OUUROBOROS

♥‿♥ It's up! Download the next set of shorts here!
Thanks for all the support and downloads so far today, before I even posted! It'll be free for the next couple of days only. Please enjoy :>

I'm quite pleased with this set overall,  and I hope people like them. Good luck, little ebook!

I'll post a couple of more times before I go to uni, I imagine - I've got a couple of posts backed up that I want to do before I leave, and then I guess I can tell you guys about my new city and things :> Sorry for being a useless blogger/writer over the last couple of weeks.

Hello hello ♥‿♥
Not only is today a Breaking Bad marathon kind of day, I've also finished editing/formatting the next set of shorts! I've uploaded them to Amazon and am now just waiting on them to be published. Should happen tomorrow, and they'll be free for a couple of days around a day afterwards. Exciting! If you want to know the extent of the Government's plans for the city, be sure to download and have a read :>

I suppose this is also an apology, in a way - the start of uni's been coming up fast, and everything's gone a bit insane. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to not expect the final set of shorts for at least several more weeks. I've got a new city to settle in to (and not get lost in), Fresher's week to deal with (ew, for antisocial gits like me),  and hopefully I'll make some new friends. I will try to publish them before the end of my first term at uni, however. I'll have my dad email me any edits and I'll go through them again, but it will very much be in my spare time. I mistimed this a little bit :/ But I hope you can understand that my studies (which are about to clean me out financially for several years at least) should probably take priority over this.

But, it will definitely be out eventually! I've come too far to abandon it now, and I desperately want to start writing my novel! The plan and characters are all coming together, and it's going to be something infinitely more exciting than the shorts (although, I like to think these are pretty exciting too!) And I've decided, hopefully around Christmas or maybe sooner, to also release the short stories in a full set - exactly as they were intended to be read. Maybe you can gift someone for Christmas? ;>

Wait for me! I really hope the stories are worth it.

Hallo, everyone! I'm sorry for being a lazy blogger this month. I decided today to write another informational post, for anyone looking to publish an ebook themselves. I've already finished my formatting ebooks post - check it here!

This post isn't very long. But I found it a little confusing to know what to do when I needed ISBNs, so this should help save other people the trouble.
Note - ISBNs are quite expensive, you'll need around £120 for a block of 10. Get saving! I cleaned the house every week for a couple of months, as well as cleaned the car. However, it's good to have them.

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What is an ISBN?
 It is an international standard book number. It's a unique number for your publication that identifies it, and is used in marketing/selling. Your book essentially gets registered on a big old database as your book, so it's quite a useful thing to have. It also makes it feel a little more official!

As to how to get an ISBN - you have to go to your country/region's ISBN agency.  A google search will help you find yours easily. The one for the UK is Nielsen. Therefore, this is the one that I used.

You need to download the application form, print it out, complete it, scan it and then email it to their address they provide (Click on 'services for new publishers' and you'll get the information, as well as links to the form.) Alternatively you can post it to their address.

The service from this company was really great. I'd managed to make a little mistake in my form, and they immediately emailed me and we sorted it out. It does take a little while to come through, however, so be prepared!

Also, another thing to note. If you're self publishing, on the form where it asks for the publisher of the book, you can either put your own name or make up your own 'publishing company' name - I chose Baytree Publishing. I suppose this can be done for superficial reasons;  so people don't at first glance write your book off as vanity published, but it's not necessary. I did it because it felt official and proper to have a 'real' publishing name ♥‿♥. You will have to register one of the ISBNs to your book when you apply, and provide a sample title page and title page verso - the site has a clear explanation of this, you can essentially mock one up in Word or Open Office (for poor people like me :> )

You will get a paper booklet in the post with a list of your ISBNs, and space for you to assign the rest of them to your future publications. You will need to register these on their site at some point, but it doesn't seem to need to be done immediately.

So, it's not actually that hard! Even so, be sure to do it in plenty of time before you intend to publish your book.

I'm afraid I'm not sure how other countries are different to the UK, but I imagine they're pretty similar.

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As far as book-writing goes, the reason number three isn't published yet is that I'm still working on 8 - Original Sin. I felt as though I didn't characterise quite correctly in it, so I'm tweaking it, and I won't publish until I am 100% happy with it.

I am also really pleased with how 4-6 has gone - I've also received a really good review on Amazon.com for it! Five stars ;__; Thank you, reviewer! It was rather flattering. So far, I've only had five star reviews on my stories (touch-wood.) This pleases me.

To everyone who downloaded my latest shorts collection, thank you! I really hope you enjoy them!
I'm sorry for not updating sooner, but I've been incredibly busy. Not only am I now working on the plan for my main project, I'm also getting ready to go to uni at the end of the month.

Scary.

Next set of shorts is out really soon. Here's the cover, close-to-full-size! You may have seen it already in preview-form, but I'm quite proud of this one! For the final cover, I'm going to try to link the design back to the cover for the first set - bring it all full-circle, like the shorts.

It's finally up! The second set of shorts in my collection is available for download HERE! ♥‿♥
Free for five days, starting today. Please be sure to download during this time! Otherwise Amazon will force you to pay :<

Please note, because I get a lot of questions about this, it is unfortunately kindle exclusive. However, if you don't happen to own a kindle or an android/iOS device upon which a kindle app may be installed, fear not! You can still download my book. You'll need to download the kindle app for your computer, which can be found HERE for free.

