MarkFassett.com

The End Is Near

Mark — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:38:34 +0000

I’m off to the store to pick up four days of food for myself. Wife and kids have gone to visit the grandparents, so I’m home alone. Since I pushed out that update of StoryBox early this week, I have the weekend free to write (except for one game of football I need to watch).

I have roughly eight scenes to go before the 1st draft of WiW is complete. It’s going to wind up a bit shorter than a hundred thousand words, I think. I have three days. Eight scenes. Think I can get it done?

StoryBox 0.6.74

Mark — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:21:53 +0000

For those of you running 0.5.73, and you like to split your documents, update to this one quickly. There is the slight potential for some data loss if you split a document but don’t view that document right away on 0.5.73. It requires StoryBox to crash, instead of closing correctly, but why risk it?

As a bonus, thesaurus functionality has been added to the right click menu of normal mode documents.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

If you haven’t yet bought your copy of StoryBox, and you want the $25 price, you will need to purchase before the end of September. Early in October, StoryBox will reach version 1.0, and the price will increase at that time to $35. You get all of the versions up to 1.0, plus all of the versions up to, but not including 2.0.

StoryBox 0.5.73

Mark — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:37:26 +0000

I added the ability to split and merge documents, as well as select multiple documents in the File Drawer. The features are available from appropriate context menus.

To merge, select two or more documents in the File Drawer, right click on one of them, and select Merge Documents. The documents will be merged up into the first document. The other documents will be put into the trash.

To split, put the cursor where you want to split, right click and select split. If you select some text, you have the option of turning that text into the title of the new document (the text will be removed from the actual document).

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

Indie Books Research

Mark — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:17:33 +0000

Since I’ve had my iPad, I’ve read a lot more often because it’s just so much fun. I’ve bought books from Amazon, Kobobooks.com, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. At first, I bought mostly traditionally published books, too.

Then, once I really started thinking about writing again, I stumbled onto J.A. Konrath’s ”A Newbies Guide To Publishing“, I think via Dean Wesley Smith’s blog (hard to remember). The world of Indie publishing opened up to me.

If you don’t know J.A Konrath, he’s an author that published several books the traditional way, but in the last year or so, due to an experiment with putting some of his older published material on Amazon for his fans to read, has decided he likely won’t publish through a traditional publisher any more because he can make more money self-publishing electronically on the Kindle.

So, where’s this going, you ask?

I got interested in finding out the quality of the typical Indie book, so I started with a couple of the people who commented on his blog. Zoe Winters, JA Konrath himself, and a couple others. I read Disturb, from JAK, and it was pretty good. I thought there were places where it could have been better, but it wasn’t awful. Zoe Winters Kept was good, too. I’m normally not a paranormal romance reader, but Kept kept me reading til it was done. My wife liked it, too, and made me buy the other two novellas in the series.

Then, I decided to be adventurous, and I downloaded half a dozen random samples from Smashwords. They were uniformly awful. Poor sentence structure, uninteresting characters, big blocks of scenery description with nothing happening.

From that, I deduced that the bad outweighs the good, but then, that’s pretty much always the case. After all, Sturgeon’s Law says “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

And then, I came across David Dalglish’s Half-Orcs books. I read the first one, and really, in the first chapter, I almost put it down. There was almost too much going on, and it wasn’t clear to me at all points what was happening or why I should care, and the writing itself, I thought, was average at best. But it wasn’t awful, and I wanted to see if it got better.

It did get better. The confusion cleared up, and after about the third chapter, I couldn’t put it down. I had to finish it. These two brother half-orcs do some horrid things in this book, but David manages to make you care about the better brother (as I see him), and you begin to root for him to come to his senses and give his brother the boot.

And then I read the second book, and I couldn’t put it down. And you know what this indie author managed to do? He managed to make me care so much about his characters in this book, despite the sometimes less than professional editing job, that near the end of the book, when the bad brother does something so despicable to his brother that it’s hard to imagine someone actually doing it, that I had to set it down for a moment to collect myself. I felt so angry at him, and so sad for his brother that I had to get up and walk around for a bit to calm down. No book since Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, which I read years ago (and reread often) has made me feel that way. Congratulations David. Hurry up and finish the last two.

