Believe it or not

 First I was waiting on beta readers. Then the first one got back to me and I had to take a break and reset emotionally.

It's funny. A story is words on a page. That's all it is. Those words are surprisingly thin. Not even quite a skeleton of the world that you are hoping to bring to life. So it should be no surprise that the world the reader experiences may not be the world the writer experienced.

But that's not the point of today's remark. The point is, it is a world, a whole world that exists in your mind and the words on the page are merely the reportage. Before you can change those words, you have to change that world. And it feels like a life change. Like changing jobs or moving to a new town or redecorating. You have to let go of all your memories of what had been and clear your mind until you can begin building what it is now. It takes a little time and, yes, it can be emotionally jarring.

***

While I was doing that, I played games. (Plus I was depressed and still getting over a cold and it was really hot). And I am really enjoying Alien: Isolation.

I didn't expect to. The play can be nerve-wracking. It is like the ultimate stealth game, except that you are up against an AI that doesn't helpfully patrol in a fixed pattern. 

But also, the scenery is gorgeous. I'm mildly disappointed in the Sebastopol being yet one more of these ruined, debris-strewn settings. I liked the whatever-it-was better; it was described in-game as being a sister ship to the Nostromo, only cleaned up a hell of a lot after a lot of hard work.

Still, even in the station I just love the way the tech looks, especially the stuff you have to interact with -- including the save points. (Yeah, that's one trick they do to make it exceptionally nerve-wracking. You can't save-scrum. You have to make it alive to the next save point. And yes when I decided to stop and take a break last night I was on what is apparently the most frustrating episode of the game, when you are trying to get out of Doctor Morley's office and the Alien has taken an interest in you.)

And now I'm going back to play from the beginning. It's a relatively short game anyhow, but now that I know I won't see the not-the-Nostromo again with time to crawl around and enjoy the scenery, and that I missed a couple of important pick-ups...  And maybe this time I can finally get out of Doctor Morley's office.

New Dimensions in Novel Covers

 But not intentionally.

I just spent two delightful days going around the bushes with tech support when my corrected book cover wouldn't upload properly. Over and over I checked; the template was 3208 pixels wide. My document was 3208 pixels wide. The cover that worked was 3208 pixels wide. Why is it displaying at the wrong size?

Tech support -- and the forum, when I eventually got into it -- were no help. "Did you use a template? Did you remember to erase the template? Did you account for bleed and trim?" Over and over "check the size," they say. "I checked the size," I say.

Until I finally figured it out. I found it through experiment, actually. And confirmed it through experiment. Unlike all the other graphics work I've done in the past, where pixels rule, the cover importer is entirely set by whatever inches the document claims it is set to.

But depressingly, I can't even upload the final revised covers. Because I am in editing and the page count might change.

And the editing? I have two beta readers who will get back to me "soon."

***

So I'm basically stuck on finishing Hounds. And that's making it really hard to clear that book from my head and focus on Wedding.

I really need the sit-down time to read my research. I have Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue and Come and Sleep: The Folklore of the Japanese Fox. There is, I just realized today, some weird intersections between Takarazuka and Kitsune. I also want to go back and review Astronauts of Ancient Japan, a beautifully stupid book in the von Daniken mode. 

I am still amused that the speech-to-text on my phone can handle "Hideyoshi" and "Kusanagi" but "Ohayo Gozaimasu" confuses it and it still doesn't know what to do with "scene" and "beat." And I've pretty much given up on dissuading it from thinking "I've seen a fox."

After a week of work (well, mostly a week of being sick and playing Fallout 4) my only process insight is that I spent a lot of days during the last book where I wasn't ready to write a scene and thus, didn't write.

So I'm going to try to outline tighter. We'll see how it goes. I'm not unhappy with the results at the moment. I think my discovery writing stumbled upon some good stories to tell in the London setting and I didn't, in the end, waste that much time in backing and filling. But I have so many stories I'd like to try to tell and I would be so happy if I could work even a little faster.

Whose Line is it Anyways

One of these days I'm writing a book on writing. I'm looking for a term now for unattributed dialog. Orphaned dialog. Headless lines. Detached word balloons.

This is when there is a line -- usually of low semantic value -- that doesn't get attributed and can't be easily linked to a specific character.

