Meta
-
On Social Media…
With the impending slow-motion crash and burn of Twitter thanks to gross mismanagement by idiot toddler billionaire and elongated muskrat, Phony Stark, many are fleeing the still-twitching but very much on fire corpse to other pastures. Not necessarily greener pastures, mind you. That remains to be seen. Whether any of these pan out will depend a lot on which celebrities and corporations (with their ad money) adopt them.
With some friends going to Hive and others to Mastodon and still others to Tribel and probably a half-dozen or more I’m forgetting, I made this list in an effort to keep all of my social media links together in one place (for very broad definitions of ‘social’ and ‘media’). I found a list of social media sites on Wikipedia and went through all of them, trying to remember which ones I signed up for. I haven’t thought about some of these in literally years. :)
Note: I do not use Snapchat or TikTok for Reasons™.
8tracks.com
About.me
Blogspot
Counter.Social
DreamWidth
Ello
Facebook (main page)
Facebook (author page)
Flickr
Goodreads
Instagram
Last.fm
LibraryThing
LinkedIn
Meetup
MeWe
MySpace
NextDoor
Pinterest
Plurk
Quora
Reddit
SoundCloud
Stack Overflow
Tumblr
Twitter
YouTube
Libib
Website (YOU ARE HERE)
Old Website
TribelDiscord – Gary#7600, but I’m not sure how this helps you. :)
Mastodon – @philosophidian@mastodon.social
Mastodon – @KaaSerpent@wandering.shop
Second Life – Sathor Chatnoir / Gary D. Henderson
Twitch – Philosophidian
Hive – @KaaSerpent, but I have no idea if I set anything up right. It seems to be phone-only, which means I probably will never use it.
TinyTIM – Kaa. Also, S’thel, Dalith, Sathor, Dracula, and I think maybe Klage might still be there.There. That’s everywhere I am, as far as I remember. There may be others. If there are, I will no doubt edit this post and add the information.
-
On Themes…
New Theme! Certain things stopped working on my old theme, Structure. Probably because it was from 2009. I mean…color me surprised, but apparently software — including WordPress themes! — does update from time to time, and if you don’t apply those updates, things stop working. Who knew? So my menus have been not working for . . . a long time. And I was too busy to worry about it, and finally today I just made time and dealt with it. Not that I didn’t like Structure. I loved it. I even had several people comment on it and say that they really liked the “simplicity” of it. And that was what drew me to it. But they wanted . . . a considerable amount of money to update it, because to do that I had to go to the pro version, and . . . well . . . not enough people read this blog for me to spend that kind of money. :) I’m already paying for six domains, and that’s more than enough.
Hopefully, this will be a theme I like, and can be better about keeping up with updates. Assuming they don’t want to charge me to update.
I’m still learning all the bits and pieces of the new theme. Seems that there are many new features of themes since the last time I spent any time playing with it, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get the footnote numbers to start over with each post on the main page, so until I figure that out, well . . . it’ll be easier to click on a title and go read the individual page instead of reading them from the main page. The whole menu situation is still not ironed out because there’s a ton of setup and I just need to figure out how menus work in this new decade of WordPress and just deal with it. For now, there is one menu, “About,” and the sub-pages associated with that. I’ve updated my Podcasts I Listen To page quite a bit, because I finally got the personal project I’ve been working on in my spare time working well enough to want to get it to output pre-formatted content for that page.
Sure, I could make a comment, here, about the whole ‘gosh, it’s been over two years since I updated my blog’ thing, and ‘gosh, what a year 2020 was, huh?’ thing, or even the ‘writing? was that the thing with the blank pages that I’m supposed to fill up with words?’ thing. But that would be calling attention to the fact that it’s been over two years since I updated my blog and offering excuses, which I’m absolutely not going to do; that 2020 was a global hellscape of awful, which everyone already knows; and that I haven’t written substantially since early 2020, but no one but me and my writers group really cares about that, so I’ll not bore you with it.
Suffice it to say, things happened, situations changed, priorities altered. We move forward.
I have been writing, but not on a regular basis. I’m getting back to some stories I started and never finished, and I hope to Get Right On That™ Real Soon Now™ I have lots of ideas for stories and for changes to my neverending novel.
With any luck, I’ll have more to share soon. I’m working on getting my home office set up and usable because as it turns out, I’m now permanently working from home, so there’s that. Once that’s done, I’ll have a dedicated place other than my dining room table and living room easy chair in which to dedicate time to working / writing.
Watch this space. Or don’t. I don’t control you.
-
Writing Report, April 2019
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
April didn’t go quite as intended.
