thedeadone.net » holidays

I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:25:07 +0000

First things first, happy new year and welcome to 2012! I hope everyone had a pleasant Christmas.

This is a bit of belated post, really should have done this in December but I haven’t written anything since November after NaNoWriMo ended. If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, well it’s a month you’re meant to set aside and attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel. The idea is to flat out write non-stop, get the writing juices going.

I sadly finished at only 30063 words, which averages out at about 1000 words a day and just over half the target. Once NaNoWriMo finished, I took short break… and didn’t write until a month later. I was drained, my motivation to write anything had been sapped. It’s not as bad as it sounds, December is full of stress too, new work project, present buying, organising travel and arrangements for the holidays, school shows to attend and so on. So lots of things to drain any extra energy I had. But now the busy-ness of the holidays is over and I can start to get back into the swing of things.

Still I can’t deny that NaNoWriMo drained me a lot. Before that I was doing a solid 1000 words a day with my wordcount. I wasn’t getting 7000 words a week out though because I took a few nights off to do various other things. It was a much more healthy approach. So when I was writing, I was enjoying the process and the wordcount target kept me going. However with NaNoWriMo that got turned up to 11. I had to hit a target of 2000 words a day at least to hit the 50,000 words, and I had to write every day. If I missed a day, I had to catch up the next day. If the story wasn’t working, I couldn’t give up the wordcount for a day to go back over it and see what I needed to do. I had to keep going.

I haven’t looked at what I wrote. It wasn’t until the 20,000 mark when I realised the story wasn’t going to work. But I kept going, pushing forward. I had a lot of good ideas but I mowed through them to try and hit that target. The lack of flexibility created stress and I discovered I really do only have a finite amount of creative “bandwidth” for these things. Pushing over the limit didn’t work for me. Everyone has their own limits. I do a lot with the kids in the evening for example and so my writing is done after the kids are in bed.

It’s not all bad, it was great to attempt to write a novel. Taught me a lot about long-form writing. I’ve written so much flash fiction and short stories over the years that I hadn’t realised that novel writing is a different sort of craft. So there is no regrets. Even during December where I wrote nothing, I did instead reach for my pen and my new Wacom tablet and do some drawings and images. (I even setup a DeviantArt profile if you are that way inclined). It also gave me some space, a break from my existing projects. And now I’m rearing to go, getting back into the swing of things.

Here’s to 2012!

Timelessness

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:00:12 +0000

(I wrote this shortly after coming back from my holidays in July. Not sure why I didn’t decide to post it, probably post-holiday blues).

Back from holidays and I’m only a few days in work and it feels like an age.

So Sunday night (which is actually a few weeks back now), last day before going back to work, the bedtime routine with my daughter went like this:

My daughter was in bed, reading her book and I came up to say lights out, have to get up in the morning, first day back. She refused to, nearly finished the chapter Daddy. Okay, I gave her a few more minutes.

Come back up later, she’s still not finished (part of me begins to thinks she’s gone onto the next chapter, but I know that’s not fair), she still needs to get up early tomorrow, so I insist. She get’s upset quickly, a sure sign she’s tired. But all calmed and lights out.

She wants a song. It’s already a hour after both kids originally went to bed. Soon it’ll be my bedtime, because I have to get up before her. But I consent. Big hug and kiss.

Now I can relax, too tired now to do anything productive. But no, my daughter wants her bed setup the way she likes. Seriously? I look at the time. Remind her again, it’s late. But I agree, gritting my teeth and set her up.

Such a contrast to the routine on holidays and already a build up of stress.

We go for three weeks every year. Enough to cover travel and still have a solid two weeks of, well, doing next-to-nothing in the French country side. I still brought my laptop with me, but there was no internet connection.

About a week into the holiday, my phone died. Just stopped working. It was only then we realised that my phone had been our common clock. We were using it to decided to start making lunch or dinner, or when to get up with the kids. I was using it to watch the time and everyone else was referring to me for the time. But without it, and no watch, we were and everyone else was suddenly timeless. (Not truly timeless, of course. There were clocks, but you had to go find them, strangely no-one wears a wrist-watch any more).

Not that it was a big shock. Early on in the holidays, us adults were already sleeping in on the mornings. The kids are old enough to be able get up themselves. And I (or someone else) would get up, roughly around 10am, and get them dressed, feed and chuck them outside (if it wasn’t raining). 10am was just a natural point though. Normally it was the call of either my bladder or my stomach that got me out of bed at 10am, not an alarm clock. And so we were already working near-timeless before my phone died.

