Purple Monster

Actually I don’t mean Optical Electronics I mean Optronics. This is a branch of ‘electronics’ using basically light. It also tends to be made from glass and lasers!

This is so perfect for my needs for the story I can not believe it.

I have mentioned this before but it gets better – becuase not only is this somehting you could have computers and the like in but it makes the components undetectable if your looking for our traditional type of electronics.

The components could also potentially survive intact for the sort of time lengths I need and is made of glass which the sea empires had in plenty being volcanic in origin. The laser pen that the Punk carries her only relic from her child hood in Babel is a key that will allow her to access the hidden components in things like the onyx ocelot.

I have quiet a bit to learn about this field still – part of my issue is that we have come upon this technology once we already have conventional electronics and so we mix it with that and need ‘normal’ electronics to make it work but if a civalisation never had electornics then the componenets may well be different.

This both restricts me and gives me more freedom!

Oh and off course they are not affected by EMP’s electromagnetic pulses from things like nuclear explosions or pulse weapons! I put this in the story intuatively and then had to panickally check it was the case!

I am enjoying the alternative tech aspect of these books muchly I have to say 🙂

Yep another of EelKat’s Surveys for character building! I really am starting to get a solid picture of who the Punk is – I’ve know what she looks like for a while but this gives depth!. The origonal is here.

In her spare time she likes to soop up her bike, research into her past, spy on the elves, learn new skills, chill with geeks, greece monkey and emos (even if she does feel like shouting at them).

When she’s left alone she has many hobbies – generally carving stone and the like and micro electronics, mucking around with science, engeernering and tech in general.

Her skill set from being a batched raised child designed to learn is high so everything is a rehash to some extent of something she’s done before. Left to her own devices the hobbies expand to fill the budget she has though often projects remain unfinished as the Elves catch up with her.

This film is dramatic with interesting cimatography, its a 1998 film containing loads of stars – it opens with protistants being persecuted by the Catholic Queen Mary. The 16 yr old Elizabeth is imprisioned in the Tower of London – I hadn’t realesed that Elizabeth I had spent any time in the tower so it is very fortunate that I am watching these films!

The film is bueatiful and brutal and I found myself very engaged with it.

It contains a posioned dress which was actually the inspiration for the Fire Storm mentioned in one of the future chapters of the Punk in Pink.

I liked this film even though I don’t really do historic films. But it does make me realise that The Punk being Elizabeth is going to provide far too much material to write about!

Haven’t entirely decided what to do about that.

There is also the prospect that the Queen had a relationship with Dudley this means that my character Matthew may definatly have to come to a sticky end – I had already decided that something was going to happen to him in order for the Punk to be happy to pretend to be Elizabeth in the first place.

The film showed the young queens uncertainty as well which added a depth that is often missing. Apparently there is a sequel which I should add to the love.film list – Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

The main thing I noticed though was that it contianed Dr Who (The one from 28 Days Later) and James Bond (the rough one that everybody but me finds attractive).

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

And what are my nano plans for 2010?

Quiet simply I now have basically half of the Punk in Pink written and feel that NaNoWriMo this year would serve well to write the remainder – I know this will technically be cheating as its bringing a half done manuscript into it – but hey! This whole thing started as a nano project and thats how its going to finish!

I still need to do alot of research for this novel and the series it nessels inside of! So that is what most of this year is going to be devoted too – research for that last 75 000 words!

So until November I will be sending the odd bits of story live plus the notes and stuff! I’m also still sending live all the notes and things I constructed in Novemeber and December but didn’t get aroudn to sending live!

Good Luck all with your endevours!

Well it’s the end of 2009 and I feel that I have definatly achieved something with doing the Nano – without it I wouldn’t have discovered the many interesting facts about my own country 500 yrs ago, nor would I have been able to meet the fantastic people I met at the write-ins.

I hope very much that 2010 is even better – anyway I’m off to celebrate 🙂

Mostly these are character and world building but I’ve found them quiet useful 🙂

http://www.squidoo.com/CharacterProfiles

http://www.squidoo.com/The13StepMethod

http://gothnowrimo.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=rulesguidelines&action=display&thread=8

http://www.squidoo.com/WritingVampires

http://www.lazette.net/Free%20Stuff/NaNo.htm

http://www.squidoo.com/CreatingFantasyRealms

This is a story that was also in the Atrocity Archives book by Charles Stross – I didn’t actually realise it wasn’t all one story as it contains the same people and is based in the same world and is somewhat foreshadowed in The Atrocity Archives.