So not what happens when there are two people in a discussion and you omit tags (like omitting the repeated header from MIDI "Running Status" messages). Aka:

"It is not," Alice said.

"It most certainly is," Bob countered.

"Is not."

"Is."

"Is not, and I have the graphs to prove it," Alice concluded triumphantly.

Also not the case when you have a speaker with such a distinctive voice, or a specific subject, or there was a previous line directed towards them:

"Engineering?" Kirk glanced towards his chief.

"I canna give ye nay more; mah poor wee bairns are burning oop!"

Well, I thought I had an example, from the scene in the station when Doctor Who is first mentioned, but it turned out to be a bad example. There's two or three orphaned lines in that scene but they could just as easily be attached to an alternating speaker.

I made the choice for Fox and Hounds to over-attribute. I am going with the general advice that "said" is invisible so I'm including it more often than is strictly necessary. I did notice, though, reading to see if I had a better example of an orphaned line, that I tend to leave off attribution of a lot of Penny's lines. The reason being; she's the POV character, and conversations happen because she is there. In many cases, she is reporting on it because she is part of it.

Well, that and she has a distinct voice.

***

I was glancing over the print version again -- I have a bunch of corrections, edits, and general tweaking to go still -- and right there on page 7 I hit a dangerous one:

“The task of the archaeological field worker,” Leslie said, “Is to get the data out of the ground."

Goddamn automatic capitalization! I feel like turning that off if it is going to do that sort of thing to me. The second quotation following the attribution should, of course, not be capitalized; "is to get the data out of the ground."

But since the automatic capitalization did this, it may occur multiple times in the manuscript. That means I have to go through the whole damn thing manually. And it has to be done by hand because it entirely depends on nuances of phrasing that automatic tools are very bad at understanding (heck, ProWritingAid doesn't do well with clauses. Dialog is pretty much beyond it.)

Well, I can probably find most of them by searching the combination (, ").

***

I am conflicted on directions here. I am eager to get Hounds in the store, but at the same time, I could build momentum better if I had another book coming out within a month or two after it. Add to this, I have beta readers currently working on Hounds, and I am still into the experiment of trying to finish Wedding in 4-6 months.

And I just got another email. Mom has been beating the bushes, and the family friends she's found have all been more than what I can ascribe to being merely supportive. Oh, yes. And not a one of them reads electronically. It's all print, all the time.

***

Just found this absolutely perfect guide to the proper capitalization of dialogue:

1. Steve said,  "Good morning."

2. "Good morning,"  said Steve.

3. Steve said,  "Good morning,"  then sat down.

4. "Ladies and gentlemen,"  said Steve,  "good morning."

Half-Title

 Prints arrived. Gave one out, will be giving two more this weekend. Spotted several things that I want to adjust before the release.

Among them being re-arranging the Front Matter. And...humph. I looked at the information page at KDP. I looked at Wikipedia. Those more-or-less agree, but only more-or-less. Then I pulled a dozen paperbacks from my own bookshelf and not a single one agreed with the KDP/Wikipedia style.

So I'm going to go title page with copyright on the verso side. TOC, epigram on the next recto after that, and half-title on a third recto just before the prologue starts (also on recto, like all of the parts and chapters).

The ebook will be almost identical, except that the TOC is actual links (I discovered how to do that).

***

Then there's some graphics clean-up. KDP was barfing at the full cover for Hounds for some reason so I stuck the front side image into their Cover Creator. Which is okay, but I like the control I get over doing the full cover myself and by the time I had Knows ready it was taking full covers again.

There's a nice bare spot on the back cover of Hounds. I am so tempted to put up a request for a pulp magazine cover or a playbill on Fiver and see what happens.

***

And editing. I am afraid I may get structural edits from my beta readers, and it is too late to apply those. Once again, I'll learn from them and move forward. I have a dozen edits of my own already (read most of the print version myself). Half of them are places where italics got left off or I want to check if it is Defoe or Dafoe (It's Defoe). But the others are slightly more work.

Re-doing the sword fight and the Geordie Final Exam to bring out the drama and the various threads. Actually, I think that's it. Although there's a self-locking door that bugs me but I haven't come up with an idea for it.

Oh, the italics? Turns out that the method I was using to highlight text for work notes carries through in formatting even with "ignore formatting" checked in the compiler. So I had to hard-format the entire text, then go back and put the italics back in. And I missed a few.

