The good stuff

Spam is everywhere. That has become a universal constant :p Of course, most of the spam I get is useless to me since it is about home loans, or enlarging (or shrinking) body parts or strange women with manly names who are coming to my neighbourhood and want to meet me – I’ve heard of a boy named Sue but now I’ve also heard from women named Roger and Douglas who say that they would very much like to meet me :p

However, most of the time, the spam has nothing at all remotely to do with anything I’m interested in. Today was different. Today, two different e-mail in my inbox offered me two things that I am very much interested in – publication and money :p The first was from an outsourced software development firm in the Ukraine. Now I do some software consultancy work myself over the Net and I charge people anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour depending on the kind of work that I do for them. This company offers to subcontract the work for me at $9 – $15 an hour. I’m supposed to get rich doing this but I really fail to see how since I won’t have much left over after I pay them. Then again, maybe they just mean that I’ll have more time to devote to my writing and get rich using the methods outlined in the second mail …

The second mail says that my next novel could be in the New York Times best-seller list! Now never mind that I didn’t ask these people to tell me about how I could do this. They’re probably really good-hearted chaps who want to make sure that everybody gets their book on the New York Times best-seller list – there are people like that out there you know. What kind of makes me suspect that their golden heart might not be pure 24 carat gold is the fact that they are trying to sell me a set of "spellbinding CDs with a practical, step-by-step guidebook- designed to impart literally YEARS of useful information on how to navigate your career as a successful author". Heck, what more could I ask for? I’ve already got the years of experience to be an author on CD, I will be rolling in the money tomorrow!

Sometimes, (especially when I read stories like this) I think that the only people who actually get rich from writing are the scam artists or the ones who tell you how to do it instead of doing it themselves :p But then again, writing isn’t always about getting rich. Sure, the money would always be nice but it also is nice to know that you’ve created something that others find useful or enjoy and remember. So with that dream in mind, I guess it’s time to delete the spam and move on …

Time flies and fruit flies :p

I thought I had not updated this blog only for a couple of days but it turns out that it’s been almost a week! Man, how time flies :p

Unfortunately, I’ve not been doing much in the way of writing the last week or so. It’s been working on one computer project after another with not much time devoted to writing or reading about writing. The good thing is that I’m hoping that I’ll come out of this period away from writing and be more refreshed to continue work on my current novel. But then again, the break might just serve to do the opposite, make me so lazy that I won’t want to write. You never know :p

One good thing did happen to me recently – I won something! I never ever win stuff – except of course for the scams where you always win something and then find that you have to pay for it :p But Simon Haynes has been running a bunch of contests over at his Hal Spacejock blog, giving away copies of books in his Hal Spacejock series. I’ve been fascinated by Simon and his road to publication ever since I stumbled across his site a while back. He seems to be doing really great with his Hal series and I’m really happy for him. But what made me even happier was snagging a copy of Hal book one in one of his contests! I’m over the moon actually :p I believe Simon is planning to give more books away in the future and so you might want to keep an eye on his blog – besides, it’s a good read 🙂

Tagging the mix

OK, I switched back to MovableType a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been working on getting Blog to do every other little thing I wanted working in conjunction with MovableType. That’s also mostly done now (yes, expect a new Blog beta soon – I just need to test this build for a few days to make sure that everything works fine and to add a few more features for "classic" blog – such as a new <$BlogTags> tag :p)

Now that Blog works the way I want with MovableType, I’ve been turning my attention to the latest features that come with MovableType 3.3 🙂 One of these is the ability to use tagging. What that means (if you’re not up on tagging) is that you can use a set of keywords to tag the subjects (or areas) that a particular entry deals with. I mostly use tagging because I love tag clouds – they give me a more visual idea of the kind of subjects that I talk mostly about and what is important to me on a long term basis :p

Till MovableType 3.3, I was faking the tags. I was actually using categories to give the appearance of tags. The problem with categories is that they are a bit more static than tags. You have to first create a category and then set it up before you can use it. On the other hand, with tags, all you do is simply specify any keyword/tag you want on the tag field and the blogging framework handles all the nitty gritty stuff behind the scenes. So, being utterly lazy, it was no wonder that I opted to use tags :p

The problem was, that I had already set up all my entries in Blog using categories and I really hate to duplicate work. I didn’t want to have to go through hundreds of entries, look at the categories and then set up tags for them. I got around this in Blog by providing an option in the latest beta which asks you at the time of upgrade whether you want to convert categories to tags. But what about MovableType? I could have edited all the existing entries in Blog and have published to MovableType again but that also sounds too much like work :p So I sat down and started working on a new PHP script which would convert existing categories in a MovableType blog to tags.

