September 29, 2006

Breaking out as a novelist

I’ve been reading "Writing the Breakout Novel" for a while now and have been meaning to talk about it. But till today, I didn’t have the perfect opening. And the opening was provided by the book itself.

We didn’t buy "Writing the Breakout Novel" – somebody was kind enough to send it to Laurie as a gift 🙂 I had heard about Donald Maass (of course :p) but wasn’t really interested in the book at the time we got it. I was in the middle of editing my novel "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" and a book on writing wasn’t going to be much use to me (or so I thought – shows how much I knew :p) But then I began thinking about restructuring my novel again and that was when I decided to come back to Maass’ book.

I read some reviews of the book online and most of the people who blogged about it seemed to be rather negative in their opinion. They thought that Donald Maass was giving a by-the-numbers solution to writing and that it wasn’t a workable solution. Having read the book (or at least the first three chapters) myself, I don’t see it as a checklist approach. Sure, Donald provides checklists at the end of each approach but I don’t believe he actually wrote the book thinking that you’d take the checklist and check each item off as you wrote the book :p I take the book more as a reference work – take out of it what is useful and don’t worry about the rest. So far, it has proven to be pretty useful to me and I might even write a blog entry or two about the most important things that the book taught me.

However, what I wanted to comment on was something that Donald mentions towards the end of chapter three. He asks, "Why do you write? If it is for money or fame, you are writing for the wrong reasons." (I’m paraphrasing him here.) I agree with the sentiment (to an extent) but can’t help thinking cynically whether all agents do the same thing – do they represent a client only if they are utterly convinced of the worthiness of the project or do they also look at how well the book will do financially? If all agents and publishers took on projects just because they loved them, I have a feeling that we’d wouldn’t have so many truly terrible books published :p

Sure, I love my work. I am so lazy that I probably wouldn’t write unless I had to write. Most of my novels start because the characters get in my head and keep doing stuff and I have to put everything they do on paper or I won’t have any rest :p But I’ve also discovered that what they do isn’t terribly interesting – that I might have to spend some time in beating them into shape and getting them to do stuff in a fashion which is more literarily satisfying 🙂 So why would I go to all that work if all I wanted was to write? There has to be something else – whether it is the desire to have other people enjoy what you’ve written or a desire for fame or money or for beautiful women (or men depending on you inclinations) to fall at your feet or to offer various body parts (hopefully still attached to the rest of the body) to be signed. There has to be more. At least for me. I just can’t see myself writing just because the characters are so compelling. Well, I can, but then there is no impetus for me to do anything more with the story – to polish it, to refine it, to make it actually ready for publication. At least, that’s how I see it 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:08 am  |  No Comments

September 28, 2006

Write, re-write and repeat

I haven’t been writing much about writing here, lately. That’s mostly because I haven’t been doing much writing lately 🙂 As I believe I mentioned sometime back, I have finally realized the need to rewrite "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog".

It began as a simple rewrite because I realized that my story wasn’t as interesting as I’d thought at first. But then I began reading Donald Maass’ "Writing the Breakout Novel" and I realized that the problems ran much deeper :p You see, here in Sri Lanka, writing is not really taught. English at best is a link-language or the third language over here and you don’t get much grounding in using English for writing (professional writing that is) at school. There are no courses (that I know of) which teach creative writing at the university level either. So what you write (and how you write) is totally up to what you pick up along the way.

Then, if you do manage to land a writing job – for instance writing for a local paper – and you are any good at writing, you get told so – over and over again 🙂 But the editors usually don’t do much in the way of actually editing your stories or telling you what you need to do to improve your writing. (At least, that has been my experience so far) So again, you are basically left to learn on your own. And that is what I did all these years till I started work on my first novel. Having not had much editing and being told all the time that I wrote well, I thought writing fiction was going to be a piece of cake – it took me a while to learn how wrong I was :p

Now don’t get me wrong – I didn’t jump in thinking that what I wrote was the greatest thing since Shakespeare and that it was going to be an instant classic. I wasn’t that delusional :p But I did think that whatever I wrote was going to be good enough for publishing. It took me many months to see the error of my ways 🙂

First, it was all the rejections from agents and publishers. But I told myself that they hadn’t even seen a page of my writing – that they were rejecting me based on my query and that perhaps they just weren’t interested in humorous science fiction. I asked around and was advised that perhaps it wasn’t a wise idea to be so specific about genre. So I went back and polished my query and queried again. Still I got rejections based on query alone. So I went and asked a couple of people to take a look at my query and polished the query further. Resubmitted and again, rejections.