And I think for anyone who has lived, worked or had to just visit Milton Keynes it is a must!

What was really interesting for me though was the other chunks of writing at the back of the book – there were discussions on thrillers and horrors as he swapped authors and genres of those classic texts that had inspired him. I have my own theory that setting and type of book are seperate and that ‘genres’ don’t really exist. What we would think of as a genre are end points on phase diagrams etc…

To be I’m not even sure if Science Fiction as such exists anymore becuase any story set in say two three years or decades down the line will have to include technological developments that would have frazzeled the brains of authors 50 years ago and been the realm of pure scifi. Fiction that contains science – hmmmm.

This has also lead me to question some things about the Punk stories but I’ll not go into them here.

Anyway basically I really liked this story – no where near as dark as the Atrocity Archives but conveys alot about the governance of this country as far as I’m concerned.

Upon our bookshelves there are many books and a few of those I swore not too read when my husband said, ‘ooo that sounds like this book’ when refering to one of my story concepts. I fear that I will lose the concept I am actually trying to portray and end up just emulating. This was one of the reasons I have avoided Stross’s work as he seems to have covered the sort of things I am trying to write about.

However, I think that I am suffiencetly advanced in my writing that I can feel the shape of my story and the underlaying premise anyway and not be too swayed by what I see and read. Also The Punk in Pink though a reincarnation of a story I’ve been working on since 15 was basically concieved for NaNoWriMo and I have specifically set myself the goal of reading everything that could even remotely be related in style, concept of even time periods!

Now I have too say The Atrocity Archives is a bit of a wild card here – it has nothing really in common with the Punk’s story unlike some of Stross’s other books I have lined up to read. It doesn’t even really come under the ‘cyber-punk’ heading. But my husband was right when he said it would be good for me to read it.

Oh and it does actually have one very strong thing in common with the Punk and that is the presance of Geeks as being fundimental to the story. I suppose all the strange occult rituals too though… I’m starting to split hairs and even I don’t know where that will lead!

I suppose there is the alternative technology thing as well.

The book is a cross genre masterpiece – the concept itself pure genius! It was like the author knows what I know – geologist, my husband, computer archetech, everything my Dad knows – world war two history, and everything my father-in-law knows – maths and the occult!

I was transfixed by the book, its humour and darkness, the fact that it is written in first person present tense made empathising with the main character an extention of self.

Plus it cheered me – I have been told so many times that you mustn’t write in first person or persent tense and yet here was a book that was bueatiful in its execution and it is both those things!

I will say though that I had nightmares whilst reading it, proper nightmares but that just means the book is vivid and strong in its imagery besides I have written them down and they will be appearing as stories of there own!

Incase you were wondering I think you should all go and buy this book now and read it!!! and I’ll be wibbling more about it later 🙂

Count Zero is another book based in William Gibson’s Neuromancer’s dystopian future and again is cyber-punk so I have devoured it in preperation for The Punk in Pink – however I have been looking for an excuess to read more and it was sitting on my shelf so it was time it was read for the sake of reading anyway 🙂

The evolution of the matrix is making ripples in the world and crossing the line when a human girl is part of it all! With art dealers and cybernet cowboys, ghosts, angles and the rich hunting down immortality it was another riveting read – I actually stayed up half the night in desperation to read it all as the story would not allow sleep :/

I liked it but as I loved Neuromancer that is unsuprising 🙂

An age ago when my husband realised I was trying to write cyber-punk type stories he also realised I didn’t even know the genre existed and so endevoured to get me various cyber punk litrature.

One of these was William Gibson’s Neuromancer which is considered one of the leading novels of cyber-punk. It had me enthralled and I gobbled it up greedily – I started off struggling in the lexicon – the speak of the book being abreviated coporate/technical stuff – buzz words that have made it into the dictionary as it were ie the tend we see with e this and e that is our current society – add in some guns and rogue heroes who are striving for survial rather than from any militant honnor fever and you have a cracking novel, plunging into the dystopia that we could so easily become.

I liked it.

I think the style is a little too fast/cyber for my Punk but the general gritty feel is the same and some of the tech ideas and social interactions are fantastic!

It is definatly the sort of book I want to write.