Off we go again!

 Greetings, all!
How the very devil are you?
Time, I think, for an update.

First of all, I have completed the first draft of the sequel to Crystal Eyes (still available at all good eBook retailers)! It's now marinading nicely, resting for a little while before I return to polish it up and try to correct some of my mistakes. I like it, I think it's a good story, I hope you will agree!

Secondly, I'm in touch with an editing company who I hope will give Heroes Wanted a look over and help me make it as good as it can possibly be. It will appear this year, I am determined!

Thirdly, I'm about to move house! If I'm lucky, I'll actually have somewhere to move into - this is still slightly up in the air. I may end up sleeping on the back seat of the car. The dog can have the passenger seat.

The side effect of this is that my online presence may be diminished for at least a couple of weeks while I try and get broadband connected. It remains to be seen what the mobile signal is like. I may have been premature announcing the whole LIVE WRITING! thing if I can't get online to actually update it. Keep an eye on my Twitter feed (@BigAlien) and the LIVE WRITING! page for updates.

There may also be a slight hiatus in my Bake Off Challenge videos - a new one of which has just gone live (also embedded below) - if I can't upload. Plus, you know, the time-consuming business of moving house may also interfere a little. I'm still going to try and bake something off each episode, they just might not appear in any kind of reliable way.

That's it for now - a short update for quite a lot of stuff.

Until next time, my friends, I bid you a fond adieu!
Allen

Doing it LIVE!

Hey ho, one and all, how the devil are you?
This is the first update I've done since the end of my Kickstarter attempt (which I've decided to label a glorious failure).
First and foremost, I'm still beavering away at the sequel to Crystal Eyes. I'm in the home straight now, heading towards the final, climactic scenes and then it will be done!  Well, the first draft will be done. After that begins the rather less exciting task of rewriting all the bits that suck and trying to find all the cock ups.

I've decided to grit my teeth against the stabbing pain in my wallet and send Heroes Wanted off to an editor. Not something I'm looking forward to, quite honestly, but it needs to be done I think. By the way, if you know of a reliable, professional editor for a fantasy novel, let me know!

There also seems to be a good chance that I may be moving house soon! To where, I don't know, not decided yet. What? I've got, I dunno, 3 weeks or so. Plenty of time...

Finally, I want to announce a new thing I'm trying - LIVE WRITING! 
There are more details on the other end of that link but the basic summary would be that you can watch, and even participate with, me writing a story in real time. No plan, no plot, no chapters worked out, just free-wheelin' down the road to wherever it takes us!

That's it for now, you beautiful people, have a good day/evening/night! 

P.S. One last thing - I'm putting up more videos on my YouTube channel with the vague hope that they may prove entertaining. Currently I'm trying to do a weekly Bake Off challenge, wherein I try to recreate one of the things baked on the previous week's Great British Bake Off. All that nonsense can be found HERE!

The Week in Review

Thought I'd do a quick introspective retrospective from my personal perspective...
What? It's a Sunday morning and I've not had my first coffee yet.
Anyway, it's been a week since I launched the Heroes Wanted Kickstarter (which is still running, by the way! Tell your friends! No, seriously, tell your friends, I need all the help I can get), an interesting, HOT week - somewhere in the high 20s, which is hot for me! - a week in which I have pratted about with YouTube, written words and tried to think of ways to promote the Kickstarter.

Ah, the Kickstarter. It's going...okay.  Ish.  Kind of.  As of the time of writing, it's sitting at a fairly respectable 10% funded (a HUGE thank you to all who have pledged!). Need to step up my marketing push (I apologise in advance to my twitter followers).  I've got a couple of ideas but it remains to be seen if they're worth pursuing.

When I've not been staring blankly at the wall and trying to wrap my head around the arcane world of "marketing", I've been working on the follow up to Crystal Eyes. It's going quite well, hit about 50k words (and this is the second attempt - I scrapped the first one as I didn't think it was very good), probably about two thirds of the way through. 
I'd love to be more accurate with my estimate but I never stick to the plans I make for stories. It inevitably ends up wandering off on some tangent or another.

Right, time to gird the loins (and whatever else might need girding. How does one gird, anyway?) for the week to come. Going to do some more video updates because I'm quite enjoying doing them. Is that narcissistic? Probably a bit.
Need to get some better software though, I'm using Adobe Premiere Elements 10 and it kinda sucks.

That's it for now!
Remember, if you've got any questions/suggestions, feel free to get in touch on the Twitter, on Google+ or on the Contact Page of this here website.

Later, folks! 
Allen

P.s. Here's a vid of me trying to recreate a scene from Jurassic Park using just an iPhone camera, a bag of crisps and a hungry dog.