To write the right way …

I finished reading Timothy Zahn’s "Cobras Two" yesterday. I was reluctant to put the book down and take up another book because I’d become so attached to the Moerau family and the other characters in the book, I’d gotten to know them, gotten comfortable with them and now didn’t want to move on to somebody else :p But unfortunately, unlike in life, there are no continuations to friendships made in books (unless the authors has written a sequel – or a few) and so I had to decide what I was going to read next. I since I enjoyed re-reading "Corbra" and because of the whole Johnny/Jonny connection, I thought of re-reading "Battlefield Earth" but couldn’t find the book and so I went through several other books before deciding to read the first volume of "The Early Del Rey" – a two volume collection of stories by Lester Del Rey with autobiographical commentaries by the author himself.

This book reminds me a lot of reading some of Asimov’s anthologies because the introductions to the stories give them a personal touch – a feeling as if you are talking directly to the author himself. I have loved what I’ve read so far because I can get a glimpse into the early writing career of Lester Del Rey and to a certain extent, it inspires me to try writing a bit more 🙂 It has been ages since I’ve written any fiction – I think the last bit of fiction I did was called "Dad’s Gone" and was actually inspired by somebody else’s writing – a story written by an online friend of mine in Australia. It doesn’t have the kind of story that I usually like to write – something which evokes a sense of wonder. This is more an introspective, character-based story with just a science fiction background. But again, I am wandering and am travelling further and further away from my original thought :p

I would like to write again. I want to write the kind of science fiction that people used to write in the good old days – science fiction which evokes a sense of wonder in you about the possibilities of science and the universe around us. The kind of stories which used to always amaze me and make me want to read more – and even try to write some. I don’t know if it is the market which has changed or the writers but I don’t see that kind of science fiction anymore. Or is it just that I’m not looking in the right place? Science fiction, if it is at all there, seems to be more about drama and characterization than about science itself. Maybe I’m not explaining it too well but I just don’t find the kind of science fiction that I used to like … So maybe I should go out and try to write some of my own … Or maybe I should not afflict anybody with bad writing :p

I know it’s been almost a week with no updates – sorry about that 🙁 There really hasn’t been much to write about for a while since I hadn’t done any development work at all and the only things to talk about were the same old stuff about bugs and user support :p But I’ve finally gotten out of the rut of inactivity and have gotten back into coding and so have stuff to write about – plus, there are new suggestions for Blog to be discussed by all and sundry 🙂

I’ve been coding BlogMan again – not with a vengeance but slowly whenever a new bug occurs to me :p Since the underlying code for BlogMan is based on Blog, there are a lot of artifacts left over from Blog that are either unnecessary or irritating. For instance, if you run both Blog and BlogMan at the same time and exit one and try to publish with the other, you will get an error because both still share the same temporary folder and the one to exit first deletes the temporary folder :p I need to fix that one still – I just remembered it. Then BlogMan has this irritating problem where it fills it’s INI file with icon information which is not there – this was something for the custom code snippets but there is a slight difference between Blog and BlogMan which causes this buggy behaviour in BlogMan. Then there are all those extra options in the Options dialog that BlogMan has no need for. So I intend to fix all of these things slowly and at the same time try to do UI changes so that depending on the type of server you connect to, the displayed UI elements would change.

In the meantime, I received an e-mail from a new Blog user who had some very interesting suggestions. She wanted the ability to have a title for each entry as well as a summary title for each day. Now I can’t even think of how to implement this UI-wise but has anybody ever needed to do such a thing before? If so, do you think this is something that Blog needs to implement? This user was actually full of a lot of good ideas – some asked fro before and some not. She also wanted the ability to insert some HTML code at the end of a set of entries for a given date – this would necessitate a BlogFooter section similar to the current BlogHeader section. This has been requested before but I never bothered to implement it since only one person needed it but I think I’ll open both issues to debate now – either here or on the forums .. over to you guys :p