Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Editing is making me miss whiskey.

Dear Reader,

I am so close to finished with my edits on this manuscript. Now I have to deal with formatting issues. Each change I make, magically, undoes itself when I upload the manuscript to the self-publishing site. EVERY DAMN TIME! Font changes? Useless. Line spacing changes? Laughable. I'm beginning to think that there are dark forces moving against me and I'm going to have to sacrifice an animal or something to make this work properly. Also, is it me or does the self-publishing sites have a hate for Google Chrome? I keep getting error messages that I don't have the current version of Flash to use various features. (I have the most up to date version of Flash on this gods damned computer right now.)

I can only imagine how hammered Hemingway would have been if he had to go through this stuff.

Monday, February 24, 2020

Flora & Fauna: Roots are hard to draw.

Dear Reader,

I've been having some difficulty with my sketches. Roots are shockingly hard to draw. I thought feet were complicated and I knew that hands were challenging. I never dreamed that something like roots would be so hard to draw. I am currently attempting to draw something that looks approximately like Mandrake root and it looks gods awful. I now understand why they just took a shortcut and drew them to look like little people in the ground with leaves sticking out of their heads. I am quite tempted to do the same thing. Ugh. Why can't roots be like potatoes? Potatoes are easy to draw. (No, I am not going to post images because I am ashamed of how ugly they are. I should draw potatoes instead.)

Craft of Writing: Revise & Revise Again

Dear Reader,

I am currently in the process of revising a manuscript in preparation for self-publication. Revision is a long process and can lead to burn out. It is tempting to say after your first run through the manuscript that it is good enough. Don't give into that temptation! Resist! For the love of your book, resist the temptation to say that your manuscript is done after one revision.

Maybe you can get away with that in a high school English class, if you're teacher is overworked and is just skimming through papers. Get outside of that special life of writing that is for secondary school and you can't just skate through with out 'extra' revision. There is this myth that authors, especially the big name ones, write the perfect book in one shot and editors just breeze through them to make sure that the layout looks good. It is a terrible lie. Don't believe it.

Revision is a skill. It does not come easily. Let us be honest, here, none of the skills in this trade come easily. Sitting down with a work and searching out its weaknesses and flaws is painful, boring, and tedious. That's why I will let a fresh manuscript sit for a few months before I pick it up again to start the revision process. And I don't try to bang my way through the process in one month. If the manuscript is really short, I may get lucky and one month is how long it takes. Most of my manuscripts, however, are not that short.

It takes me at least three months to get through a NaNoWriMo project (50k+ words) for my first round of revision. Then I set it down for a month to work on something else. After that, I pick it up for the second round of revision. The first round is checking to make sure that the major story elements work and that I have character details correct in most of the scenes. The second round is where I start looking at the mechanics of the book and things like grammar. It is the nightmarish part of revising and editing that I don't particularly enjoy. Still, going through the book with a fine toothed comb is the only way you can get it ready for the third round of revision. That final round of revision is where I try to get things like pagination and font spacing right. I am still looking to make sure I didn't miss anything in the previous rounds of revision.

After spending most of a year on the three revision phases, I will have a manuscript ready for me to consider publishing. I stick it in a proverbial drawer for another month, sometimes two. Then I read through it. If it still works and still tells the story I want to tell, I proceed with the process of self-publication. Sometime, however, after the functional year of revision, I have to scrap large parts of the manuscript and rework. That puts me back at square one after I have done that. I usually want to light my laptop on fire and throw it out a window when that happens. It's ok to cry and eat that pint of ice cream when that happens.

After those feelings pass, come back at the writing desk and see what you have sitting there. It just might be worth spending another year on revision. Or, you might be insanely lucky and have something that is just right. Still do that first round of revision, just to make sure, though.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

SCIENCE! fiction

Angel checked over the plasma rifle. Satisfied that Maeson had kept the weapon in good condition and fully charged, she walked out of the security suite with the plasma pistol holstered at her left hip and the rifle over her right shoulder. It felt good to have a real weapon in her hands. The sword was in her left hand. It was not as elegant as the katana that she preferred but she took what she could from the situation. She stepped back into the stairwell and looked down to the deck below. Satisfied that there wasn't anyone coming up from below, she continued down to the corridor to the lift.

As she stepped into the lift, she said, “Bring me to the lower cargo deck.” Aeolus initiated the movement of the module. The gravity systems required for the lifts to work were hardwired to stay on-line. It was something that Angel couldn't command Aeolus to override. She didn't worry about that, however, because she figured it was something she could use to her advantage. The doors to the lift hissed open and she stepped out. The plasma breech was above her. She could see how it was slowly eating away at the metal in a far corner of the cargo bay.

