Avarthrel Blog

The Actual Org-Mode Experiences

2012-01-25T20:13:52Z

So, NaNoWriMo 2011 is far, far over.

Before the NaNo kicked in, I recommended people to check out org-mode and look at my ramblings on my endless struggles with other writing software packages.

That ramble was a little bit premature because I hadn’t actually completed a major writing project with Emacs. I’ve written a lot of short stories over the last year or so, but due to my increasing self-critique I’ve not actually gotten anything out. And, of course, the fact that I kept switching software probably didn’t help much either. =)

But NaNoWriMo is now done, and bashing out 51,757 words probably counts as some sort of an achievement that gives a little bit of an indicator of how Emacs works as a prose writing tool.

I told people it would work, and dammit, it did. Except for a few small snags.

]]> There were some major oddnesses that I had to learn about.

Darkroom isn’t light-proof

In the previous blog post on Emacs features, I made a big deal about darkroom-mode. I really shouldn’t have babbled about it at all, because the kit is kind of broken and needs some manual tinkering and gluing before it works satisfactorily. It doesn’t work the same on all platforms. There are other hacks that achieve the same effect, but which also may require some tinkering and expert customisation (read: you need to change hardcoded values, and you can’t do customisation through M-x customize or adding settings to ~/.emacs - hardly user-friendly).

It’s a shame that I didn’t ever really have the mental capability to handle elisp coding so I could make this thing actually work like charm. Features like this would be awesome if they were part of standard emacs install, or were at least some sort of an easily installable package that would be both cross-platform and easily tuneable.

Emacs’s convenience depends entirely on what I have installed

Which brings me to another point: I got an Eee PC laptop halfway through the NaNoWriMo. It came with Windows 7 “Starter”, ~~a version of Windows that didn’t come wi~~… (sorry, I made that joke too many times already). Of course, I had to install all software I needed to do NaNoWriMo on the thing. All I really needed was Emacs (an awesome Windows port, of course, exists) and my version control/syncronisation software package (i.e. MSYSGit).

But it didn’t come with all of the stuff I had grown used to on Linux. All of the little packages that don’t ship with Emacs. If you want to extend Emacs, the instructions usually go “drop the files somewhere and add stuff like (require 'whatever) to ~/.emacs.”

The thing about this is that the files literally come from all over the world, in various forms. I have no idea where some of these packages came from, but I sometimes can take a few good google searches to refresh my memory.

Fortunately, Emacs 24 will bring some light to this, because it will ship with a real package repository and a package manager along the lines of dpkg or rubygems. (If you say “App Store”, I’ll frown. Nobody will have fun when I frown.)

Perfect WordPerfect 5.1 emulation! Oh no wait…

I mentioned WordPerfect 5.1 in the previous article, because it genuinely was one of the best authoring environments I had seen - blue background, white text, no bullshit. Too bad WP doesn’t support most of the modern niceties.

One of the cool features I discovered during my NaNo rush was Emacs’ colour theme support. And by grace of gods, it does support WordPerfect 5.1 colours right out of box.

Not without a hitch, though:

It’s a contrib package so it’s not working out of box on all Emacs instances. It doesn’t ship with Windows Emacs, for example. Does with Aquamacs and Debian Linux packages.
On Debian Linux, colours don’t work all the way. The buffer background stays white if it’s out of the actual text area.
Once you set a colour theme, you’re committed to it until you close and restart Emacs. It completely messes up the colours. You can’t get to the default. Even the “default” colour themes aren’t exactly the same.

Just like darkroom, you can file this feature under “nice idea, can’t wait to see it when it will finally actually work”.

NaNoWriMo is all about the word count! Ummmmm…

Word counts are a weird beast. There’s bazillion different ways to count the words. NaNoWriMo doesn’t disclose their wordcounting methodology, but they appear to somewhat agree with the common definition of splitting the stuff into word-like bits.

f course, in Org files, there’s a lot of stuff that you don’t want to count. You want to keep your notes out of the final word count. You basically want to put your story in a single section of a file, and then count the words in that section only.

And Org-Mode doesn’t do this out of the box.

Fear not, though - the people in the Org-Mode mailing lists are writing code that will stick per-section word counts into the property folders.

…notice how you can’t actually download the raw message from the mailing list so you have to do some copy-paste trickery to save this into the file.

…notice how this code is being developed by just sending updated versions to the mailing list. Not, for example, in a public git repository or something.

…notice how I couldn’t find a single instance of the code that would have actually worked on the versions of org that I have at hand.

Yes, this was going on in 2011. In open source world.

I had a deadline. I had to write my own bloody awful word counter that’s run as a script. Not very elegant, but at least it works nicely. I could always run this thing in a shell buffer. It even worked on the first try on Windows port of Ruby. Not much of a problem.

(This is a tradition, you know, except with Ruby instead of Perl this time.)

I hope the upcoming Emacs package repositories will make life a little bit easier for this kind of situations so people could just upload a bunch of separate elisp packages that extend org mode. Modularity is the watchword, and so on and so forth.

But on the good side…

…the bloody piece of software just made it possible for me to finish NaNoWriMo in the first place.

I can’t understate this.

I can be critical about these little inconsequential flaws of Org-Mode, but as you can see, a few small repairs can fix a lot of flaws. No wordcount? Toss in a script. Fancy full-screen stuff not working in Linux/Mac/Win? Just live without it, or use whatever the hell you have. Stuff not working all across the board? Suck it up or just do some handwork.

Sure, things could be a lot worse, but I got to my goal.

Despite of the hurdles of the other software.

What hurdles? What?

In NaNoWriMo 2010, I used TextRoom and StoryBook.

I found StoryBook pretty amazing. Before I even began writing I started fleshing out the story outline in StoryBook and it worked wonderfully for the purpose.

This year around, I was less well prepared. I started making the outline later on, and dammit, that was a mistake.

Storybook had suddenly gone payware. You need to pay to do anything really useful with it. This is what is killing a lot of open source projects these days. It almost killed Movable Type, but the developers came to their senses. It murdered MySQL. It’s making me move away from Celtx, because I just know that the open source version isn’t going to get any interesting features any more — and in all likelihood neither will Storybook get any new interesting features.

Anyway: Late planning + no Storybook = disaster.

So how do I do story planning? In the org-mode land, it seems the expression goes something like this: “dude, just throw some org-mode at it.”

And it worked. I made a ginormous table with plot summaries and I was able to chart the story pretty well and design a plot that actually makes some sense and is even more complex than the plot in the last year’s novel.

Frigging amazing.

NaNo 2011 was a resounding success thanks to Org-Mode. And I expect NaNo 2012 to be even more resounding success if there will be some minor improvements.

Thank you, org-mode.

I’d launch into an epic fanfic here, but hell, I need coffee and Halo: Reach. Bye.

My NaNoWriMo 2011 journal

2012-01-13T17:38:34Z

It’s sad that I haven’t had found the time to comment on my NaNoWriMo progress on my blogs at all. This NaNoWriMo seemed to be a bit more bleak than the last year’s incredibly fun journey, mostly because some of the people I followed last year weren’t writing and I didn’t even get a chance to follow some other people. Also, NaNoWriMo website’s tools were not as fun this year around.

But overall, it was still an incredible journey. Just with a little bit more of proverbial taste of blood in the mouth. I’d say I survived through NaNo this time, not really finished it.

I’ll probably release my book draft later on. As in last year, I’ll release a PDF and possibly an EPUB version. Cover is already drawn, and shown on the right (click for a larger version).

I’ve also made some sort of a video journal. Once I get around to editing it (and doing the EpicDiff run to show how the text mutated over time), I’ll put it to my YouTube channel. This is also the first time I’ve ever produced anything major in Org-Mode, so I’ll also write a separate blog post on my experiences with Emacs as an authoring environment. (Summary: it’s probably the best environment I’ve tried so far, but there are a few snags that I really wish were fixed easier.)

