunity to write another dream section (I'll stop short of calling it magical-realist but that's what I want to say), and the reason for that is that I REALLY ENJOY WRITING THIS WAY. To be brutally honest, although I love this story itself and have enjoyed writing it for several reasons, the fact is, I really love writing the more surreal/dream like sequences. Without these, I don't think I could have written it at all.

Yes, there it is, out in the open, my confession: what my book is about is not entertaining the reader - it's about entertaining and indulging myself. Actually, I'm not bothered if people think less of me because of this, because I believe (at the risk of dying in obscurity (which I obviously don't believe is going to happen to me)) that writers should write what's best for the story, not the audience. And often that will mean not being commercially viable as far the publishing world is concerned.

I think that as a writer I owe it to myself to write what I want, not what some potential audience or publisher wants. LIfe is too full of compromises as it is: why should I compromise something that means an demands so much of me? Of course I want commercial success, but I also want to write something that is beautiful in itself in the same way that visual artists create objects of beauty. It might seem arrogant to say, but I consider myself and all writers as artists just as much as sculpturers and painters are. And that means creating objects of beauty no matter the conditions and circumstances.
Cheers.

2 Comments

Book Covers, Cops and Title-Tattle

5/13/2012

3 Comments

 
Sex, Death and Trains: All Yours For Nothing (still!)*
*Terms and Conditions apply: you can get a free copy of my first novel, The Darkness Beneath, by following this link - but hurry! Only the first 100 people to sign up can claim a free copy.

Rolling and Tumbling
Well I rolled and I tumbled, and I also ducked, weaved and bobbed through last week as I waited for my accountant to call with the exact time and date of the end of the world. Turns out it's 0900 next Tuesday. Which means that I've had another week of sticking my head in the sand and pretending that nothing-serious-is-about-to-happen.

So look out next week, watch out for jack-in-the-box highs and wrist-slitting lows: my rational self will be rationed for at least week, as will the few pennies left in my bank account. On the upside, you can sit back and watch me go into meltdown from the comfort of your own living rooms. Consider it a service and don't forget to send an occassional postcard to me at the asylum/debtor's prison.*

(* To be announced.)

Cover Story
I love book covers me, they're brilliant but creating them is a real art. Some book covers make me want to buy the book just for the cover but I have to say that far too many covers from indie authors are pretty amateur. Especially those that are only published as eBooks, and the designer (if that's not too grand a term) hasn't considered shrinkage. I.e., how small the text and images will be once the full size art work has been shrunk down to Kindle size.

Another major error is the mixing of fonts. It's not that you shouldn't, but I think the basic rule is that you shouldn't use more than two, and they should be simple enough to be readable after they've been put through the incredible shrinking machine. This also goes for the images used. Sadly, many of the covers I see are either the work of people who know nothing of design, or are the creations of people who think that Photoshop's main purpose is to create cutesy borders around terrible photos. To which they add the following across the bottom in some less than attractive and far too enormous font: © IamRubbish Photography. This is done because they make the twin mistakes of imagining they have an image worth copy writing, and that their work is so good they can call themselves professional. Wrong on both counts.

But I digress.

Title-Tattle
What you're here for is, apart from watching my financial implosion, is to find out more about what's happening with The Girl isn't it? Ok, ok, so here's the story. I realised the other day that to make one of the final chapter's last few scenes work, it has to take place in the dark. Not a problem really, just slide time forward a couple of hours and your done. 

Well, almost. We want dark but it's summer, not high summer but we're still graced with very long days. Darkness doesn't get out of his limousine until at least 2200. So the slide has to be by at least two hours, otherwise the cops are going to look very silly walking through the woods with their torches shining while the sun's still high in the sky. 

And yes, this is a love story/romance, why would't there be cops? 
Cheers,
3 Comments

Life and Taxes, Sickness and Writing

5/7/2012

2 Comments

 
Sex, Death and Trains: All Yours For Nothing*
*Terms and Conditions apply: you can get a free copy of my first novel, The Darkness Beneath, by following this link - but hurry! Only the first 100 poeple to sign up can claim a free copy.

You Have Friends!
Last week (and all of this so far) was not a good week as I had a cold and bloody awful toothache (and there's no past tense about either now, they are just less noticable). These forms of misery are not compatible and had to be fought of with Echinacea and pain killers. Something I try to avoid at all costs, but the combination of bastard irritations got the best of me. Which is why both my blogs are late this week.

On the upside, I had many good wishes from friends world-wide via facebook, which was very cheering - thank you all for your support!


Just When I Thought Everything Was Going To Change
It didn't. But not for a want of trying. We arrived at the tax office on Thursday morning ready to be hung out to dry only to find the appointment had been cancelled at the last minute.

Very sadly, a family member of the person we were seeing had died that morning. It's moments like these when you realise that the enormity of many problems we have are purley subjective. Not that that means anyone's problems are lessened because of it. But given the choice between death and taxes, I'll go for taxes every time.


Novel Two Finished!
Or is it? As all writers come to learn, writing is all about re-writing and although I have finished the main body of writing, there's still a ton of re-writing to be done. But that's the fun part! That's the bit I really enjoy, the carving of the real story from the thicket of my words. Removing the dross, the deadbeat, the dull and the screamingly hilarious attempts at saying something clever. 

