Servusamanu.com

I recently found out that my readership was slightly larger than I expected, that is, there are apparently more than two people who occasionally stop by Servusamanu.  That is unfortunate because I don’t usually put more than a few minutes aside for articles in any given week.  I’ve obviously been remiss toward my silent audience…

Hopefully I can rectify that now that the new year is upon us.  Unfortunately, I’m beginning the year without much of a running start.  I’m sitting here very much at a loss of what I could or should write about.  I am tempted to write a review of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, but I really prefer to review things that I like.  A scathing diatribe on its numerous inanities would no doubt flow easily, but does it really do me any credit?

I also watched Blood Diamond last week.  It was suggested to me and it was not a terrible suggestion, but I found it too to be a bit lacking.  The setting, Sierra Leone, was gorgeous and filmography was crisp and moving, but the story was half-rate and the dialog fairly insipid.  Blood Diamond is a period piece and a heart-strings work.  It wants to be a documentary half the time and does not make any rebellious choices with the characters or the plot that might make it more than a glorified history special.  I enjoyed myself watching it, but I’m not going to throw words away on a story that you could probably manage to piece together from the title a short game of 34 questions.

This calendar turning holiday of ours suggests I should write about resolutions or something along those lines.  Phooey!  My goals didn’t change because I tossed away my “pictures of Arizona calendar’ and put up my ‘pictures of really tall mountains’ one.  I’m still trying to teach myself french and have had some success.  I’m hardly fluent, but I can understand the news a bit and I’m fairly good at reading.  My web design hobby is going along perfectly well.  I’ve got a few jobs and a few more on the way.  Eventually I’m going to remake this website and robertdrake.net, but I haven’t even started so what’s there to say?

Work is proceeding as it always does, that is from 9-5 in a week day format.   I’ve yet to make any substantial push for Linux in the community, but I have nearly virtualized the entire server room.  The Gods of Good and Proper Networking should be smiling on me.  I am currently considering some classes above and beyond work and so far that looks to be coming together.  It all seems very far away and distant at the moment.

I have some mind that I might travel to Chicago for a baseball game sometime in the early summer and Louisiana in March.  Both visits depend on how generous my tax return turns out to be.  I always have eight restaurants left in New Paltz that I want to visit.  I’ve left the expensive ones for last…

That’s everything, yes, all my projects and goals?  Oh, writing?  Do I even do that anymore?  Yes, I suppose I do.  I finished my last novel, Lonetracker, just before Christmas.  I’ve got it chilling on ice for a few weeks.  I want to give it a last read through before I try to publish the thing.  It’s not good enough, but it’s not The Lost Symbol either.  My big problem is the length.  It comes in a nice word count: 110,000 words, but in manuscript format it’s almost 600 pages.   That’s a good 200 pages longer than a 110k word novel should be.  It’s all the dialog and I don’t feel too bad about it, but the overall length is well beyond what a publisher would normally consider for a first time novelist.  The hope is that I could pull them in with the first few chapters and they’ll take the necessary risks beyond that, but I’d prefer to play the odds and at least have overall length on my side.  I’m sure I can cut out some more…

I have another story planned for this year.  It is a huge departure from the science-fiction adventure of Lonetracker.  The new story is meant to pull together novels like A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer, or On The Road and spatter it with the intertextuality of anything by Eco and the simple, haunting musings of something from Camus.  Under no circumstance will thousands of words be italicized, will the character’s speak in blocks of wikipedia text, or will the character’s come to absurd conclusions after a few seconds of deep thought.  (I’m looking at you Lost Symbol).  This new story, untitled as of yet, has been bouncing around since at least the middle of 2007.  I’ve written the first chapter twice already, neither attempt succeeding at anything interesting.  Luckily, I’ve got a motley crew of character’s already have assembled so there’s plenty of the work right there.

Anything else I might write about?  Well, I cooked bread today.  Honey graham granola wheat.  It goes well with raspberry preserves, but no one really cares I’m sure.  I guess that just leaves the Seahawks game….

the Seahawks are trash.   Why would I even say a word more?

SO I’m got the one plot line read. There are a handful of tweaks and I’m not one hundred percent happy with the last chapter, but otherwise it’s solid. A few artifacts seem out of place so I’m having those moved around. In general everything seemed to come together. It’s the shortest of the plotlines, really just a bookcase for the other larger one, but I felt entertained reading it. I explore some of the larger cultural issues of the world, which isn’t strictly necessary for the plot, but I feel like it opens the world up in a way that is useful as well as interesting.

Next up: the main plot. It’s the longest and so probably the most time-consuming. I expect another week or two. I have Veteran’s Day off so that’ll give me good time to work, but….I also purchased Dragon Age: Origins (review forthcoming), which is always in my mind begging me to play. Overall schedule is still to finish this whole damn thing this month. I feel like I’m going to miss it by a week.

Today a general roundup of what I’ve done lately:

Read The Plague by Albert Camus.

Excellent, of course. Perhaps less philosophical than The Stranger, (an arguable critique) but a much softer read. I don’t know how much of the work was fictional and how much was based on Camus’ actual experience with a plague-stricken town in North Africa, but it came together very much as a genuine account. There a certain subtlety to his writing, a sort of silk-thread irony, that I suppose is very french, but either way I wish I could incorporate into my own writing.

Virtualized a file server at work.

I took an existing freebsd fileserver and moved it onto a virtualized Centos 5.3 server. I’ve also begun in earnest my project to push Linux OPAC machines to outside libraries. We have the first machines installed and an overall guide created. We’re just waiting on requests for OPAC’s at the moment.

