Another week of working on my Apocalypse Weird novel, working title Siren’s Call. And a very successful week it was too. That’s a total of 6,370 words bringing my overall total at the end of the week to 36,654. One of the things that’s a little bit different about this book, compared to the ones I’ve been writing recently is that it’s very clearly set in England. In London to be exact. One of the unexpected issues I’ve run into with my writing over the last few years is what language to write in. I don’t mean English, French, Chinese or whatever, I write in English, but the question is exactly which flavour (or flavor) of English to use. I grew up in England, writing and speaking British English but about ten years ago I moved to Canada. Canadian English is, for the most part, British English but a lot of the television we watch and the books I read are from the US and use American English. The company I work for is international so emails and documents can be in American or British English, and I work with people from all around the world, all of them using their native variation of English. And it’s not just the spelling … Read More
Building the Apocalypse – 30 March 2015
Yes, I’ve already missed my self-imposed goal of posting these on Mondays but The Walking Dead Season Finale trumped writing the blog yesterday. It’s worked out for the best anyway, you’re getting something more than a few word count metrics. I’m going to talk a little bit about the writing tool I use for my fiction – Scrivener. For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, Scrivener is a custom word processor designed for writers of all types. There’s a couple of big differences between Scrivener and something like Microsoft Word. First up, it organises your project into folders, sub-folders and files, like you would on a hard drive. At the most basic level, you might have something like a manuscript folder with one sub-folder for each chapter beneath that and then one text file for each scene in each chapter. Something like this: That nested structure makes it very easy to jump around. Rather than having to remember page numbers or scroll endlessly through a single 300 page document, you can just jump to the right chapter or scene. You can also move pieces around very quickly, something that can be very handy if your book has multiple plot threads. Scrivener also provides … Read More
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