Yesterday’s new that Steve Jobs has died did not hit me with great surprise or emotion. After all, he was very ill for nearly a decade, visibly so for the last 5-7 years. The outpouring of conspicuous grief on all social networks has been overwhelming.

Now I’ve had time to reflect, I can see how and why people have behaved this way. He pioneered the personal computing industry, fell foul of a boardroom coup, watching his brainchild fall into the gutter, came back to rescue it and turned it into one of the most successful companies on the planet – and in history. Regardless of what you thought of him, Steve Jobs was a pioneer, industrialist and designer that affected the lives of billions: there are people around the world who don’t have running water but own an iPod or iPhone.

It can be said without exaggeration or hyperbole that his passing leaves behind a handful of pioneers who are household names that have fundamentally changed the course of history.

Most places in the UK have just enjoyed a phenomenal weekend of late/Indian summer weather, unseasonably warm at 25-30°C. So Sunday was Braai Day: an afternoon of BBQ, drinks and conversation with good friends, most of whom were South African (braai being Afrikaans barbecue).

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog entry and even longer since I’ve written a story of any length. My writing group vaguely remember me, but it’s been nearly a year since I have attended. It’s about time I write something.

So tonight I got home from work, had dinner and did a couple of chores, then sat down with the sole intention of writing. On my main PC, which was probably not a good idea.

When it booted I remembered that I needed to take care of the various settings in this new blog installation, so took care of that.

While I was at it, I did the same for my other sites. It would be silly not to while it’s fresh in my mind.

Then I took care of a few data housekeeping tasks. While waiting I checked Facebook and Google+, and then… Well, you get the idea.

I must remember that the actual process of writing does not need an Internet connection. Research and brainstorming can require it, but neither of those are actually writing.

Imogen’s books to date are based in London in the 1780s, before police forces, and involve an unlikely pair of investigators: the wife of a naval officer and an anatomist. Her first two books are Instruments of Darkness (Amazon|UK) and Anatomy of Murder (Amazon|UK), her third book is due for release shortly, called Island of Bones, and she’s currently working on her fourth.

The talk that Imogen gave was based around her experiences as a writer (before, leading up to and after publication), the steps involved in the process, explanations of the people involved, the editing and release process, some of the research and minutiae involved in her current work in progress, and everything that an aspiring — and even published — author could want. She was friendly, engaging and honest, and felt very accessible. Most of us felt comfortable asking questions in the post-talk Q&A, as we did during parts of Imogen’s talk, and she answered all questions with patience and humour. If it’s any indication: Imogen brought a number of copies of her books with her, which were handed around for us to look at — we bought them all. Then it was to the lovely library-in-a-pub next door, Great Expectations, for some laryngeal lubrication. Where, I’m afraid, I may have monopolised conversation with her in the noisy environment.

The combination of the restart of the writing group’s season and the visit from Imogen has reinvigorated my motivation for writing. While I have spent the time well in catching up on my unread pile as well as studying the occasional book on the craft of writing — I’m currently reading Plot & Structure (Amazon|UK) — my creative output has been almost nil. This partly came about due to the last manuscript critiquing session I attended, as the (requested) criticism that was provided showed me that I did not understand all the necessary elements of a story, and that it was clear such deficit would not get me much beyond scratching the surface of the competitive fiction market. And there was the group break, summer, etc. Last night’s events gave me a kick in the pants and have set me on my way again.

The first step in this was my submission this morning of an entry into Reading Writers’ annual Autumn competition, judged by someone in the industry who is not a member of the group. Although I did not write a new piece for it (the deadline was this morning and I had to both sleep last night and go to work today), I did have a larger piece already done with an shoe-hornable theme that needed to be cut down to meet the word limit. Cutting a large piece down to 1,000 words — even if it’s just an excerpt, as this was going to be — is hard work! You can’t just copy and paste a chapter, as the start and ending needs to make sense as do the characters and their activities when the reader hasn’t had the benefit of prior explanations, introductions and foreshadowing.

It was a bit of a panicked rush, but I managed to get it in and accepted by the independent judge. Deep sigh of relief, and now back into the creative writing fray!

So here’s what I’ve done in the last month:

Submissions & Queries

• 31 January: The First Line (literary)
  
• 16 February: The Binnacle; The Bitter Oleander (both literary)
• 17 February: Boulevard; Confrontations; Glimmer Train (all literary)
• 18 February: Take a Break (women’s tabloid); Australian Woman’s Day (women’s general interest)

Rejections

• 16 February: The First Line
• 22 February: Take a Break
  

I’ve provided the names of the publications here to give writers of any level an idea of what’s out there. Your favourite search engine or one of the major market indices — such as Writer’s Market (Amazon|AmazonUK) and Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook (Amazon|AmazonUK) — will give you their submission guidelines and contact information.

