Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 8 of 14)

Back to Basics

January 15, 2024 /

A week or so ago I was catching up on some motivational videos that covered reviewing 2023 and planning for 2024 when the presenter talked about time in the chair and the correct position.

Time in the chair made complete sense. If I write on average 1,000 words an hour, then if I spend three hours “in the chair,” that’s 3,000 words. Of course that shouldn’t be a single three hour block. I’ve tried that and everything gets stiff, my eyes start to cross, and to be honest, I can’t focus on a story for that long. I know, I’ve tried and my brain turns to mush just as I start the third hour.

The key in this instance is to take a break every hour or so. I tried that this month and it really makes a difference. Even five minutes away from the desk helps reset your thoughts and lets you sit down again with fresh ideas.

It was the second comment – correct position – that initially confused me. Then, I listened and understood. Get a chair the right height for your desk. Sit straight, feet on the floor, knees at ninety degrees. Use a keyboard, don’t try and work across the trackpad on a laptop.

Full disclosure. I’m a bit of a sloucher in a chair, and no surprise, it makes my back sore. After listening to the video a second time, I changed how I sit at my desk. It felt strange at first, but after fifteen minutes or so, it felt more natural, and I seem to be getting more words written as well.

Sometimes we have to return to basics to move forward.

An Update on AI Audio

January 8, 2024 /

AI is the current hot topic in many areas of our lives at the moment – from an AI engine being the first level of customer support, or those incessant robo-calls, to “creating” stories or images.

I have been following the various legal cases that are currently in flight, but that isn’t the focus this week. Instead I want to talk a little about AI audio which in the past two years has gone from almost pariah to an accepted medium.

As I mentioned in the posting of October 2022, I ran my novel Thieves in the Temple through the free Google Audio converter and played around a little with the various voice options. I didn’t do much more than that, and made it available on Google Play for the same price as the paperback. At the time, Google Play was the only place to make it available.

Fast forward to today, and those options have grown dramatically. The AI audio files from Google Play can now be made available on Kobo, Draft to Digital, and Book Funnel to name a few.

The feedback I had on the audio sales showed me there are still some tweaks I need to make to the text so the AI can interpret the words more easily. Those tweaks are on my schedule for the first quarter of 2024 so by the second quarter, the audio of Thieves in the Temple and the sequel novel Death at a Wedding will be available more widely.

Stay tuned for updates.

Back From a Hiatus

January 1, 2024 /

While jotting down some ideas for 2024 plans and goals, something drew me to the website here, and with it a certain amount of surprise that I realized I haven’t posted anything since July of 2023.

At the same time was the realization that maybe it was not so much of a surprise. There was a definite tilt in our world over the summer, and that contributed to 2023 being the lowest word count year since I started keeping track in 2017. I am looking to change that substantially in 2024, and over the next few weeks I’ll share some of the goals and the plans to reach those goals.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom in 2023. I finally finished the next Jacob and Miriam novel – Death at a Wedding – and once I get the final feedback from the my proof readers, it will be up on all the usual places. Currently, I am targeting the end of January. The next story – The Corpse in the Courtyard – is already under way and hopefully you won’t have to wait two years for that one to appear.

And the tilt? I’m not sure it has completely finished twisting our lives but we are learning to live with it!

System Upgrades

July 20, 2023 /

Since moving into our house just over five years ago, our network has been the standard AT&T router, and a signal extender in the room I use as an office. It’s worked reasonably well, although there have been times when the television in the office goes into a streaming spiral, and my internet connection is horribly slow.

This was mostly liveable until we upgraded our security system – adding cameras and sensors and all of it connected into the network. At which point the connection in the office wheezed and croaked. The television barely connected and connections into a client’s VPN became unpredictable. For other reasons we had the security company technicians back and I mentioned these issues as he was resetting the control panel. He looked at our set up and shook his head, with the expression you normally see when a doctor’s about to deliver bad news.

Essentially, the router and extender weren’t capable of handling the load.

We talked about options and the technician recommended either Eero or Orbi. Some research showed Orbi is a Netgear brand and as I’ve used Netgear a lot in the past, I bit the bullet and placed the order for a router and satellite.

The one thing that impresses me nowadays is how easy installation is for all manner of equipment. Guided by the phone app it barely took thirty minutes, and that included reconfiguring the network name on the AT&T router so we could reuse the original name on the new system. Next was to check everything connected, and when I turned on the television in the living room, I paused. It was the best picture I’ve ever seen – clearer, sharper, more color depth. The one on the office was the same. It was like we’d bought new televisions as well as a new router.

The VPN connection still has its moments, but given how everything else is working, I’m thinking that’s the clients issue.

2023 So Far

July 6, 2023 /

It seems hard to believe we are already half way through 2023. It doesn’t seem that long ago since we were coming down from the New Year festivities, and wondering when it wold warm up. Now we’re into those hot, heavy, humid summer days and wondering when it will cool down.

Back in December, I had six writing projects in mind, and no surprise I’m still working on the first one. There are some reasons for that – multiple day-job projects that only really calmed down in April, and if I’m honest, no real planning to accommodate those projects and the writing. The result has been the lowest six month word count in a long time, which I wasn’t happy about, especially when I looked at a “completed” chapter and found a series of annotations that reminded me the chapter wasn’t as completed as I thought.

Yesterday I took a hard look at the manuscript and found some more not quite completed chapters. Mapping that tidy up, and the chapters still to write to a calendar for the next quarter gave me a schedule. The schedule also includes the first part of the trilogy I mentioned back in December and some short stories that got started and ground to a halt. I added those in so I could at least acknowledge Heinlein’s second rule for writers (You must finish what you write).

I’ll keep you posted.

