A quick hello

Well now, well now indeed. This has been a stressful couple of weeks!
House moving, avoid it if at all possible unless you can pay someone else to do it for you while you go on holiday.
That hellish nightmare aside, I'm talking to an editing company for Heroes Wanted so things are moving forward, albeit slowly. I'm still letting the sequel to Crystal Eyes marinate - I'll give it a while longer so I can come to it fresh. In the meantime I've had an idea for a short story or two that I'd like to put out.
I'd like to get stuck into the Live Writing story but since I'm writing it in Google Drive I really need to get a more stable net connection than my iPhone provides out here (I'm in the middle of nowhere!)
Also starting to put some thought into a story for this year's Nanowrimo - I'm thinking some epic fantasy might be just the thing this time. I hope that there are plenty of you joining me!

Outside of writing, due to the fact that I'm actually in a holiday cottage this week with no real internet, there won't be a Bake Off Challenge video. I still plan to do one for each episode so I'll just have to play catch up when I get into my new place.

This has been ludicrously hectic and I am, not to put too fine a point on it, knackered. It's tempting to just get rid of all my stuff and buy a mobile home but then I think, "would I still be able to play Guild Wars 2 and Warcraft then?". Priorities, people, I have them. Not necessarily good ones, but I do have them.

Midge sends her regards, by the way. I suspect she thinks all the moving around and stressing that humans do is silly. She is probably right.

Right, time for some minimum effort dinner - pizza and a baked spud!

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.

Here we go!

It's all kicking off here at château Donnelly (note: I don't actually live in a castle)!
First of all, I've released an updated version of my first novel, Crystal Eyes, out into the wild - this version has fewer typos, a swanky new cover design and a deleted, bonus chapter!
If you've already bought it, I believe that deleting it and re-downloading it should get you the new version.
If you don't have it...well, I just don't know what to say to you. I'm deeply hurt. But you could make me feel better by going and buying a copy (go here for details)!

But that's not all! I'm finally ready to begin the Kickstarter campaign for Heroes Wanted - it should be going live within the next few days! 
This will let me get professional editing and provide cool swag like paperback versions, t-shirts and whatever else occurs to me! 
Keep an eye on the blog and my twitter feed to find out when it goes live.  Believe, you won't be able to miss it.
I'd be thrilled if you would join in with me on this little project and I'm very excited to finally release Heroes Wanted into the wild!

Wait...is this still on?

Hello, world!
It has been far too long since last I graced these pages and I can only apologise for that, but I'm back now and I swear I won't neglect you any more. We're still friends, right?
So, what's been happening?
 As you can see I've changed the design of the website after upgrading to the newer version of Squarespace's templates. I like this new look, it's all swanky and sleek.
As part of the move I have also got the domain allendonnelly.com, so that's cool.
What else...oh yeah, sometime in the next couple of days I'm gong to relaunch my first novel, Crystal Eyes, with a stylish new cover, bonus deleted scene and fewer typos than there were before. Here's the new cover:

View fullsize

I've also been working on the sequel. Yes, still. I had written quite a lot but decided I didn't like it much so...into the bin (figuratively speaking). Some parts of it may resurface in the newer version, we shall see.

Finally, I'm about to launch a Kickstarter project for Heroes Wanted. This will, hopefully, help me cover the cost of getting it professionally edited and allow me to provide cool swag like signed hard copy versions and t-shirts and so on!
It's almost ready to go, just need to sort a couple more things, so keep an eye out over the next few days.
Not that you'll be able to miss it, I'm going to be pimping the hell out of it once it gets going...