But now we had lunch when we all started to feel hungry or started planning dinner when it was evening and the kids were hungry. We’d still aim to put the kids to bed at the same time, but if they weren’t tired or they wanted to do something, we’d let them stay up a bit and when finished they went to bed and fell asleep quickly. No struggles or hassles.

And we the adults, we play games and go to bed when we started to feel tired.

And this enabled me to write. There is no writer’s block when there is no worry about time. You write till you don’t want to write or something demands your attention like the kids or hunger. You know you have more time later. I thought I’d just become lazy and just do nothing when I have too much time, that I need structure. Apparently not. I drew when I felt like it too. (I didn’t attempt to do any projects with my drawing, but that was a conscious decision I made before the holidays.)

I spent good time with the kids, with my wife and got fully rested. I actually spent time day-dreaming on purpose, something I would feel guilty about when not on holidays.

But once we had to hook back into timetables and deadlines, stress suddenly returns. And time becomes precious. Getting the kids to bed becomes pressured, because there are deadlines. Specific times they have to get up. Things that need to get sorted.

Time or the perception of the passing of time seems to be for me the source of most daily pressures and it sometimes feels a bit arbitrary. Kids school opens at 8am. Why? Why 8am and not 10am? (I read that teenagers, for example, work better if they sleep in late). Why do we work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday? It’s purely convention, an agreed use of time. The idea of maximising productivity is the act of making as much use as possible out of the time you have.

Even writer’s block to me feels partly due to time… I have to write now, this is my window, but what I write is crap. I’m running out of time… I become paralysed unable to act, as if some imaginary clock is ticking down turning my procrastination into worry.

Real world example: “From daunting to doubting”. Here is a post I wrote about my big writing project, where I’m losing enthusiasm and energy for it. It was the pressure of time, the “result” taking too long for me to see.

Now contrast with this post I made after the holidays: “I’m back from outer space…”. I got loads done and I’m excited again.

Removing the constraints of limited time, at least for me, is a big aid to creativity.

I’m back two weeks already? My my my…

Mark Cunningham — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:14:04 +0000

This is what three weeks looks like

Two weeks on and I’m still lacking much motivation. Things are getting up to speed though, shortly my daughter will be going back to school signifying the end of the summer and the routine will dramatically change again and in work, all our customers have returned from their holidays and have started dumping crap on us again. And it’s taken me two weeks to just sit down to write this post. Shouldn’t really take that much, but energy and focus have been lacking. I guess the dull weather since getting home has putting on a drain, especially when we had such lovely weather on holidays.

(More pics and drawings after the break)

He was so tired, he just fell asleep outside

When I was on holidays, despite only get one true sleep-in (as in I wasn’t woken by the kids at 7am, my wife and myself took turns getting up to take care of the weeks) and despite the weather not being gorgeous all the time, I was rather productive. I wrote three new short stories. They are currently sitting on my laptop awaiting editing, but it was fun to just write and they are rather short. I will eventually get them up online, if you care to read them. I also spent a huge amount of time working on my Lost Heroes RPG: Book of the Gods. In total I wrote 27,288 words (is that a lot?), all for my own pleasure. I’m still chugging away at Book of the Gods, but my rate of progress has severely slowed (writing this post means I’m not working on it). But it’s moving forward at least.

The weather before we left: foggy, cold and raining!

The holiday was great in general. It was nice weather most of the time, expect for one memorable storm that started suddenly with thunder and lightning in the middle of the day. Then hailstones the size of large marbles and ten minutes later, it’s over. An hour later, the sun has dried everything.

There was some family crisis, my poor wife hurt her back and shes still have some serious problems with it now, over two weeks later. It’s slowly getting better, but I won’t get into it. Besides that it was just good to get away.

The weather in France

I also got to do some drawing and painting, some of it came out quite nice, but I certainly didn’t produce as much output as I have done in previous years. One of the quirks of the place we go is that there is no television, no Internet connection and we don’t even bother to turn on the radio. It’s absolute great to disconnect. I did try to “tweet” a little while away but it seems I forgot that a text message is longer than 140 so I ended up with loads of messages that cut out right in the middle! Anyway, I left behind any of the work I did create so I all I have of the stuff I did are these photos:

I’m not too fond of the watercolour though. I never finished it, becoming frustrated by the mixing of the colours (I couldn’t produce enough consistent colours). I didn’t get the chance to do another though. The great thing though about where we go is that its full of inspiring things! Books and posters from the Napoleon era, this antique box of gaming stuff, these old boilers in every room or this great big tower at the front of the house:

But holidays can’t last forever I guess. And now I’m back in the real world. Go me!

