A Day Late, A Dollar Short, and a Story Board Recap

I’m a day late with my post… I have no good excuse, and thus I will not offer one.  Rather you will just have to rest assured that my self-flagellation for this oversight will be intense and masochistic; however, nothing can be as intense and sadistic as the holiday shopping season, in which my wife and I have been engaging lately much to my chagrin (how’s that for topical segway?).  When one enters these months, it is no uncommon thing to find oneself bereft of funds even when attempting a frugal approach to the whole matter.  If I had a different mindset, I would swear that there was some form of retail conspiracy designed to subliminally create desire for stuff that, on the one hand is only used once a year, and on the other is generally shit that will wind up forgotten in a matter of months.  I love this time of year… I don’t really love this time of year… I’m not even sure I like it… no, I’m pretty sure I don’t like it… I loathe it.

A big part of this stems from the fact that I’m not a Christian (and that’s all I’m going to say about that), and so to me this whole holiday thing is an exercise in making the economic wheels turn; and that’s not entirely a bad thing, mind you, but don’t expect me to be all cheery about it.  This kind of outlook is made complex when one has small children, as I do… you need only imagine.  Thus this time of year becomes more a celebration of family and, yes, gift-exchanging; because gift-exchanging has significant social value beyond the purported symbolism attached to it due to the religious element underlying this particular holiday season.  [Important note: I’m not criticizing any one particular approach to celebrating the holidays (by the way, “holidays” means “holy days” in case you weren’t aware), nor am I attempting to pass a judgment on you whether you celebrate in a religious fashion or a secular fashion… I’m just, in the interest of diversity, telling you how all this appears from my perspective — you’re welcome to skip ahead to the Story Board part of the post.  Go on… it won’t hurt my feelings.]

When I was young, I believe, this outlook which I adopted was an attempt at having some kind of ironic, intellectual objection to the whole holiday thing… but then I was young, so how intellectual could it have really been… when you’re young, your experience is limited no matter how intellectual you think you are.  As I got older, though, I observed an unfortunate amount of Christmas related misery… enough to last me through the remainder of my adulthood.  Mind you, this was nothing that happened to me personally… well, not most of it anyway; say a 20/80 split between first-hand experience and observed experience… or perhaps it’s better to describe it as empathetic experience.  I put it this way because I’m a lucky dude: I have a good, loving family; a nice home; a job I enjoy; and, between my wife and I, a fair income that meets all of our needs and affords us a modest amount of luxury.  Others aren’t so lucky, and this time of year puts some terrible stresses on people… undue stresses which, in all likelihood, are principally the individual’s fault if we’re going to accurately assign responsibility here.  That doesn’t mean I like it, or that I don’t believe that there is an organized industry behind duping these poor folks.

Personally, I think it’s unfair to take advantage of people even if everyone involved makes that snide aside and says, “they ought to know better.”  They don’t… that’s the problem.  Hello: housing market and banking debacle of our recent history… remember that shit?  This holiday thing might be on a much smaller scale, but it’s in the same vein.  I work at a library and one of the main tenets I believe in with regard to library work is the idea that it is our responsibility to give people access to resources which will allow them to make informed decisions about important matters which affect their lives.  It’s important to me; I believe in it; thus, my gift to you this holiday season is an invitation to visit the library to do some research on the things you intend to purchase for your loved ones — you don’t have to get rooked, or allow yourself to get rooked… and the big box stores and multinational corporations are completely indifferent to whether or not you’re an informed or uninformed shopper… they’re there for the money, and if they can have you hand it over to them with a smile they’re okay with that.

