I like how he creates the personalities of the characters, some of them with delightful absurdity while the others fit more with stereotypical mindset you expect with the various animals. However, the detail he puts into the animals isn’t really done with the human characters of the stories. I found the humans to be relatively shallow, more like puppets with predictable roles that I figured out pretty much from the beginning.

I enjoyed reading this. I could easily see myself reading it again when I want to have a couple hours and I’d encourage it for most of my family.

I won’t call it the first draft, simply because two chapters still end with “NOTE: Make this suck less.” There are some other notes in the story that need to be cleaned up before I can really consider it first draft quality.

There is a lot left to be done. As I edit and integrate the writing group’s feedback, the bigger things get a note in the middle of it to come back to it. Plus, I’ve changed how characters interact over the story and some of those need to be backfilled to earlier chapters (including a few in the first chapter).

It’s a nice feeling being able to see the end of the story. I think everything is just about the right place, though I’m struggling with the pacing of the last few chapters. I feel they are coming too hard and fast but the plot seems more logical that way.

It is also really hard to keep your villains smart right to the point of their defeat or when they exit the story.

I’m still amazed how hard it has been to finish the last 14 chapters since I stopped submitting it to the writer’s group. I feel like some of the words are just slogging but I just pushed past it, simply because I want to succeed. Not having a weekly or monthly deadline just makes it just harder to keep chugging. I have that vague deadline of ICON 35 for the writing critique and the desire to have a polished version by the end of the year, but those don’t get me through the individual chapters as effectively as being accountable to others.

The plan right now is to rewrite the two terrible chapters and start working on the more painful of the edits. Around taking care of EDM, working out, and losing weight.

Going to be a busy end of year.

Personally, I don’t like glowing reviews. I automatically discount them. When my brother gave me four star rating for my novel, I was happy because he gave reasons why it didn’t get five and they were reasons I agreed with. I felt I earned that four star rating, though I would have loved five, I didn’t really write up to the five stars. In my reviews here, I don’t use stars. Now, I also don’t have very many illusions that people read any of my posts, much less my reviews, but I’d rather give the reasoning for my reviews instead of reducing it down to a single numeric value.

I love reviews though. Every time I find one for one of my short stories, I’m pretty much jumping around, even when they rip my heart out. It bums me out with the negative, but I try to get what really bother them, realize you honestly can’t please everyone, and strive to do better next time.

This definately influences the reviews I give. I know they are a marketing tool for indie writers and a egoboo (ego boost) for writers, but I don’t like slapping five star reviews on anything. I view the stars as a bell curve, most of the novels should be a three. I compare it to the hundreds of books in my basement as “average” and then 80% of every book out there is in that three star range.

But that really doesn’t help the ego or the marketing. Well, I don’t know if it helps the marketing. I actually ignore five and one stars when I read reviews. But, I also suspect that my beliefs in reviewing aren’t reflected by the reviews on Amazon, Good Reads, or anywhere else. I’d love it if someone could look at all the reviews I gave, or have Amazon actually normalize for the individually reviews for their scores (I average 3, so my 4 is like most people’s 5). Sadly, the technology isn’t there.

In all honesty, my novels should have gotten a two star from my brother; I don’t consider it the best thing I could have written and while it was trivially interesting, it isn’t anything I’d hang a career on.

I’m considering posting reviews for a few stories I read. I know that for a purely marketing approach, I should give them a five, but my logical side says I should give them a three. They are average to the professional novels I’ve read, but nothing that stands out as being amazing and something I constantly reread or integrate into my own writings. But, I don’t know if giving that “honest” three helps the authors (either ego or sales). And, looking at indie writers, where a single sale is almost important enough to break out the wine, that can be brutal.

Mostly, for Amazon and other marketing-influenced sites, I usually give +1 to my bell curve system. So, a good solid average story is four stars. Despite that, I still feel bad when I review a story that, when compared to the thousands of books I’ve read, still remains in the first sigma from the center of that bell curve. I know that everyone wants a five star, but do I cater to the marketing and ego, or do I go based on math?

Didn’t happen.

I ended up most of my hours playing with the MythTV box and getting it to run a bit smoother. I tried to get it to export the recordings better, so I could copy shows for Fluffy while she was at the hospital, but somehow, I couldn’t get it to work properly. Even on my Linux box, they came out pretty broken and non-watchable, but the MythTV has no trouble with them. It is–to say the least–annoying.

After that, Fluffy got home so we talked about the incoming baby, the fact we should practice the diapers thing (probably won’t happen), and the general conversations that hover around the unspoken realization that we are going to probably have a third person in our lives by the end of the weekend.

Writing-wise, FOTS is getting very close. The current chapter total is 30 and I’m just about done with 25. There isn’t a lot left, but it is the final fight scenes. Unfortunately, I’ve been thinking about these last five chapters for four months now. I’ve played them over in my head so many times while I was driving to work that I’m having trouble getting them out on the paper. The baby thing isn’t helping there.

