Liebster Award

 

As I mentioned yesterday I have been put up for an Award, this award is the Liebster Award. I was nominated by the Wife so I am not sure if that is allowed but hell I’ll take it!

Please make sure you check out her blog

http://zehirablog.wordpress.com

There are rules that go along with receiving this award so I shall post them below – if you are nominated please ensure that you continue the tradition.

The Liebster Award is very unique in the fact it brings recognition to the smaller blogs of the ‘verse.  With that in mind, all of the nominated blogs will have less than 200 followers.

The rules:

1. Thank the Liebster Blog presenter who nominated you and link back to their blog.

2. Post 11 facts about yourself, answer the 11 questions you were asked and create 11 questions for your nominees.

3. Nominate 11 blogs who you feel deserve to be noticed and leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been chosen.

4. Display the Liebster Award logo.

5.  No tag back thingys.

Eleven facts about me

1)      I have played in both the World Championship and European Championships of Laser Quest.

2)      I can legally use Lord or Laird as my title.

3)      I am very good climbing trees.

4)      I had my hair braided for the best part of an entire year.

5)      The first Internet game I was “addicted” to was Planetarion

6)      I do not like mushrooms.

7)      I have been with my wife for over 13 years.

8)      As far as I am concerned the 2 pints of larger and a Packet of Crisps episode “Bungle” is the funniest thing ever created.

9)      I used to be a Chef.

10)   My favourite TV Show is Scrubs.

11)   My Dream job would be to run the Local Pub that I worked in for many years when I was younger.

The Eleven questions I was asked

(1) Which famous people living or dead would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?

Brandon Lee
(2) What is your favourite topic to Blog about?

Writing my Pulitzer Prize winning Novel
(3) Do you have any guilty pleasures?

I love Storage Wars and Pawn Stars
(4) What three words would you use to describe yourself?

Geeky, Unflappable , calm
(5) Who would play you in a movie version of your life?

Jared Leto
(6) If you were to write collaboratively with any author, who would it be and why?

Stephen King – so i could convince him to write more Dark Tower novels
(7) Is the glass half empty or half full?

When you think about it, it’s just full
(8) What is your greatest ever achievement?

Winning the Premier league with Chippenham Town in FM 2010
(9) If you had your own theme tune what would it be?

Mr Jones – Counting Crows
(10) What is your favourite film?
The Crow

(11) If you could be an animal for a day, what animal would you be?

A Wolf – I love the Jungle Book!

Eleven Questions for my Nominees

1)      Book or Movie?

2)      Tea or Coffee

3)      Late Night or Early Morning?

4)      Xbox or Playstation?

5)      Nintendo or Sega?

6)      Lannister, Baratheon, Targaryen or Stark?

7)      Optimus or Rodimus?

8)      Han or Mal?

9)      Football or Rugby?

10)   Marvel or DC

11)   Beer or Wine

 

My Chosen 11

 

 

http://fantasyinmotion.wordpress.com/

http://tmpinsyr.com/

http://fotsfantasy.wordpress.com/

http://emilyramos.wordpress.com/

http://gamingphanatic.com/

http://sffbookreview.wordpress.com/

http://rscottsteele.wordpress.com/

http://fantasyshortstories.org/

http://staceykatheryn.wordpress.com/

http://sweep-the-leg.com/

http://atoasttodragons.com/

 

Guilt Trip

 My week off was kind to my creative side, I blogged every day, I wrote some more of SFU and partook in some “free writing” to help get the old noggin firing on all cynlinders.

Nine days and just over one working week later and I’ve not even looked at the blog let alone started writing for it and SFU has started to accumulate dust once again, although on the up side my 30 day trial of Scriviner will now last me beyond pay day meaning I should be able to upgrade to the full product.

What bought me back to the blogosphere and writing a post was plain and simple.. guilt.

This week I have been nominated for an award, now if my sporadic posting habits and inconsitant quality control where not good enough reasons to guilt me into posting, I was also nominated by Wife, who has managed to consistently stick to a post a day schedule.

There are stipulations to receiving the award and various tasks that must be completed upon acceptation, but I think I need to get a little run of posts going before I feel comfortable enough receiving it.

Back to Work

Sadly my week off is coming to an end, I’ve enjoyed it, mostly.

I attended my Sister’s wedding, spending time with family that I don’t usually get to see all that much. I have played a LOT of League of Legends, I’ve kept pretty up to date with my Blog (although im not yet back to post a day status) and I have managed to write some (albeit it not a lot) more of So Far untitled.

But now it’s time to return to work, don’t get me wrong I enjoy my job but it’s always tough to find the motivation to return after an extended period away.

This entire preamble really is just a way to link in with the “Best Job In the World”, a PR campaign by the Australian tourist board.

A few years back they offered one lucky winner the chance to have the “Best job in the World,” this year they have not one but six different options. Not only are these “jobs” amazing they even come with a significant pay-packet, a whopping $100,000 AUS

 

If any of the below take your fancy then you only have a few days left to apply!

 

One Word Story…..

I came up with what I thought was a pretty cool idea yesterday, I have a lot of different people who read my blog, some creative, some authors, some real life friends and a surprisingly regular amount of people researching Theodore “ted” Lewin.

I thought what could be interesting would be to tap into the joint imagination of all my readers and start a story written by all of us. My original idea was a paragraph each, I then revised this to a Sentence and then after a conversation with Wife to a word.

It turns out that this is a game that she plays in her Drama classes to get the imagination of her children flowing.