I encourage you to shop local; give the little guys a chance this holiday season — they’re the ones who have a more direct impact on your local economy anyway, and they’re the ones that actually care if that economy is healthy or not — the big guys don’t give a fuck.  Put your hard earned dollars in the hands of your local merchants; believe me, it’s the better way.  Sure, you can’t always do it… there’s plenty of things you can only get through Walmart and Target, and you want to keep those places viable too because they employ your neighbors, your friends, and your family.  All things are better in balance, right?  So yeah, I’m sorry to wax a little preachy — I’m not a fan of the red suit or the dead tree; I participate because it’s important to my wife and kids, otherwise I’d probably opt out.  This time of year, season wise, makes me pensive and this bubbles up to the forefront of my mind every year.  Again: I’m not inviting debate here, nor am I challenging anyone else’s enjoyment of Christmas or “non-specific, politically correct, secular holiday season” or what ever.  I don’t like Christmas, but I do like the season and I do enjoy the spirit of the season… and I like Krampus, the Christmas devil… heh!

That lovable Christmas devil…

So, Patrick Rothfuss’ Story Board rocked this past week — it was a total geek squee for me (okay, okay… you got me, they all are).  This past episode was about blogging, and Patrick’s guests were: the Bloggess herself, Jenny Lawson; Wil Wheaton; and John Scalzi.  Now, you’ll note that I didn’t link any of those names like I usually do because they’re all in my blogroll — these are people I read and follow, they’re on my Feedly and my Twitter feed.  I’m a fan of each of these folks, but especially of John Scalzi, whom I look up to (like Patrick Rothfuss) for his accomplishments as a novelist.

The discussion on blogging was an extremely informative one, and I believe Patrick thought it was of particular interest to aspiring writers because blogging has become something of an essential component to being a successful author.  Patrick’s guests brought a high degree of experience (they’ve all been at if for a long time) to the discussion which became more about the art of blogging itself rather than a discussion of how it can be used as a tool to promote work and grant fans access.  Personally, my favorite part of the discussion was when the four panelists (for lack of a better term) spoke about blogging as a form of memoir writing, which I’ll readily agree is a constituent of why anyone would want to blog.  Sharing of oneself, even if you don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers, is a huge part of being a writer.

For me, personally, blogging has eased my anxieties about sharing my writing which is kind of essential to being a writer.  Someone who glanced through my blog said, “you don’t put any of your writing up on your site.”  Bullshit, the entire site is my writing — it’s not my fiction writing, which is what the person meant, but it’s my writing never the less and it’s more personal than my fiction writing.  Sure, like any social and interpersonal interaction, there is a persona involved — it’s all part of the show, folks — but this persona, especially in this case, is very limited… it’s an extremely thin veneer, I assure you… I really am this much of an egotistical bastard, all writers are.  Any writer who tells you he or she is not egotistical is full of shit.  Being egotistical doesn’t mean writers aren’t good people; all artists are egotistical, it’s part of the drive which compels them create.

Watch this episode of Story Board and see what you glean from it; I’d be interested to know:

I don’t know why I haven’t been embedding these prior to this; it’s a dunder-headed oversight I will rectify from this moment on.  I actually got to watch most of this live when it aired on Tuesday which was the first time that ever happened — I may have missed the first twenty minutes or so.  I have to warn (only because Geek & Sundry does), these four have potty mouths so you may want to use headphones if the kids or pets are around and it’s definitely not safe for work.  If you feel inclined, I’d like to hear your impressions of the episode and you can do that in the comment box below.

I’ve started work on a new project, it’s something I’ve been meaning to write for some time and have just put it off repeatedly.  I’m going to begin by writing a series of short stories and perhaps a novella or two (yes, this is in addition to the other stuff I’ve been working on and the edits on both Hell-Kind and The Everlasting Darkness).  Again, let me emphasize that the best part about this is that I’m not on any sort of deadline — I’m my own boss, I work at my own pace, and I enjoy the freedom.  Until next time kiddies!  Cheers!

Blog-O-Rama; or, On the Last Day of NaNoWriMo My True Love Gave to Me…

…lunch at a Turkish restaurant.

