Blowing the dust off

I finally started to get some figure-drawing memories back. Took it long enough.

Four passes for this one. So far. Still not sure how exactly I'm going to ink it to make black-figure (or perhaps red-figure if it ends up looking better) Attic pottery.

Broke out my old pencil set and did action lines in red, drew roughs and guides in blue. Then anatomy (you usually draw nude then add clothes). Then outfits and features. Then a fourth pass to go slightly Attic with the linework. In particular, a typical eye form.

I'm being slightly annoyed now because the basis of both Attic styles (and even the later polychrome ware) is a silhouette figure on solid background, with details picked out on top.

In black-figure, the artwork is added with slip; this is a slurry made of finer-grind clay than the larger grained and more porous clay of the body of the pot. The pot is fired in three stages; in the second phase, the entire pot is already black with oxide formation and the finer-grained slip vitrifies, sealing in the color. The last re-oxidation stage brings the base clay back to reds and oranges.

Details were incised into the slip (presumably before firing) allowing the red base to show through. The later red-figure added details in the same slip as the background. In both, and especially in the later polychrome, specially formulated glazes added white, red, and yellow to the mix.

Thing is, I did line work. Typical of line art, the figures are outlined and the outlines carry through, becoming internal details. I'm not really sure how to best prepare it for filling in the solid color areas in Gimp.

The problem I'm having in the black v. red is that the black-figure is closer to the right period (I'm not duplicating the actual pot of the story in any way...it was painted in the Orientalizing period, barely out of the Late Geometric and prior to the full development of black-figure ware). Black-figure is harder to read, though. Also, traditionally (but not always) women would be picked out with that white overglaze I mentioned but whereas people of the period would understand this as short hand for the women having a slightly paler, less-sunlight skin tone, for us it looks like a white girl facing off against a black guy. Not what I want on the cover.

Red-figure also usually has that same symbolism but I feel better about omitting it there. Red-figure is also a lot more identifiable to the general public as "Greek Pot." The only real drawback is I'm intending a black backdrop so I need to be able to separate pot from background. Well, that and I really do like the look of the red background -- it has a lot of nice texture -- and less of that shows through if it is used for the artwork and not the ground.

And I might change the pot. The Calyx Krater has that wide mouth that casts a big shadow. The Column Krater looks to my eye a little late period. There's also the Volute Krater, with the really fancy handles. But at that point, why not use an Amphorae?

Why so Cyrus

Or should that have been "Osiris?"

Anyhow, that's the title of a new working folder. I'm taking the Bronze Age thing back to its roots and prepared to do LESS research on a LESS serious book that goes back to the Five Man Band concept and brings back magic and gods. So a lot less obsession about pottery forms in Cypress imports in 1182 BCE and more of, well, an Italian Hercules movie. So that's off the back burner. Not the story I was working on, exactly. But something faster and easier to write based on the work I've already done.

And I'm largely settled on London for the sequel to the novel that's going to be on Kindle before December is out. Assuming I can finish the cover. This is the down and out in London, everything going wrong, increasing misery taking an even sharper and literal downward turn in the last third -- into the various tunnels and crypts and mysteries and dangers under London. Some of which are not exactly of the real world. Because this was going to go into directions of pseudo-history eventually.

I'm early enough in plotting yet so not sure whether it is Fox and Hounds or Sometimes a Fox. Although the latter being, well, Napoleon, perhaps that's a better one to set in Paris? (I hear you saying; why Paris? There's more to France than Paris. Well, there certainly is. But there's more to the world than France, too. Why Paris is, specifically, because I've been there.)

I still have a file called Badgers which means nothing at all but that's where my military SF urban fantasy love triangle goes. I'm just not feeling that one at the moment. Maybe if I buckle down on the horror elements, or at least the classic horror tropes, I'll get an interest back.