She resettled the rifle on its carrying sling so that if she needed it quickly she could bring it to ready immediately. “Captain,” the ship said via the neural-link, “This level may be able to tolerate combat but only for a limited time.” Angel muttered in the darkness something about how it wasn't going to be a long fight. She reached the emergency egress to the upper deck and climbed the rungs up. She punched in her command code and the hatch opened.

Her vision heightened to the limits of human vision and pushed farther by the display that the neural-link generated, she could tell that her targets were at the opposite end of the bay still trying to figure out how to open the main hatch. “Dregan!” she shouted. The cloned units turned as a single body. As they began moving towards her, she stepped back and dropped back down to the lower deck through the open hatch.

The first of them jumped into the darkness. The clone found himself with a sword cleaving into his torso as he hit the deck. The claymore was heavier than what Angel was used to but it did the job superbly. While the cyborg clones were well designed to infiltrate non-combat units, it left them a little more susceptible to injury than the combat units. They lacked the metal impregnated skeleton that the combat unit clones had because they were just bodies to throw as cannon fodder. They didn't have the neural-link or any of the other features of the combat units, such as enhanced reflexes or broader visual acuity. They were little more than doomed men wearing her lost lover's face and memories. The second clone began to climb down the ladder as Angel moved back.

In the pitch dark of the cargo bay, they stumbled over the corpse of the other clone. Angel brought her sword down and decapitated them. Two clones executed, she awaited the other four. She knew that the clones would learn from the situation because they were not androids. She called up to the clones on the deck above. “Dregan! Get down here!” Angel waited. “I'm not getting any younger, lover boy,” she called as another clone came down. Their foot met the bodies and gingerly they felt their way around them. “That's right,” Angel said, “Come this way, follow my voice.” With her enhanced vision she watched the clone walk directly towards her.

She stepped forward and hacked into the clone with the sword. Where the first two didn't have an opportunity to scream, this one did. It was a cry of betrayed agony. Angel felt something inside her sicken at that sound. “Don't worry,” she said, moving closer as the clone dropped to his knees, “I'll make it better.” She could see the head turn towards her. With a single blow of the sword, she beheaded the one that gazed at her with wounded betrayal in their eyes.

The clones on the deck above moved towards the hatch and down into the cargo bay below. Angel stood well back from them, the sword at her feet and the plasma rifle in her hands. She shot the first one in the back. A brilliant, blindly bright blast of light came from the blow and the body began to burn as it fell away from the ladder. The third clone hesitated at the hatch entrance.

“Lights up, Aeolus,” Angel said, “I want him to see what I've done.” Angel blinked at the sudden shift from utter darkness to pale running lights illuminating the gloom. As the clone in the exo-suit climbed down, they looked around the empty bay. They saw Angel standing at the opposite side with a plasma rifle trained on them. They saw the bodies of the other clones.

“What are your orders?” Angel demanded.

“Complete the mission,” they answered in Dregan's familiar, husky voice.

“Well, the mission is complete and we're enroute to deliver the data,” Angel said, “So, I'll ask you again, what is your orders?”

“You're compromised,” they said, “We are supposed to take command and confine you until the replacement arrives.” Angel shook her head.

“Wet-work never was your forte, was it?” The clone shrugged while looking around for something to possibly defend himself with. “Listen to me,” Angel said, “I promise, when I get back to Terra Firma, I'm going to burn the whole thing down, like we planned.”

The clone's attention snapped to Angel. As she edged forward, she let the plasma rifle swing back to her side. She slowly drew the pistol at her side. “Xenogen is going to go down,” Angel said, “Just like we planned. I just have to get back there to shut project Morpheus down and all the rest of them. You're going to help me, just like we talked about it.”

“I... I don't remember,” the clone said. Angel's voice was soothing as she raised the pistol. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you're dead, lover boy,” Angel said, “They killed you thirty years ago.”

“But, I'm right here,” he said, “And you haven't aged a day.”

“Stasis in the Creche does that to you. They got me the day they got you,” she said.

The clone gripped their head through the exo-suit. At her words, a memory of Angel's screaming and blinding light and pain hit the clone. Operation six was a failure because of the neural-link synchronization sickness. He fled into the the city and found Angel. They were happy for a time. And then operation six found him again. They accomplished synchronization for a brief moment to implant the command to bring the wayward and hunted prototype cyborg to a location for them to take her in.

The clone looked over at Angel as the memories slammed into them. “End it,” the clone said in a ragged voice, “You don't know what else they programmed into me.”

