So, about that Warp Factory

So what happens when you spend a week editing and priming your new lovely piece of art?

You upload the wrong version of the PDF.

It’s riddled with glitches. Page Breaks didn’t work (thanks Scrivener, and whilst I’m at it thanks OS X for having an awful dictionary) and there’s formatting and line spacing issues that ultimately rendered the document a hopeless reading experience.

Shame. Damn shame. Thanks go out to Roy for picking it out.

There is a new version of the document online. I added the correct page breaks, reformatting the section breaks (they didn’t break up the scenes enough in my mind) and reduced the font size from 12 to 10. I’ve also touched the typos and removed some duplicate text. It looks a much better document.

Warp Factory is my largest piece of work, and I’m learning that the larger a piece is, the more work is required at the business end of creating a final outputted piece of work. A learning experience indeed.

Warp Factory now available

The completed Warp Factory is now up on my website. It’s – um – a little more than the 8 thousand word count I alluded to previously. Shall we say 15 thousand instead?

Warp Factory

…is completed.

coming very soon here

Teaser for Warp Factory

Warp Factory is now in the final stages of editing, and will soon be available on the web site. After a period of time where I have nagged enough people to read the story I will probably take the story down, do another edit and then put it out to sell…

In the meantime I’m putting up a few short teaser paragraphs from the novella. The final story runs around 8 thousand words.

Link is here

Progress update

Nope, still around. Warp Factory is sat waiting my delicate (read: aggressive) touch.

As usual life &c has gotten in the way…

Warp Factory – Completed

Yes. You heard me. I finally completed writing Warp Factory as of five minutes ago.

Note I did not use the word ‘finished’. This is because it patently isn’t. Editing is as much an art as writing – more so in some cases – but for now I can sit back, grab a whisky and review the final words ‘The End’ at hte end of my document.

As some people say down in Kentucky (often vicoferiously), ‘Praise the lord’

Musing on a complicated ending

Work on Warp Factory is ongoing – slowly. Dear God how slowly. I’ve reached the point of truth in the novella. This truth, as in most short stories is where things finally make sense to the reader. I’ve been building to this for 5 years. The pressure, from nowhere else but my own sense of completion, is enormous.

I’ve tucked away my subtle plot-points in the odd sentence or thrown out dialogue and built my internal narrative, all while hooking in the reader – I hope – so as everything builds up into the climax there are all these balls up there in the air, just waiting to land. The tricky part is the more complex your story, the harder this becomes. Plot elements I’ve missed, logic gaps, a cool idea thrown in in the last quarter which fucks up a major part of the first quarter. Seemingly minor characters I’ve completely forgotten existed (and believe me this happens quite often with me). Somehow Ive got to keep these babies in the air, constantly juggling them all while focusing on the most important thing of all: the writing.

I think the mechanical aspects of narrative and plot building are the forgotten skill needed by today’s modern author.

Flowery prose means shit without a gameplan¹.

This is where I am right now. Multiple plot elements in the air, a character I’ve re-defined several times has to fulfill his arc, the idea for that whizz-bang ending becoming more compromised by the logic of the story, which was blatantly obvious at the time yet I decided to ignore it because the ending is cool. And endings are cool. Let’s not forget that. But – and I keep telling myself this in the vain hope it will stick one day – they are not the reason a story exist. There are other bits in there we should not forget.

¹ I thought about excluding Stephen King in this statement as the guy tends to write off the cuff and rarely plots. BUT having said that, and for all the love I have for King, he can’t half fuck up an ending.

Warp Factory – ongoing

Back on it. Like a tiger on a gazelle. Or a predator on a predatee.

I’ve finally transferred all my hand-written notes onto my iBook (bought of my father at the end of December) and am planning to steam ahead.

I say ’steam ahead’. What I probably mean is struggle on the very same section that saw me stop writing at the beginning of December.

Hopefully the iBook – damn how I missed a laptop – will make this process swifter. Handwriting is good – but I’m slow.

Half-Way (?) through Warp Factory

Getting there. Slow, but so fulfilling. Every story I write is like learning *how* to write all over again. I love it. Word count is an estimated 10,000 words. Yes, another long one.

I’m taking my time and really letting myself get involved with themes, metaphors and character interaction, all because the synopsis is written and I know exactly where I am going. Why didn’t I follow this method ten years ago is a question which will bug me to shit from now on.

I love the undercurrents between Frank and Analiese, all these rivers of emotions, how Analiese is Frank’s tentative link to reality and Analiese is trying to understand this version of a person she has known over and over again.

Yes, above final line is very cryptic but I’ve gotten past the point of posting plot notes, or even snippets of the story. There are many twists and turns, certainly more than I anticipated when I started re-writing Warp Factory (and a hundred times more than when I first decided to write a story on what I thought was a cool-as-fuck title) and I want the sense of mystery to remain that way.

Warp Factory: update

I managed around 2,500 words this weekend. So far it’s going well, although I’ve become obsessed with passive writing and word repetition.

This is not healthy.