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One More Step Along The Road (My Friend…)

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I just wrote nearly 3,000 words on the novella I’ve been working on since November. It’s bordering on 20,000 words now, which is concerning – but I’m closer to finishing a draft of the damn thing, which is making me feel good. God knows how long it’ll take to knock it into shape, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it…

It’s dark as hell– bleak fantasy with a very explicitly sexual edge. I’m going to be interested to see whether I can get the damn thing to even work.

After that? Who knows…

The Vitally Important and Not At All Delayed Christmas Update

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Getting ill a week before Christmas isn’t advised, especially when you’ve still got a whole selection of things to do. Thanks to my in-laws being a pretty gigantic family, my Christmases have transformed from a quiet, reflective time to something resembling a military operation, but while the preperation is pretty major, the end results were more than worth it. Our first Christmas spent properly at home, and everything went smoothly. I received a whole selection of things, but the nicest part of the process was seeing George opening the presents I’d gotten her, and breathing a small sigh of relief as I realised I’d made the right choices.

Since then, life has been very quiet, and wonderfully lazy. We did, however, get ourselves a gloriously nice new TV (hooray for High-Def) and an XBOX 360, meaning life has been filled up with an awful lot of Chow Yun-Fat impersonations on the game Stranglehold, and discovering the true joys of oddball 3-D platform puzzler Portal, part of the ‘Orange Box’ collection.

Getting myself back into the swing of things is going to be an interesting process. 2008 really needs to be a serious writing year, whether I like it or not. Being terribly relaxed and lazy is all very seductive, but it isn’t actually going to get me anywhere.

Ah, well. Only time will tell…

Who On Earth Is Saxon Bullock? (A Reintroduction)

/ saxonbullock2000 / 10 Comments

Hi!

Thanks for popping in. Considering that this blog has been largely gathering dust for the past month, after many claims of “Yes, I’ve really got to post more!”, I don’t know how many people are likely to be reading this- but I thought it was an appropriate time for a relaunch, and to properly welcome anyone who’s actually here.

So…

My name is Saxon Bullock (a gift of nomenclature that means I regularly get people staring blankly at me and saying “Is that really your name?!?” It’s a question that usually makes me wonder exactly who would want to pretend that their name is Saxon Bullock?). I’m a 33 year old freelance journalist who’s been writing for a variety of magazines and websites for just over seven years. I’m a regular contributor to SFX magazine, I review for Channel4.Com/film, and I’m soon going to be writing a TV column for Vector, the magazine of the British Science Fiction Association. I’m also making my first steps into the world of writing novels, with my first book – a fast-paced, comic-strip sci-fi romp entitled The Hypernova Gambit – finished and currently being looked at by a professional Editor.

This blog goes through different phases- sometimes it charts the ups and downs of my life, sometimes it’s an outlet for my writing worries, and (at least fairly regularly) it’s where I gabble on at length about SF and Fantasy TV. I’ve been fascinated by long-form storytelling from a very early age (mainly as a result of growing up with the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who, so I always find watching TV an educational experience, even if it’s only trying to work out why a particular show doesn’t work. Most of my TV related talk comes under the heading of “TV EYE”, and I’m going to try not to let the onset of the current Writer’s Strike in Hollywood (and the potential upcoming drought of drama) slow me down. No doubt, once Season 4 of Doctor Who starts, I’ll have plenty to talk about…

Essentially, I just wanted to say a big hello, and that any comments, greetings, or random comments would be very gratefully accepted. Please feel free to introduce yourself- and hopefully there’ll be something happening around her fairly soon that might actually make you want to stick around…

Pleased to meet you. How’s it going?

Freedom (Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship?)

