Thursday 21 March 2013

March 21st – Sound The Trumpets!

The first real intermediate mark was passed today. I hit the quarter million words point, in fact finishing with two hundred and fifty one thousand, five hundred and twenty three words written. It’s so satisfying to write it out long hand like that, so forgive the self-indulgence. I managed 3,103 words today and safely negotiated the first grey moment for my leading characters when he is summoned away from their first date by his boss to deal with something that can’t wait.

So now I have him obsessing about missing his chance with her while performing a complex job when he’s tired and not giving it the attention it deserves. Classic male issue territory, and ripe for a disaster. Meanwhile she’s at home on her own, her flatmates having gone out without her and wondering what she did wrong to make him leave like that, even though she overheard his end of the cell phone conversation with his boss. The plot is boiling along nicely, just add another spoonful of angst and we’re well away!

Today was been a busy technical day too, getting two book block interiors ready, completing one e-book cover and starting work on a print cover.

I’ve also been reading with great interest about toy camera effects. You can now buy properly mounted cheap deformable plastic lens for both mid-range and top of the range DSLR cameras. The idea is to be able to mimic the effects the cheap film cameras of the eighties produced by accident. Why spend several hundred pounds on a camera, and then spend twenty quid on a cheap lens which gives you distorted vignette images with poor colour- balance and fixed aperture focussing? I’m sorry I just don’t get it. Why would you? Apparently the answer is the specific effects cannot easily be reproduced in post-processing in Photoshop. That means I spy a business opportunity, someone, very soon, is going to produce a plug-in filter for Photoshop that will do all this and more – it’s only a matter of time. The problem for them is going to be pricing. If the actual physical lenses are so cheap, who’s going to pay a lot for the software equivalent?

As Apple say, "there’s an App for that".

Or as I prefer: “there’s an App for that, and then you…”

It’s a bit too morbid to continue that line of thought. Ah well, back to writing tomorrow.

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