I’m also trying to work on emotions that flow. I had a rough spot where one of the teenagers changes their mood very quickly. While I know it happens in Real Life™, it seemed rather rough on paper. I’ll figure it out, I just have to get out the first draft, then I can start pulling apart the chapters and reworking them as I go.

We do have a date though. The doctor is tentatively planning on inducing Fluffy (SMWM if you use initials) on the evening of August 14. That means I have about 1.5 weeks left before that unknown event does or does not change my life.

Naturally, I haven’t quite finished my novel but I have to finish a commission (due on the 13th) and a story writing contest entry (I’m in round 5 and its due on August 12).

We are going to sit down and figure out what we need for the first few weeks of EDM’s emergence. And probably go buy things like, I don’t know, diapers? They’re important, right? Mostly, we’re going to go through our baby registry stuff and pick up the remaining criticals this weekend.

Beyond the programming and working on a commission, I’ve just been doing “life” thing. Fluffy’s car broke down and we had to return it to get it fixed right. They are keeping it over a few days, so we are down to one car again. *sigh* At least it isn’t anything really critical.

I also got a chance to play the demo for Revenge of the Titans, a RTS tower defense game. I actually liked it; I normally like TD games but I haven’t really warmed up to RTS games. This one… I could enjoy. They have a special right now, 50% off ($13) for pre-ordering and I decided to pick it up. Amazing how many fun games you can get for under $20.

Apparently, someone turned the AC on in the house and cranked it pretty far down. Not entirely bad, but the place is mostly empty and it was running enough to spike that bill. We found a few things to deal with, mostly education for the real estate agent, but the place is still in good shape.

You know, for not being sold.

We brought Inigo with us and left them at our friends, uteck and Bouncy. Then, on Sunday, while Fluffy was at the shower, I got a chance to chat with them and Science Princess. And saw this absolutely adorable knitted angler fish.

Fluffy drove and I got a chance to work on FOTS. Got another chapter and a half done, but still got a while to go. Naturally, no one really wanted to talk about it, but that’s okay since I don’t want to force people to talk about my “baby”. I did get some coding done in addition. I think mfgames-writing-python is almost ready for prime time. It has already exceeded the Perl version in features and the codebase is a lot cleaner. I just need to get installation, documentation, and a few more task items done and it should handle most of my Creole and DocBook needs.

http://community.livejournal.com/merry_fates/95549.html

Oh yeah, and Linger is coming out. It has a beautiful cover.

The Princess

“So, all I have to do is pretend to be uncomfortable and they’ll think I’m a princess?” She spoke with a southern accent with just a hint of whiskey and smoke. “What if they don’t buy it?”

He tipped his hat as a pedestrian walking along the cobblestones. Turning back to her, he shielded her from the rain as he whispered, “Don’t worry, they’ll buy it. I gave them the idea last week. All you have to do is give them the whole spiel about being delicate and tender. They’ll drink it up like a cat to milk; they want to find a princess. They want the perfect wife for that boy of theirs.”

She rubbed the soot from her face. “Are you sure? I don’t want to spend another night in the cells.” She whimpered, “Or in the gutters.”

“Don’t worry,” he reached up and stroked her cheek, “I might not be the best father, but at least I can make sure you get a good night sleep. And maybe a man to take care of you. Just go, honey, and just have faith in your father.”

“I love you, papa.”

He kissed her cheek. “I love you too, my youngest. Now go,” he firmly pushed her toward the manor at the end of the street, “you will always be my princess.”

She hesitated, turning in the rain. It dripped through her threadbare clothes and he felt a lurch in his heart. He wanted to take care of her, he wanted to find a thousand gold to treat her like the princess she was. But, he couldn’t.

He waved for her to go on, turning away so she couldn’t see that more than rain ran down his cheeks.

Friday, I felt burned out, so I decided to just work on some minor things for the novel, mainly drawing up a rough map. That got me thinking about the terrain of the world. I have a super-continent in the world with deserts in the middle. My thoughts then worked on the problems of how to create said deserts in the middle, and what geological structures I’d need to make something “reasonable”. Which lead into trying to figure out how to fake plate tectonics for my fantasy world so I could have the mountains I needed so I could have the desert I needed so I could figure out how to…

In the end, I just drew a map of the area of the novel, the cities involved and the rough terrain. Something to be said about not over-thinking things. Though, I’m pretty sure I screwed up one of the geological structures but I’m not going to worry about it too much. I want to get the “big” map done at some point simply because I’d feel a lot better if I could have a framework to work on. That and I want to put it into Google Maps. I already did that with an Exalted map I drew and it was a lot of fun. Something to be said about zooming into a world/map you created and seeing all those lovely roads and markers.

