May 2008 Archives

Here's one odd perspective to my writing. For some odd reason or other, sooner or later, no matter how adventurously I start, I end up writing about plain ordinary life of the characters. It can be a good thing, because that's actually what I want to write, but I'm not entirely so sure that it is what the people want to read.

Let me recap: Jenyr's Company went to investigate a forgotten temple, went through a mind-numbingly pointless trek through seas, went to take back a besieged city... and now they're kind of stuck where they are.

And oh boy, will the fun ever stop: Sooner or later, Faira's getting married to, of all people, an elven duke, and right now spends time in Anchorfall running a pawn shop and sorting out, er, little things. Gnedrnygr's a magician, and magicians can spend decades sitting by a stack of books. Facyr's dreams have come true and he's happily guarding the city with his newfound soulmate and wife Cassandra. And the giant crises that threaten the country have gone, gone, gone! Great opportunity for covering life in a pseudo-mediaeval world. Not-so-great opportunity for fantasy genre in general!

So what can I do right now? I can't think of a big crisis to shake things up, so I have to deal with little crises. Let's see what I have in store for the future: Facyr's and Cassandra's new life as a married couple -- and as city guards. Faira's new business venture, a good investment for the future, and some gambling luck. And, um... well, I have a whole bunch of little stories on little people on not so epic events.

The point is, since these are small events, they don't really expand all that well into short stories. And that hinders me. I have always had the tendency to write short stories -- my stories just seem to grow naturally into the short story or novella size. Perhaps one day, I'll even finish that novel. But here, I have a bunch of small stories that just don't work as short stories. I seem to have had this irrational contempt, I verily dare say, for flash fiction. I certainly seem to have the material for them -- why the heck am I not writing them more!

I recently did a Flash a Day thing to, among other things, shake my thoughts loose. I don't think I'll be doing a Flash a Day soon, more like "More or less pre-prepared flash fiction story published every day for one week" -- but I really, really need to start thinking of writing more of the flash fiction stories, because I think they can help me dislodge some of the ideas that are too small to grow into the scale of short stories. I also think I'll not do the "limit to one page" thing; I'm, after all, writing this stuff on a crappy lappy and LaTeX right now.

But the big point is -- I hope to write more flash fiction soon! I really need to rethink the whole thing... again.

A quick, rather inconsequential note: I have migrated Avarthrel Wiki to PostgreSQL database, because I use PostgreSQL for just about everything else already. It was a pretty interesting exercise, and installing MediaWiki on PostgreSQL was certainly far less painful than it was before, when PostgreSQL support was still new. However, the transition still wasn't without friction: had to reupload images (only got back the image pages), the logs and statistics were pretty blank and had to be rerolled (and I don't know how I can get the logs back for real), user accounts with no edits are gone, the deleted revisions are gone for good (well, I only deleted complete junk anyway)... But the bright side is, at least I don't need to run MySQL on my computer right now.

At the same time, I took a look at the Semantic MediaWiki extension. This would make editing the wiki site much more interesting because it'd allow more thorough categorisation of the articles, factoids and like. Unfortunately, it also relies on new database tables, and the PostgreSQL support appears to be "experimental", which is just a nicer word for "doesn't actually at all". It would have been fun if it had actually worked!