Muse News #7: Scottish Trip Days 1 & 2

This won't be a long post today because the internet access here is a bit unpredictable and could drop out any second!

It's the evening of my second full day here and I've already had adventures a plenty.  Here are just a few of the highlights so far.

The View Across The Loch

This is my third visit to Kentallen and the view across Loch Linnhe is one of the things that I love about this place and no number of photos will do it justice, but he's one to give you an idea.

The view across the loch from Kentallen
[Phot: Jack Gilbert]

Fifteen Minutes of Terror

NASA described the descent of the Curiosity Mars probe as "seven minutes of terror".  I had a similar experience going on the Nevis Range cable car yesterday.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Nevis Range cable car, it's a wonderful feat of engineering.  It's just that I have a fear of heights and by their very nature cable cars rely on being quite a way off the ground.

It was something I wanted to push myself to do and I'm incredibly pleased with myself for riding it up Aonach Mor.  The views were spectacular and well worth it.  Here's a photo of the view along with the tweet I managed to fire off to distract myself from my vertigo.

Loch Lochy and the Great Glen from Aonach Mor
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

Loch Ness

And finally, today's exploration took us up to one of the most famous of Scotland's lochs, Loch Ness.  This was my second visit there - last year I took a fast RIB ride around it - but this time my appreciation was purely land-based.  Sadly, I didn't see the monster, but then again if I had, things could have got complicated, so it's just as well I didn't.

A small slice of Loch Ness, but no monster.
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

So, that's two days down and there are still another four to go!  There are more adventures awaiting and I'll try to post and tweet as and when internet access allows!

Muse News #1:

It's been a long time since I've posted anything in my blog, so there's a mountain of news from the Gilbert pen!

After some long, deep and very meaningful chats with myself, I concluded that starting my indie publishing career (I hope!) with a potentially six book series is possibly a tad ambitious.   Consequently, I've dusted off my long-suffering techno-thriller, 360 and begun work on the fourth draft with the intention of getting it ready for publishing before the end of the year.

That means The Wickedest War, my previous work in progress, is being rested and I hope it will benefit from the many lessons I've learnt and continue to learn from publishing 360.

The Wickedest War - rested but not forgotten!
[Photo: Jack Gilbert]

So, I have been working on a project during the last year-and-a-bit of blogging silence.  I've been working hard on the fourth draft of 360 and it's been an educational and emotional experience. I've always been poor at keeping the word counts down on my novels and 360 was no exception. The first three drafts hovered around the 142,000 word mark.  I lopped off a hundred words here and there between each draft, but I always managed to justify the survival every scene to myself.

Not so with the fourth draft.  360's been on a diet.  An extreme diet.  When I powered off my laptop last night, the word count stood at a slimmer and svelte 113,000 words.  Yep, I've been merciless.  A few thousand words will have to go back in to fill in some of the gaps but generally speaking, I don't think it will go much beyond 115,000 words.

I've also rewritten other sections to make the whole thing much tighter and pacier.  This week's goal is to finish that off and complete the fourth draft.  So, it's very nearly ready to hand it over to my ever loyal and patient beta readers for their views and comments and it'll be interesting to see what they think of the revisions.  I know a couple of them liked it just the way it was.

The other thing that's occupied me recently is the development of my online presence and conversations with other writers have convinced me that I really do need to get my backside in gear and knuckle down to keeping my blog up-to-date and my Twitter stream flowing.  If you're a tweeter then please do follow me @trebligkcaj.

As for this blog, I'm planning to post a Muse News every Monday with all the latest news on my works in progress and any other events worth sharing.

Then on Thursdays I'll be posting something I'm calling Notes In The Margin.  Those posts will cover subjects that I've been thinking about (I do lots of thinking) and will usually be writing related, but I may stray into more general stuff if the whim takes me.  The first one (this Thursday) will be about doing accents for audio books, so be sure to check that out!

And if I find anything else of interest to post between all that, I will!

Until next Monday, that's all for this week's Muse News!