Website Updates, and Progress

Three pages today. I would have easily reached four or even six pages, had I not gotten side-tracked tweaking the code for my website/blog (ahem. For four hours). Well, there were a few different little glitches on the site in both FireFox and IE, and they've been bothering me for months now. For whatever reason, I chose tonight to be my night to make those updates. The result is that the glitches are gone, I made a few minor graphical enhancements, and I'm a bit more cross-browser compatible.

I guess that's worth sacrificing a few pages' worth of work, since the website/blog is, after all, most people's first impression of me. It's one of those marketing things that I've decided to get a jump on well before I even have an agent, let alone a publisher, because I don't want to get in a crunch (or hire somebody else) on account of the website later on. Plus, tweaking it gradually over time gives me a good chance to let the design gradually "settle."

Even so, this can't become a habit. I did finish with chapter 5 tonight, so I'm back to revising/expanding with chapter 6 tomorrow. It won't be until I get a fair ways into chapter 7 that I have another all-new scene to add.

The stats as of today:
-35,500 estimated words.
-41,126 actual words.
-Five fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (78 pages total).
-Eleven completed chapters in all (142 pages).

Made it... barely.

Just a quick post, today. I took yesterday off for a family event, so no progress then. Today was your typical Monday, but I managed to get a lot done today despite that. Tonight it took me four hours to write my four pages (two hours for the first, an hour for the second, and an hour for both the third and fourth together), and I also made minor revisions to my work from Saturday. I really didn't think I was going to make my goal, but somehow I managed to pull myself into the swing of things at long last, and I did.

That would be a rewarding feeling, if I wasn't so exhausted. But I know I'll appreciate it more tomorrow -- and even more so, I'll appreciate this sort of thing in aggregate, because if I let nights like tonight stop me, then I'm likely to get stuck for days. My hope is that by having pushed through a tough scene tonight, tomorrow's scene will flow easily. That's been the tentative pattern so far, but I don't necessarily trust it to hold up indefinitely.

Oh yes, and I broke 40,000 actual words today! Anyway, that's all for now. Time to get some rest...

The stats as of today:
-34,750 estimated words.
-40,376 actual words.
-Almost-six fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (75 pages total).
-Almost-eleven completed chapters in all (139 pages).

Plotting and Brainstorming

I didn't make my writing goal today. I revised my content from last night, and made perhaps a half-page's progress on the rest of the scene. I was having a lot of trouble determining how to wrap up this scene and ultimately end it, and that was really stopping me cold. The initial ideas that I had had when first planning this scene now seemed insufficient, but I couldn't figure out anything better.

Well, after an hour or two of flogging myself with this, trying to come up with something brilliant, I finally realized I could talk it over with my wife, who is also a writer (and a terrific editor). In the past, we haven't talked much about works in progress because we like to give the other one a chance to read the finished product (or at least a mid-level draft) with fresh eyes. But lately we've been breaking that habit, and that's definitely for the better. Brainstorming works so much better with two people than with one. Ten minutes of talking with my wife, and we had eliminated several possibilities and established the general parameters for what could happen in the next part of the scene -- being able to set some boundaries is really important when you have writer's block, or at least it is for me. With that all settled, a really great idea for ending the scene occurred to me straightaway.

Sometimes it's my wife that comes up with the great idea for my writing, sometimes it's me who comes up with the great idea for hers, but often just being able to talk to someone else about a troubling scene makes the writer come up with something all by himself/herself. Certainly, it varies, but the point is that having that second person can be really invaluable. I'm sure I would have come upon a solution eventually, but with my part-time writing schedule, it could have taken days or weeks of misery and blockage. Instead, though today was shot for writing, I'm all set for tomorrow. Tomorrow should be a good day for writing, easy to hit my goal, because I know just what I want to do with the upcoming sections (even though I'm sure that some in-the-moment details will surprise me).

Writers are often rather solitary, as writing is considered a solitary art, but if you find yourself frequently blocked, getting a friend/spouse/family member to be your sounding board might just be the ticket to breaking through. I think a lot of people use their critique partners this way, actually. But even if you don't have a full-out critique partner, having an idea-partner might be a really great way to help keep your writing on track. After all, just having someone to poke holes in your logic is a huge value in itself. Much better that happen during the ideation stage, rather than after everything is done (or worse, after publication).

I'm really glad that I finally realized this. It gives me a lot more confidence that I'll be able to maintain my pace of progress after I run out of content that needs to be revised/expanded.

Met my goal again.

Four pages, yet again! And I also made some minor revisions to the six pages from last night, so those are fully ready to go, now. This content was almost completely new, but it replaced another scene that was preexisting, so my total page count didn't rise as much as my revised page count. I had been planning to write another all-new scene to go with the one from last night, but the pacing just didn't feel right with what I was planning. So instead, I archived that idea, and will probably re-insert that scene (and actually write it) sometime later in the book. I suspect somewhere in chapter 7 or 8, unless something even better strikes me before then.

The stats as of today:
-33,750 estimated words.
-38,959 actual words.
-Five-and-a-portion fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (71 pages total).
-Ten-and-a-portion completed chapters in all (135 pages).

Well into chapter 5.

Six pages of all-new content today! And it only took me two and a half hours, amazingly. I was really flying through this content, which is surprising, because I hadn't planned it out as well as I usually need to. This scene was a flashback, and a key one at that, but since I knew the characters well enough, it came pretty easily. It actually surprised me three times with twists on how the scene developed, but I love it when scenes do that to me. It gives me the same sense of surprise that the reader gets.

Anyway, I can't say much about the specifics of the scene, as usual, but I'm now about a third of the way through chapter five. I hadn't intended on writing this entire scene tonight, but, like I said, things were just flowing. I'm happy to see that this can happen when I'm writing new content, and on a Friday to boot. If I keep this up, I'm going to finish ahead of my goal, which was ambitious to begin with. I guess we'll see if I can maintain my momentum that long. I hope so!

The stats as of today:
-33,500 estimated words.
-38,628 actual words.
-Five-and-a-portion fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (67 pages total).
-Ten-and-a-portion completed chapters in all (134 pages).

Finishing Chapter 4

Man, today was one of those days that makes me love being a writer. I was really feeling stuck yesterday on what to do with the next scene. I knew that I was going to have to rewrite it pretty completely, and it's a scene that is pretty emotionally loaded, so I was really concerned about doing it right. Well, today I spent a good amount of time after work just thinking about what I could do with that scene. My wife went to a movie with some of her friends, so this was an ideal time for me to just try and figure this out.

It took about two hours of driving, running on the elliptical trainer (nothing like endorphins to help the writing process), and zoning out looking at the rain -- but I finally figured it out. The scene had been awkward before partly because of its content, partly because of its brevity, and partly because of how it touched on important issues without really explaining them properly (because there were certain things I didn't want to give away yet). Well, I figured out how to fix all that, and I did it without giving away more than I wanted to at this stage of the novel.

Additionally, it actually gave a whole new level to one of my long-planned sub-plots, so that was an even bigger bonus. The ultimate result was some new content that I'm really proud of, five solid pages for my daily total, as well as a finished chapter four. All right!

Of course, tomorrow I'm going to have to do it all over again, because I have another emotionally-charged scene that I have to write, and which I haven't fully thought through just yet. So we'll see how that goes, but I'm hopeful. It will be a good test of the speed at which I'll be able to work once my current revision/expansion phase is finished with this book.

The stats as of today:
-32,000 estimated words.
-36,814 actual words.
-Four fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (61 pages total).
-Ten-and-a-portion completed chapters in all (128 pages).

Some days you win...

Some days you win the battle with yourself, some days you don't. Today I only completed two pages of work, though I did spend an hour making some slight adjustments to yesterday's work (that shouldn't have taken an hour, but it speaks to the state of mind I was in). Today was exhausting, and I was just too distracted to get as much done as I would have liked. I also wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with the scene I'm rewriting, and that never helps. I'll be better prepared next time. Tomorrow will be better, I'll make sure of it. Publicly airing both my successes and failures is a help, actually.

The stats as of today:
-31,000 estimated words.
-35,751 actual words.
-Almost-four fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (57 pages total).
-Ten completed chapters in all (124 pages).