Finished the Spot Edit for my Story.

I started with 100 items, some very small, others rather expansive, that needed to be fixed or tweaked in my novel. This week I managed to tackle the last of them. For the next month I’ll be doing general read-throughs. At the end of the year I’ll decide what, if anything, I want to do with it, but I’m still somewhat happy with the work overall. It is a huge improvement on my last attempt at this although the tone and voice still tweak my ear more than I should like. I’ve got a few more stories planned for next year so I’m eager to get onto those either way.

Pre-Ordered Dragon Age: Orgins

That should be coming next week I think. I still miss Baldur’s Gate more than it’s respectable to admit.

Started Watching Season 4 of Venture Brother’s

My favorite Adult Swim show is onto Season 4. I usually miss the television episodes (Sunday at midnight), but they put them online on Monday. Best stuff ever.

I read through my story once, fixing up the grammar, filling out the continuity, rewriting a few sections that obviously needed it.  From there I wrote up some ‘artifacts’, basically small out-of-story vignettes that flesh out the story a bit without being part of the strict narrative.  Because I have three plot lines I broke the story in three and read each plotline from beginning to end.  Within that edit I polished the chapters and tried to make them each exciting, worth reading, well-written etc.

Now I’m on to my final beginning-to-end, nothing skipped, edit.  This is, hopefully, the edit where I sit back and enjoy the story.  I’m not sure it’ll quite work out like that, but it’s coming together.  Once I finish that I’ll have a few friends read it and then…

Well, we’ll see.  One thing at a time, eh?

Until next time, Adieu!

I’m finishing up the last of the ‘artifacts’ in my story.  Basically, I’m stuffing fictional primary sources between my chapters.  They’re meant to pull the reader in and give them the sort of background information that a person in my world would already know.  I don’t need to have a character write out how the local government works because that’s something every character in the world should already know.  The question becomes, how can I tell the reader things without dumbing my characters down?

My solution has been artifacts.  I’ve got one for each chapter so far, but we’ll see how many make it into the final draft.  I like the idea, but my worry is that they will become burdensome.  Not every reader wants to know everything about the world and if its not strictly pertinent to the story would it be better to leave it out?  Brevity is always desirable, but there’s a different between redundant wordage and ancillary knowledge.  The first is like wading though mud, the second is a short scenic detour.

So far I’ve been happy with the artifacts because they’ve given me an opportunity to play with a number of different styles.  I have a court transcript, journal entries, advertisements, a travel itinerary.  I’ve been able to write a poem, a few scripts, and even a short homage to hard-boiled noir fiction.

While I have enjoyed writing the artifacts, the same thing that makes them enjoyable is potentially a downside.  By changing the voice and tone so dramatically, I threaten to dilute the ‘brand’ so to speak.  My artifacts are relatively short, but in total they come to around 25,000 words.  That’s a good fifth of the novel.  Editing will cut that down some, but not enough if they aren’t any good.

I’ve yet to make a final decision.  That’ll be a decision for a later article.  THis weekend I’ll be starting the final edit so I’ll have a few things to say there I’m sure.

I’m almost done editing my story or rather, I’m almost done editing it for the first time.  I only have a few chapters left before I can say that all of it has been looked at, at least once.  Whew!

I think editing might be more time-consuming and exhausting than the writing itself.  Writing is, by and large, quite fun.  I get to translate a few disparate ideas into a cohensive story.  Toss in some dialog, describe something cool I saw on television, conjure up some funny names.  Stories practically write themselves on the best days.

Editing, however, what a plodding, boring, experience!  Each chapter is apprixmately two thousand words.  I spend a good twenty minutes just making sure the grammar falls in line with ‘standard written english’.  From there I read over the thing, change out words, add specifics, straighten out any continuity problems, and tidy the language up.  Step three normally involves picking the whole thing apart, sentence by sentence, trying to find ambiguity, remove wordiness, and get a picture of what makes this chapter important.  The last step, or what should be the last step, is a matter of propping up the style, making it fun to read.  Sadly, that last step takes me hours on hours on hours.  I’ve yet to get through a chapter in less than three hours and a few have put me out at least five.

And once I finish, I start the whole thing again.  I have to say, I’m getting bored with my characters.  They keep running through the same plot over and over and over again.  Just another few weeks though, or maybe a few months, and than I can put the whole thing down, nicely arranged, and say, “My novel is done.”

I cannot wait!

I finished the rough draft of The Lonetracker Chronicle just an hour or two ago. Now, there’s plenty left to do. It’s an unedited masterpiece and by that I mean it’s a masterwork of misplaced commas, typoed words, broken continuity, and boring narration. I’m taking a few weeks off to get some reading done, enjoy the summer, maybe visit a few friends and then it’s on to the editing. I feel like I’m only maybe twenty percent done with the whole pen to published process, but I’m past that first big hump. It feels pretty great.

The Lonetracker Chronicle is a science fiction story built around the apocalypse that nearly destroyed humanity in the early 22nd century.  Mankind survived and even made it into space, but even two hundred years later the scars of the great apocalypse run deep.  For history professor Arrek Borthwait, his own scars run even deeper.  Invited to critique a movie depicting the apocalypse, he finds his own past has come around in the person of Sengal Tariff, the movie’s director and an old nemesis.

That’s all I’m going to put out for now.  I still need to write out the back blurb text and get together a suitable query latter for when that time comes.  For now though, whew!  Both very happy and very tired.