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I have a new toy. The fabled ASUS eeePC has finally arrived- a dinky laptop the size of a small hardback novel, and it’s taking a little getting used to. Thanks to the keyboard being much smaller, it’s going to take me a while to learn to type at my usual speed on here. Expect the number of worrying typos to increase exponentially. At the moment, I feel like I’ve just made the acquaintance of someone who I know I’ll be great friends with eventually, but I’m currently unsure as to exactly how we’ll be getting along…

I am, however, writing this in bed. There’s the occasional rumble of traffic outside, and I’ve just wandered through to check our Rayburn heater, which is currently chugging away merrily and will be hopefully keeping us toasty warm for the rest of the night. Both George and I are ill at the moment, both suffering from coming to the end of an extended, frenziedly busy period of activity, and it’s a combination that’s occasionally meant outbursts of grouchiness.I’m also suffering from fatigue, thanks to only getting an average of about five hours of sleep a night, and even with Christmas coming up in the next few days, it feels like life has gotten just a little bit too insane to cope with.

I’m hoping I can make this computer work, though. I need to write more. I can’t waste any more time- I need to use every available opportunity, and hopefully this thing is going to help me do it.

More soon…

Compression Factor

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It’s official. Time is getting short. Weekends where I end up with an absurd number of deadlines are starting to increase, and this upcoming weekend is becoming one of those times when I think “Right- that’s definitely the most I can cope with”- and then another heap of reviews and reports arrive. It’s the peril of being a freelancer, particularly in the run-up to Christmas– you just can’t afford to say no.

The good news is that I’ll be earning plenty of money. The bad news is that I may get a vague chance to slow down next Monday afternoon- just before I have to depart on another two-day burst of subbing.

I’m officially looking forward to Christmas, if only for the chance to not have to do anything for a little while…

(Tick tock, tick tock…)

Thoughts on the subject of not getting around to posting in my Livejournal…

/ saxonbullock2000 / 2 Comments

I should have posted by now. This is getting ridiculous.

The last week has, to be honest, been rather fraught. I ended up with a gigantic log-jam of reviews to clear before today (as I begin five days of Christmas Issue-related subbing at What’s On TV), added to which I had the fun of struggling with my MiniMac to get it to do things which were very easy before I installed Leopard (OS updates are truly the work of the devil), and the beginning of the Olympian effort of sorting Christmas out. I’m hoping to get a teeny-tiny laptop soon, which will free up time on the train for potential blogging and writing, and there’s a whole host of TV-related stuff (thoughts on Heroes, thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: Razor, and various other thoughts about the season now winding to a shut-down via the strike) that I should have written, but I’ve also got a review of the year to do for Vector, so I’m trying to save most of my thoughts for that (at least initially).

As a result, posting is something that gets put off- and yet I enjoy doing it, and the social side of interacting on Livejournal is actually pretty good for me, considering that massive proportions of my life are now spent on my own, and I have the habit of spending certain social outings blinking wildly and feeling like I’ve recently arrived from a different (and incompatible) plane of existance.

I’m also waiting on feedback on the book- from an actual editor. Gulp.

Basically, this is just to say that I’m still here, still battling through, and hoping to actually play a slightly more major role in this long-form improvisational drama called “Life”- (and not the one starring Damian Lewis as the ex-cop Policeman).

Now, to dash dramatically into the distance while accompanied by a dramatic (if annoyingly repetitive) theme tune.

(Cue the credits…)

Out of Synch (but feeling Cultured)

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Wednesday morning, and I’m feeling seriously dislocated. 2,200 words written on the current Novella- which seems, as does all my writing, to be getting bigger and bigger by the minute. It was supposed to be 10,000 words, and I’ve already cracked 13,000, I haven’t yet finished- and even what I have written needs a lot of expanding and controlling.

The other problem is that, in a display of quite ridiculous silliness that I’m only capable of when in an incredibly scatty mood… I managed to go into London last night for this month’s BSFA interview with Iain M. Banks. Only one problem– I got the wrong night. Thankfully, I realised this before traipsing all the way from Waterloo to South Ken, but I still managed to feel like something of a complete berk, as the clues only truly added together in my head once I was already on the train to Waterloo. At the least, I was able to take advantage of my completely unnecessary trip by doing some Christmas shopping, and visiting the lovely nessreader, who was fantastic enough to track down a proof copy of Iain M. Banks’ new tome Matter for me, proving she really is a an absolute diamond.

Now, of course, instead of having a Wednesday in to cope with the rising tide of work – I’ve got another trip to look forward to. Hopefully, however, this one will go just a little bit smoother…