Writing

Expanding My Horizons

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I’ve spent the majority of my reading time, nearly all of my life, reading Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. I love the adventure and the speculation and possibilities that are inherent in those genres.

Reading outside those genres has happened occasionally, but never consistently. I’ve read Stephen King, though most of his works are essentially fantasy. I’ve read books by F&SF authors who dabble outside their original genre (Stephen R. Donaldson, Bradley Denton and a couple others). And then I’ve read the occasional book suggested by some other media outlet. A radio interview with Joe Gores got me to read a couple of his mystery novels. A recent article on James Patterson caused me to look at his books on the shelf of the bookstore recently, which resulted in my purchase of “When The Wind Blows” (Of course, it treads on SF territory) and the consequent finishing of that novel in a day.

I’m going to make a commitment to myself that at least one in every three books I read this year (and for the foreseeable future) will be something from outside my comfort zone of the F&SF genres. I’m going to try to sample all sorts of stories that I haven’t read, in the hopes that it will expand my vision of what’s possible to do with a story.
After all, I just read a book where I doubt any of the chapters was longer than four pages. I flew through the book and it was impossible, almost, to put down. 416 pages and 127 chapters. It’s not something I’ve seen before, but it was certainly effective. What other techniques are out there that I’m not aware of because my reading has been so insular?

Software, StoryBox

StoryBox v0.0.51 – Christmas Break Over!

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So, yeah, it’s not much of an update, but it’s a start. You can now empty the trash.

What took so long, you ask? Remember that other work I do? Well, it kept eating my time, right up through the day before Christmas Eve, and I’d planned a vacation over the Christmas holidays to get away from the computer and hang with my kids some (since they were home from school) and basically just recharge as much as I could. So I took that vacation, and I feel much better now, thank you. 🙂

I have spent time working on the export functionality, and basically, the merge in rtf format is kicking my butt. Something about merging the documents together is ruining all the formatting, and I haven’t figured it out yet. For the time being, you can export each document separately to maintain any formatting you want (bold, italics, etc…) which isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing. I am going to continue to work on the export merge of rtf since I cannot in my mind call it done until that works correctly. But in the meantime, I’m also going to try to keep putting out little fixes for other things as well.

It’s BACK TO WORK time!

Software, StoryBox

StoryBox 0.0.50 – Finally, another update

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My day job crisis is finally slowing down, and I’ve manage to squeeze out a few hours for StoryBox. Fixed a couple bugs, and added some additional export options, and spent a few hours trying to make the rtf export correctly merge documents so that the formatting (bold, italic, etc..) doesn’t get lost, but for some reason, it gets lost if I merge two documents together. Yay for bugs in components I didn’t write!

I’m really really sorry for the delay between the last update and this one, but there literally was no time. I couldn’t even finish my NaNo novel. I heard a couple grumblings that maybe I’d gone away, never to return, and that SB was “dead”. That is absolutely not the case. I’m completely committed to supporting StoryBox for the long haul. I’m approaching the point where the really easy fixes and changes are done, and only hard stuff remains. In software development, typically the first 90% of the features take up only about half the development time. And I think that’s where I’m at now. I’ve got the first 90% done. Now, it’s time for polish and refinement, and that’s probably going to take another three months or so. You won’t see any huge changes between now and then, I suspect, but there will be lots of difficult, minor looking changes (like the rtf export issue – I think I’m going to have to write my own rtf library… boo! hiss!).

Writing

NaNo Update and Other Ramblings About Writing Goals

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My NaNo novel is going better, so far, than any of the previous attempts. I’m over 12,000 words, and I know, sorta, where it’s going. I previously never made it much past 5000, and I never had an outline before, not that the one I have is much of one. But any outline seems to be better than none for trying to mash out 50,000 words in a month.

Of course, at 12,000 words, I’m not on target anymore. I’ve essentially only averaged about 1,000 a day, which is far short of what I need to win NaNo. I’ve got to hit 2111 words a day, now, to win, and I don’t know if I can manage it. It was hard just getting 2000 yesterday. I just have too many projects going, and suffering through a cold for the last week hasn’t helped at all. I’ll have to see if I can pop some extra words out this weekend, but we’ve got projects to get completed around the house, too, so I don’t know how much uninterrupted time I can squeeze out.

I’m satisfied, though, with my progress. Even if I don’t win NaNo, I’ll finish the draft of this novel, as it will still count toward my goal for the next year (yes, I worked out my 2010 goals early) of getting three novels drafted.

“Huh, what?” you say.

I’ve come to the obvious conclusion that, if I want to get better at writing, I need to write. And I think I need to write a great deal, so I’ve set a goal of drafting three novels by the end of 2010. They’re going to be written as practice, with no intention of trying to get them published through a traditional publisher. I may even make them available here, in some fashion, if they aren’t total trash. A friend of mine, back in 2006, did a project he called A Short Story A Day, and this will sort of be my novel version of that project. I’m not about to post as I go along like he did. I’m not that comfortable with my fiction yet, but I may post them as I edit them. We’ll see.

Software, StoryBox

StoryBox 0.0.48

Drag and Drop index cards! Yes, now you can drag your index cards from one spot to another to reorder them. It’s not, perhaps, as smooth as it will be after years of refinement, but it works.

Also in this build, I removed Session word counts and replaced them with “Daily” word counts. I’m a little worried about this one, really, about if there are some of you that actually would prefer a session word count over a daily word count.  Personally, I got annoyed that the session word count would reset every time I closed StoryBox because sometimes, well, sometimes I closed it on accident, or I have to do multiple sessions in a day to get my target. If you want session word counts back, I can put them back in (in addition to the daily wc), just let me know. One other little tidbit about the daily word count. It does not reset until you close the project for those of you that start your writing at 11pm and write til 1am. Your daily wordcount won’t reset on you in the middle of your session.

Oh yeah, if you have documents open when you close a project, when you reopen the project, it will now reopen the set of documents you had open when you closed it.

There are a couple other additions, too – read the release notes on the download page for more information on them.

Software, StoryBox, Writing

NaNoWriMo – 6.5 Hours To Go and StoryBox 0.0.44

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I’ve tried to spend the day working up my plot and my characters for my NaNoWriMo attempt, but I kept finding things in StoryBox I wanted to change immediately. I really need to not try to write on the same computer where I develop StoryBox. I did manage, however, to come up with an idea, a half a dozen or more scene descriptions to start the novel, and a description of the final scene, as well as short descriptions of the essential characters. There’s still a lot of work to do, but what I’ve got should get me through the first couple of days. I’ll try to make sure I stay a step or two ahead on the scene descriptions as I go, and I may even get more done this evening as I watch Monster House with my kids.

My main worry, now, about NaNo, is that I’ll spend the time I’m supposed to be writing on tweaking StoryBox. For example, todays effort netted a Recent Projects list under the file menu, tweaks to the Black theme for checkboxes, a Dated Entry option (for doing things like keeping a journal inside of the Box of Notes folder), and the moving of relavent document types to the top of the File Drawer context menu (so if you right click on the character folder, “New Character” will be at the top of the context menu).

Enjoy your Halloween and good luck with NaNoWriMo, if you’re participating. I’ve set a goal this year to complete it, and I mean to. No more 5000 word attempts for me. Mark crosses his fingers, shuts his eyes and says this over and over until he thinks he believes it!