And lastly, I'm seeing if I can combine the Space Opera idea with the Tiki Stars idea. I still have some basic problems. But they are both potentially un-reconstructed stuff that could possibly be deconstructed a little if that works better. And it would be hell of fun. And half the research would be hanging out in Tiki bars drinking mixed drinks so there's that...

Bye, Sierra

I had to upgrade in order to use DropBox. Well, that was worth it. Allowed me to coordinate Scrivener files between machines.

Unfortunately it also broke Carrara and Poser. So pretty much all my 3d aps. And all the ones I was going to use to build and render the calyx.

Carrara is deadware. The missing menu problem isn't fixed as of the last release, and there will be no other releases (I would say updates and bug fixes...but it never had those).

Poser might or might not work. Apparently I do have to at least put in the latest patch. Of course Smith Micro sold it off and instantly stopped supporting, and the company that bought it has no interest in supporting older versions so...no patch is available.

It is apparently a problem with Flash. Which everyone knew was a stupid idea for just displaying thumbnails. And no work-around natch. And Mac got rid of Flash because it is a giant gaping security hole.

So I wonder what other software it broke?  Well...Inkscape is still dead....

UV nodes on a Grecian Urn

The calyx model is done. I think. Now I just have to paint up the textures. Artwork, bump map, spec map. And render, of course.

Cheetah3D is growing on me. The best thing, right now, is that no operation caused it to crash or cause the object to become un-editable. And that's way ahead of Carrara on it's best day. The lathe operation puts out a clean UVmap and the built-in tools did a decent job of mapping the handles, too.

I agree with the manual. The bezier spline controls are not good. Better to make a spline in an illustration program and import it. My first take at handles was with a spline sweep, but I didn't like the resulting profile.

So I did a box model, dropped it on a symmetry tool, and then dropped that on a subdiv smoothing tool. All worked just as I'd hoped, with just a little learning curve involved. I think the software could end up being fast, once I put some custom hotkeys into it (apparently you can).

>>>

Meanwhile an instrument I had in my wishlist went on open-box sale:

Yes; transverse flute, otherwise known as Western Concert Flute in C. Closed-hole, C foot, not the longer B foot. And, yes, it is pink. 

I fired up my camera because this is the last chance I am likely to have to attempt to play an unfamiliar family of instrument without any prior study. Yeah; that question has been floating around. My opinion is you can get a sound out of most plucked strings and hammered instruments, including percussion and keyboards. Single reed, a little harder. Double reed and brass, harder yet. Bowed strings, extremely difficult; yes, you can get noises, but not anything resembling the characteristic sound of the instrument.

That's the thing about the piano. Sure, a random child or small animal can't play a Chopin Etude, but when the press down a key, it sounds like, well, a piano. 

Turns out the transverse flute was tough for me. Apparently some people get the embouchure right away. Some don't. Apparently the book method is you detach the head joint and just play that for a week. Then you play the first octave until you are good with it. Then you move on to the second octave.

Five days and I'm playing scales but the second octave is not secure. A very breathy tone I'm not happy with. But as far as adding flute sounds to a composition -- yeah, I've got enough. I may work on it for a few more days but then it is back to the trumpet. Which, for all I may have said about it in the past, is oddly pleasing to play.

What is it about 3D?

Maybe it is because working on a 3-dimensional form is largely incompatible with the interface of flat display, keyboard, and mouse? Like doing orchestral synthesis; even with keyboard, breath controller, and CC knobs you just can't put the same nuances in you can with an orchestral instrument in your own hands?

It seems that every 3d application I have worked with re-invents the wheel. Usually badly.

They are largely unintuitive and often have clunky workflow -- the kind of design where something you do once an hour has a hotkey sequence but something you have to do several times a minute requires selecting from a drop-down menu.

And they lack useful manuals.

It took three days of searching to find anything resembling a manual for Cheetah3D. It is a third-party, fan-written, but fortunately free manual. Still, every resource I've seen seems to jump over those early basic steps that become so rote everyone forgets they have to be explained to the beginner.