***

Didn't identify any specific ways to improve my method. Did get some metrics out of it. Hounds was done in eight months, and only about four of those months were actually hammering out text. Planning took a full two months and formatting and re-writes another month or two. Somewhere in there was a month of re-writes on Knows, so I'm not counting that.

It was still long enough so I'd lost some of the specific notes I wanted when I got to the scene they were for. But at the same time, I really need a certain amount of simmer time to get the ideas together. I am quite convinced the reason I've re-done the sword fight twice already is because I pushed to write it before it was quite ready.

So I'm not sure how to tighten down to six months. At least the other issue; the lack of focus in the plot, is something I should be getting steadily better at.

...quickly dissolve into banality and romance

Title taken from a Quora question on horror movies.

A Fox's Wedding is officially started. I would really like to kick this one out in six months. (On re-tracing of notes, Fox and Hounds took eight actual months -- although stretched over nine in calendar time, it was interrupted by a month of editing work on The Fox Knows Many Things. And on that note! I am doing another edit round on Hounds, meaning it will technically be in third draft before it is published.)

But back to A Fox's Wedding. As much as I'm already generating ideas -- and putting a few things off the table as well -- I really need to hold off on brainstorming until I've done the pre-planning.

That's a bit of brain work there. I want to identify what parts of the process could be better. I want to find where I could have written a better story, and even more, where I wasted time.

But anyhow. A few things I already know: I've largely given up the idea of a strong overall character arc through the series. Penny is still growing and learning and will do so for at least another book, but the place she is emotionally and in relation to her character and archaeology at the end of Hounds is really not where she needs to be to make Wedding work. So I need to think of these as episodic, not as strictly linear.

I want to use things I already know. However. The Writing Excuses podcast had a recent episode titled, "Write what you want to know." I like that. So the Takarazuka Review is in the book and I've bought my first book to start reading up on that. (Because I know almost nothing about it but I've always been fascinated).

I'm also pretty set that there will be scenes in Kyoto, and in Tokyo. And the Fushimi Inari shrine (the one with all the torii gates), and Toei Uzumasa Eigamura (the Edo-era standing set near Kyoto). Business that is probably in it is the earphone bit (with her friend Aki giving her lots of not-always-useful advice), dressing up as a Geisha (possibly with shamisen), and a big training sequence.

Things that may or may not be in it; wartime Shinto, Kusanagi (the sword, not the anime character), the Zanryū nipponhei (the last of whom probably died in the 1980s), Lupin III, UFO cults, Iga Ninja, a Rocky V twist to the training, and a "Yamatai" episode (aka the death island from Tomb Raider 2013).

Things that are probably not in it; the Tokyo Tower (anything I want to do with it, I'd rather do with the Eiffel), and Moe.

Re the latter. There's not going to be a lot of people calling her "cute" and trying to get her into amusing costumes. It could be fun but there's a better book for that (specifically, the No Man's Sky archaeological survey/Great Nintendo Burial book). So the joke I'm going for here is that to most of the Japanese she encounters she is westerner; crude and suspect and freakishly huge. And yeah there's a ton to unpack there so that's a lot of fun stuff to be writing with.

I've also decided to use the stuff I know: Speed Tribes, the Home Dramas I watched on TTV, other things which are really a decade or three anachronistic. I don't think this virus is going to calm down in enough time for me to fly back there and do more on-the-spot research, and I've got a bookshelf full of stuff I'd like to get some use out of.

I Hate Hamlet

No, actually, I don't. It's the name of a play. Which I've done. But sometimes I do hate history.

So there's several thematic threads that are running through Fox and Hounds. One of them is Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet. Another is Doctor Who.

At the emotional climax of the story, Penny quotes from the Gravediggers Scene. She even goes on about Yorick's skull; why it shouldn't be some plastic anatomy model but should look like something that came out of a grave.

Finished the scene, finished the edit, compiled, uploaded. And then I hit something in my Quora feed.

The Royal Shakespeare Company has a real skull. It was bequeathed by Andre Tchaikowsky, a pianist and composer. It took them twenty years to finally use it in a production, but in 2008 it starred as Yorick in a production of Hamlet, alongside -- David Tennent in the title role. David, who previous played The Doctor in, of course, Doctor Who.