The result is a new script which seems to work fairly well 🙂 You can find it under the Blogging Scripts section on my site if you need this particular functionality. Just remember that the script works only with MovableType 3.3 or later …

Voint of pew – the spew

So continuing on from yesterday, let us delve further into point of view (POV) when writing and editing a novel. I mentioned yesterday that a story could get a bit stale if written in first person POV because you see everything through one person’s eyes, your impressions of the world that the character inhabits are formed based on the POV characters impressions and opinions. This could lead to a slightly one-sided story. According to "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers", some writers get around this by having their novel be first-person POV but have several different characters tell the story over the course of the book. Another gimmick (and one which is probably financially lucrative) is to tell the same story through the eyes of different characters as several different books :p

I thought that one classic example of this would be Piers Anthony‘s Incarnations of Immortality series since I seemed to recall that this was the same story told through different characters. However, on looking it up, it appears as if I might have been mistaken. Another example that I can vouch for is Gordon R. Dickson‘s "Final Encyclopedia" and its counterparts, "Young Bleys" and "Other". The latter two novels show basically the same events that took place in "Final Encyclopedia" but from the perspective of the antagonist of the main character in "Final Encyclopedia". While events do tend to repeat, you still find yourself fascinated because of the completely opposite viewpoint of events and people 🙂

Of course, there are also other reasons for using (or not using) first-person POV. If you write in first-person, all your reader can see and know comes from what the POV character knows. This is a good way to do a whodunnit for instance because the reader is kept in the dark till the main character discovers the mastermind behind the murder.

One thing that goes hand in hand with POV is language. Depending on the POV that you’re using, you have to be very careful about the language that you use. Is your POV character an illiterate villager who has just arrived in the big city? If so, you can’t have him describing the things that he sees in the city (when you’re in his viewpoint) with precision and in four or five syllabic sentences. Each characters language and mode of speech is shaped by their background, upbringing and history. So you have to think about how that particular person would speak when you start writing in their viewpoint.

POV is probably one of the most complex (and sometimes hard to pin down) parts of successfully writing a novel/story. There is a lot more that I can talk about with regards to POV but I know that "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" comes back to the same topic from different angles in various other topics in the book. So we’ll probably come back to this topic again 🙂

Voint of pew

It’s back to "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" today and we take a look at "Point of View" – or rather, what I learnt about point of view from the book 🙂 So let’s plunge in …

When I first wrote "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog", I had a real problem with point of view :p I’d have one scene where things would switch between the viewpoints of two different characters. This concept, called head-hopping, is illustrated with a rather compelling example from Larry McMurtry’s "Lonesome Dove" in the opening to the chapter on point of view (POV) in "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers". Since I don’t know if I can reproduce even excerpts from other writers’ works (I don’t believe I can – not without permission …) I will have to rely on a much less effective method to illustrate the point. Basically, I will have to tell you how it works rather than show you (remember show vs. tell? :p)

But I guess I should draw back for a moment and get into the whole point of view thing first (even though anybody who’s a writer already knows all of this to begin with :p). Basically, point of view deals with the viewpoint that you present to the reader. Is the story told from the viewpoint of a particular character as the action unfolds? If so, this would be first-person POV as opposed to a story told from an external perspective looking in on the action taking place, which would be third-person POV. Even in third-person POV, you have to have one point of view character but the POV character can change from scene to scene. When the POV character switches from person to person within a given scene, that’s when head hopping takes place.

Then there is the omniscient POV, which is a whole another ballgame. I don’t think I want to get into that for the moment 🙂 Some books/authorities on writing get into a whole list of POVs. I believe I read somewhere that certain books list twenty-six different flavours of POV. But I believe if you break it all down, the basics come down to first-person, third-person or omniscient.

Of the above, first-person is probably the easiest one to write because it goes something like "I did this, I did that". I believe the one example that sticks most prominently in my mind for first-person POV is R. D. Blackmore’s "Lorna Doone" – that book has such a strong first-person voice that I still remember the voice even after about thirty years of first reading it 🙂 Another very popular example is of course, the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories which are all told in the POV of Dr. Watson.