"Adjust UV's by applying the Scale tool to your Selection..." Okay, great, but how do I select UVs in the first place? The regular selection tools don't seem to do anything. That's the sort of thing that gets skipped over.

Two things annoy me very much from both a workflow and a "why are we doing this" angle; first is that selection and manipulation are separate. So if you want to operate on more than one polygon, you click the Select tool from the menu bar, possibly go into Area or another Select Mode (which does NOT toggle, but only acts for the duration of one selection), then go back and click the Manipulate tool also in the menu bar, go back and pick up your selection (don't accidentally click outside!) and then you can move it.

Oh, except you didn't "Make editable" so nothing happens. That's the other thing. Like Fusion's weird way of splitting editable objects into different types, I don't understand the underlying philosophy behind "make editable" and what it functionally does.

There is one fix which should be easy to make and I hope will happen soon; grey out menu items that don't apply to the kind of object you are working with. As it is now, all the menus open up; even contextual menu pops up with every operation that could be done on any object. Carrara, for all that I have and would say (It is dead ware -- Don't buy it), gathered the applicable tools to the contextual menus.

Actually, I lied a little above. Although it too has unintuitive aspects to it, and lacks any and all useful documentation, Fusion360 is hyper-fast and efficient at navigation and basic operations. The hotkey camera and selection controls and the multi-purpose contextual handles meant I could model pretty much as fast as I could think.

I had a lifetime subscription at a locked-in rate that was quite affordable. So of course they broke the contract, jacked the price, offered me another "lifetime" subscription at about ten times as much, and from what I can tell from their official pages, broke that contract for the people who were foolish enough to sign for it and is now at something approaching what I pay for rent.

Carrara, meanwhile, no longer works under the last four or five upgrades to the MacOS and there is no support and no plans to ever make it work properly. Although they will still sell you an "upgrade" to 8.5 (yes -- throughout its history, Carrara almost never released patches. Instead they'd sell you the point upgrade for full price, promising that it would include the bug fixes for the last version. Which it never did.)

So, yeah, I'm pretty much waiting for Cheetah to get over the early teething problems, to get popular and powerful, at which point they will stab the user base in the back, sell out to Autocad, and jack the price out of range of the ordinary user. But for now, I think I can get it to do what I want.

At least it is easier to navigate than Blender.

Singing Vampire Tiki in London

From everything the books say, there is probably a lot more editing that should be done.

But I'm tired of it. I'm going to go with Papa Heinlein on this (his old school advice was, "You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.")

Heinlein's rule isn't the absolute it seems at first glance, though. A nice essay I read recently talks about this as a process problem. There is a school of writing that says "get the draft out at all costs"; this school reaches an apex with NaNoWriMo, in which you are expected to write a lousy, too-short draft you will clean up later.

Me, I do a lot of editing on the way. When I'm re-reading a chapter to figure out if they mentioned the dingus and what the fellow's first name was, I also notice where I doubled a word or forgot to close a parenthesis. It seems to work; the grammar checker found very few errors of that type to alert me on.

I also do deeper structural edits. Now, they sound like the sort of thing that should have been caught in the outline and "fixed" then. But things grow organically. So while writing the climax I might think of a cool setting to use, and then I'll go back and plant references in earlier chapters and move some stuff around so the climax can happen there. And while I'm there, it is basically a second or third or fourth pass through the dialog and descriptions that are in that chapter.

Which means I tend to write a fairly clean draft, overall. So when I read the "standard advice" about doing four drafts until it gets good, I have to reflect that, again, is a descriptor of process, not a proscription of universal needs. I don't have to sit down saying, "I am doing a re-write" to be basically accomplishing a re-write.

(Which is sort of the argument I have against the pantser v. outliner battles; neither are the purists they claim to be. They just categorize what they do as falling into a specific pattern. "I wasn't outlining, I was just writing some rough drafts of possible scenes.")

