Hi! If you haven’t yet learned not to expect updates on Fridays, you might have been expecting an update today. Too bad. I was going to put one up, but we’re moving to Fayetteville tomorrow, and all that packing we were going to do today? Didn’t get done. But guess what! We have a car now. That’s why we didn’t get any packing done. Packing- -, car++; I figure we did well enough.
Expect another update when I bloody well get around to it.
I don’t know what my writing process is – or rather, I do, but it’s constantly changing. I have yet to settle on something I like that works for me in both the short and long term. Part of that’s probably due to my schedule – which is about to change – but not all. Since I’m putting Derelict in a drawer for a month while I start my next book and work on Zosias, I thought I’d talk about how I write, have written, and plan on writing.
I think it’s worth mentioning, at this point, how Derelict got its start. (It’s kind of funny, I’ve always thought.) In the summer of 2004, I was enjoying my last summer vacation before moving to Hot Springs for the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts (ASMSA). I had recently acquired the first computer I could call my own, an Emachines laptop (because I didn’t know any better). There were two main reasons I wanted a laptop: because I figured I would need one at school, and because I wanted a laptop to write on. I had done some writing on the family computer in the past, but for some reason the static environment in the computer room just didn’t do much for my muse. The fact that the computer was running Windows 3.1 probably didn’t help a great deal.
At the time, I was on my first read-through of The Wheel of Time. It got me thinking. I’d always wanted to be a novelist, right? What better way to get my start than a massive multi-volume epic like the one I was currently engrossed in? (I got better, I promise.) The first chapter of the story (entitled The Storms of Heaven, a name that sounds a heck of a lot like Jordan’s The Fires of Heaven) went great. But after that I found myself suffering from a pretty big problem: the second chapter. I concluded that I needed to develop the world more to continue on the main story, and started up a short story called Ghost Ship in order to do just that.
Around the time Ghost Ship hit 10,000 words, I accepted that maybe it was going farther than the so-called “main story.” In retrospect it wasn’t that bad: the original draft of Ghost Ship reached 11,783 words, while Storms reached 8,803 words, 7166 of which were in the first chapter.
In retrospect, my problem with Storms wasn’t what I thought it was. I kept trying to come back to it because I loved the characters in it – I still do, in fact. They’re neat characters, with a lot of potential, even if the old version of Rose does trip some Mary Sue-sensors in my head now. And I’m happy with the premise. The problem was that a bunch of neat characters, and a means for getting them in the same place, isn’t enough to carry a novel – much less a series. What I needed was a plot, and that, in a nutshell, is why Ghost Ship beat the socks off of The Storms of Heaven. Going into it I thought, “I need a clear idea of what this story is about, so I can get it written at short-story length.” (Look how that turned out.) And if most of the characters were cardboard cutouts, if literally every other scene was solid exposition, well, at least the thing got written. By the end of that summer it was too late for Ghost Ship to fit into a short story, but it could have been a decent novella. I was almost done with it as such when I left for ASMSA. It was probably within three or four thousand words of the end – and there it would stay, because by golly, ASMSA keeps you busy. What time I wasn’t devoting to schoolwork (and hanging out with large numbers of fellow geeks for the first time in my life), I was devoting to the process of meeting and falling in love with my then-future wife. I would occasionally pull out Ghost Ship to tinker with, and I made dozens of false starts on other works, but it would be quite a while before I got serious writing done again. Years, in fact — because the next serious writing I did was when I picked up Ghost Ship and began expanding it into the novel that is now Derelict.
Let me back up, though, to that summer before ASMSA. I think it bears studying, since the hypothetical topic of this post is my writing process. Let’s look at how I worked during that summer that I got so much done.
First, I didn’t have anything resembling internet. I had access to it at school and the public library, but not at home. I had plenty of books, but I don’t really think of those as a distraction from writing – ultimately, they tend to work as inspiration. (When I’m reading a lot, I want to write. When I’m playing a lot of video games, I want to create them. When I watch a lot of anime, I want to write, score, and animate one. For the sake of my sanity and that of those around me, I try to do lots of reading.)
Second, my schedule was essentially free. Most days I stayed home all day while my folks went to work. Sometimes, probably about once a week, I would go into town with them. But most of the time I just stayed home. Given a completely free schedule, I would usually settle in to start writing at the kitchen table with my laptop around the time my parents went to bed – about 8-10 PM. I would write until my mother woke up at four the next morning, spend some time with her in the morning, then maybe write another hour or two before going to sleep for the day. I’d wake up in the afternoon, often with an hour or two to spare until Mom and Dad got home, and I’d pretty much just do other stuff for a while, often involving hanging out with them.
