It's amazing what happens when Rik manages to distract himself from the writing.
First there was the whole
publishing stuff to Kindle thing (publishing the
Tome (UKians go
here) was easy; working out how to publish poetry was a right bugger).
Then there was the idea of doing a booktrailer to promote the Tome - well, lotsa people are getting a Kindle for crimbo, so why not get them to read the Tome in the new year? Which led Rik to downloading a whole host of new software for making the booktrailer:
FotoMorph for mucking around with photos,
OpenMPT for composing a soundtrack to the potential video (hollow logs and blowing-over-milk-bottles stuff, if you're asking),
MS Expression Encoder 4 for capturing video of a spinning (GoogleEarth) globe of Rik's constructed world - because it's cool, 'kay, etc, etc, etc. Which all needs to be learned and mastered before Rik getsdown to the actual
building the booktrailer thing.
Is that enough distraction-from-writing-books to be getting on with? Of course not! Rik's latest idea is to have a stunning booktrailer showing people some of the story ... which, as Rik doesn't have money for actors and the like, means doing it in animation. But not any old animation, oh no. Rik has to do it in proper 3D raytraced animation, which means he's downloaded that granddaddy of bastard software packages to learn -
Blender - and he's already 3 days into learning how to model like an old pro.
So Rik apologises for not writing and editing more of the work-in-progress. He cannot resist the shiny.
