Being a collection of transmissions received on the E4 FTL radio emergency band, 2002-11-07 to 2002-12-07 (planetary local time).

This is a short novel (very short; 55000 words) I wrote in 31 days as a slightly late NaNoWriMo project.

Update! My Diary has a vastly superior sequel. Read Child of the Sea and the Stars online here or download an ebook!

Originally it was intended to be a slightly late IWriSloMo project, which doesn’t have a set word count and is therefore a lot easier. However, about a third of the way through I realised that I was actually on target for the more ambitious NaNoWriMo version, and so switched.

This all started out as a writing exercise. Rule #1 of writing: the first prerequisite for writing anything is to have your fingers meet the keyboard. (Or pen, if you are so inclined.) Before this, my total output consisted of a dozen or so mostly unfinished short stories. I needed some way of drastically increasing the amount I wrote; which meant getting into the habit of writing something regularly.

The traditional way of doing this is to start a diary. But who wants to read about my life, a sessile computer programmer in Reading, the least characterful city in Britain? I needed to write someone else’s diary.

Now it’s all over, and I’ve come up with, well, rather more than I expected. I’ll tell you four things I discovered: firstly, writing takes a lot of time. This took about two to three hours a day, every day. Secondly; writing is addictive. If I could have stopped before 0200 each day, trust me, I would have! Thirdly: this damned island has been swirling around in my head all month, and I’m quite glad now it’s finished and both the island and I can go to sleep. Fourthly: it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Be warned that the version here is only nominally proofread. I’ve done some tinkering, corrected some spelling and grammar, and rewrote one scene I wasn’t happy with, and that’s it. Every so often someone points out another typo and I’ve fixed it; thank-you, all, and if anyone sees any more, please let me know! But other than that — what you see is what I’ve got.

This is not great literature. In fact, it’s not literature at all. But I had a lot of fun writing it, and if I can give people some pleasure in reading it, I’m happy.

You can read it online here or, alternatively, download ebook versions here.

MobiPocket version

Get this version if you have an Amazon Kindle, and then copy it into the documents directory on your Kindle using USB.

Alternatively:

epub version

Get this version if you have any other ebook reader.

My Diary is © 2015 David Given, all rights reserved. Do not distribute elsewhere without written permission from me (which I am very likely to give if you ask).

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