The biggest difficulty I encountered while participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo challenge was the simple fact that I didn’t bring my A-game.  I got out of the gate fast and strong, and I made half the challenge in fifteen days in anticipation of my anniversary trip with my wife.  When I got back four days later, I had the motivation of a plastic dummy and I had a hell of a time putting myself back in the appropriate frame of mind.  I squeaked out a few pages, kept pushing to meet my word count, but ultimately I found I wasn’t sitting down consistently to write… I was spending too much time fucking off (more on this in a moment).  Problem number two, was that I didn’t adjust my writing style for NaNoWriMo.  I’m not the most sophisticated writer in the world, okay… I use a few nickel words here and there, but a good percentage of my descriptions read like reportage (“just the facts,” which, oddly enough, seems to work okay) and my meter is staccato in the extreme; i.e., I use a lot of short sentences (think Hemingwegian, rather than Faulknerian).

In order to be successful at the NaNoWriMo challenge you have to remove all the chaff, cut away all the fat, trim away all the excess, and just write the bones — it has to be a mess with an eye toward “salvageability.”  I didn’t  do this, and I paid for it later in the challenge.  The worst part about it was that I was aware that I was doing it, but some of that had to do with a big change I made in the narrative presentation of this novel which is the second installment in an Urban Fantasy series; the first installment being the novel Hell-Kind, to which I have previously referred in this blog.  Allow me to ‘splain: Hell-Kind, which I finished back in August, comes out to about 330 pages worth of 1st person point of view (a convention of Urban Fantasy); The Everlasting Darkness, which was my 2012 NaNoWriMo project, is not written in 1st person and that was a decision I made while I was still working on Hell-Kind.  The Everlasting Darkness has two point of view characters, but the narrative is delivered in 3rd person limited.  Anyway, the other characters — who didn’t get anywhere near as much to say as the main character in the first book — had a lot to say in the second.  My characters got really chatty, and I couldn’t shut them up; which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not something you want to wrestle with while you’re trying to charge through 50,000 words in 30 days.  I’ll admit, right here and right now, it got a little frustrating because I kept having to rein myself in.

The third problem, which I’m a bit embarrassed to write about but feel it needs to be said, was that I allowed myself to get demoralized when I noticed that none of my friends supported my fundraiser.  I didn’t have huge expectations, but I figured at least a handful of the folks I consider closest would’ve given up a couple of bucks just to demonstrate a little solidarity — that didn’t happen, and it sucked… not an excuse to stop writing, but I have to say I got a little bummed out.  At any rate I pulled myself back together, decided I just have the misfortune of knowing a bunch of stingy fuckers (heh!), and got on with getting on.

Perhaps the single, biggest tactical error I made during NaNoWriMo was carving out the time to watch Patrick Rothfuss’ StoryBoard episode four.  It’s not Rothfuss’ fault, but after watching that episode and the video I posted not so long ago (I believe I mentioned watching StoryBoard in a recent posting) I had a nostalgic fervor that resulted in me hunting down first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule books… perhaps “obsession” might be a better way to characterize it.

I can’t recall exactly when it was that I first played Dungeons & Dragons… it might have been the summer between my 5th and 6th grade year.  I spent the night at the house of a friend and his much older brother, home for the summer from college (my friend was a late-in-life baby for his parents), decided to hone his Dungeon Master chops by taking his little brother and his little brother’s impressionable friend though a simple dungeon.  Back then, the Dungeons & Dragons rule book was a red, soft cover with holes punched in it for a three ring binder… like this:

old skool dnd books

All three of us shared one set of dice, and my very first character was a magic-user… I can’t recall the name… my friend played a cleric, I think.  Together we entered a dungeon devised by his older brother, we opened the first door, encounter!  We rolled initiative, I cast my magic missile, my buddy hit a goblin with his mace, and then we ran like hell all the way back to the village.  It was awesome, and I was hooked.  We played all night.  By the end of the summer, our guys were 3rd level, and we wanted to continue the adventure… we had cleared out the first two floors of the home made dungeon, but his brother was leaving and he was taking the books with him.

During the first month back at school, I found and bought a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons rule book, found out it only took characters up to 3rd level, and had to raise money to buy the second book (the blue one pictured above which takes characters from 4th through 14th level).  We played one on one like this for just a brief time, and then my friend lost interest and I was stuck with books and dice and no one to play with.  I eventually got another friend interested and then we went berserk.  To complicate matters, I had my eye on this every time I went to the bookstore:

The next level of geek nirvana…

Dungeons & Dragons was like a gateway drug, and it led to the playing of Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Battle Tech, Star Trek the role-playing game, Marvel Superheroes, and more… much more.