Anyhow, I have it with a beta reader. It may go on from there, even to a native German speaker (who is sure to be horrified at the way "Herr Satz" mangles both languages.) And I'm not intending to do much past react to any complaints those readers might have.

>>>

Which sends me on a tiny language rant, a take-that on the kind of phrasebook speak where there is always a single word-for-word translation. I think this is a place invented languages often fall down on.

The closest you can get to a universal "Hi!" in Italian is "Ciao." It can be used at most times of day, and for that matter, for goodbye. But it is somewhat too casual for a good speaker to use with people he doesn't know well.

In my story, the first "Hello" is "Bueno Sera" (It is evening, and he hasn't been introduced to her.) Later, she greets him with "Buongiorno" and he returns with "Salve." (He's being "oddly formal" at that moment.) She also says "Ciao" to a friend.

And that's just Standard Italian; for this book I made no mention that almost every Italian is bilingual, speaking both that and one of the regional dialects so disparate they can be mutually incomprehensible.

I did mention in the book that they speak a regional German in Bavaria, but the only example I gave of Bayern was counting as "Oans, zwoa..." instead of the usual “Eins, zwei, drei.."

>>>

So I downloaded Cheetah3D and am getting into making the proper art for the cover. I'm rusty on 3d and on drawing and I'm feeling wiped out by that intensive editing work so I don't expect progress fast. This is really a better time to be dreaming a little. Say, coming up with what to write the next time I'm in a writing place, so I don't have to sit around waiting for the ideas to form.

As of the inevitable re-reading I had to do in checking edits in context and making sure no pages had dropped out in the process, I find myself not unhappy. It isn't exactly what I set out to write. The action does eventually end up just over the top although there is a slow boil in getting there. There isn't a lot of digging but there is an archaeological sensibility that makes it not quite and not just history-based. It is fun how many things from myth and history end up getting referred back to and given connections. And I achieved the "deep dive" into Athens, and it feels sort of right; she had to take a detour for half the book but, at last, I get to really sit down and hang out in Athens.

Can I do this again but do it better? By "better" I mean more focused, with less of a "If this is Tuesday this must be Belgium" approach and more of a single culture being the focus. And less of the oh-so-fun but somewhat extraneous details. And more sustained action. But, more importantly than that, a proper internal/external conflict, with Penny really wrestling with her inner demons (this book the conflict was pretty much, "Hey, wanna be a hero? Why not?") And with a strong antagonist who interacts nicely and who is properly visible to the reader (this one, the antagonists are largely masked, although the big round of edits put them a lot more on stage).

But things changed for me over that last push. New ideas showed up when things were bubbling, and some of the older ideas seem less attractive.

So here's the current line-up:

The transhumanist vampire-werewolf milSF love triangle is not interesting me quite as much at the moment. Maybe it will grow on me.

I'm having strong ideas towards Space Opera. I've talked before of doing a Used Furniture story. And there's the idea of an actual opera, or rather a group of performers...Downside is that I am already far too drawn towards cliche and kitsch and the intersection where make-believe hits reality, and there are too many excuses here. Well, in space opera, really. Like Epic Fantasy, it runs on Fable.

Sort of similar in the used furniture and big Space Opera tropes is a concept I'm calling The Tiki Stars. I'm talking retro-culture at full blast, Rat Pack in space, Moon Zero Two. Thing is this kinda wants to go in a Men's Adventure direction already and then there's the Tiki problem (as someone put it, imagine you are a good Catholic and you get served a beer in a glass shaped like the Virgin Mary.) It would be fun to write but, ugh, I'd probably have to pick a Sad Puppy nom de plume or would be Oh John Ringo No.

Although I've said I'd like to take a break, Fox and Hounds does seem a likely project to tackle next. Yes; I made the commit and all the Athena Fox titles will have fox-things. Starting with The Fox Knows Many Things. My beta reader already tells me she likes it.

