Building on the pedigree charts I released about a year ago, I’ve made a handful of new charts. For the four-generation chart, I’ve added one that has three to a page. I’ve also added five-generation and six-generation charts for people who like to write small:
Beyond that, I’ve got something sort of new that I’m calling a family chart. It’s similar to the family pedigree I mentioned when I released Emperor — a pedigree chart meets family group sheet hybrid:
There’s also a tabular version for when you don’t care as much about the relationships between families (if you’re just trying to figure out which kids go with which parents, for example):
And last but not least, a timeline, for mapping out chronological relationships and that sort of thing:
While I do love software, it’s hard to beat paper for stuff like this — paper lets you be messy. I’m finding myself doing a lot of my genealogy research on paper for just that reason. It’s more flexible. I seriously, seriously love paper.
As mentioned in my last NaShoStoMo post, I’m a bit behind. It’s day 20 and I’ve only written 14 stories. But I feel fairly confident that I can hit 30 stories by the end of the month, especially now that I’ve learned to write shorter stories (my last three have been 400 words each, instead of my usual 700–1200 words).
#7: “If You Could Hie to Kolob” (LDS science fiction)
#8: “Crumbs” (retelling of Matthew 15:21–28)
#9: “Tyrk” (fantasy, about the circus)
#10: “Babushka” (disturbing)
#11: “The O-Bomb” (middle-grade, kind of)
#12: “The Red Minivan” (fantasy of a sort)
#13: “To Have and to Hold” (science fictionish)
#14: “Look Up” (thrillerish)
And of course I have plenty of ideas for the remaining sixteen stories.
I’ve often wondered why we had a lot of “thus saith the Lord” revelations back in Joseph Smith’s day (just look at the Doctrine & Covenants) and don’t get many at all nowadays (“The Proclamation to the World on the Family” and “The Living Christ” are the only ones I can think of, and even then they’re not directly in the Lord’s voice).
Don’t get me wrong, I fully believe that the Church nowadays is led by God just as much as it was in 1830, and I likewise fully believe that our modern prophets receive revelation. I was just curious as to why the format seems to have changed over the years.
There is, in view of what has been said, need of continuous revelation. However, we must understand that there are two classes of revelation given by God to man. The first deals with the structure and content of the plan of salvation. Once given it does not need to be given again. Adam received it…. Christ gave the same revelation to man in His dispensation. So did Joseph Smith in his dispensation. The foundation, or platform, once given does not need to be given again unless men forget the truth.
Then there are revelations that fit the changes in our lives, meet our new needs, help us overcome unforeseen conditions—revelations for our daily guidance.
This great country, the United States of America, has found itself in a great depression. We have the Gospel. What did the Lord do? He spoke to his Prophet, and we have what is known as the Welfare Program. It is the application of the eternal principles of the Gospel to present day needs. It is as revelation. We have that type of revelation continuously.
So, when people say: ‘We ought to have revelation now as we did in the day of Joseph,’ we must answer, ‘Open your eyes; we do have revelation every day; such as we need from day to day.’
Revelations have been given to Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, Joseph F. Smith and President Heber J. Grant. Every one of them has had revelation whereby the Church has been guided.” (John A. Widtsoe, “Modern Revelation and Modern Questions,” The Deseret News, Church Section, 28 January 1939, p. 6.)
Occasionally I run across weird characters in Vim that show up as numbers in angle brackets — <95> or <97>, for example. They’re just curly quotes and em-dashes and such, but they’re encoded oddly, and there’s no way easy to do a search and replace on them.
Except that there is.
Yank the character. (That’s Vim talk for copying to the clipboard.)
Start typing your search-and-replace command — :%s/
Hit Ctrl-R followed by " (double quotes) to paste the character.
Finish out the rest of the search-and-replace and hit Enter — :%s/<97>/--/g
Voila. (There might be a way to fix these characters with iconv or some other encoding app, but I haven’t been able to get it to work other than this way.)
I ended up finishing that third story last night and writing another, and then I wrote another two tonight. This is awesome — I went from writing no fiction at all for months and months to writing around thirty pages so far in the first week of April.
I’m not going to post the stories online, because they’re embarrassing, but here’s what I’ve got so far:
“Wallwalker” — about a high school kid who can walk through walls (fantasy/science fiction)
“The Baby and the Box” — about a newborn who can see the creature on the ceiling (fantasy)
“Gravedigger” — about a golem and a little girl (fantasy)
“Back in a Bit” — about a husband who takes out the trash and doesn’t return for ten years (science fiction)
“Clerk’s Office” — about an elders quorum presidency who finds a door that leads under the church (horror)
“Fire to Fire” — about a boy who can start fires with his hands (fantasy)
I do plan to write a realistic story at some point, honest. But the other twenty-nine this month will almost certainly be fantasy or science fiction, because apparently that’s what I do. (And I’m very okay with that.)
A side effect of all this story writing that I didn’t foresee (I must be blind, because it’s kind of obvious in retrospect) is more confidence in my writing, enough that I’m now raring to go back and write Tanglewood, that young adult fantasy novel I started two years ago but lamely gave up on. (It changed a lot after that draft, by the way.) Some of my stories this month will come from that world, I think.
Almost one week into NaShoStoMo so far. I’ve written two and a half stories and I’m hoping to finish the third story tonight, so I’ve got to write three more to catch up. I have a feeling I’ll be playing a lot of catch-up this month.
I have to say, by the second day of the month I was this close to giving up. I figured that NaShoStoMo was an unnecessary extra stress in my life and besides, fiction isn’t even useful, and there were so many other more worthwhile ways to fill my time and blah blah blah yadda yadda. Luckily I realized that that was Resistance talking (see Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art). I managed to muscle through it, and I’m really glad I did. Story ideas are flying at me from all over the place. It feels so good to be writing fiction again.
But man, writing middles is hard. And endings are even harder for me. I can handle beginnings just fine, but as soon as I get to the middle, it’s like every bone in my story goes limp, and it’s kind of hard to end properly when you’re flopping about with your invertebrate middle.
And that’s why I’m doing NaShoStoMo: to learn how to write middles and endings. Thirty stories is going to be really good practice for that.
Also, keeping my stories short is proving to be difficult. Writing a story short enough that I can finish it in a day (preferably a single sitting) would seem to be easy, but as soon as I get going, it’s like I go into novel-writing mode and I’m spinning out the first chapter of what’s going to be a much longer story. So my other goal is to learn how to clamp down and tell each story with more economy.
And yes, all three stories are kind of pathetic, but you can’t expect much more from that from rough drafts. I do plan to revise some of these lumps into something nice and shiny someday.
An animation test I painted in Photoshop and threw together in Blender, mainly just to play around with parallax layers (and to get back into doing animation again):
Introducing some simple LDS scripture reading charts, starting with the Book of Mormon. They’re available in PDF in nine different languages for now (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai), with more to come.
Last night I came across NaShoStoMo (National Short Story Month) via my friend’s blog. Basically, you write thirty short stories in April, one a day, 200 words minimum.
I’m doing it.
I haven’t written much fiction in the last nine months, but I miss it, and this’ll be a great prod to get me going again. Most of the stories will be quite short and most will be horrifically bad (figure I may as well get that out there), and there’s a good chance that no one other than me will ever see any of them, but you can’t become a good writer if you don’t write. A lot. Time to get back into the habit of spinning stories.