Books vs. Movies

So I recently saw Stardust, a movie adaptation of a Neil Gaiman novel. From the early trailers, I wasn't interested in this movie, and from the jacket blurb and the description on Amazon, I wasn't interested in the novel. It really just didn't seem like my type of thing -- even though I write fantasy, I really am not a fan of most traditional "high fantasy," which is pretty much what this seemed to be (albeit with many strange twists, such as an odd-looking pirate played by Robert De Niro -- though I like De Niro very much, he's not exactly what jumps to mind for fantasy, right?).

Well, I guess by now you've probably heard similar sentiments all around the Internet, in papers, and from family and friends. In my case, my sister was dragged into it with low expectations, and came out talking about how great the movie was. She convinced me and my wife to go, but even still, we went in fairly reluctantly. And then, of course, like everyone else, we came out talking about how great it was. De Niro was perfect for the role he played, and I can't imagine that pirate being played by anyone else.

Well, I suppose I could launch into a discussion of bad trailers and/or bad jacket blurbs, or even a discussion of how new and/or humorous twists on old formulas don't synopsize well -- but that isn't what I really want to talk about today. This post is titled what it is because I'm now reading the original novel of STARDUST, and so far I'm really loving it -- and I'm realizing that I really prefer to read the novels after I see the movies. Otherwise, I get irritated by everything that's missing in the movie version, and everything that they changed or "messed up" for reasons of time, or visual splendor, or whatever. This was how I felt about the last few Harry Potter movies, having read and loved the books long before.

It's interesting how it only seems to work one way, most of the time. I read Stephen King's THE SHINING earlier this year, really enjoyed it, and then saw the Kubrick film -- which, of course, Kubrick really made his own, and so was completely different from the book. If I'd seen the movie before reading the book, I wonder how I would have felt? It seems to me that when I read a book after the movie, it's like finding a treasure trove of new detail to flush out what I already liked in the movie, whereas when I see a movie version of a book, it's often a popularized, lobotomized version of the book.

The upcoming movie adaptation of THE DARK IS RISING does not look promising in that regard, but I'll be going to see it regardless, because that's one of my favorite books of all time and I'd like to see how it translates to film (even though I suspect it will not fare well -- they renamed it "The Seeker," for crying out loud, and gave Will more powers and a girl crush -- that's not the story that first captivated me in fourth grade). But there's always hope, right? Fans of the Lord of the Rings books (which I am not) largely seemed pleased by the movie trilogy, and I thought the most recent movie version of THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE was exquisite. I suspect that I AM LEGEND will be an excellent adaptation of the Richard Matheson classic (which I only recently read), despite how much it has obviously changed from the original, given the trailer.

So it's not that I don't think that adaptations of books make for good movies, but it's just that so often the movies are an entirely new entity. Sometimes the movie keeps the spirit of the book, sometimes it keeps the plot and/or characterization details, sometimes it keeps little of anything. In an abstract sense, I don't really even see anything wrong with that -- film and fiction are two totally different mediums. I'd think it acceptable for a writer to hear a song, or see a painting, and be inspired into writing a novelization. That's acceptable partly because the book and the painting would so obviously be two different things -- no one would try to claim that the book was the "book version" of the painting. That wouldn't even make sense.

But since movies and books do have so many elements in common -- though novels lack the visual component of movies, and movies lack the internal life of novels, they otherwise have many shared components -- I think the tendency is for people to think that they can see the movie or read the book, and one is just as good as the other. That's where I disagree. If you saw the movie Stardust and loved it, wonderful -- now go and buy the book. If you've read the book, you might well like this particular movie adaptation, as well -- though I will warn you that many details have been changed, the spirit remains intact.

Film adaptations generally say "based on the novel," but it seems like that generally isn't something that people take too literally. Perhaps it would be more clear if we said that most movies were "inspired by" the book. Interestingly, people often have the same problem understanding what "based on a true story" means. As if memoirists just jotted down the facts of their life as they happened. A lot goes into making a successful, interesting memoir, even if the memoirist's life was inherently fascinating. I think that the same thing is true of book-to-movie adaptations.

If only more people would realize the differences inherent between the mediums, and how much is missed by seeing just the one "version" in the theaters, then perhaps the recent upsurge in novel-based movies would cause a corresponding upsurge in readership. If only.

More Progress

Nothing insightful today, just a progress report. I was feeling pretty sick this morning, so I didn't think I would be writing much, but by this evening I was feeling much better, and so managed to surpass my daily goal by a page in only a little over two hours. I had a longish meeting this afternoon, and oddly that seemed to clear up most of my cold symptoms. That's probably not one anyone's heard before. Meetings have never been a cold remedy for me before, but whatever works...

The stats as of today:
-30,750 estimated words.
-35,285 actual words.
-Almost-four fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (55 pages total).
-Ten completed chapters in all (123 pages).

Conflict vs. Anger

I made my goal of four pages again today -- four and a half pages, actually. I had to almost completely rewrite the opening two scenes of chapter four. In one scene, nothing really happened, and in the other my two characters (Elaine and Darrell) were passive and a jerk, respectively. Not exactly my best work -- my weakest writing in ALDEN RIDGE came in this particular chapter, actually, because I was trying too hard to write in a style that is not my own.

I was intentionally trying to create external conflict between the characters, in keeping with some of the writerly advice that I was reading around that time. I had read that a modern debut has to have conflict on every page, and I took that a little bit too literally in the case of Darrell needlessly acting like a jerk. In my rewrites, I was able to maintain the conflict -- he and Elaine are disagreeing about something important, and ultimately he doesn't get what he wants -- but I did so in a way that doesn't even make him come across as rude.

I suppose it may seem a subtle distinction, but essentially I just made it so that the conflict was implicit to the scene, rather than something that I was artificially manufacturing by characterizing Darrell in a way I hadn't originally intended. Based on the original version of the scene, I actually had one reader who started wondering if Darrell was going to actually turn out to be the bad guy. Suffice it to say, this was not what I was intending to convey. But I do feel like my reworked version is firing on all cylinders.

So that's what I did with the second scene -- the first scene, which was largely between Darrell and Lela, was just empty before. He told Lela some things, she said okay to each thing, there was some internal conflict on his part, and the scene ended. Fairly true to life in representing how a parent might give instructions to a child, but not exactly riveting to read about. In the original version of this scene, instead of having conflict that was manufactured, I just didn't have any conflict at all.

Fortunately, I was able to solve this problem during my rewrite. I introduced some new issues by showing more of both Darrell and Lela's thoughts (one of the beautiful things about my choice to write in third omniscient), and I rewrote their dialogue so that it was a lot more active and involved some real back-and-forth between the two of them. That way it wasn't just his monologue with her brief acknowledgments inserted in the middle. Much, much better this way.

At any rate, tonight's work takes me about a third of the way through my original chapter four, and then chapter five is going to be my first all-new chapter during these rewrites. I'm very much looking forward to that -- I guess I'll be reaching that point in three days at the most if I keep to my schedule. Oh, and also: today I hit 30,000 estimated words. All right!

The stats as of today:
-30,000 estimated words.
-34,684 actual words.
-Three-and-a-portion fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (50 pages total).
-Ten completed chapters in all (120 pages).

Excerpt, and a new rendering.

Today was one of my ten days off for this month, so I did very little revising/writing. Most of my spare time was spent working on a new rendering, this one depicting the factory from the opening chapters of ALDEN RIDGE, as it sits on the river. I've posted a full-height version below, as well as a version that has been cropped to be easily displayed on standard computer monitor dimensions.


Additionally, I've finally gotten around to posting my new excerpt from ALDEN RIDGE. You can read that here. This excerpt only contains one chapter, but the amount of content is just about the same as the two chapters that comprised my (most recent) old version. The new version of chapter one largely takes place just before where the old chapter one started, so most of it is all-new, but it catches up to the content of the old chapter one in the last two or three pages (out of what is a total of twelve and a half standard pages).

In general, I think that this new version is much better written, and contains a lot more to grab the reader's interest. It's written as dark fantasy now, remember, and so no longer exhibits the terseness or extreme pacing of a thriller. And yes, this is written in omniscient third -- please don't complain to me about that. I'm mostly posting this so that this website showcases my best work; I'm really not looking for feedback on this content at this time. I wrote it too recently to be able to make good use out of any good constructive criticism just yet.

Inspiration Strikes

Woohoo! I had suspected that today might be a productive day, for whatever reason, and I was right. This morning I woke up with the edits for the next lines of chapter three fixed in my head. When I went to make them, I wound up sitting down and working for two hours to finish off the rest of that chapter -- and I easily hit my daily goal of four completed pages. Much better than last night!