To keep it from getting lost within the normal Blog I have created a separate page for this to be housed, ideally, dependent on success, at the end of each week  I’ll compile what has been written so far and we can carry on in a never ending story!

If it garners some interest I would like to follow up in a week or two expanding it to be a sentence each, as I think in the long run this could prove to be a more readable story, but if I do that I think ill start again from scratch!

You can (and should)  post as many times as you like but please make sure you follow the rules below.

1. You can only post one word at a time
2. You must allow two people to post in-between each of your words
3. Punctuation does not count as a word

Please make sure that you tell as many people as you can about this idea, either through your own blogs or other social media as the more involvement there is the longer and most likely more ridiculous the story will be!

To Start please head over to the link below!

 

 

 

The Crime Fiction Writers Exam

You may remember a few posts back that I posted the Fantasy Writers Exam.

I stated at the time how odd I found it that the Fantasy Genre is picked upon more than others, considering that it is by far the smallest section in any bookshop I have visited and the fact that I can count the number of contributions to TV & Film on one hand.

Wife suggested that perhaps I should give the same treatment to other genres and create their own exam to be taken before beginning their journey into their own chosen genre.

So I did.

The Crime Fiction Writers Exam

1. Is your main character an aging detective with a drink problem?
2. Or winding down to retirement?
3. Or the department “bad boy”?
4. Or a maverick loner?
5. Or have an estranged Wife?
6. Or a dead wife?
7. Or emotionally damaged?
8. Or a veteran cop who has just got a rookie partner?
9. Or a hardnosed woman trying to make it in mans world?
10. Does that rookie partner throw up the 1^st time they enter the morgue?
11. Does your main character have nothing to do with law enforcement, but has an uncanny ability to solve crimes?
12. Are they police happy about when this happens?
13. Does your main characters boss ever say “ill have your badge for that”?
14. Do you have a good cop/bad cop scene?
15. Is your main character Belgian?
16. Scottish?
17. Swedish?
18. At any point does your main character put themselves in a dangerous situation without informing anyone where they are going?
19. When they do so does their phone run out of battery?
20. Or loose signal?
21. Does your main character hook up with the 1^st female Lawyer that they meet?
22. How about Doctor?
23. How about Coroner?
24. How about Journalist?
25. Is the title of your novel a line from a Nursery rhyme?
26. Does your main character take of his sunglasses and make a witty pun at every crime scene?
27. Does your Novel contain a two digit body count?
28. Does your body count equate to ½ the population of the town the novel is set in?
29. Are any of the characters based on the “murder mystery” dinner party you recently attended?
30. Or hosted?
31. At any point does your main character get all the suspects in one room and discuss their whereabouts during the time of the murder?
32. Does your main character at any point say “Elementary”?
33. At any point does a female character fell like she is being “watched” but tells no one about it?
34. Does your main character bump into the killer and not even know it?
35. Or just miss them when visiting an apartment?
36. Or arrest them but then let them go because their clearly innocent?
37. And then realise in the final chapter that they weren’t and it all fits together?
38. Does your main character end up as the killer’s final target despite in no way fitting the pattern of their previous victims?

Please feel free to suggest any additions and Ill add them to the list.

Happy Egg Day

The Easter weekend is always a good one, not only is there the promise of chocolate, but there is also the ultimate long weekend.

The addition of the Friday means its two short weeks with the best part of a whole one off in the middle.

Rather than our usual Sunday comedown with Monday’s stress peeking over the horizon, today can be spent in glorious abandon, staying up late, eating copious amounts of chocolate and having those extra few beers that are normally reserved for Friday and Saturday, safe in the knowledge that you can lay in tomorrow and recover.

So despite an hour of it being stolen in the night, make sure you make the most of your extra day and have a happy Easter.

Writting Tools

As part of my goal for World Creation and general forward movement with SFU I started researching what tools are available for us writers, world builders, Gods if you will, to use when starting our very own Genesis.

I have touched on Maps in a previous post, although I shall revisit them in more detail over the month, today I thought I would focus on Writing Tools.

Like a many of you I’m sure I use Microsoft Word for pretty much all my writing needs, whilst it’s great for letters and documents, I feel it perhaps leaves something lacking as a creative writing tool.

So I set about finding what could replace it.

  The first piece of software that I can across was Scrivener, this is once nifty piece of software, it’s a little daunting when you first open it up, it is not your average Word processing program.

With this program you can map out you entire story, colour code until your heart’s content, split your novel by character, location, whatever you want. You can have all the research associated with your novel, pictures, YouTube clip, documents you name it they call all be on hand at the click of a button, all in one place.

I’ve Downloaded the trial and started messing around with it a little, its only downside that I can see so far is the £29 ($40) price point, but I can see this being worth it!

SCRIVENER TRIAL

The next stop was Storybook. Essentially this is an Open source version of Scrivener, some of the features are different, and it doesn’t have the cool corkboard effect that I found pretty exciting in Scriviner, and overall it feels a little like Scriviner Lite. It is however FREE, and if you want all the bells and whistles there is a Storybook Pro option however this is a similar price to Scrivener and if I was paying I think I stick with that.

STORYBOOK FULL

The third option I found was Liquid Story Binder XE, it’s more of the same idea which isn’t surprising if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. What does appeal to me about Liquid is that it does seem to have been designed specifically with Fiction writing in mind

LIQUID STORY BINDER XE TRIAL

I don’t know if any of these will help me (or you) with your writing but i’m going to give them a go and see what happens, let me know if you use this or any other software to help with your writing and what your opinions on them are!