Robyn Writes

New Moon Rising

New Moon Rising

I should probably be ringing in the new year in a pub, or a bar, or at a gig, but instead of dodging vomit and strangers, I’m sat at on the sofa in my fluffiest pyjamas, with The Walking Dead on in the background and nursing a glass of water. I’ve had better nights, but I’ve definitely had worse.

It’s usually about the time of night that I start to get reflective. 2017 has, for all intents and purposes, been a shitshow from an external point of view. Brexit is a load of wank, and the level of fear and loathing spreading throughout the world is something that we need to keep fighting as fiercely as we can. But on a personal level, I’ve accomplished enough to feel as though I made a difference this year.

One of my main goals was to read more books. The thought process was read more books, write more stuff. Well, I was an overachiever when it came to the first part of that — I hit 36 books in total this year, which is a huge increase on the 10 or so I read in 2016. Most of those were books that were in my to-be-read pile, but I delved into a fair few new ones as well. Admittedly, I didn’t stray too far from sci-fi/fantasy, but that’s something to concentrate on next.

I wanted to write more, and to a degree, I suppose I did. I wrote a few more blogs than the year before, drafted a few stories and entered a couple of competitions. I also edited the vast majority of my friend’s novelisation of our D&D campaign (still a few more chapters to go!), which was a great experience and a really worthwhile exercise.

I also branched out in terms of my social circle, joining said D&D group, which was possibly the best decision I’ve made since moving to Cheltenham. It’s the nerdiest shit I could even think about doing, but I’ve made some fantastic friends, laughed until I cried and started DM’ing a campaign, which has been brilliant for my improvisation skills. Our campaign’s still going strong, and I’m excited to see what comes this year.

There are still lots of things I’m working towards. We don’t own a house yet. I don’t have my own little writing nook. But those aren’t too far away. I haven’t written that book, or even finished the little pieces I started working on. Nevertheless, I have ideas, and I want to find my drive. I’m planning on taking up a diary for the first time in years to try and see if I can inspire myself some more. I’m not setting any resolutions as such, but the same applies as most years — read more, write more, do more stuff and take better care of myself.

I usually do a little yearly roundup of things I’ve enjoyed most throughout the year. I’m not doing anything quite so expansive as usual, but here’s a sample of stuff I’ve loved this year.

Records: Creeper — Infinity, In Your Arms; AFI — The Blood Album; Dreamcar — S/T; Kesha — Rainbow; Chelsea Wolfe — Hiss Spun

Video games: Persona 5; Destiny 2; Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age; Mass Effect Andromeda; Assassin’s Creed Origins

Movies: Thor: Ragnarok; Star Wars: The Last Jedi; Power Rangers; Wonder Woman; Kubo and the Two Strings

Books: Raven Stratagem — Yoon Ha Lee; Ancillary Sword — Ann Leckie; The Bone Key — Sarah Monette; Four Roads Cross — Max Gladstone; A Long Day in Lychford — Paul Cornell

Marching On

Marching On

My blogging at least once a month is going well, as I’m sure you can all see… February and March have been BUSY. Work busy, life busy, writing busy, generally busy all over.

At work, I just finished off a project on community management strategy for a gaming website that I’ve been helping out with for a number of years, helping them to transition their social network to their main website. It’s been a great experience and I feel like I’ve done everything I can to help support a community that has been there for me through thick and thin. So that’s been good.

Life? I just don’t seem to have time to do anything, I’m always out and about. However, one good thing I’ve been doing with my time lately is popping along to a D&D games night set up by Proud Lion, the local comic book shop. It’s great fun, I’ve met a lot of really lovely new people and I’m finally getting back into playing. My role-playing still leaves a lot to be desired, but I think I just need to get back into the swing of being another character. I’d like to sit down and do a proper character sketch when I have the time and dig deep into what makes my half-elf cleric tick.