The stats as of today:
-29,750 estimated words.
-34,222 actual words.
-Three fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (45 pages total).
-Ten completed chapters in all (119 pages).

One of those days...

Bleh. Today was one of those days where I just didn't want to write at first, for a variety of reasons. It had been a fairly tiring day of programming work, and besides, it was Friday. Also, there was a really severe thunderstorm and several tornadoes touched down in the area -- I don't care about lightning, but tornadoes have been the primary actor in my worst nightmares since I was a kid. Lastly, I was kind of sore, and finding it hard to get comfortable in my chair. Oh, and I was a bit too hot.

Ahem. Presumably you see where I'm going with this. All of the above was quite true, and would previously have been enough to dissuade me from trying to write unless I was already excited about writing that day -- but if I was excited about writing that day, I most likely wouldn't have noticed any of the other stuff. As I said, previously I would have let this sort of mood, the cumulative effect of all those little excuses, trip me up. But not today!

Granted, the first hour I sat at my computer was almost completely wasted. I did just about everything but write -- and then I finally managed to get control of the situation, and made myself start working. It was difficult going for another hour or so, and then I really got into it and the last two hours of the session weren't bad at all.

In all, I did make my goal of completing four pages of work, though a lot more time and effort was required for that result than I would have liked. But that's just part of being a writer. I've decided that I can't afford to always wait until the muses are smiling. If writing is going to be my career, I have to learn to press on even without my muses, when I am utterly and completely alone in the productivity-generating department.

Some days, writing is more an act of willpower than it is inspiration. I very much hope that those days remain in the minority, but I've decided that I have a job to do regardless. Even if it isn't always a romp in the park, I can't escape the fact that I can't not be a writer. So today I wrote my four pages, even though I didn't really want to, and even if tomorrow is one of the good days I'll still be glad I pushed through those four pages today. That sort of determination on an ongoing basis is the only way I'm going to reach the goals I've set for myself. I'll be interested to see if I can do it. I've never written a novel in less than a year and a half before.

The stats as of today:
-29,250 estimated words.
-33,730 actual words.
-Nearly three fully-revised-and-expanded chapters (40 pages total).
-Ten completed chapters in all (117 pages).

Rewriting and expanding.

Okay, time for a writing progress update. I've been working on rewriting and expanding all the content that I've previously created for ALDEN RIDGE. Planning work for LUCIEN'S STORY has been on hold for a while, because I've just been so energized about my work in progress.

I have basically three reasons for undertaking this rewriting effort. First, I realized that I was underwriting in a major way in my earlier chapters. My later chapters naturally changed back into my normal, proper style, but my earlier chapters were written and paced like a thriller rather than like fantasy. You may recall that I initially thought I was writing a supernatural thriller, but now that I know I'm writing dark fantasy I had to go back and make some changes. Part of it was also just a knee-jerk reaction to being told by professional readers that I was overwriting in THE GUARDIAN. Even though I fixed that problem by my final draft, that fear of overwriting persisted into my work on ALDEN RIDGE, and the effect of that was not beneficial.

Secondly, and this is perhaps the most controversial reason for my rewrite, I'm switching from third limited to third omniscient. Oh, how decidedly un-trendy, right? Well, I have too many interlocking perspectives to be able to fit them all into isolated scenes. To properly show all the points of view that I want to show, in third limited I would have to make characters do a lot of thinking back and talking to each other about past events. This is obviously undesirable, while the nuances of the relationships are brought out especially well by having the interlocking perspectives that are possible with third omniscient. And if that style choice makes my book a little bit harder to market to agents and editors, well, then I'll just have to make the every other aspect of the writing that much more attractive. I've talked this idea over with an editor I know, and we've agreed that this is probably the best course of action for this specific book.

Lastly, I'm rewriting to add in a new sub-plot that I've recently come up with. It resolves my issues of not being entirely certain what to have Lela doing during the early parts of the book, which is important because she's always been vital to the later parts. Now I've finally figured out how to balance everything out so that she plays a continuously important role, just the same as Darrell and Elaine do.

Sometime soon, whenever I have a chance, I'll put the new version of my first chapter up on the website. I think it's one of the best things I've ever written, and I'll be very interested to see what you all think.

I have a new goal.

I decided to make this two posts, because these really are two topics. My last post was about how I am now rewriting and expanding what I've already accomplished on ALDEN RIDGE. Well, this post is about the new goal that I have set for myself in this regard.

Things are moving along with the story now; all my prior writers' block has been un-stuck, and I have every hope that this will remain the case now that I've figured out the true way that I want to tell this story. There was always something ever so slightly off with the writing style before, but now it really feels just like me again.

So, given this positive turn of events, I've decided to make the most of my new productivity, and apply some real discipline. I'm going to try to keep to a schedule of completing work on at least four pages of the book every day, for at least twenty days each month. If I can manage that, that will mean I'm completing 1,000 (estimated) words per day of writing, and 20,000 estimated words per month. That would mean a completed novel in four months.

I've never maintained such a consistent pace before, so we'll see how that goes. But when I was really going strong on THE GUARDIAN, I was writing more like 2,000 words per session. So hopefully I can keep to the proper average per month, if nothing else. I'll keep you updated on how it goes!

So far, my results are thus:
-Yesterday, I completed nine and a half pages of rewriting/expanding (2,375 estimated words!)
-Today, I completed five and a half pages of rewriting/expanding (1,375 estimated words!)

And it wasn't that I felt some compulsion to keep working, either. Writing has suddenly become fun again, and I've remembered all over again why I love doing this. For a while there I was so shaken by uncertainty that it was hard to remember the good things, but I'm well and truly through that slump, which was the worst I've ever experienced, now.

So, after today's work, my statistics for the manuscript are:
-29,000 estimated words.
-33,209 actual words.
-Two fully-revised-and-expanded chapters, plus a few pages into the third (36 pages total).
-Ten completed chapters in all (116 pages).

Take off work to... what?

It's really sad when the government has to tell people to take off work and have sex. Apparently that's just what's happening in a province in central Russia, though, where there's a low birth rate. Women who give birth on June 12 next year will even be eligible for prizes like appliances or even a new house. I guess it's good to see that the government is taking action on an important issue like the birth rate, but it's odd that people need incentives like that. I wonder if it's a factor of economic depression, or some other sort of social phenomenon?

Introverts

I've always known that I have introvert-like tendencies, but I've never thought I was a true introvert because I don't have any fear of public speaking. I'm not shy at all, in fact, and quite enjoy lecturing on technical topics in particular. I gave an hour-long presentation on Trends in Rich Client Development at a local council for technology executives just this Tuesday, in fact.

Therefore, it was with great surprise that I discovered this article from The Altantic, and this follow-up interview from several years after the article's original publication (thanks to Shrinking Violet Promotions). It turns out that I'm apparently an introvert after all, even though I have an affinity for the limelight much of the time, and am quite good at relating to people. Often I unconsciously make myself the center of gatherings (oops) by keeping up with everyone present and providing a lot of casual banter (as I've gotten older, this attention-grabbing habit has lessened steadily from its peak during my teenage years).

There are many different degrees of introverts, but I fit what are apparently the most salient factors in determining one's introvert/extrovert orientation: I don't seek out parties or the company of other people in most cases, I have no problem being alone for extended periods, and I tend to be drained, rather than energized, with extended social contact with others. Workplace contact is fine, and I've been known to run multi-day all-day meetings with large groups of clients, while retaining more stamina than any of the other attendees... but put me in a party with a group of non-family acquaintances for a couple of hours, and I'm bushed by the time I leave.

As the writer notes, this is largely because I have to consciously work to keep up the conversation when its not someone extremely familiar (family or my very best friends) or a topic with a very specific agenda (work, for the most part). I don't have to pause to think overly much when I'm talking about work things, but if you just want to chat with me about random inanities, I'm really going to have to work to hold up my own end unless we slip into anecdote-sharing mode. Then the storyteller in me takes over, and I'll be just fine until I run out of relevant anecdotes or the topic shifts again. And if it's a topic I don't have any real knowledge about, like professional sports, you're going to find me just smiling and nodding a lot (with the occasional grunts of agreement or commiseration).

