March 2006 Archives

At least I've now gone through the First Unpublished Story (1UPS) myself - that is, scrawled some comments on the printed out text. The Second (2UPS) is halfway through.

Boy, was there ever a lot to comment on in 1UPS. I did find another big problem in the text. I just read someone rambling about how much one writer's stories sucked when they had omniscient narrators. Well, here in my story we have fact-throwing narrators and fact-throwing characters. It's not quite the same thing and not quite as annoying, but I noted one of my problems maybe that the characters - or the narrator, very rarely - starts explaining stuff. It's appropriate when it's appropriate - Gnedrnygr is supposed to know a lot of things, but he doesn't know everything either. But if any character goes rambling on about some background detail, it doesn't turn out very interesting. The story has one part where two characters talk on nature of magic - current version is rather weak, and basically the characters are just extensions of the Rambling Narrator. If there's any good examples of this, I kind of revere how Raymond E. Feist did boring-background-revealing in Magician: Apprentice - Two characters engaging in debate. The current dialogue in my story doesn't sound very much like a dialogue - it's two characters stating facts. Ugh. Boring.

Anyway, the 1UPS is progressing. It's been quite an educational experience: One of my big problems with writing was that I thought "hey, I can write, now can I? I've been doing this all of my life" and when my stories turned out okay but not great, I got disappointed. When I printed the stories, grabbed the pen, and started scrawling "this stinks" all over the copy, I remembered the real formula on how to make great art: You don't make great art by just spitting it out, you make something and then you refine it over and over until it's perfect. And I feel writing may be an art form where I actually can do the refining until it's perfect - I have less patience with other art forms, but I have infinite patience with words.

Now I have one very very scrawled-over printout here. Initially, I thought the story sucks because of the small bugs, and that I'm not a good writer afterall. Now, I have a profound realisation: I don't suck in general, because with good examination I actually know where I suck, and I can correct my suckage. Okay, my philosophy sucks if I think this is profound. After I fix the dozens of small errors (and the few really damn big ones) I found, I have a much more solid story and more tolerable language. I think, anyway.

And the reason why 2UPS has needed much less scrawlings so far is that I've actually read it a couple of times before I printed it - as I write earlier. I wonder how I fix the really big problems in this; I need to think about that...

Today at the university, I put the photocopier card to the machine. 97 credits left. Whoopee.

Stuck a printout in it. Chomp chomp chomp.

45 credits left.

So far, there's 52 pages of Avarthrel stories. That's pretty much for something that started in the summer and to what I haven't had much time to devote to.

The thing is now on paper. And when it's paper, I can really read it. And when I can really read it, I can spot errors easier.

Holy cow, does the writing on my new stories ever stink.

But hey, the difference between a beginner and a serious person is that the serious person tunes the thing until it doesn't stink. And that's what I'm doing. The only bad thing is that I'm subjecting my beta readers to suffer the same anguish. Maybe I should put disclaimers to this. (Then again, if the other beta reader got past the first few pages, maybe he does have nerves of steel.)

And I particularly value the fact that I now know exactly how I stink.

Here's one major bad thing I've noticed about my stories. It's the "things happen" syndrome. Pirates in the Morning Mist has basically this set-up: The Protagonists go to one place. They find out things. "Hmm, looks like things are happening." They go back home. "Oh wow, things have happened." The second of the new stories has this sort of problem: "Wow, we sure could use some MacGuffins. Why? Well, uh, we have a lame reason." They nearly effortlessly get the MacGuffins from the Obvious MacGuffin Factory, while the other kind of MacGuffins automatically materialise. "Now we have both kinds of MacGuffins! The day is saved!"

I need to think about this. Seriously. I think it's just that in PitMM's case, I thought of a good way to wrap up the plot. Then, all of sudden, the characters just started following along those rails. "Let's wrap up the author's story! Mmm, fascinating things planned along the way!" In the new story's case, it's probably just that I figured out a good plot, but haven't yet figured out where to really find the muscles to attach to the bones.

I also need to focus more on little details.

And I definitely, definitely need to read the story over and over before I publish it. The newest story improved a lot with two read-throughs with speech synthesizer; I can't possibly imagine what possibilities will open with a paper copy and pen.

One of the things I've noted in Wikipedia is that I'm afraid of making small edits, even when I'm good at small edits. I have lately learned to fix small problems immediately as I spot it, because otherwise I forget, and no one will do it; now would be a good idea to apply the principle to my own writings.

