I ended up shelving the Cria/Iresha storyline (it’ll be its own book) to focus on Makrannan’s, which then made it clear that Makrannan’s storyline was weak and problematic. So I threw most of it out. The worldbuilding was flimsy as well, leading me to spend the last month fleshing it out (magic systems, history, surrounding cultures, etc.), and I now have a much more solid grasp on the world. I’ve also been learning more about Makrannan’s character and backstory.
All that prewriting has gotten me to the point where the next step is writing the full outline. I’ve done an amazing job avoiding that, however, because I don’t have a good ending yet and the middle is completely vague and muddy — nonexistent, really.
My goal this coming week: figure out a better ending, and plan out the overall structure of the novel. Once I have the boundaries and shape of the forest in place, so to speak, planting the trees should be much easier.
One of the things I’ve run into is that there is an overwhelming infinity of choices at almost every step of the plot. Having a solid structure will, I believe, help with making better design choices in plotting the book.
Sidenote: yesterday marked thirteen weeks solid of writing a thousand words a day. A lot of those words have been prewriting or random freewriting, but establishing the habit has finally given me the confidence that I can manage the day-to-day writing load necessary to finish a novel.
The pruning and splitting of the blogs is now complete. From 2,600 posts down to 400, and from one blog to (cough) fifteen. In my defense, these blogs are basically like categories, albeit with a bit more separation (tags don’t cross blog boundaries).
There is of course a feed for each blog (see the subscribe page for the list), and I decided to do a consolidated feed as well. I also added exclusion parameters to the consolidated feed, so if you really don’t care about my type design and art posts, for example, you can use this URL: https://blogs.bencrowder.net/feed/?exclude=type-design,art
The blogs are running on Slash, a Django app I wrote. It’s fairly simple, and writing it hardly took any time at all. (What took the most time was going through the 2,600 posts and deciding which to keep and which blog to put them in.) Also, I’m trying out Disqus for comments. Still not completely sold on it, but it was faster than adding comments to Slash.
Matthew Butterick posted a link today to Quad, his in-development typesetting engine, written in Racket. It’s an attempt to take the best ideas from both LaTeX and web browsers and build a modern, flexible typesetting engine.
The syntax (at least as it stands right now) is naturally very LISPy, and the examples are fairly low-level, but I’m quite interested to see where things go. While I haven’t done much typesetting lately, I’ve been itching to do more in LaTeX and less in InDesign, so that my source files are plain text and not locked into a proprietary format. And some things are more easily done in code. Also, I’ve wanted to share the source files for my work (as I’ve started doing with the PlotDevice sources for my language charts), but putting InDesign files in a GitHub repo just feels wrong. And InDesign isn’t exactly cheap, either.
So, LaTeX for now, and possibly Quad once it’s matured a bit.
At someone’s request, I recently put together Microsoft Word editions of the LDS standard works, for use as study aids. (The person who requested it is using Word to highlight, annotate, and add footnotes/endnotes.) Verse numbers are included.
Process (for the curious)
I downloaded an SQLite version of the scriptures and wrote a Python script to extract the text in the right order, with markers for the headings. I then copied and pasted the whole thing into Word.
In Word, I did some wildcard-based find-and-replacing to remove the heading markers and apply the appropriate styles, and then I added a hanging indent so the verse numbers are less obtrusive.
As a heads up, in the near future I’m going to be splitting this blog into several. The main reason is that the audiences for the things I want to blog about often have very little overlap, and the ever-present sense of alienating segments of my readers weighs heavy on me and makes me not blog much at all.
Right now, I believe these will be the different blogs (and no consolidated feed in the works at this point):
I’ll be writing a new blog engine (in Django) to run this, mostly for fun, and also to fit my workflow better. (This blog is currently on WordPress.)
Also, I’ll be pruning old posts, deleting anything that doesn’t accurately represent me now. Anything that makes me cringe, if we’re being honest.
Expectation is for this all to happen sometime in February. Blog engines aren’t very hard to write (this’ll be my third or fourth), but going through 2,600 posts will take some time.