On the one hand, I did cross another milestone: I wrote “The End” at the end(?) of my novel(?). Use use the (?)s because . . . well . . . it was the logical “end” of the story, although it does leave things in a rather prickly situation. Which is great if you know there’s going to be a book 2. Not so much if it’s supposed to be stand-alone. But I’ve never envisioned this as a stand-alone. And only once I get it rearranged and retooled will it be a novel. But as it stands as I write this between projects at work on April 30th, it is not a novel. “Novel” implies a sort of structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Character arcs. Coherent . . . ness. As it stands, it is 110,000+ words of . . . loosely related anecdotes involving the same characters and in the same universe.
So, yeah, it is not a novel. There are threads left dangling, characters mentioned once and never brought up again, a suddenly appearing thirteen-year-old son of a secondary character who was convenient to use as a hostage in the final confrontation scene . . . Kid doesn’t even have a name. I called him [HAL’S SON].
I discovery-wrote my way into some cool stuff, including finding the perfect location in which to set much of my action (and causing a huge difference in the different parts of the story as I have three locations. The final one is a place that is very Atlanta, which is what I want. If my story could take place anywhere, then what’s the point of setting it in Atlanta other than convenience? Most Atlantans will recognize the location I’ve chosen if they have ever driven through Spaghetti Junction, and those who aren’t in Atlanta can google the location and see the structure I’m describing. So it works out.
Last month, I said, naïvely, that I wanted to finish the thing in April, “so that I can start on the rewrite.”
Yeah.
About that . . .
No. :)
What had happened was . . . I kept coming up with things to change the plot, not augment it. New ideas about how my magic system works. Who can do what and why. (More of) What my adversary’s reasons are for doing what he’s doing. Etc. So I work through those by free-writing them, and then I also have other ideas for stories, and I’ve written those down with enough notes to help me remember everything without inflicting another Skullcosm on myself.
Because that was all infinitely more interesting than continuing to attempt to revise and submit some of my finished stories. I mean, I did spruce up one called “C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” (alt title: “Coulromisia”) and submitted that as my work to be critiqued for Write Here, Write Now, which starts day after tomorrow (as I type this). It’s one of the darker things I’ve written. We’ll see what the critters have to say. :) But that is the only story I did anything with in April. I didn’t even submit the rejected story from March to another market because, frankly, I forgot. <sigh>
Here’s my report.
April 2019 Writing Report Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel– Yay!Rewrite This Damned Novel – . . .
Three More Novel Outlines– Did that as one of my free-writing. So I have enough on all three to participate on a plot break on any or all of them. I think. We shall see which one I pick. :) The problems I have with all three is that they’re too similar to things that already exist, and I need more. Or maybe abandon the ideas if I can’t make them into anything coherent.Write Here, Write Now – I leave tomorrow (as I type this; May 1, 2019)
Read Forty Books – Meh. Maybe if they’re really short books, I can catch up? I have read a lot of short stories and reference stuff. But those don’t count on Goodreads. Well, except the reference books. I have one on autopsies, one on blood spatter, and one on crime scene investigation. You know, a little light reading. :)
Submit Things To Places – May. May is a good month to send Things out. To Places.
- The word I was fishing around for was ‘cohesion.’
-
Writing Report, January 2019 + Goals
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
This month I had incentive to write beyond just wanting to write. I belong to an online writers discussion forum called Codex Writers. Each year beginning the first full Friday-Sunday weekend in January, we have something called Weekend Warrior. I’ve talked about it before, but rather than giving you a link and making you go elsewhere, I’ll just explain it here, again. On Friday night, we’re given six prompts. By Sunday night, we write a 750-word (or less) flash story using one or more of the prompts and upload it anonymously to the site. Once the deadline has passed, participants download all the stories in our divisions (no one can read all the stories, so we’re divided into smaller subgroups randomly, to make the task easier and more enjoyable), read them for critique, rate them (again, anonymously), make a short comment explaining our rating, and upload those ratings by Friday evening . . . at which point the next week’s prompts go up and we start all over again. It’s like a slush pile, only better because you get comments. :)
The prize at the end? Five new stories, assuming you participate each week. And the knowledge that you can write a story to spec in just over two days. And the completely anonymous feedback from a plethora of readers — who are also writers — some of whom loved your story and some of whom . . . didn’t. But now you know why they did or didn’t.