Any comments, criticisms and reviews are extremely welcome. I just hope people enjoy it. :>
The first set of shorts was, I felt, quite a good success - it peaked at 5 for the top 100 dystopias and 34 for the top 100 sci-fi stories, with downloads from all over the world. According to my dad's calculations, there are around two million books on Amazon, and at the time of writing this the first set is ranked #114,436 on paid downloads. Okay, so that's a horrifically huge number, and at first I was kind of disappointed - but then he said that this made it in about the top 6% of ebooks.
Not sure if that's true or not - it may have been some huge miscalculation - but it's kind of nice to think about.

Not so bad for my first book, right? I hope this book can reach the same heights, or even better.

Good luck, little ebook! I worked hard on you, and had a lot of fun writing you when I wasn't tearing my hair out over story five. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I liked writing it.

♥‿♥

I've finally returned~! Spain was interesting, to say the least. Various shenanigans occurred. I've got about three blogposts to come about my misadventures this summer, but first - the second set of shorts is formatted and ready to upload to amazon and will
 be published (hopefully) within two days! After a slew of last-minute edits and changes, I'm quite proud of these. My favorite is definitely We've Lost Our Moral Compass, which seems weird considering up until I reworked it completely I despised it in every possible way. I'm really excited for everyone to read them!

The second set of shorts will be free for 5 days. I'll post and tell you when they're ready.

Other updates: I have a facebook page now, so you can get important updates etc. from there too if you like. :>
I am also now nineteen. I feel no different.

Another thing, you might note that the cover of my first ebook has changed ever-so-slightly. The reason for this is simple. I managed to choose what is, perhaps, the only spider image on the internet WITH ONLY SEVEN LEGS.
This was pointed out by a friend of my Dad's. Oops.
I thought about keeping the spider a bit 'special' on that cover for a joke, but decided against it in the end. It's fixed now. If it ever becomes famous and you've got the one with the seven-legged cover, well, count yourselves lucky ;v

And I suppose spiders brings me on to one of the many shenanigans that occurred in Spain. Might as well do the entire post now, photos and all!

We stayed in this really nice villa, small but super pretty, because we always prefer to self-cater rather than stay in an expensive hotel. Couple of photos for you!



The pool was easily the best thing about the villa. Being from England, hardly anyone has a need for an outside pool, and they're too expensive to maintain for the five days of summer we normally get. It was a huge novelty for us. Until the so-called Spider Episode. I'll explain.
One morning, I was sitting by the pool and I happened to see what I thought was a leaf at the bottom. It was pretty big, a bit spider-like, and I thought it was from one of the plants nearby. One of my kind, helpful family will retrieve that, I decided, and left it. But by the evening when we all went in the pool, it was still there. My little brother, who continually bangs on about being a 'real man', was told by my dad to swim down and get the 'spider' as 'a real man would do that, no trouble.'
'It's a leaf,' said Joseph, but still did not dive and get it.
While they argued about the prerequisites for manhood, the hero of this story decided that a real woman would succeed where a real man failed - using a bit of ingenuity. I got the net from the side, swam over and picked up what I thought was a leaf, intending to chuck it in Joe's face with a battle-cry of SPIDER! and have a laugh at his expense.
Alas, when I brought it to the surface, I found that it was the biggest spider that I had ever seen outside of a zoo.
The battle-cry turned into a scream for assistance very quickly.

I don't think I've mentioned on this blog yet, but I really don't like spiders. I'm not a full-blown arachnophobe - I don't mind the really teeny-tiny baby spiders. Those are kind of cute. I don't mind pictures of spiders, or looking at spiders from a safe distance when they are behind glass. But anything near me, anything bigger than a few millimetres across, anything where I can see the segments in the legs, I absolutely cannot stand. The legs really, really make me uncomfortable. And this particular spider, well! - you could see those awful shiny leg segments very clearly, if you get what I mean. I'll show you.

My ipod camera was too rubbish to get a decent picture (my phone had run out of charge.) But it was far too huge for any self-respecting spider to be. Bigger than half my palm, and when I googled it I found that it was one of these.

(Image credits: jacked from here - click if you want to learn more about these blighters.)
It's a funnel web spider, and they can be extremely poisonous. I had no idea they existed in Spain! I thought they were only around Australia, but a bit of google-fu told me that there are some in Europe too. And there was little old vaguely-arachnophobic me, picking it up with the net thinking it was only a leaf and I'd get one over on my brother!
It was thrown out of the pool with some enthusiasm, net and all, and then examined from a cowardly distance. In the morning it was eaten by red ants, and thus, the Spider Episode reached its conclusion.



Moving on, these are a couple more photos of the area we stayed in. Incredible mountains, all terraced, seemingly many years ago. We were on the Costa Blanca, and visited Valencia and even Benidorm for one day, because we're classy. Valencia was so pretty, really beautiful, with every building decorated. I think my dad fell in love with Spain that day - he kept waxing lyrical about how amazing everything was, how nice the paella was, how he even liked speaking the language. The only thing stopping him dropping everything and moving out there is, I think, the temperature - which was extortionate. 37 degrees most time we were there, and it was impossible to sleep at night.