Reading the interview, I was surprised to discover that my wife is not just an introvert, but also shy. I'm an introvert only, and one with an affinity for positive attention, so that's a pretty big difference in outlook. We've both always known this about ourselves and each other, but we never really had the words to put to it before. It's somehow reassuring to discover that there are a lot of others out there just like us. In college, all our friends thought we were crazy for never going to their parties. We thought they were a little crazy for being amused by the endless routine of empty socializing and drinking. Now that everyone is older, and more focused on careers and apartments/houses and serious relationships, it's a lot easier for us all to relate.

Still, it's nice to see it written in a major publication that we weren't the crazy ones. We were simply introverts, and we still are. Perhaps that's why I so very much look forward to (hopefully) someday going on book tour, even though I know how exhausting it will be for me. I imagine the majority of writers are introverts, and that those who aren't also shy probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

Estimated vs. Actual Word Count

This is something that I've been meaning to write about for the better part of a month now, but I've been putting it off because it seemed too difficult to explain. I think that this is partly what has been holding me up from posting more updates on how my writing/editing is going, also, since I need to make this post before I can properly inform you of my progress.

The issue is how word count is reported. I've always just been one to hit the "Word Count" option under the Tools menu in Word, and leave it at that. Seems simple enough, right? That's the actual word count.

Well, I've recently learned that most of the publishing industry still doesn't think in those terms -- they want to know the estimated word count, which is 250 words x number of pages in standard format (12 pt. Times New Roman, double spacing, 1" margins all around, et cetera). See Anne Mini's Word Count category for her detailed first-hand explanations of why that is, and how this works. Suffice it to say that, based on the acceptable word counts that many agents mention on websites and blog posts, and then the corresponding page counts that they mention on occasion, you'll see that Anne is right, and that there is still an overt expectation that you use estimated word count instead of actual.

This means that, when I initially queried THE GUARDIAN with 145,000 words, the agents were probably thinking the equivalent of what you would consider 162,000 "actual" words, when really I should have told them something closer to 118,900 words. When I shrunk my novel to 96,000 words, it was actually more like 84,000 words in their parlance. 80,000 words is what they would consider 320 pages, so that's right in the sweet spot of the range for most debut fiction (80,000-100,000 estimated words).

Please note that there is not absolute conversion factor between estimated and actual word count, even if your manuscript is already in perfect standard format (hence the conversion factor discrepancies between my numbers above). It's all about how many pages you wind up with, which can obviously vary a lot if most of your chapters happen to end with a page that only has one or two lines of text, versus if your chapters largely happen to end right at the bottom of each page. Depending on how many chapters you have, this could throw you off by several thousand words one way or the other.

Right now, however, my actual word count for ALDEN RIDGE is 31,287, and my estimated word count is 27,750. Previously my target was about 95,000 actual words. From now on, however, I'm going to ignore the actual word count, and just shoot for about 80,000-85,000 estimated words. That will probably work out to about the same thing.

At any rate, I figured this estimated-word-count expectation was a little-known fact in the aspiring author crowd. It's certainly not something I had ever encountered before Anne started talking about it on her blog. Hope this was useful!

Talent or Learning

Okay, this will be my last cross-post for today. If you haven't seen today's post over on the BookEnds Literary Agency blog, you should definitely check it out. It's called "Talent or Learning: What Makes a Writer an Author." This is not only a sterling example of why the BookEnds blog such a great read, it's also a really well thought-out examination of the broad ingredients for a good author (or football player, as it happens). I've seen similar discussions of this topic many times before, but this particular salvo in the ongoing debate really surprised me (in a good way), and helped me to think about the whole issue in a new light. Highly recommended.

Marie Brennan on Writing

While I'm posting links to content by others, I thought I'd point out this essay by author Marie Brennan (thanks to Chandra Rooney for pointing me to this). Marie's essay discusses the perception by non-writers that writing is easy and that it can be done by anyone. I think that Marie's response is not surprising when you think of how professional writers are likely to react to such (even indirect) aspersions on their craft, but her response is better put than any I've previously seen. Definitely an essay to bookmark and look back at whenever philistines have got you down.

Stupendously Ultimate First Line Challenge

If you're a writer and haven't yet seen Nathan Bransford's Stupendously Ultimate First Line Challenge, you should drop by and submit your first line(s), and then get ready to vote on your favorite from the finalists list later this week. There are lots of entries already, but I'm sure he'd love more. Contest closes tomorrow evening.

My initial Mozy backup is finally complete

About a month ago I wrote a post on Mozy, a new backup tool that I had been using for a few weeks at the time. Well, I thought I'd post an update, since as of 5 hours ago, my initial backup set is finally complete.

Perhaps it seems egregious for an initial backup set to take a month and a half, but I was backing up 59.3 GB of data. About ten years worth of my computer art materials, (legal) music, home video clips, numberless digital photos taken by my wife, and of course my writing. The whole process took longer than it otherwise would have because I throttled it down to about 30 Kbps between 8:30 AM and 10:00 PM, so it was only able to run at a full (for my cable connection) ~390 Kbps during the night hours.

I must say, it's been a bit interesting checking in each day to see how much progress had been made. But still, I'm looking forward to having this just kick off at 2AM every night, and quickly back up whatever changes I've made during the day. That's what I got this for, after all.

If I had one main suggestion for Mozy regarding initial backup sets, it would be this: how about creating a service by which clients can email you DVDs for you to upload straight from your data center? The indexes would certainly be a problem since you normally map everything to the hard disks, but if you made it so that Mozy had the option to do an initial backup set to a set of DVDs, then you could embed the indexes right on the DVDs and easily read them when the clients send them in.

This, of course, would take development time away from your main efforts, and would also require ongoing man hours for staff to handle the DVDs as they arrive. So I wouldn't expect this service to be free -- perhaps $5 per DVD would work for all parties. Whatever covers your costs while making it easier/faster for clients to do that initial backup set. Although, I can see where that added service might cause capacity planning problems in your data center, because your volume of data could quickly jump upwards when a lot of DVDs come in, whereas right now every individual client stream arrives at a fairly predictable trickle.

There are always so many different concerns when you have a centrally hosted software service like this. Part of what professionally interests me in that model, I guess.

Baby talk is perhaps biological?

Yesterday, there was a very interesting article on baby talk from macaque monkeys in the Chicago Tribune. Evidently, researchers have discovered that the monkeys have a special voice that they use only for talking to infants. This voice is higher-pitched, too, just like humans when they do baby talk. From the article:

The intent seemed simply to get the infant to look over and make eye contact with the caller, she said, then to amuse the infant, much as a human might try to get a baby to smile.

A rhesus macaque wanting to charm a tot has an advantage over a human: Besides babbling in baby tongues, it can wag its tail. The monkeys often wag their tails in the presence of a monkey infant, like a human using a rattle to entertain the little one.

Evidently, this tail wagging is extremely rare when they aren't in the presence of infants. The article vaguely suggests that this behavior in macaques might be indicative that baby talk in humans might have a biological imperative behind it. That seems plausible to me, given the ubiquitousness of baby talk amongst all human cultures.

The interesting thing is that this could fly in the face of modern critics of baby talk, who believe that using nonsense words and such stunts the baby's ability to learn real words. Of course, my argument would be that the nonsense words don't necessarily have to be a part of baby talk; it seems like the tone, facial expression, and intent alone would qualify.

My wife and I have both had an aversion to using nonsensical baby talk, even before the studies that show that might be harmful (or at least not helpful), but we still do the tone and facial expressions and such with kids. I'm no expert, but it seems like that would both satiate any biological imperatives that exist (plus fulfilling whatever role they play in the baby's development or at least mood), while also not confusing the baby with gibberish. Who knows for sure, anyway? But it is quite interesting...

Talk about a wate of paper

Check out this article on the bills that AT&T sends to iPhone customers. Apparently some of these monthly bills were as large as "small novels." That sounds like gross exaggeration, but, looking at the pictures, it doesn't seem like that is the case at all. Makes you feel a little bit better about the volume of paper used for manuscripts in the publishing industry, doesn't it? At least all that paper actually has a point...

Author Bio Updated

Anne Mini recently did a series on how to construct proper author bios (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and this inspired me to redo my own author bio. The old version was much longer, and in some senses more informative, but the problem with it was that it was just too long. There was just too much information that I was trying to convey at once, so the important points were lost in the shuffle. It was really styled more like an encyclopedia entry than a marketing tool, anyway, so I doubt it would have been very effective with professional readers.

