Obscurities

 Every Photo Tells..., Featured, Music, Podcast, Solo  1 Response »
May 192013
 

Obscurities CoverAfter some fine-tuning of the music from the ‘10 Weeks : 10 Sounds‘ project, I have compiled it into an album that is now ready to download from Bandcamp.

The music is embedded on the right-hand side of this site, so you can listen to most of the tracks before downloading for a very reasonable price. In addition to the music I have already featured on this site, the final album includes another 16 pieces of music that were recorded at the same time, but not released (these do NOT appear in the track list shown, but are included as bonus tracks in the final download).

The whole album has a Creative Commons (BY-CC) licence, which means you can freely share it, use it in podcasts, films or online projects, just so long as you credit it to Mick Bordet and include a link to this website in whatever you produce.

In addition to the music, the download contains a full-colour pdf booklet that describes each track along with photographs of all the instruments, and a pdf file of a novella that accompanies the music.

The novella (also called “Obscurities”) introduces a character from a forthcoming book, who discovers a box full of instruments and learns the story behind each one: a story that forms her own personal history and leads her to learn about her ancestors and herself. Yes, each of the instruments she finds is one of those used in the album and each has a very different tale to tell.

ObscuritiesBookThe eBook is also available at Smashwords in formats for all the usual eReaders.

As if that wasn’t enough, the story will also be appearing in audio podcast form over the next few weeks at Every Photo Tells…
The audio version of the story includes snippets of music from the album, so is also a good way to hear some of the music and immerse yourself in the story at the same time.

Pushing Forty

 Featured, NaNoWriMo, Some Other Scotland, Writing  Comments Off
Nov 252012
 

NaNo GraphFor the final weekend of NaNoWriMo I’m pleased to have hit the 40,000 word mark – a milestone worthy of comment, I think. That leaves only 10,000 words to hit the NaNo goal, but I think, from progress so far, that it will take up to 60,000 words to finish the story. Since it took 66,000 words to get as far as episode 26, this does fit with my original expectation that Some Other Scotland would last for around 50 episodes in total.

It is full steam ahead from now on, as I spent some more time working out plans and timelines using the still-in-development tool ‘Scapple’, the latest software from the developer of ‘Scrivener’, which is the writing software I use to put together SOS. Here’s what I put together using Scapple to help me work out the order of events, the items that still need to be dealt with and the trail of evidence to be followed by Sykes and Co. (yes, it is too small to make out any details, so no spoilers!).
Scapple planning

I have found Scapple to be great for throwing together a whole load of ideas and showing the links between them. Standard mind-mapping software can tend to limit layouts to a hierarchical structure, but Scapple lets links flow in many different directions, which is ideal for my way of working. It outputs in a variety of formats, so I have a copy in pdf format that can sit within my ‘Research’ folder in Scrivener, letting me check back on the plan without having to open another program.

When I first started putting together a timeline for the story, I used a trial copy of Aeon Timeline which seems to be ideal. In fact it was very easy to use, had all the features I wanted and even has a straightforward way of synchronising with Scrivener that made the whole process work smoothly. Unfortunately, the way the software works meant that my long timeline (4,000 years approximately) was too much for it to cope with. It let me enter the events in the timeline and was able to display them, but when I wanted to zoom into any time period less than a month it could not display any further detail. As a result it was no use for plotting out events that happened within the course of a single day, of which there are many in certain sections of the story.
According to the support website, this is a known issue and the way around it would be to have separate timelines for each set of events (e.g. one for neolithic times, one for 18th century, one for early 20th century and one for the ‘current’ time), which is really not practical and would make the otherwise perfect software a pain to use. I ended up switching the timeline to a LibreOffice spreadsheet for comparison purposes and using Scapple to identify the actual flow of events (i.e. event X must happen before events Y and Z).

Now that I know how the story will end, it is just a matter of keeping on with the writing and then beginning the editing process. Look out for another new episode in the next week or so, depending on how well I progress with the writing over the next few days.

Almost there!

