Whoa. Sorry About Vanishing Like That

Not dead. Just writing epic poetry and other stuff.

I'm now finished the first draft of the poem for the MA. Fourteen thousand words in length. My prof is kind of boggled. He tends to giggle when he looks at it, like he can't really believe anybody has handed him fourteen thousand words of Ottava rima that actually rhymes and scans. I can't blame him. Having done it, I find it hard to believe too.

Bad news is, I'm not supposed to post a final version herein. The piece will be subject to the usual examination by various prof types around the traps, and I'm supposed to more or less keep it under wraps until they've had a good long look, kicked the tyres, and all that shit. Sorry about that.

There's a lot of editing left to do. I noticed a couple of seven-line stanzas, for example, and I lost track of my cantos in the run-up to the finish. But on the whole, it does the job, and I'm kind of staggered that I did it. I am also seriously in awe of a man who could produce something nearly ten times the size using quill pen and paper, without rhyming dictionaries and thesaurus, etc. I don't know of 'genius' is the right word to apply to Byron, but he certainly was an unusual chap. His ability to concentrate must have been outright fucking staggering.

Anyway, once I finished the first draft I got a week off the academic stuff, so I promptly dove in and went over the edits on the novel. It has a title, by the way: Path of Night. It's the first in a series set in Australia in modern times, and it falls somewhere between thriller, sf, and horror, with a streak of good old Australian ironic humour. The cover is coming together (get your act in gear, Adam!) and as soon as the editor and I figure out how to ship files back and forth between our disparate software (her .rtf would only open in my WordPad. When I opened it in anything else, everything after page 14 was missing. So of course, I did my editing in WordPad, and sent it back... whereupon she opened it with something Macintoshy, and sure enough, everything after page 14 was missing. Since then, I've saved it into odt with Open Office, but that crippled my editors ability to do much of use, so now I've tried both .doc and .docx format. It will be interesting to see what happens.)

I'm also diving into a filmscript -- purely because I can. I've had a really brilliant idea, and I've never done a full-length filmscript, so I'm just going to write the farkin' thing. Hell, if I can write an epic poem in Byronic Ottava rima, just how fucking difficult can a filmscript be?

Oh -- and young Jake has decided he needed a blog. It's over here. Drop by and make the little bastard think. It's good for him.

Now, I'd better go and get cooking. The fambly will be back from orchestra soon, if they don't wipe out on the rain-drenched highway on the way home...