The writing blog of David Stringer
I’ve just finished reading Afrika Reich, which is a very tough book to read at times. The book is set in a parallel universe where Nazi Germany’s victory at Dunkirk forced a ceasefire with Britain. They then defeated Soviet Russia, while pacifist America stayed out of the war. At the Casablanca Conference in 1943, Germany and Britain then carved up Africa between them.
Burton Cole, a retired former soldier and the protagonist, is hired to kill Walter Hochburg, the Governor of German Kongo.
The first book I read this year was Moneyball by Michael Lewis. A financial journalist, the main body of his journalism has covered Wall Street.
In 2002 Lewis set out to look at how a new, more analytical approach to baseball management was altering the way the game was ran, only to discover that, by and large, it wasn’t. The one exception to this rule was the Oakland Athletics, under the charge of General Manager Billy Beane.
Something I intend to do more of during the next year, is read more books. That feels like it’s an obvious thing for an aspiring writer to do, but I have a bad habit of getting distracted by television, internet and news sites.
It’s easy to think of news articles and TV programmes produced the previous month as being more relevant to my life than a 19th century book about 17th century French soldiers.
But I find books more absorbing and, as a result, a superior form of escapism. Unfortunately, they also demand more, compared to vegging out in front of the telly or laptop, which are essentially passive forms of entertainment.
It seems I’ve let things slip a bit on the blogging. I started off relatively well, but fell away after a few weeks – before this post I’d not written since December 9th.
I’ve not just been sitting on my backside staring out the window though – at least not all the time – I’ve been looking into writing for a few different sites.
I’ve recently branched out my writing, and have started to do a little bit of journalism, on the up and coming American news website The Leaky Wiki.
Already I’ve covered the scandalous emails showing that the Qatar World Cup was not chosen as the result of corruption, and sat down with a leading member of the American Tea Party.
Hopefully there’ll be more to come in the coming weeks, I’ll do my best to keep up the habit of regularly updating my blog and twitter accounts when a new edition goes up.
There are two editions a week at present, Monday and Thursday, if anyone reading wants to bookmark the site and check back regularly. The site has just started up over the past few months, and is becoming a very good site, which already has a lot of entertaining articles.
Like many across the world who want to be writers but keep putting it off, I’ve been taking part in NaNoWriMo.
But rather than using the month, as intended, to get an entire novel written, I’ve used the thing for two different purposes – to get a short story written, and to get started with writing a blog.
The blog so far has been a partial success I’d say – got a fair few things down there, starting to get into a rhythm.
The short story, a science fiction story set on a space ship in the distant future (I never said it was anything profound) is something I’ve went back to on and off for a few years.
I’ve had greater problems with this. Mainly around self-consciousness – I tend to feel, when I’m writing, ‘did I do this right? Does this work?’
So I’ll obsess over whether jokes are funny, action sequences are exciting enough, and so on.
SciFiFootball 