I was now convinced that my brand of science fiction just didn’t work. Then I read a few humorous science fiction novels by Simon Haynes. He was getting published (and he was brazenly calling it humorous science fiction never bothering to hide the "H" word :p) – so why wasn’t I? I looked a little deeper and realized that perhaps I needed to make my stories more interesting. Sure, I was interested in my main character but was anybody else going to be interested in a guy who’s on the run from his wife’s wrath after selling her dog? It wasn’t as if it was going to be the end of the world if his wife caught up with him, right? (Well, maybe the end of the world for him but why should anybody else care?)

So I began planning how I would make the story better, make it more interesting. In the process, I realized I had too many characters and too many plot threads – I needed to prune and to consolidate. I needed to make the main character’s story stand out more – the reader had to be invested in the main character, not be swivelling back and forth between the stories of four or five different characters. I had come that far on my own … and that was when I read "Writing the Breakout Novel". That opened up a whole new vista of possibilities and things that I needed to look out for. Of course, it would take me a whole new blog entry to talk about all that I’ve learnt in the first three chapters alone. So I’ll reserve that for another day 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 6:52 am  |  No Comments

September 25, 2006

Slinky links

On the track of deleting traces of my old Vista install and re-installing Windows XP, I ran into some interesting information. It appears that Vista (and XP before that) has the ability to create symbolic links, or, as they are more commonly known in Linux circles, symlinks 🙂 No, I don’t mean those dreary old shortcuts, I mean real symlinks which are tied to the file system :p

Here’s how it all came about. I started deleting all the dreck left over from my Vista upgrade install prior to installing XP. In the process, I ran into certain folders which just would not delete – even when I had assigned all permissions/ownerships to my user account. I was completely puzzled but left the issue till later and went ahead with my XP install. However, once XP was up, I went back to trying to delete these odd folders and they still wouldn’t delete. Somewhere in there, in between pulling my hair out in frustration and doing a gazillion Google searches for the answer, I happened to do a directory listing in DOS and it listed these strange, non-deletable folders as junctions instead of directories. The light suddenly went on as the clue-dart hit me squarely between the eyes :p

Now I had known about NTFS streams (another really nifty but way underused file system feature), way back when they were introduced. But I had not known that NTFS had the capability to add junction points even though the ability had been there in both Windows 2000 and XP! Further reading led me to the Systinternals tool named Junction, which allows you to create and delete junction points. I used the tool to delete most of the junction points which were giving me trouble and was finally able to get rid of all the extra folders left over from the previous Vista installation. I later discovered a few other shell extensions which let me do the same thing from within Windows Explorer itself – NTFS Link Shellextension, Junction Link Magic and NTFS Link.

But what’s the use of all this extra stuff when Windows itself doesn’t support it, would be the question, right? 🙂 Well, I came up with one use almost immediately. I normally have all my data on a separate partition so that I can wipe the OS partition and reinstall everything without losing any data. But one thing which bites me all the time is the fact that most of my account specific data goes in C:\Documents and Settings – especially the My Documents folder. Sure, I can use TweakUI and set the My Documents folder to a different location. In fact, that’s how I used to do it till now :p But the issue with that is that sometimes, certain apps will still go to C:\Documents and Settings\Fahim\My Documents (or wherevere your documents folder is) instead of going to where My Documents has now been re-pointed to (usually on D drive). With junction points, I can simply set up the C:\Documents and Settings\Fahim\My Documents to point to my D:\My Documents folder and everything would go to the correct place! And that’s exactly what I did. Ah, the joys of discovering something new :p

September 23, 2006

Vista wins and wobbles

Yes, I know, I was supposed to write this one about a fresh install of Vista but I was prevented from doing so by Vista itself :p The actual fresh install, which I did several days ago, went really fast. The fabled 20 minute install was (almost) true. The copying, extraction and installation took about 15-20 minutes but then there were several reboots while Vista did all of the other configuration and customization stuff and that took about half an hour or so. Still, it did feel much, much faster than an update install.

