'Orange swirls,' by me, via Flickr

It is amazing where ideas come from, and how quickly a plot can form if you only leave it to stew in the back of your mind while you get on with other things. Active consideration of plots and storylines is all well and good but passive consideration, where the parts of the brain you aren’t using for whatever you’re concentrating on are put to use on something else, is sometimes even more effective. Take today for example.

I have been putting together a project with my friend Jade Stewart over at Here Film This Productions for quite some time now. Way back in April last year (almost to the day, in fact) we started discussing a joint project for our two companies. The project is currently going under the working title of SlackerReality but this will very likely change before everything is ready for release. We are scheduled to begin filming in late summer but until now, the project was proving difficult to get going because there was no real plotline for it that stood up to scrutiny. We’ve had plots but they weren’t great.

Today I came up with one that everyone who’s seen it thinks is great. Not only that but it’s a plot that splits very nicely into three sections, so we can actually get three series worth of storyline out of this. That, to me, is amazing considering the whole thing came to me in an epiphany earlier today. I’ll keep you posted on how the actual scripts come together. Getting the overall ideas down will help with scripting but that doesn’t mean everything will be smooth sailing. I’m sure there will be hurdles still to overcome.

In other news, I spent an hour today studying what lawyers refer to as The Vandervell Saga. This is a particularly troublesome part of trusts law that I have had problems getting my head around in the past. I think I understand it now so it was time well spent but damn that’s an annoyingly cumbersome piece of case law.

Still, it should prove useful in the future so I can’t complain too much. Now it’s time to get back to revision!

If you use Second Life, this message is hilarious

One of the most difficult aspects of recovering from a life-changing illness is that there are many days when you think you are going to be fine from here on in. You feel great. You know you’re back on top form and you’re ready to take on the world.

And then you feel awful again in a matter of days, or maybe even hours.

I am on the road to recovery following what has really been a year of hell, during which the whirlwind of mania grew ever larger and culminated in a period of hypermania before exploding in January. It has not been an easy path but it is working out.

I’m getting far more good days than bad now, but even that is not perfect. Why? I don’t have a proper job right now, so now I don’t need to struggle with keeping my head together (and believe me, it has been a struggle) I just need to struggle with boredom. It is crippling me. I work on comics, I produce videos but that’s all. I need to write more, but I’m still spending a lot of time drawing absolute blanks.

I am focussed on revising for my final exam right now. I have 10 days left. It is going well but I am worried sick that the work I do in preparation for it will not be enough. Last time I took an exam, I was caught up in the middle of the whirlwind and I felt like I knew everything. Everything in the whole damn world. I crashed and burned badly. It was one of the factors that eventually brought me down to Earth with a sickening thud. I’m scared that is going to happen again.

Still, I have 10 days left to prepare myself as best I can. Let’s hope it’s enough.

Draft cover design for 'The Curse of the Other World' by Zoe Robinson

Although some would say it wasn’t the best idea to design the cover of a book before the first draft was even completed, I sometimes find it helps to focus the mind on the task at hand. To this end, I have put together a sample cover for The Curse of the Other World, my first full-length novel.

This novel, like Unholy Crusade, is set in an alternate history universe that I have been putting together for several years. It will hopefully feel as real to you when you read the novel as this universe does. That, I think, is the goal of any writer – to create something so believable that it could pass for reality. It helps the suspension of disbelief a hell of a lot, I’m sure you’ll agree!

Unlike Unholy Crusade, this is less detective fiction and more occult horror. I want this book, which focuses on the rather brusque psychiatrist Dr Kate Barclay (who has her own blog – click the link to read it), to feel different to the first book. Both are set in the same world, but that does not mean they have to have the same feel. I’m looking to explore different aspects of this alternate Earth.

The idea of setting all my books in the same world isn’t a new one. I’ve been re-using names and locations in my stories for years now. The Final Report of James Graham and Henry Carter’s Journey were both in the same universe. My aborted NaNoWriMo novel, The Scream of Eternity, featured James Graham as a young man and Henry Carter’s son is an important character in Unholy Crusade.

I think it helps to make the world feel more real if people keep recurring, rather than a whole new cast having to be conjured up to fill the same roles as characters in other novels.

As yet, I have only the most basic of ideas about which characters from my other stories will appear in Curse of the Other World. It’s possible that none will, since the book is set in a different area of England to the other stories. If characters do turn up, they will only be there because the story requires it, however. I’m not a fan of shoehorning people in just so it’s obvious that story X takes place in the same world as story Y.