Going on holidays tomorrow! :)

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:20:31 +0000

So I’m going on holidays tomorrow, for a goodly period of time (but not too long). Can’t wait to get out of here and stop worrying about the recession, work, weather and everything else for a little bit.

I’m looking forward to it, not least because it’s time with my family but also because it’s time I get to indulge my creative hobbies, normally my drawing, writing and coding. No deadlines, no plans. In fact I finished off my One Month Fudge Adventure Challenge early because having a deadline was definitely focusing me but to the exclusion of all my other creative interests. Of course my family takes first place in practically everything (and I can’t wait to see my daughter again as she went ahead to spend a week or two with her French granny), but there generally enough time to get into stuff I don’t do at home.

I’m bringing my trusty/quirky 10-years-old laptop with me, but I won’t have internet access or even local TV. That’s fine for me. I’ll have a local webserver installed, so if I feel like it, I may work on TDO-Mini-Forms WordPress plugin (not bug fixes though, but additional features and refactoring). I’ll have my sketchpad, pencils, paints and bright clear weather to work by. I already have a number of projects I’d love to attempt. And my old laptop with OpenOffice and an install of Bazaar allows me to write away with few worries (and I have a score of ideas and projects just waiting to be cracked open). I’ll even have the time to read tens of books, compared to the measly one or two books every few months I do the rest of the year.

I’ve also been recently getting into twitter (@thedeadone) and using it quite a bit, more so then I blog. But I’ve found I can twitter from my underpowered non-iPhone mobile so I may be sending some tweets and pics from my holidays. I’ve even setup my WordPress blog (so that I can post from my phone too (thanks to a cool plugin called postie), so possible expect some short updates and photos here.

See you in a while!

Inking some Graphic Art

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:00:24 +0000

Also on holidays, I played more with ink, even bought more pens. (WordPress is still cropping my thumbnails, so click on the images to see them in full)

The first was a design I had been doodling for while, an icon for this website in fact, I like it so it may be appearing soon as a part of this website design!

This second one, was something more of a experiment with shapes and I liked what emerged. It’s very, em, primordial I guess.

I then decided to try and do an Icon for my L___ H_____ RPG project:

I really like it. It might even work on the front cover of a book, maybe. So I ended up trying to do a few for the different types of Gods in L___ H_____ RPG:

I had done a third one, but the lines came out wrong so I plan to redo it. The second one here also is unintentionally phallic so I think a redesign is in order. The first one works though and it’s quite cool too because you can turn it upside down and it still works!

I’ll probably do more, it’s sort of enjoyable way of design and drawing: methodical, creative and surprising. However, seeing them on the computer screen does change them a bit. If you like them, drop me a comment!

My first thoughts on using charcoal

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:00:01 +0000

So over the holiday I got to some drawing. The big thing really was that I started to use charcoal, not a major step but something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. But I started with a simple tonal study, to get my eye and hands back into the swing of it (for some reason WordPress has cropped the thumbnail so to have a proper look at it, click on it):

So my first effort with charcoal was this (click on it to see the bigger version):

It was done as quick experiment on my sketchbook (across two pages) of a twig. I did the outline in ink. However you can see where the charcoal smudged accidentally. I liked it, it was much easier and faster to pull out the change in tones using the charcoal than with pencil like in the tonal study I did first. But a lot messier and prone to accidents.

I then went out and found something to really try the charcoal out on. In Chargey, where we were on holidays, there is lots of really old lovely things. There was this “saint” statue on the side of the old house, worn by weather, it had long lost its head. I love the fact that it was just a lump of rock but somehow you were able to perceive that it was once a detailed statue (again WordPress has cropped the thumbnail, I’ll have to find a fix for that):

The first one was done with pencil and charcoal. I didn’t do any of the background which I think distracts from the picture, loses it’s context, but I also found the final work messy and, well, a bit random. The second study, I outlined in ink first, including the background and then tried to capture the tone of the stone statue with charcoal. I think the second one is better but loses the feel of the statue. Everyone who saw the actual drawings preferred the first one, because the contrast between ink and charcoal was much more noticeable than the digital copies here.

There was a second statue, much bigger than this one but also very similar. This time I tried toned paper (i.e. not white):

The first thing that hit was the effect of the grade of paper. My light pencil marks were not working, so I dove straight in with the charcoal but I couldn’t make any tone… just black and a tiny smudge. The effort was a bit, well shite. If you knew the statue in the house, you’d recognise it, but I think it failed to capture anything else.

