The other day I finally got around to buying "The 10th Kingdom" on DVD (used to have it on video, back in the dark ages) - and to my extreme annoyance, the first disk in the set is refusing to play on any of my DVD drives. Grrr!

In the end we managed to watch some of it on my husband's work laptop (with external speakers plugged in), but it's going back shortly for a replacement or refund. A real pity, as I love the series and am really looking forward to watching the rest of it...

[For those of you who have never seen the show, "suck an elf!" is the young trolls' favourite curse - said quickly, with the stress on the first and last words, it sounds a lot like a certain obscenity that's popular in the UK :) ]

Posted by Anne at 7:52 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

Well, the conference was even better than I had hoped, in some respects at least. On the plus side, I got some very encouraging feedback from Juliet McKenna which has made me decide to stick with the new Dreamwalkers project for the time being, and I met friends from last time as well as making new ones. On the downside, I don't feel I got much out of the Saturday programme; I've reached the stage now where the talks aren't telling me much I don't already know, and the trend seems to be away from workshops where you actually write and learn. So, this may be my last Winchester conference for the foreseeable...

At Juliet's recommendation, I have signed up for NewCon 4 in Northampton this October. The guest lineup is very good, and agent John Jarrold is attending (though of course I won't be thrusting my manuscript into his hands!). One of my crit group buddies is also booked, so it should be good fun :)

Posted by Anne at 6:31 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

Since sending off my sample chapter to the conference, I've been concentrating on worldbuilding for my Dreamwalkers project. In some respects, I don't have a lot to do because the world is based on heaps of previous projects, but on the other hand I have to decide which bits to keep, which to modify and which need inventing entirely from scratch.

These last few days I've been focusing on sorting out the names of countries. I have a couple that I wanted to keep, but the rest needed replacing. At first I thought of digging out my old notes and seeing if there were any other names I'd forgotten, but in the end I came up with a bunch of new ones, using a simple method. You see, an awful lot of European place names, especially on the continent, come from the Celtic and Germanic tribes who lived there before the Romans came along. So, all I had to do was to pick some tribe names and "warp" them in a different linguistic direction.

Continue reading "On top of the world" »

Posted by Anne at 7:49 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

I wrote the cover letter and synopsis over the weekend, and now the work sample is on its way to the conference organiser - hopefully just in time to hit the deadline. The synopsis is a bit sketchy, especially towards the end, but since my only one-to-one is with a fellow writer rather than an agent or editor, I'm under a lot less pressure to make a stunning first impression!

Posted by Anne at 10:42 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

That's the length of my opening chapter in this first draft - if you can call it that, since it's loosely based on something that was written and revised several years ago! However the second scene was written completely from scratch, in order to bring in the main plotline as early as possible, so it is substantially new material.

I'm not sure if the hook is strong enough, but I want to start with Ellie's childhood because the magic in this world is pretty unusual and I think readers will enjoy seeing Ellie get to grips with it. Maybe once I've written the whole book - or got some negative feedback on the opening - I will feel the need to change it, but for now I'm reasonably happy with the way it's going.

Posted by Anne at 4:33 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

As you may know from recent blog entries, I've been really struggling with my work-in-progress, The Guiser, for the past few months. It's got to the point where I really don't want to use it for my conference workshop, because I'm sick of trying to sort out the plot!

I thought about reviving my 2YN project, but that's still at too early a stage of development to be usable - I have to get a writing sample to the conference by June 6th! So, I've been sorting through my "trunk novels" to see if there isn't something worth resurrecting. It's been an interesting exercise, seeing all the promising stories that just foundered completely after a few chapters because I had no idea where to take the story or how to develop the initial idea into a novel-length work. I'm hoping that I can bring my experience of outlining for NaNoWriMo to these projects and turn them into completed books - there are some really nice ideas and characters in there, and I know it's going to be fun spending time with these old friends :)

Posted by Anne at 6:53 AM | Permalink| Comments (0)

My name is Anne Lyle, and I'm a palmoholic.

Yep, I've had to admit it to myself. I recently decided I was fed up with the Palm Treo 680 I bought a few months ago, and bought a cheapo Nokia (3110 Classic) from a work colleague to replace it. However the Nokia's music player is somewhat frustrating, as the display is too small to show more than a dozen or so characters of the track titles. It's fine for music, but not for podcasts, as you usually see only the beginning of the podcast name with no indication of episode, and they don't necessarily get listed in the right order either! I found myself really missing Pocket Tunes, as well as a few other favourite Palm apps, but I didn't want to go back to the Treo as I really wanted something with a good text entry system (I just didn't find the Treo's thumb-board at all easy to use).

I ended up getting a Tungsten E2 from ebay for sixty quid - and it arrived this morning, yay! It's got an annoying screen whine that can only be shut up by using a system utility called warpSpeed that could potentially knacker the whole PDA(!), but apparently this flaw is endemic in Palm's recent larger-screen devices, so there doesn't seem much point in sending it back. I'll just have to be a bit more careful about backing it up...

Posted by Anne at 4:37 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

I was watching "Doctor Who Confidential" on BBC iPlayer this evening (nothing unusual about that!), when a bit of theatrical jargon caught my ear. During a section about lighting effects, the gaffer (head electrician) explained that he was following the script "from what's called 'sides'" - and I was suddenly taken back four hundred years. "Sides" was a term back in Shakespeare's day for the individual scripts which contained each role's lines and cues; lacking photocopiers or typewriters, the copyist provided each actor with only the bare minimum he needed to follow his part.

For me, one of the joys of history is discovering unexpected links with ancestors long dead, and today's find was a very small but still pleasurable addition to that list...

Posted by Anne at 8:04 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

My Eee 900 arrived this afternoon, and I'm posting this entry from it! The keyboard is taking a little getting used to, but I can type surprisingly fast on it already, now that I've switched it to use Dvorak. The only real complaint I have so far is that it does get quite hot in operation - one reason I was so keen to get the Palm Foleo - and I suspect that the battery life will be disappointing as well. I just hope that UK buyers can pressurise Asus into supplying the same battery to consumers as they did to reviewers (in our case, 5200Ah instead of 4400).

Really looking forward to taking this to the writers' conference next month - next task is to get SuperNotecard installed!

Posted by Anne at 5:24 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)

OK, so I decided to switch to the Pearl White Eee 900, because the keyboard would be easier to read in dim light (a big issue when you suffer from presbyopia, as I do). On the plus side, the white Linux edition is already available in the UK, so I was able to bring the delivery date forward by a week. On the minus side, although Misco have dispatched my Eee today (on next day delivery), despite it being a Bank Holiday, CityLink have an estimated delivery date of Wednesday 7th. WTF???

Thumbs up to Misco, big thumbs down to CityLink...

Posted by Anne at 9:45 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)