Anyway - the following is basically just a copy-paste of my /r/nanowrimo posts, with some minor tweaks. Hope it’s interesting enough.

]]> November 1: Unix word count tool lies like a rug. It can’t be 2251 words already.

November 2: 4067 words as of today, and I’m feeling the stuff is kind of disjointed. It’s weird to write a bunch of stuff and then realise I have a bunch of really incomplete chapters. First, it’s kind of a feeling of a failure, but then I realise it’s just stuff that needs to be fixed and meat-ified in the following days. There’s, like, a whole month to do this stuff. And there’s always December to fix the plot holes, or something. =)

November 3: 6100 words!

Aside of some very broad directions, I still haven’t outlined most of the book and I have a very vague idea of where the hell I’m actually going. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to hit my target of 6000 words today.

So I added an awesome circus performance.
And very very roundabout and hopefully tastefully subtle off-page sex. (Look, it has to be roundabout. Wordcounts, dammit.)
…in the same chapter. Not the same scene.

November 4: 8148 words. Pros: Some parts of the stuff I’ve written actually form something that someone might, on a good day, call some kind of a story thread. I even have some vague ideas that allow me to tie all these weird threads I have on my hand together. Cons: Head not work. Need to be coffee bad. Wrote stuff while not really in a conscious state.

November 5: 10066 words! I felt the characters were totally underdescribed so I got to work. More to come.

Also, last night, produced a little bit more dependable tool for word counts. May not be terribly useful unless you use emacs org-mode like me. This tool lets me put notes and the story in the same file, which will hopefully help me to make the story make more sense. =)

November 6: 12114 words!

Last night I finally made something that sorta looks like an outline, and actually marked up my text with chapters and scenes, and shuffled some underdeveloped scenes around to places where they make far more sense. I’m no longer writing in dark! I have some - not a clear idea, but some idea - where I might stick some of the stuff I was thinking of, and I can actually make the plot make some sense.

In theory.

Yeah, I added a whole bunch of interesting scenes and did a lot of work on them.

The content of the scenes is still dangerously random though. Only two new plainly obviously word-count-padding roundabout off-page sex scenes. =)

But hey, at least I’m thinking of a cool twist ending that will put the events of the book in a whole new light. Unplanned awesome plot features.

November 7: Clucking bell. I woke up late, had to waste time to file some papers, and felt incredibly crappy today in general. Can’t touch my Xbox 360, because unfriggingbelievably I still need to mop up my DVR’s hard drive by watching some of the shows so I will have space to record more.

This is not a day to write.

But I have found my saviour.
Got some coffee going.
Fired up Thief: Deadly Shadows soundtrack. Had completely forgotten how awesome writing music this is.
Typed the hell away.

14072 words. Continuing the steadily lethal speed of 2000 words per day. Yay.

Oh yeah, I’m ~~parodying~~ cunningly referencing The Da Vinci Code. A low move. Kick me.

November 8: 16041 words.

Somewhere, beyond reach of mortals, the god of knowledge welcomes a recently departed man to the Eternal Library.
Meanwhile, the protagonists try to make sense of a totally not goddamn Dan Brown ripoff of a puzzle box.
And in the ageless sacred gardens of the gray City of the Dead, there’s a juggling elf and a bunch of wolves performing funny tricks.

…what the hell did I just write? I swear I’m not on drugs.

This sort of work on completely unrelated things in pretty much random order may not make much sense right now, but I swear this makes much more sense when I actually finish this thing.

Anyhow, over 15k now. Yayyyy!

November 9: 18143 words.

Yesterday was exciting. I rambled about all sorts of cool things. Today was boring. I worked on one scene that was kind of invented out of thin air, but I felt it was sort of interesting considering the big picture.

But hey, I somehow got >2000 words done! Yay! I was even using a wrong word count program for a while, which was giving me wrong word count. I was, like, “no WAY I wrote over 2500 words yet.” Now I’m like “no WAY I have over 1000 words just in the background notes.” =)

November 10: 20014 words. Awesome.

This is probably the point where I should start seriously considering making some sense. Okay, I have a plot outline and I have been following it, so I guess I will eventually make some sense. There’s yet hope.

In related news, I guess I need to write a bit more after midnight, so that Skyrim won’t ruin my 2k/day pace. This novel of mine has elves having sex. I’m surprised if Skyrim will have any, though it is always a possibility. =)

November 11: I knew I could do it.

Come from the town. Dig Skyrim from the backpack and stick it to the shelf. Sit down. Write the damn 2000 words, like I’m bloody well supposed to do. All it takes is normal kinds of discipline. It happened before. It happened today. No problem.

22051 words. It’s almost like a crappy sample rate, only one better.

And I’m improving the confusing chapters. Yay! The book really is starting to make more sense when I fix stuff that I didn’t really get right earlier on.

November 12: 24100 words. The past few days, I’ve been goofing off a little bit, but now I got back to the early chapters that didn’t have much meat. It’s surprising how a little bit of expansion to the chapters that didn’t have anything substantial yet can restore my faith in the project. =)

November 13: 26106 words. Over halfway done. Uh… prologue and one chapter reasonably complete so far, the rest in various states of completeness. I don’t actually see any problem with this. =)

November 14: 28054 words. This is one of those days when I just have to say “don’t ask what happened, I just got a cup of coffee a moment ago and I have no frigging idea where the 2000 words came from.”

November 15: 30113 words.

Got a new Eee netbook. Came with something called Windows 7 “Starter”, which is apparently the version of Windows that doesn’t come with Emacs and Git, for some reason that I can’t quite comprehend . Had to download and install them separately. Not a biggie, but it was a rather boring and time-consuming setup.

But it works now. I made stuff in time.

Still, I needed a bloody keg of coffee to get my brain running properly.

November 16: 31007 words.

Yes, it finally happened. I produced ~1000 words today. Which is not quite near 2000 words. A few hours in the day remain, but I don’t think my head can take it. My body may not be falling asleep and my fingers keep typing this comment, but my conscious mind is wholeheartedly behind the whole sleepiness idea.

I was in a pretty zombie-like state today. The highlight of the day was that I installed Ruby on the new netbook and my wordcount script, which I had written on Linux, worked perfectly on the first try on the Windows system. I just wish my brain had been tagging along so I would have been able to produce some words for the script to eat, too!

Tomorrow, I’m going to take the new netbook to whence it came. The Town. The place that is quite not like my apartment. Need to seek some inspiration in a place that has, uh, places. And space. And fresh air. Dammit.

November 17: The failure the previous day was crushing. Was stressed. Had had my fill of writing in my apartment. Went to the library. Had fresh air.

Had a funny random moment when I ran the word counter.

Ended up with 33516 words.

November 18: The nanowrimo website was mocking me.

Mocking me.

Branding me a total failure after failure.

So I decided to show the damn thing what’s what. 36172 words. That’s right, I recovered from the failure and got back to where I was supposed to be if I’m writing 2000 words per day. And I made some pretty interesting new scenes, I think. And I even got some of my further analysis done on what has been done and what needs to be done. It’s extremely gratifying to see my scene list go from red to green with a little bit of additional text in some scenes. Outline is really shaping up. Hopes are getting high again.

November 19: 38031 words. Still new scene ideas. More structure stuff and integration. Feeling that a couple of scenes in the story are a bit too close, they probably need to be moved. Intriguing. Well, things will be fixed. =)

November 20: 40221 words.

I suck. I just couldn’t wake up early enough and procrastinated all morning. And ate a pizza and really wanted to take a nap but said “hell no” and got writing. While my brain was still greased.

So I lay down on the floor on pillows, plugged a USB keyboard to the netbook, closed my eyes and typed what the hell I was thinking for 90 minutes straight.

