Releasing this one a little early because of a crashing bug with the ToDo list. There will still be a release this weekend as well, unless I really screw something up.
The End Is Near
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
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.
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
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).
Indie Books Research
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
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.