As Anne points out, one of the primary purposes of the author bio is to make the author sound interesting. I think my new version does that a lot better (and more concisely) than the old version did. For those of you with websites and/or blogs -- do you have an author bio online, yet? It might be a good thing to do, both as a great thing to have on hand for when agents request it, and to have readily available online in case someone from the industry stops by (you never know, right?).

If you post one, drop me a comment and let me know; I always like finding out more about the people who stop by my blog!

Forging New Habits Is Hard

I've recently started trying to adopt the habit of putting two spaces after every period. This was not something that I ever learned, and it's something that still seems very foreign to me to do. I've of course seen plenty of other people who do this, but it's not been anything I've ever wanted to do myself; I always thought it was an antiquated practice. But recently I've learned that it throws off page counts in Standard Format, so I'm trying to learn this as a new habit.

I'm getting pretty good at automatically remembering to add that extra space most of the time, but fairly often I look back at my text and notice a string of places that I missed. Ah well, I've taught myself to put spaces on either side of em dashes, to put spaces between my ellipses -- and then to take them out again once I learned that was wrong -- and to put spaces between parentheses and their contents in programming but not in fiction. Ah well, I'll have this latest change down soon enough, despite years of conditioning to the contrary. It's just a bit amusing to see my subconscious struggle with it for the time being. How hard or easy do you find changing habits like this to be?

Writing Update

Been a while since I've logged one of these, unfortunately, but that's just the way it goes when planning and editing. I've partly been working on the worldbuilding, etc, for LUCIEN'S STORY, and that's not something I can really share much about, since I'd rather you learned of all that by actually reading the novel someday. The decision-making and discovery processes for that sort of thing are not all that scintillating, anyway.

The other part of what I've been doing is working on ALDEN RIDGE again. I showed the manuscript to an editor I know, to get some outside feedback, and this has resulted in some very good new ideas on how to handle certain aspects of the structure of the story. So I've been working on planning those changes, as well, and am just now getting to the point where I'll be working on them in earnest.

I'll post more updates as they become relevant, and try to keep you up to date on what's going on. I hope you're using my RSS feed and Google Reader (or whatever RSS program), and not relying on just checking back every few days.

Pachelbel Rant

My sister showed me this yesterday, and I must say, it is hilarious.

Rejection Collection

Here's a great post from the blog of Stephen Parrish. It basically lists a number of famous authors and works, and the ludicrous number of times many of their works were rejected before going on to become massive bestsellers. So if you've got a nice little pile of rejection letters, as I do, don't let that alone stop you. Maybe your prior works just weren't quite ready for prime time, maybe the industry just wasn't quite ready for your book, or maybe it was just dumb luck that passed you over. There's nothing to do but keep at it, and if you start feeling too down on yourself for being rejected, just look at Stephen's list again. You're in excellent company.

On Outlines and Revising

I saw this post over at The Incurable Disease of Writing today. It's called "I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw." The post itself is a reaction to an interview in The Writer, and I have to say that I could not agree more with the original interviewee or Missy from The Incurable Disease. I don't have much to add to her post; you should just read it for yourself.

I will say, though, that I treat anything as an absolute. I do plenty of research and character design and worldbuilding and so on -- both before I ever start writing and consciously as I go -- but my initial outline is never even close to how the book comes out in the end. The characters always take me in unexpected new directions, and new ideas occur to me all throughout the writing process. And yes, I find it impossible to move on if my previously-written chapters have not been edited to some fair degree. Sometimes there's nothing to do but just plunge ahead with nothing but a long-term plan, good worldbuilding, and strong characters -- in such situations, the characters themselves will almost invariably show you what their story will be. And, you know what? I think that's how important parts of the most unique stories come about.

Mozy

A few weeks ago, a client told me about a program called Mozy. It was so inexpensive ($5/month) that I signed up right away, and I've discovered that this program is really a terrific value. It was recently featured in PC Magazine, I'm told, but I haven't subscribed to that particular publication for a number of years now (too consumer-oriented; I've gotten so I much prefer TechRepublic).

I did a popular post on Data Loss and Backup Solutions a few months ago, and I think that this particular product is an excellent solution to the backup issues I outlined before. This is very similar to the more-expensive tools from Connected TLM that I have used in the past, but this tool is much simpler and more cost-effective. They even have a version that is completely free for up to 2GB of data, which should be more than enough if all you're looking to back up is your writing materials. I have a a lot more data than that to back up (58GB for now), so I'm doing the paid account. If you don't already have a backup solution (or aren't happy with the one you do have), check this one out and see what you think.

Lucien's Story

I've been finding myself very stuck with ALDEN RIDGE lately, and this past week I've hit a point where I realized I just needed to set ALDEN RIDGE aside for a bit. A number of life events, some of which I mentioned recently and others of which I don't care to mention right now, have certainly helped me fall into a non-writing rut, but even back in early May when things were easier I was having trouble with this particular story. It's told from the perspective of multiple protagonists, and though it is "dark fantasy" it is still more than a little off the beaten path for my normal writing genres -- that's both good and bad. Variety is good, but being in unfamiliar territory has been slowing me up and giving me a lot of issues to consider that just wouldn't come up in a genre/writing style I am more used to writing in.

A new idea for a story set in the world of THE GUARDIAN has recently come to mind, and in light of these troubles with ALDEN RIDGE I've decided to pursue that for a bit. It's actually something of a prequel to THE GUARDIAN, and adds a number of exciting new elements to the mythology of that world. Right now I don't have a true title for the book, as it is still in pretty early form, so I'm just referring to it as LUCIEN'S STORY. Lucien is the protagonist, who lives about in Ivoria about 10,000 years before Sean Sunderland (the protagonist of THE GUARDIAN) is born.

Now, this isn't to say that I'm giving up on ALDEN RIDGE. It will take a whole lot more planning before I can even start writing LUCIEN'S STORY. I'll be working on both books at once, dividing my attention however my attention wants to be divided at the time. Right now I'm a bit burned out on ALDEN RIDGE, and LUCIEN'S STORY is still new and exciting, so I'm solely focused on the latter. I have a feeling that will change over the next few weeks, as I rekindle my enthusiasm for writing through this new work. Once I've got a little bit of distance from ALDEN RIDGE, I'm not as likely to feel like all my eggs are in that one basket, or that I'm in some sort of rut or that it's bad that I'm off doing something outside my usual specialty.

I've been warring with myself about making ALDEN RIDGE more traditional-fantasy-like, or adding more elements of Science Fantasy, but that's counter to my original vision for the story and I keep having to make myself not do that. I want this story to been broken-earth fantasy, with some elements of magic but not in a reassuring way. This is a world of fear and supernatural darkness, and frankly it can be hard for me to exclusively inhabit that world for months on end. If you were to pick up the book, it would only take you a few days at most to finish it, and there wouldn't be any problem. In most respects, writers like Stephen King are far darker than I am, anyway, and it's not like that has hurt their readership. But as a writer, while I truly want to produce a work like ALDEN RIDGE, it's not my "bread and butter" and so I find my thoughts turning to my world of Ivoria again. Indulging my hunger for visiting Ivoria should actually make it a lot easier for me to finish ALDEN RIDGE in a timely manner, with all its original darkness and spareness intact.

Hopefully the two stories will feed off each other -- when I hit a block with one, I can just divert attention to the other. I've read of various professional authors who do this, Orson Scott Card chiefly among them. I've long thought that this is how I would like to handle things if I were writing full time; writing something off-beat (for me) while at the same time continuing to service my core worlds. I hadn't thought I would do this unless I was able to make writing my full-time job, but seeing as I'm not writing much at all these days, I feel like this tactic will get me out of the rut I've fallen into with ALDEN RIDGE.

Of course, now I'm tempted to tell you more about LUCIEN'S STORY, but there's quite a lot I can't say. I will say that this story tells of the beginnings of Ashmedai, the lord of the demons that Sean Sunderland struggles against in THE GUARDIAN, and also Arc, the vampire who aids Sean. LUCIEN'S STORY is actually set back when Ashmedai and Arc were both human, before demonkind had even appeared. I also get to explore how the links between Ivoria and our world (the real world) first came about, back when Ivoria was free and still fairly advanced, and yet people in our world were barely learning agriculture. The story will be told in third person, but will follow Lucien about as closely as THE GUARIDAN follows Sean Sunderland. The other two most notable characters in this book will be Morgan Reed and Vincent Valerian, Lucien's two closest friends and companions.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Fear not, there will be no spoilers here. I know that it seems like everyone in the world is reading Harry Potter just now, but I haven't yet had the heart to look out into the news and blogosphere to find out what everyone else thinks about this last installent. Truthfully, I don't really care what anyone else thinks: to me, this was the last great book in a great series, and Rowling's best yet (The Goblet of Fire and The Half Blood Prince were previously my favorites of her work).