NaNo progress

NaNo Halfway

 NaNoWriMo, Some Other Scotland, Writing  Comments Off
Nov 172012
 

NaNo Graph
The halfway mark for NaNoWriMo has passed and I am pleased to say that I have managed to stay on target. The little chart here shows a couple of yellow and orange days, which are those where the daily target was not quite reached, but that was balanced out be the days when I wrote well over the target (mostly weekends and a few days off work). As I write this post, my word count sits at over 27,000. That is roughly equivalent to eight episodes of the podcast, so I edited a section of what has been written so far and recorded it with my nice new AKG Perception microphone. There is a new episode of the podcast just been posted and I will be recording more in the next few weeks.

The whole process of writing SOS in this way, instead of on a weekly basis, has made it flow well, though fitting it back into a twenty minute episode can be more tricky than writing it in specific, episode-friendly chunks. Nevertheless, I am currently finishing off the end of the second act of the story and will soon be starting to bring all the final threads together and wrap it all up. The story has taken some unexpected turns, even without the last of the polls being included, but I am very pleased with the way it is making its way to the conclusion.

NaNoWriMo 2012

 NaNoWriMo, Some Other Scotland, Writing  Comments Off
Oct 172012
 

NaNo GraphIt’s that time of the year again and, after sitting out last year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I’m giving it another shot in 2012. This time I have set myself the goal of writing another 50,000 words to Some Other Scotland, so not technically a new story. The weekly nature of the news stories, which have fed into the plot of SOS since the first episode, has been something of a mixed blessing, breaking the writing flow. By attacking it in a large, continuous block of writing over the month of November, the aim is to finish or at least come close to finishing the whole story.

With just two weeks before NaNo kicks off, I have been writing up Every Photo Tells… stories in advance, so there is nothing to get in the way during November. One of those is set in the SOS world, which is a gentle way to dip my toes back into the story. Over the next week I will be looking at the plot lines as they currently stand and working out how they will resolve over the second half of the story.

The chart of my progress on will be on display here. Do drop in and see how it is progressing and make certain I don’t fall behind!

Fellow NaNo writers, if you’d like to add me as a buddy, my username is SOScotland.

Glimpses

 Featured, Podcast, Short Stories, Some Other Scotland, Writing  Comments Off
Nov 202011
 

A few months ago the team at Podioracket launched an anthology podcast featuring writers of Podiobooks.com stories. This is the second of these collections they have produced, though this one differed from the first by showcasing stories that were spin-offs from existing podiobooks.com titles. The idea is to give people a taste of some of the books available on the site, perhaps interesting them in tales that might not otherwise have appealed to them based solely on their descriptions. I thought this was a great idea, having already written a number of stories in the same world as “Some Other Scotland“, and knew straight away what to write.

In the early days of SOS, I wrote a short story that appeared at “Great Hites” called “The Cave pt1″. It was prompted by the ‘polar bear’ news item that came up and was set about 4,000 years ago, providing an outside view of a historic meeting. There was always going to be a second part to the story and ‘Glimpses’ provided the opportunity to tell the rest of the tale. This new story is set in the same time period and focuses on a meeting between the clans and the advanced civilisation featured in the main storyline. Throw in a mind-controlled polar bear and some bad attitude and you know that it’s not going to end in cuddles. If you haven’t been following SOS, then this story gives you a flavour of the main story, but if you have then this is probably the most ‘essential’ of the Spin-offs I have written.

The story has been available in audio form at Podiobooks for months (there is an audio promo below), but has just been released in eBook format. You can find it in a range of formats for all e-readers, or to view on your computer, at Amazon(for Kindle users) and Smashwords(in many formats).

You can find out more about the book on Goodreads or Shelfari – please leave a review if you enjoy any of the stories. We really want to get the news out there about the collection.

Glimpses Promo [ 0:53 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some Other Podcast

 Podcast, Some Other Scotland  1 Response »
Feb 022011
 

Some Other Scotland
Between Every Photo Tells…, Wiener Blut and numerous other activities, my attention to Some Other Scotland has been spread rather thin of late. Okay, very thin. I am in the process of sorting this out.

First of all, a new episode of the podcast series was posted yesterday and it features something that was set up back in episode 4. Admittedly, because of the nature of the podcast and its audience-influenced plot-lines, at that time I had no idea what it was set up for, but once I did, it was just a matter of sitting on it until an appropriate time. The pace will be stepping up a gear or two over the next few episodes, as a result of this event. I have already started writing the next episode, so keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

Polls

There is a new poll, ready for you to vote on. In the past I had to rely on third party poll sites that were either awkward to work with or didn’t do what I want them to do. The new, integrated poll fits the design of the SOS site, lets me include links on each poll item so that you can visit the original news items before making your informed decision to vote for the three things you’d like me to inflict on the characters. The new system even lets me provide a poll archive, so clicking on the ‘Polls‘ menu item will show all the polls from the past. Unfortunately this ability will only be available from this week’s poll onwards, but I hope you find it useful.

