Ceallaigh's Blog
I had a breakthrough about the narrative structure of the last chapter yesterday evening, which propelled me forward pretty far this afternoon. So it was a good writing day, the best I've had in awhile and on a difficult part of the denouement, no less. If all goes as expected, I'll have the novel finished in the next couple of writing sessions. Now all I have to do is figure out how to celebrate...
My apologies to anyone I might have ignored in the last few weeks, or failed to respond to, or what-ev. I've been a little single-minded lately. =)
Today I spent much of the afternoon at the CBC Radio studio in downtown Halifax volunteering as a set-dancing, Gaelic-singing, Gaelic-speaking extra for the forthcoming Gaelic short film from Opolo Pictures entitled, "Ruidhle an Fhìdhleir/The Fiddler's Reel. This was a post-production sound fill for part of the film that needed new material, including the sounds of feet step-dancing (hence the title of this post), the sounds of people clapping and encouraging a fiddler and step-dancer, additional singers for the chorus of a Gaelic love song (which most of us already knew) and 'walla' conversation in Gaelic.
Tech Speak
I've just learned via my Twitter feed that a certificate authority in the Netherlands issued a valid SSL wildcard certificate for Google to a third party in July, leading to concerns that attackers may have been using the certificate to route sensitive traffic through their own servers, capturing it and compromising user data in the process. Microsoft Technet has issued an advisory about the certificate, and a Pastebin post of the SSL certificate alleges it was used by the Iranian government for man-in-the-middle attacks. Google has written about the attack on its blog, and PC World has provided an excellent overview of the problem.
Could it be? Do I dare to hope? IMDb: Wonder Woman (2015)
So, if you signed up for the newsletter in the last couple of hours, could you go back and do it again? I've over-written my database without checking for new subscribers.
Sheesh.
I don't have a ton of time this evening to detail my holiday, but I will say that it was one of the most pleasant weekends I've spent in a long time. Both The Full Monty and Anne of Green Gables were brilliant shows, and the actors and crew I met were fine people. Of course, my friend Katherine was the most brilliant stage manager of all; I mean, that goes without saying. =) You could practically see her backstage, gleaming and all that.
Here then, is a link to my photos: Prince Edward Island, 2011.
I've uploaded my rebooted web site to our server, and it's accessible now at csmaccath.com. Please note that it's not quite finished yet, but I wanted to close my Flickr account today and point folks to my own image galleries, so I jumped the gun a bit and finished all but one or two things this afternoon. Here's what's changed:
Miscellany
For the most part, this reboot takes the long-running, somewhat personal site I had and turns it into a professional web site for my writing career. There's more information about the Petals of the Twenty Thousand Blossom series, the theme has changed, the menus have changed, my social networking links are more prominent and I've provided a site map so folks can find the old content I don't link to anymore.
At one time, this bibliography represented the body of my research for Petals of the Twenty Thousand Blossom. However, I realized many years ago that for the better part of my species and planet-building (alien physiology, land ecology, etc.) I neglected to add my scientific sources to this list. Since most of those were Internet science resources, and since I didn't bookmark them, there are gaps in my bibliography where these subjects are concerned.
Therefore, this is a best-effort bibliography of my pre-draft researches, reasonably accurate with the aforesaid caveats to 2007, when the primary world-building for this series was completed. I have excluded resources I reviewed and subsequently discarded along with resources specific to world-building and the writing craft in general.
Of course, none of the individuals whose work is represented here have endorsed my novels, and any factual errors present in the final series are surely mine.
I've finally taken the time to set up an Amazon.com Author Page. You can find it here:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005CD0QHM
My milling of Alasdair Mhic Cholla at the 2011 An Cliath Clis Milling Frolic.