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

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

The biggest news:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

I was kind of inspired to do a small update to the website today after reading Slashdot story about Scridb folks opening an e-book sales channel. (Won't affect me - first, my stories are under Creative Commons licenses and shall remain so; second, if I want my stuff published through commercial channels I expect some sort of editorial gatekeeping to go with it; third, the bloody thing is only available on US at the moment anyway).

The Avarthrel tales have been on Scribd for a while now. I've had a couple of reads, it seems, though not too many since the initial publication. Not exactly a rousing success, and not really all that much bigger than my success in deviantART or Elfwood so far. Not that I'd be complaining - any reads are good reads =) I guess I just need to write more.

Though, I have to say the whole premise of Scribd is a little bit weird. I uploaded mostly textual PDFs, which get read through this weird Flash-based PDF reader. This, on the Web. You know, the famed text-based medium. We'll see how this thing pans out. I'm actually more looking forward to publishing comics this way, one day; deviantART doesn't handle multi-page things too well, for example.

Anyway, I now put a random link to my scribd page to the Avarthrel web site sidebar.

...I guess I had to just say something to fill the void. It's not like there's been a lot of things happening in Avarthrel development lately, but at least there has been some slow progress. I'll probably post more about my (non-)experiences with Celtx soon.

Just a quick note - the stories are now also available in Scribd. Not sure if / how this will help people find the stories, but there they are now!

Lately I've had this weird boneheaded feeling - in some days, I just don't feel like writing, yet in some days, I feel like I'm both unable to write and I feel so boneheaded that I suspect I've suddenly become a complete idiot. But in days like this, I feel just fine! Perhaps I'm not stupid yet! All I need is to be awake and use my head a little bit!

I have made some little progress on a few stories.

Today, I added a low-resolution map to the Avarthrel web site. I've yet to come up with an elegant solution on how to display the map on the web in a manner that would involve a little bit less effort on storage and maintenance side. I will probably use OpenLayers to serve a big chopped-up map one day...

My first experiences on webgen-based site have been a little bit disappointing, because the thing is already creaking on the seams. I have no idea how to tap into the output before it's written to the disk - I wish I knew a more elegant way to say "pages should be fed to HTMLTidy before they're written to the disk" than to run it manually. I have no idea how to add additional dependencies - I wonder how to say "the main page depends on these Atom feed files"? Hmmmm...

Well, this is one way to combat the writer's block - a new version of the website has been tinkered with, verified that it at least somewhat works on MSIE this time, and sent forth to the web server. I shall work on restoring the functionality later (little bits like, uh, commenting, is still missing.) But at least the website finally has some directory structure too! And actual proofread content! And stuff! And junk! Hooray!

The website is now backed by webgen, which will make the maintenance and adding pages a snap.