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Artists and Rooks is now looking like a complete draft. Probably isn't. 41.3 k Words and now transferring to eBook reader to read in one go / basic proof annotations.
I'm now seeing parts that I may re-write as I tend to whizz through to get the story down and skip by putting a sentence of narration instead of character actions + dialogue.

I may add a scene near the end.
 
Weekly Status

6 New Traditional Poems
5 poems accepted at Adelaide
No Submissions
Read Ursula LeGuin's "No Time to Spare" - fun
did and mailed my taxes....ugh!
have sort of settled in to/with new computer...
 
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Re-read "Artists and Rooks" last night, finished about 2am. Transferred 107 annotations to laptop from eReader. Started 6th revision. I can see places now that need cut (some are repetition) and other places where content needs added. All in the notes.
Also in the previous "Rook" book "Papers" were replaced by ID cards, and MC's surname changed by the Government, so that needs updated. The novel was started at the end of September 2017, and both "Exiles and Rooks" (Celtic Otherworld #6) and "Conspiracies and Rooks" (Celtic Otherworld #8) have had a lot of re-writing / editing. The overarching plot of the resurgence of the Inamok Empire (books #3 to #10) is now clearer, though I have no idea yet what might be in book #11. If it happens at all, it may involve Marion and her Rook Familiars. :D

kennychaffin said:
Ursula LeGuin's "No Time to Spare"
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Not read that one yet. I have many of her books. She's a great loss.
 
Artists and Rooks now 42.5 k words. Time to let my chief Beta Reader read it. I'll let it mature now for a month or two and come to it fresh again.
I might need to add finding a body, but perhaps it works if the body is never found.
 
Yay! Editing and proof reading done, paperback published on Amazon soon. Looking at list of my ebooks there and thinking I should probably do a hard copy of some. Am thinking Crater is long overdue for a paper version. Mars next stop...
 
Updated blog with big post on my attempt to break Google Translate, added a couple hundred words to a short story and did heavy editing on my novel. Hope to have novel submission-ready by middle of April.
 
Still plugging away at books two and three of my series; bouncing back and forth. No great strides made lately but book two is slowly fleshing out toward my 100k+ word goal. The goal is not set in stone; just happens to be the length of book one.
 
God I wish I could finish things....

Driving one of my kids to his climbing club yesterday I had one of those "If I start a strip like this I wonder what would happen?" moments. About 30 seconds later I knew what the punchline was and, after keeping the idea alive in my head for the five minutes it took me to drive him there, I spent the next hour writing/thumbnailing the thing in my sketchbook. Halfway through, what turned into an 40 panel, five page story, another character walked onto the page and had a better punchline in her hands. I love moments like that. The thing is now occupying my drawing table and all the other things I have been working on are suddenly not as interesting.

The last few things I actually finished were for other people and are:

my first cover for someone else's comic:
40781073372_5ccf4d68be_z.jpg

out in April from Markosia.com

I have four pages of art (and four other pages of lettering) in this:
https://gumroad.com/l/octrta

And a couple of strips in anthologies somewhere in Kickstarter Limboland.

Now if only I could work out some way of making MONEY out of this...

This is the last thing I did for me:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/junkmonkey/26904092158/in/dateposted-public/
 
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Ray McCarthy said:
It's only much use to translate to a language you are fluent it, and even then poor. It's a brute force database. Most grammar based research on language based translation is dead.
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Actually, I was surprised at how good it is. Yes, it's far from perfect and you do need to know both languages in order to fix its errors but, for single clause sentences, it does a pretty good job. I even tried putting it through both German and Danish before going to English and, oddly, it turned out better than just the German-English version.

It's kind of fun to deliberately mess with it by mixing metaphors across multiple clauses. And I do wonder about the day when the "errors" become subtle enough that they are accepted as valid interpretations, thus expanding linguistic possibilities by means of an automatic algorithm.
 
JunkMonkey said:
Now if only I could work out some way of making MONEY out of this...
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Did Disraeli say: "When I want to read a novel I write a book"?
In your case draw & letter a strip. Keep doing it. Making money isn't everything. I'd rather be you than Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Theil, or boss of most big USA companies.
 
As a complete aside I have been rereading The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle. I first read it as a teenager but bought the book in a secondhand shop and it was only when three quarters of the way through that I realised a chunk of it was missing. I tried to piece together the plot after the missing section as best I could but... Here I am, many decades later, finally with a new, complete copy and big smile, what a delight to fill in the missing section and it is still a cracking read.
Why am I mentioning this? I have a pile of unfinished bits and pieces all over the place and its reminded me how annoying it must be if someone should start to read some of it only to find it is never finished... note to self... keep going!
On my to do list to finish are The Cloud Lily, Zoology, Space Zombie Holiday 2 and some Stargate & Star Trek stories over on fanfiction and of course, editing and publishing Crater, will probably merge it with part of Craters as an extended novel now that Last Dog Standing is self-published as a paperback!
 
May update this in the next few days, but this is the end of the First Quarter and here are my totals as of today

18 traditional poems
1 prose poem
2 microfictions
97 submissions
11 publications (poem/micro/etc)

based on my annual goals the only one I'm way ahead on is Submissions
almost close on poems, but way off on micro/flash/short stories
and nothing yet on new self-published books (last book was almost two years ago...need to correct that! my excuse is that I'm getting more picky about what I want to include)
 
My annual goal is to be still alive, reading and writing. It's working so far.
@kennychaffin You've been busy. Still, I only write novels. I find re-writes, proof reads, edits etc is a lot more time than getting a story to a reasonably coherent first complete draft.
 
Ray McCarthy said:
I find re-writes, proof reads, edits etc is a lot more time than getting a story to a reasonably coherent first complete draft.
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Ha! It took me a year and a half to get my first novel attempt to an unreasonable incoherent collection of too many words. It's been sitting in an untouched computer file ever since for exactly the reasons you mention. :eek:

That and an acknowledgement that I need to improve my skills more first. Such a long slog.
 
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