We went to Benidorm to see the Mundomar sealife centre, and watch the dolphin show on my birthday. It was amazing! They even had a tiny baby dolphin, though it didn't perform through being too young. I was at first concerned about the welfare of the animals, but they seemed to have kind keepers and the ways their welfare was maintained were all explained for us. They constantly swam over to their trainers to be kissed and have hugs, and I feel as though if the dolphins were upset or unhappy, they are such intelligent creatures that the trainers couldn't get them to perform their tricks or be so close to them.

I'm really awful when I go to any kind of animal place. I always look out to see that the animals are kept well and are cared for properly, as it's really upsetting to think of any being badly treated. Luckily most places I've visited have been at a high standard for animal welfare.


My favourite animals from the sealife centre~

The other incident that happened while on holiday was, believe it or not, on the very first day. We needed to get food so stopped off at the supermarket, where this - and I'm not sorry - stunningly good-looking human being gives us kiwis to try for free. Thanks to some picky eating habits as a child, I'd never eaten kiwi before, but found that it was really nice (also, a hot Spanish guy was giving it to me, do you think I am cold and unfeeling?) So, I ate it.
Everything was fine until my face swelled up.
So, exhausted from travelling, still tired from Holland, I had a violent allergic reaction to kiwi fruits. In front of a devastatingly attractive young man. I know, you just can't purchase this level of coolness. I was born with it.
Hey, at least I know I will never need botox in the future. I can just eat a kiwi fruit before I leave the house.

Also, can I heartily recommend Barry M's waterproof black liquid liner? I foolishly put it on without realising we were going to a water park one day, and the whole time worried my face would be melting off. But after an awful lot of slides, two goes on a rather good wave machine, several adventures with fountains and swimming pools, it was still one hundred percent intact at the end of the day. Good, huh?



But one of the best things about Spain was definitely the beautiful flowers everywhere. They're all so bright, all pink and red, and mostly huge! You rarely see flowers that big here, and they were all over the place. So many different flowers that I'd never seen before - they were really beautiful! My favourites were the hibiscus plants by the pool - the photo with my hand shows exactly how big they were.


Too bad England is too rubbish to grow any, or I'd fill my garden with them.

That essentially concludes my shenanigans in Spain, and this post! I will post about Holland at some point, with photos, but I'm on edge for releasing the next set of shorts. If you've made it this far through my ramblings, may I suggest you check the downloads page? I've updated it with a new cover that I've developed for the third set of shorts, so you can see a preview of it in thumbnail form before I properly present it to you after this second release. :> Easter egg!



 I will leave you with a picture of my face. Yes, that is a bikini. No, you aren't seeing the rest of it. Society's not ready for that yet. 

Aah! I just checked on amazon and my ebook has received 50 downloads after just two days of being up! I don't know what kind of numbers are good for a first ebook, but this seems like kind of a lot to me and so I'm really happy ♥‿♥

(It's still free for four more days, download HERE! Also, if you have no kindle or iphone/ipad/android with a kindle app, you can download a kindle reader to your computer free from here.)

Thank you so much to everyone who downloaded my book, and to everyone who will download it! It means a huge amount. I really hope you enjoy it, cause I had fun over the last year writing it. As for part two, it'll be out just as soon as I get the final edits done! That's Quantum Entanglement, We've Lost Our Moral Compass and Spidermusings. I personally think these stories are better than the first lot, but I did write them later on after I improved a lot. So, I'm starting to get excited for them too.

At the moment I'm actually working a little more on my big project, The Light Age, and I'm finalising the plans for that. Super-happy with it so far. But I guess now might be a good time to talk about why exactly I chose to do this kind of project over my gap year, rather than attempt to get published traditionally.

Getting a book of mine into actual book shops as a real, paper book is obviously my ultimate dream. But I did a lot of research about the publishing industry and it just seemed next to impossible to break into it. Publishers want you to have an agent, agents want you to have been published already... As an unknown, you really have such a little chance! But the main thing I didn't like is that as an author in the publishing industry you seem to get very little control over your book. They can edit it however they like, make you edit stuff out, make you add things in... And when I write, I guess I see it like painting. I'll try and explain.

I'm really picky with the words I choose and the sentence structures, because it's like choosing colours and tones and every subtle shade of a painting. Everything builds up into this whole piece, this whole scene and then eventually the whole story, and if someone were to chop it about too carelessly I feel as though it would lose the effects I've tried to achieve. Of course, everything needs editing - I edit my stuff relentlessly, and ask people all the time how I can improve! But throughout I am careful to keep the feeling for the story that I intended. I would also worry about my actual content and scenarios, not just the way I structure things but the things themselves. The publishing industry has been known to pull stuff like this too.

I guess a lot of my content can be seen as uncomfortable, unpleasant - my stories don't always have a happy ending. In fact, a lot of them have really quite horrible endings. And that's okay, because how many happy endings are there in real life? I'm not going to tack on some happy-happy-la-la-obnoxious ending on the end of a story about courage in the face of impossible adversity because it makes it hollow - it cheapens it. And besides - writing is art! You should write things that you want to write, that you feel are important - not what people have to want to hear. Of course, it'd be really nice if people did enjoy your work; I really, really hope that people like my stories. I actually teared when I turned on my computer and saw how many people downloaded it (even if it doesn't seem like much to most authors, it's a lot to me!)

