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Aesthetic Morality in the 21st Century
Morality in art has always been a fascination of mine. And by art I mean literature, music, movies - the works. Some weblogs even. A favourite artist of mine is the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. One of Gould's theories was that music should be judged on moral considerations rather...
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Motivations: comparisons between novel-writing and blogging
I had written a long post describing my motivations for writing my novel, but on reflection I won't publish it because it belongs more to my personal journal than on a public website. That is to say, it's probably only relevant to me. But to sum up in a sentence: my...
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Reflections on writing a novel in 27 days – Part 1
In November 2003 I embarked on a new adventure: writing a novel. I took part in Nanowrimo, an annual novel-writing challenge that takes place every November. Nanowrimo stands for 'National Novel Writing Month' and the task is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. I first discovered Nanowrimo just...
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Re-design braindump 2: Ancillary or Primary
What's your primary content?I felt a bit guilty about dissing Jason Kottke's new design yesterday. I didn't mean to be negative, actually I admire that he's put all his content in one feed. It has its merits - for example readers only need to subscribe to the one RSS feed....
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Dirtside to Spaceside – my novel in PDF form
I've released the 0.9 version of my Nanowrimo novel, which I wrote in 27 days during November 2003. Apparently there were 3680 people all over the world crazy enough to successfully complete the Nanowrimo contest in 2003. So here's my effort:Dirtside to Spaceside (PDF - 344KB)Shortly I will begin to...
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Braindump of weblog re-design thoughts
I'm thinking about re-designing my weblog. While I was busy writing my novel in November, others were exploring the boundaries of the weblog form. Dave Winerre-designed his hugely influential blog, Mark Pilgrim did a re-design (and curiously, Dave and Mark's blogs have ended up looking pretty similar - or maybe...
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Liv Tyler waved at me
The world premiere of the Lord of the Rings was held in Wellington, New Zealand today - my hometown. Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director of the Rings trilogy, is from Wellington. He's the King of Wellington as far as I'm concerned. And NZ's capital city turned on a beautiful...
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Dirtside to Spaceside – the novel
I've published my Nanowrimo novel on Read/Write Web as an HTML file. The PDF version will have to wait till Monday. I tried to use the Adobe Online Conversion service, but I couldn't get the file size under 600KB for some reason (which is odd because the Word file is...
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Nanowrimo Novel Finished!!!
50,060 words. Completed in 27 days. The new name of my novel is: Dirt-side to Space-side. This is a NASA term for the Interplanetary Internet. I'll post a PDF version of my novel in the next day or two (once I correct the spelling mistakes).Looks like I'm the second Nanowrimo...
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Nanowrimo Day 26 – 96% done. One more day to go…
The penultimate day. 48,011 words (ch. 54 onwards). One more night's writing to go. I think I'm bringing together all the threads in time. I can't wait to finish now, although I'll probably miss it once I am finished. But I won't miss the late nights and early mornings. It's...
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Nanowrimo Day 25 – 92% done
46,253 words. Here's the latest (chapter 49 onwards). Two more nights to go and I'll be finished. Yesterday was quite difficult and I wasn't satisfied with my writing. I couldn't get in The Zone. No flow mojo. Thankfully today was easier and I was back in rhythm. I even went...
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Day 23 – building now to an exciting conclusion
42,448 words - nearly 85% done. The end of chapter 46 is here, then I started a new page for chapter 47 onwards.While walking in the local park today, feeding the ducks on a lovely sunny breezy Sunday with my wife and two-year old daughter, I had some ideas for...
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Day 22 (Sat morning)
Saturday morning as I write this. I will have more words to contribute later this weekend, but for now I'm at 39,564 words. Here's the latest (ch. 44 onwards).
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Novel, Day 19
36,119 words. Here's the latest (ch.42 onwards).I'd be interested to know if anyone is reading this and if so, what are your thoughts. I don't have much time to respond to your comments, but I do appreciate them.
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Nanowrimo Day 18 – virtual worlds and avatars
34,094 words. The latest is here. Yesterday and today was spent writing a long chapter 41, where the main character Declan is inserted into a virtual world as an avatar. I surprised myself with some William Burroughs-like imagery to descibe the virtual world. It's likely to need some tidying up...
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Nanowrimo Day 15 – plus some thoughts on categories and topics
27,563 words. Here's the latest (ch. 34 onwards). I'm hoping to reach the 30,000 mark by end of tomorrow. That will give me a nice round figure to aim for of 10,000 words per week for the final two weeks.I'm enjoying having two storylines intertwining now. On the one hand,...
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Nanowrimo Day 13 – nearly halfway there
24,662 words - virtually 50% finished. Tonight's words are chapter 32 onwards. Today was quite productive. The new storyline has energized me and is taking the overall story in an interesting direction. I'll be taking a day off tomorrow. Fridays have been declared rest days by my wife, which is...
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Day 12
22,009 words - hanging in there (see ch. 31 onwards). Decided to introduce a sub-plot, to liven things up. It's about a Silicon Valley graphics designer named Dave Darwin, who has just started a social software company. The themes of avatars and social software which I'm introducing here will eventually...
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Day 11 – Exhausted (as the Foo Fighters song goes…)
Man *what* a struggle, 20,059 words - here they are (ch. 28 onwards for today). But I'm not that happy with tonight's words. I think the quality is not great. I had to interupt my writing a couple of times. Bah! Hopefully tomorrow is better. Well, later today - as...