So far, we’re in week four, which means I’ve written four flash stories in January. Two of those have already been turned into longer stories and one of those (now 4700 words) has been taken to my Tuesday night critique group for a more thorough examination. It needs some editing based on what my group said, and then I’ll put it through one more round of critiques before obsessively editing it for a couple more weeks and then, finally, sending it out into the world even though I hate it, now, every syllable. Such is writing. :)
The way I do Weekend Warrior, now, is to get the prompts and just do a free-association on each one, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, until something gets past the part of my brain that filters out bad ideas and starts to tickle the creamy center. Then I elaborate on that one (or those ones) until I can’t think of anything else. That’s all on Friday night. By Saturday, I probably have an idea what I’m writing, but sometimes I don’t write it at all, but continue to freely associate. I like to let it marinate and dry-age in my brain until Sunday, at which point I start writing the actual story . . . and find out that the story I have in my head is not what comes out of my fingers onto the screen at. all. but is usually better in some ways. I then submit it sometime after 10 pm and spend the next couple of hours obsessively proofreading and tweaking it to get it Perfect™. So for a single 750-word story, I can generate a couple thousand words over a three-day period before it gets submitted. Which is awesome from a word-count and consistency point of view. :)
In between writing for Weekend Warrior, I’ve continued to work on my novel. It’s a giant, swirling, incoherent mess that I hope to clean up into a coherent, slightly less swirling . . . neater-thing that . . . is readable. <gestures vaguely>
I also noticed something that started to really bug me. I use Goodreads to put in all my books. In past years, I’ve read a lot of books in a given year. But in the last couple of years, I’ve read less and less as I listen to more and more audio and watch more YouTube. This is bad. I love reading, but I’ve let it slip away. So I made another sheet in my spreadsheet for time spent reading, come up with my own formulae for levels and points and such, and am now tracking that. It’s helping me to incentivize reading something every day, whether that is a single short story, part of a novel, or something non-fiction. I also count audiobooks, because regardless what anyone says, I count that as reading. Is it exactly the same thing? No. But I still absorb the story. My comprehension is still high. I remember where I left off just like I do with dead-tree or dead-electron books. So it counts as reading, for me. Your mileage may vary.
I also thought it might be informative if I made another spreadsheet with all of the stories I have in various stages of completion, regardless of length, subject, or whatever.
there are over ninety
Twenty-six of those are the Alphabet series I wrote. Another 30+ are from Weekend Warrior.
Also? I love making spreadsheets. So there’s that. :)
For January, 2019, my stats are
- Words: 31,362
- Daily average words: 1,012
- Time: 1,645 minutes (27 hours, 25 minutes)
- Daily average time: 53 min
- Average words/hour: 1,143
- Chain: 123 days
- Level: 5 as of 21 January
- Quota: 400 words per day until 20 December, then 450 words/day
For January, 2019, my Reading stats are
- Minutes: 2,148 (35 hours, 48 minutes)
- Daily average minutes: 77
- Days on which I read:
- Audiobook: 7
- Short Story: 12
- Novel: 9
- Non-Fiction: 7
- Chain: 13 days (I missed 3 days; 13 was the longest chain, of which there were 3)
- Level: 1
- Quota: 20 minutes per day
Goals
Yeah. I’m not big on ‘goals’ because they sound too much like ‘resolutions,’ but here’s some vagueness.
- I want to finish this damned novel and finally have something for my novel-writing group to read. I’m the only one who hasn’t had at least one novel put through the group, and some are working on a third. So I’m behind. By April 1, I want the rough draft done. The one no one will ever see. The one that gets turned into the alpha and beta versions.
- I have ideas for three more novels unrelated to the urban fantasy series for which the current WIP is book 1. It’d be nice to at least start outlining those.
- I’m attending one writing-related fun-thing this year, in May in Baltimore. Since I pay myself minimum wage for writing and I’m now writing every day, I have enough put aside to indulge one trip.
- I want to read at least forty books/audiobooks this year.
- I know this is a vague, non-SMART goal, but here it is anyway: submit, dammit. Stop self-rejecting.
- For each contest on Codex — and there are quite a few — ‘anonymous’ is achieved by selecting what we call a nom de guerre, which is used instead of our real names, so you may be reading a story by “George, Absolute Prefect of Saturn” and find out later that it was <insert famous author’s name here> and you never knew. Or you may find out that you absolutely love the writing of “Lulu, Queen of the Zorgs” and find out it’s someone whose name you’re unfamiliar with, but now you know to look for it in all the publications.
- Words: 31,362
-
Writing Report, December 2018 + Year-End Wrap-Up
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
December was a fairly decent month. In spite of a somewhat major holiday and spending quite a bit of time with my mother both at her house and on a vacation trip to south Georgia, I managed to write at least the minimum number of words every day, even when I had Internet speeds that reminded me of 110-Baud modems.
I had some interesting revelations about a couple of my characters and made copious notes to go back and add some conflict between my two main characters to set up something that happens about halfway through the novel.
I also finally managed to figure out exactly what my antagonist is doing and why. Like, the details of it. I know that seems silly that I have an outline and am writing on the novel and only just now figured that out. I had the gist of it — with the understanding that it would probably come to me during the writing, which it did — but not the reasoning behind it or the exact order of events. Once I figured out some stuff about the magic in my universe and how it’s used by different mages (and therefore what my antagonist is doing), I was able to make that leap. My notes are in-line in the document itself, so it’s not like I’m going to lose it. :)
The whole Safari issue is really frustrating. My self-control has never been good, so knowing that I can get to Facebook on Safari means I might as well not block it on my other browsers. I hope they fix that issue (which is a feature they added). Many is the night I’ve gotten my writing for the day done at 3:00 AM because I procrastinated.
