Erich T. Wade

So, I kind of haven’t posted anything this month since starting my 50k warmup challenge. Mostly that’s been because I haven’t gotten around to it. I have been working on the 50k challenge; it went very well for a little while there at the beginning of the month, then took an arrow to the knee somewhere around the 10th. I’ve kept up with the base 750/day come hell or high water, though (I’m up to a 60-day streak! Woo!). The upshot of all this is that I’m currently at around 36,500 of the 50k I was aiming for by month’s end. This isn’t a hopeless case – I’m going to be putting in lots of writing time in today and tomorrow – but it’s pretty grim, from the standpoint of 50k being a firm goal.

That’s not the standpoint I’m taking, though. I’m taking the standpoint that, as a warmup to NaNoWriMo, 36,500 is pretty damn good. I’ve been motivated to write this month more than I have in a long time. I haven’t gotten any work done on long-form fiction (not exactly, but I’m getting to that), but I do have _ideas_ for long-form fiction. Ideas that I’m excited about. Ideas I’m going to base this year’s NaNo around. These are all good things. And, you know, last year I called my NaNo at 22,974 words. So there’s that.

I *have* been working on a lot of fiction this month, but it hasn’t been long-form. Instead, I’ve been writing a lot of shorts related to Kat’s campaign, expanding the world and characters and letting her see things she normally wouldn’t, working from her character’s perspective. It’s actually a lot of fun and, more importantly, it’s really low-pressure writing. The shorts are written for an audience of one – my wife – and if one of them kind of tanks or just doesn’t take off, it’s not really a big deal. It’s better than just writing fiction that will literally never see the light of day (by one person, granted) and because it’s low-pressure, there’s very little barrier to entry when I sit down to start writing. Because I have Kat’s reactions to look forward to, it’s much, much easier to get motivated to actually write them. These are all good things.

Both of these have been so successful that I’m going to keep them up after this month – that’s probably a bit of a “duh” in the case of the shorts, but I’m going to keep angling for 50k words/month as well. It’s a fun challenge. It’s kind of relaxing in a really roundabout way, too; I’m not sure I can explain it exactly, but it is. Probably that’s just me remembering that I love to write or something.*

Current music: an amalgam of old playlists, currently playing “Anywhere” by Evanescence.

*So** funny story; I sat down to figure out what I’d need to add to my writing goals to hit 50k a month, and it turned out to be . . . nothing. Yup. Currently I have 20 taskdays/month on which my goal is 1500 words of prose, and then 750words every day on top of that brings it to about one or two thousand words over 50k, depending on the month. I just never noticed because I’m still playing catchup and ramping up and stuff.

**So do me a favor and don’t count the instances of “so” in this post. And, you know, if you do, that one in the quotes right there doesn’t count. Holy verbal tic I don’t feel like editing out right now, Batman. Does it count as a verbal tic if I’m writing? Is it a textual tic? Just a bad habit?

Years ago, we lent out our copy of Katamari Damacy, never to be seen again. Last night we picked one up for $12 (!) at a Vintage Stock. This morning, Kat showed it to Summer.

Summer calls it “cleanin’ up outside with a ball.”

She wants one so she can clean with it.

She is sad that we won’t get her one.

This is a story most of my long-term gaming friends have heard at one point or another, but I’ve never shared it on my blog. It came up while I was writing another blog post, and it kind of got away from me until I decided it didn’t deserve to be relegated to a footnote.

I grew up around Dungeons & Dragons, and have been GMing (for various values of GMing) from a very young age. I GM’d my first games when I was four or five years old. They involved cornering an understanding (or, more often, trapped) relative with a crossword puzzle and having them work their way through a “dungeon” of arbitrary challenges with arbitrary results, trying to get to the bottom-right square. They were . . . not well received.

Through elementary school and into middle school I ran traditional dungeon-based games in what I called Dungeons & Dragons, but was actually a bastardized homebrew mess with whatever tables looked interesting hurriedly copied out of my dad’s books when he let me look through them. Throughout this period most of the adventures took place in the same dungeon, called the House on the Hill, which lived in a three-ring binder and got larger, more deadly, and more bullshit every time I had a few minutes and a pencil. There was a town nearby, and a river running down through a ravine past the caves leading to the entrance, and I often developed a world for it to sit in, but all the campaigns ended up at The House on the Hill within a session or two.

Well, in middle school I finally got my hands on some actual D&D books with the release of third edition, and I wasted little time getting a game started over recess. My first two players for this particular game were sisters who both decided to play druids, and one of them chose a horse as her animal companion. I want to say they were both horse-riders, but I’ll only swear to one of them having been – it’s been over a decade at this point. The point is, I brought them down the river to The House on the Hill, which was of course the center of the campaign, in roughly no time flat. I had dropped a few hints to the effect of “the adventure takes place in there,” which had always worked before, and I had the maps of the entry caves ready and newly stocked with 3.0 monsters. I got them right up to the entrance of the caves by about the second session. Everything was ready to go. And then . . . they didn’t go in.

The horse(s), apparently, would not want to go into the cave under any circumstances. My suggestions that perhaps these horses wouldn’t mind too much were swiftly and thoroughly rebuffed. My players, as it turned out, knew a whole fuckton more about horses than I did, and they couldn’t in good conscience leave them outside or anything. Instead, they did what no previous group had done: they turned and walked away from the dungeon. After a few minutes of being thunderstruck I closed the old Trapper-Keeper and started flying by the seat of my pants.

And that’s the story of how I stopped running dungeon adventures.

No. No I did not.