Firstly, I found out that Firefox bugged when trying to make a drop cap for the Pirates in the Morning Mist story. Big sigh, twiddling with CSS, and while I was at that, added more ranting on why that story stinks.

Today's big problem was "how the heck do I make printable versions of my stories", for which there was Only One Good Answer, as everyone knows: LaTeX.

So there I went, read the instructions for lettrine, insert text, spend good time twiddling with OpenDocument-to-HTML-to-LaTeX conversion, and...

...drop caps don't work with short lines here either.

Bang-head-on-table time! Okay, if the most advanced typesetter imaginable can't handle this stuff, it's probably better left undone until I figure out something better.

In other news, character wiki rolls forward really good, I still can't think of much good to write about, and oh, and if anyone else wants to beta-read my stories, email me and I might throw an OpenDocument file at you. I just read my last drafts and unlike the first few stories, they don't look that awful. I guess there's hope.

The wiki I use internally switched software yet another time. This time, to MediaWiki.

Why? I don't know exactly why I moved from that. SnipSnap worked for its purpose. But there was something about it that made it not quite work right. Maybe the user interface was clumsy. The markup was definitely clumsy, and the categories just weren't neat. SnipSnap was a good software, but maybe it just didn't work for my own work. It had features that I didn't care much about, like the blog thing and mysterious view types. It was a blast from past, working kind of like Everything2.

But regrettably, as an active Wikipedian, I've found MediaWiki the best wiki engine ever. It Just Works.™ and has tons of features that make my life easy.

If it's the zillion-ton gorilla that takes care of one of the most useful and popular websites out there, it has to be good enough for me...

The only bad thing about MediaWiki is that it needs the Satan's own database system, MySQL. I only switched because someone somewhere somewhy rambled about MediaWiki's upcoming support for PostgreSQL. I hate MySQL. Some silly, silly features, and the mysql client is just... not good. Especially if I installed it out of box and there was no help. Grr.

Anyway, I think I may open the wiki to people some time later. It might prove to be interesting. I plan on using CC BY-SA license for the wiki content, and reserve the right to grant myself and people the right to use different license. I plan on relicensing the stories I've written, for example, under CC BY-ND.

On writing: I wrote a character questionnaire yesterday. It seems like a fun way to build some initial material for a character's bio. 100 questions, and now the count rose to 108... I can find out a lot of interesting sides of the character by figuring out the answers to these questions.

Let it be known: this was a major coincidence, nothing more. The first country I started mapping honestly was Grycia, that far northern country that is easy to map, few towns, lots of mountains. That was also the first country I started mapping in AutoREALM... which is made by Andy Gryc.

Probably subconscious influence at best. I previously used AutoREALM a few years ago, definitely a long time I started writing Avarthrel stuff. There's definitely no connection here. =)

Just a random whee-ee. Apparently, AutoREALM has the honor of the most perfectly working app I've ever tried to use in WINE. Thus, the weird, probably unnecessary, yet quite rewarding task of mapping Avarthrel has started. I'm still waiting for the proper Linux version of this app, though... not to even mention some (ahem) now-standard features, like SVG support in and out.

Having a map is all good, because I have in my head some sort of idea on what the world looks like and having a real solid map will undoubtedly help a lot.

I've noted that I'm not optimally productive when sitting in front of computer. I'm only optimally productive if I'm sitting in front of computer and have some idea of what I'm doing.

So I'm instead doing idea sessions the Ancient Way. Lying on bed with a notebook at hand. (The famously expensive one I bought before Christmas...)

I'm usually good at coming up with ideas at 2 o'clock in the night before I'm falling asleep. It's just that making sense of the ideas can be somewhat... challenging.

"Woodpeckers!"

...I suppose that's a good idea if I need to write a fresh-smelling adventure in the woods. But why the heck did I put that exclamation point there? I sometimes wonder...

And what's this weird stuff then?

"Board games: A combination of checkers and mahjongg"

...?? I sometimes remember rather vaguely what the heck I was thinking when I came up with this stuff. I think I was thinking how weird is that a lot of fantasy stuff rips off chess, either by featuring chess as part of story (I'm playing Betrayal at Krondor right now...) or by featuring a thinly-veiled variation.

Okay, so all of the ideas are so far pretty rational. Almost workable, and possibly even good. Don't be surprised to find woodpeckers or checkers-mahjong combinations. =)

Yay. Finally got around doing this blog theme thing. Whatever inspires me, inspires me. =) Um... so I switched the theme in the blog. Yay. =( I don't know why I'm even writing this. Not really significant news.