Maybe I can make that part of the ‘game.’ If I go to Facebook after 8 PM, it’s some sort of penalty. Hmm. I’ll work on it.
For December, 2018, my stats are
- Words: 27,492
- Daily average words: 887
- Time: 1461 minutes (24 hours, 21 minutes)
- Daily average time: 47:08 min
- Average words/hour: 1129
- Chain: 92 days
- Level: 4 as of 18 December
- Quota: 350 words per day until 18 December, then 400 words/day
Yearly Wrap-Up
For 2018, my stats are
- Words: 127,701. That’s well over a novel’s worth.
- Daily average words: 946
- Time: 9356 minutes (6 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes)
- Daily average time: 58:29 min
- Average words/hour: 819
- Longest Chain: 92 days
- Number of chains: 2
- Total Writing Days: 160
- Level: 4 as of 31 December
- Points: 5472 as of 31 December
There were days prior to August that I wrote and recorded my time, but not the number of words (Really, past me?), so the totals above include that writing time, which is why the words per hour are probably a bit off. In 2019, I will count words and time each time I write, so those numbers won’t get “off” by too much.
My best (most productive) month was September, with a grand total of 37,243 words written. My worst month was August with only 15,649, but I was only writing for 13 days in August, so that could probably be prorated, but I’ll let it stand. :)
The most time I spent writing was in September, as well, with 2048 minutes, total, but a surprise is that January was second with 1546 minutes, total, but I didn’t record the number of words I wrote. I suspect a good bit of it was while Weekend Warrior was going on. This was well before I rediscovered the magic writing spreadsheet and started using it daily, but I was using the time-tracking app and kept track of how long I wrote, because that makes sense.
I plan to keep this going for 2019. I have a good chunk of a rough draft of a novel that I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to write since 2008. It has gone through a number of massive changes as I’ve learned things about writing and revised my characters and my world and figured out a plot that I hope makes sense. Well over half of the total 127,701 words were on short stories, blog posts, the outline, and free-writing to get to something outline-like. Right now, the ‘novel’ is a hopeless mess that needs a lot of help before I would consider letting eyes other than mine see it. I hope that by . . . let’s say April? . . . I might have something resembling a rough draft. <crosses fingers>
Oh, and you bet your sweet bippy this blog post is going towards my words for 1/1/2019. :) Let’s get the new year off to a decent start with some extra words!
Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete As a final bonus, if you’re at all interested in what the spreadsheet looks like, here is a screen shot of the 2018 worksheet. You can’t read it as is, but if you click on the image, then click on it again to get the magnified version, you can see every cell, should you feel the desire to do so. :)
If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy of the sheet . . . well, I could be persuaded to share a blanked-out version. Probably. ;) Alternatively, you could use the one I link to way back in another post, the truly shared one that exists as a Google Doc where you can see everyone else’s progress as well.
Just know that I found and corrected a major bug in it today as I was preparing the 2019 sheet for the first entry (this blog post), and that extended to the 2020 sheet. If I give you a copy, you’d be on your own for fixing stuff like that.
- Words: 27,492
-
Well, It Was Supposed To Be a Sale
On January 27, 2018, Johnna, a friend of mine who is in my Tuesday night writing group (The Forum Writers), sent me a link to Spectacle Magazine with a note that said, “Have you tried here? When I saw this, I thought of you and your short stories. I think you could submit something here and have success.”
I looked at the site and discovered that they had literally just published their first issue, and that they were paying nicely.
I had just finished editing two short stories and thought, “Why not?” One of them got sent off to Spectacle and one elsewhere. Both deadlines were sufficiently into the future that I didn’t obsess (much) over checking (much) my email (much) every day to see (much) if I had a response (much). Nada (MUCH).
On the evening of February 15th (the submission deadline), just as I was about to shut down my computer to head upstairs to prepare for bed, *ping*.
A new email on the account I use exclusively for writing. Well, I mean . . . it wouldn’t hurt to look, right? A rejection just before bed is nothing new, after all. So I called it up. Yep. From Spectacle.
“Dear Gary,” yadda yadda blah blah blah “loved your submission” blah-de-blah-de-blah and here it comes . . . “and want to publish and illustrate it for an upcoming issue.” Yep! Exactly what I figured. Crap. This story is– <sound of record being scratched>
Wait. What?
I read it again. It still had that last sentence. And again. Still had not changed. I — and I’m a little embarrassed to admit this — got on Facebook and sent the email to a trusted friend and said, “Does this say what it looks like it says?”