Generally speaking, I like the new spellchecker in Google Docs. That is, I like in in concept. In practice, I sometimes wonder whether crowd-sourcing spellchecking to the Internet is such a good idea.

Hologne: For when you want to look as good as you smell!

. . . also, hologna: for when you only want to appear to be eating bologna.

Right now, I’m in the process of moving to a new, better apartment. As a result, this blog will be slightly less dead than usual, as I’m posting to inform you that I probably won’t be posting.

I’ve only been meaning to set up Google Analytics for a year or so, so that’s totally on schedule.

I’ve been curious for a while what my traffic statistics look like, and too lazy to check. I guess now I’ll know.

Yeah, I’m calling it. Time of death is 22,974 words.

I’m going to set This Novel Will Fail (whose secret title is Hypernode) aside for a while, work on Derelict, play some Skyrim, do some reading, sleep, that kind of thing.

So, where to from here? Well, Derelict’s deadline for Draft 3 is December 20, so that’s what I’ll be working on this month. In its current state it’s pared down to not much more than an outline with a few scenes slotted in; yWriter says I need to average about 4k words a day from here forth to hit the word goal, but of course a lot of that is already written and waiting to be slotted in. There will need to be some new scenes drafted – quite a few, actually, as the focus of the book is changing a bit from previous drafts – and a lot of connecting bits still need to be written. After that I’ll be working on Draft 4 from (hopefully) Dec 21 to Feb 20, which is going to be cleanup; there will be a lot of rewriting scenes, fixing the kinds of continuity errors that crop up when you write a book over the course of several years and change the plot direction numerous times. Plus a lot of the current scenes will need to be cleaned up because they’re just not that good, and I left fixing them for a later draft.

I have come to think of first drafts* as the notes from which I will actually write the book. First drafts of stories are very rough for me. I don’t write linearly, so I end up with scenes scattered all over the book, and I’ll write scenes just to see whether they work or not. Then I’ll leave them in the draft, tucked away in the corners, for me to step in later when I’m revising. yWriter’s strength is also its weakness here; its design makes it very easy to write lots of little scenes and squirrel them away in your book, but it’s not as good for taking a section that needs to be complete and just writing through it. What I really want is a way to view and edit multiple scenes or chapters in one editor so that I get the flow as I’m reading through it – like a traditional word processor. I finish reading one scene and instead of breaking myself out to click on to the next one, I just keep reading, fixing things as I go. I can do this by exporting and working in another word processor, of course, but re-importing to yWriter was . . . messy, the last time I tried it. Probably what will happen is, at the end of draft 3, I will export into something like RTF or ODT, and then I’ll do most of the work for draft 4 in OpenOffice. Note that this isn’t necessarily a complaint – yWriter is amazing in a lot of ways, it’s just that it doesn’t happen to be a traditional word processor in addition to a nontraditional word processor. There’s a limit to how much I’m allowed to complain about that, and I think I’ve reached it.

*And make no mistake, with the changes I’ve made, Draft 3 is a new first draft of Derelict. Not the first first draft, but a first draft.

Current music: Same station as yesterday. Still really good. I think it’s time I make a new main Pandora station, where I’m pickier about how much I have to like something to thumbs-up it.

All you people who live in places like California and Japan have permission to laugh at me, because this probably barely counted. It didn’t even bother to knock anything off my shelves. But for the record:

Northwest Arkansas. Earthquake. My desk shook. It was annoying, because I was trying to bookmark something via drag-and-drop at the time.

Also: I am aware that we have actually had several earthquakes in the area over the last several years. Somehow I managed to not notice any of them, which was honestly pretty disappointing.

I knew I wanted to blog about the changes to Google Reader as soon as I saw them, but I also knew that I would need a few days to cool down. So I waited until today to write up my reactions. I got to the end of a thousand words or so, looked it over, and realized that I hadn’t waited long enough to cool down. So you don’t get to read that. For now, suffice it to say that though Reader did need a rework and the ability to share to specific circles was a much-needed feature, we also need to be able to read shared links in an RSS reader.

If you, like I and many other people, are annoyed by the new interface, I recommend the Greasemonkey script Google Reader Absolutely Customizable. I test-drove several and liked this one best because of its customizability. I recommend you also visit the Custom CSS thread and poke around. I dropped in the link recoloring, because the gray links on black text were going to drive me mad. Here, have a before-and-after.

You can actually use that script to make it much more compact if you wish, but I like the bits I didn’t hide.

Sharing is not as easily fixed. There’s a Chrome addon and (for Firefox) Greasemonkey script that seems to restore the old functionality; I don’t know how it works, so I’m hesitant to recommend it in case it relies on db access that Googles going to revoke or something, but I’ll happily test it if anyone else is interested. You don’t want to use it in conjunction with the aforementioned script, as it duplicates much of the functionality in a much-less-customizable way and they don’t always play nice. Also, at least on my ‘Fox, sharing and unsharing items doesn’t work; it seems okay on Chrome though.

Long-term, I think the best bet would be to find a way to import links shared in Google+ as an RSS feed, with links to the relevant discussions as well as to the articles, though I can think of a few issues with doing so off the top of my head. The truth is, sharing to different circles is just too important a change to let go of, but reading through shared links in Google+ is pure hell.

Oh, and one last thing: At first glance it looks like Google Reader only lets you share if you publicly +1 the article, which would be boneheaded for too many reasons to list. It turns out that if you click the “share” button in the top-right, on the black Google bar, it lets you share the currently selected article to Google+ without +1ing it. A “Share to Google+” bookmarklet would be nice, too; I only rarely shared from within Reader.