The day before the last book's release, I saw blog post from a reviewer at The Guardian, and they were really smashing Rowling's writing in prior books. The only specific complaint leveled at her, however, was her use of saidisms, which is currently very un-trendy. Personally, I think if that's the most serious complaint you can give to someone's work, that's really saying something.

But I know how people can get when something is this popular. I actually avoided reading the Harry Potter books until the fourth one came out (and then I started at the beginning and read all of them). I myself tend to think that anything wildly popular can't be good (and I'm often right), and so it took years of prodding by my wife and other members of my family before I consented to read the books. But once I did -- wow. I'm a huge fan of Rowling's genre, and yet I've never read anything like her books before.

I was less captivated by the first three books in the series simply because they are not as deep as the later ones, and because they are clearly aimed at a younger audience. Not to say that I wasn't captivated to some degree, or that I didn't enjoy them, but for me they failed to reach the level of personal connection that the later books evoked. Reading the Deathly Hallows, I found myself utterly in its grip, and the sadness that I feel at its close has, for me, only ever been evoked by three series before: the original Ender Quartet, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Dark Is Rising Sequence. Maybe The Chronicles of Prydain as well, but it has been a long time since I read those books.

Were there things that could have been handled better in Rowling's books? Yes. Undoubtedly, yes. There are things that could have been handled better in all human works, no matter how venerated. With older written works, such as Shakespeare's plays, we may be too culturally removed to see the seams in the writing, but I feel certain that the great authors and playwrights saw them in their own works. What author doesn't see the seams, however minor, in even the greatest that they have created? The only way authors become great is by seeing those flaws, and overcoming them.

Whatever her detractors may say, whatever they may point out as failings in her style, it is clear to me (and many others) that J.K. Rowling will be remembered as one of the great masters. There is a universality, a depth, and a poetry to what she has created that I am certain will endure. I look forward to sharing these books with my children someday, and I am certain they will find it curious how their parents remember the times when the entire world was caught up by the tales of Harry Potter all at once.

These are some of the happier thoughts that I have now that I have followed Harry's story to it's amazing close. These are the thoughts that battle with my feelings of loss, now that yet another great tale has come to an end. Whenever a series like this concludes, it is as if all breath is stolen from my body, and life seems shallow and pale. It is as if someone very close to me has died, quite frankly, because I know that I will never read anything new about Harry or his friends ever again.

If there is one true complaint that I can leverage against the end of this series, it is that I would have liked a little more closure between the last chapter and the epilogue. I would have liked a little more chance to say goodbye. But, after all, it isn't really goodbye, is it? Harry's world will live forever, or at least longer than I will, and I can experience his first day at Hogwarts any time I like simply by going to my bookshelf.

And yet, right now, all I am conscious of is that his world is now closed to me. All I have left are moving photographs, a pensieve full of rich memories. In a few days, or perhaps weeks, I will be able to feel that this is enough. But at the moment, I must feel that something very special has been taken from me. So bravo, Ms. Rowling, for in my mind this is the greatest achievement of all literature: You have created a world so compelling, so robust, that readers like me find their very selves entangled in the stories you weave. Harry Potter has changed me, like so many others, and for the better. My greatest hope, not just as a writer but as a human being, is that I may someday create something that will do the same.

Blogger Reflection Award

Many thanks to the very humorous and insightful Stephen Parrish for tagging me with the Blogger Reflection Award, which is, as he notes, not so much an award as a gesture. Still, it's nice to hear that one's blog has been of value to someone (even if it's not updated as often as one would like recently).

Now it's my turn to tag, so here goes (in no particular order)...

- Stephen Parrish himself is the funniest and has the most-interesting-topics-I-wouldn't-otherwise-read-about.
- Anne Mini is the most knowledgeable person on everything writing that I know. And she shares her knowledge for free! Amazing!
- Colleen Gareau (through her blog) has taught me more about Canada than I ever knew before, including an number of things about Canadian politics and civil rights that I might never have encountered before (since I live in the USA).
- Karen Mahoney (who has only recently left livejournal for Blogger, so has few archives at the moment) is by far the most refreshing aspiring writer's blog that I've found. She undergoes the same trials and tribulations as the rest of us, but her posts generally try to find the positive in these things, and she is frequently insightful. Just check out her recent post on Writer's Block if you aren't convinced.
- Jamie Boud is the only diary-style blog (about nothing in particular) that I read. It's a really good read (and the pictures are routinely excellent as well).
- Rachel Vincent is the most interesting new-author blog that I read at present. It's exciting and informative to see how her career is progressing.

Of course, there are many other blogs that I read and enjoy, time permitting, but these are just a few highlights (out of those that don't belong to agents).

Wherefore art I?

No, I'm not dead. A confluence of life events this past month has pretty much wiped me out, though, so that blogging has been a bit less of a priority. I don't care to go into specifics, but at any rate the normality of life has been interrupted by a few family medical emergencies, several large batches of new work at my day job all at once, and also the Independence Day holiday and the attending family visits. Some good stuff, some bad stuff, a large amount of stress from various items, a smaller amount of relaxation to recuperate.

That's largely what the art I've been doing over the past few weeks was all about; relaxing my brain. As a writer, you'd think that I would find writing relaxing, that I would find my solace from the world into escaping into the worlds that I create. I suppose that's partly true; certainly, if I stray away from writing too long, I get really antsy to get back to it. But in truth, I don't think that any career (or hobby, or anything else) should dominate one's entire life, or all of one's leisure time. That seems to be the impression that a lot of writers give on the Internet: that to be a successful writer, you must let writing consume virtually your entire life.

I posit that this is not true. Certainly, you must be prepared to let writing consume virtually your entire life on occasion--say, during revisions, or at the end of the novel when things are really flowing fast or a deadline is looming. That seems quite reasonable to me. However, keeping that mad pace (or anything close to it) up at all times seems to me to be, well -- mad. As writers it is expected that we have stories to tell, things to write about. In order for that to be true, I should think it an obvious corollary that writers must thus have lives of their own; after all, if most of their life experience comes from reading and writing alone, they aren't likely to produce much that is startlingly original.

Perhaps some of you will read this as a long-winded excuse for the fact that I have not written anything new for about two weeks now. Feel that way if you must, but someday I hope you'll find that you are able to take long breaks of your own. It will do you good, in any endeavor; any ruts you were in before the break, you'll tend to break out of. I've also been doing a lot more reading over the past few weeks, since I haven't been so busy writing. Harry Potter has been the order of the day for most of this time, as I'm rereading years four through six in preparation for the fairly imminent release of the closing seventh book. Despite the differences that some take with her style, I must say that J.K. Rowling really is an incredible writer and storyteller. You might not think that there's much I can learn from Harry Potter for a broken-earth zombie novel, but there certainly is . . . .

At any rate, before my life-imposed writing hiatus, I had had a number of breakthroughs on my manuscript. Aside from greatly expanding my second chapter, I've also now greatly expanded my first. The new opening that I have provides a little more depth, and is significantly less teaser-ish. I'm very excited about it. At some point in the next month or so I'll post the new versions of both chapters on my website, but I'm going to wait until after I've let them sit a bit longer, and until I've had a chance to get a bit more outside editorial feedback.

I've also made it about two thirds of the way through chapter 10, so that's some progress there. The planning and writing of the first chapter additions was a major hangup for me for a couple of weeks, so that really stunted my other progress as I wrote three different new openings before I found one that I liked at all (and that one I loved). I've had about enough editing for at least a few weeks, at any rate, so this week I'm going to get back in the saddle and write some new content--finish off chapter 10 for sure, and hopefully get a good ways into chapter 11.

So that's the news from my part of the world; I apologize for not responding to comments as much as I normally would have lately, and for not posting comments on everyone else's blogs. It's just too time consuming at the moment. I am still reading all my regular blogs, however, and I've been enjoying hearing how all of you are getting along (quite well for the most part--bravo!). Until next time . . .