The advantage to first-person POV? It’s the fact that the narrative voice is very intimate – it’s somebody telling their story to you personally. Third-person POV by comparison feels a lot more distant but the problem with first-person is the fact that you have to sustain the viewpoint character for the length of an entire novel. The character has to be strong and memorable and the reader has to be able to identify with the character enough to keep reading. With third-person, this becomes easier because you can draw on several different characters to provide viewpoints as you go along and there is a bigger pool of story tellers that you can get your reader involved with 🙂 The main thing to watch out for with third-person is head-hopping. Even in third person, readers feel more comfortable going through a scene with one POV character. When you start showing the thoughts and emotions of multiple characters in a third-person POV scene, people are unsure as to which characters eyes they’re witnessing the scene and this in turn tends to draw them out of the story.

There is much more on the subject of point of view but probably one entry is not going to be enough to cover it all. So I will try to continue on the same topic tomorrow 🙂

Bugs and betas

Yes, I know, I probably should have another entry in the self-editing series today :p But I decided to take a short breather to write about coding so as to reassure any Blog users sitting on the edges of their seats :p

I’ve finally gotten around the HTML comments being parsed out issue in HTMLEdit 🙂 As I believe I mentioned when I last wrote about it, I had switched to using HTML comments to mark out the position of the More … tag instead of the Blog tag that I’d been originally using. The HTML comments however were being stripped out and there was no help from the HTMLEdit author even after posting on his mailing list. He did release a new build of HTMLEdit a few days ago but there was still no answer to my question and the new build did not resolve the issue.

So, I sat down yesterday with the source code for the new build and Blog and began doing a few systematic runs to isolate the bug. I finally discovered that the issue was that any HTML comments were being saved fine but were stripped out when the entry was loaded again into the HTMLEdit component. The question was, why? So it was back to more debugging. It turned out that the HTMLEdit author was checking to see if a comment tag was in the HTML document’s body and the comment was saved only if it was in the body.

Now my entries, they are not full HTML documents. I simply save the entry as a snippet of HTML and so of course, there is no BODY tag and so the comments did not turn up as being in the document body :p So they were being stripped out. I modified the code to remove the body check and also notified the author of the component via his mailing list. So what this means is that I’m now ready to proceed with the coding that’s needed to get the next beta of Blog ready 🙂

What’s planned? Well, the thing which was holding me back was the conversion of <$BlogMore> tags to <!–more–> comments. Now that I can do that, I will be bumping up a beta version number to do the necessary internal changes. This release will also have tag support since MovableType has tag support via XMLRPC and I want it. I also would like to roll in the changes for the category categorization :p But I’m not sure if I’ll get that bit working in time for the next release. But hopefully, I’ll have a release ready soon …

Building character

In our second foray into the lessons learnt from "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" let us look at what chapter two, "Characterization and Exposition" taught me so that in turn, perhaps you can glean something too 🙂

A good story needs good characters. People that you can relate to, or sympathize with or just be plain curious about. The trick however is in creating a good character and breathing life into them so that they actually become interesting enough to grab (and hold) your attention. This is where characterization comes in 🙂 The problem of course is in the "how".

You can start with a long narrative description which describes your character from the tiniest hair follicle on their head and down to the gum stuck to their shoe, but is that going to make a character believable? More importantly, is all of that necessary to the story? Does it make the reader like your character more?

Most of the time, the long narrative descriptions just bore a reader to tears and takes them out of the story. Besides, while all that information is certainly dumped, not much of it might get picked up unless written well. The whole process goes much better if you go back to basics and show what the person is like rather than telling the reader. Make the reader work to understand the character. Get him/her involved in the character from the get go. Don’t treat the reader as if they were somebody who needed to be spoonfed every last bit of information and they will reward you by sticking with you 🙂

So how do you do that? One of the best methods is to bring out the character’s character gradually, through a succession of scenes. Is your character a slob? Then don’t say that s/he is a slob, show it through a scene where his/her mother comes calling and is appalled at the dishes stacked up to the ceiling in the kitchen and the pile of dirty laundry that she has to push out of the way before she can even get into the apartment. It works better and it also humanizes your character 🙂

The writer’s show

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to write down, in my own words, what I learnt from "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" so that the ideas become much better solidified in my own mind and also helps somebody else who might not be so clear about these core concepts. In that vein, let’s tackle the first one, "show, don’t tell".