Most of the issues that I’d faced with my upgrade install of Vista were gone but there were new issues to replace them :p I could run Explorer fine now but I had to re-install most of the programs that I use again before I discovered that a couple of ones that are really important to me would not work correctly or would have issues. Then, FireFox started showing erratic behaviour – I lost bookmarks and settings and had to restore and then toolbar customizations and window positions would not be saved. I am not absolutely certain that this was all due to Windows Vista but I had enough troubles to make using Visa a bit of an issue.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are lots neat features to Vista that I really want. The alternate clocks are one thing – you can add two extra clocks so that when you hover your mouse pointer over the system clock, you can see the time at two other locations. I used to have to use a third-party application to do that in the past. Then there is the Vista start up, it starts up fast and feels very responsive – none of the sluggishness you experience with XP when you first start up and have all your start-up items starting at once :p

However, I had so many issues with Vista, that I was forced to go back to XP. And that was a story in itself because it took me about a day to get all the Vista stuff off my partition and to put XP back in :p Sure, I could have simply formatted the partition but I didn’t want to and so, most of that time was spent struggling with all the folders that Vista had added and setting the permissions on them back so that I could actually delete the folders. One thing Vista seems to do right is to set good security permissions – the bad part is that even the XP installer cannot overcome the security to overwrite existing Windows files :p Anyway, after a day of struggling, installing SP2 and then all the patches and so on, I’m back in XP. I still have my new Vista install on my machine but I’m not sure I will be booting into it anytime soon. Maybe when Vista goes gold and more of my apps actually work there …

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Posted by Fahim at 6:35 am  |  No Comments

September 20, 2006

Vista woes

Yes, I know, I’ve been silent for a while. It’s mostly because I’ve been struggling with my system. The cause? Windows Vista :p But let me begin at the beginning …

I’ve been a participant in the Microsoft Customer Preview Program (CPP) for Windows Vista. But though I did get a copy of Vista Beta 2, running it under VMWare wasn’t good enough due to the fact that the OS wasn’t getting a full workout that way – I just don’t use VMWare or dual-boot installations that much becuase I’m busily using my main Windows installation all the time :p So, when Vista RC1 was announced, I decided that I would put Vista through its paces and also try out the upgrade feature in Vista by upgrading my production machine to Vista RC1.

"Big mistake", I hear you saying. Well, yes and no 🙂 The actual upgrade (which I ran about 7-8 times at least) takes anywhere from one and a half hours to two hours. I had to run it multiple times because the upgrade would crap out at some point and roll back to the previous installation. And I have to say this about the rollback – it was flawless … I’m impressed 🙂 After figuring out all the little glitch points in the upgrade (for instance, when it reboots after launching the upgrade from XP, you I had to boot into Safe Mode if I didn’t want it crashing out), I finally got the upgrade to complete successfully.

Everything was good. Everything looked good. All my installed software appeared to work – even stuff that I couldn’t get installed from a clean installation of Vista when I was using beta 2. Then I found the problem – there has to be one, right? Windows Explorer just would not work. Sure, the Explorer instance acting as the shell worked fine but I couldn’t launch any other Explorer instances in Normal mode. So no Windows Update, no Network Settings, no Control Panel and basically, no changes to the system. The funny thing is that I could run Explorer fine if I booted into Safe Mode :p

I tried everything I could think of – I uninstalled any programs which installed shell-extensions and so might be interfering with Explorer, I used Autoruns and disabled any non-Windows DLLs which were being loaded by Explorer, I tried disabling the Aero interface and went to classic mode – no luck. The weirdest thing was that Explorer would not crash – it would simply pop up for a second and then close with no error message. I tried loading WinDBG and finding out what cause the crash but all I learnt was that it crashed from ntdll.dll (I think ….) I finally found out that if I clicked on something in the Explorer window when it flashed up for a second, that I could get it to pop up a C++ error dialog which didn’t say anything helpful. When I did that though, it did send an error report to Microsoft 🙂

I tried contacting a few Microsoft managers in the shell division but have yet to hear back from any of them :p I posted in the Microsoft newsgroups but didn’t get any feedback – not even somebody telling me how to log Explorer crashes to see what is causing them (and that’s something that I’d still like to find out – whether there is a commandline switch to enable logging for Windows Explorer). I finally chalked this up to a bug that nobody else has seen before and since it looks as if I won’t hear anything from MS (at least not soon), I decided to do a fresh install of Vista 🙂 I’m actually writing this from that fresh install but I’ll write all about that tomorrow …

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Posted by Fahim at 6:46 am  |  No Comments

September 12, 2006

Weekly update

It’s been a rather interesting week 🙂 The highlights – I pulled all but six scenes from "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" and decided to rewrite it, I started work on a new PIM application and above all, I’ve been communicating with a lot of people and it’s been both good and bad (and yes, I can’t mention some of it here even in broad, general terms due to various reasons :p)

First, the writing news. After reading Simon‘s Hal books (and receiving a kind crit from him about both my query letter and the first page), I decided to plunge in and do something that I’d been considering for a while. I decided to re-write my first novel 🙂 As some of you might know, I’ve been trying to get an agent or publisher interested in the book for a while now. While a few were mildly interested, nothing has come of it so far. I knew that the book wasn’t the usual fare – it was humorous science fiction, it had no definite villain and it didn’t have much action. But I thought that this was my "style" of writing. That it was a personal thing.