Basically, I don't want someone else having creative control over my stuff. I also wanted to make my own cover, make sure my stories were presented exactly how I wanted to present them to people. They don't let you make your own cover in the publishing industry very often. Sometimes authors end up with a horrible one, or one that doesn't match their book - or even a downright offensive one. And they may not be able to change it.

That really worried me. So, I decided to go it alone. I guess now I have to deal with the label of 'vanity publishing', but I'll just have to hope that my work can stand for itself and people will find it worth something. I like to think my work is good enough to be read by people - and surely, it can't be any worse than certain books that actually were published! At least, I hope not. If my stuff is as terrible as certain things currently out there, I don't want people to read them! I'd be so embarrassed.

Mostly, I thought it'd be a bit of fun. A little experiment, something to do with my gap year. I'm on my own, but that's kind of fun. ♥‿♥ I can do what I like, it's an adventure that could have any kind of ending. Entrepreneurial! That's the word. I might not be a proper, legitimately published author like I always dreamed, but I can certainly be an entrepreneur until I get there. If that doesn't sound too pretentious, that is. And maybe, by the time I get there, authors and the art they create for people will be a little bit better respected by the publishing industry as a whole.

Once again, thank you for any downloads! Please enjoy.

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Just a quick one.
My book is now in the process of being uploaded to Amazon! After much stress and unnecessary, overwhelming rage and finally happiness as the evils of bureaucracy and online banking (the most counter-intuitive thing since forever) were defeated, I figured out the numbers I needed to type in the boxes and it's all moving along nicely!
It should be up on Amazon in between 12-48 hours. However, a wild problem appeared.
Amazon will not let you sell an ebook for free. 

I had to set the price as $0.99 (in proper money, 65p ;V - otherwise known as the lowest price I could set) but I've also enrolled my book into this thing called Kindle Direct Publishing Select, where every 90 days I can promote my book as free for 5 days. I'll try and figure it out so it can be promoted as free as soon as possible for everyone. I'm really sorry! I honestly intended this ebook to be 100% free. I'd downloaded free ebooks before - a collection of Sherlock stories, and Oliver Twist - but I suppose those are public domain works. Maybe it won't let you sell things for free that aren't public domain works. I don't know. It's all a bit pointlessly complex for me. :/

I mean, I guess the money would be nice - I've got uni fees to pay! But I really did want this to be free, so everyone could have an example of my work. I'm really, really sorry. Hopefully you guys can download it for free during the 5 days it will be available every 90 days - I'll be sure to point them out! I think I still get money if you download them then, hahaha.

Thanks for understanding. ♡

✎ It took longer than I anticipated, but the rewrite of short story five: We've Lost Our Moral Compass is done! ♥‿♥ I'm really proud of it; the concept as a whole is a million times better, and I guess I really got into the story as a whole because it now ties with nine: Viral Heart for the longest. Assorted thieves, fences and other criminals, oh my! I've also edited a couple of others along the way, mostly to replace the old concept entirely but also to add a couple new tidbits to the storyline, a handful of new connections. I think I can finally say that I'm proud of the story overall. ♬♪

I've also gone back and characterised the twelve ministers some more. Without giving too much away, these are some of the people involved in the Government of the city. This was because the reworked story five allowed them to get a scene of decent length, and I got to explore the character of the Minister of Media. Out of all the Ministers he's arguably the most powerful, and I personally feel he's also the most creepy. He's handsome, he's charming, he's always smiling, and he's ever-so-friendly and sincere. His actions in the fifth, I hope you'll agree if you read it, will dispell this masquerade rather quickly.
The other Ministers I've gone into detail with are Defence and Science. Defence is cold, stern, always serious, and the Minister of Media does have a bit of a laugh at his expense every now and then. Science, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. He doesn't refer to himself in the first person, choosing instead to talk about things in terms of 'This Minister'. Only once will he break this habit. Essentially, the Minister of Science does not exist as in individual entity with his own thoughts and concerns. His only goal is that of his Premier. He was also extremely frustrating to write.

The final Minister that gets properly introduced is actually the Minister of Justice, and unlike Media, Defence and Science he does nothing to drive the plot. For the most part, he is silent. Ancient and decrepit, he looks on at events through bleary, dishwater-eyes, and the only time he speaks is to condemn. ♡ I wish I'd been able to go into the other Ministers more and develop them, but there simply wasn't the time or the space - I'm proud of those I have, though. They make rather good nasties, I like to think.

My ISBNs have also been ordered and paid for, as soon as they get here my first ebook will be up for free! That's the first three shorts. I will have to think up ways to trick people I know into downloading it ;v Hopefully it will be within the week! It's really exciting now OTL.

Ebook formatting post is next, hopefully tomorrow if I can get it written up in time. ♡

Okay, so! I've successfully got my head around the formatting of my ebook, and I'm really proud of what I have so far! I'm actually going to do one last-minute edit of the stories before I post it, but right now I'm waiting on the ISBN number to come through. It's all very exciting! I've got it working on my Kindle, and it all looked great -
Except for the cover.
Puddlenuts.

