Has it been a week already?
I have nothing to write I'm afraid.
So I'll leave it, shall I?
Yeah...
Tara.
Reg :-)

Once, long ago, before I woke up and screwed my head on properly, I contacted an agent here in Germany.
At that time I was convinced I needed a representative to sell my tome to the great wide world and so make my millions. This lunacy all stemmed from those bloody forums that are full of people who haven't really a clue about the industry themselves, but insist on dishing out bad advice as if it were from Dan Brown, Ken Follet or J.K.Rowlings personally.
Anyway, as I wrote, I thought I needed an agent.
I sent my manuscript off to several agencies around Britain and America, all to no avail.
I was simply too unknown to be interesting and my book was crap as well, I guess. ;-)
Whatever, one day, whilst licking my spiritual wounds from yet another rejection, I came across an agent in the Writers and Artists Yearbook who was based in Hanover, not fifty minutes drive by car!!
Hurrah and hussar I thought as I happily punched in the telephone number, this could be my lucky break, (which sadly it never is, no matter how often I think it will be.)
I was put straight through and spoke to a very nice chap who said to me that if I write the manuscript in German, he'll take me on.
Now, needless to say I was a bit flummoxed; smugly pleased with my marketing skills but still flummoxed.
Why would any agent say that without even seeing my MS???
So I asked him and the answer is amazing. The thing is you see, according to the agent, Germany, that great land of scholars and poets, is suffering a drought in the creative writing game. There are loads of books on the market but the majority of them are translations from foreign authors.
Gasp!
Of course he could have just been pulling my leg, or perhaps he was a madman or whatever reason you can find to not believe him. However, it's still amazing to me that so many German language prints are translations, especially when you consider the population count of the German speaking lands. A good measure of this is the fact that I have never once read a book translated into English by a German author. Not one. Well not intentionally, lol.

So why is that?
Why is a land like Germany a poverty stricken desert when it comes to authors? Is it because German is such a hard language to translate?
I think any translation work is hard and very often a lot of the original magic of a story is diluted by the act of the conversion itself. However, if that were the case, why do the translated novels by English speaking authors do so well in Germany?
It's all very strange.

Whatever, I didn't try to translate my book and now it's at a publishing house in London somewhere been given a critical once-over… hopefully a not too critical once over, mind.

Have a good one.
Reg :-)

11 pages down and I'm finding my flow, slowly.
I'll finish the first chapter and then go over it again, refining and tweeking where needed.

I would have achieved more this weekend were it not for my extremely frantic social life. Friday was a party for a workmate who's leaving the firm, Saturday was a birthday party. So Sunday I managed nothing, sadly.
Drums tonight so the next session will be Tuesday at the earliest.
A weekend wasted but it was fun. :-)
Productivity shouldn't be measured in word counts, well that's my take on the problem, lol.
Have a good one.
Reg :-)

Well, eight pages down and it's going well…
OK, it's not going well at all, actually.
When I fall out of writing practise I find it hard to rediscover how to make a page flow. Reading back on what I've written up to now, it all seems so stilted, jerky even.
I'm not happy with it and I'm only on the eighth page… BAH!!!

Whatever, practise makes perfect so I'll do what I always do when the going is hard, head down and plough through.
Luckily I'm not afraid to bin things so when I find my rhythm again I'll simply replace the old passages.
The story is in my head so there's no danger of losing any important parts, well I hope there isn't anyway.

The research for the story is an ongoing thing. I think to myself that I've found the perfect beast to use in the story, for example, and then I'll stumble on something that fits the role even better and decide to look it up on the web.
Then, like an epileptic convulsion, the Wikipedia frenzy takes over.

That's the thing with Wikipedia; you start off innocently enough on one page and then get caught up in a blackhole of information links that devours you into itself.
I have quite happily spent whole afternoons skipping from one link to the next, sucking up useless information that has nothing to do with the original line of query that took me to Wikipedia in the first place.

I hear you, "Focus, Reggie, focus".
Easier said than done, my fine learned friend, easier said than done.

Have a good one.
Reg :-)

I've sorted the plot out, researched my characters and surroundings and have started to write.
Perhaps I should start a new Blog page?
The thing is, this Blog was meant to deal solely with "Division". Now it wouldn't be too bad if I was in the process of writing a part 2 to "Division", but I'm not.
This new project involves dinosaurs, megafauna and a Europe ruled by Napoleon, (that's got you thinking Tee…) and has obviously nothing in common with, "The Division of the Damned", i.e. Vampires working for the Third Reich..
Whatever, let's see how it all pans out, shall we?

It's strange writing with a long term goal in mind again. I'm back to thinking about the characters and their situation 90% of the day, pondering their interaction with the whole plot in general. I must look like a right nutter to my workmates, sitting on my own, mumbling incoherently to myself about Indricotheriums or Sauroposeidens, Latin phrases, musket ranges and the iron rule of Emperor Napoleon 1st.
Ah well, they still talk to me so it can't be all that bad, lol.

Have a good one.
Reg. :-)

Well I'm back.
Did you miss me?
Didn't think so, lol.
The four day tour of the pubs of Cambridge went amazingly well. I stuck to Real Ale, so I wasn't poisoned by the chemicals they use in beer brewing nowadays, and had a great, if expensive, time.

Unfortunately, my plan to take a notebook and pen for ideas didn't quite pan out as I thought, but never the less, I've taken on board a whole rook of plans for a new book.
I'm done with short stories for now. They're all sent off and I await only the rejections.
I need something grittier, something I can live in when I have time to think to myself or I'm bored. I need to create my own world with its own laws, physics, timeline and life.
So that's what I'm going to do.

Wish me luck.
Reg J