I’ve been through this before, after all. My acceptance into Viable Paradise went much the same way, including taking a printout of the email with me on the plane up to Boston just in case somewhere along the way it changed to “Psych! Your writing sucks and you should be ashamed for making us read that dreck,” so I could just slink off to a different hotel and hide for a week. I wish I were kidding.
Impostor Syndrome is . . . yeah.
I held the news while Spectacle worked out some issues with its author contract. The original one was . . . very rights-grabby. The second one was . . . better. Then they started working with SFWA and I figured time would tell. It was clear that the publishers were new to publishing and were trying to do better. So we were hopeful.
By the end of April, however, I was getting worried. They were still replying to emails and saying, “We’re almost there!” Then, at the very end of April, they sent an email with the new contract (blank) for us to look over, and a note that said they were going to get the new contracts sent off to all the writers who’d had stories accepted “within the next day or so!”
So, I waited. And I waited. May. June. The publishers stopped replying to tweets and emails. Still, I waited. And then, it was July. I withdrew my own story from consideration because it was clear to me that they were never going to send anything. I never received a response to that email. I can’t prove that they ever knew I’d retracted my submission. Issue 2 had not come out. In fact, their website had not been updated since before April. In fact, their podcast had petered out at episode 5 in May. It concerned me at the time that only one of the two publishers bothered to take any time to say a few words on the podcast, but I thought, “Hey, it’s probably a small, two-man shop and he’s busy.”
Finally, in September, one of the other affected writers confronted them and got them to admit that they were shutting down after one issue. None of the writers whose stories had been accepted were going to see print. And those who’d been paid were the lucky ones because they got free money. But they asked the confronters to keep it under wraps so they could “reach out personally” to inform all the other writers. So they kept it under wraps. Nothing was said publicly.
Well, now it’s December. A full year since they opened for submissions. They still have said nothing in public. They didn’t bother renewing the SSL certificate on their website, which speaks volumes. As far as anyone can determine, no writers were informed. Not even the least effort was made. So it was deemed safe to go ahead and say it: Spectacle Magazine is gone. Kaput. Done. If you got paid, keep the money and resubmit the story elsewhere. If you signed a contract and didn’t get paid, you should probably consider the contract null and void and resubmit that story elsewhere. And if you never heard squat, move on. Everyone probably already had (like me), but it reflects really poorly on the publishers to not own up to anything to the people who they kept saying they wanted to work with and communicate with. I don’t know what status the signed contracts are in from a legal point of view, but it would be truly interesting to see what the law would say about the validity of a contract that one party had no intention of ever keeping.
So much for that. So my “first sale” turned out to be a “first bad experience” instead. Huzzah?
Does it leave a bad taste in my mouth? Yes, it does! Does it mean I’ll never submit anything ever again? No! Does it mean I’ll be less trusting of new markets in the future? <sigh> Probably? Maybe? A little? Will I still submit to them? Probably, yes. But will I give them the benefit of even the most minuscule doubt? Hell no. Spectacle has removed that gene from my writer DNA. At the first sign of flakiness, I’m outta there.
Back in July when I posted about this on my Facebook page and very carefully didn’t name the magazine, I said, “I think they bit off more than they could chew, and are probably scrambling to figure out what they can salvage. If they ever get their act together, I’d still like to one day publish something with them.” Well, not any more. If I ever see the names of the publishers of Spectacle associated with literally anything else, I will avoid it. Because they’ve demonstrated their true colors. They’ve shown us who they are in the most honest way possible: their (complete lack of any) actions.
To be crystal clear: I don’t fault them for biting off more than they could chew or being not savvy in the publishing industry. Those could happen to anyone. And they seemed to be trying very hard to make their contract work, including listening to experienced writers and SFWA. What I fault them for is not behaving like responsible adults when it became clear that they were going to call it quits.
- This was not mere speculation. Their bios said as much. They were, if I recall correctly, software people from Silicon Valley who decided to publish a magazine.
-
The Death of LiveJournal
I joined LiveJournal on January 7, 2003, because a group of friends I had been interacting with for ~13 years suddenly all disappeared from our usual platform (over internal politics by the people in charge) and went to LiveJournal. I have well over 3000 blog entries on LJ. I loved the site because of its privacy features and ease of design.
Recently, now-Russian-owned-and-operated LiveJournal explicitly changed their terms of service to require obeying Russian law. This entails “protecting” minors from discussions of “sexual deviancy.” This is code for LGBTQ+ issues. In order to continue using the site, one has to click “agree” when logging in, and if you don’t, Bad Things™ will happen. (i.e., They disable/remove your account and you lose all access to your blog.)
So I clicked ‘agree,’ but I cannot and do not and will not ever actually agree to those terms. So what that means is that I have to find some way to export all of my 3000+ posts from LJ and import them either to here or to my Blogger blog. Blogger is probably a “better” choice in terms of tone, but I prefer WordPress for the control I have.