I already posted the old cover I made for the ebook. Unfortunately, I hadn't really considered how it would look on the Kindle, and it was just too dark. The text was too thin and didn't show up, and it was so dark that the designs couldn't be seen. So, it was back to the drawing board! Eurgh.

I worked on it for some time, and then came up with this.

The resolution of it isn't that great uploaded to this blog, it's a little blurry, but in real life it's huge, and all the lines are crisp. I swear! And it now actually looks rather good on a Kindle!

I made this ebook cover in GIMP, and it took me about an hour of messing around. The background is a soft grey, and a free paper texture from bashcorpo on deviantart gives it a bit more life at full-res especially. I pasted this in as another layer over the base, and turned the opacity down extremely low.

The fonts are the same as last time; Infinity and Jura. If you look at most books, you'll find that they have two fonts on them from different font families, and that's what I've tried to replicate. The cogs are free brushes, obtained from coolestbrushes. The spider image is from a photo on freerangestock, by Danilo, and I cut it out from the background and turned it into a silhouette. Everything I've used is free for personal and commercial use, and has been really useful to me. You always gotta check the terms of use e____e It's quite a chore to find good resources for free. Either of these sites, I can recommend.

Let this be a lesson to all wannabe-ebook-cover designers! If it doesn't display well on an ebook reader, you haven't done your job.

Next post will be an actual tutorial of how to format an ebook the way I did, because it was so profoundly stupid and took so long and turned me into this:

Seriously, there was no decent guide as to how to do it with a word document anywhere on the internet! My heyday as a master of google-fu seems to be over. It will be explained.


In other (hopefully more interesting) news; the rewrite of number 5 is going well. I'm actually quite enjoying it now! The Ministers get to be their creepy, diabolical selves in it, and it's all fabulously disturbing. Here's to a life of crime for Carina! And hopefully a less boring post next time.

On an unrelated note my little brother just set off the fire alarm frying sausages. He offered to make me some too, and put them in some toast. The toast is sliced bigger than a doorstop and the house is full of smoke, but it's the thought that counts. The last time he tried to make food for us both he brought me back two bowls - one of plain pasta, and the other of plain rice (?). This is definitely an improvement.

Finished editing the stories on paper this morning ♥‿♥ Huge relief. Now they just need to be typed up, but I have encountered a bit of a problem.
I absolutely hate the fifth story, We've Lost Our Moral Compass. Absolutely, unequivocally hate it. I've never liked it much, even when I wrote it (it took a month, and I had pretty bad writer's block on it.) And when I read the stories in order, I found that to me, it kind of ruins the whole set. It feels out of place and even when I edit it it doesn't work.
There is only one solution - a complete re-write. Different plot, different everything. I already have ideas, and it shouldn't take a huge amount of time. It's a bit annoying, though - especially considering that I thought I could have a break from writing things for a while! (Also, I can't wait to move on from this project as a whole, it's starting to get wearing after however many months I've spent on it. I want to start my proper novel!)

Incidentally, I've been working extensively on the plot of this series in my spare time and it's expanded into four books instead of three. It's something I've been putting of doing for ages, but it's also something that really needed to be done. The story is cut up far more neatly, now, and I'm quite satisfied with how it's working out!

Back to the shorts, on a positive note, I am very happy with the edits I have done to the other stories. The older ones needed a lot of work, and it's either testament to some improvement over the year or that I wrote them too recently to see mistakes that the newer ones didn't need so much. I'm choosing to believe the first, because it makes me quite proud. :v

Life is skittles, life is beer~
Spring is my favourite time of the year!
I think so, don't you?
You do? 'Course you do!

After a stupidly long winter, it's finally sunny and sort-of warm again! Ate the first strawberries of the year. They were huge! And I'm actually able to sit outside some, which is amazing. Winter is the worst season for me purely because I end up stuck inside because I can't stand cold.

In actual news, Shadows on a Wall is complete. Straight on to Quantum Entanglement. Hello, horrific moral quandaries and assorted angst.
Ten down, two to go.
Also, Margaret Thatcher died. People seem to be throwing parties. Ding, dong, the witch is dead? Not very classy, if you ask me - but then, what do I know?

I guess I've been a little busy with everything, all things considered. Sorry, poor neglected blog!
But, things have been happening.
I have completed Viral Heart, which to me is a massive achievement (forgive the probably unattractive narcissism?) It's strange, but when I set out to write this collection of shorts, it was this story that I could  never see myself completing. It was as though it was too big for me. I knew what I wanted to happen in it, but I didn't know how to link it together or even how to write it. It was always this far-away thing, off in the distance, 'yeah I'm totally going to do this after everything else' thing.
I've never been a completer-finisher, not really. I get bored of old ideas, get new ones, start those, then never finish them. Perhaps that's why I made this blog. So that if I didn't finish this damnable project I'd have all this to feel guilty about.