27,315 / 95,000 (28.8%)

Numerous New Art Pieces

I've been doing some new artwork this weekend and this evening, in some new programs. The first two below were done in the (free!) Personal Learning Edition of Vue 6, a pretty incredible program that I'm just now discovering. Those forest scenes that were such a bugbear for me in Bryce are incredibly easy in Vue--and the atmospheric effects of Vue beat even Terragen 0.9, which is saying something. The latter two (abstract) images were done in Apophysis, an awesome freeware fractal flame generator. I actually did a fair bit of post-render editing in Photoshop for both of those images, but I never would have been able to create effects like that by hand alone. If you're into digital art, I highly recommend you take a look at both these programs!

Here are the new pics:

PS: I'm also on deviantART now.

Writing Bloopers

Urban Fantasy author Rachel Vincent has an interesting post today on writing bloopers. Her homophones are pretty amusing in particular. I haven't ever had such a blooper go out to anyone else other than my wife, fortunately, because she's an excellent editor and almost always sees my work before anyone else. That said, my wife has caught several really funny issues in the past:

Partway though writing THE GUARDIAN, I decided to change it from third person limited to first person. This was fine, but I manually had to go back and make a large number of changes in the three chapters that I had written at the time. One of the few that I missed resulted in: "I finished brushing his teeth, and spit out his toothpaste."

Also, sometimes when I'm editing I accidentally wind up splicing several sentences or sentence fragments together. Does this happen to anyone else? It usually happens when I get several good ideas in a row, and I'm rushing to get them all down before any leak away. At any rate, I wound up with one sentence in an early draft of THE GUARDIAN that read: "Which I what I had been studying for to pass."

STAR WARS Fans hate STAR WARS?

Yep, you read that right. Check out this article at Jive Magazine if you're curious. This is somewhat how I feel about the series (given the horrible prequel trilogy), although I love the entire original trilogy and think most of the video games are fine. I don't have any plans to read any of the books, though -- maybe someday I'll try one, if my reading list mysteriously shrinks to nothing and I can't think of anything else.

But really, I've noticed this for a long time: it seems like STAR WARS fans definitely adore the various ideas posited by the franchise, but hate how many parts of the stories actually progress and are executed. It's interesting to me, then, how enthralled so many are by the series if this is true. Perhaps this makes STAR WARS the ultimate "high concept" story, then, if this is true, because it is in fact so high concept that it can withstand any hackneyed story that is actually attached to it. Either way, there's something indefinably great about STAR WARS, and the feeling of magic and adventure it elicits is nearly unparallelled -- and yet so much of the "true believer" fans' reactions are still decidedly negative.

That's interesting, and also unfortunate. I think it boils down to plotting, personally, and a few bad choices in subject matter (Ewoks, Jar Jar Binks, Midichlorians, etc). Also it seems like internal consistency is often sacrificed for that which is most dramatic in the moment (see the JIVE article for good examples of this). These are mistakes that any writer would normally get castrated over by fans, and it's also the sort of thing that would probably keep a debut novel from making it into the market at all in today's publishing climate.

It's funny, because looking at STAR WARS can provide so many good lessons for writers on what not to do -- and yet at the same time, it has those indefinable qualities that we all strive for in our own writing (and which so few published books even accomplish). How does one create that sense of magic? Rich-yet-archetypal characters like Obi Wan, Darth Vader, Luke, Leia, Han, and Yoda? If people hate aspects of the writing so much, why is it that they still love these characters so much? Not to mention all the background of aliens, exotic planet locations, strange technology, and so on. How can a story frustrate and captivate people at the same time?

If you've been reading, thinking I have a suggested answer at the end, I apologize. I don't. My only hope is that I'm someday able to write something that captivates an audience in the way STAR WARS captivated me, and yet do so without frustrating them at the same time. Tall order. But that's why most of us write fiction, isn't it? Because we've been captivated by stories we've heard in the past, and we want to add our own voices to the mix in hopes of captivating other readers with our own new stories.

My list of books, movies, and even video games which have powerfully captivated me is hundreds long, and comprises many different reasons and ways in which I was captivated. I write because, having been touched this way by so many other works, I can't not. Each story I write energizes me with the hope that it will touch someone else in some meaningful, powerful way. I write because I can't not.

Keynotes

Anne Mini recently made a very interesting post on keynotes, or book concepts, as part of her excellent ongoing Book Marketing 101 series. I highly suggest you check it out. The rhetorical question style of keynote is definitely not something to try on literary agent Nathan Bransford, who is well known to loathe rhetorical questions, but for my own keynote that's the style I chose. This keynote certainly won't be in my hook or query letter, but as a one-liner to pique someone's interest (or get them to ask about my full hook) it might be just the ticket.

Here's my keynote for ALDEN RIDGE:

What would you do if you had to choose between your daughter's soul and the life of every other living person you knew?

My Longest Render Time Ever

Whew, this was an interesting rendering. It took me an unusual number of tries to get the trees the way that I wanted, and to get the perspective right for the camera. Once all the models were in place, I realized something surprising -- this scene had over 25 million polygons! (That's an incredibly excessive amount.)

The reason for the high polygon count was simply the number of foreground trees, of course, and the three detailed terrains that make up this image. Worse yet, I had decided that volumetric atmosphere was needed in this scene in order to really get the right sky/fog effects.

Well, I feel like the end effect was worth it, but all of this conspired to make this--by far--my longest render time ever for a single scene: 34 hours and 28 minutes. Yikes!

To add insult to injury, once the render was complete I discovered that the 2D background trees (on the ridge) had experienced a clipping problem during the super-long render, and there were ugly brown boxes obscuring a large part of the ridge. I thought about trying to do a partial re-render of the scene, but there's not a graceful way to do that at high resolution. So instead, I had to spend about an hour in Photoshop, carefully editing out the glitches by hand. I think the result was actually quite good. But one thing's for sure--I don't plan on doing any more scenes of this level of model/sky complexity any time soon!

More Renderings

I've added four new images to my 10th King ablum. This is the first work that I've done since upgrading to Bryce 6.1, and also includes my first Hexagon 2 work as well. I'm pretty pleased with the results.

An incredible deal.

So, it turns out that ownership of Bryce, one of the main 3D rendering programs that I use, has changed hands from Corel to DAZ Productions. I've been using Corel's last version (5.0) for years now, but DAZ has put out two major releases since the version I had been using. Turns out that the first of those versions, 5.5, is now offered completely for free. If you ever thought you might like to get into 3D landscaping, here's a great chance. Additionally, through the 30th of June DAZ has all of their Bryce content on sale for incredible discounts. You can actually upgrade their free 5.5 release to the later 6.1 release for only $20, which is ludicrous. Normally this sort of software is $100 at least; I think they are trying to increase their audience.

On an unrelated note, if you haven't tried Google Sketchup, you might like that as well. It also has a free version, and is even easier to get into than Bryce. Sketchup is particularly useful for modeling objects or architecture, whereas Bryce is more about landscapes, trees, water, and atmospheres/skies.

New Art Online

As part of the rollout of my new art gallery system, I've added a lot of new content to my gallery. Whereas on Picassa I had only ten galleries, in the new system I've now got seventeen main galleries and sixteen sub-galleries. In all, there are now 399 pieces in my online collection -- that's a lot more representative of the work that I've been doing over the last nine years.

Of particular note is a new album called 10th King. This is my latest album, and is still a work in progress. I haven't been doing much art since third quarter 2006, so I was also really pleased to recently produce these:

New Art Gallery System

One of the other new things I'm doing now that I'm running my website with PHP is implementing an all-new art gallery system. As much as I liked Picassa, the new PHP-based SPGM tool that I'm using is much more flexible (if you have prior programming knowledge). I've had to make a number of extensions and changes to SPGM to make it work the way I want, but I think the result is very nice. The new gallery system allows me to do hit tracking on the image pages, add comments to individual images, and more. Before I had no idea if anyone was even going into my gallery at all, or how much anyone looked at. It's also really nice to be able to add little explanations or background notes to each image.

Also nice is the ability to have albums within albums. Many of my albums now have sub-albums that have the lesser-quality images available, but less prominent. This is helpful because there are some legitimately interesting images that fall under that category, but I want to have only my better work showing in the main galleries.

A More Dynamic Website

Well, I've been thinking for a while about switching to a more dynamic website platform than shtml, and now I've finally done it. Over this past weekend I finally made the changeover to PHP. PHP isn't a language I've ever worked with, oddly, and a little bit of the syntax (string concatenation in particular) seemed strange to me. I know about twelve other programming languages, so it's a little unusual that something seems that syntactically different to me when it comes to basic operators.