What I don’t have is a good way to do this all at once. There is a LiveJournal importer, but it has only negative reviews, because apparently although it tries to import comments along with the blog posts themselves, it ends up duplicating the comments. And not just once or twice, but up to ten times, each. This is something I, too, noticed back before I created this site, when I was playing around on WordPress.com. It was ugly and useless, and I never did get everything cleaned up. It’s a big reason why I’m not hosted on WordPress.com and have my own domain, in fact.
What this means is that I must export my posts — sans comments! :( — from LiveJournal to XML files, then import those into WordPress. But on LJ, one can only export 1 month at a time.
I have 170(ish) months of posts, which will generate — you guessed it — 170ish files, and each one will have to be imported into this blog separately.
What this means to all both of my loyal readers is that . . . things may get weird, here. I have no idea what the LiveJournal posts are going to look like when they end up on WordPress. I have no idea what the date stamps will be. I have no idea what WordPress will do with my formatting or my embedded media or my userpics . . . I just don’t know. I’ll have to try a test, and even that may not be a good indication.
What I do know is that I will turn off the thing that automatically tweets, Google+s, Facebooks, LiveJournals, and Tumblrs new posts, because that would get real fugly, real fast.
I don’t know how long this will take. I do know it will require a ton of time. Time I don’t really have. So it will be slow going. And I also know that although I’ve tried to keep my blog here at least PG-13 because it represents the “professional” part of me, should I ever be published and people come here looking for more me (Hey, it could happen!). My LiveJournal . . . is not PG-13. It’s not NC-17, but it’s certainly at least R-rated. So I will just warn you now. :)
As soon as I’m done exporting all my posts and I’m sure that everything is safely saved and thoroughly backed up, I will be deleting my 14-year-old account on LiveJournal. They will receive no more of my money. They will receive no more of my time. They will receive no more of my consideration. I’m done.
Now, to all the people who are going to snidely comment, “LiveJournal is still a thing? I thought it was already dead!” . . . we get it. You’re very funny. But I really like some of the stuff I have on that site. It’s some of my best writing, and I hate to lose all the comments that I got over the years from friends, former friends, and strangers alike. But there’s no way to preserve them. Will I keep every silly one-sentence pun post? Probably not, to be honest. But whether you knew it or not, there is — or was; I suspect this TOS change will drive most of the decent people who are still using the site away — still a thriving community. Perhaps not as active as it once was, but still active nonetheless. And part of me will miss it. But a much bigger part of me hates what it has become, and refuses to use the site on their terms.
Stay tuned for further developments.
-
On Patterns
Sometimes, we’re not able to see the patterns right in front of our faces, because we’re too close to them. One has to back up to see that there is, in fact, a pattern.
Lately, I’ve been trying to type up what amounts to a synopsis of my novel. It’s not written completely, yet, but . . . it’s for Reasons. That will become clear in the fullness of time. I was specifically trying to come up with what themes are included in my novel. I’m terrible at themes. A theme has to beat me about the head and shoulders with a dead fish before I notice it.
While I was working on that, I noticed something, and started looking at my other writing.
I have a distinct pattern. And it’s pervasive.
I shall give you a couple of examples.
A few years ago, I signed up for an eight-week writing . . . “course,” I guess? Kinda? . . . by local(-to-Atlanta) author David Fullmer. It was eight consecutive Wednesdays or whatever, and consisted of him giving us lectures, answering questions, and assigning homework, and us reading the homework aloud the next meeting. The first week, our assignment was to write a setting. To pick an interior or exterior scene and describe it so that others could see it. No dialogue. If characters are present, they’re ‘furniture.’
This is what I wrote.
I woke flat on my back and opened my eyes to complete blackness. Panicked, I struggled to sit up. Strange noises came at me from all sides, and I realized quickly that they were echoes of my own movements. I made a conscious effort to sit still and breathe normally. I listened, trying to gauge the size of the room. In the distance to my right I could hear the slow, steady drip of water into water. Plink! Plink! Plink! Plink!
“Hello?” I called, and it was redoubled and sent back at me in shards by walls an unknown distance away. I shivered in the still, icy air as the echoes faded away slowly. I was sitting on hard stone so cold it seemed to leech the warmth from my body. I felt around me with my hands, following the coutours of the rock as best I could, its surface rough and clammy against my skin.Not my best effort by any measure, but it shows the pattern: David asked for me to make readers see the scene, and the only thing I wanted to write after that was a setting in complete, total darkness where seeing is impossible.
Another example. I have a time-travel novel that is currently trunked, waiting for me to come up with a better ending. The entire thing came from my saying, “Why is it in time travel novels that it always hinges on some cataclysmic event? Why can’t the event be something ordinary, but could only be done by a certain person?” (It is still trunked because I didn’t handle that premise as well as I wanted to.)
