Igenlode Wordsmith

I had an unusually bizarre dream last night, which came out as a Blake's 7 episode (although there was a lot of stuff with bicycles and cinemas earlier on that I have forgotten) in which Avon was for some reason condemned to death by being taken up inside a tall tower and left to stand in the darkness on a high beam there with only two vertical ropes on either side to cling onto for support... so once the ladders were taken away, the moment he lost his balance or became so exhausted he could no longer hold on, or was no longer able to stay awake, he would inevitably fall. ( Read more... )

I have a suspicion that it may have been triggered by reading Joe Simpson's anecdotes of mountaineering deaths on the Eiger yesterday, which featured several cases where climbers were eventually found frozen while still attached to their ropes or wedged onto their ledges -- I'm not at all sure where the B7 content can have come from, save that I was also coincidentally rereading the exchange Mei Bruges and I had about Blake/Avon slash last night while looking back over the records of my AO3 stats script. But Blake wasn't part of this dream at all, so I don't quite see the relevance...

I did, however, receive a review on "Chick or Child" on AO3 almost immediately after bewailing the lack of readership there (now up to 10 hits!)

And... another rewrite, this time of a blurb that would actively put me off reading the fic in question (assuming that the writing style of the cover actually doesn't reflect the nature of the interior prose -- otherwise, tweaking the outside really isn't going to do much good :-( )( Read more... )

Sharing this again because it's just such a good piece of writing -- about acting, about editing, about Blake's 7: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/boucher-backbone-and-blake-the-legacy-of-blakes-7/

In the last week, I've actually been doing some art :-)

Here are some daffodils that were busy growing outside (not a real painting, but a pencil sketch 'coloured in' with watercolours)
https://www.deviantart.com/igenlode/art/Daffodils-671804636


And here is Major Thania from the B7 episode "Trial", copied from the Sevencyclopedia as part of my push towards finally getting "Blue Remembered Hills" published -- sadly she is not going to feature in the story, but I thought I might pinch her smart uniform as a basis for my Rall's clothing; I really can't see the officer cadets running round in baggy Federation troopers' overalls, somehow.

(from http://igenlode.deviantart.com/art/Federation-Costume-673134567)

I've now rough-typed two more chapters for "Blue Remembered Hills" (Ch18 and 19) (Edit: these ones from the 12th of March 2014!) and dared for the first time to look ahead in the manuscript and work out how many chapters I have left to go -- it looks as if after all this time there are only three chapters left :-D

I've got chapter length issues, though: Ch19, the pivotal one, is under two thousand words, and the surrounding three are at least twice that size, while the final two scenes constitute another very short chapter. The penultimate chapter has two scenes in it and might be splittable, but the second scene of that would be pretty short as a chapter on its own, and really can't stand together with the epilogue material following; there's a significant time/distance jump.

And Ch19 will just have to stay short, I think. It's probably explosive enough on its own. All those long chapters are going to be a real pain to proofread... (it takes the computer about twenty minutes just to read them out :-p)

Current word-count: 65,000, more or less. I estimate around another 10,000 in the remaining material.