I decided to write a small situation report, because there are actually situations that need reporting about. Without further ado, some inconvenient bullet points:

• My laptop was out of commission for a while (I just started it up last week and - whoops! - turned out it works perfectly after all). I wasn't writing stuff. I am now.
• I'm... pretty much doing the same stuff as before, what comes to the stories. These things sometimes take a long time to materialise, dammit...
  
• Kara the Assassin is doing fine! I'm now in middle of the first "serious interlude" in the comic. I'm trying to organise the comic in yearly volumes so that every yearly volume has one such longer serious interlude of maybe 4-5 pages. This particular interlude is, um, the Epic Character Background Thingie Comic.
• I'm also sort of in process of tweaking the PDFs. I figured out a way to include full-page cover art in XeLaTeX (tip: look up "pdfpages"), so I can do the covers in Inkscape and do the rest of the typesetting in LaTeX. Now I just need the bloody cover art.
  

The biggest news:

I'm currently in some sort of really weird rage mode. I need to work on Conman's Dictionary. If you want to see the code, it was just migrated to Gitorious.org today. I need to put out a working 1.0 release soon. Why? Because I was inspired to write sarcastic and pretty stupid advertisement for the web site for the occasion - it'll be there when the biggest features I want will be in the software and I iron out the wrinkles and actually release the version 1.0. Sometimes, the strangest things motivate me to do things.

"Movable Type 5 no longer supports SQLite or PostgreSQL."

Bbbbbbbbbbbbbastards. And I was so sure I wouldn't need to migrate to other systems any more.

So, Movable Type 5 only supports MySQL, a database engine I'm not sure even exists any more, after recent massive forking and corporate acquisitions and shuffling of key developers and whatnot. Most importantly, since these blogs I have here are based on SQLite, I've left with no way to upgrade this stuff.

So I'm possibly hereby annoucing a very preliminary plan for a great, dramatic transition to Drupal 7 when it comes out. They support SQLite and PostgreSQL.

(...or, as far as subtitles go, "a lonesome geek posts stuff that doesn't exactly demolish all of those stereotypes" or perhaps "I just had to post it, okay?")

Yesterday, I posted here a plea for feedback, addressed in general to my well-hidden and sporadic crowd of readers.

Today, come what may, I'm asking a question that has been bugging me for a while. I'm asking for opinions about my stories from female readers. I want to write fiction that's accessible and comprehensible for all kinds of people, say, young adults upwards. (As the sufficiently self-critical author of the stories, I just can't imagine anyone's enjoying these stories really all that much, so I'm shy of advertising them as "enjoyable" in addition to those traits. But I do hope they're enjoyable too.) It's hard to get a comprehensive picture when most of my friends, the regular commenters, are all male. The only female reader who has commented on multiple stories of mine is my sister, and a) she hasn't commented on my recent works at all, so I have no idea how I'm faring now, and b) a group of one is hardly a statistically representative sample. She, along with the few other gentle passing-by ladies who decided to comment on the stories, appeared to like them though. I'm just curious about the rest of them.

In yesterday's post, I failed to list which of my stories I want feedback to right now. Only to the latest of the stories, because they haven't really been read and commented by so many people. And by latest, I mean the one with the rainy day, the strange religious contemplation, a bit of war and the eternal mysteries of the society - perhaps even that one bit with the odd animals, but I know it was not technically a superb story. Also, I'm curious about the webcomic. I don't really know what else to say in this request, save of what I already outlined in yesterday's request. I'm just curious about what works here, and what doesn't; good sides, bad sides, what went right, what went wrong, what's to love, what's to hate.

So, that's my request, and when I read through it again, it didn't quite read like as weird as I thought it would look like, so I guess I'll just go ahead and post it now. (I feel so much better when I've got these odd questions out! Maybe I'll post better blog posts tomorrow!)

...which should be easy if no one's reading this. Well, I'm sure someone is. Maybe.

The only thing that annoys me about writing is that I've written these Avarthrel stories and stuff since 2005... and I've gotten about two or three brief unsolicited comments on how the heck am I doing. The people whom I've asked comments from have usually only pointed out technical problems and given broad overview of "yeah, you're definitely going in the right direction with this thing".

So here I am, suffering from seasonal depression, drinking coffee at 23:01 and whining in a blog about how lonesome I feel. ...see? see? When I put it like that I start to smile right away.

I think I should just use this time for my advantage and tell what I really am looking in feedback. I've so far electred not to post some of my stuff to absolutewrite.com, even though I read the boards from time to time and sometimes even post there. That's because the share-your-work forum seems to be for people who revise stories. I don't really look for that sort of feedback. I'm looking for post-mortems.

Yeah, of course it'd be helpful to get feedback while the story isn't done, but I usually tend to only torment my friends with these things. And I usually don't ask opinions from many people anyway. It's hard for people to read the story many times and even more so to give helpful feedback while the story is not completely developed. Hmm... come to think of it, there's at least one story that's still not done because one of my friends never sent back the critique and the story sort of fizzled. *sigh*

So, from most of the people who stumble upon this text on their own, I'd appreciate post-mortems. What went right, what went wrong. No need to use fancy words. Just list big things that went right and big things that went wrong. Little details that worked, little details that shouldn't have been done. And definitely make them post-mortems in the sense of "focusing on what went wrong".