And I got a lot of writing done. In retrospect, given that this process went on for around a month, and I got around 20K words written, that means I wasn’t actually churning out words at a very rapid pace – writing anywhere from six to ten hours a night, I got less than a thousand words a day in general. It wasn’t my typing speed – I was easily in the mid-60 WPM range at the time, and I’m not any more. It was mostly that I just dawdled around in my writing. Didn’t stress out about it, didn’t try to force it, had all the time in the world to write however much I wanted to and pretty much took my time. For years, I would look back on that summer – my last free one – with longing, as a sort of idyllic time when life was good. In some ways, that represents my ideal writing process: write by night, sleep by day, perform some human interaction in the afternoon, get paid enough for my work to not worry about anything else.
I didn’t expect this to take so long. Possibly because I didn’t think about it too much, who knows. Either way, I’ll save the rest of this for next Friday. (Look at me, I have a buffer!)
Current music: Better than Ezra, Greatest Hits album. I have it because of their song Desperately Wanting, which is rather nifty. As it turns out, it’s not the only one.
Let me give a quick shout-out to one of my friends here. Over at Alternative Dreams, one of my best real-world friends has a blog going about various topics that interest her — and they’re really, really interesting topics. There’s not a lot there yet (poke poke), but it promises to be really interesting. So far she’s mostly talked about aquaponics, which is pretty nifty stuff (and immediately applicable to Derelict, which is nice), but there’s also a video on crafting bead-and-wire spiders. And did I mention she’s got a job in the local university’s nanotech lab, despite being an undergrad? Seriously, go have a look.
Sooo I didn’t put up a post last Friday, or any time since then. Thought about it a couple of times, but I make no excuses: I never said the Friday updates were a sure thing.
I’ve decided to officially close this draft of Derelict. There’s enough stuff changing about the story that I really need to go back and get everything in shape, and excepting the ending and the New Sirius climax, most of the book’s pretty much written. But I really feel a need to fix some things I’ve known I need to revamp for a while before moving on, and I also want some time off from it for a little while. So I’m going to do the classic stick-the-manuscript-in-a-drawer-for-a-month thing and work on other stuff before I get started on the next draft.
What other stuff, you may ask? Well, I’m glad you potentially did. Most of my creative time this following month will be spent on two things: Zosias, and my next book. Since I don’t think I’ve discussed either in any detail here, I’ll tackle them in order.
Zosias is a tabletop RPG I’ve been developing for a while now. By “a while,” I mean it started as a D&D 3E campaign, before there was any need to call it 3.0.
It’s grown a bit since then. By “it’s grown a bit,” I mean that I’m now the lead designer of four, and that I eventually plan to build a PDF publishing company with it as the founding product. It’s no longer a 3E campaign but a separate, SRD-based ruleset using the OGL. The SRD was, of course, based on third edition, so there are similarities — but due to the character of Zosias, and the nature of the OGL, there are necessarily quite a few differences. And that’s all I’ll say for now, other than that it’s extremely awesome.
My next book. It’s no secret (so I might as well tell you): My ideas are like kudzu. I’m not one of those people who has to scrounge for ideas. (Don’t ask me where they come from. The answer is somewhere between “I don’t know” and “everywhere, with no regard for my sanity.”) As far as ideas for novels go, other than Derelict, there are (off the top of my head) about . . . well, five stories that I’m definitely going to write and one that I might tear apart for partial integration into other tales. Two of those stories are huge multi-volume tales: Allerdan is currently planned as a seven-book series, and there’s not doubt that I have a heck of a lot of material for the world of Derelict. As in two direct sequels before getting into a main series of at least three, probably more than twice as many, books. One story is planned as a series for middle-grade or YA, but is mostly just a rough idea right now. and Old Nick might be a trilogy. So conservatively, I have my next fourteen books planned out to at least the concept-and-shreds-of-plot stage — assuming that I scrap The Shroud, only write the main series in the Derelict universe as a trilogy, never write the potential YA series, and cram Old Nick into one volume. And not counting Derelict, which is relatively close to done.
Those are just the ones for which I have a solid core idea, at least a small cast of characters, and a skeleton of a plot. If I write one of these books a year, I’ve got my next fourteen years of writing planned out. I’m pretty sure I can think of some more stuff to write in fourteen years. So I’m not worried about that.
Tangent over, let me tell you a little about my next book. While I have a pretty good idea of Derelict‘s working title, this new book is going by Wings to Chase These Dreams right now, which frankly sounded a lot cooler a year and a whole lot of repetitions ago. Let’s just nickname it Wings for now.
Derelict is a space opera (or possibly a fantasy in space). I put Wings firmly in the fantasy category — though technology is far ahead of what you normally see. That is to say, the technology level is probably around that of America circa 1960-80, though with a lot of major and minor differences. Wings is also very much a coming-of-age story. While Derelict has several LGBT characters, it takes place in a society where that is essentially a non-issue. Not so for Wings. The protagonist is a lesbian in a society that is downright hostile to homosexuality: and so Wings becomes something of a civil rights story as well. There’s a lot of other stuff going on as well — I’m really enjoying developing the world’s magic system, for one — but I think I’ll discontinue further rambling for now. Suffice to say that I’m really, really excited about the book, and I’ll be working on it for a little while in the following month, before I pick up Derelict for that next draft.