Viral Heart was always going to be the 'event horizon', and I've passed it. I'm finally on the home straight! (Three months after my original deadlines for myself, oops) Inspiration strikes at the strangest times. There are three more stories left to tell, and they are all about 50% complete at this point. I'm currently working on Shadows on a Wall, the final story, because it leads chronologically on from Viral Heart (yeah, I guess it's pretty complicated.) I am now extremely excited for Quantum Entanglement, as it's taken a far darker turn. Think Joseph Mengele and the mentality behind the Nazi soldiers who had to work at the concentration camps. It's going to be equal parts fun and horrific to write, I think.

Viral Heart numbers exactly thirty-nine A4 pages, size ten. Thus, I have dubbed it the longest short story in history. I can't think of one off the top of my head that is longer, and I'm not counting novellas here ;> Sssh, let me have this one?

So, left to do, I have:
Finish: Shadows on a Wall, Quantum Entanglement, Tears Become Raindrops
Edit: We've Lost Our Moral Compass (ew),Viral Heart, the above.
Final edits/copy-editing: the entire collection. This is going to be fun.

I've also been having vague ideas for a novella series after the collection/written as relief alongside my trilogy. Based loosely around the seven deadly sins (fully aware this in itself is not the most original concept, but what I've got planned for it is going to be.) It wasn't even meant to be based off the sins, it just sort of turned out that way. The main two ideas I have going on are Burnout/Little Grey Box, which would qualify under 'wrath' - and Narcissus, which is obviously going to be 'pride'. They're set in a near-future Britain, specifically London, where unemployment and mob violence and youth gangs are rife. Basically, the way Britain's going at the moment! Burnout stars a young, unnamed female anti-hero with a penchant for arson, uneducated but definitely not ignorant, and doesn't end well at all. Bit of a comment on the demonisation of youth, I suppose, as well as the way society likes to fit everyone into neat little boxes. Narcissus, on the other hand, stars a handsome young man with delusions of grandeur, who ultimately finds that he cannot match his imagined reality and can never become perfect.
It also doesn't end well.
But then, none of my stories ever do. :>

I'm totally aware of what I said at the top of the post, and this will not be started until COTD is complete. Scout's honour.

Will try to post more often with updates. It's getting exciting now! ♥

Hello, hello! ♥ What I have promised, I shall deliver!
This is my (so far) completed ebook cover design. I worked out the final details today. I'm quite pleased with it, though I expect I'll be changing things around every now and then. This is the cover for the full set of shorts, though I'll also be releasing them as four sets of three. These will each have slightly different covers, as I'll explain below.
So, here we go! Unfortunately you can't get a drumroll on a blog, so you'll just need to imagine one.

Yeah, so I was just editing We've Lost Our Moral Compass (almost completed the digital edits, have completed the ones on paper) and my computer decided to crash. Unfortunately it crashed right in the middle of me saving my file, so now I have to write all the edits out again.
All of them.
Shriek.
Flail.

It was a dark moment. I shall put off dwelling on it.

Now, as anyone who lives in Britain knows, we've had a stupid amount of snow over the last few days! So, you can all have some snow spam because every idiot with a camera seems to be posting them at the moment, and this idiot doesn't want to miss out.
I tried to make a Dalek snowman, but unfortunately it was an embarrassing failure. No photos. None.

I also finished reading 'A Clockwork Orange', which is absolutely fabulous and has made it onto my list of all-time favourite books for being deliciously dark and twisted and thought-provoking, and for some incredibly fun messing-around with language.

So this is being written basically to put off my Chemistry revision (exam is in two days. Christ.) and because my friends are being funsponges and ignoring my whinging on the matter on skype. Boo, commoners!
Whinging is pretty pointless if no one gives it attention :( My friends are peasants. I'm not being narcissistic at all here. Gosh.
All you need to know about this one is that my self-esteem is not going to recover after this exam. This is going to be abysmal.

This post does actually have a point, of course - and that is that I'm trying to design my ebook cover! My laptop was broken so I was using my Dad's at this point (I got it back today) and so what I've got so far has been made in GIMP rather than my usual Photoshop. It's not done, my original design idea turned out not looking so great so I had to scrap most of it. But I've sorted the typesetting and the background and so decided I might as well post my progress.
It was born out of a desire to escape Chemistry revision and We've Lost Our Moral Compass, and me stumbling across lousybookcovers.tumblr.com. I can remember thinking, as I scrolled through it – this is not going to be me. I absolutely refuse! So, I decided then and there to make my ebook's cover. For one thing, it was a valid reason to procrastinate. I was going to have to do it sooner or later, and I might as well get it done while I was feeling creative. You can see the first part right at the top! I personally feel it's pretty snazzy so far, especially for someone who isn't so interested in graphic design. I'm not posting the whole thing yet (partially because this is only a start) and though it doesn't look very impressive now I hope it will later!

I had a look at the covers of the books in my room, and tried to figure out which ones worked and which ones didn't. The first thing I looked at was typesetting - most book covers have two different fonts - and I picked Jura and Infinity after a quick google search. I experimented with sizes/combinations on MS Paint (stay classy) before hopping over to GIMP and arranging them.

The background itself, I already knew that I wanted to be navy blue. Not as harsh with white text as black, and it suits the nature of my writing. I added more colours and hues with a low-opacity layer and a fuzzy paintbrush (deep purples and greens) to give depth, and also incorporated a free paper texture from bashcorpo. I noticed in my bookshelf 'market research' that covers looked better with a faint texture to them rather than flat colour, so I turned down the opacity on it, adjusted the colours and erased some distracting darker areas. I quite like how it turned out!