82.3

Primary edit is done, and as of last word count, came up just slightly to 82 thousand words. I am tempted to edit out 1/4 of the references and words and described stuff. Might pull it down around 70K. But I feel is better to learn from this and do different next time.

Funny. I've heard it said many times research is like an iceberg. You need to know more than what you put on the page. Well, sure, but what I found this time is I have to read so much before I grasp the overall shape, especially of a location I want to set a scene, I've learned far too many details. To get enough of a sense of the ferry to write the basic movements and other key events, I ended up having so many details in my mind that even when I left most of it off the page I still ended up talking way too much about carpets.

Anyhow. Now I've got ProWritingAid fired up and I'm doing line edit. And I've got a bit of a rant stored up.

Not about the software, or that particular process. Sure, it is flagging me for passive voice to hell and gone, because it is designed to edit business presentations and I'm writing archaeology. "Ancient stones were stacked in low rambling walls" is better than, "We stacked the stones," sorry!

Yeah, sure, I changed a couple. "They forged it..." was stronger in the particular circumstance than "It was forged...," for instance.

This is also work I can't take to the cafe, because I need the full laptop with internet connection. The software uses an online brain. And I need to have a web browser to check on things like the use of the ellipses in written dialog (the sort of thing that, as useful as Strunck & White is, it doesn't cover.)

>>>

No, my rant is on something about editing.

Here it is. You go anywhere where advice is given to writers, they all say "Pay a human editor." I basically agree with this. Hell, even in my specific circumstances I'm pretty sure they are right. A human editor is worth that much to your career (for this book, it doesn't make financial sense, but if for some reason it does get eyeballs then I am tainting my readership if the editing is obviously lacking.)

But here's the thing. These same advice-givers point out that an editor will catch "all those mistakes" in tense, point of view, plot holes, character names changing midway through the manuscript, misspelled words and common substitutions.

And this is where I part company. No, seriously. You are going to write a NOVEL, from 60 to 120 thousand words, and you don't understand verb tenses? You don't understand POV? You haven't figured out that when a red squiggle appears under a word in the software you are using, it means you may want to look at the spelling?

You know, really? I don't believe it. Not at entry level. Up at the leader level, a book goes through a professional line editor who sends back a marked proof and the writer then spends months going through every passive voice or cliche or dangling participle that editor has flagged to decide whether the needs of the story are great enough to break the rule of grammar here.

These are structural insights software can't make, though. At best, software can flag everything that fails a small number of rules doggedly applied. I mean, I've got a line that contains "...kind of weird..." and the software I'm using thinks it should be "a kind" or "the kind." Grammatically correct, just not idiomatic. When I wrote that something had happened in the eighteenth century, it insisted it should be hyphenated, because of course I had to have mean AN "eighteenth-century" NOUN.

This is the kind of thing a well-paid human does. And the entire industry is having more and more trouble coming up with those people. It is getting to the point where editing is unaffordable. Daily newspapers gave up the battle a while ago, at least my eye tells me every time I run into another front page typo.

Which means a book that is earning in the tens of thousands. Has to be. For both the publisher and the writer to be able to afford the services and the time to have those details discussions about whether that specific error is one up with which they shall not put.

At the Kindle level? People are getting lifetime sales in the low hundreds. It doesn't make financial sense to do that kind of editing.

And, also, honestly? The people who are pushing a book out on Kindle and who don't understand how POV works...well, they've got bigger problems. The whole system has a basic flaw, really. The old gatekeeper scheme had problems but it did mean writers were kept in the trenches until they'd figured out the difference between First Person and Third Person and how to change viewpoint characters smoothly.

(If I might direct your attention -- I read the first two books out of a ten book series, and as of a sample chapter of book six or so the author was still head-hopping. But at least by book six he'd figured out what point of view was.)