This was a concept which used to frequently confuse me. When I said a character "looked confused", I’d think that I was showing it because I could immediately start picturing somebody looking confused :p However, I realized that I was getting entangled in semantics and that the concept of "show, don’t tell" was about not telling how somebody felt or looked or acted but rather, letting the reader draw a mental picture which leads them to conclude how the character feels by way of description. While it may sound like an advertisement, I have to add that I came to this realization only after reading "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" :p

The technique to employ is rather easy and it makes sense too 🙂 Instead of spoon-feeding your reader every drop of information in long narrative passages where you basically describe a person, a situation or a society, you use conversation or interaction amongst a few people to bring out the same information but not directly. For instance, you can have a long passage about how wan and ill Katy looked and go into minute detail about the translucence of her skin, the way her body was racked by coughs etc. Or, you could have a couple of Katy’s friends talking in concern about Katy and how she hasn’t been looking too well lately. The latter technique might end up being slightly longer but it also gives you a much better sense of immediacy of being in the room with the friends while they discuss Katy and her health problems. Basically, it draws you into the story and that’s what we all want as writers, right? 🙂

The cut and chop of fiction

When I first began writing my novel, I thought editing consisted merely of going back through the manuscript afterwards and catching typos and tightening up the phrasing a bit here and there. Shows how much I knew :p I believe I did only that on my first pass over my novel. But then again, that was right after I’d finished writing the novel. I then laid it aside for a couple of months and went back to it and discovered that there was a lot more that needed doing. So I made another pass. I then thought, "This is it, I’m done".

But recently, about a year after the first novel and about 10,000 words into my second novel, I’ve been considering doing a third pass. As I write the second novel, I begin to see what was wrong in the way certain things were done on the first. I want to tighten up the plot, change viewpoints and eliminate some of the really convoluted sentences that I’m prone to. So, I began reading a book which would help me, "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" by Renni Browne and Dave King.

Actually, Laurie discovered the book and got it. I simply began reading it after she got it :p I wasn’t sure how much the book would help me at first. I am only at the fifth or sixth chapter at the moment but I’m sold now 🙂 The biggest plus point I see to the book is that it doesn’t deal with abstracts. It doesn’t say this is how you should edit and leave it to you to find the specifics. Instead, it deals with concrete examples in almost every page. Not only that, at the end of each chapter, it has a checklist which might be useful to you when going through your own book. Adding to that are the exercises at the end of each chapter which tests what you’ve just learnt.

So far, I’ve learnt about show and tell, characterization and exposition, point of view, proportion and dialogue mechanics. Sure, if you write, you’ve probably heard of all of this (or at least some of this) at one time or another. I had heard about these too. But the book actually made me aware of them as entities/concepts instead of abstracts 🙂 For instance, I’ve always been told "show, don’t tell" but when writing, I’d sometimes be a bit confused as to what was showing and what was telling. I realized about the confusion and how the confusion came to be when I read the chapter on "show and tell" as well as "dialogue mechanics". In fact, just a few chapters into the book, I’m already planning a lot more extensive edits to my first novel than I’d originally planned :p

I find the book so useful that I’m wondering if I should perhaps write a few blog entries outlining what I’ve learnt from the book. It will help me solidify the concepts better in my own mind and perhaps it might help somebody else too. I’ll have to think about it …

Site and Blog ….

Well, the site is coming along fairly OK 🙂 So now that the transition seems to be over and MovableType working fairly OK, I’ve been turning my attention to what MT offers and how I can leverage it.

One of the first things to fall under my searching eye was tags :p Now I’ve been talking about tags before and my efforts to implement them in a way that would work with Blog and whatever remote blogging platform that I used. WordPress didn’t actually do much in the way to support this out of the box – at least, not when I last checked. MT on the other hand, supports tags in a big way – especially in their upcoming 3.3 release.

In fact, MT supports tagging via the XMLRPC interface as well! The uploaded entry structure via XMLRPC has allowance for a tag field and so all I’d have to do from Blog would be to simply provide a place to enter the tags in the Blog interface and then upload the added tags with an entry and MT would take care of the rest. What could be more perfect? :p

The problem here is of course that I’d have to make another database change. As I’ve explained before, this is where I’m stuck with Blog at the moment. It looks as if the HTMLEdit author has disappeared again. He does this every once in a while but unfortunately, what this means is that I can’t proceed further with the current work on Blog till either he comes back or I find (and fix) the bug myself. At the moment, it looks as if the latter course of action is the only one available …