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Sad times and Happy Times

Well I have not update this site in a while and that I mainly due to a complete lack of drive after a family lose.  I have also been playing Civ 5 a lot which is a major time sink. Good news is my MacBook Air is not powerfully enough to run the huge levels. I’ve been getting low memory errors so I have had to stop playing ;-). I will need to upgrade in time for Civilization : Beyond Earth which is out in October.

But the good news is i’ve started to get back in to the writing frame of mind and made good progress on my novel. Will update the web site with progress and thought as it happens. Got to give the web crawlers something to read :-).

 

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Today I Have Mostly Been Voting(isn)

Well today I was voting in the european and local council elections. I Did my part and voted which is good. Strange thing is I voted at 7am in the morning .

This was because my girlfriend was join to college and I was suffering insomnia, so thought why not? I was up from two trying to sleep with out much success.

After my girlfriend left for college I sat down at 8.30 and started to right and this time the muse found me. I have churned out four and half page which is very good for me. I might have to start going to bed earlier and getting up at 6am to help the muse find me. I’m going to be knackered doing it but if it helps my out put increase my output I’m all for it.

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Well This Is Hard

Well thing are not progressing as quickly as I had hoped but I did set my self rather high goal. My new years resolution was to complete a novel by the end of the year. So far I have not much closer to completing it.  I think the main reason is a completely misjudged the sheer amount of preplanning you have to do to be in a position to  start a novel length story. All I have done so far is short stories. I’ve enjoyed these immensely but they are a different thing entirely. One where you don’t actually need to worry about where the story is going. With a novel You do.

So here i am completely behind schedule, wondering when you have actually done enough research. I fear if spend to much time planning and researching I will never get it done.

Something that has made starting a lot easier is the idea that this novel will never see the light of day. As I am not to worry about getting it in to a publishable state. So the quality of the story matters less. That is the only thing that allows me to even think about starting.

Well will do for an update for now peeps.

 

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Sky Vs The Three Prongs

Of Character Development. “Ermm , Cough”

Any way.  Like a lot of people I have been watching Marvel’s Agents of Shield which, aside from what are they going to call it following The Winter Soldier events, has losing lot of audience lately.  Including a lot of my friends who are much bigger geeks than me.

Now I was wondering what was causing this. My point of contention would the strong female lead of Sky.  To which I will add that my girlfriend hates her.

Sky is a character that the show was strangely built around rather than Coulson which in and of it self is an odd choice but not the reason that I have trouble with character.

It wasn’t till I was listening to an old episode of Writing Excuses and Brandon Sanderson was going over his Three Prongs of character development. A bit later after hearing this I figure out what was wrong with the Sky, well at to me least.

Brandon discussed how three prongs can be used to help create a well round character. The prongs or bars are: One for Sympathy, One for Competency and a Third for Proactivity. With a good character will have a balance of these to make them interesting. A Character with everything full would not be as liked by the reader. Well not as easily.

Sky by contrast has all three bars at full. This has left her not as interesting as the other characters.  She lacks their flaws to make her compelling. She started as a lowly hacker then in very short time became the go to action woman for all the other characters who were more experienced and talented than. One part of the show has her pointing a gun with the skill of a fully trained Shield Agent but having gone through none of the training of a Shield Agent.  It came off as being very forced and artificial. I can see what the writers were intending, I can now also see why the character is not working in the show.

So thanks to Brandon and co for helping me figure it out.

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Moleskin Evernote update

So I’ve been using the Moleskin Evernote Note book for over a six month and I have say I like it. There are however some caveats to that.

First is there is simple not enough stickers to make full use of them. You end using all the sticker at the front of the notebook or hoarding them till the end and not using them.

Second the camera app is not actually that good. It takes okay picture but it edge detection isn’t all that. It’s best feature is how the sticker automatically tag the picture with the cat and tags in Evernote but as I’ve spoken about the paltry amount of them.
I’ve taken to using Scanner Pro. That app does a much better job of edge detection and has a nifty change to high contrast black and white, which with my bad hand writing is a massive boon.

Third it is quite expensive for a Notebook even compared to the premium you pay for Moleskins. Now I have to admit to a fondness of Moleskins as love the feel of the paper when I’m reading and writing. Also the price does include three months Evernote Premium subscription which is about . I’ve found that using scanner pro to add the notebook images seems to stay under the 60mb limit of a free Evernote account. The only time I went of was when a added over fifty pictures.

In conclusion. Nice notebook if you more physically orientated rather than digital. It works for me but I’d probably just use Evernote with any Moleskins notebook and Scanner Pro as it is a cheaper option that only missing the stickers.

Now if you could get the sticker separately then it might change things but we will have to wait and see.

Evernote Moleskine book. £23 each from Moleskine and Evernote Directly.
Though I have seen it on Amazon for as low as £16 that if you want give them the money.
Evernote Premium is £2.99 for a month or £31.99 for a year. (Update If you go directly with Evernote the prices are £4.00 and £35 for month and year respectively. Dont know if the cheaper price with Mac App Store or something else weird is happening.)
Also try Rhodia ‘Webbie’ Webnotebook which I’ve heard good thing about and can be brought for around £6.95.

Will review Evernote at some point as it to big of a subject to go into here.

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Times are some times grey.

Well now, here is another piece of procrastination.

I sit at my desk staring out of the window as Birmingham try to wash it self clean with dirty water, as the wind blows about like an asthmatic who has finally worked out how to use an inhaler.

I’ve got back from the doctors where we had the good news that my girlfriend has not got a chest infection. Which is good.

There is a point when you realise that all your hopes and dream realise that you have to stop arseing around and get your head down. Lost a couple of days already to the crack like game call “Game Dev Tycoon“.  It is a horrible addictive game and depressing similar to Game Dev Stories. All of this brings into focus that I will have to cut the amount of games I play over the next year, don’t even talk to me about the new consoles. I have not decided which one to get but either one is now out of my budget, which is sad.

Oh Well at least with the self-imposed exile I’ll be able to save a bit of money. ‘He says in vain’.

Peace out peeps.