– Page 13 – Claire Rousseau

Writing atrophy

Posted on June 15, 2013February 21, 2014 by Claire

I haven’t written a word of fiction for more than three months.

Real life has been very busy, with work going into overdrive at my office and having to move.

Of course I’m sure it didn’t help that I launched an exciting and time-consuming new website only a few weeks ago, as soon as work resumed its normal level of business.

Needless to say, I’ve already fallen off the Get Your Words Out wagon. I tell myself that it’s because I don’t use LJ much at all anymore that I’ve missed reporting my wordcount so many months in a row, but in truth I’m sure that if I’d had anything positive to report, I would have been all over my journal posting about it.

I remember how excited I was last month to start writing again, and how much I relished the opportunity to dedicate a full afternoon to The Paradise Swarm. The afternoon came and I sat in front of my open Scrivener document for a good 30 minutes, typing and deleting sentence fragments over and over again. I eventually had to pick up a book of prompts and exercises and work on that for an hour or so to warm up my writing muscles, before I was able to produce a miserly and pretty useless few hundred words. Cue disappointment, lack of self-belief, and all that jazz.

I know this is all very ‘woe is me’ but I only mean to underline how much more daunting the prospect of writing regularly becomes when one doesn’t do it, or has never successfully done it. I love my story, and I want to make progress on it. However slowly I was writing last year, I want to regain at least that.

So, I’m going to keep trying, and keep looking for strategies to motivate myself, and keep the writing ball rolling once I’ve actually started again. Does anyone have tips or strategies to keep the mojo going when life or work gets in the way?

The Shambling Guide to New York City – Review

Posted on May 29, 2013December 15, 2016 by Claire

ShamblingGuide Author: Mur Lafferty
Series: The Shambling Guides #1
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Orbit
Date: January 2013
Source: Own copy
Buy the Book – Goodreads

Zoe’s last job was a train wreck. She’s back in her home town of New York City, desperate for a new start, but running out of cash fast.

So when she finds an ad for a seemingly-perfect job as a travel guide editor, she’s not going to let the excuse that ‘she’s not the right type for the job’ and ‘wouldn’t fit in with the team’ stand in her way. Sheer determination wins her an interview in a dilapidated theatre and dinner with her potential new boss.

It turns out the job is to write a guide book for New York’s visiting monster population. The boss is a vampire, and the payroll includes zombies, an incubus and a death goddess. Zoe has to come to terms with the existence of another world, hidden in plain sight in her city, and learn to deal with her new co-workers often-disturbing feeding habits. When the balance between humans and coterie (monster is an offensive term) starts falling apart, Zoe is caught in the crossfire.

The Shambling Guide to New York City is an absolutely delightful almost-debut from RPG writer, Escape Pod editor and podcaster extraordinaire Mur Lafferty, whose career I’ve been following for some time. This is not her first published work (she has self-published the Heaven series through Kickstarter and her novel Playing For Keeps came out from Swarm Press in 2008) but it is her best yet.

She presents us with a rich supernatural underground to New York City, full of hilarious anecdotes and smart tweaks to reality (the MoMA’s closed galleries are really hired out by visiting demons who are too big to fit in human-sized hotels) told through excerpts from the book Zoe is writing. As a protagonist, Zoe is made even more likeable because she shows real strength of character, even as she has to accept her weaknesses in dealing with an overwhelming situation.

After her engrossing and thought-provoking novella Marco and the Red Granny, Lafferty gives us another kick-ass elderly woman to love and cheer on in the hilarious and irreverent Granny Good Mae. The rest of the varied cast of characters is also handled perfectly so that the reader even likes the brain-eating zombies. This is also a very funny book, Lafferty’s humorous touch is spot-on throughout and her dry observations on the human or coterie conditions made me snort out loud several times.

In short, I can’t wait for the second instalment in this series, The Ghost Train to New Orleans, and you should all go read The Shambling Guide to New York City, out in UK and US bookshops now. You can also go to Mur’s website to listen to a chapter of the audiobook for free every week.

Introducing Many A True Nerd

Posted on May 24, 2013August 14, 2017 by Claire

As if life weren’t busy or exciting enough lately, I’ve just started work on a new awesome (and time-consuming!) project.

I’d been wanting to write about a whole host of geeky things for a while, but couldn’t find a home for my writing. There are many awesome geeky news sites out there, but the ones I liked & thought I had a shot writing for didn’t really focus on the subjects I wanted to cover.

Some would have TV and games, but not crafts and baking; some would have geeky things for the home but not boardgames; some would have books but nothing else, etc.

Add to that the fact that I know so many talented and nerdy writers, and an idea started to form. I’m obsessed with creating and maintaining websites, and I’m also a proud grammar pedant. In fact I’ve been editing @AlastairJRBall online serial The First 500 for some months now and I love doing that. I thought, if there isn’t a platform exactly like I want, I should just create it.

I could start a new site, dedicated to the type of geek news me and my friends are interested in. That could mean basically anything. Really silly or really in-depth things, from gifs to interviews, from reviews to let’s plays, from opinion pieces to recipes, in any and all fandom. I’ve heard too much crap about who is a ‘real nerd’ or a ‘fake geek’. I don’t think these distinctions are helpful or based in much truth. The geek world I know is varied and fascinating and that’s what I wanted to explore with this new site.

When I started telling my friends about this idea, they rose to the occasion even better than I had hoped. Jon wanted to try out new online marketing strategies and make Let’s Plays; @AlastairJRBall wanted to write about cinema, @NickMB about comics; @LorelaiSquared had just done awesome interviews of the Welcome To Sanditon cast and crew; @Jenepel wanted to help with a potential podcast.