Live long and prosper.
Current music: Alien Ant Farm, Smooth Criminal. Full disclosure: I like this remix better than Michael Jackson’s original version. And that’s all I’m saying, because frankly — and no offense to the guy — I’m tired of hearing that name.
For the longest time, I’ve had this troubling problem with my laptop. You see, it’s extremely useful to be able to write anywhere. In fact, my first computer was a laptop precisely because the family computer was in a location that, frankly, was rather poisonous to my muse.
Unfortunately, writing anywhere on my current laptop has proved to be something of a challenge. For starters, the computer has a few issues. Nothing major, but its battery always reads at 5% charge – no matter what – and doesn’t last long at any rate, so it pretty much has to be plugged in most of the time I’m using it. Also, it occasionally has this problem on boot where the backspace, u, and a few other keys don’t work until I reboot. My account name on the laptop is Cthulhu, so you can see how this might be a problem. (My laptop’s name is R’lyeh, in case you were wondering.)
All that’s fairly trivial, though. That’s not what stops me. It’s not that my laptop runs Ubuntu, and as such doesn’t run most of my favorite Windows-based writing aid programs (not easily, anyway). It’s not that the aforementioned programs run slowly, though that’s a factor.
It’s that my files aren’t with me. They’re at home. I can transfer one to my laptop’s desktop via flash drive, modify it, transfer it back – but that’s a pain, because when I get home I have to set up my laptop, plug it in, turn it on – desk space is at a premium for me right now. I usually just end up making new files on the laptop’s desktop and transferring them in bulk every few days or so. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a nice, compact way to carry all my files with me from computer to computer?
The answer, of course, is a flash drive. And it’s not like I don’t have a few. I mean, they’re literally giving them out with boxes of cereal these days. (Seriously. 1Gb flash drive with 8 proof-of-purchases. Don’t remember the brand, but it was there.) The problem with my flash drive, see, is that it’s sticking out the front of my desktop, where it happily stays 24/7 holding my most important files and, well, not really doing anything else. Because I’m afraid of losing the bloody thing. Or breaking it (a justified fear with my most recent one, whose USB plug is at an angle with the rest of it). And then my precious, irreplaceable, neurotically-backed-up files would be gone forever. Except for, you know, the backups. (In all fairness I don’t back up stuff as much as I should, but it’s often enough.)
So I’m compromising. Today I dug up my old 512-meg flash drive, a nice compact Sandisk with a pretty blue light and, more importantly, a lanyard. This is, in fact, the very flash drive that I got back in high school and used until, oh, a couple of months ago when I “upgraded” to the 4-gig, lanyard-less, already-broken-necked flash drive sticking out of my desktop right now.
And you know what? Works like a charm. I loaded up a couple of files and spent the first half of my break digging through some of the more interesting stuff I’d left on it. Then, I wrote about a hundred new words on Derelict during the last ten minutes of my break. It’s sticking out of my desktop now, merely awaiting a quick file transfer. It’s like having an old familiar friend back.
Best of all, I finally got over my guilt for replacing the poor thing.
I’ve started playing around with Inform 7. I haven’t done much with it yet — not as much as I did with I6, certainly — but overall I’m impressed. I was a bit discouraged when I first went to the site and found that the beautifully constructed language, so perfect for text adventures, had been completely redone in natural language. I really liked the old Inform.
But obviously the designer thought this was an improvement. I gave it a try.
Ironically, I7′s biggest feature is the one I like the least: the natural language programming. I can see some clear advantages to it – I’d imagine it’s much easier for a user unfamiliar with programming – but I find it much to wordy. I’d rather type “crate.isContainer();” or even crate.setTag(GOB.CONTAINER);” than “The crate is a container.” Though my second example is 28 characters and the actual I7 code is 25 characters, so maybe my whining doesn’t hold water. It comes down to personal preference. I’m used to coding, and I like code.
But ultimately that’s only a minor quibble, because the natural language parser is generally pretty good. “Generally pretty good” is, in my opinion, high praise for a parser of natural language – particularly English. It can be a little picky sometimes, but even if you’re not sure what it wants from you, the compiler gives very good feedback on what you could be doing wrong. And if there’s any group that’s bound to be forgiving of picky parsers, it’s people who play text adventures.