I took Saturday and half of Sunday off to play games. Board game with friends from Iowa City. Played Cthulhu 500, Marriage Material, Seisen-So, and one other game (can’t remember). Lost every one won Sen-So and lost the others, had a ball doing it. I also decided to play video games for the rest of the time. Mostly the demos I’ve downloaded on the PS3. Found a few games I want to buy, if I give myself some times to play them again. And, finally a PS2 game (on my PS3 *I love my PS3*) that I bought a few months ago.

Writing-wise, I got chapter 21 done. Ended up splitting it in half, so I’ll have another chapter, but that has been ebbing and flowing for months. At the current moment, I have 9 chapters to go until the end. Chapter 21, while starting roughly, turned into a nice piece of work. I’m very happy with the second rewrite.

Finished up the weekend working on Python stuff. When working on my writing tool chain, I realized I made a few decisions that ended up being difficult to work around. This is a natural part of my development style (you never know what you need until you find out what you don’t need), but I’m also trying to write more Python code because Perl is harder to get on Windows. So, I rewrote about 60% of the tool chain in Python last night. It does the basics, just not the language processing, quotes, and attributes.

I actually use all three of those. In the current novel, I have 2 (+1 used in four chapters) languages plus mental communication (apparently decent telepathy given the writing group’s critique). From one of my favorite books (So You Want to be a Wizard), I used to use parens for telepathy, but somewhere around WBM, I switched to double angle quotes. For the primary language, I’m writing normal, but for the secondary, I’m using italics (well, underline right now). Now, I could hand-enter all those things in, then when I have to change it, use search and replace. Instead, I decided to use language codes and let the rendering system handle it. So, when I write, I just use codes for the other languages and communications.

“This is double plus good speak.”
“tel: This is telepathy.”
“de: This is a foreign language.”
“I have a `sp: foreign phrase` in the middle of my sentence.”

That way, if I need italics or underline, I can change it easily. I also used contextually translated (underlined but in English) for the first half, but lately I prefer having the actual foreign words put in there. It got more obvious with a character who swears a lot (inspired by a character from Empowered) but is highly competent.

I don’t use blockquotes much, but I do use them at the top of each section. It was my way of giving background on the world without having characters rehashing stuff they would have already known. It seems to work and it is fun coming up with the various quotes, books, and songs in the world.

Finally, attributes. The format I’m writing in (Creole) doesn’t really handle metadata attributes, but DocBook 5 does. I’m hacking a format for those because I want to keep track of information that the reader won’t usually see but is helpful for me.

= Title of Chapter
* Author: D. Moonfire
* Point of View: Bob
* Characters: Bob, Robert, Steve, Mary
* Starting Location: At the corner of the street
* Starting Time: Tuesday at 13:00
* Scene Type: Character Building, World Development

And here is the first line of the chapter.

For the most part, these are complete overkill. The Author is put into the DocBook author while the others are put into DocBook ““. These came from a few techniques on the Internet that suggested keeping track of things like characters and scene types to help build up a story. And to manage POV and intensity. I’m planning on using them later during edits to see if I need to tweak stuff around, but it also gives me hints on the chapter’s or scene’s purpose.

I don’t know if these will help. I’m finding them useful at the moment and I have a feeling they’ll be more helpful in the future, but I’m still working on faith. I do know that writing in Emacs (Notepad++ on Windows) and using a program to convert it to DocBook has worked out very well for me.

It also means I can use some conversion utilities I’ve worked on to create PDF, HTML, and ePUB for critiques. A writing friend offered to beta read (I think) and verify my horsey bits in the story and since she loves her new ebook reader, I’m going to send it as ePUB. I send out a PDF and HTML for my submissions to the writing group, complete with line numbers to make it easier for them to say “paragraph 171 is really, really bad”.

Well, that was my weekend. Seems like a lot when I write it down.

On the weekend, while Fluffy was at the baby shower, I decided to write a little “toy” utility to bookmark the position in my video files. That way, I could hopefully go back without having to remember where I was. Naturally, it took a lot more hours than I expected, but overall I was pretty happy.

I still don’t “like” the language. I like having semicolons at the end of my statements, not having white-space to determine flow control, and I miss my end braces. Yeah, I can put “# end if” at the end, but it feels more like a hack. I also find my eyes looking for that ending brace, my code feels naked without having that closure. I’m sure, if I keep using this, I’ll get used to it, but it takes at least a few days.

Now, I consider myself in the “damn good” level of Perl. When I want to throw together a quick program (say, mfgames-writing-perl library), I used Perl. But, it seems like Perl is being left behind for more recent languages. I also noticed that Python has a fairly good library out there, which has many of the things I want. I’m not giving up Perl, but since I have to rewrite the writing tool chain (not Perl’s fault, my fault for not designing something right), I decided to give Python a try and see which one “stacks up” to my needs.