February 10, 2006

Coding, Testing, Writing – Life goes on …

I finally finished editing my new short story, "The Wyrm’s Lair" and sent it out. I haven’t really tried submitting short stories anywhere before (heck, I only started submitting my novel less than a year ago :p) and so am not sure how it will go – keep good thoughts in mind for it 🙂 Of course, I’m not totally accurate in saying I haven’t submitted any short stories before – I have submitted two stories before. One, a long time ago to an e-mag and they didn’t like it and the other one was just before I started work on the short story that I sent out today. The second one was rejected as well but I’m not totally surprised about that one since that didn’t have too much action – it was more of a character/mood piece. This one, I really like and it sort of came together much better even than the first draft once I’d edited it. However, it might not be everybody’s cup of tea :p So now that that’s done, I have to consider what I start working on next. Probably editing "Honest" …

I’m also beta testing AstroSynthesis. AS is probably one of the best space mapping software out there 🙂 I love it because it helps me to map out the universe that I’m writing about. It fleshes things out and helps me keep track of what world is where and how far away each world is and so on. Now if I could take it a step further and I could also map out each planet as far as the land masses and stuff goes, it would be perfect. Actually AS has a sister product, Fractal Mapper which does help you do this but it takes quite a bit of work to create a good looking Fractal Mapper map and I just don’t have the patience :p Besides, I already have enough projects without taking any more on. But back to topic, I am beta testing AS 2.0 and I was really thrilled to be picked to beta test since besides my own apps, I haven’t beta tested anything much. Of course, what with all the other stuff going on, I haven’t been able to do as thorough a beta test as I would have liked and I feel a bit guilty about this since the developer is sort of getting cheated by having me beta test. Hopefully, I can make up for it in the future beta releases.

Now that WriteTrack is out, I have started work on another project – a Word add-in to highlight often used (and misused) words in a document. I’ve already written most of the code for this as a macro and so the logic isn’t too difficult but there is a UI to the add-in and that’s where I’m struggling at the moment. I hope to have the add-in done within a week and then I hope to keep adding more functionality to it as I go on, creating a suite of little utilities that will be helpful to writers. That’s something I see a great need for with Word – it’s not too shabby a word processor but most of the available tools are just as overpriced as Word is :p We need more free stuff so that us poor writers can actually afford to have them 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 9:01 am  |  No Comments