A New Challenge

I’ve decided to take up the challenge of present tense. Ever since I wrote that first post about my brain having difficulties with present-tense works, I’ve been thinking about it a great deal, and so I’m going to go ahead and give a solid attempt at reading the first book in the Spellsong series by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Maybe I’ll get into it; the concept is a fascinating one, which is why I was drawn to the book in the first place. I expect it’ll be tough going at first, but this past year has all been about challenging myself in various ways, and so far I’ve risen to every challenge, so I’m sure I can manage it.

In other news, my fascination with reddit.com continues to grow. There’s a fantastic community of communities over there, including several for writers that seem really interesting; particularly /r/write. Keep your fingers crossed that things will work out there. There are interesting plans afoot.

From Another Point of View

I must issue a correction to my post earlier this week entitled “From a Certain Point of View.” I incorrectly called Spellsong and various other books 2nd person present tense, when they’re actually 3rd person present tense.

It’s that present tense bit that gets to me, but I won’t go into all that again here.

Sorry for the error and resulting confusion! I am now adding point of view and tenses to my ‘must refresh memory about’ list, which continues to grow daily.

Thanks to L. E. Modesitt, Jr.  for taking the time to comment personally.

Stop SOPA/PIPA

As I write this, something remarkable is happening around the world. Mostly in the US, I suspect. English speaking students are trying to do homework the only way they know how — by visiting Wikipedia.org. Instead of the usual wealth of questionably curated content they’re used to, they’re being greeted by a blackout page that’s denying them the use of the site for 24 hours.

Wikipedia’s not the only site blacking out today; Google’s logo is blacked out, Reddit.com will be going down for 12 hours starting in several hours from the time this is written, and many other sites will be blacking out in various ways. The other site I write for, GeekBeat.TV, will also be observing the blackout.

I’ve been following a Twitter search for the last several hours, completely transfixed, that’s looking for tweets containing the terms “wtf wikipedia.” There are a LOT of them. It’s kind of awe-inspiring to see just how much awareness Wikipedia is raising with the blackout, and a little disturbing how much UNawareness there is out there.

SOPA/PIPA are important issues for any content creators to understand, even ones like myself who don’t live in the United States. It seems on the surface like people in other countries wouldn’t have anything to worry about, but if major sites got pulled and they’re sites we still use, that’s one small impact.

A bigger impact is that the very purpose of SOPA at least is to allow American companies to deal with sites they deem infringing but that they can’t legally touch specifically because they’re outside of American jurisdiction. Under SOPA, they could have made such sites appear to disappear from the Internet. (Could have, because the technical trickery that would have made that possible is no longer part of the bill, thankfully.)

It’s still very important to raise awareness of these issues because you can bet there will be more bills of this nature coming out in the States for consideration, and I’ll be surprised if similar things aren’t brought up in Canada and more countries too. Know about it and be watchful about online freedoms, and hopefully we won’t have to worry about it.

The Editing Process

I’ve been at this full time writing thing for a little over 2 months now and I have plenty to show for it; 7 completed stories is not too bad at all I think. They cover a decent range of plot and theme and there’s even a little genre variety thrown in for good measure. They’re all first draft though, and that’s a problem.

I think it’s time to shift gears into phase 2 of this project, and that is beginning the editing process.

This doesn’t let me off the hook with writing. I still have to post every single day, and for WIP500, I still have to write a minimum of 500 words a day, though that’s 500 a day on average.

The problem of the editing process has occupied the back of my mind since I finished the first story back at the beginning of NaNoWriMo. The second problem of how to integrate the editing process into the writing process without stopping the writing has occupied another corner of my mind since near the end of NaNoWriMo when I was beginning to build up a decent backlog of work.

I think I’m just going to make it a very simple and straight-forward system. I’m trying to write in public as much as possible, and I’d like to do the same with editing wherever possible too. Every day I’ll put up a post about how the editing is going, what I’ve been changing in a given story and why, the direction I’m trying to take it in. This will stop me from posting 5000 different drafts of each story. I may still post significant draft updates though, if people are interested in seeing them.

Feedback Requested

This editing process is where I’m going to be most in need of feedback from my readers, and that begins with suggestions on how I could be doing better in presenting material.

Some time back during NaNoWriMo someone on Google+ suggested that it was a pain to read things online and then have to email me or leave a comment in order to provide feedback, and that I might want to make my work available in eBook formats, as PDFs, etc. I thought this was a pretty good idea; I don’t know that it’ll make giving me feedback any easier, but it will certainly make it easier for you to read and that can only be a good thing.

Formats

I’ll be spending some time over the next day or so doing exactly that. Everything will still be available in the blog of course, but I’ll be making .mobi, .epub and .pdf versions of the first drafts available for download.

Once this is done, I’d love to hear what you think about it.

I’d also love suggestions on other things I could be doing to make things easier or better.

The Future

One idea I’ve been kicking around in the back of my head is to borrow a page from Scott Sigler’s book, so to speak, and release audiobook readings. This would, of course, only occur after a story was all edited and finished.

I’ve never done any kind of long term reading like that, but it’s at least something I could try, as an experiment. See how people like it, if I’m any good at it, what the response is, etc.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’d love your feedback; please feel free to leave comments on the blog or stories, or to email me, or to get back to me on Twitter at @fictionimprob, or at my Google+ profile at http://gplus.to/GordMcLeod. Hope to hear from you all soon!

2011 is Dead. Long Live 2012.

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As I write this, 2011 is drawing to a close and none too soon. A lot of things about this year have been pretty fantastic, most notably the founding of this site, but in many other ways this has been a year I’ll be happy to forget.

2012 is 45 minutes away, so I’m taking this chance to think about what I want to accomplish in the year ahead with some resolutions.

Reading

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The first of my resolutions for 2012 is reading. I will once again participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge, but I will not be setting a goal of 100 books this time. 30 books will be fine to start, and I can update that higher if I finish too early. It’s been months since I dared read a long book, and I miss them.

On the positive side, I DID finish my 100 book challenge for 2011! I had to read 9 books over the 30th and 31st of December to do it, and obviously they were very short books, but I did it legitimately and it feels pretty awesome.

Writing

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

I have two writing resolutions.

The first: I will take part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again come November. And I will win again.

The second: I will take part in WIP500, a new challenge to write 183,000 words over the course of the year by writing a minimum of 500 words every day. (2012 is a leap year, for those who did the math and wondered how 500 times 365 equals 183,000.)

The nice thing about doing both is that WIP500 counts any words you write for NaNoWriMo, so if you manage to stick to at least 500 words a day on average right up to November and then go on to do your 1,667 a day for NaNoWriMo, you’ll finish WIP500 before you even finish NaNoWriMo, let alone before year’s end.

I have a bonus third not-quite-resolution that I need to investigate but hope to implement, which I’m stealing from Judith Graves, who in turn got it from Scott Myers. It’s a progress chart that will probably help a whole lot with my progress on finishing Prices.

Speaking of finishing Prices:

Publishing

My final resolution is to publish 4 things in the Amazon Kindle store and hopefully other fine eBook vendors like the Nook store and the Apple iBooks store.

Happy New Year everyone! Hope 2012 is far better than 2011 was regardless of how well 2011 went for you.