Not porn. It’s a very post-modern stream-of-consciousness scene expressing the deepening relationship between the two protagonists and their realisation on the fulfilment and comprehension of their goals in life and their mission within the story. Seriously. You guys would be able to see that if I just had time to fix the bazillion typos this month, but I obviously don’t.

November 21: 42205 words. The previous stream of consciousness attempt was so awesome that I wanted to try another one. The previous one was about the protagonists - easy stuff, I just needed a good summary of the situation where the story was and where it was moving to. This one was about a few minor characters, how they perceive the situation, and how the ideas in the story affect them - in a completely different manner. (…also I had never ever written a high-flying and philosophical lesbian sex scene. Let’s see, hmm… hmm… nope, writing strange unfamiliar scenes is not anywhere near folk dancing and incest. I definitely had to try this.)

November 22: 44325 words. Basically, the situation was this: I had no idea what to write. So I wrote a scene that had been sort of bubbling in my head, but that had nothing to do with this story. After I was done, I somehow (merely figuratively) slapped my forehead and said “damn, why didn’t I put this thing in the novel? I totally needed this so my shadowy guiding forces get some personality and their motivations become clearer.” Basically, I had this good scene I had planned, but I didn’t really know what story to put it in - until now. And it seems to fit. Wonderful.

November 24: 50000 according to my word counter.

Might be higher according to validator, but I’m not really done yet and I think I need to work a little bit more on some parts of the novel. Still, glad majority of the stuff is done.

Last year, the 50000th word was “fucking”. This time, it was “carnivals”. Both were equally calculated and preposterous choices. =)

November 29: Had a weekend off, did some more writing.

I end my NaNoWriMo 2011 with an official wordcount of 51757 words.

Tomorrow I’ll make cover art. And possibly typeset the bastard into PDF. Not sure yet.

The last fixes were mostly to a few sex scenes. I thought they might end up being embarrassing, so I decided to take another look. That’s when I realised they weren’t going to be embarrassing to most people, because they were just incomprehensible. Some more wording, and bam! Less confusion! …and not much more actual sex.

Still, I have to say that a lot of stuff that remains needs serious, serious fixing. This is going to be a huge pile of work when I get around to clearing it up!

No, really, learning is eternal

2011-07-04T12:49:12Z

It is a lingering doubt, but an important one: Is it time to rethink why I write? Maybe it’s always a good time to rethink why I write, and how I write.

One thing is sure, though: I’m always learning, and the fact that I didn’t get completely depressed again when I recently got some critique is a good sign that I’m probably showing - maybe - some improvement. I think I’ve conclusively shown that the answer to the obvious first question, “should I write to begin with?”, is a resounding “yep”.

Now, I just need to seek some guidance on “how” and “why”.

]]> I got critique on two things, actually: a story I’ve been working on, and my blog posts. The former was requested, the latter wasn’t [the critical comment apparently isn’t there any more, though]. But both, fortunately, made me think all the same.

The former critique made me feel a little bit weird. Here I was, completely sure that the story was awesome. The first poster said that it bloody well wasn’t awesome. I took a good look at the story and concluded “holy shit, this story is awful, I need to fix this stuff pretty thoroughly.” I’ve been trimming the story, filling holes, and making the story make a little bit more sense. Maybe the foremost lesson I learnt from this is that I had again tripped over the famed “pee-headedness line”; I really, really, really should get critique more often because I get all of these delusions that the stories are actually in good shape when they plainly and obviously are not.

I guess that’s what the critique is supposed to be about. I need someone to bring me back to the ground and be realistic.

And the scary thing is this: I’ve experienced it before. I’ve told this to others. And here I am, suffering through the same thing again. Oh well, doses of realism are always healthy…

But here’s another thing to be learnt from this: I think the story isn’t going to suck completely. And now that the problems have been caught, they can be fixed. Things will be all right. This is why I also should get more critique - I keep hearing about all these flaws, but I don’t always spot them in my own stories. This is why editors are awesome.

The second, uninvited critique gave me another fascinating thought. I’ve been blogging for a long time. I’ve never really worried about getting any readers; there has always been some random commenters no matter what I’ve rambled of and where I’ve hosted the blog. It’s pretty clear that I’ve written some interesting posts.

But here’s the annoying thing: I’ve never really thought who am I writing these blog posts for. I’ve written them for myself, primarily.

So imagine my surprise when Google Analytics says that I’ve gotten 47,940.91% traffic increase. (Yes, really.) Someone posted the article about Emacs to Hacker News. And there, we have someone complaining about the “passive-aggressive” crap in the intro.

Wow. I’ve written something that turned out to be interesting for some people and apparently generated some interesting discussion. And people complain about my writing. Aargh! I had not considered the idea that it might become popular! I had no idea that actual people would read my article!

Maybe I should start writing articles for actual people - consider the readability a little bit, try to avoid some annoying style. In short: I should not just write for myself. Yeah! I should… write for the readers.

(Cue an army of Emacs users going M-x facepalm again)

This is obvious stuff. Why didn’t I see it before?

I think this illustrates one of the problems I have with a lot of writing advice: You never realise what the heck all those good bits of advice actually mean until you get burned personally, or someone points out that this stuff actually applies to your own writing. You may hear advice over and over and over again, or even think of some exceedingly obvious things beforehand,

This is a class of problems that are simple to understand, but hard to spot. And that’s why we have other people. That’s why it’s awesome to have editors.

Not that any editor would have pointed out that I need to do some incredibly obvious things like actually writing for actual readers, but the principle remains the same.

Scott Adams was right with one of the claims in “The Dilbert Principle” - It’s impossible to be smart all the time, and we’re all idiots sometimes.

So why I write? I think the answer before was “because it’s fun”. I think my new answer is “because it’s fun, and I hope you find it fun too”. How I write? By learning while I do it. Always more learning. And when I think I should stop learning, I need to be whacked on the head until I remember that I was supposed to be learning.

I try to make my writing clearer. I promise to strive for improvement. Please tell me when I fail, because fail I shall.

Let's just use Emacs

2011-05-24T19:39:32Z

Somewhere around the previous post, I made an outlandish promise that I might try out Celtx to see how well I could write a story in the “novel mode”.

I think I have to take it back. Because Emacs foiled that plan.

And I still can’t believe it.

Emacs as a prose editor. Bah. Pigs are flying.

]]> I’m a long-time Emacs user, and if there’s one thing that bugs me is that Emacs has frequently been in a state of stagnation. As every Emacs fan knows, Emacs is the ultimate text editor – nothing can be better than Emacs. It’s a religious position, kind of like the Apple fandom. So, obviously, you get some pretty heavy cognitive dissonance when you notice that the competing editors are better at something.

And in recent years, Emacs had a lot of things that were just plain outlandishly crappy. Off the top of my mind:

Font specification that was bizarrely difficult. Setting fonts was bloody impossible.
No soft word wrap.
Stone-age widget set in GNU Emacs. Neater widget set in XEmacs, though distinctly not GTK+.
Super-ugly font rendering.
No support for UTF-8. Later, a hacky support through a third-party package.
Bizarre configuration system.

In times when the competitors get things right, it’s easy to start looking for alternatives. These alternatives are not Emacs. And it shows. You use them, and you will experience great pain.

But… It’s always refreshing to see that stuff gets fixed. My greatest pains were experienced years ago when I used XEmacs, which was updated ridiculously slowly, and that pace was still faster than what GNU Emacs had at the time. Much to my surprise, GNU Emacs folks launched version 22. What the hell. I thought we were going to get stuck in version 21 for ages.

And now they’re going at version 23, which is even more amazing.

So, GNU Emacs is actually updated fairly often now, and each new release seems to bring in some outrageously awesome features. UTF-8? We have that now, out of box. Stone-age widget sets? Hell no – you get GTK+ on Linux and Aqua on Mac, fits perfectly to both desktop environments. Ugly fonts? GTK+, Pango and Freetype, yadda yadda yadda. Setting fonts? It’s in the freaking menu now. If you want to put it in ~/.emacs, it’s just (set-face-attribute 'default nil :font "Anonymous Pro 16") or something like that, and voila, you’ve got awesome fonts.

