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.

The Editing Process, Part 2

My quest to maintain an entirely digital editing process has encountered a bump in the road, and I’ve resorted to printing out stories on dead trees to go over with one of those archaic writing implements people used to use decades ago. Pens, I think they’re called. Ah well.

On the plus side, the delay that this struggle caused me has left me almost completely cut off from The Price of Demand, the story I’m currently editing. It was the first Prices story I completed back in November, and this last month that I’ve spent in zombie land has been very kind to my ability to edit the proto-steampunk material I wrote before.

Reading The Price of Demand makes me realize just how many bad sections there are, but also how much there is that I still genuinely like about it. Over all I’m kind of encouraged. I’m not ready just yet to tear the whole thing up and throw it away! This is progress.

I still think most of the editing will be done digitally, but I bow before the ability of paper to make things look really different. I’m going to have to redouble my efforts to eliminate the paper from the process though, simply because I’ve been all digital so long now that I really am not equipped with enough free desk space to work with sheets of paper comfortably.

The next big challenge in editing awaits me, and that is making sure that I don’t spend far too much time in Minecraft and/or Star Wars: The Old Republic. They’re way too tempting. 

I figure once I’ve edited each story and gotten it into an ‘improved/revised’ state, I’ll post the eBook versions to the site for download too. I haven’t done that yet because I haven’t been completely happy with them so far. I am a bit of a perfectionist though so I’ll have to restrain that impulse and just treat those eBook versions as rough works too.

From a Certain Point of View

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about perspective and how it applies to writing, what I prefer to read, what I prefer to write, what other people prefer to read.

This was mostly prompted by discussions at Goodreads in The Sword & Laser’s discussion forums. The book they’re currently reading, Rule 34 (affiliate link), is done in the rarely-used second person form.

Second person is common in game-books, which is a form of writing I enjoy, but when it comes to reading a story or novel that I’m not in some way “participating” in, I just can’t enjoy it. More than anything it’s the synchronicity of the experience. Since I’m supposedly an observer experiencing this story of someone else’s, my mind rebels at the idea that it’s in present tense, happening RIGHT NOW. How can I be reading a record of events happening as I read them?

Some people can get past this, but I can’t seem to. I’d been eager to read the Spellsong Cycle by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. but when I realized they were second-person perspective, I abandoned them before I even started.

If you’ve checked out any of the fiction I write in the Fiction Fragments or Draft Stories sections of the site, it’s pretty clear that I favor 3rd person limited for the most part, though now and then I find myself drifting into 3rd person omniscient.

Do any of you have very strong feelings about particular points of view in writing? I know I’m not alone in my feelings on 2nd person present tense, I’ve discussed it with some others. Any of you disagree? Feel free to let me know, I’m very curious about how people get around the simultaneity issue and why it’s not an issue.

eReaders as Proofreading Tools

One of the beautiful things about the Kindle is that it’s fairly easy to put your own content onto it. Stick a USB cable in, attach it to your computer, copy and paste files into the documents folder, and as long as the document’s a supported format (of which there are plenty,) you’re golden! You’ve got your document on your Kindle.

This can be really valuable for any writer in several ways. Naturally the first use most people will think of is creating Kindle ebooks for distribution and/or sale, but that’s not the limit.

How about using it as a proofreading tool?

One of the best ways of self-editing a document (which we all have to do, no matter how many other people will be looking at our work too) is to change how you view it. If you wrote it on paper, get it on the screen and look at it that way. If you wrote it on a screen, put it on paper. Especially if that paper is coated with eInk.

When you proofread on eInk, you can change how you’re looking at the document in many ways, at any time, as many times as you like. You can make the font size bigger, change the typeface, the line spacing, the words per line, even the screen rotation. And those are just the Kindle options, other eReaders may have other options to explore.

Every change you make alters how your brain processes the words you’re reading, which helps combat the “too close to the work” issue that makes editing your own work such a challenge. When you’re too close to it, your brain remembers roughly what to expect, and our brains are far too good at seeing exactly what we expect, instead of what’s really there.

Anything you can do to change up the display counteracts the brain’s habit of filling in errors with expectations, and makes it more likely you’ll spot unexpected typos, missing words or awkward-sounding phrasings.

eInk is my preferred choice for this, but the same can be accomplished with any reader, and in fact it’s a good idea to use eInk and other readers in combination, if possible. Right now color eInk displays are uncommon, and color is yet another way to change things up. So grab your tablet if you have one, or a computer-based reader and get proofreading.

Google+ Hangouts and Editing

A lot of my planned working time was taken up unexpectedly tonight by a really fantastic Google+ hangout. Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer of Discovery.com) and several other astronomers were aiming a telescope at the sky and looking at the moon, at Saturn and several of its moons, and at several constellations in real-time online. It was fascinating, and inspiring.

It made me start to think about other uses for hangouts. I know writers have taken to doing writing hangouts, which I haven’t tried yet. Has anyone tried an editing hangout? It could be done as part fiction reading, part suggestion/critique/workshopping. It seems like that could be an interesting way to take advantage of the technology, as well as solve some of the issues I was having conceptually with editing in public.

I’ll have to put the idea out there on Google+ in particular, see what users there think. If you’re on Google+ and would be interested in something like that, add me to your circles and let me know.