cowlark.com

My Diary

Being a collection of transmissions received on the E4 FTL radio emergency band, 2002-11-7 to 2002-12-7 (planetary local time).

This is a short novel (very short; 55000 words) I wrote in 31 days as a slightly late NaNoWriMo project.

Originally it was intended to be a slightly late IWriSloMo project, which doesn't have a set word count and is therefore a lot easier. However, about a third of the way through I realised that I was actually on target for the more ambitious NaNoWriMo version, and so switched.

This all started out as a writing exercise. Rule #1 of writing: the first prerequisite for writing anything is to have your fingers meet the keyboard. (Or pen, if you are so inclined.) Before this, my total output consisted of a dozen or so mostly unfinished short stories. I needed some way of drastically increasing the amount I wrote; which meant getting into the habit of writing something regularly.

The traditional way of doing this is to start a diary. But who wants to read about my life, a sessile computer programmer in Reading, the least characterful city in Britain? I needed to write someone else's diary.

Now it's all over, and I've come up with, well, rather more than I expected. I'll tell you four things I discovered: firstly, writing takes a lot of time. This took about two to three hours a day, every day. Secondly; writing is addictive. If I could have stopped before 0200 each day, trust me, I would have! Thirdly: this damned island has been swirling around in my head all month, and I'm quite glad now it's finished and both the island and I can go to sleep. Fourthly: it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Be warned that the version here is entirely unproofread. I finished each episode, spell-checked it, and uploaded it. And that's what you've got. So there will no doubt be many grammatical and continuity errors. If you find any, please let me know. I'm planning to proof-read and revise it sometime in January --- there are a couple of scenes I'm not happy with. But I'm not making any promises.

This is not great literature. In fact, it's not literature at all. But I had a lot of fun writing it, and if I can give people some pleasure in reading it, I'm happy.