The new Typo theme is called RPG Royal Decree, done by the fine folks at emagica, and it rocks. This thing rules, much more so than the theme contest winner, in my opinion - I tried the winner briefly and guess if it worked at all? Titles in Flash. Pshaw. Anyway, this theme rocks. Coffee! Need more coffee! Argh!

I definitely say this, I love the SFWA site. They have great stuff there. I also find the Writer Beware subsite pretty interesting. After all, Atlanta Nights (along with The Eye of Argon) was one of the inspirations for me to start writing fantasy stuff. If people dare to publish that slop, I'm not afraid to release my drivel either. =)

Anyway, Writer Beware has a blog too. Here's one entry I picked up at random, about giving the work away. For people who don't dare to read all that and read most of the stuff from the Writer Beware site, here's the gist: Don't publish your writings online if you intend to profit from that stuff. Editors aren't reading free sites looking for talent, and they get picky about what counts as a publication.

Now why am I publishing my stuff online? I'm doing it for the readers, and readers alone. I most certainly don't intend to profit from this stuff. I don't want my talent to be "recognised" by some literature magnates. Nobody wants to commission a random no-name writer for any task anyway.

I'm publishing my stuff online because, ahem...

Ladies and gentlemen! You have free first-row seats to see in the mind of a madman working on some of the early stories! And, as this is your unlucky day, by far not his last stories, either! Here's a noob. See noob write. See noob get some things right. See noob stumble and fall.

Just remember that I'm the hell not looking to get this stuff published through "ordinary" channels. If you want anything published commercially, contact the commercial publishers first. Nobody is vetting my stories (which is why it was no great surprise when I opened up the story file a few months later and gasp it was full of embarassing typos!). People in deviantART and who visit my site are ordinary people - I don't assume they're professional critics, much less editors looking for work. If they were, they'd probably open their mouths more often.

The blog post gets points by refererring to Terry Pratchett's The Truth - I just finished it a few days ago, a great book =)

The blog post does not explain one thing though: Why would anyone publish anything free of charge?

I'm an open source user. I contribute to Wikipedia. There's the "towards the Common Good" aspect there. Art for art's sake. Share and enjoy.

Just remember that if you publish for free, it's hard to turn profit, duh. And when you've decided to do the stuff for free, then do the stuff for free - there's no reason to get greedy after that and want money.

I'm a computer guy. I wasn't employed by the industry but I saw, through news headlines, an industry go boom when people were trying to find out ways to do Kewl Stuff for Free over the Internet. Doing stuff for free is not the way to get profit. I'm doing my fantasy short stories for Fun (and, since there's little feedback, primarily for my fun, remember that), and my Wikipedia stuff (and other factual writings) for Greater Good, and sometimes mixing those goals, and I don't pretend theres much else in any reasonable motivations.

And I should stop thinking of Stuff at two thirty in the morning. =)

(A news bit: A friend just picked up the next story. Leet. I'll be getting the Editorial Control, even when I'm publishing stuff free here. =)

Yup, the next story is almost ready. (Umm, two new stories, in fact. Just some editorial lag, as earlier.) This story was quite interesting that I just sat down and wrote it. Planning helps. =)

Some introspection: The only things that kind of annoy me about the new story are that there's really not that much stuff in it that would rank as fantasy. I also noted that I have very little ability so far to willfully go into conflicts where something is at stake. The protagonists end up being overpowering. I noted the same thing about D&D stuff we did ages ago. I don't make a good DM because there's precious little chance the characters might end up in a situations where they might die.

I'm a wimp. I admit that. I hope to rectify this. I hope the next story I write will be a little bit bigger step toward both of these things.

But the reason I really liked writing this current story was that I noted that I can pick up good ideas that I've been thinking of and turn them into stories. I like writing of questions that interest me. It's a good way to think of things.

Hard to say much else, but I'm happy that there will be more stories in the future.

Umm, here I am, twiddling thumbs. The new story is still being read by the editor fellow, which is why it's publication is taking a bit of time. I could go ahead and fix it up and publish it right away, but if I have the chance of getting the story read by someone first, it may make a bit more sense later on. I hope, at least.

I'm also working on yet another story. This time, one set far earlier than the other stories, so I have the chance of using some other characters and stuff like that. This could be fun.

[Note, 2008-04-29: I'm not sure what story I'm referring to in the latter case - could be the story that was under the working title "Requiem for the Smashed Legs.", still unpublished. I'm tagging this accordingly.]