The Rik Files

Rik · at 7:47 pm

... after videotaping your neighbour's funeral on the specific request of the grieving widow, and then editing it all down onto a DVD for her, all in the course of 6 hours, is to listen to a bit of Matt Bianco:

And no, I'm not going to upload the funeral tape onto YouTube. That's just too wierd - even for me!

Rik · at 11:20 am

"The End"

Yep, those are my favourite words right at this moment, because those are the words I found myself writing at just gone 3:00am this morning on page god-knows-how-many of the first draft of my very first science fiction novel.

And as a bonus, I also dreamed a title for the book this morning (later on; I was in bed by this time) ... The Gods in the Jungle. Snazzy, huh? The title only brings up two Google hits, so it should be safe enough to claim as my own.

Some statistics:
First word written: 1 November 2005 (All Souls' day)
Last words written: 23 March 2008 (Easter Sunday)
No of words inbetween: just over 127 thousand
No of chapters: 36 plus a short epilogue
No of sex scenes: um, two? Plus allusions to quite a few other encounters
No of point-of-view: characters: seven
No of other characters: there's a whole circus of them
No of alien monsters: the Barby Rats are cute - not monsters at all.
Happily-ever-after score: well, there's certainly a resolution for the 2 young lovers and the evil uncle ...

Anyways, there's lots to do still. Revision, for instance - though that shouldn't take too long as I've been revising for consistency and style as I go along. Then it's all the fun of submitting the tome to agents (and publishers) and waiting for them to recognise my 'genious', etc, etc, and so forth.

PS: Should I be worried about the jolly zombies in the dream that gave me my title? The royal blue rooms with bright yellow windows floating through the sky were also rather trippy. Even cutting off a zombie's face didn't kill it - luckily they were fine about the knifework, said it happened all the time and I didn't need to worry.

PPS: there's no zombies in my novel, just in case people were worrying ...

Rik · at 5:53 pm

... my Dæmon, apparently:

The books were good, the film not so good. The dæmon might just make up for the film - if she behaves herself, of course.

Rik · at 11:56 pm

The RikVerse website

Snazzy, huh?!? It ties in with the poetry book thingy - marketing and stuff.

Anyways, I've redesigned the poetry website. In the end I decided that simple was best, so wordage has been cut down as far as possible. I also radically redesigned the navigation and made access to the poetry - which is what the website is supposed to be about, yes? - more immediate.

The look'n'feel is distinctly minimalistic and uncluttered with a nice, large, open and well-spaced fontsize to make people feel right at home, and the poems easier to read. Images have gone - there's only three static images on the whole site. Who needs images anyway?

Even so, this isn't a simplistic recoding: there's plenty of little bits'n'pieces of backroom stuff to make it feel a little more, well, sophisticated; for instance video and audio feeds are now embedded into the page but only appear when the visitor requests them - check out the Judgement poem for an example of both, and while you're there have a play with the navigation pane.

Most importantly, of course: Enjoy!

Rik · at 7:25 pm

Well, actually, I'm very happy with most of the Rik's Poetry Pages website, but there's two things that I think could do with a bit of a spring clean:

1 ~ the home page: what would you both like to see changed here? Less words? More words? Different words? Random poem of the day? Links in sidebar rather than at bottom? More kittens? Better eye candy?

2 ~ the name of the site. Rik's Poetry Pages - well, it's not very inspiring, is it? What do you both think I should call the site?

C'mon folks: talk to me here! I want your input on these key issues!