Remember that — just as the Lotto catch-phrase says you’ve gotta to be in it to win it — you’re never going to get published unless you can submit your work and risk rejection. Acceptances are feathers in your cap showing you’re doing something right, whereas rejections are a good excuse to give that piece another polish using your increased skills and knowledge.

So… how many works have you submitted recently?

My birthday sure came around quickly this year. It seems only a week or two ago that I was digging my driveway out of the snow so that I could head off to Christmas Day festivities, a month or so before that it was Easter, and then a few weeks prior to that it was my previous birthday. Tempus does indeed fugit…

In your pre-teens time takes an eternity, often measured by the arrivals of birthdays, summer holidays, Easter and Christmas. Then you hit your teens and things are then measured (at least where I grew up) by notable birthdays — 13 (teenager!), 15/16 (age of consent), 17 (driving licence) and 18 (drinking age). Aside from the round numbers of 20 and 25, and the more traditional and now meaningless “coming of age” 21st birthday, in your twenties you notice that these events start to speed up. I’m now officially in my “late thirties” and they’re getting even faster. But there’s hope once you get into your forties, fifties and beyond. No, wait… I got that wrong. There isn’t. It just gets faster still, so I’m told.

But it’s not all bad. Growing old is a privilege that most of humanity doesn’t get — even in this day and age. I also like to reflect that those who have achieved mighty things had exactly the same hours in each of their days as I have in mine. If anything, we have more leisure time available than any of the generations who have gone before us. Most of us get Saturday off for a start, saying nothing of not having to forage for food or shelter, and living twice as long with better quality lives than people even a century ago. And while it’s a far cry from the futuristic computer utopia we were promised in the 1970s — that computers would reduce our working days to 4 hours or less with the same productivity and pay — the reality is that we’re required to get more done in the same amount of time simply because we can.

The plus side to this is that we can achieve more in each of those days than ever before — the trick is to make what you’re doing meaningful, if and where you can. And that’s exactly why I’m writing and working on building a career as a writer.

While exactly how I achieve that is still slightly nebulous (to use classic British understatement), I am working on creating a short story each week and submitting it to publishers, building my technical skills as a writer (not that you’d see it in this long and winding, self-indulgent ramble of a post), testing out how social networking can complement my activities, building a network of contacts and going to conferences. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating journey that I’ve just begun, and I’m enjoying all of it.

I received an excellent birthday present from the Open University last night: the results of the writing course I’ve recently completed. It’s a result with which I’m extremely pleased, and the tutor’s marking and personal comments are extremely encouraging. The tutor is also encouraging me to turn the piece I wrote for the assessment into a full book, so I suppose that’s high praise? She’s also encouraging me to take the next level creative writing course, which is the natural progression of this creative writing stream. It’s a year-long course costing over £600 and will require 600 hours of study (around 19 hours per week), so it’s not something I’m going to do without serious consideration. But I am serious considering it, and have until late Summer to decide.

Part of my day job involves being on-call for one weekend in every 6-8 weeks to fill in the gaps between our 24-hour “follow the sun” customer model when the North American team finishes their Friday afternoon and the Asia-Pacific team starts their Monday morning. It’s easily the worst part of my job which, as far as things go in workplaces, means it’s a pretty good job.

My first week on-call saw my first call-out occur at 1:00am Saturday morning and took 3 hours to fix. The next call came in at 5:00am and took 4 hours, during which another call came in at 7:00am so had to work two emergencies concurrently. By 11:00pm Saturday evening I was beginning to panic as it was clear the calls were going to continue, many being worked in parallel, I’d had no sleep since Thursday night, and I was working at 100% workload. It continued until 6:00am Monday (before we had the Asia-Pacific team)… and I had to be in the office for 9:00am. Your mind starts to do weird things in that kind of situation, and I can honestly say that I have some idea of what sleep deprivation torture is all about. (Though such victims tend not to get paid for the experience and it’s not done by their employers).

That experience was almost five years ago and I’m pleased to say that this weekend on-call was nothing like that first one (in fact, nobody in the company has ever seen a weekend like that). But living with that possibility stifles all creativity, so this weekend was spent watching DVDs and, perversely, waiting for Monday. On the plus side, I’ve now finally seen George Romero’s Dead trilogy — which was purely for research on the zombie story I’m writing, you understand…

Now it’s Tuesday and the juices are flowing again!