Enough about the natural language. So far, I like Inform 7 a lot. This is mostly because the I7 development environment is an amazing tool. Having worked with it just a little bit, I no longer want to contemplate the process of writing a text adventure without it. It keeps track of commands used in testing the game, what their results are, etcetera. So (for instance) if three common commands to start the game are “inventory,” “take off hat,” and “burn hat,” it keeps track of that, and you can tell it “The results I got this time are the ones I want.” Then if you do anything that breaks or otherwise changes the results, it will let you know. If you don’t want to type these every single time you test, you can move on down the tree of commands to where you do want to test and have it automatically play through the beginning of the game for you. If you spot a typo, you can fix it and click “Replay,” and it will re-enter the commands from the game you just played so that you’re back where you were, virtually no effort, typo fixed.
If you want to write a text adventure, try this software out. If you don’t know what a text adventure is, I’m sorry; I don’t feel like explaining it right now — google the xyzzy awards and Zork, and see where that takes you.
Good night, and good luck.
I’ve been thinking a bit about nomenclature in fiction lately. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about words and names derived from real-life people and places.
But first, credit where credit is due. While this sort of thing has bugged me for years, I’ve been thinking about it lately due to a post by Peter Ahlstrom on Brandon Sanderson’s boards. (Have I mentioned Sanderson enough? Go read Warbreaker.)
The characters don’t speak English, so what we read is a translation into our language. [. . .]
I do think it’s a good idea to pay attention to anachronism when using metaphors and idoms, but that’s also something that can be taken too far—for example, trying not to use any words with latinate roots because there was never a former empire of that type in the universe you’re writing in. That would probably be impossible because English is what English is, and the book is written in English.
-Peter Ahlstrom, assistant to Mr. Sanderson
He was talking about a turn of phrase used in the Mistborn trilogy, but the point obviously holds for a much broader spectrum of fiction. And it’s one that has bugged me for years. When, in my Zosias campaign, the gnomes developed rifled guns, I didn’t call them rifles and I didn’t call the process rifling. The process is called spiraling. This was due to the belief that “rifle” comes from the name of the inventor of the process, though my google-fu is having trouble coming up with a reference for that. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should have just named it after Rifle Bottleblower.
Most of the time, I think, Ahlstrom’s point holds. For the most part, making up a new name for something just because the etymology doesn’t hold up in court is pointless and confusing. Most of the time I just gloss over it these days.
But I still think there’s a place for it. Renaming something basic can add flavor to a setting — if you don’t mind the confusion — and I think that, used sparingly, it makes a great spice.
Even so, in Zosias I’ve mostly taken to naming the troublesome ones after Bottleblowers as a form of lampshade hanging. That’s mostly my friend and co-developer Michael’s fault. The Bottleblower clan of gnomes has been a running joke for years now. (Seriously, I don’t remember the last time we ran a gnome that wasn’t part of the Bottleblower family . . . )
Eh, so there you go. Have some random thoughts.
I’ve loved computer programming for quite a while now. I don’t know exactly how old I was when I first started programming in QBASIC, but I know there was a book on BASIC programming I checked out from my school library over and over again sometime in elementary school. I didn’t have a way to write the programs in it at the time, but I loved reading it. A couple of years later I started on QBASIC. (You don’t need line numbers? The line numbers don’t have to be in order?) Then I got a computer that wasn’t hopelessly out of date and went off to ASMSA, where I learned Java, my language of choice since (though Python is pretty neat). Most of my class notes for the next couple of years included snippets of Java code.
So programming’s been part of my life for a while now. Sadly, I’m kind of out of date. Since I started serious work on my writing last year, a lot of my other hobbies have fallen by the wayside (notably not including gaming). Programming’s one of these, and it kind of makes me sad sometimes.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. (Am I allowed to admit that?) But I have to wrap it up somehow, right? Oh, hey, I remember now! I’ve been being attacked by programming ideas again lately. Mostly I’ve just been jotting them down for later reference, but a couple have stuck with me. One of these has to do with Inform.
Inform is this lovely little programming language I discovered . . . four or five years ago at ASMSA. (Whoah. That long?) In short, it’s a programming language designed for writing text adventures, and if you don’t know what those are I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining them in this post. It’s been a while since I played with Inform, and apparently there’s been a major upgrade to the language since I last did (as in, apparently the coding is intended to be in natural language now — whoah — but I’ve not yet toyed with the new version.) Nonetheless, if I write a text adventure any time soon, it’ll be in Inform. And I just might, because I have a nifty idea.
I love indie games. I love books. I’m a writer. I’m a programmer. Why not smash these together a bit? I have an idea for a text adventure prequel to a duology that’s been kicking around the back of my head for a while now. I think it’d be neat — the text adventure available free on this site, with some references back and forth between it and the duology so that neither is necessary to enjoy the other, but they enhance each other.
That’s about it for tonight. I bid you all well.
Current Music: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bad Moon Rising. I’m listening to a Pandora station seeded on Johnny Cash right now. I love Johnny Cash.