“I had to give you a chance,” she answered. The clone of Dregan nodded and straightened. Angel fired her plasma pistol and the head whipped back as it was vaporized. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she turned around and picked Maeson's sword.

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Rough couple of days.

Dear Reader,

I haven't been sleeping well. It's beginning to show. Because I have complex-post-traumatic stress disorder, I have nightmares. I have lots of them pretty much every night. The nightmares range from invented fantasies of horrific things to reliving trauma. Usually, it's reliving trauma in some fashion.

I'm doing my best to get back into the swing of posting daily. Yesterday's lapse in posting was because I was busy with familial business all day. Monday was a day where I wandered around the apartment feeling pathetic until I wrote some escapist revenge fantasy. I'm not sure where I'm going with this post. It isn't what I had planned, but it is honest. I suppose there is that, at least.

February has always been a rough month for me, beyond the fact that I have been suffering from seasonal affective disorder on top of c-ptsd. There's a few trauma anniversary dates in this month. And the birthdays of people who had abused me in the past. It makes February hard because I can't just ignore it and move forward. My brain just won't let me. I'm still trying to process it all and even though it's virtually a lifetime away from me, I still can't fully wrap my mind around it. The week leading up to Valentine's day is usually the hardest.

So, please forgive my silence. I'm not doing too well right now. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day.

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Still loopy from this cold, but ...

Dear Reader,

I'm still sick with this stupid cold but I am on the mend. I'm a bit loopy and scattered at the moment. As such, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a week for an update on the serial stories. Because I'm having difficulty writing coherent sentences and sticking to a theme for longer than a few minutes. I am, however, going to encourage you to read the stories from the beginning if you're not familiar with them.

Dacia's War is about a desert kingdom dealing with a war with a neighboring kingdom and unrest along its northern borders with a splash of cultural turmoil. There's politics, sex, and violence. All the good things you look for in a fantasy story, right?

The Iron Lily really is an adventure story about a man and his dog. Sure, there's a lot of violence and a lot of weirdness, but it really just boils down to a man and his sentient dog going on a quest that just might be what saves the kingdom from a rising evil.

Monday, February 3, 2020

Flora & Fauna: The Poisoner's Book I

Gather the herb by the light of the waning moon. Be sure that it has five teeth upon the leaves, sharp and pointed. The blossoms must be fragrant. Beware the stench for it has driven men into madness. It is recommended to wear a mask or a cloth o'er one's face when harvesting the herb. The more spots on the blossoms, the more potent it is for it is an elder plant. Take only the leaves from the lower portion of the plant. Those closest to the earth are closest to death.

In your mortar and pestle, crush the herb with oil and salt. This will draw out the deadly humors and strengthen them. Add the ashes of nettle roots and mix together until a thick paste. Spread this paste out upon a cloth and dry it in the sun. When dry, crush the remains into a fine powder. Take care not to breathe in the dust. Store in a bottle in a dark place where the light of the sun can not reach it.

Blow a pinch of this dust into the face of your enemy while cursing them to suffer the wrath of the dread god of all evil. Upon breathing it in, they shall choke and swallow their own tongue before collapsing to the earth stone dead.

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Craft of Writing: Brain Dump

Dear Reader,

This week's post is similar in spirit to my previous one on the merits of keeping a journal. I picked up the concept of a 'brain dump' from Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal blog. It is a place where you write down all of the random thoughts that hit you. It is supposed to help free up your mental processing energy for the tasks you have at hand. Some people keep a brain dump page in their bullet journal. Others make have an entire notebook dedicated to this. Either way, the practice of using a brain dump is brilliant.

It keeps a record of ideas that come to you as they arrive. Because they're recorded, you can flip back through them and pan for the ones that are really useful to you. While 'buy dog food' may not be vital to developing a plot outline for your book, if you're making a shopping list at the end of the week, that note is going to be helpful. One may wonder, what manifestation of a 'brain dump' do I use.

I keep a daily journal that is functionally my brain dump. I started out with the intention of recording my thoughts about the day's events, but the time I was using it switched from evenings to mornings. Now, I just free write about whatever is pressing on my mind for two pages. I distinguish this from The Artist's Way's morning pages by the fact that the goal of the morning pages is different from a brain dump. The morning pages are focused more on building one's artistic strength and are ideally a place where one experiments with ideas and concepts in a free form way.

A brain dump is just that. It need not be full sentences. It can literally be a list of words. It does not need to be artistic, in fact this may hinder the process of using a brain dump if one tries to inject artistry into it. It is simply a place to off load the random (and not so random) things on your mind so that you can focus on other tasks.