Wiki

Over on the SOS Wiki page, there have been a number of additions to bring the wiki up to date with the plot, such as discovering the name of the ‘Sidhe‘, adding in new locations, characters and items of technology. There was a spam attack on the wiki a few weeks ago, which slipped past because of some settings that have now been changed. It is a really useful resource for listeners of the podcast and don’t forget that anyone can register as a user there and make their own additions to the information there.

Subscribe!

There are a number of existing spin-offs that I will be dropping into the feed as well, in between regular episodes. In the past these have been spread around all over the place, but I am keen to bring them all into the main feed. For a while there has also been the ability to choose a special feed, for example if you are a podiobooks.com listener, but would like to grab all the spin-offs to enjoy. It was never very clear how this works, though, so I have added a Subscribe page that lists the special feeds you can access along with a nice shiny iTunes button to press if all that sounds too complicated and you just want to listen to the whole podcast.

Some Other Scotland

A Year of Stories

 Every Photo Tells..., Podcast  2 Responses »
Jan 302011
 

This weekend we hit two milestones over at Every Photo Tells….

First of all, we published our fiftieth short story on the podcast. That’s rather impressive, considering that we would have been happy to have been publishing our twentieth by this stage and that is due to the writers who have been inspired by our monthly photographs to write stories of their own.

Thank you to everyone who has submitted a story to us since we started. We have had some really positive feedback about how we are treating people’s stories and listener numbers continue to climb steadily, so we must be doing something right.

Secondly, February sees the start of our second year of production. Yes, it has been a whole year since we started the podcast! By the end of the month we will have included a total of 52 episodes in our feed, effectively one story per week.

We’re already looking forward to compiling ‘Book 2′ for release on podiobooks.com, as well as some other new ideas for the website.

A Share of the Golden Age

 Featured, Podcast  Comments Off
Jan 272011
 

Owner's Share coverIf you have been following Some Other Scotland and/or Every Photo Tells… and are looking for more podcast fiction, then I can recommend Nathan Lowell’s Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper. The ‘Share’ series of stories concluded yesterday, though there will be more stories in the future set in the same universe. I have heard it described as science fiction for people who don’t like SciFi, but like the best of the genre it is focused on the characters more than the science. You won’t find space battles, weird aliens or endless technobabble, but a gentle trip through the career of a newcomer to space travel, making his way up through the ranks from the equivalent of a deck scrubber to captain and beyond.

Mr Lowell reads the stories himself and has a very relaxed and clear delivery that is easy on the ears, but if you’re not a fan of podcast fiction, the series is also being released in book format.

Thanks to Nathan for providing such a great series for free download at podiobooks.com and I look forward to future explorations in the same world. He will also be appearing in later episodes of Wiener Blut, where he plays a major character who is important in the second half of the story.

More from Vienna

 100 Word Stories, Every Photo Tells..., Featured  Comments Off
Jan 042011
 

The Danube in the SnowMy micro spin-off from Wiener Blut has now appeared at 100 Word Stories. It is called ‘Kardinalschnitte’ (after the cake which goes so well with Viennese coffee) and links directly into the back-story of this week’s main Wiener Blut episode, telling a very brief story about the Meiers. There is a voting system in place at the 100 Word Story website, so once you’ve read or listened to this week’s stories, please take the time to vote for your favourites. You can even vote for one that’s not mine.

From Every Photo Tells… comes my other new story this week. It’s another Wiener Blut spin-off, longer this time, set in another character’s past in the midst of one very cold winter. It could be considered a bit of a spoiler for the main story, so you might want to leave it until that is complete, but it certainly won’t ruin anything major.

Every Photo Tells… has just been added to the Duotrope writers’ market listings, so we hope to be bringing some stories from a whole new group of authors to our listeners in the near future.

For the moment, it’s back to writing on Some Other Scotland and then I have a couple of other short story projects that I might consider, if time allows, before the end of this month.

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