What this highlighted for me was the effect of the type of paper on my drawing, in particular with charcoal. On my notebook (the twig) I was able to get a really good strength and contrast of tone, but on my A4 sketch pad, the paper is thinner. It has a different effect, harder to generate really deep tones. But the coloured paper was the thickest of them all but it’s texture made it impossible to create contrast in tones at all. I’ve always known that paper makes a difference, but it was always negligible for me. With ink, I would place a spare page underneath thin paper so it’d soak up ink that leaked through. Also the way my coloured markers’ ink spread, was really affected by the thickness of the paper.

So my first thoughts on charcoal is that it’s cool. I like what I can produce with it, but it does require further playing with it. And I love its messiness.

Kids Lesson 345: What not to do in a public park

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:00:48 +0000

Children cannot cease but find new ways to embarrass their parents. Alice, our 4-year-old, actually is not that bad but there was certainly, shall we say, a public incident, while on holidays. We were staying in this lovely old country house and we had got this great big inflatable pool out the back. The kids were hopping in and out all day long and we had allowed them to take up the habit of peeing on the grass behind a tree (rather than run across the hard stone floors inside while wet). Alice’s older cousin, who is a boy, stayed for a week and she started copying him, learning that she could pee standing up if she was wearing just her swimsuit.

Anyway, on the last day of the holidays we drove for 6 hours straight back to Paris. The kids were wrecked from being couped up all day in the car so I took Alice and Tristan, our 1 year old, out to the little park beside the apartment block. There was a small playground, too big for Tristan, too small for Alice but they still played there. As Alice was climbing up the ladder to the slide, she froze, clenching her legs together. “Daddy. I need to go to the toilet.” She looked like she was about to pee right there and then. Okay, okay, I thought. I lifted her down and said “we just have to go out of the park and up the lift. You can hold it that long can’t you?” She nodded her head while biting her lip. I picked up Tristan and started strapping him into the buggy when Alice called out “Daddy, I can pee her!”. She was pointing to a small patch of grass, outside the little playground, beside the very public pavement through the park.

“No Alice. We just have to walk over there and go up the lift.” So I went back to strapping Tristan in and then I looked again over at Alice. She had pulled her trousers and panties down to her feet and was about to try peeing standing up. Two mothers, who were sitting on a bench while their own children played, were in fits of laughter. Of course, I couldn’t pass it off with a witty comment because my pidgin French is awful. I had to finish with Tristan and then pull up Alice’s trousers and walk off with my bright red cheeks. Arg.

Fringlish!

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:00:33 +0000

While on my holidays last month in France, I came across some humorous “Fringlish”. Check this out:

It’s a brand of sugar, in a pink colour, called “Daddy”. That’s right you can buy your Sugar Daddy in France in a pink container.

And then I came across the “Plate of Terror!” On one of my first trips to France, I was given a menu in a restaurant that had bad English translations on it and in the desert section they had for Chocolate Mouse: “Chocolate Moss”. This time, I was surprised to find the “Plat du Terroir”!

Plat Du Terroir on the Menu

Note: Terroir actually means Countryside (i.e. Countryside Dish) and it was gorgeous, hot French cheese and potate and lovely ham. Yum.

3 weeks of holidays isn’t enough!

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:56:55 +0000

And the rain this morning really tops it off. I’ve spent the last two days going through all my emails, forum posts, web feeds and blog comments and I’m dozzed out with info overload. It really feels like I haven’t been away now at all, ack!

I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.

Support for TDO Mini Forms will be quiet till August…

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:33:15 +0000

… because I’m going on holidays!

Unfortunately I’ve heard that WordPress 2.6 will be out very soon and I haven’t prepared for it. I’m aware of the changes but I haven’t setup a 2.6 test bed to do the work. So please be careful about upgrading, as soon as I get back it’ll be one of the first things I look at.

Also in my current work-queue:

Form Hacker:
- Form Import/Export and TDOMF Fixes
- Support for hacking the Error and Validation and Stylesheet
Excerpt Widget
Admin Error and Warning messages on some dud Custom Field configurations (such as empty keys or titles, using the same keys across multiple custom fields, etc.)
Display an Admin warning if Error messages are enabled (with the last release you can enable all PHP errors by a magic combination of options)

BTW If you want to show your appreciation of TDO Mini Forms by just clicking, you can pop over to WordPress.org and give it a good rating!

thedeadone.net » holidays

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