And the biggest, greatest feature to hit Emacs 23?

visual-line-mode.

Or, as the folks who have not been touched by the awesomeness of Emacs say, “soft word wrap”.

Soft word wrap means that it’s infinitely easier to eyes and your mind to edit stuff that’s picky about line breaks. And if stuff is not picky about line breaks, this means you’re not mashing M-q all the time. Suddenly, it’s much less painful to edit wikitext. Writing fiction practically needs soft word wrap; this is pretty much not negotiable. Even this blog post was written in visual-line-mode, even when Markdown isn’t picky about line breaks.

Now, it’d be pretty silly to say that I’m giving Emacs another whirl as a fiction writing environment just because of soft word wrap.

No, I’m giving it another whirl because of all of the other features that Emacs has gained since I last tried it. Two features in particular; these two features totally made me scrap my plans to go out and buy Scrivener.

The first major piece of awesomeness is org-mode. org-mode basically solves one of the problems in way that isn’t intuitive first, but after you notice it, it becomes a “now why the hell didn’t I think of this before”-type idea.

My previous big objection to editing text files was simple: When you work on fiction, you really need to be working on multiple files at once… and these files should be stored in one “project file”. None of the text editors could get this. I loved TextRoom and Bean, but this was really one of the Scrivener features that made me drool. Of course, Celtx solved this problem as well. You could have a specific files for random work-in-progress scenes, and files for scrapped scenes, and things like that. And, of course, separate files for notes. Heck, a categorised database for background information.

org-mode developers, in turn, just ask a relevant big question: “why use separate files when you can conveniently stick the stuff in one file, dammit?”

A piece of fiction can just be a bunch of text paragraphs in an outline file, you know. When someone asks you “can you edit and rearrange individual scenes?”, the answer is simple: well, it’s just a bloody outliner, of course it can do it.

Then the org-mode developers say other fascinating things: “You know that feature in Scrivener where you can add status to your work? We have that. Hell, you can customise the statuses. You know the feature where you can stick random tags to your pieces of fiction? Hell, we have that too. Shit’s fully taggable and searchable. That corkboard thing? Fuck corkboard, we have folding and fuzzy-search hyperlinks – whenever, wherever. Adding comments to the text? Comment lines start with # – you know what to do. And before you ask if you can add text formatting and export as HTML, hell yes, we do those too.”

Basically, org-mode bends the definition of outliners until you realise that outlines are text and text is outline and now you’re a babbling lunatic who no longer makes sense. But it does make sense. I have seen but a fraction of the true genius of this software. I feel like I was listening to Ted Nelson’s rants again. In org-mode, I’m… not editing a document. I’m editing a piece of fiction, one piece at a time. On a computer. In a way that makes sense.

With org-mode, I can just drop my notes in a section called “Notes”. I have a section called “Story”. Underneath, I’ll have chapters and scenes. Whoop de do. After a while, I get “Rejected stuff” and “Stuff that might work better in some other story”.

The second revolutionary new piece of code is darkroom-mode. This mode turns Emacs into a full-screen text editor. Seasoned Emacs users will probably do M-x facepalm at this point and say “you need a special mode for that?” before realising that some people here are stuck using GUIs, and these GUIs need some encouragement to return to the primordial and primitive state.

The sad truth behind full-screen “distractionless” writing programs is that they’re basically very feature-limited text editors. There wasn’t really any problem with this idea as such, but the fact is that the granddaddy of these programs is a proprietary commercial product that sells for $25. Yes, people pay money for feature-limited text editors. In open source land, we call these things “some programmer guy’s first shot at glory, before they realise everyone and their dog has written a limited-feature text editor and starts telling everyone to just use Emacs.”

I’m not condemning these people for trying to sell these products, I just find it ridiculous that they can make money. It’s like dot-com bubble all over again. I’d call the idea of “distractionless” writing programs ridiculous and overhyped, except for the fact that the concept certainly works well enough. I loved bashing text out in last year’s NaNoWriMo and not really looking other directions. I want the same stuff in Emacs.

Now, there are open source projects that implement the same ideas – I’ve used TextRoom and Bean quite successfully. But sooner or later, you’ve got to ask: Why not go the whole hog? Why not use a real text editor? You can make Emacs do this stuff, can’t you? Aww, we have no soft word wrap! …ahem, we now have soft word wrap. Moving on…

And the ridiculous thing is, running Emacs in fullscreen should be easy, right? In Linux, we have virtual consoles. To hell with X11, just go for the good ol’ text mode. Actually, when I was using a dog-old Celeron laptop, I ran Emacs in Linux text console, because the laptop was too puny to ran X11 in the first place.

But temporarily ditching GUI takes time and effort, even if it’s just “flip to the virtual console and log in”. Besides, I’m also working on an OSX laptop; no virtual console here. And here’s where the darkroom-mode kicks in. In GUI, Emacs needs some additional boosting to make it a worthwhile fullscreen editor: alternate colour mode à la Bean, and some additional margin control. Fortunately, darkroom-mode does just this, and seems to work fine.

Add as the sugar in the bottom, I could get markdown-mode, and got blogging covered, too.

Truly, people are making Emacs do everyfriggingthing. And this is awesome. I can now bash text out in Emacs, and edit it in LibreOffice, while Emacs also doubles as my web dev and LaTeX editor, and file conversion assistant. Less programs, more results.

But still, it’s fun to return to Emacs as a fiction editor. When I was a kid, I wrote my first horrible fantasy novel(ette) with DOS Emacs, when Windows 3.1 Write wouldn’t cut it. I also wrote the first Avarthrel stories with Emacs, before abandoning it due to lack of soft word wrap and limited typography. I’ll be happy to see how this renewed relationship works out.

But wait! I hadn’t used VICE in years, but there’s now a full-on Aqua port of VICE for OS X. When I was a kid, I was sure (probably, can’t remember for certain) that I could never fill up the ginormous memory space of 30490 bytes, available in Mini Office II. And yes, MO2 word processor looks just like the vaunted Distractionless Writing Environments™: edit time clock, word counter, and free memory counter – what more do you need? Hit ⌘F and VICE looks and feels just like a real Commodore 64 – just with a better keyboard. Maybe, just maybe, I should prove the kiddy version of me wrong and write a story in MO2. Still, my nano2010 project turned out to be 308171 bytes – yep, I really, really had to check that there wasn’t an extra “1” in the end. I would barely fit that text on a single 5.25” floppy… split on two sides. But short stories? Maybe, maybe…

That, however, kind of reminded me of one of my famous author’s brushes with no-bullshit writing environments of yesteryear:

“I am happy to greet the geniuses [Seymour Rubenstein and Rob Barnaby] who made me a born-again writer, having announced my retirement in 1978, I now have six books in the works and two [probables], all through WordStar.” —Arthur C. Clarke

(And I hear George R.R. Martin dug WordStar too. They’re all wrong! Wrong, I say! WordPerfect 5.1 FTW!)

Poor people can't afford cheap things

2011-05-09T11:47:56Z

It’s that time again - time to rant about software!

All I’ve learned over the past few years is that developing writing software sounds deceptively easy, yet no one seems to get it right.

]]> I’m a big open source fan, as should be fairly apparent. My current setup for bashing out text consists of Bean (OS X) and TextRoom (Linux).

I have used Celtx for comic scripts. Now, Celtx finally includes “novel” support, so I can actually use it for fiction. Celtx has some cool features I really like, like the ability to put multiple documents in the same “project” (so I can just rip out omitted scenes and stash them elsewhere while I rework them) and the cross-referencing system is pretty damn cool.

And this brand new addition is, paradoxically enough, seriously making me to consider spending actual money for evil proprietary writing software.