What does any of this have to do with NaNoWriMo and writing a novel.  Well: it intersects with my participation in the NaNoWriMo challenge because I haven’t played Dungeons & Dragons in 13 years  and taking the time out to listen to Patrick Rothfuss, Peter V. Brett, Naomi Novik, Myke Cole, and Saladin Ahmed talk about how Dungeons & Dragons honed their storytelling abilities and equipped them with the tools they use as novelists to this very day made me realize that I was doing the same thing they were.  My writing and my reading are partly an homage to my years spent playing role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.  It will likely make no sense to you if you never played Dungeons & Dragons, or if you played for a little while and decided it was not for you… or if you believed the bad press the game got back in the day and chose to stay as far the hell away from it as possible.  For me it was an obsession, and a critical part of my childhood and later development.  So much so that I acquired the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons core rule books (on the extreme cheap, by the way) over the span of a week.

As you can probably tell, being that the topic hijacked this posting, my NaNoWriMo work suffered a similar trip to the back-burner.  So it was in mad panic that over this last week I got my shit together, pulled my head out of my ass (temporarily, I assure you), and put the old shoulder to the wheel.  At the end of this challenge I wrote the way I should have written over the course of the entire month — with abandon, just the bones, and with an eye toward “salvageability.”  I bashed out the last 3000 words last night, and pushed the counter over by 500 words just for good measure.  If I had freed myself up like that from the get-go, I would have finished the novel in fifteen days and probably could have started a second one.  For a while there I wasn’t entirely certain I had it in me to finish this year, but then I called myself on my own bullshit.  I made a deal with myself; I said, “Self, you fucking procrastinator, we are going to finish this novel or I am going to make absolute certain that I publicly shame us for not having the stones to cross the finish line.”  I promised myself that, in the event of my giving up on the challenge, I would spare no expense to custom design a t-shirt that read: “NaNoWriMo 2012 Epic Failure, Mock me with Abandon” on the front, and “Losers like this deserve all the shame they can get” on the back for me to wear everyday until November 2013 when I might be able to redeem myself.  It was the old, stockades in the public square approach, and it worked.

There was absolutely no reason for me not to finish; sure, life got in the way… but then life gets in the way constantly — that’s life.  In the end I had to beat myself at my own bullshit; I had to call myself on my own laziness, and I had to man up to the challenge I signed up for.  I’ll do NaNoWriMo again in 2013, I’ll finish again, I’ll win again, I’ll even solicit sponsorship again only this time I won’t hold my breath.

Now I’m going to go read… no noveling in December… the draft of The Everlasting Darkness needs a fleet of boatloads of editing and revision, and I need to add the meat back in now that the bones are laid… but that can wait until January.  My StoryBoard write up before the new episode the week after next, well… I’ll just allow what I wrote above to stand; it really was an episode for former D&D gamers, and my advice out of that is: if you’ve never played a role-playing game, give it a whirl… you might be surprised by what a dynamic storytelling tool it is.

Cheers!

The Ides of November, or NaNoWriMo-ing

We’re half way through the challenge, and the month, and I’m still alive… here’s the proof:

Me at the midpoint… still alive.

I have to say that taking four… ahem, actually five… days off for my anniversary helped… in spite of the fact that the foregoing advice is not to back away from your project for more than two days if you can help it.  I’m going to concur with that advice because even though I was happy to get back to work on the novel, it took some focused self-kicking-of-the-ass to get me going.

On the upside: I’ve crossed the 30,000 word mark… this time last year I was nearing the 40,000 word mark, but I was on a suicide run then… this time out, I’m on a more leisurely stroll.  I’m going to shoot for 40K by the end of the weekend, but that’s a very liberal goal — I’ll be solidly pleased if I make 35K, which I most assuredly will.