Time to get the analogy machete out and send it slicing through the weeds of words and - oh, looks like I've started again.

The great thing about finishing the main body of writing is that now I can measure the time left on book two in months, rather than the end being in the dim and distant future, a time yet unknown to Man. After so much work over such a long period of time, it's great to start imagining that I can see the mirage of the finishing line.


All Change!
Another great thing that's happened with this book is that the very wonderful Nicoll Heaslip has come up with a much better name for it. The working title has always been Life Cycle, which is, let's face it, rubbish and only hints at what the contents are about. 

So, from this moment forth, book two is called: The Girl Who Dreamt of Water. Admittedly, this might not give you much of a clue about the story either, but it's so damned poetic that I refuse to call it anything else. So if you're confused by the title, you can read the first three chapters and sort yourself out.

And I'm very, very pleased to announce that she's also creating and designing the cover. Given how excellent the first one is, I can't wait to see the second. 

Looking back at last's week's moan about the Wall of Indifference, this week was totally different. When I announced on facebook that I'd finished the main writing of The Girl, I was awash with congratulations from so many friends, which was very cheering - thank you all!
Cheers.
2 Comments
    Picture

    Author

    Mick Davidson is a full time technical writer and semi-full time fiction author. He also finds time for both guitar playing and photography. When not being creative, he is heavily involved in Staring Out The Window research.

    He is definitely in the market for publication and agent representation.

    The links in my blog are doors to adventures and other countries, they don't all land in the most obvious puddle.


    Fav Blogs + Websites
    Specter Magazine

    Zencherry
    Dave Palmer
    Libboo
    Peirene Press
    Rebecca Venn
    Bigo + Twigetti
    Wryd Climate

    Archives

    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011

    Categories

    All
    2012
    3d
    A. A. Milne
    Abstract
    Adelaide
    Amazon
    Art
    Artist
    Australia
    Author
    Authors
    Aylesbury
    Bach
    Barnes And Noble
    Bbc
    Blog
    Blue Door
    Blurb
    Book Covers
    Border Trilogy
    Borges
    Botton
    Boundaries
    Calligraphy
    Carlos Ruiz Zafon
    Cbd
    Censorship
    Character
    Charles A. Wustum
    Charles Dickens
    Charlotte Wood
    Choose
    Christina Cummings
    Comfort Zone
    Competitions
    Composer
    Cormac Mccarthy
    Creative
    Creativity
    Critique
    Cycling
    Cyclist
    Damocles
    Dbc Pierre
    Delusions
    Depression
    Design
    Dickens
    Distraction
    Dreams
    Ebook
    Editing
    Ego
    Escape
    Eurovision
    Experiments
    Facebook
    Fiction
    Flow
    Francis Bacon
    Free Book
    Friends
    Gayla Drummond
    Gormenghast
    Graffiti
    Great Ocean Road
    Guitar
    Harpercollins
    Hiccups
    Holiday
    Holland Park Press
    Hot
    Iaay
    Indie Author
    Indifference
    Inspiration
    Inspire
    Istc
    Jane Austin
    Jan Freidlin
    Jealousy
    Jeffrey Eugenides
    Js Bach
    Julian Barnes
    Julien Barnes
    Kenosha
    Kent Haruf
    Kentucky
    Latin America
    Laura Numeroff
    Lazy
    Lee
    Le Guin
    Lesson
    Lettering
    Libboo
    Life Problems
    Lincoln Brady
    Lionel Shriver
    London
    Lonely
    Loss De Plott
    Madness
    Magical Realism
    Marian Newell
    Marilyn French
    Marketing
    Masterpiece
    Maureen Hovermale
    Mccarthy
    Melbourne
    Mervyn Peake
    Middlesex
    Motorbike
    Myers
    Mystery
    Negative
    New Authors
    Novel
    Novels
    Opinion
    Optimism
    O'Reilly
    Owensboro
    Paddy O'Reilly
    P.A. O'Reilly
    Peirene Press
    Perspire
    Plan
    Pod
    Poetry
    Positive
    Pr
    Print On Demand
    Prometheus
    Publication
    Publishers
    Publishing
    Racine
    Reading
    Rebecca Venn
    Resistance
    Restrictions
    Review
    Reviewing
    Re-write
    Re-writing
    Roald Dahl
    Rules
    Russ King
    Self Help
    Self-help
    Sign Writer
    Simon Imagin
    Sleepless
    Songwriting
    Specter Collective
    Specter Magazine
    Stephan J Myers
    Success
    Suicide
    Suitcases
    Sun
    Sutcliff
    Tale Of Two Cities
    Tate
    Tate Modern
    Taxes
    The Hoopla
    The Mind
    The Sense Of An Ending
    Tonya Cannariato
    Train
    Travel
    Twitter
    Type
    Umberto Echo
    Usa
    Uw Parkside
    Vampire
    Vintage Press
    Water Color
    Water Colour
    Winnie-the-Pooh
    Wise Grey Owl
    Writers
    Writer's Block
    Writing
    Writing Problems

    RSS Feed


Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.