How Beasting Dartmoor is progressing and a few secrets...maybe ;)

 

I thought about the blog for this week, and this week I am giving you an update on how my Novel in a Year stuff is going.

Beasting Dartmoor has reached a significant milestone in getting to thirty thousand words. I'm now ahead of where I expected to be, enabling me to take a bit of a breather.

I say breather, but not quite, as you may imagine. I will continue to write daily, especially during my weekly Zoom session with William and other writers on Sunday afternoons. I will now have time to flesh out a plan for the story to go forward and catch up with the admin-type things that happen behind the scenes while writing a book. That's something readers only ever partly hear about.

I've been able to have 5000 words of the first three chapters edited. It is the first time I have had my prose looked at in this way, and it was very daunting too. I'm used to magazine editors going through my articles. That is a very different process. I have gone through the edits for the Prologue, and I was astounded that my words could start to look like a proper book. Whether it reads like one is another matter. I will now edit the rest of the 5k words.

One of the tasks I shall catch up on is the character sheets. I have long teased colleagues at work that I'm writing them all into the characters, and I always leave my notebook in view. I have a secluded place on the grounds of the community hospital where I work, where I write for half an hour at lunchtime if the weather is nice. The other day I was sitting at the table I use, and a couple of walkers asked if they could join me. They were getting their picnic out of their rucksacks, and I popped out my notebook and warned them that I was a writer and there was a possibility that they may appear in my book. Thankfully, they did see the funny side. Will my colleagues recognise themselves as characters?  

Although there is still a long way to go with the book, I aim to be finished and ready for editing and proofreading towards the end of the year or early in 2024.

Thank you to all of you who take the time to read these blogs. A few people have reached out to me and told me that they do, and I find that very humbling.

We are going camping again this weekend, and I hope to spend a relaxing weekend writing…fingers crossed.

My Limited Take On This Years Apple World Wide Developers Conference

Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) took place in the first week of this month. This much anticipated annual event from Apple is where they announce new products and software updates that will be upcoming in the rest of the year. For weeks prior, rumour abounds, and invariably, there quite wide of the mark, except this year. The word on the street was that Apple would announce their Vision Pro Headset, a first for the company, and sure enough, they did!

Before I comment too much about the Vision Pro headset, I need to tell you about the update in Operating Systems, which will be available from around October this year.

The new Mac OS is called Sonoma (it could be a joke somewhere). It's currently out for Beta Testing, and from what I have picked up, the reaction is quietly positive. I know problems have rendered some machines dead in the water, but that is what beta testing is all about. Sonoma will only be available for older Macs and seems aimed at their newer silicon versions. It would be worth a check before downloading to see if your Mac is compatible.

 One of the new apps that has come to my attention is Journal. It is a new Apple journalling app. It will hit the Day One journaling app that I use pretty hard, although one professional freelance writer that I know will not use Day One after a severe issue with it losing a lot of his data. It has made me consider saving my journals to another source before the update. 

Of course, there will be many updates and new features.

For IOS users, there will be IOS17. There are over forty plus updates and enhancements. The list of iPhones that will be able to take this update must be dwindling, and my 5SE will need help to handle the update.

Before WWDC, there was the long-wished-for announcement of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad. I've seen mixed opinions of both of these. They are slightly stripped-down versions of those available on MacBooks and seem different from what users had wished for. Newcomers to both apps on the iPad will see things differently.

Ok, now to the elephant in the room, the Vision Pro Headset. A totally new direction for Apple, and as always, they have come up with something different. They are not your run-of-the-mill VR headsets, certainly not at the price point of £3500. They will do all the VR things, and you can even immerse yourself in Apple TV (can't you just watch the TV for that). Their strangest feature is the eyes you can see on the front of them. They're your eyes too. Not that you are looking through the headset, It's some clever engineering that's using cameras inside the headset. It's pretty strange

To round up, then. A lot is coming up for developers to get their teeth into. There will be the usual refreshing of Apple's current lines, a new 15-inch MacBook Pro. There isn't any advanced chatter about new silicon chips. The M1 and M2, and their Pro versions, continue to give remarkable performance. Unfortunately, latency built into the Intel versions of MacBooks and iPads will likely see them consigned to history over the next 12 months.

Thank you for reading. I will now go back to writing the novel and maybe a cup of coffee to wake me up. 

A Weekends Camping.

After teasing you with my camping prospects last week, this week's blog had to be inevitable. I had some other ideas for this week's post, and this came out as the best one to write. I'll drop a line or two at the end of this piece about next week's post.