Software that is not Celtx.

The reason for this is fairly complex, however. In novel writing arena, Celtx is obviously giving hell for software that is also geared toward novelists. On OS X, it’s trying to compete with Scrivener.

Common sense would suggest that there’s really no reason to get worried. Scrivener has a bunch of neat features. If you want them, you’ll pay for them. Celtx is an open source project; if you want features, you should suggest them an hope someone implements them.

The problem is that Celtx is probably not having any of that.

Why? Just a hunch.

Celtx is selling add-ons to the basic software.

Now, I’m not against selling proprietary add-ons for open source if it helps you achieve goals that are hard or impossible to achieve via open source efforts, due to lack of motivation. For example, if some Hollywood studio needs interfacing with some hideous proprietary legacy system that was really popular at some point in time, they can - and probably should - pay for that support. The rest of us, who have used fully open source workflow for ages, don’t need it.

But they’re charging money for stuff that conceivably could go to the core product. Celtx is selling an add-on that enables full screen “distractionless” editing mode - similar to the one in Bean and TextRoom - for $4.49.

I know what people are saying. A low price like $4.49 really highlights the fact that people wouldn’t pay more for it. Dammit, full screen mode isn’t rocket science. Hell, perhaps some newbie who wants to have their first brush with JavaScript and XUL is rolling up sleeves right now and is going to code the feature right n…

…wait. The proprietary full screen mode add-on causes one small problem: you can’t have that feature in the open source product, now can you? I mean, if it was in the core open source product, then you’d not get sales from the proprietary add-on. They cannot accept such code contributions.

So here’s the bottom line: Celtx is selling a full screen mode and a plot organiser as a separate product. This means that while such features would be very fun to find in an open source project, those features will never be implemented in open source Celtx, even if the user community would like to contribute the code.

So, if I want those features in an open source project, I might as well start looking for other programs that do the exact same job. Like, uhm, Bean and Storybook.

And if you assume the problem is that I’m a cheap bastard, then think of the other alternative: If I go out and pay for those features in a proprietary side, I might as well go and buy the better software - and that might well be Scrivener. Why pay $15 for a “Celtx Plus”/”Super Bundle” when I can just go and pay $40 for Scrivener and get far more features? An old proverb says that poor people can’t afford cheap things - you’ve got to buy the best thing you possibly can, so you won’t be needing fixes right away.

I’m not saying I will get Scrivener. Celtx has the basic functionality down, I don’t really need the full-screen mode (I still have a bit of attention span left), and being a Unix guy, I’m not averse to using a huge bunch of tools to accomplish my goals, so I don’t really need an “integrated” solution for writing stuff. I’ll definitely give Celtx’s novel mode a whirl.

What I would be asking for Celtx to do, instead, is that they should really consider the premium add-on strategy an the way they gather money. Open source projects thrive when the core products are open, because this will let people implement features they think are absolutely essential. The focus has to be on improving the product. Creating two classes of products means that the implementors have to consider the organisatorial political implications of the design decisions; if at any point you have to say “you can’t improve the product, because we won’t be making money that way”, you’ve failed at project management. Celtx has found some interesting ways to generate money - the “studio” feature is probably very neat for people who need that sort of things, and the way they’re bringing Celtx to the supremely evil and open-source-hating Apple devices (*insert obligatory ahems from a guy who’s typing this on Emacs on OS X*) is just the kind of stuff I mentioned earlier about fulfilling needs people can’t or won’t be able to do.

Vendor lock-in? In my open source?

2011-03-18T14:00:13Z

One of the reasons I like open source is that vendor lock-in is less likely. Often, open source applications are built on open file formats and open standards, and files can be edited in different applications. The reason people stick to specific applications is that they happen to work for them. There’s something in each app that makes them suitable for specific tasks. This is not always optimal; for example, currently OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice is the best implementation of all OpenDocument features (i.e., if you want metadata and templates to work properly, you use these applications, because other applications are likely to mess things up), but if you want to just get access to the file content, there’s plenty of applications that read ODF files and can write ODF format files.

But there is one application that illustrates that you can get into vendor lock-in hell in open source world.

]]> This application, of course, is MediaWiki.

Don’t get me wrong: MediaWiki is an excellent piece of software, and it is probably one of the best and most versatile wiki packages ever, especially for larger wikis like Wikipedia. If you use it as intended - as a single hub for your data - it’s a wonderful piece of software.

But it’s not exactly a wonderful piece of software if you want to get data in or out. I made the mistake of picking MediaWiki when, in retrospect, a smaller package (MoinMoin) would have been much better.

It’s just that I can’t move to MoinMoin right now.

I assume my silent readership has gone up by 200% and I have at least one reader now. For the benefit of my new readers, a summary of my basic situation is this: I have an internal wiki “encyclopaedia” for Avarthrel-related notes. These notes form the “canonical” description of Avarthrel. The wiki has been on a couple of different platforms: Instiki (a grim spectre of things to come, because basically the same thing that happened on current setup happened with this software), SnipSnap, and for most of its lifetime, MediaWiki.

I’m all about openness in world design, so the crucial question people might be asking is this: why isn’t the “encyclopaedia” of Avarthrel out in the web?

There’s a simple reason for that. MediaWiki won’t let me do that.

Providing this encyclopaedia of internal notes would be fairly trivial if I could just export the wikipages as HTML. There’s a MediaWiki extension called dumpHTML, which would let me to export the wiki to a set of HTML files; I’d just need to provide some sort of a skin for it, and hey, there it is. Based on the state of this awesome encyclopaedia dump project, can you guess how well this script actually works? Right.

MediaWiki does, these days, also support SQLite, so I could stick this wiki on the webhost. There’s just one small problem: Migrating MediaWiki from MySQL to PostgreSQL wasn’t exactly easy, and involved recreating user accounts and re-uploading files. Migrating from PostgreSQL to SQLite would probably involve same stuff. And there’s always the fact that MW extensions are not extensively tested on PostgreSQL; it’s likely that if the software fails to work on PostgreSQL to its full capacity, it won’t work too well on SQLite either.

That’s the sad secret of MediaWiki: the actual software works pretty well, but the data migration and data exporting is hell; the tools work to varying extents, and you’ll probably lose a lot of work. There are tools to dump the data into backup files, and restore those backups, but you don’t get full parity.

The tool usability isn’t very fun either. Sticking some information to this blog post, for future reference:

% php5 maintenance/update.php --conf $PWD/LocalConfig.php

and

% MW_INSTALL_PATH=$PWD php5 maintenance/dumpBackup.php --full --output=file:/tmp/whatever.xml

…because you just love it when there’s two different ways to specify where the config files are.

And while PHP is a very good programming language, there are certain… quirks.

% php5 --version
...
zsh: segmentation fault  php5 --version

*stare for half a minute* *very slow facepalm*

My current situation is that I upgraded PHP from 5.2 to 5.3 and MediaWiki from 1.15 to, um, 1.15. MediaWiki blew up, failing to render page content. I upgraded MediaWiki to 1.16, but this only broke the system further. My only consolation at the time is that the data appears to be intact and I have backups from time before the upgrade. MediaWiki may not be to blame, but I sure as hell don’t have any idea what broke this time. MediaWiki is enterprise software that is far too complicated for customers to comprehend, and like all enterprise software customers, I’m at the vendor’s mercy what comes to them shipping a version that actually works. I’m not a paying customer, so I shouldn’t expect help; all I have is a vague reassurance that this particular version works for the particular client that the vendor has provided the software for (that is, Wikimedia Foundation). It’s not a nice piece of software when things go hopelessly wrong.

So, don’t be alarmed if I start looking for ways to migrate the thing to some system that is a bit friendlier to exporting tools, like MoinMoin. The only problem, right now, is getting the data out of MediaWiki. Granted, this will be less of a hell than with certain proprietary systems, and it will be a bit of a hell when the advertised data exporting tools are outdated in some days and just plain refuse to work in others. But still…

You'll never know where you end up...