I was drawing the images to use on the cover by hand (I had a little picture for each story drawn out, but it didn't look so great on the mock-up so I'm rethinking the design) and now I'm having a long think before I commit to another. I'll be creating it myself in either Photoshop or Illustrator, but whatever happens I want it too look professional and classy. Think cogs and gears, perhaps a swallow. I'm going to take my time on this one! I'm determined to do it right. I'll post the full cover just as soon as I finish it - and hopefully soon after (drumroll...)
My first three stories will be available to download  for free! (:

This blog isn't dead. :>
I just have had an extremely busy holiday season, and it's only just calming down now! Lots of nice presents, and writing. I finished story number 8 at 00:05am Christmas Day (because I was determined to get it done before I went to sleep on Christmas Eve) and was stupidly proud of myself afterwards. ~

As for where I now am with the stories:
♠Completed: 1,2,3
♠Finished, need edits: 6,8,9
♠Finished, need serious edits: 4
♠Half finished: 10
♠Unwritten: 5, 7

I also completed 'Death of the Hour' and I'm looking to slot it in, though it still needs edits. It's starting to look pretty good now! Also, considering publishing my ebook on amazon very, very shortly - the first one will be free and will contain 1,2 and 3. I'll then release the others as paid, I think - either in batches or as a complete set. Who knows? But it's super exciting!

I had to trudge off to the hospital today, where I spent an hour having an assortment of needles stuck into me and laughing my head off. Apparently this is my basic response to blind terror, because I did exactly the same thing when I went to the dentists' to have two teeth yanked out. I'm really not okay with needles - as in, really not okay. It's not necessarily a phobia (my two happen to be small spaces and burglars) but they really, really freak me out. Pretty sure the nurses thought I was deranged.

So... I guess I'll try and keep posting.

(The picture of the cat is unrelated. I just befriended it this morning and took some photos. It was a pretty awesome cat, to be fair ♥)

But I am having a bit of a problem :<
I really want to include two new short stories into the set - and they should actually be quite short this time - but it's just giving me more work to do. Originally I was going to maybe do a first and second edition of the set and include them in the second but I want them now ugh :< This is so lame. I really like them, too! I plotted them out a while ago and wound up procrastinating on my actual stories by writing some parts, and now they're better than my actual stories and it's just not fair OTL.

The first one is 'Quantum Entanglement' which is a story about a couple of scientists (who just so happen to be the parents of a character in another story) - perhaps my first love story ever, if it can count as that? I really don't do romance, but the plotline follows how they met, became friends etc, wound up having a kid, the works. The guy's a neuroscientist and the girl's an astrophysicist so that's pretty interesting in itself to write, and basically they wind up finding out a whole bunch of the Government's plans and it doesn't end so well for them.
I'm mostly just proud of the name of this one, okay? :<

'Quantum Entanglement occurs when particles interact physically and then become separated'.
You see what I did there? You see?

The second is 'Death of the Hour' which I just thought was a pretty interesting concept. The character it centres around is called Cassandra Trent, and she's from story number 8 'Against the Machine'. She's an ultra-paranoid computer genius with a twitchy demeanour who is obsessed with conspiracy theories. You know, the works - doesn't like to go outside in case the Government take her away to do experiments on her, that sort of thing. Death of the Hour chronologically takes place after Against the Machine (though it appears before ATM as a story in the collection, the timeline of this is a bit wibbly-wobbly and back-to-front, though it's all put in order again in the final story.)
Cassandra is now an even more paranoid computer genius with a even more twitchy demeanour, gone a little bit off the rails during the years she's spent alone. Now her time is spent recording the names of everyone who has died because of the Government's crimes. Every hour, on the hour, she updates the record. It's hidden away online so that they can't find it. She sees this task as 'penance' for her actions in ATM, which I can't mention because it would give away the story. :> Also because no real record of the dead is kept in the city, at least not an honest one - and she feels that someone has to do it. Prior to this in the story all the people who get sent off to labour camps for various sins are referred to as 'forever missing'. As they never come back, they are eventually forgotten. I guess Cas feels that if their names and numbers go on record, if they are remembered, it wasn't for nothing.

'Citizen 2788145AS Alexander Saker deceased, mind-wipe, 13/07/69 21:00
Citizen 291045200LM Leon Malenkov deceased, death by officer, 13/07/69 23:00'

She's sort of vital to the plot as she holds the circles of revolutionaries together online and acts as a go-between, passing information along, but she was never intended to be a major character.
I just thought that the idea of keeping record of the deaths in such a way was pretty interesting. I think it would unhinge most people, after a while.

Interestingly enough, both of these are written as a second-person narrative. I've never really dabbled in second-person much before, but I found it fit these two well!

