Post-NaNoWriMo Thougts
So I was able to do it, I finished the book on time, ringing in at just under 52K words. Where to go from here? I dunno. One of the winner offers is for five free paperback copies of the book through some partner site. I'll probably redeem those once I think of a dang title for the thing just so I have print copies of the draft for matter of prosperity before getting into editing and expanding it. I've got a little while to figure that out, though, so for now I'm back to programming.
But I will say this about nanowrimo: It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work, yeah, but I had some of the most fun doing it as I have in some time creating things. I came off it with my mind clear, fresh, having actually come up with multiple other story ideas to work with and adapt into things that I came up with in just that last month. It was kind of interesting, it was like pouring all my energy into writing one story opened a floodgate of ideas for all the other times I was not at a keyboard to sit and write, far more intense than my normal creative process comes up with ideas.
At the end of the day, I've come to a decision: I'm definitely doing this again. Next year, the year after, I'll keep doing it whenever I can. And I've decided that's what my pool of random dream ideas is going to go to. I keep a page in my private dev wiki called just 'scratchpad' where I add interesting story ideas that come to me from dreams to look at later, and I'm going to do just like this one, just pick one at last minute at random and go. I'm looking forward to it, that's for sure.
Date posted: 11 December, 2012Tags: nanowrimo regularspelling writing
NaNoWriMo Update 2: Keeping Up
Oh right, I was going to try and post an update the other day, but the site was acting funky and I didn't have the time. And I never did post the link to the public share of the document on here (I did post it on Twitter, here it is). Nearly done with it, still don't have a proper title for the story, just still called the "Third Tier Story". But it is what it is, and what it is now is a much more clear sci-fi story then I was playing it up to the halfway point.
I mentioned last time that as of that point I had planned it up to the halfway point. Once I got to that halfway point, though, it was back to playing it by the seat of my pants, up until Sunday. On Sunday, planning out this last week, I was able to finally plan out where I wanted the last four updates to go (to finish Thursday because I have things to do on Friday), and so most of the last half was once again spur of the moment. Honestly I don't like writing that way because it ends up reading like a screenplay and you can't clearly picture the scenario I'm trying to show. But for this story I've just had to deal with it the whole time, because I did not plan this story ahead. It's all being done live, and so I haven't had enough time to think ahead of time how to portray it clearly.
So here it stands, a fifty thousand word book that's probably not that easy to follow. At some point when I decide to do something more with it heavy revising would be necessary, and it would probably grow to at least half-again that size to double or more in size. When would that happen? Who knows. Probably some distant time where I would have to read the whole thing entirely again to even remember what I wrote, because right now, where I'm not thinking of it first then writing it down afterward, the full details of what's been happening have sure been having a difficult time sticking in my head.
Date posted: 27 November, 2012Tags: nanowrimo regularspelling writing
NaNoWriMo Update 1: Aimless?
So to actually post an update on what I've got going on for NaNoWriMo. I'm below par right now, having fully missed two days and getting well under par a third day because of computer crap. I went into this not knowing at all what I was doing, as I mentioned last time picking it at very last minute (literally as I was writing that blog post I found that part of the rules about starting something new), and all it was was a very rough idea that popped into my head months and months ago. Or actually a year ago, according to OneNote, that section was written October 2 of 2011.
It wasn't even a developed idea either, it was something rough that popped into my head when the newest Van Canto album came out and I was listening to the bonus track A Storm To Come from it. I can remember my thought process, I can tell you that much. Not that long before that I had been coming up with a new overall setting for writing different stories in and had just hammered out that basic thing, and then one of the times I was listening to that song trying to learn the words, the priest in the beginning giving the funeral gave me the impression that he might be condeming the man (which he's not, really, if you read through the official lyrics with the action description, he's just reading a sermon from the Bible). But from there I got the idea of a power mad priest, and some opposition to his position, and went from there.
While I've of course posted on here my progress in writing stories as I've written them, even with The Pocketwatch I had more idea of where I was going than I do here. All I had in these notes were four characters and their very generalized motives, and that's it. No other plot and otherwise, so I really have just been wandering as I've written so far. Cranking up my realtime self-writing all the way up, I've just typed and typed to see what came out, hoping for something that would work. It's incredibly speech heavy, almost to the point of a thinly veiled play more than a book, because that's the way I think when I write stories by running storylines in my head: I let the stories write themselves, driven by how the characters act and react with each other. There's very little environment description or detail, but that can be done later when cleaning it up.
Now, after a number of days of writing, I have finally come to the point where I have an overall plot. Or at least, half of one, anyway. I've got where I want to go up until the midway of the story. The second half can come later, but now that I have an idea of where this will be going, it will come later, I'm not at the point where I have to worry about it anymore. I'm where I need to be, I know where I'm going, and I can get there now. So by the end of this weekend I should be caught back up to par, and once I am, I'll share out the document publically so it can be read as I work.
Date posted: 08 November, 2012Tags: nanowrimo novels regularspelling the_pocketwatch writing
Let's Try This Again
Oh hey look, now it's actual NaNoWriMo time. And since trying to do personal NaNoWriMo failed so spectacularly, I didn't ever get work done on The Wristwatch. And with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 just now coming out and the SDK's for the phone finally coming available and information on capabilities finally becoming public, I figure now's actually a good time to take a break, wait for MonoGame to catch up and the other XNA libraries I use to possibly convert to that (if not I'll do the updating later), gather my thoughts together on what I'm going to work on next, and take some time for writing.
