Adrian FaulknerFantasy Author

As some people know, I narrowly avoided a bad flood last month. That said, the leak in the water pipe in my ceiling was enough to cause a lot of damage.

As a result the upstairs ceiling has needed to be replaced, and rooms totally emptied in order to facilitate the work of pulling the old one down.

I am a person who loves their clutter. I’m terrible for holding onto clothes thinking that “one day, I might fit into this”. So this has been a (slightly forced) opportunity to have a bit of a clear out.

I don’t feel I’ve stopped these last few weeks and feel an exhaustion sleep does not seem to be able to cure – a mix of exertion and stress. So much so, I’ve noticed I’ve not really had time to tweet or even update this blog.

Editing work on the novel has pretty much stopped whilst this has been going on. As much as I’d like to do NaNoWriMo this year, I think it will be spent editing.

I’m dieing to get back into it and have to tell myself that it won’t be much longer now. Workmen are here this week but days feel like weeks and as cluttered as it is, I want my house back. Then I think I’m going to sleep for a week!

“In fact, I will go as far as to send you on this adventure. Very amusing for me, very good for you – and profitable too, very likely, if you ever get over it” – Gandalf, The Hobbit

Writing can be a very solitary business, and one where it’s easy to get yourself in a rut, chained to your computer for a ridiculous number of hours in the day, waiting for that muse to strike.

But when that happens, I’ve learned I have to go away and do something, make my desire to write stronger by denying it to me.

I have a phrase I use on friends when they’re in a bit of a rut, or a bit down: “Go and have an adventure.”

Now that doesn’t mean to go off and slay a dragon, but that instead the person should take themselves off somewhere they wouldn’t normally go: a shop, a museum, a countryside walk. Go do some activity you’ve never done before, or go to some place you’ve never been before; something you can tell friends about when you get back.

There’s no better way to break out of that rut and lift the spirits, than by going off and doing something different. It breaks the monotony and repetition that can grind you down, gives you inspiration and mark my words, you’ll come back feeling better for it.

Everyone these days talks about needing to be connected to the internet but I think I’ve gone the other way.

Last night I had a nasty outage with my ISP which meant my internet connection effectively went down, and I was surprised how much it didn’t bother me.

Don’t get me wrong: email, web access, Facebook & Twitter have all become vital parts of my life, and since getting my smartphone I don’t think I could ever go back to being unable to check my email whilst on the move.

In the ‘old days’ I would have found yesterday a major issue. One of the reasons I’m with the ISP I am is simply because of the quality of service. More than an hour’s downtime and I would be jumping up and down screaming.

None of that stress last night when I just thought that if I really needed to get online I had my phone but otherwise I was in for a quiet evening.

I swear this is all Mark Charan Newton, Lee Harris & Paul Cornell’s fault. I attended their frankly awesome panel on social media at Alt.Fiction

One of the things that came up was whether you should be promoting yourself as an unpublished writer, and the answer came back yes.

Now, I’m not exactly unpublished, and have had the adrianfaulkner.com domain for several years but have never done anything with it other than set up a couple of test web pages. So recovering from my long day on Sunday, I set to work on redesigning it.

There was part of me that felt quite pretentious doing it. “Hey, everybody, come and look how little I’ve done!” However, the message that you have to market yourself these days came over loud and clear at Alt.Fiction. I had to do that for A-F (and did it quite successfully) so trying to repeat that with “brand Adrian” feels like a bit of an adventure.

But, at the same time, I’d been collecting images for my bibliography for a while now and putting that all together made me realise that maybe the website wasn’t such an ego trip after all.

Who knows? This writer’s mantle still feels a little odd to be wearing, even after all these years, and there’s been a lot of discussion on hype this past week all over the internet which has made me feel uneasy. I just have to tell myself, I’ve been here before, this is nothing new, just different, so I shouldn’t be entering into it with trepidation.

I’m convinced this is all about confidence. Enjoy the site!

Picture Credit:  Picture byDeviantallan.  Used under Creative Commons

There are some days when Twitter is beyond awesome!  The other day I’d tweeted that I’d had a dream with a creature that was a mix of a Killer Whale and an Octopus.

@antallan commented on it and I thought nothing more of it, until he came back that evening the the above awesome picture he’d drawn.

It’s pretty freaky seeing an idea that existed in your head being created in some other medium by someone else… but an awesome kinda freaky!  He even gave the creature a name:  The Orctapus.  I like it!

Be sure to check out his other work over at DeviantArt