The very first self-contained short story I wrote was from the POV of a woman who was on the losing side in a battle against her second personality. Another was about an old woman who hires a vampire to cure her dying son. Another was the typical rookie-writer ‘Adam and Eve’ story where they were AI programs created sort of by accident on a limited budget by harried programmers. In my dragon and princess story, the dragon is the hero, not the knights. In my novel series, I wanted an Urban Fantasy specifically unlike most of the others that are popular: male cast, third-person POV, characters inside the establishment/law, magic is ‘out,’ no sexy vampires or werewolves, nothing sparkles, etc. Another story evolved from me saying, “If a psychic wants me to believe in them, they need to call me at home and say, ‘Gary, you’re in terrible danger!’ and then prove it.” And then writing that very scenario.
I think my pattern is that I look at the ‘rules’ and try to find a way to turn them on their heads, at least to some extent.
And, you know, I think all writers do this to some extent. But the fact that it took me this long to see it is kind of funny, I guess. How boring would it be to read the same characters in the same stories handling the same situations in the same way, every time? (It would be like re-reading the same book over and over again.)
Now, how does that answer the question about themes? It doesn’t. At all. I suck at themes. I may have mentioned that.
-
Silence, Be Broken!
So . . . it’s been a while. :) Unintentionally, mind you.
Last November, I was doing what I called NaNotWriMo, meaning that I ignored NaNoWriMo for the first time since 2008, and instead, I decluttered my office. I made it a lot better. It’s still not perfect, but it is orders of magnitude better than it was.
And then toward the end of November some stuff happened. Real-life stuff. Stuff I won’t go into. But it was enough that I didn’t want to blog or write or do much of anything else creative. So I left the office declutterization unfinished, abandoned all my writing projects, and every time I thought I had something to say, here, I’d talk myself out of it with a very old argument. “Dude, this is a writing blog. You should write about, you know . . . writing. And since you aren’t doing that, what’s the point?”
And that is how we end up at May 7th with the first post since November 18th.
But enough about that. I have ranting to get to!
What I was wondering is: am I the only one who, while reading, lets a name that appears to have several, conflicting, legitimate pronunciations throw me out of the story?
I can’t help it. Every time I see the name, I find myself pausing and thinking “Is it Lord High Emperor of Space and Time Potayto Salaad, Potahto Salaad, or Pah-tah-toe Salaad? And is it Salahd, Sah-lah-ahd, or Sah-lah-ahd?”
Yes, this kind of thing really does bother me, and it is literally every time I run across the name while reading. It slows me down and throws me out of the book. If it’s a name like Mary or Frank or Kira or even Binbiniqegabinik, there are very limited ways it could be pronounced. And in the case of that last one, it was made clear in the book what the proper pronunciation is, if I recall correctly.
A friend posted a question on Facebook, asking if she should use ‘Kira,’ ‘Brianna,’ or ‘Brienne’ as a character name. I voted firmly for Kira, because for me, those other two would cause me to read at half speed unless a pronunciation guide were given. Is the ‘i’ in ‘Brianna’ long or short? Is the first ‘a’ like the one in ‘bat’ or the one in ‘father’? We won’t even go into ‘Brienne’ and all the different ways I could find to pronounce it. I would probably have to just mentally call ‘Brienne’ something like ‘Bree’ or reading a sentence would go like this:
Brienne [Bree-en? Bree-en? Bry-en? Bry-en? Is the final ‘e’ pronounced? Gaaah!] and Gemina [Is the ‘g’ hard or soft? Is it ‘{G|J}em-i-na’, or ‘{G|J}e-mee-na’? Gaaah!] leapt into the saddle of Brienne’s [Bree-en’s? Bree-en‘s?] steed Fnaben [Dammit.] . . .
I’m guilty of it, myself, of course. On Second Life, I’m known by the name Sathor Chatnoir. Although ‘Chatnoir’ is fairly simple if you know French pronounciation, apparently ‘Sathor’ gives people fits. To me, it’s obviously Say-thor (where ‘Thor’ is pronounced like the Norse god), but when I heard people pronouncing it (we sometimes abandon typing and actually talk), people were saying it to rhyme with Dan Rather’s last name, or pronouncing the ‘Sa’ as “sah” instead of “say.” I was totally flabberghasted because to me, it’s so obvious. :)
And yeah, I know that it doesn’t matter how a name is pronounced unless there’s some poetry involved (A Elbereth Gilthoniel / silivren penna míriel . . .). I guess all I’m saying is that I like to know. Maybe it has something to do with being raised fairly early in my reading-for-pleasure life on books like The Lord of the Rings where there is an actual pronunciation guide right there in the book to tell you that the “C” in “Celeborn” is hard, or that the second syllable of “Lothlorien” is stressed.