But of course the rules for the NaNoWriMo say "start from scratch", so doing The Wristwatch itself is out, and in fact doing anything I've got currently outlined is out because I've partially written in some amount everything I've got planned. That's okay, though, I've got another idea I can use. Somewhere. Thought it was a quick thing I jotted down it in my Evernote stack, but I'm not finding it there now. Must be in one of my other scratchpads.
But I'll find it. And I'll write it. Let's see how this goes.
http://nanowrimo.org/en/participants/the-bard-src/
Date posted: 31 October, 2012Tags: nanowrimo novels regularspelling writing
Tabula Rasa II
So the plan of course was trying to write a novel this month as I had a bunch of travel going on. And it was a decent plan in theory. However, as it turned out, it didn't work at all the way I wanted, and in reality I got very little work done on it. So now I'm just going to cut it off and get back to programming.
The problem was my choice of tools. As I stated in my intention last time, I got a Transformer Prime with dock earlier this year, which worked fine for general light tasks going to events and stuff doing working on web from those and such. What I didn't realize - and what I really should have tested more before - is that is where the line is drawn. The problem came from trying to do anything more than that. When I tried to get into the very serious, heavy-duty typing, it fell apart, leaving it in shambles. I ran into three distinct problems: typing lag, performance problems with large documents, and formatting issues.
By far typing lag was the worst one, though, and from some research seemed to be a systemic problem with the Android UI itself when running in horizontal orientation, which of course the whole tablet is when the keyboard is docked. I type at a fairly high speed (at the moment doing a test on TypingTest.com I received a score of 79 wpm adjusted for errors, but all night I am fumbling up typing both this and that so it was with a large number of errors), and when I would try typing on the tablet after just a few words it would start lagging and to see if I was typing correctly I would have to stop and wait. This is with multiple programs I tried: Kingsoft Office, OfficeSuite Pro, QuickOffice Pro HD, and something else I deleted right away so I don't remember anymore. The only two programs I had that wouldn't lag were DocumentsToGo and the built-in Polaris Office.
With those out of the question for actual typing, I did try to use them for reading through the work I had already done. I have two documents making up the Pocketwatch, "privateworld.dotx" and "privateworld ahead.docx", which make up Act 1 and Acts 2-3 respectively of the book (becuase I started in the middle when I got the idea for the book), as well as a document called "REF-PrivateWorld" which is an export of my StoryLines project for the book which contains the full story sequence-by-sequence. Trying to read the REF document was a disaster, nearly all of the programs either simply got an error reading it or rendered it with the tables in the document blank. But aside from that all of the programs struggled sluggishly to scroll through the documents making it difficult to read back to make sure I got something correct or to jump somewhere else to work on a different part.
Which left formatting issues. Polaris Office only can save in .doc format, which is why when I very first got the tablet I purchased DocumentsToGo (QuickOffice I purchased later in a sale, and OfficeSuite Pro I was using the trial of, for reference), because at the time it looked like the best option. I use .docx format exclusively since I started using Windows Phone, since that's the format that the Office Mobile 2010 saves in, syncing with my Skydrive once Mango came out (none of the Android productivty suites sync with Skydrive at this time, so I use FolderSync for that). However as I did some work on the book (in July, actually) I discovered that DocumentsToGo doesn't format the way I want it to, double-spacing new paragraphs (which I could ignore somewhat), and shifting the entire paragraph indentation when pressing tab, which was a much bigger issue with me. I eventually found in the settings where to adjust the spacing for new paragraphs, but nothing I could do in the configuration would let me get DocumentsToGo to not make everything at the same indentation, I could not use tabs to start new paragraphs. And this made formatting a mess once I brought it back into Word on the PC, so ultimately that was not an acceptible program for the task. This is why I tried all the other programs, but with the abhorrent lag problem I was left with no other choice than to work with Polaris, saving in .doc format to reconvert later, much to my disdain. But that didn't work well either for me, because, as it turned out, Polaris liked to jump back to the top of the document if I stopped to think for a while on what to type next, making me have to go through the sluggish task of scrolling back to where I was again.
And that's how it went. The tablet, the Android platform altogether, works for a lot of things, but serious authoring it just does not, or at least that was my experience with it. From what I've seen of Jelly Bean its supposed to fix the root cause of the typing lag issue, but who knows when that will roll out to the Transformer Prime. But its too late for that now, the trips are done, and I ended up getting very little work done on the tablet. And that's the end of the experiment. Windows 8 will be out soon, and Transformer-like devices will be coming out for that, leaving the decision simple from there: go go back to Windows, which is a long proven (on x86, not going to get an ARM Windows 8 tablet) platform, where these same problems aren't going to exist because the OS has long been designed for the tasks I want to do, and I will be able to use a "real" productivity suite on it (sticking with Office, but LibreOffice and WordPerfect are just as viable options), as well as being able to program on the go as well.
Date posted: 22 August, 2012Tags: computer writing