During my mini-vacay, aside from having a real blast with my wife and taking advantage of a long weekend with no pressing tasks or haranguing deadlines (except for the novel which was parked in the garage), I got to watch the latest installment of Story Board and boy did it hit home.  This episode was about role playing games and how they contribute to the development of the storytelling skills necessary to take on something ludicrous like writing a novel.  I was an avid D&D player in my younger years, and to support the theme of Patrick Rothfuss’ discussion I wholeheartedly agree that the years I spent running D&D campaigns and the years spent participating as a player had a direct correlation to my development as an aspiring fantasy writer… even though I still consider myself primarily a “hobby writer.”

This Story Board discussion began here:

If you’ve not watched this, and you’re not a big fan of good ol’ D&D, watch it anyway because likely one of your favorite fantasy authors is featured in the video; there’s Peter V. Brett, Brent Weeks, Elizabeth Bear, Jim C. Hines, Patrick Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie, Saladin Ahmed, Myke Cole, and Scott Lynch — with Ahmed and Cole acting as co-Dungeon Masters.  If you are a fan of D&D, or you played sometime in your misspent youth, be prepared to get hit by the nostalgia train.  Ernest Cline‘s Ready Player One whet my appetite for D&D when I read it last year, but this shit made me want to roll up a character and find a game.  Alas, I don’t have time to play D&D… but it did get me thinking.  Watching Story Board later, and listening to Rothfuss, Brett, Cole, Ahmed, and Naomi Novik talk about their D&D experiences and the way it shaped their storytelling was both illuminating and entertaining.  I definitely have more to say about this, but I’ll hold it in reserve until after NaNoWriMo.

So, yeah… fourteen days (more like thirteen) left to go, and Thanksgiving is next week.  I’m fortunate to have a good support team, and there isn’t any reason I can think of (short of some unforeseen tragedy) that will prevent me from finishing with a more than adequate word count… it’s just a matter of buckling down and getting the words on the page.  The story is going well; surprisingly, it’s flowing a lot better than I expected.  It’s still a totally shitty first draft (all first drafts are shitty just by their basic nature) but it’s loaded with salvageable content which is a mighty fine thing.

No post next Friday due to Thanksgiving aftermath, but I’ll try and get something up on Saturday.  Cheers for now.

Quick Update, and See You Next Week

Here’s the view from the back end:

NaNoWriMo Dashboard view

Sorry the screen capture utility I have in my browser doesn’t seem to be working, so I used the camera on my phone.

And this one is from inside Scrivener, the project counter from which I extract my stats:

Scrivener project tracker

No picture means it didn’t happen, is what they say… this is my proof pudding.  That’s actual novel-in-progress behind the little window, by the way.

I’ve been banging along pretty well, with only a few rough spots in the early parts of the project that will definitely end up on the cutting room floor — editorial chaff, as it were.  Right now this is coming out as story for story’s sake, and any artistic flourish is being left for after the project is done.  I’ve also encountered a couple of instances of technical difficulty — my wireless keyboard has freaked out on me twice so far, and will probably end up getting replaced in favor of a better quality keyboard before long… you get what you pay for.   Anyhoot, I wanted to break 25,000 words before I left for my mini-vacay, and I’ve accomplished that… I can now officially chill for the next three days, and enjoy myself.  Even with the break, I expect I will be done ahead of schedule, and that means more time to spend with the family during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Next post next Friday, fo-shizzle.  The newest episode of StoryBoard aired and I haven’t had an opportunity to watch it because of NaNoWriMo, but I’ll watch it soon and do a recap when I get chance.

Cheers!

 

My StoryBoard recap, Don’t Be a D!ck, and Other Thoughts…

Ever since I quit smoking I’ve been lethargic… you’d think it would be the other way around, and indeed, for most people quitting smoking means an up sweep of energy… For whatever reason this was not the case with me… and let me tell you: that lethargy has been profound.  For example, I spaced on the blog which, even though I have only as many followers as I can count on one hand, I feel it’s an obligation to myself to maintain my schedule and post every Friday like I said I was going to unless some extenuating circumstance should arise.  I didn’t do that… and that made me fall deeper in to my blues.  Another example, I totally spaced out on the second episode of Patrick Rothfuss’ StoryBoard and would’ve spaced out on the third episode had I not listened to the little voice in the back of my head which said I’d missed something, and which prompted me to investigate what that “something” might be.  Again, I’m under no obligation to anyone but myself here, so what I’m getting to here is that I largely failed myself in these respects.  Sure, the overarching purpose was more noble: trying to stop myself from poisoning myself to death is a pretty important undertaking in the interest of one’s longevity, however, I gave my word on the other stuff and I failed to keep my word and that was bullshit… for me…  What can I say, accountability is important to me.