At any rate, you can see the immediate benefit of the changeover to PHP in the image on the sidebar on the main page. It now cycles through a series of photos taken by my wife, rather than always just showing the same one, so I think that adds a bit of freshness to the mix. I have more complex additions planned, but one thing at a time, right?

Updated look.

So, the look of the blog/website has once again been altered somewhat. I'm gradually carving out the end look that I want. This time there's less white space, which I think ultimately makes it more visually interesting. I tried out a couple of different schemes, but ultimately settled on warm tans for the periphery colors; I think that's significantly more inviting than before. Nothing earth-shattering here, but I think the look has definitely improved.

What's the longevity of blogs?

Today I found this interesting post over at TechRepublic. From the post:

Security expert and tech curmudgeon Bruce Sterling famously quipped at this year’s South-by-Southwest conference that “I don’t think there will be that many [blogs] around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.”

Interesting. But I agree more with "The Trivia Geek," the author of the post, who puts forth his own theory on why blogs will, in fact, survive. There probably won't be nearly so many blogs, since those participating purely because of blogs' current fad status will likely move on, but good blogs will likely always remain until another tool comes along that is better able to "let writers write."

My new hook.

Nine years have passed since the undead ended civilization, and now all that remains are small bands of survivors huddling in isolated towns. Ex-doctor Darrell Williams lives with his four-year-old daughter Lela and three other survivors in an abandoned electronics factory. Others weather the assaults of the relentless undead in the nearby ruins of Alden Ridge, but Darrell hasn’t been able to enter any town without suffering a panic attack since his wife Mary was murdered. Yet when his tiny community begins to undergo a nightmarish transformation, Darrell is forced to stray from the factory’s shelter.

Darrell knows he is Alden Ridge’s only hope, for he alone has seen this before -- he and Lela are the sole survivors of the collapse of nearby Stantonsburg. He must quickly discover why the land rots, why animals are becoming supernatural aberrations, and why the townspeople are undergoing the most terrifying changes of all -- despite the risk that saving every other living person he knows may mean surrendering Lela to the dark force that touched her when Stantonsburg fell. As Alden Ridge descends into chaos, he frantically searches for a way to save both his daughter and the town.

Chapter 9 is finished, and a note on word count.

No editing tonight; instead I've been working on new content and some prewriting. Ideas for the next section of the book are really coming together, and I expect to really be able to make fast progress on it. Only 800 words tonight, but more to come soon.

Also, I've adjusted my target back to about 95,000 actual words. Turns out my real goal is 80,000 words based on the old 250 words per page estimation, and so that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 95,000 words based on MS Word's word count feature. Turns out that the estimation based on the count of pages in standard format is what most agents and editors actually expect to see, though. Now that I know this, it's actually fairly apparent on many of their blogs. Take literary agent Jonathan Lyons' comments under this post at his blog.

For now I'm going to keep expressing my progress in actual word count, though, because that seems more meaningful for now:

24,941 / 95,000 (26.3%)

Explaining our triumphs.

[For those readers not interested in programming, bear with me. This post is actually about writing in the end.]

Today at work, I solved a technical challenge that I had concluded was impossible a few years ago. This wasn't an earth-shattering discovery by any stretch, and I'm sure that someone somewhere has thought of this before, but my solution to this problem was a sideways one, and that's always really satisfying. It took all day to code (which is really long for a single feature for me), but now I have a way to:

Automatically script all changes to all stored procedures, table triggers, and functions in 2+ (presently 4) connected databases on a single server. The reason that this is a triumph is that it was all accomplished in completely native T-SQL code in SQL 2000, and can all be administrated from a single database without any hard-coded links to the other databases. Even better, I figured out a graceful way to detect when the same peice of code has been changed in multiple databases that share an identical codebase -- I can even recognize which ones were identically updated and which ones are now in conflict with one another.

Now, if you're one of the fellow writers who frequents my blog, your reaction is probably "uh . . . whatever." That's fair enough, if you're not an experienced SQL programmer. Even if you've worked with databases for years, if you're not familiar with the nuances of dynamic coding techniques, system tables, cache strategies, and cross-database scripting (especially dynamic cross-database scripting), then it's unlikely that you'll have any chance of understanding why I'm so pleased.

It's the same way I'd look blankly at you if you told me about something brilliant you did to fix your car, or some sort of crazy new technique that you used to save a patient's life today. You can explain all you like, even laying out exactly how your entire triumph was accomplished, but I still won't get it -- not really. Oh, if you're good at explaining I could follow what you were telling me, but there's no way that someone not already an expert in your field is going to have a true appreciation. The listener's reaction is likely to either be "that sounds easy" or "that sounds impossible, like all work in your field" depending on the nature of your explanation.

As a programmer, I generally have the benefit of being in a "that sounds impossible" field. Certainly some users occasionally think that a difficult task should be much easier than it actually is, but more often programming is regarded with a certain degree of mysticism. I'm really going to miss that when I'm a full time writer someday. Just because most people can type or construct sentences, they assume that novelcraft is a lark.

I've spent several hours this evening reading my work out loud, editing like crazy, and the result is a much tighter, much more varied-sensory-inputs, much more speakable and eloquent prose. I can say this to all of you, and you understand immediately how this is an accomplishment. But a frustrating number of outsiders are more likely to wonder what the big deal is. After all, when they sit down to pen their first of many bestsellers, their first draft will be so perfect as to merit immediate publication (and bags of cash) sans any editing at all.

Resist the temptation to hit these people. Instead, build relationships with your fellow authors; they understand what you're going through when no one else is likely to. If you have to explain your triumph past a certain level to a lay person, you probably can't explain it to them. Even the best-written words cannot communicate ideas that the reader is not prepared to accept. That last is actually an important thing to remember in general.

Tech Q&A: How do I enter less/greater than in blog comments?

I've seen this question various places around the blogosphere, so I thought I would address it as the first in a new "Tech Q&A" series. If you've ever tried to post the "<" or ">" characters in blog comments, you've undoubtedly found that these symbols (and anything between them) mysteriously disappeared. Why is that?

Well, when you type in your comments you are entering what is referred to as "plain text." That means that, while it's still in the comments box, your browser views whatever you type in as being literal Roman characters or symbols. Something for humans to read, in other words. When you type left or right carats here, there's no problem.

The problem arises when that plain text is submitted to blogger. Blogger no longer treats it as plain text, but rather starts treating it as HTML markup. This is actually very helpful, because it let's you embed links and images in your comments, and/or allows you to italicize or bold words using those tags.

The only problem with this approach is that if the commenter has entered certain characters -- most notably the left or right carat -- then content after the < will disappear. If there is a > that follows it, then content will become visible after that. I called this a problem, but really this is just how the Internet works in such situations; I don't think that there is much blogger could do differently save possibly not allow HTML in comments at all (which would be bad), or load their rich text editor on the comments page (which would be bulky, and thus undesirable). So I think that they're doing about the best they can reasonably do at this point.

What if you really need to display that < or >, though? For instance, what if you're writing out a math equation or trying to show someone else how to create some HTML code? Fear not, the browser programmers of yore thought of this long ago. There is a special character sequence that tells the browser to show a left or right carat to the user, but that carat will be ignored by the browser. My recent link to the ASCII Codes reference includes not only these sequences, but many more.

Here are the relevant codes:

When you want to show a literal "<" in the posted comments, type &lt; instead.
When you want to show a literal ">" in the posted comments, type &gt; instead.

Those character codes probably seem incomprehensible, so let's break them down. First, there is an opening character that tells the browser that a character code is coming; that's the ampersand. Then comes the actual character code itself, which is specific to the character you want to print, and then comes the closing character that tells the browser that your character code is done; that's the semicolon.

In the specific case of the above examples, the "lt" stands for "less than," and the "gt" stands for "greater than." Easy to remember, right? Feel free to ask for further clarification in my blog comments here, or even to try our the character codes there for yourself if you want to. Also, if anyone has topics that they'd like to see in a future Tech Q&A feature, please send them in.

Revising is Writing

Even though I spent over an hour and a half working on my manuscript tonight, I didn't write any new scenes. In fact, I lost word count -- about 200 words. Why, then, am I so pleased with the result of my labor? I've been revising, and in revising turned the first draft of last night's scene into what it should actually be.

The first and second drafts of a scene often require nearly the same amount of work and thought as one another. The second draft is just as much writing as the first draft is, even though it rarely produces much word count; that's what I think.