I’m so, so excited to add another little brick to the big, bad interwebs, in the shape of our new online magazine, Many A True Nerd. Please check out the website, twitter feed and the YouTube channel and do all the like-comment-subscribe-follow thinggies if you do like it.

We are also looking for new writers, so if you are interested in writing for Many A True Nerd, email us at manyatruenerd [at] gmail [dot] com.

Writing in non-November Months

Posted on March 10, 2013February 22, 2014 by Claire

I had only written a few things before I moved to the UK, including some really bad fanfiction and a generic epic fantasy first chapter starring a feisty young princess with flowing red hair and a mysterious elf with two apostrophes in his name.

It was only after my first Nanowrimo, having met the amazing NanoLondon writing community, that I started to write original fiction.

I didn’t write much, and my output was extremely inconsistent in terms of quantity.
Let’s not discuss the quality, okay?

Last year I wrote 100,000 words across all of my writing projects, including this blog – meaning that it took eleven non-November months to write as much as I wrote during November. Not a great result, though it was definitely progress. Earlier this year, I entered a LiveJournal challenge called Get Your Words Out, aiming for 150,000 words in the year.

I won’t lie, I’m not keeping up with the monthly goals I’ve set for myself at the moment, but the year is only just beginning. I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up the pace once I’ve gotten more practise under my belt. I’m always trying to set up regular writing habits for myself, and I’ve never been very successful at it. When I started writing The Paradise Swarm again, though, with a plan, a word count goal, and some scenes in mind, things seemed to pick up quite a bit.

Progress is definitely very slow, but it is at least steady, and I think the slower pace allows for better quality too. I brought some of the novel to read to my Critique Group, who were very encouraging and told me to just keep writing.

As I tend to fall prey fairly easily to the ‘Work on this one scene for six months until it shines’ monster, I made an extra effort to take that one on board. One scene gave me quite a bit of grief, so much so, that in the end I straight up ignored it and moved on to the next. Truth be told, as it’s currently in Chapter Two, and I’m pretty bad at beginnings, it’s probably going to die a nasty death later on, rather than being re-written. So all’s good.

The next few months look to be fairly bad in terms of productivity as work is getting busier and I have to move soon, but I’m going to try and keep writing through the chaos.

GEEK 2013

Posted on February 28, 2013November 13, 2015 by Claire

Last week-end, a couple of friends and I took a day trip to Margate for GEEK2013, a gaming expo with a focus on retro games.

The ‘puzzles, tournaments, consoles and pinball machines, […] retro computer games and current card and computer games’ promised on the website were available for all to try, which made for a truly interactive environment.

I’m not the most seasoned of con-attendees, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

Games everywhere!

The first hall we came into had the various vendors’ tables, as well as the panels’ area and the food court. The games were very few and we were a bit confused until we walked into the main room, which had games EVERYWHERE. It was a pretty nifty sight, with retro and vintage consoles right next to rows and rows of more recent machines, all basked in blue and purple lighting.

I’m far from an expert but even I could recognise lots of familiar games. We played Pong on a vintage Atari (I got crushed), we tried out for the Mario Kart SNES tournament (I came very, very far behind the qualifying time, but @TheJonFoulds almost made it!), I was introduced to Goldeneye (I died a lot). We also got to try out Space Invaders on tiny consoles so rare/vintage they were chained to the tables. Again, I died a lot.

I like video games, but I must admit I am abysmally bad at most of them, so it was a great triumph when I beat @TheJonFoulds at Tetris 64! Speaking of Tetris, there a giant Gameboy… A GIANT GAMEBOY!! I totally flailed and squeaked with joy when I saw it and after that, I had a hard time resisting the temptation of buying an actual Gameboy just to play hours upon hours of Tetris.

Only at a con!

Towards mid-afternoon, we took a pause from all the gaming when I dragged the guys to watch the Cosplay masquerade. Nothing better than settling down with some yummy cake and warm coffee to see the nerdiest possible type of nerdy thing! I am unapologetically fond of cosplay and I felt pretty good about the fact that I recognised quite a few of the characters, despite not being the most dedicated gamer. First place went to a really nifty King Dedede, with her awesome hammer!

The next speaker presented a talk ambitiously titled ‘The History of Video Games in Ten Minutes’, which did a pretty good job of that. While fun, informative and as brief as promised, the talk did mention that when video games became more accessible for families to play as a whole ‘Now fathers and sons could play together’. Everything up until then and everything afterwards felt inclusive and positive, not only during the talk but also during the con. It was just a touch of bitterness that the speaker did not think twice about adding such gendered expectations in his talk.

As a counter-balance to that unfortunate slip-up, though, we saw a kick-ass young woman smash through her competition to win the Super Mario Kart tournament we’d failed to enter earlier, and by the same token establish a new Female World Record for speed at Super Mario Kart. She was signing copies of the Guinness Book of Records when we left!

The delicious chocolates we bought in town and the amazing pies and ciders we had in the pub later only added to the awesomeness on the day, and the game we played on the train home, Chez Goth, really deserves its own review. All in all, a great day trip despite it being absolutely freezing cold.

Overall verdict: LOVED IT.

To put it bluntly, I feel like I got my money’s worth – I got to actually play with consoles I’d only ever seen on TV before, revisit some of my favourite games, discover the games my friends consider beloved classics, learn a bunch of cool things about the industry, and witness a world record being made! Of course there were also the usual food, geeky wares and games on sale, but I did not feel like the point of the whole day was to make me buy stuff, which is more than I can say for other cons I’ve been to.

Dear GEEK organisers, see you next year and GG!