We are having a reasonable period of sunny weather in this country. The one thing spoiling it is that the high-pressure system has been high up in the Irish Sea, which has allowed winds to come in from the east, making it somewhat cooler, certainly on the East Coast.

The winds didn't deter us, and last Friday afternoon, we set off to the campsite with the car laden to the gunnels with gear. With our family guests delayed by traffic on the way down from Hampshire, this would give us the time to put up our newly acquired tent without too much attention.

I had spent many hours pouring over several YouTube posts on how to pitch the Kampa Hayling 4 Air tent and felt quietly confident that I could have assembled it by the time anybody arrived. That confidence took a bit of a knock when we opened up the footprint to find two pieces. I pegged one down with all the bravado of a seasoned camper. However, my wife wasn't so sure. She wasn't convinced even when I explained my thoughts. 

We got the tent out for the first time and pegged it down on top of the footprint, still needing to be convinced we were doing the right thing. We then started to pump the tent up after a couple of aborted attempts because we had the valve the wrong way around (can you see how this is going?), we pumped the tent up successfully and managed to guy it out reasonably quickly despite the rocky ground underneath the surface. Most of all, our guests were impressed when they eventually arrived.

All was going well until bedtime. It was starting to get chilly, as it does this time of year, something that we weren't prepared for. Also, some bright spark had suggested that we shouldn't pump the bed up so far, which would stop us from bouncing around when either of us turned over. Both accounts lead to an uncomfortable night, and for me to have an exceptionally aching back. A trip down into Sidmouth, purchasing a mattress topper, and blowing up said mattress fully gave us a much better night's sleep on Saturday.

All in all, we had an enjoyable first outing with our new camping gear. So much so we have booked to return in a couple of weeks; we should then be fully up to speed before our ten days in Cornwall next month.

That's this week's piece. I hope you have enjoyed it. It might be a bit mundane for some, but it certainly was an adventure for us.

This week Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) took place. It is a much anticipated annual occurrence, and there was much speculation about what Apple would announce and launch later this year. 

You may have seen a few things about WWDC online and in the press. Next week, I plan to have a blog about my view of this year's announcements for you to read.

Have a great week. Whatever you do, try to read more and write more. It's great for the well-being. Go on and give it a go. 

Spring has Sprung, We're off Camping!

 Spring has finally sprung, and we are enjoying a period of warm and sunny weather, all be it with an east wind which sometimes makes it feel a bit cooler. I'm pretty thankful, to be honest, as this weekend we're off camping.

For those of you that know my wife and me, you might be raising an eyebrow and thinking, 'Really'? 

Yes, ye of little faith, we are going camping or rather 'glamping' to be precise. After spending some time in Cornwall camping with my wife's family last year, we decided to make the bold move to get our own tent and gear and go it alone in the camping field.

Earlier this year, we ordered a Kampa Hayling 4 Air Tent, footprint and carpet (there, I told you it was glamping). This purchase is a far cry from the canvas blue ridge tent that my parents bought in the early 1970s. Life was a bit leaner back then, it was the 1970s. Dad was a Postman and Mum had the three of us to bring up. They were thinking about taking me, my brother and my sister on camping holidays to make things cheaper for them. However, the austerity of camping back then must have put Mum off a bit as our holidays, from then on, consisted of caravans and the tent was rarely seen again.

Camping certainly isn't cheap (is anything these days?). Still, we are very fortunate to be able to fit out our tent with kitchen and storage units, cookers, tables, chairs and, most essentially, an electric hookup. I say essential, as my wife needs to have somewhere to plug her hairdryer in, that was the deal breaker, and we all need something to charge our phones and my MacBook.

On Friday morning, I shall be busy loading the car and top box with all our camping gear for the first time, trusting that I will have everything to hand when we arrive at the campsite to enable a quick start to the assembly process. We're going relatively local to us. We will be pretty close if we must return to base and get whatever we've left behind.

The Hayling 4 Air Tent is a long way from my days of a two-man bivvy with a G1098 fighting order, large pack and rifle or, in my case, a GPMG

(here, lofty, you're a big lad. You can carry this) on a snowy Dartmoor night. The Hayling is an Air Tent; you peg it down, blow it up, and 'bob's your uncle'…hopefully.

We're starting to feel excited. We've got the weather (I knew this was the best weekend three months ago when I booked the pitch), and we won't be alone. Our family guests will be at the campsite early to set up and sit back with a glass of wine and laugh at us setting our tent up!

Watch out on my socials; I'm sure I'll be sharing some photos over the weekend.