However, after reading Simon’s Hal novels, I finally came to realize that my story just wasn’t interesting to everybody out there. Sure, some people will find it interesting because it appeals to their specific natures (like it does to mine :p) but it doesn’t have mass appeal. And that was where I had to make a choice. I could have said, this is a personal work deeply connected to me emotionally and I’m not changing a word, no matter what. Or, I could have said that I’d make whatever changes necessary to get published. Of the two roads, I decided to take the one which (hopefully) will lead to publication 🙂

I enjoy writing and there was a time when I said that I’d simply write for the sake of writing as long as somebody enjoyed what I wrote. I still feel that way but with the advent of old age, I am getting to the stage where I don’t want to simply do something with no goals set 🙂 I see no point to spending months on a novel if nobody will read it. So I’ve decided to put my all into this new version of "Honest" and see if it will get published. If it doesn’t, then its perhaps time to say that getting published is not the dream to follow – or not, I really don’t know. I’m rather fickle that way :p But at least for the moment, that’s the goal.

In order to do this, I’ve decided to restructure "Honest" completely. I’ve dropped everything but the first six scenes and even those are being changed to introduce more conflict and get things happening more quickly. I’ll be bringing back some of the older scenes depending on how the story develops but at least one sub-plot will be completely dropped and I might change the current four-threads-of-story format to something different. Besides, the current format gives equal time to all four threads and that wasn’t working either :p Let’s see where it goes when I take up writing again.

But writing’s on hold for the moment while I work on my latest coding project – a PIM (Personal Information Manager) which allows you to store all kinds of information using a treeview format. There are tons of other PIMs along the same lines, right? Yes, but the thing is that none of them have the one thing I really want. The ability to tag information so that I don’t have to rely on the tree paradigm to categorize and store information. I’ve found only two PIM apps which actually allow tagging but they don’t have anything besides basic editing features for their notes. So I decided to create my own. But things have been so hectic that I am not making as much headway as I’d like. Ah, well …

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Posted by Fahim at 7:02 am  |  No Comments

September 6, 2006

Books and serendipity

Simon and I were discussing Sir Arthur C. Clarke yesterday and in the process he happened to mention that he thought ACC had shared lodgings with William F. Temple a long, long time ago. Who is William F. Temple you ask? Well, I only learnt of Temple through Simon’s page about his search for Temple’s Martin Magnus books. (It’s an interesting story, you should take a look :))

But the mention of Simon’s hunt for Martin Magnus books made me consider what my most serendipitous book discovery had been. I believe it’s the Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony 🙂 (Yes, I know that some people turn their noses up at Piers and say that he writes as if books were going out of style tomorrow :p But I liked his early work and still consider myself a fan though I haven’t read any of his recent stuff.)

I think I first discovered Piers Anthony quite unexpectedly. I saw this book with an interesting cover in the local library called "Castle Roogna". I took it home and read it and was enchanted by the puns and the world he created where plants had pies growing from them and everybody had a magical talent. In case, you’re not really familiar with "Castle Roogna", it’s part of Anthony’s famous (or is it infamous?) Xanth series. I hear that the later novels (the series runs to 30 books or more and is still going I believe) weren’t as good but the early novels were quite interesting.

So, hooked by "Castle Roogna", I went back to the library and searched high and low for any other books by Piers. The only other book I found was "A Spell for Chameleon", which if I recall correctly, was the first book in the Xanth series. I devoured that book as fast as I could but I wanted more. But unfortunately, this being Sri Lanka and it being the early 80’s, it wasn’t easy to come by books. Especially books by a specific author. I scoured the second-hand bookshops (the best source for good science fiction and fantasy those days) but for the longest time, I could not find anything by Piers Anthony.