2011-01-18T20:43:04Z

Character design is a funny process.

A lot of people seem to think that it's crucial to design the characters beforehand, write all sorts of character questionnaire forms, and whatnot.

But as a software guy, I don't really believe in that. Just like software is often best designed in an interative fashion - you make plans, implement something, refine plans, refine implementation, and so on - the characters are pretty much easiest to build that. So the "character sheets", to me, are just a springboard.
]]>
A good example of the character design process is Kara.

Kara's origins are a bit obscure. Initially, Kara sprang into existence as some member of the Order of Dried Petals. At the time, I was mostly focusing my design efforts on the Order.

The very first mention in my notebook about Kara, dated April 15, 2009, isn't very detailed:

~~Karadjana~~ "Kara" ~~Borjenn~~ Karaydjhenna Bourejenn
"We all bleed red. However, we all ~~make~~ also make an equally funny ~~sound~~ splashing sound when we fall ~~in a~~ head-first in a well. Avoid the well."

The spelling of the first name apparently mutated to "Karaydhjenna" at some point.

I started writing a story at the time, and I didn't have really a good idea about the character at first - just that the Order had to commit some pretty odd murders to make people realise things. But not much in the way of the character. Apparently, I had typed some notes later on:

Karaydhjenna (Kara) Bourejenn (b. 3.VI.608 AR--) is an assassin working for the New Order of Dried Petals. Before joining the order, Kara had worked in many menial low-paying jobs in the Anchorfall docks; her most frequent employer was Villard's Paint Kitchen. In this period she was married twice, but didn't have any children; in both occasions, her husbands got killed violently. Kara found the Order soon after it had been re-established in 630 AR. She hadn't even considered a life as an assassin, and was mostly drawn to the order due to its religious message; she found comfort considering how most of the people around her seemed to die before their time.
She usually comes across as a rational and humorous person who doesn't take life too seriously - and especially doesn't take death too seriously. While not averse to taking life when needed, she tries to avoid killing people as much as possible, and avoids all cruelty, but few of her victims have managed to escape without crippling injuries.

I had also made some notes about a few of the people Kara had killed at first, most importantly the circumstances around her first few kills.

And that's about as far I got when making notes when I started drawing the Kara the Assassin comic. Most of these things were written a few months before the KtA began.

But the weird thing is this: I had no idea about her personality, beyond the vague general idea. "Rational", "humorous", "doesn't take life too seriously"? Yep, vague, general. I had no idea what that really meant, but that was the direction I had decided to take her development.

And curiously enough, I had absolutely no idea how she looked. Looks aren't that important in short stories, but they're pretty damn crucial in comics. So when I started drawing Kara the Assassin, I had no idea what she would look like when I drew the first panel. I had to make a decision. She had to look... like something. Something appropriate.

And with that, a small part of Kara's attitude and demeanor seemed to form. Oh damn - Kara has to have, like, facial expressions and all. In the subsequent comics, she needed to frown, she needed to smile, she needed to be happy and cranky and kind of normal. And I had to make some decisions that don't directly apply to a black-and-white comic: by the second comic, I had decided Kara was a redhead.

But the most crucial thing is this, in retrospect: I had absolutely no idea what was going on in Kara's head in that panel. And to a certain extent, I still don't. Why is she looking to the viewer? I still don't know that. In the second panel, she closes her other eye and looks at her victim with a puzzled, really weird look - I have especially not figured out what the hell is she thinking there.

Is it bad that I still don't know the answers?

Not necessarily. Yeah, if I re-drew the comic, I'd probably change the expressions a bit.

But the crucial thing is this: I didn't know the answers then, but heck, I definitely know the answers when I draw the new pages now. I've started to understand what makes the characters tick.

In comic page 48, we see Kara with a rather familiar-looking expression on her face.

When I drew that panel, a thought occurred to me: I know what Kara is thinking here. And I knew exactly what the other characters were thinking.
From right to left:
Boris: "I want to apologise. This is absolutely nothing personal."
Kara: "I know I'm not supposed to be angry. Yet, I'm not apologising for being a bit peeved, no matter what the Order says."
Tina: "You may be thinking that, unlike my friends here, I'm clearly unarmed. And there's a damn good reason for that..."

Doesn't sound much, but the crucial detail to think is this: it's now far easier to guesstimate what Kara is doing in the tales, which makes the tales both easier to write and easier to draw.

Kara's details have developed over time. For example, the Order of Dried Petals is supposed to be a serious organisation, so I figured that Kara's lack of reverence is probably going to cause a bit of headache to the higher-ups. I had written some notes about Kara's first kills; Filbert Goodmeadow's tale was eventually covered in "Not a Funny Story", and I guess that tale inspired a few more details and inspired me to cover more ground in tales further on.

I guess the main thing to learn from this rambling is that, uh, characters can and should take a life of their own. Don't chuck the character sheets out, but never underestimate the power of just going where the nose points at. Beware of what the folks in the software industry call "analysis paralysis".

Necessary evils: character sexuality

2010-11-27T18:14:16Z

Okay - here's a completely pointless blog post that's a whole lot of hot air over a non-issue. But dammit, it needs to be said. Sort of.

Here's a frequently heard bit of writing advice: one all-too-often neglected part of character design is the character's sexuality; it crops up way too often in unexpected places.

Here's another frequently heard bit of writing advice: if your fictional characters start talking to you, go see a shrink.

The big question: Are they trying to mess with my head? =)
]]> I don't give a damn. I just want to put it on page and be done with it.

So here goes: My characters speak to me in various ways. And I'd probably want to go in bed with them. There.

(Now, obviously, I'm well aware the characters are fictional, and as such, it's just me who's finding the stories with the characters interestingly introspective, and I obviously can't get in bed with characters who don't actually exist. Don't call the loonie house just yet. I'm perfectly aware that these are fictional characters. Thank you. =)

Honestly, I don't know - is this a good thing or bad thing?

I know it's weird, but at the same time, I can't possibly imagine that this would be an unexpected side effect of a creative process. I want the characters to be somehow appealing and interesting and I want the stories they appear in to have some sort of an interesting message. I want the characters to provoke some sort of a reaction.

I keep thinking of the relationship between the characters and the environment they are in, because that is one of the things that makes the characters interesting. And one part I end up thinking about is the sex lives of the characters. Because that obviously affects the characters and their relationship with the world.

"There's no need to think about it too much", the wise advice on character sexuality said. "But do think about it in general terms. Because it does crop up." (I can't remember what page exactly said this, but it was probably this blog post, in Finnish).

So, I keep running into sexuality in the stories, even when it's not exactly a hot-button issue, and I keep explicit sex scenes out of the short stories and comics.

I get weirded out because I'm not really sure what everyone else thinks of this issue. I'm... puzzled.

I guess the only reason I get really weirded out because this stuff could be classed pornography. Just because sexuality could play part in the stories.

I'm honestly afraid of the reactions, but at the same time, I know I'm worrying too much, and for no reason. This blog post may be completely pointless, but dammit I'm going to post it for the sake of my sanity.

So here's a statement from me: I have a mission to create interesting characters. Part of that comes from thinking of the sexuality of the characters. It should be darn obvious when you look at the stuff the characters do. But still.

I care about the characters. Because if I didn't, then the characters would be entirely pointless. I try to make characters with points in their favour.

I guess the biggest problem I have right now is that I have no way of telling whether my care for the characters shows outside or not, because I don't get a ton of feedback from outside sources. I sure as hell hope it does show.

So I sort of care for the characters for variety of reasons. The real reasons why I'd want to sleep with my characters is usually some other reason besides their sexuality. For example, I wanted Faira to be smart and cheerful, Kara to be carefree, Quirierle to be smart and resilient... OK, I may just have a thing for tomboys and smart women who kick butt. I don't really care much about the sexuality; it's just a bit of backstory to somehow explain the character relationships.