As to personal shenanigans - I spent last evening with my friends (who are all back from uni, it's brilliant) and we went ice-skating in town. On an open air ice-rink the one night it decided to rain. The ice looked like it had a sea on top of it with all the lights, it was so cool - if just a little bit dangerous. ;> I haven't been for ages, which was unforgivable - but I still managed to do all the turns and spins and crossovers without killing myself.
I actually need to get my own pair of ice skates, the stubby ones without picks that they give you at these places are horrid. The only reason I'm any good at skating is that I spent most of my life from the age of twelve to fifteen down the skate park, so used to be pretty hot on rollerblades. I'm nowhere near as good as I used to be, which is a bother, but I can still look snazzy if I want ;>
Afterwards we all went to the bar, looking like seven drowned rats. Brilliant. ♥

Oh, and my statcounter on here says that I've been visited by several people from America and also people from Germany and Ukraine? If you guys are reading this, hi from the UK ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ Nice to meet you!

This was totally written to procrastinate on my story. I'd apologise, but I'm not sorry at all.

Forgot to update this. A lot of stuff has happened, okay? :<

First of all - and quite clearly, most important of all - I'm going to the Houses of Parliament. That's right! I have two days of work experience there this summer, and it's going to be fun! What can I say, other than this is blatantly just the beginning of my rise to power? First the UK, then the world!
I'll actually post about the story behind this work experience at a later date. The politician in me is super excited!

On the other hand, this is my current progress with my short stories (the titles can be found on the current projects pages)

Stories 1, 2, 3, 6 & 9 are completed, and I actually like them. 1, 2 & 3 are in the final stages of editing, 9 is close behind, 6 needs lots.
Story 4 is completed and I absolutely hate it. It took a whole month because I kept blocking on it, and it still sucks.
Story 8 is being worked on right this minute and is half way done!
And story 10 has a bunch of ramblings written for it that I mostly don't like and will change.
7 will be written but will be super long, and I still don't know how the hell I'm going to do story 5.

Over the last few months the overall storyline of the collection has developed a lot! I'm really excited by it now, even though it is super behind schedule.
I also completed NaNoWriMo this year, beating 50,000 words easily! Unfortunately I didn't know you had to submit your work once you finished, so it didn't even go on the damn record. Boo!

I'm super behind schedule with it and won't get the ebook completed in time, but I'm going to do my best to hit my new deadline - Easter. I've got no work until early January but I've also got to revise for my Chemistry retake, which is pretty lame. I'm going to fail it, I already know. I don't just hate Chemistry, I actually despise it. I'd forgotten how much I hated it until I picked up my old notes again.

Everything's going well in general, though this short story collection project is taking far longer than I'd hoped. It may well eat up most of my gap year, but I don't mind so much any more. I really think that the plotline, now completely refined, will be enjoyable for other people to read. At least, I hope so! We'll just see what happens.

I also sent off my UCAS form (just before I got my parliamentary work experience - so I can't put it on there, which sucks) and am nervously awaiting my results! Regrettably Cambridge said they'd take me for English but not Biology (or NatSci as it would be there) so I've had to start gunning for Durham. Please let me in, okay? If I get to the end of my three years and haven't made my fortune as a writer/get sick of science I'll just convert to Law, I suppose.

I'll update this more, I swear :<

Diana, this is for you. ❤  
Thanks for a wonderful afternoon discussing our respective stories, novels, plans, potatoes, theology, life, the universe and everything. Respect for putting up with me and my lameness! We must do this more often and I want to see that story, ok? I know you read this so :>

Yeah so I haven't updated this for a few days, I've been too busy procrastinating on my stories to do anything else. Forget 'We've Lost Our Moral Compass', I'm working on the tenth short and the final one in the collection (both physically and chronologically) which I should not be doing because I really ought to be finishing the others but whatever. It's fun.
I have worked a couple of new concepts that I really really wanted into the shorts so I'm fairly pleased. The first one is the story of Icarus - obviously a slight distortion of the original, since the setting is a parallel future. It ties into the idea of swallows symbolising freedom of thought - in the shorts Icarus was a man who wanted to fly like the swallows that he watched from his window, so he made a pair of wings and flew away. Then the ending is the same, of course - he flew too close to the sun and burned his wings. It's my favourite of the old legends, always has been. I'm just a little bit obsessed with the imagery in it. And it fits because in a way, most of the characters in the shorts could be compared to Icarus. Nick, John, May, Richard, Chyber - all of them fit.
It also gives me so many ideas for digital paintings, which is something I really need to get back in to. And just drawings in general. I'm ridiculously lazy and unmotivated these days.
The other concept that I've worked in is to do specifically with Richard's character. One of the recurring phrases in the shorts is that 'The Government always win'. Richard Deaux is a gambling man, addicted to cigarettes and vodka, and it pretty much mirrors the idea that 'the house always wins'.

In other news I'm falling behind on nanowrimo which is bad, and I need to feel bad. I was also reading my new book on quantum physics on the bus home (it interests me, all right? It's the only part of physics I really like) and one little paragraph in there somehow made most of Chemistry A-level clear to me. It was about electron shells in atoms and how e- move between energy levels and emit different shades of light and that's why spectroscopy works because each element does different colours due to different numbers of atoms and shells/energy levels and I don't know it's not the most thrilling stuff in the world but I had an eureka moment and then felt really lame. Why didn't I understand this last year? Maybe I wouldn't have got a B if I'd actually understood Chemistry instead of parroted it, and then I wouldn't have had a B ruining my other nice A-level results.