StoryBox 0.5.72 – Emergency Bug Fix

Mark — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:22:02 +0000

Turns out one of the “fixes” in 0.5.71 still had a small problem with it that could be damaging to some data when using the single document mode. When creating a new document while the parent document was selected (ie – creating a scene in a chapter via the file drawer right click menu) or by double clicking a scene in the outline view, the parent document (chapter) would have it’s title replaced by the title of the scene. It would also replace notes, synopsis, and potentially tags.

Update to 0.5.72 immediately, especially if you use single document mode.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

Incidentally, I found this while writing in the car while Wendy drove us to a wedding on Saturday. Beautiful wedding – annoying bug that I couldn’t fix until this morning.

StoryBox 0.5.71

Mark — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 07:46:46 +0000

As I’ve said before, the writing is going great. I don’t know if I’m writing great, but there are far more words than there were three weeks ago, and that’s a good sign.

But a man only has so much time, and with the recent addition of two to three hours of writing, StoryBox progress is a bit slower. Of course, I’ve made some changes lately that I thought were easy changes, and when I go try to use StoryBox, I find I screwed something up. Like the other day when I made a change when using the single document mode so that it would remember where in the document you were when you switch between documents. That worked great. Unfortunately, when I went to write that evening, it wouldn’t allow me to type into any of the documents.

So, here’s the general plan regarding StoryBox updates, though I reserve the right to deviate from this plan at any time. For the foreseeable future, StoryBox will be on a weekly release schedule, most likely on Saturdays, though sometimes it may slip to Sundays. I’ll break from this, of course, if someone has a problem that can’t wait a week.

The writing is good news for StoryBox in other ways. I’ve got new features I want to add that were never on my initial list. And I’m working out kinks in new features before you’re seeing them.

As for today’s release, you’ll notice that the build number has jumped a bit. You didn’t miss anything. Since I’m making builds for myself during the week, I have to increment that build number. This build was focused on making certain things smoother, and easier to use. There aren’t any really huge features added, just bug fixes and some streamlining.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

50,000 Words in 30 Days!

Mark — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:18:35 +0000

I was too tired last night to write a post after finishing my daily 2k, but I thought yesterday was a pretty cool milestone for me. I finally won NaNo – sort of. I hit the 50k mark, and if I were to place the 18 days of writing I did in August immediately after the 12 days of writing I did back in November, I won!

Of course, I can’t really do that, so I didn’t win, but that 50k does mean something else important to me. I’m half way done with the first draft of WiW. 37.5k words in 18 days. At this rate, I’ll be done right around the 10th or 11th of September.

What have I learned the past 18 days? I’ve learned that I can sit my butt in the chair and write my 2000 words, even if I don’t know exactly what I’m going to write that day. And if I can do it while working an 8 hour a day job plus updating StoryBox once a week and getting hours in with my kids and WoW, as well as some reading every day – why can’t you?

StoryBox 0.5.68

Mark — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 22:01:00 +0000

This latest build contains some bug fixes, and the ability to set the default properties for your document types yourself. Don’t want it preserving the format by default in a scene, you can change that. Prefer the default status to be “First Draft”. You can change that. Open the preferences, click the Format tab, and click the button near the bottom.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

Unofficial StoryBox Test Build

Mark — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:11:54 +0000

There is a test build of StoryBox that I hope solves a crash issue for users of non-US keyboards. The crash happens when typing certain characters into some fields, like the synopsis and the notes. I don’t have one of these keyboards, so I can’t actually test my fix. If you are having this issue, could you please download this test build and let me know if it solves your problem?

The file is here: http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

And if you’re not experiencing that crash, could you please try it out anyway? The fix required updating the libraries I’m using for some of the UI, and I’d like to know of any bugs that could have been introduced during the update before I call it “official”.

Updates

Mark — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:54:21 +0000

Perhaps you can see that I’ve made a couple changes. The reading list got long enough, I decided to move it down the page a bit and move categories and links up so you can see them. I also added progress information for my current projects. They will mostly be writing projects since I’m bound not to talk about most of my game projects until after they’re released.

Anyway, for a quick update on my writing progress, last week was a good week with nearly 15,000 words written on Wizard in Waiting. I made my 2000 a day target every day. I’m sure it’ll require a rewrite when I’m done. When I started this WiW in November, I pretty much just threw ideas onto the paper, and was figuring out who the characters were as I wrote, and I’m still doing that, which leads me to believe that there will be many ‘out of character’ behaviors from each of them.