Writing busy, THAT’S A THING THAT’S HAPPENING. I wrote, edited, finished and submitted a story to a short story competition for the Evesham Festival of Words. I have no idea if I’ll win, get shortlisted or even longlisted, but at least I finished something and submitted something. I’m pleased with the concept, but genre fiction doesn’t always perform that well at these kinds of things so I’ll have to wait and see.

Now that’s over and done with, I suppose I’d better get cracking with my ‘Ready, Set, Novel’ plan. I’ve completed a few of the exercises but got distracted as soon as Mass Effect: Andromeda came out (I have more thoughts on that to follow up with soon). Setting aside time to write just seems impossible at the moment – I only managed the other story because it had a 2,500 word limit – but I’ve got to do it if I ever want to get a book out there.

Also, a quick Mount TBR update – I’m up to 11 books out of 24! It’s pretty exciting to (almost) hit the halfway mark, so exciting in fact that I went and splurged on a Humble Book Bundle collection from a bunch of great female authors… Whoops. That takes the unread Kindle library up to about 130 books? Jeepers. That said, I’m totally ignoring the Kindle in favour of physical books at the moment. I’m currently on Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series, which is full of wizards, and swearing, and feelings. I’m reading The Virtu and it’s the best. You should read it too.

Metrics and Measures

Metrics and Measures

January’s officially out of the door, meaning that 31 days (and a few more) out of 365 have been and gone. It’s ridiculously cliché to say it, but tempus fugit and all that. I can’t believe where the time has gone already and how ridiculous the world has been in those few days.

However, I’m not going to go on about the state of the world for now. Instead, I’ve been trying to look at what I’ve been up to, and compressed them into various numbers to make it look more impressive. So, in those 31 January days, I have …

  • Read four books, or 1,170 pages if you’re feeling fancy
  • Written 1,086 words of a new short story called Guidance
  • Spent two days in London doing business things
  • Baked approximately 42 spiced nutmeg biscuits
  • Walked 181,339 steps (and it’s still not enough)
  • Written one article for a great website
  • Played around 15 hours of Final Fantasy XV
  • Raised my fist in triumph at 14 new AFI tracks
  • Cried at two different Mass Effect: Andromeda trailers

If you look at it like that, January wasn’t so bad at all for me. I’m feeling pretty posi about February, too. So far, I’ve properly kicked off a major project at work that’s basically my dream project, and although it’s been a lot of hard work so far, it’s been really fulfilling. Hopefully, I’ll continue to do some good stuff there but it already seems like it’s making an impact, which is great.

I’m also planning on doing lots more writing, if I can. I picked up Ready, Set, Novel! by the NaNoWriMo people to help me plot my next big idea — I think with a bit of additional help, I’ll be able to really solidify this one and make a good start. The only problem I have is that I have two big ideas that are totally incompatible and I need to choose which one to focus on first …

I’m going to finish Guidance, somehow, as well. I’m not feeling it too much at the moment, but I need to push through and actually complete it so that I can move on fully to the next thing. And I bought a new editing pen that’s a nice purple colour, so if I want to use it, I need to have a first draft to edit!

Mount TBR is progressing pretty well, too — four books down out of a possible 25. I seem to be going through Kindle books a lot faster than the print ones, probably due to the amount of time I spend on the bus each week, but I’m optimistic about hitting that goal. It’s also been great to dive back into the Kindle archive, see what I bought three years ago and discover how good they actually are. Has it stopped me buying new books? Well, seeing as I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing as I type this, then no. But it has forced me to pick up some treasures that I was otherwise missing out on.

So, I suppose that I need to continue forging through February and make it a good one. 2017, I won’t let you get me down, no matter how many depressing articles fill up my Facebook feed.

Mount TBR Challenge 2017!

Mount TBR Challenge 2017!

My to-be-read pile is shameful. Ignoring my boyfriend’s Warhammer books, our shared bookshelf is positively drowning in stories that I’ve never read, with books stacked upon books as we struggle to make space for all the things I’ve not even touched since bringing it back from the bookshop.