Here is a link to YouTube where you can find the first three episodes of Patrick Rothfuss’ StoryBoard: LINKEY-LINK; if you are serious about writing, doesn’t matter if you’re not interested in writing genre fiction, I suggest you watch these.  Why?  Well hell, I’m glad you asked: you know how Writer’s Digest offers those writing webinars and panels on fiction and they charge you upwards of $100 to access them… well, Patrick Rothfuss’ StoryBoard is a lot like those but for free, and I don’t know about you… but “free” is in my price range. Granted you are not getting targeted, one-on-one assistance or attention with Rothfuss’ show (they do answer questions at the end, but those are mostly “fanboy” questions); no one is going to look at your manuscript or your proposal and give you advice; no agents are going to tell you the “secret formula” to getting published.  What you will see are professional, published, best-selling authors talking about the craft and about the things that get them all riled up, the authors they look to, the elements of a story’s architecture they believe works or doesn’t work.  This is inside information presented in a fun, informal, and informational way without the fleecing of your pocketbook.  Seriously, no one can guarantee success in writing, and there is no “secret formula;” it all boils down to your motivations for doing it, and the satisfaction you feel out of crafting a story, or breathing life into a character, or setting a perfect tone/atmosphere, or ripping some sweet dialog…  Brother/sister, if you’re doing this to get rich and famous, choose again because there are easier ways to accomplish those goals… writing is not one of them; this is an enormous amount of work with little to no immediate pay off.

Groovy?  Understood?

Mr. G is here to shoot it at you straight, not to be a jerk.  Write because it’s a glorious, soul-fulfilling thing to do and not because you want to swim in fame and money… only one percent of one percent of writers ever get there… the rest of us do this and continue to do this out of sheer love, obsession, madness, or because something deep within us compels us to do so.  And don’t think for one second that I’m trying to dissuade anyone from writing; write, write to your heart’s contentment… write simple because you can hold a pen and you have something to say… write because passion demands it…  Don’t not write because someone was a jealous dick and told you you couldn’t (we’ll get to that bit after this very unplanned digression and the StoryBoard run down).  Okay, I’m getting off my soapbox now and putting on the motor board…  More after the cut:

Oh Snap!

I swear I don’t know where the hell my brain is these days… there will be no Friday post tomorrow because my lovely wife and I will be at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
I caught up on Patrick Rothfuss’ StoryBoard and I’m prepared to share some impressions and to distill some of the wisdom I found from the last two episodes… that will most likely manifest on Saturday night. Also, good news: I’m writing like a mad bastard again. Right now I’m writing a pair of novellas which I will make available for download sometime in the near future… okay, in the quasi-near future because next month is NaNoWriMo, and I’m planning on birthing a novel in November — my “write experience” has taught me that this can be a tad traumatic, so the novellas will definitely go to the back burner next month but I’ll get them out, I’m going to hazard to say, around March 2013. They’ll be in eBook format, most likely both EPUB and Kindle, totally DRM-free, and they will either be free or .99 each. More on all that later.
Am I forgetting anything else? I sure hope not… turning into an absent-minded boob is not something I’m particularly enjoying. Cheers for now.