And I'm actually glad I didn't know about this before I wrote the scene.

Oh, right. Yes, book is uploaded and I've ordered pre-release copies. I want to give my Dad a crack at it before I hit the "publish" button:

I also took the chance to tweak the cover for the Athens book:

For some reason they both ended up looking rather dark. Well, so with two down and a third in planning, I've got a general scheme. Artifacts when possible. Athena and/or her fedora in the image in some disguised form -- if possible (it wasn't in Hounds).

Space; particularly, in a tunnel form. For the third book, this will be the line of torii gates from the famous hilltop shrine outside Kyoto. Color grading; Knows is the old teal and orange, Hounds is more in the umbers, and Wedding will be greens and reds. And the Owl of Athena.

***

So that's up. The first big step on the Japan book will be pre-planning. Looking at what I've learned with an eye towards finishing faster and being happier with the results.


***

The Apple crazies continue. You can't buy an older OS from them, exactly. You buy a license, and three days later they email you twice; a pdf, and the key to the pdf. Which when you open it with that password, gives you another code, which you then "redeem."

Says Apple "the Redeem link is right there in the Quick Links drop-down." Dudes, if there was anything in the drop-down tabs I'd click it. Turns out you have to be in the "Please buy whatever shit we think is hot this month" part of the Ap store for the particular tab to be visible.

So hooked up the Mac Mini again. And this time, after going through all the agreements to re-install Lion, instead of popping up with "That item is not currently available from your selected store" (seriously, you call that informative?) it starts downloading it. Whew!

If the contractor hadn't given me twelve-hour notice he needed access, I'd now have three computers and three monitors and two keyboards and drawing tablet and optical drive spread around the desk. Instead of three monitors, two computers, and one keyboard...

***

Ordered a hank of black horse hair from Amazon and made up a new string for my Gue. After a bit of trial and error, I now have a pair of strings that sound decent and can be tuned a fifth apart. Now I should write some music for it.

Once the Japan novel is properly started.

Hot on the chase

Hot weather and smoke alert. And we don't do air conditioning around here. The swamp cooler took the edge of things when it got desperate but it was lousy weather to be running computer and dual monitors and pushing hard.

Except I'm getting there. I've done most of the re-writes and tracked in some of the changes I wanted to do as well. And I've been pushing it through ProWritingAid as I go.

(ProWritingAid was unhappy about the diary scenes, as those were open-end paragraphs as per the style manuals. But it also got nasty about elisions for dialect when they happened within a quote; every time I had something like "Canny bag o' Tudas, man!" it would flag that as having failed to close the single quotes before closing the double quotes.)

Down to Part IV and the last 12,000 words of the novel. Even started the upload process, putting in category keywords and blurb into Kindle.

The biggest chunk of rewrite text will go easy. That's the extended tomb crawl. I'll just pop my Royal Philharmonic recording of music from the first Tomb Raider games -- that I joined the Kickstarter on -- on headphones and type away.

The Geordie Final Exam is a bit more work. I've got a dozen different pages of Geordie slang open right now, including two different translation widgets (neither of which does that much). Did I mention I took a quiz on "How well do you know Geordie" and scored 11 out of 16?

Re-did the pencils for the interior graphics as well. If I continue at this pace, I can be ordering my Pre-release copies before I go back to work Tuesday.

But, boy. Even without turning on the switches that explicitly search for the stuff, I'm noticing a lot of repeated patterns in my writing. Similar sentence structure. Similar turns of phrase cropping up over and over. Good thing they are getting flagged as passive voice (since it is after all a story, not a business report, there are a lot of those flags. Which gives me a chance to re-visit some of them and say, hey, maybe this one character here doesn't say "in a manner of speaking" or "some of the others" or other stock constructions I'm over-using.

But ye gods, those commas. I can't afford the time to really dig into each and every one, and I don't have the grammar to quite understand what I'm doing wrong, so I'm having to, over and over, make a flash decision about whether to preserve Penny's breathless, run-on construction or to make it more grammatical.

Sigh. I'm adding that to the list for the Japan book; that Penny will be for most of it trying to speak more professionally (she's stuck playing her character for most of the book) and I can have fun contrasting it with her narrative voice.

In fact, the reverse has been the intent for two books now. That the narrative is slightly more professional (or her dialog is exceptionally flighty). The place where it really helped on this book is that the Londoners are mostly speaking in proper sentences so Penny's voice contrasts nicely.