My friend Charlotte, enabler of my book hoarding habit and all-round great gal, turned me on to a possible solution from My Reader’s Block: The Mount TBR Challenge. So excited by the possibility that I might finally crack through a few titles, I wrote a whole article about it for Nothing In the Rulebook — you can check it out here. The crux of it is that there are several different mountains to choose from, depending on how many books are in your pile and how many you feasibly think you’ll read. I went for Mount Blanc, which is 24 books.

So far, I’ve knocked two off the list — The Autobiography of James T. Kirk and The Lost Child of Lychford by Paul Cornell. They were, admittedly, not that long (although thoroughly enjoyable!) but they’re on the pile, so it’s not cheating.

Currently, I’m reading Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman on Kindle when on the bus, and The Wizard Hunters by Martha Wells when at home. When flicking through my Kindle trying to find the next book to read, I realised that I had over 100 books sitting on there that had never been touched. Add the 50 or so on the bookshelf that have yet to be cracked open, and that’s a lot of bloody books. I can see myself aiming to scale up.

As I mention in the NITRB blog though, I’m hoping that this will help spur me on to keep writing myself. Although I’m not setting myself any hard and fast goals for the time being (New Year’s resolutions are always a waste of time for me as I end up breaking them fairly quickly), I am intending to at least produce a few things this year, and keep submitting to competitions. And if that helps me get a novel on the go, I’m all about that. But I’m also enjoying taking the time to discover some fantastic new worlds, as well as revisit others with a different point of view. So wish me luck — see you at the summit!

Between the Pages

Between the Pages

Believe it or not, I’ve not read that many books this year. It might not seem like a wildly shocking fact, but I used to read a book a week – sometimes two, if the mood struck. It’s not that I don’t have loads of books to read, it’s that I have a tendency to get a bit too attached to my 3DS or a show on Netflix. That’s the thing – with so much media to consume out there, when do I have time to do it? Something’s got to take a back seat, and sadly, it’s been books for most of this year.
 
However, with the weather getting colder, and the fact that I’d not joined the library service in this county yet weighing on my shoulders, I decided to pop up there and grab some books. I’ve now read more books in a month than I think I’ve read in about a year, which is great! Here are a few I’ve really enjoyed so far…
 
Barbara Hambly – Those Who Hunt the Night
 
God, I love vampires. I especially love vampire books with really 80s covers.
 
hambly
 
Set in Edwardian London, this is a mystery novel worthy of Conan Doyle, but with creatures that skulk in the darkness and a hero that rides an early Norton motorcycle. It’s not a huge book, but it’s gripping – I finished it off in just over a week. Although its main character is a human – the unlikely warrior James Asher, don at Oxford University with a secret past – the vivid nature in which the vampires are portrayed, particularly the dashing Don Simon Ysidro, won me over. Ysidro is a total babe.
 
Warren Ellis and Phil Jimenez – X-Men: Exogenetic
 
I’m a comic person too (Marvel pls), but I don’t have time to keep up with single issues, so I usually grab a few trade paperbacks when I can. Exogenetic, set in the events following M-Day, sees seemingly dead mutants revived with Sentinels lurking within their hollow husks of a body. It pits the X-Men against some of their biggest enemies, all at the hands of one particularly evil genius. It’s not Ellis’ most cerebral work, but it is great fun.  
 
Ann Leckie – Ancillary Justice
 
Where to start? I can’t believe this is a debut novel. It’s so elegantly crafted, a true tale of revenge but from the eyes of a ship’s AI, no less, stranded in an ancillary body and left to seek out its destroyer. Most interestingly, the novel’s main character (and the Radchaii in general) uses the pronoun ‘she’ to refer to people of all gender. Although it threw me to start with, it made me realise just how male-centric most sci-fi books are, and it was a refreshing change to visualise a character as female upon first instance, rather than male. I’m thoroughly looking forward to reading the next two books in the series.
 
On the to-read pile, I’ve got The Relic Guild by Edward Cox, of which I have heard Very Good Things.
 
What have you been reading lately? Please post your recommendations in the comments!
 
xoxo – Robyn