As far as Kara's concerned, her sexuality has only cropped up a few times. for example, there's a couple of direct references that Kara's into one-night stands; she'd just think the life is too short for another marriage that ends too soon. (Epic backstory says two of her husbands got themselves killed on the Docks.) Kara and Boris, the two primary protagonists of the comic, have a largely one-way relationship where Kara's not quite sure if Boris, the eternal warrior monk, gets the point that sex is supposed to be fun.

Similarly, I had to go out and deconstruct how Quirierle's psychology works, even when she's only appeared in one story so far (and had a cameo appearance in the comic). She's a former soldier in a world where soldiers are - as far as noble ideals go, not necessarily the practice - not supposed to really get married, just to leave broken families behind. So she's kind of grumpy when one-night stands are hit-or-miss, and is a little bit averse of even making lasting friendships, let alone getting married - even when she's no longer in the military.

That sort of things.

I'm not apologising for this stuff. It's just one of the way I try to make the characters interesting.

Am I succeeding? I do hope so.

And thus endeth NaNoWriMo. In victory.

2010-11-27T15:22:02Z

All I can say is that the NaNoWriMo 2010 was an amazing experience.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The novel didn't turn out to be as good as I expected because I just didn't have time to add all of the neat stuff in, and the beginning of the story ballooned so much that the last part of the story is kind of sparse, but hey, I finished the story. Yay yay yay. There's the remaining 11 months before the next November to finish it up! =)

"Dusts of Avalon" is, contrary to what I've previously written, a military science fiction novel that also deals with some Arthurian stuff. Epic stuff all around! You can read it at Scribd and comment there, or download the PDF from there, or you can also grab the PDF from ye official Web 1.0-compliant website. I'll probably make the story available in other formats (EPUB and plain ol' HTML) later on.

Back to revisions. And, of course, back to writing more Avarthrel stuff!

NaNoWriMo: A third down, two thirds to go

2010-11-08T21:57:57Z

A little note:

I've stalled it in previous years, but this year, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo, dammit. Here's my participant page, in case you're interested.

I'm doing fine. 8 days out of 30 behind. 18,038 words out of 50,000 done - that's over one third, which jives pretty well with the fact that I'm getting close to done on the first act/part of the novel. I'm apparently slightly ahead of the nominal schedule.Yayyy.

NaNoWriMo is turning out to be slightly challenging. One of the reasons is that I'm decidedly not writing an Avarthrel tale; this is a military science fiction novel that is set on 27th-century Earth. It's also challenging because it's based on Arthurian legends (and mating King Arthur with science fiction was actually inspired by this fine entry in Good Show Sir) and I don't know that much about Arthurian tales, so it's a little bit of a research problem too.

But the biggest problem is simply this: it takes me months to get a 8000-word short story done. When I started writing Avarthrel tales, I started writing a novel, quickly figured "gee, this is really damn difficult, isn't it?" and decided to stick to short stories until I get the milieu properly figured out. Getting "Shadows Over Nothross" done was probably my biggest literary achievement so far, editing that tale took a whole spring and in retrospect, that tale probably had a wide variety of problems stemming from the lack of planning. And it's only 22,000 words.

Now I'm looking at the effort of writing a 50,000-word novel. In a world based on real world, on a genre I really love as a reader, but haven't yet written anything significant in that genre. And I'm looking at the word counter that says 18,038 and I'm thinking "bloody hell, that word count algorithm is probably buggy. I probably use too many dashes. Yeeeeeeeah, that's probably pretty damn endemic in my writing."
And I'm also thinking "Damn it, I can finish this."
And I'm also thinking that every time I ramble about this project to anyone at all outside, it commits me harder to this project.
Now I absolutely, positively have to finish this project, come hell or high water.

In other news, the Avarthrel tales that were slightly late to begin with will be slightly more late, due to NaNoWriMo. As if that would come as a surprise. =)

Back to writing!

Some deficiencies of the Semantic MediaWiki

2010-09-28T10:49:40Z

(Damn! I should blog more often.)

I have been using MediaWiki for my character/world notes so far, and it seems to perform very adequately. Semantic MediaWiki is an awesome enhancement that makes MediaWiki the best damn information organisation tool ever.

However, there are certain things that could make it much easier to use SMW for organising information about fictional entities.
]]>

The Protagonist has a [[friend::The King|friend in high places]].

This establishes a relation between The Protagonist and The King - specifically, that The Protagonist's friend is The King. In semantic terms, we have a triple of information: subject (The Protagonist), predicate (friend), and object (The King). This is an one-way relation - The King isn't necessarily the Protagonist's friend - but if the article about the King says "The King also considers [[friend::The Protagonist]] a close associate", then we have established a two-way relation.

This data can also be simply information: The Protagonist is a [[occupation::lumberjack]]. The Protagonist has downed [[beers drunk::2936]] pints over his life. The Protagonist was born in [[birthdate::May 19, 632]] AD in [[birthplace::The Cold Northern Country]].

Now, the latter two properties have a few small problems which I'd like to discuss.

Semantic MediaWiki date type is perfectly suitable for real-world dates. It's less suitable for fictional dates. Avarthrel uses Gregorian calendar to a certain extent to make it much easier for me to compute dates (this is just a total coincidence as far the world is concerned, of course); The funny part is that the calendar has an odd notion of years. Fantasy worlds aren't fantasy worlds unless the people wouldn't start a new calendar due to a gigantic event, just because. Obviously, I can't use the thing with a weird calendar.

Another date-related oddity is that dates can't be used with semantic properties, unless I specifically add dates to everything and add specific processing rules for the dates.

In other words, I can't say "The Protagonist worked as a lumberjack in May 3, 651. In May 15, 651, the Protagonist became Sir Protagonist, the Knight. In May 29, 651, the Protagonist became the Liberator, Saviour and Prince of the Principality of Halfakingdomnia" - or, rather, I can say it, it's just that it needs extra clumsiness that makes doing all other kinds of queries difficult, too. It would be exceedingly cool to add historical perspective to the properties so it would be possible to do queries like "what was the Protagonist's occupation in May 16, 651?" without affecting queries like "what is the Protagonist's occupation - or, rather, all known occupations over time?"

The location presents another problem. The Protagonist lives - or lived - in a Cold Little Town with Shacks... which is located in the Northern Backwaters Farming County... in the Duchy of Big Hopes But Little Rewards, in The Cold Northern Country. But all the semantic data just tells us that the Protagonist lives in a Cold Little Town with Shacks. That alone should answer the questions "Which country does The Protagonist live in?" or, through a second-degree inference, "Who is the duke who reigns over his lands?" Geopolitical data is hierarchical in nature, and I hope this sort of properties and queries would be far easier to do.

Testing a "writer's word processor"

2010-05-10T15:31:31Z

I've been looking for a word processor that might work better than OpenOffice.org Writer for the purpose of writing fiction. I have a rather haphazard list of features that I deem necessary, and I really should write them down some day.

That said, so far it seems that TextRoom is the best software I've found. It's still far from perfect, but it looks like a good try.

]]> WriteRoom, which is one of these newfangled "distractionless" word processors. (I've also previously evaluated PyRoom, which is also nice, but needs some gimmicks to run on Windows, while TextRoom has pre-built binaires for Windows and Linux.)

"Distractionless" word processors sound like a good concept, unless you're a bit of a cynic. Here's what I wrote about "distractionless" word processors earlier, because I've actually implemented one myself - sort of. I'm working on marketing material for Conman's Dictionary, which includes a brief bit on this awesome application.