Anyway, it’s probably just me, and this is just a rant, but at least it’s off my chest, now, and I can get back to plotting my novels and novellas. :)
You may notice over on the right of this page three circular graphs showing progress. Those are novels I’m working on co-plotting. They are the first three novels of my MCU Case Files series, and there are a lot of interwoven plots that need to all resolve by the end of Book 3, so that’s mostly what I’m working on. The current figures are only guesses, but I had to point out the cool graphs because cool.
-
Logos
When I first created this site, I liked this theme I’m still using. It’s called “Structure,” and the logo they had by default was a block-capital S and T connected by the T’s crossbar. I thought how neat it would be to have my own logo in a similar style. I got an icon designer application and spent far too long (probably close to three hours) drawing a 32 x 32 pixel icon, literally pixel by pixel. If you look at the tab on your browser where you’re reading this, you should be able to see that icon. It’s a light gray capital “W” superimposed on a black capital “W”, slightly offset to the lower right.
But I’ve wanted something better since then. Because ugly. Because lack of graphic design talent. Ideally, it would replace or augment the image at the top of the page where it says “WriteWright The blog of Gary D. Henderson.” Ideally.
The other night, I had a new contact through the “Contact Me” widget and went to that site to deal with it. They were encouraging me to upload my business’s logo. The desire to have my stylized W/W icon/logo hit again, so I spent a couple of hours trying to find sites that would allow me to design logos.
Did I mention that I suck at graphic design? I mean, like really. I have a certain amount of artistic ability (I took art classes for years, and didn’t suck too badly), but I stopped trying to develop it when I discovered computers when I was a junior in high school. (Making a computer jump through logic hoops I designed seemed more fun (and easier, and faster, and more rewarding) than drawing, painting, etc.)
I found quite a few sites out there that allow one to design a logo for free. They usually have a selection of “clip art” one can choose from, and then text can be added. I went through quite a few of them, poking at them to see if they had anything I didn’t hate. (Started off on the right foot, at least. “Didn’t hate” instead of “liked.”)
I was surprised when I found something on every site I tried. I stopped after five. Below are my results. Some sites allowed me to download the design; for others, I had to take a screenshot and clip the image. Which is why, for instance, one of them has visible grid lines and a couple more look a bit rough.
That won’t be the case in the finished logo.
While most of them allow you to design the logo for free, if you want to actually use it, of course, you have to pony up. What I don’t know is what “should be” a reasonable price would be for something like that.
So I thought I’d put the potentials up here to see what people think. Because with the whole ‘suck at graphic design’ thing I have going.
I’m not attached to any of these to the point that I couldn’t just delete them and move on. But these do represent what I thought looked best from the alternatives each site offered me.
Let’s begin!
WriteWright Logo from LogoTypeMaker This was the first site I tried. As I flipped desultorily through many uninspired suggestions of clip-art, this one popped up randomly, and looked enough like my original vision that I took notice. It was originally in shades of sickly green, but one of the options they allow is to change those colors, so I did just that. I like the monochrome look I’ve selected for this site, so I stayed with blacks and grays. I would probably play around with colors a bit more and dump the text entirely.
WriteWright Logo from OnlineLogoMaker This one is arguably the closest to my original concept, although I’m not overly fond of the font. (I think it’s the curviness.) But it is the only font they supplied where the W allowed an exact overlap, with all the widths and the angles lining up. I know because I tried every single font I didn’t hate.
WriteWright Logo from LogoMaker On this one, I don’t think I got the colors exactly matching, but the concept I was going for is obvious. Again, it kind of goes with the “W” theme, closer to the first design than my original idea, but it’s kind of appealing, to me. I like the ‘rite’ and ‘right’ added on this one, and would probably keep the text.
WriteWright Logo from LogoGarden Total departure. This site didn’t have any “W” designs that weren’t hideous, but instead of ditching it altogether, I decided to flip through the hundreds of clip-art images they had to see if any of them called to me. They had a whole section for “writing and writers” and the quill pen is a natural enough association that I went with it. Others that drew me were a stylized pen nib, and a pencil reminiscent of the LiveJournal logo. (Neither of which is shown, because ultimately, I got tired of designing logos. Also because the pen nib design could be taken as a stylized depiction of cleavage, which is probably the point.)
Is the quill maybe a little too cliché?
WriteWright Logo from GraphicsSprings Finally, this one is back with the overlapping / nested “W.” The original colors were somewhere in the puce range, but I switched to graytones. Again, I would probably dump the text. This one has a certain . . . “Art Deco”? . . . look that I like. But is it too much like the Volkswagon logo? :)
I did a Google image search for “W” logos. There are a lot of them. Some of them are close to some of the designs above, but then there’s only so many ways you can twist a “W” and have it still recognizable as a “W.”
Anyway, you tell me. I lack the graphic design skill, and frankly, they’re all kind of blurring together at this point. Does anything stand out?