And extensive gigantic missives aren't required by all means. If you read my stories and spot anything wrong, just hit me. I like to critique people's YouTube videos by posting something along the lines of "x:xx - this reminds me..." - and with 500 character limit, YouTube won't let me write giant long bits of feedback. So even bite-size comments are fine. It works, or at least I think it works: People can look at the specific part of the video and see what I'm commenting on. This should be even easier in text. Most of the critique I get from my friends are already as notes in word processing files or scrawlings in margins. If you post in the comment forms, I can usually find the place if you just hint where the problem is.

So this is my nightly whine - a bit of a plea to encourage people to comment more and what I'm looking for.

In Sunday, I finally finished "Once it's rolling...", a story that has been in works for a while. You can find it here in Avarthrel website, in deviantART and Scribd. Soon, hopefully, also in Elfwood.

This story has been in works quite a while. It started off as a story for my planned Flash-Fiction-a-Day 2 effort. Turns out the story just kept growing and keeping it in "flash fiction" size was not going to cut it. Some other stories also showed similar potential for hugeness, and one story ended up as a part in another story.

This is also a testament to the fact that next time I get the bright idea to improve my process and rebuild it from ground up, I think I'll reconsider it. This story was produced in relatively short amount of work, using plain old OpenOffice.org Writer. My hacked and patched-up LaTeX workflow just wasn't good enough: OpenOffice.org Writer, despite of its deficiencies as far as process goes, is actually pretty good as a word processor. I just need to figure out a way that would convert the OpenDocument file into clean HTML, then into weird hacked-up sorta-kinda-HTML some of the websites use, then into Markdown for my own website, and finally to LaTeX for PDFs. I'll have to hack together some XSLT when and if my head can take it.

Also, good news on the story front: I discovered "memoir" LaTeX document format, which produces some awesome results in fiction front, and I don't need to knife the "article" document format that much any more. Also, I figured out why TeX wasn't producing PDF metadata (it should be done via hyperref parameters) and how to use XeTeX for maximal frigging font-related awesomeness. Please see Scribd or the PDF version of the story on the website to see what it looks like. I'll probably re-do the rest of the stories using this document format when I'll get the chance.

The only big problem with this thing is that you can literally spend hours getting the output just right, hence such a late blog post...

Long time has gone by and there's been too little good blogging from my end. But here's something, now! Here's just a few thoughts on an issue that I really don't want to put much thought into.

I wish to state emphatically one thing: Until I have an editor to tell me otherwise, my stories currently use, and shall use in the future, the official spelling standard called Weird Mutated Foreign Spelling.

(Author's note: I was not actually that sure what to do with this little essay... thing... blabbery. Since it was inspired by a thread in a writing forum, in a blogging subforum, I decided to, um, post it in a blog that I... do... about writing. Or something. It's kind of grossly off topic in regards to Avarthrel. But it certainly is on topic as far as my own writing is concerned. You can't get more writing-like text from me, no!)

I have no idea what I was thinking, but it seems that I have started writing and drawing a webcomic. So, the first Avarthrel web comic is Kara the Assassin, or Karaydhjenna Bourejenn's most preposterous exploits for the glory of Carriglena & provocation of Thoughts. I was supposed to finish first short story featuring Kara a long time ago, but I was slacking off. But I think webcomics is a good medium for assassination fantasy fiction.

Speaking of slacking off, most of the slacking off has been caused by the fact that I've not been able to work efficiently with half of my stuff in LaTeX files and half of it in OpenDocument. Luckily, this has all been fixed now: I got a slightly beefier used laptop which can run OpenOffice.org just fine. (It also incidentally runs Windows XP, and the hard drive is too small for me to cram Ubuntu on it too...) I hope I'll be able to finish this giant bunch of unfinished stories soon!

I have a bunch of stories in the making, and I really really really need to just stop and make some sense of this whole big mess I'm in. I'm in danger of stagnation. I've tried to break the habit by writing a lot of stuff completely unrelated to Avarthrel... and it has helped somewhat. I think I'll get a few stories done this summer! Life is good again!

I really need to get the stories going. Some might say that writing stories is about going to a new unexplored and uncharted territory, but my problem is, I'm already in the uncharted territory and I bloody well should have made a map of this incident.

On a completely unrelated note, here's a drawing of mine that I finished today, incidentally also about heading to uncharted territory - Quirierle hunting an unspecified monster. Also testing deviantART embedding...


Okay, where the hells are you? by ~wwwwolf on deviantART

OK, this is kind of lame and weird at the same time. Following on the creation of the Avarthrel characters as Miis, here's Faira as she appears in Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City. I have to say that the game doesn't quite have the appeal of other games in the series, but it's still a rather nice game to waste time on. Not bad waste of time, actually. Kind of funny, at some times. And, of course, the game has a shady fox in it.

Okay, why the heck is Faira in a kid-friendly game? I have no idea. Perhaps she just enjoys seeing cute animals. Or perhaps she's just trying to learn to fish. I mean, that's what her parents did.

I usually play as my primary character in the game, but I wanted to create a second character just for the heck of it. And here's one!

I've started to collect not-so-modern stuff in Faira's home. Harder than it seems. However, I have some extremely essential stuff already, such as this wonderful item that this fox sold me cheaply for...

...no wonder the thing was so cheap. I wonder if I can find a fence in this game that would gracefully sell gold bars worth a few million Bells?