A Soft Spot

June 15, 2023 /

I recently started reading Amanda Foreman’s book A World on Fire. The sub-title is “Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War,” and the first section of the book is introducing the major players and setting the scene.

I’m only about fifty or sixty pages in, out of eight hundred, but there was one theme that jumped out at me, and that was the passion, anger, and vitriol evident between the two parties in Congress. It reminded me very much of what we’re seeing most days in the news, although I don’t think we’ve quite reached the stage where in 1859 a Virginia newspaper put a $50,000 reward on the head of William Seward for allegedly inspiring and instigating John Brown’s raid.

Foreman goes on to relate how the atmosphere in Washington grew poisonous as Southerners sought to implicate leading Republicans in the supposed conspiracy behind the raid. Again, change some names and events and you could be in 2023 rather than 1859.

I hear a lot of talk about how in the 80’s and 90’s the House, the Senate and the President worked together for the good of the nation. Did they really? A few years after I moved to the US, came the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. I don’t recall much togetherness. So I guess the real question is were those supposed halcyon days of the 80’s and 90’s the norm, or is normal the combative nastiness we see today, and that Foreman describes?

All of which reinforces an opinion my father first expressed many years ago. He declared a soft spot for all politicians, regardless of allegiance. It’s a deep peat bog in the English Peak District. There are many to be found in New England and around the Great Lakes.

A Milestone in Time

June 1, 2023 /

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were talking about some places we’d visited and trying to pinpoint when we’d been there. I threw out a date that sounded right, and she shook her head. No, she said. We went before COVID!

And that made me pause for a moment.

I’ve read a lot of articles and commentary on how COVID was a defining period for many people, and hadn’t really made the connection myself until then, and I wondered why.

The answer, as I see it depends on how the COVID pandemic affected you. We were incredibly fortunate in a combination of working from home and living in a semi-rural area, we were shielded from many of the issues people faced in more urban settings, especially with regard to lockdowns.

I think because we didn’t have the huge dislocation many people went through, COVID wasn’t such a defining period for us, until we looked beyond a daily, or weekly focus and considered longer timeframes. So while it took me a while to catch up with the rest of the world, I’m definitely more aware now of pre and post COVID timelines.

Kitchen Experiments

April 16, 2023 /

This past week my wife was out of town catching up with some friends, which left the kitchen open and available to explore two dishes that have been on my let’s try list for a while. I do a lot of my experimental cooking while she’s away. And I make sure to be cleaned up before she gets home!

The first meal was Goan Venison Curry from issue 12.22 of the Big Green Egg Life Style magazine. The combination of fennel, cloves, chili, and cardamom appealed to me, and as I have stack of cubed venison in the freezer, it seemed a good choice. Except I must have missed something, because the generous spicing described in the article didn’t materialize. If anything the whole flavor was very bland, which was disappointing because I love a good curry.

With the curry behind me, the next experiment was Roast Chicken with Babylonian Spices from the book The Witches Feast by Melissa Jayne Madara. The dish is based on a translation of the recipe amusarnu pigeon with broth from tablet 8958 of the Yale University collection, dating back to about 1,700 BC.

After the not so great experience with the curry, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into – especially as I made some changes – sesame oil instead of olive oil, and the roasting phase on the Big Green Egg instead of the oven. While the chicken cooled after poaching in the sauce, and before roasting, I tasted the sauce, and immediately knew I had something different.

I was really pleased with the chicken, and plan to try it again. Now all I need are the other recipes on tablet 8958.

Managing Chaos

March 30, 2023 /

It’s been a while since I posted, and directly related to the way my world seemed to spin out of control in February and March.

As well as closing down one project, and starting another, I was asked to help manage the response to an RFP. It didn’t sound much, but these things never do. Suddenly I found myself juggling three projects across three time zones and trying not to double or triple book meetings. It’s all very well to suggest using an online calendar, or paper to manage this all, but the overhead is horrible. I know, I tried both and I wanted a simpler option.

I’ve written about the Obsidian application several times on this blog, and no surprise, we’re going there again. One of the three projects I mentioned is tracking the progress of several thousand line items on a shared Excel spreadsheet. I got a handle on my piece of that by building a quick tracking board using the Obsidian Kanban plugin. I have about twenty distinct items in flight at any one time and finally I know the status of each one.

The calendar was a little harder. Eventually, I went really basic. Using the Obsidian Canvas feature, I built a column for each day of the week, then added a note for each meeting with the time, description, and a color code for the type – client or personal. Because Obsidian synchronizes seamlessly across all my devices, it’s a quick glance to see if a specific date and time are free.

For the moment, I think the chaos is under control. One of those three projects finishes at the end of March so the need for coordination should become less. Except you know how it is with chaos. It’s never completely tamed.

He said. She asked

February 1, 2023 /

Last night I was part-way through a book, racing to the end, when suddenly I was out of the story, looking at the room around me, and wondering what happened.

When I looked back at the story, the actual words on the page, the author had written one of those dialog statements that reads like a question and tagged it at the end with “she asked.”

Back when I was a newer writer, I added all manner of tags at the end of dialog. You know the sort of thing – Mark demanded, she whispered – I’m fairly certain I never wrote he ejaculated. Even to my novice mind, that never seemed quite right.

And then I discovered Elmore Leonard.

Pick up any of his books and open it to a random page. The chances are you’ll find whole blocks of dialog – sometimes pages – where the speech attribution, if any, reads: Chili said, or she said. I’ve read and studied Elmore Leonard’s books and never in those blocks of dialog are you in any doubt as to who is speaking. I learned a huge amount from that study.

It took a while, but I did get back into that story, and it ended as I hoped. I just wish she’d said instead of asked!

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