by Nick Bryan
The final confrontation begins! Upcoming Hobson & Choi projects revealed! The most exciting podcast since… ever?
You can listen on Mixcloud, download the MP3 here or subscribe on iTunes to have it thrown at you every week. Or if you hate iTunes on principle, you can point your RSS reader at our Libsyn page to get every episode.
by Nick Bryan
Two weeks ago, I spent the best part of seven days bashing my head against the same short story brief, before concluding that I simply didn’t have the right idea. So, last week, I went off to write other things, only to be distracted by the plumbing in our house going wrong.
This week, at last, I got my shit together. A nice man came over and rearranged our pipework (only sounds dirty) so we can have both hot water and heating at the same time. Meanwhile, I went to multiple cafes, battered the keys of my poor netbook within an inch of their lives and seem to have produced, at long last… stuff.
I’d love to take sole credit for my recent breakthrough on the stuck short story, but the kick was actually provided by Alastair JR Ball, good friend and fellow writing chap. Once he made a handy suggestion about setting, the rest of it dropped into place like Tetris blocks.
And so I took myself to various cafes for the best part of 1.5 days, drank enough tea to keep five regular English people going and hammered out the first six thousand words of the probably-about-eight-thousand-word piece. If you’re curious exactly what it is, there are more hinty-details on tomorrow’s Hobson & Choi Podcast.
Suffice to say, you’ll hopefully get the chance to read it in the near future, but it is pretty cool. And funny. And sweary. And maybe at times a bit harsh, but aren’t all the good things? Just me?
One last point, as just talking about myself typing isn’t amazing blog-fodder: I’ve been using the web-app Hemingway to edit some of my old work, during breaks from tapping out the new story. It suggests various ways to smooth out and improve text phrasing, attempts to spotlight long sentences and adverbs, etc.
Now, it isn’t flawless and I’m by no means advocating blindly implementing every change it suggests. Sometimes long sentences are long for a reason, and it also has a fun habit of marking any word ending in -ly as an adverb for destruction.
Still, Hemingway proves a useful broad tool for finding spaces where I can use a stronger, less rambling phrasing, so I’m recommending it anyway. Worth a look.
And now, I’ve got another few bits of work to run through that site, and then the remainder of this story to tap out. Fare ye well.
by Nick Bryan
Time to take stock now, as Hobson & Choi assess their suspects list before the case moves into its final stage. Meanwhile, I’ve been reading a lotta X-Men comics…
You can listen on Mixcloud, download the MP3 here or subscribe on iTunes to have it thrown at you every week. Or if you hate iTunes on principle, you can point your RSS reader at our Libsyn page to get every episode.
by Nick Bryan
Last week, I discussed how my writing wasn’t entirely flowing, words refusing to come out no matter how long I stared at the page. In a typical ironic-sadistic finger-of-fate fashion, this week I had a much easier time getting the material down when I was at the keyboard, but… was frustratingly not finding much opportunity.
No sooner had I lined up a few clear days of work, the pipework in our house experienced severe explosive turbulence, all over our bathroom floor, leaving me waiting in for a lot of plumbers. Don’t worry, this won’t be a whole blog about plumbing. I’ve spent so much time lately failing to get our house watertight again, most of my available computer time has gone to working on my writing, rather than blog posts about it.
Nonetheless, it’s been a good week for the art, so I wanted to get a post done in the name of confidence-building self-affirmation. Here is some stuff that’s happened, in quick-and-dirty bullet point form.
It’s not all sunshine – for example, the project I mentioned being stuck on last week… yeah, still no ideas and do need to get it done in next couple of months. But all this upbeat stuff made it much easier to cope with the puddle spreading across the bathroom and ruining my socks whenever I went to pee.
by Nick Bryan
Hobson and Choi do some mature acronym comedy in our CSI tie-in special! Meanwhile, I talk about blogging in the back matter – Check here to find out if I actually did any…
You can listen on Mixcloud, download the MP3 here or subscribe on iTunes to have it thrown at you every week. Or if you hate iTunes on principle, you can point your RSS reader at our Libsyn page to get every episode.
by Nick Bryan
I believe these WriteBlogs were meant to be weekly, but obviously that hasn’t happened. Upsetting, because it means I hit that old blog cliche – a post opening with an apology for not blogging recently.
Shame I picked this time to drop off the WriteBlog schedule, as I was chuffed with the last one about comic scripting – nice balance between self-indulgent me-talk and links to worthwhile resources. Anyway, let’s move on. What’s been going down? Well, there was the Hobson & Choi birthday…
As I’m sure you all know, due to being avid H&C fans, I did two chapters of the serial last week to mark our first birthday on the 17th of February. This was a very apt idea, but the execution of it utterly killed me. I really thought it wouldn’t be too hard – writing a chapter usually only takes a day or so, I had the necessary extra day spare – but then two things hit me:
ONE – real-life interruptions happened – occasions to be planned, other work to be done, pints of beer that wouldn’t drink themselves, that sort of thing. Frustrating, but survivable if not for…
TWO – I got stuck on the first of these chapters. H&C #54 just killed me, the bastard. I have an entire draft worth of material that I threw away. And even worse, it isn’t even material I can use later – all scrap. I’d “budgeted” two days to write both chapters, and ended up taking most of three days on just the first one.
Mustn’t get too doomy, I made it – thanks to the paranoid amount of padding I add into my schedule, I was able to have those problems but still get the chapters up. And then I tried to move onto another project and ran into a dead stop of uninspiration. Basically, my entire writing productivity for most of February is the previously-mentioned short comic script and meeting my self-imposed H&C deadlines. This, by my usual standards for a non-Christmas month, isn’t amazing. So, could this mean…
Hmm.
I’ve never got as far as saying Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist, but I’ve never accepted that it’s a condition all on its own. Yes, there are times in life when I’ve struggled to write due to external circumstances or the story just not working – or, as per ONE and TWO above, both of them at once when really damn lucky. Might as well call that writer’s block, it certainly blocks your writing.
So, not much to do beyond try to work around it – throwing my hands up and acting as if I’m cursed would just annoy me. Case in point – today, I fucked off the project I was stuck on (after emailing a couple of friends for help) and went to do something else. Not really a long-term solution, gotta go back to it eventually, but I got a decent amount done at a good speed today for once, and feel much better as a result. One reason why I’m back here doing this, I suspect.
Admittedly, I was going to write more tonight, but got distracted screwing around on Twitter. A major street in south-west London was flooded with sewage, you see, and there’s no way you can’t want to make puerile jokes about that burst of turd. It’s funny because it’s poo, after all. (Kudos to whoever on Twitter coined the term poonami.)
So I churned out a few quips, one of them got a few retweets and again, I feel better. And when I’m feeling beaten down and anxious about the state of things, I’ll take any good cheer I can get. Even if it is slightly embarrassing that my most “viral” Twitter effort in a few months is a joke about shite and undigested sweetcorn…
The worst part is, long after the #poonami has receded, local residents are going to be finding stray bits of sweetcorn EVERYWHERE.— Nick Bryan (@NickMB) February 27, 2014