The trend in modern writing applications - that is to say, software geared toward novelists - is toward simplicity and lack of user interface clutter.
Conman's Dictionary is in the front trenches of this battle with its revolutionary Notepad feature, which will allow you to make relevant and accurate notes with the rampant one-track-minded ferocity of the dreaded Swampspector himself. The notepad itself consists of an elegantly initialised JEditorPane instance, which also utilises a scrollbar in form of a likewise simply and elegantly initialised JScrollPane instance. Dismissal of the editor is handled through the very latest in button technology, a JButton - pure, simple, standardised, unambiguously labelled as the close button; perhaps a tad bit conservative in its design, but nevertheless exhibiting functionality over form. Text of the editor is practically stored in the most fitting of XML datatypes, an xs:string, one of the most elementary and efficient of XML datatypes in use. When using the Notepad feature in Conman's Dictionary, you can almost see that you are editing a long litany of characters stored in the file between and tags as a simple character stream. No formatting, save whitespace; just you, your text, a text editor control and a button to end your ardourous day of work.
..."So this Notepad is just a bloody normal Java plain text editor field", I hear you say after a pregnant pause. I smile and nod... and you smile and nod in return; we both know how these modern word processors are fundamentally awful and blatantly over-engineered for wrong purposes - they're all geared toward office peons writing forgettable rubbish paperwork, not true artists working on true literary art.
Seriously, though, the Notepad is highly useful for storing simple notes for work-in-progress stuff, and it's stored right in the same file with the dictionary itself.

This pretty much summarises why I've never really bothered with these software packages. WriteRoom is a bog-ordinary, rather limited text editor which sells for $25. TextRoom is basically a Qt HTML editor widget in a nice wrapping. I get this weird moral dissonance that says that "less feature-packed software does the job, dammit", but also "the more you think of it, the more it sounds like snake oil".

So, here is why I think TextRoom is awesome:

Runs on both Linux and Windows.
It actually has on-screen formatting. If I want italics, it will show up as italics.
The file format is basically just souped-up HTML - easy to import, probably.
The Word Processor shall have white text on blue background, all else is heresy, and TextRoom lets me use this colour scheme. The colours that are displayed on the screen are not the colours that get in the actual document. They're just the colours that are good for your eyes when you write the bloody text

The last is the biggest selling point for me. When I write the text, I don't care what the text looks like. I care that my eyes don't bleed while I write.

But still, when I write, I care about semantics: I want to make sure headings are there, I want to make sure quotation marks and dashes are there, and I want emphasis when emphasis is due. So here are some of its shortcomings:

When you introduce features like "full control over fonts", it gets grimy. If I specify an on-screen font, I expect that to be used for the whole text. I only need italics or bold for specific parts. Now, it lets me micro-manage the formatting, which isn't an entirely good thing.
I like automatic smart quotation marks in OpenOffice.org; I get "quotes like this" for English and "quotes like this" for Finnish without any extra effort. Similarly "space dash space" brings me an en dash. Really, all I need is a convenient way to drop in the special bits of typography that the keyboard doesn't have.
OpenDocument support would be awesome. If I could swap stuff between TextRoom and OpenOffice.org without any data loss at any point, life would be sweet. It would be awesome to use one program for producing text, and another for formatting it, working on macros and all that other crap. It'd perhaps work even better if it also supported paragraph styles: I don't want to touch formatting, but if I want a header in the text, I usually want it to actually, you know, be a header.

But still, having written a bit with TextRoom for now, it seems fairly awesome. I'll probably post more about this when I get inspired enough.

Do software licences get you down?

2010-05-02T10:58:10Z

I haven’t blogged anything for a while, so here’s something just to get me back on track… A little bit on video weirdness and fan fiction weirdness.

]]> Recently, there’s been some rumbling about free standards on the Web. Commercial software providers are pushing for H.264 as the HTML 5 video standard. The problem is that H.264 (also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec, the codec that’s used in Blu-Ray discs and HD video cameras too) is heavily patented, while Web standards have traditionally been free to use; simply put, you don’t have to pay anything to anyone to implement a Web browser. There is a free-to-use video standard called Theora that isn’t quite as advanced as H.264; people are also pushing Google to open up a video codec called VP8, which would be a contender to H.264.

There’s a big problem that the H.264 proponents frequently ignore: As the Free Software Foundation points out, H.264 licences only allow the H.264 licenced software to be used for the “personal and non-commercial use”. If you want to use it for commercial purposes, you supposedly need to pay more. No, this is not included in the price of most H.264 applications; even Final Cut Pro, Apple’s flagship video editor software, is only licenced for “personal and non-commercial” H.264 use. People probably frequently ignore this little condition. People could get bitten in the butt pretty severely in the future. (A decade ago, people said “who cares - MP3 is free!”… and the next month, hardware manufacturers were paying MP3 licence fees.)

But I’m not writing this to whine about H.264 specifically. I’m writing this to whine about the “personal and non-commercial use”.

I’ve seen an incredible amount of drama in fan fiction circles, even when I don’t even read fan fiction. I get it; people like TV series and video games and whatnot a lot, and then enter into pointless squabbles over whose fan character is the best. Then they enter into even more pointless squabbles over who has the right to use which fan character.

They all forget one big thing: they’re guests in the house. They don’t have the rights to their fan characters. The real owners of the franchises own the rights.

This is the big trap that people wander into when they venture in the land of “personal and non-commercial use”. There’s always a big threat hanging above their heads: someone else has the right to say that this won’t do.

I’ve seen people build entire imaginary media empires around Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon. These imaginary media empires exist because Sega and Nintendo allow them to exist; if they didn’t, they’d be crushed.

It is my opinion that fan fiction is a similar sort of trap as the H.264 licence situation. People find something awesome. They pretend to themselves that there’s a niche here that they’re allowed to use for their own good. What’s really happening is that they’re not really aware of who is in the full rights to stomp them.

Personally, I’ve always felt uneasy when I’ve used software that is only intended for “personal and non-commercial use”. On the other hand, free and open source software has always felt like the right choice for me, because it won’t try to dictate how the hell am I supposed to actually use the software. Software that says it’s only for “personal and non-commercial use” is saying “You’re not a professional. You’re not creative. What you create with this software is insignificant. What you create with this software will always remain unprofitable, because we say so. You are a normal consumer, and normal consumers don’t create. Normal consumers are not allowed to be creative in any way.”

Note that I’m not saying that true art is always commercially profitable, or even the inverse case that the true art should always be non-profit. What I’m saying is that true art shouldn’t be constrained by that sort of thing. Artists create something, and they shouldn’t need to be concerned whether or not the artwork is, one day, going to make money. That sort of thing puts limits to one’s creativity. What would you say if you created artwork for non-profit purposes, and when this work would be sold after the eventual thunderous posthumous recognition, the first thing the buyer would see would be the software vendor asking for money?

It’s same sort of thing with fan fiction. “You’re a guest. You’re allowed to create fan fiction because it’s nice. But you’re destined to always be derivative. You’re not the Creator. You’re the Fan. The Fans are not really creative, they’re just repeating what the Creator did.”

And what I’m trying to say is this: Normal consumers are allowed to be creative. You are allowed to be creative. Creativity is everyone’s right. Software licences that tell you that you’re not allowed to use a piece of software to express your creativity and reap all of the potential benefits from it.

Similarly, I don’t want people to create Avarthrel “fan fiction”. I want people to create their own works based on Avarthrel. I don’t want people to just be “fans” who create works in my shadow; I want people to contribute in their own way. If you are creating an epic fantasy work and suddenly realise “damn it, I don’t want to create an Avarthrel-based work after all, I’m a great author on my own merits and want to create something original instead”, that’s your right and I’m willing to accept that too - I’m not that attached to my very own media franchise cashcow thing.

The latter is, of course, just academic because I don’t have actual fans who would be doing this. All I’m saying is that if you create fan works, then bloody heck, there’s nothing stopping you from creating something actually original. It could be a liberating experience. Try it!

Surprisingly few non-news news

2010-03-12T22:25:15Z

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.

Grave Movable Type news

2009-11-16T12:08:32Z

"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.