Of course, being consumed by the need to read more of Xanth, I kept scouring the bookstores each time I went there and finally, I discovered a copy of "Source of Magic" (another book in the Xanth series) and "Split Infinity" – a new series. Now "Split Infinity" was interesting in that it was a book which combined fantasy and science fiction – it was a story about two worlds. In one world, science reigned and in the other, magic. I liked the concept and the whole thing about the main character, Stile, being able to move between the two worlds. Of course, it wasn’t a stand-alone book. Stile’s story wasn’t completely resolved by the end of "Split Infinity" and I wanted to read more! And of course, there were no more Piers books to be found 🙁

I searched for years but didn’t find any of the other books in the Apprentice Adept series. Then, sometime in 1993, I went to India on a short trip with a cousin. I was walking along the street in Bombay when I saw a second-hand bookstore and never being one to pass a second-hand bookstore, I went in. You could have knocked me down with the owner’s feather duster when I discovered not one but both the other two books in the Apprentice Adept series! I grabbed them immediately and held on tightly all the way back to the hotel 🙂

So now I had the complete Apprentice Adept series (or so I thought) and I was happy as a clam. I knew what happened to Stile at the end of the series and I went my merry way confident in the knowledge that I had completed another fantasy series. Then sometime in 1997 or so, I was browsing through the shelves in a secondhand bookstore in Georgia (where I was working at the time) and what do I see but more books by Piers Anthony in the Apprentice Adept series! I was stunned. The dastard! He had gone and written more books and I hadn’t known all this time :p But the good news was that the store had all four books that continued the series and so, I was once again up to speed on the Apprentice Adept series and I was happy. Of course, given Mr. Anthony’s habit of extending a series, there is always the possibility that the Apprentice Adept series will get more books added on later. But for the moment, I’m happy in the knowledge that I have read the full series 🙂

September 5, 2006

A Second Course of Spacejock

I finished Simon Hayne’s "Hal Spacejock: Second Course" yesterday and I must say that I enjoyed this book several magnitudes more than the first one. (And that is not to say I didn’t enjoy the first one – as you’d see if you read my review of the first book :p)

This book certainly shows that at least some authors mature over the course of years 🙂 The first book was enjoyable and a smooth read but the humour wasn’t a primary factor – especially in the conversations between the characters. From the opening pages of "HS: Second Course", the humour in the conversations is much more evident. I can’t say much more without spoiling the story for people and so I won’t. Just take my word for it 🙂

And another thing which really drew me to this book was the complexity of the plot and the hairpin twists and turns that Simon introduces into the plot. There is a bit towards the second half (which again I can’t comment about for fear of spoiling) which has so many plot elements packed together in a few chapters that Simon must have used a compression program :p It has lost alien civilizations, deserted planets full of alien technology, lonely towers standing guard far out to sea and a lot of other things that I really enjoy reading in a science fiction novel. In fact, I wish I’d written thins one 🙂

In fact, about the worst thing I can say about "Hal Spacejock: Second Course" is that I don’t like the cover as much as the cover of book one. Now don’t get me wrong, Dion Hamill is a good artist and there are elements in the cover of the second book that I do like but Hal looks a bit grim and old and Clunk looks a bit shifty eyed in the second book. Now the first cover (by Les Peterson) has what I’d think of as the "classic" Hal pose and while Clunk looks a bit big and purple in that one, he still looks really cheerful. And that’s how I personally see the books – one big, cheerful read 🙂

September 3, 2006

Of crapometers and poems

Miss Snark is currently running her semi-regular 3rd annual Crapometer where she reads your query letter and the first page of your manuscripts and tells you what you did right (or wrong). I sent in my entry but never received a number and by the time I got around to even thinking about contacting Miss Snark about it, she’d already posted the winners. You snooze, you lose :p Ah well, her comments about other participants still makes for interesting reading though and the comments themselves should help anybody figure out how to craft a good query letter. So go take a look 🙂

I’ve not written much recently since I wanted to put writing on hold for a bit so that I could spend my writing time on reading Simon‘s "Hal Spacejock: Second Course" 🙂 I’m enjoying the book and will post a review once I get done but it’s slow going at the moment (not due to any fault of the book) but because I’ve not been feeling a 100% recently. But I’m halfway through the book and this is an even better read than the first one – some writers, like wine (not that I have any experience mind you :p), get better with time.

Though I’ve not been working on "Hunt for ‘Read October’", I’ve actually been writing a bit of poetry after ages. I thought I hadn’t written much in the way of poetry for close to 20 years, but going through my archives here, I notice that I had indeed written a few poems during the time this blog has been existence. These new poems however, are slightly different in that they have a central them and are part of a series 🙂 But more on that tomorrow (perhaps). For now, let me just post the first poem.

Light

Light and dark, day and night,
People walking in daylight bright.
Deeds foul or actions right,
Nothing ever is black or white.

Do you wonder ’bout the world of grey,
That often is just a thought away?
If you would bother to open your mind,
A different light you would find.

Where rights and wrongs are blown away,
And might does not ever hold sway.
A world of thought before deed,
With nary a hint of lust or greed.

A world where humanity really thrives
And towards excellence forever strives.
Like a sunflower opening its face
To the sun’s blessed life-giving rays.