The First One Over the Finish Line, Technology, and Other Mental Oddities

I’ve officially had one beta reader finish the first draft, and it’s been a wee hell for me waiting for one of them to finish.  He’s compiling notes on the story to share with me, but he also just bought a house… so I don’t imagine I will see those notes anytime soon.  Still, the first draft has been read by someone other than me; the story exists in someone else’s brain other than my own.  I just finished reading Jim C. Hines’ Libriomancer, in which the protagonist is a magician-librarian who is able to use the power of readers’ collective belief in a book to pull items out of the text and wield them in his defense… like Excalibur, because that’s the very first thing many of us Fantasy geeks would reach for (I’ve got a review for Libriomancer over on Goodreads if you’re interested: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/424048621)… I think I might reach for Aragorn’s sword, Anduril, first… hmmm… or a lightsaber.  Okay, okay… I digress… In my mind, books and stories become more real as more people read/watch/listen to them.  A story just isn’t a story while it exists only in your head, it’s incomplete and in a very nascent stage at that point: it has to touch another, hopefully a lot of others, for it to gain any real momentum… any real magic.

As a writer this conjuration requires a lot of attention and detail, everything must be in meticulous order for the reader to suspend disbelief so that he/she can participate in the fiction dream you’ve crafted; hopefully, they will identify with your character enough to become immersed in the story.  In that respect, a story can be a veritable witch’s brew of amusement and entertainment; it cannot be mere sleight-of-hand because the reader will not appreciate being tricked unless the trick is the heart of the story itself, in which case the reader will be delighted… in theory anyway.  There is no way a writer can account for every temperament or sensitivity, you just kind of hope you score more in the positive rather than in the negative.  Research and careful plotting are critical here, because if you pull that off right often readers who don’t like your character will at least come to respect your story for it’s structure.  I like to use architecture as an example: I like architecture, but it doesn’t move me that way other forms of Art do… in fact, I don’t really consider architecture to be Art (hold the hate mail, and follow along for just a moment), but I respect everything that goes into making a great piece of architecture (For me, architecture falls into the category of “decorative arts,” which falls into the larger category of “Craft,” which to me is not Art.  I’ll expand on this in a future posting.  I wish I had more followers, so we could have a nice discussion about this… I’d love to hear what others think).  What I’m saying is: if your story is sound, but your characters are flat you still have a novel or short story or tale or whatever…  Make sense?  I hope so, because I haven’t had much sleep and my brain is buzzing in a way that makes me a bit unhappy… I’m being held aloft by coffee and the guide wires are pretty thin at this point…

The last time I posted I made a mention that I would be talking about technology this time around, and I don’t want to back off of that simply because I was highly amused by a posting on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, where he lists all of the tech he’s currently using.  I’m not going to do that, at least not to the degree he does.  What I do want to do is mention the fact that I have been composing more and more on my mobile devices than ever before.  The quick rundown is this: I have an HP laptop, an Asus Transformer TF-101 Android tablet, an Asus Nexus 7 Google Android tablet, and a Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android smart phone; I provide this list only for context, not to brag.  I take my phone and my Nexus 7 tablet with me everywhere, I enjoy these devices thoroughly because they are both on Android 4.1.1 Jellybean, so these are the devices on which I will focus.  I’m not going to discuss technical specifications for either device because those can be easily found here for the Galaxy Nexus, and here for the Nexus 7.  What I will say is that Jellybean is far and away the best Android experience out there.

I got my wife and myself a Nexus 7 tablet each because I wanted to test drive the Jellybean OS (and give my wife a really awesome gift, because she deserved it), and the Nexus 7 was the first device to receive the update.  I wasn’t instantly impressed with the device because the first one I received was defective and I had to wait for a replacement, but in the mean time I watched my wife use hers and that’s where I began to be impressed.  She would not put the thing down… and truth be told, two months later, she still hasn’t put it down.  My wife is not a techie, and I was afraid she wasn’t going to enjoy the Nexus 7 if it proved to be too complicated for her to use; at which point I would give up and get her an iPad (because the iOS devices are renowned for their ease of use and user interface).  I have nothing against Apple (virtually nothing anyway… the baby fit they threw in court against Samsung didn’t overly impress me though), and one of the reasons they are at the head of the tablet and smart phone class is because of the ease of use of their devices… well, and the status associated with using their devices… again, I digress…  I don’t personally prefer Apple iOS devices because of the “walled garden” approach to services attached to their devices, I like a fair bit of freedom and choice… I totally get that iEverything makes the user experience what it is which many people feel is “premium,” but I like to  have the ability to choose without running into any walls that are going to require me to jump over or break through… I had just escaped Amazon’s Kindle wall, and I was not interested in getting myself caged again.