As I’ve probably mentioned already, I’m a huge fan of the zombie and zombie apocalypse genres, including but not limited to things like Army of Darkness, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, World War Z, and the Resident Evil series (Zombieland and a few others are in my LoveFilm queue). So I’ve been wanting to write a short story in the genre for a while, and I’d very much like to write a novel and/or screenplay in it eventually.

Having not done it at all before, on the way home from work this evening I put a bunch of the pieces together, came up with some great ideas and decided to give it a go. Here we are 2,100 words later (and nowhere near finished) and it’s time for me to go to bed. With all this creativity bursting out of my head, the story wants to continue writing itself. I could probably reach 8,000 or more words tonight if I just let myself go.

The problem is that I can’t — I have a day gig that pays the bills. The other problem is that with this creativity unleashed, I am going to have a hell of a time getting to sleep tonight. I mean… it’s midnight and I’m writing a new blog post, the night is cool, the heating is off, and I’m running like a fan heater.

Is there a trick to just switching off?

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Spring edition of a magazine that I’ve been interested in submitting something to for a while now, called The First Line, as mentioned in an earlier post. I nearly chose not to write something for this edition, as I’m not a big fan of writing on religious themes, but I found a way around it and decided to give it a go.

As I had all afternoon and evening available, I decided to try out a new piece of writing software I bought this weekend that’s designed to make you more productive, the desktop edition of Write Or Die! (US$10). It’s written in Adobe AIR (familiar to most Twitter users) and — along with the expected text input area and ability to save as plain text — it will give you a progress bar if you specify the number of words or the amount of time (or both) that you want to write in that session, and it has a few options that will first prod you or even punish you, if you want. Not a bad motivational tool, as you find yourself typing continually to avoid the flashing and noise, while avoiding self-editing, and it’s easy to churn out words with little effort.

Or so the theory goes. Cutting a long story short, after using it to write a story that I was quite pleased with, I saved it over a file of the same name (no big deal, the operating system should ask me if I’m sure, etc, and do it seamlessly), exited the program and opened the file in an editor to discover that the save I’d just made didn’t happen. I don’t know what went wrong, but none of it got saved: 1200 words and 45 minutes flushed away.

I was not a happy bunny at all. I’m not pointing my finger at the software, as I really don’t know what went wrong and where. It could have been the software, it could have been AIR, or it could have been me, I just don’t know. Besides, it’s not like it was a novel.

So after making a cup of tea to regain my composure, I set about to writing it again, with as much of it from memory as possible. This time I used another piece of software that I’ve been meaning to use properly for some time: OmmWriter (watch the demo video, it’s stunning). It’s currently only available for the Mac, it’s free, and it uses a Zen-like atmosphere to stop you from getting distracted. It’s a beautiful looking piece of software and does the job very well.

The story has now been fully written, imported into OpenOffice.org for formatting, edited and improved, saved as a Word document (per their submission guidelines), and submitted for their consideration. Now begins the waiting game…

Borrowing an idea from a friend’s website, here’s a bit of fun to sum up today’s writing:

Today marks the end of the writing course I’m taking with the Open University, as the final assignment (worth 70% of overall course mark) is due. I submitted mine last night, in a rare example of beating the deadline by a mile, and now the waiting game begins. Marking may take a couple of months.

It’s a basic level 12-week online course that I decided to take in order to pick up any fundamentals that I may have missed throughout the years. It turns out that I’d missed very little, but there were a few bits here and there that were useful, it was excellent practice, it gave me a huge ego boost (the feedback on the first assignment was stunning), and it provided the ability to get the work critiqued objectively (something I now can obtain via my writing group).

The other reasons I took the course were to give me confidence in my abilities by knowing I understand the fundamentals, to be able to say that I have taken a formal creative writing course, and it acts as a good preliminary to a more intensive course of study. The natural progression from this course is Creative Writing, which is a year-long course representing around 600 hours of study and costing over £600, so is not something to be taken on lightly. Other choices include an MFA degree course or other individual courses, either with the OU or elsewhere. If I do decide to take another course sometime soon, expect I’ll mix-and-match individual OU courses with third-party courses.

While I very much want to develop my creative writing skills, I also very much want to develop scriptwriting skills — primarily screenwriting for film and television. As of October 2009, the OU seems to have completely flushed all screenwriting and playwriting courses out of their course list… including the basic level Start Writing Plays course I wanted to take. It’s possible they’re in the process of developing new courses, particularly as there are excellent private screenwriting and playwriting courses available for comparable cost, but I’ll have to wait and see.

So for now, my plans are to just get on with writing and submitting work to markets, as well as gaining a foothold in periodicals that interest me. I now know I have the necessary fundamentals, so now it’s just a case of putting it to practice more often and playing the submit-and-wait game.