Because otherwise my whole cast sounds alike. Even the Geordies.

Howay, man, I'm paggered but.

 Been a week of slow progress and small disappointments.

Take today. IT was dumping some old Mac Mini's, and I snagged one. Was thinking of setting it up for recording at the shop (so I can play trumpet parts without my neighbors screaming at me.) Had some company stuff on it. No problem, says Apple. Erase the hard disk, it will boot up from the restore sector and you can download the factory original OS right off the net.

Except no. Turns out Apple was either lying, have changed it, or were incomplete about it. But that took an hour or two of pressing buttons and hoping that it would actually work this time. So now I have a brick, and a copy of Lion on order just in case I feel up for making a boot disk for it.

My laptop has been running hot. Hot enough so it automatically cranks down the CPU cycles, which causes videos to stutter and CPU-intense applications like 3D stuff to get, well, ugly. That actually took a while to figure out. The same IT dump included a broken cooling pad so that got me thinking I should just order one of those.

Amazon lost the order. While it was wandering around the boondocks I thought a little harder and finally dug into it and opening up the laptop to clean out the vents and re-do the thermal paste turns out to not be quite as scary as I thought. But needs some special tools. So I ordered those.

And got to thinking about that. If I'm opening it up, why not replace the ailing optical drive, increase the RAM to maximum, and even put in an SSD? 

I got inspired enough I opened it up anyhow and blew out some of the dust. And then the cooling pad arrived anyhow so I'm using that for now.

***

And then there's software. Carrara no longer ran after the last OS "upgrade" and I had enough problems with it already. So I'd purchased Cheetah3D and that was good enough to knock off the calyx model I needed for the last cover.

The next model should have been simple. This was the section of Underground platform I needed for the next book cover. But it was a freaking pain to do in Cheetah. The UVmapper is not wonderful, there's no polygon groups (at least, not accessible), it can't manage to keep scale constant (I brought a model back out of the render to tweak, and it got thrown into a different scale and position the moment it had been opened by Cheetah.) And the poly tools -- well they basically don't exist. The thing is barely functional as a prims modeler and is useless for polys.

Well, fine. This time I'm finally going to learn Blender.

Oh, yeah. And while I was too sick and stupid to work on the novel over last weekend (and part of the week) I was messing around with Fallout 4. I've basically stopped playing the game. I think I spent as much time in console mode as out. "Player.additem" and "tcl" and the like are right at my fingertips.

More software skills learned at some expense and like as not never to be used again. 

Yesterday was all about making the busted UVmap Cheetah crapped out actually work. And then being very annoyed by the behavior of the Paths tool in PhotoShop...why? Because part of Leslie Green's look was a distinctive serif font that is apparently quite recognizable. There is a commercial font "inspired" by it, called Beeching, but several of the characters are clearly wrong and the serifs are the wrong shape and for twenty bucks...!

So I hand-edited Baskerville and it is close enough. Gives me even more respect for the art of font, with how to mix the thins and the thicks for grace and readability and all that other stuff I didn't actually do. I pretty much made a dog's breakfast of it but I'm using it anyhow.

Now I just have to add in the drips and broken tiles and the proper oxblood and so on. Plus displacement and spec maps and you know the drill.

***

And create the other graphics. I'm willing to put it out with a mock-up cover just as long as I'm printing author's copies for the beta readers. Because I really want my dad checking on the Britishisms and especially the Geordie. Because that's exactly the sort of thing he likes doing.

As I go through pass after pass, cleaning up and tightening, each pass I take out more of the Geordie and make it more obvious what they are saying. I was editing the first pub scene, though, just before I stopped to blog, and that turned out to be very annoying since I could either have Liam speaking Geordie or contributing. Which was only part of the picture; the characters in this scene aren't coming across as distinct voices. I realized I could swap lines around, they were that generic. And that's not good.

I've also been taking a lot of notes about ways I want to go through and bring the main plot lines out and make them more obvious. One of them being the "dun dun duuun!" pass; the one where I have the story (if not Penny herself) recognize that An Adventure Has Just Begun.

***

And one other rescue from IT's pile works fine; that's a 3 TB external drive. Which again slipped through their clutches with all the data intact and I just got done erasing it.