When my replacement Nexus arrived I got the experience for myself and I was so impressed, so much further impressed after watching my wife enjoy her device, that I made the decision to save up and order a Galaxy Nexus smart phone; having devices that are not bogged down with OEM bloatware is something to be appreciated.  The pure Android experience of the Jellybean version of the Android OS is something you have to try for yourself; in a way it’s like the iOS of Apple’s devices in that it works smoothly and feels, for the first time, like an integral part of the device not like it was just dumped onto the device and made to work by the OEM; but it’s all Android, not a copy of iOS in spite of what Apple might say.  Where iOS feels stable, Android Jellybean feels robust; where iOS feels aesthetic, Android Jellybean feels pragmatic; where iOS feels like pop, Android Jellybean feels like rock ‘n’ roll.  It will be interesting to see where everything lines up after Windows 8 comes out in its non-beta form.  There are very differing opinions out there as to whether or not Microsoft has what it takes to compete in the mobile market, since their Windows phone hasn’t exactly been a huge smash hit; I prefer the “wait and see” approach, myself.

So what does any of this have to do with writing?  Well, as I mentioned earlier in the post, I’ve been doing a fair bit of composing on my mobile devices — for the first draft of the novel, I wrote snippets of scenes, and even a whole chapter or two on my mobile phone (my Motorola Atrix 2, the phone I had before I replaced it with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus), and the Jellybean Android OS makes me feel a lot more confident about about doing this.  The Atrix 2 ran on Gingerbread, and crashed on me a few times causing me to lose what I had written.  My Asus Transformer runs on Android ICS, and is far more stable than the Atrix 2 ever was… bit it’s slow and choppy and not exactly the best writing experience in the world even though I have the keyboard dock for this tablet.  I have a very light-weight text application on the Transformer called, JotterPad HD Pro; it’s a simple text editor with a minimalist interface, that allows me to write in relative comfort and includes just the right tools I need while writing on a tablet.  I was so impressed with this app that I wanted to see how the Nexus 7 and the Android Jellybean OS would handle it — the 7 inch form factor of the Nexus 7 doesn’t give me as much physical room to work as the 10.1 inch form factor of the Transformer, but the quad-core processor and the Jellybean OS make JotterPad HD Pro work like a damn charm.

JotterPad HD Pro is a tablet app, so I can’t install it on my phone; instead, I use the Writer app (another simple text editor) on my phone, copy and paste into a plain text document in Dropbox, and then import it to JotterPad HD Pro on my tablets, or into Scrivener on my laptop… and since both JotterPad HD Pro and Scrivener are connected to my Dropbox account, it makes it easy for me to move files in between those different apps.  It works for me… may not work for anyone else; rather, I believe others will have figured out a different workflow that’s best for him/her.  I put this all here as a suggestion only… trust me, typing out a chapter for a novel on a smart phone is not ideal, but it will work and it can be done — I’m happy to be your guinea pig.

Holy shit, I sure didn’t intend to ramble this long… Before signing off, I will note that I am aware that it is Saturday and not Friday which is the agreed upon blog posting day…  Mandy and I volunteered at the girls’ school yesterday evening for their annual PTA carnival, and the experience left us wiped.  Plus I wanted to come back and watch Patrick Rothfuss’ Storyboard; he had Brandon Sanderson, Cherie Priest, and Terry Brooks on this time out, and I will remark on the show next week.  Cheers!

Egads!  Looking back through my archive I see I never commented on the second episode of Storyboard, the one where (*squee*) Amber Benson comes out… and Mary Robinette Kowal, and Brad Beaulieu, and Amber Benson… did I mention Amber Benson?  Oh, and a special guest appearance by… oh, I won’t blow it… I hate spoilers… but Amber Benson is in there 😛  I’ll devote the next posting to Storyboard, that will make it easy.  Later!