I’ve decided to stop serializing The Edge of Magic and pull it from my site. I’ll keep writing it, but serializing my first novel in public was a fool’s game, and my hubris has been given its due. Perhaps I’ll serialize something once I’ve actually learned how to write novels, but there’s still so much I need to learn and it’s hard to do it well in public.
My plan now is to finish the book (including at least a couple good rounds of editing) and, if I’m not utterly ashamed of the result, release the completed novel on my site later this year.
For the few who were reading it: I’m open to having more alpha readers, so if you’re interested, let me know.
What I’ve learned so far
The way I write, I need a better plan before I start drafting the book. Far more detailed worldbuilding, a cohesive plot, clearer characterization, etc. — a really good outline with scenes that move things forward.
That said, outlining gives me a literal headache every time I do it. Not sure what’s up with that.
At any given point, there are so many possibilities, so many choices. Having a clearer structure will help those choices support the novel instead of veering off on tangents, so things actually happen for a reason.
Next time, I think I’ll only have one POV character. Juggling three while also trying to learn how to sustain the weight of the story over the course of a novel is…difficult.
The good news, of course, is that I’m learning a lot about writing novels, far more than I expected (cf. hubris). Still a lot left to learn, but the progress is visible.
For the past two months I’ve been working on a fantasy novel, The Edge of Magic, and I’ve recently decided to serialize it on my site (reasons below).
The first three chapters are up. Every Friday from now on I’ll post an installment — one to three chapters, which comes to around 2,500–3,500 words per installment. On that page readers can also subscribe to updates via RSS or email.
I’ve released fiction on the web before, of course, but this is the first time I’ve done it without being able to edit the whole piece in advance. It’s terrifying. I do have an outline as a security blanket, and I’ve already written the first eight chapters, but writing a novel in public (more or less) makes me feel even more naked and vulnerable than I expected.
My main reason for doing this somewhat unprudent thing: I have a bad habit of endlessly tweaking the beginnings of my novels and never getting past that point. By putting the chapters online as I write them, I’ll feel forced to resist that urge and finish the book. A psychological gimmick, sure, but I think it’ll work.
The secondary reason: writers generally need to write a few bad novels before they can write good ones. While I hope The Edge of Magic isn’t too terrible, getting reader feedback earlier on — with analytics to see where people stop reading, etc. — will help me learn faster. Consider this an open beta.
Once the novel is finished, I’ll do another editing pass and put it on the Kindle store for a couple bucks, with the free version remaining available on my site as well. I plan to serialize another couple novels after that, then try my hand at the traditional publishing route. I’m not going to submit these serialized novels to any publishers, though, since they’ll have already been published.
Whew. To be honest, I’m still surprised I’m actually moving forward with this — the past few weeks have been a blur of incessant insecurities and fears. But sometimes scary risks are good for the soul. Here we go…
I’ve recently begun scanning my journals using my iPhone and the Scanner Pro app, and it’s working out fairly well. My process:
Using the built-in iPhone camera app, I long press to lock focus and exposure (this saves time so it doesn’t have to autofocus each time), then photograph each page of the journal. It’s not as high quality as it would be if I used an actual scanner, but it’s much, much faster, and far more portable.
After I’m done photographing, I open Scanner Pro and select the images from the camera roll, then use the Black & White Document setting to process them into a PDF.
From Scanner Pro, I export the PDF to Dropbox.
The resulting PDF is nice and clean and easy to read, and the files aren’t too big (150 pages is usually between 80 and 200 megs — for me, very much worth the space to preserve important documents).
A concocted example:
That’s before (the image is straight from my iPhone camera, no postprocessing), and this is after Scanner Pro is done with it:
I should add that ordinarily, with actual journals there wouldn’t be as much empty border around the content.
One hitch I’ve run into is that Scanner Pro chokes on anything larger than around 150 pages (it crashes), so I do long journals in chunks.
For that reason and a few other small annoyances, I’ve been looking into replacing Scanner Pro with a desktop-based script that takes a list of photos and processes them into a nice black and white PDF. Imagemagick gets me part of the way there with this command:
Here’s what it looks like for the above note card scan, at 30%, 50%, and 70% threshold, respectively:
At some point I’ll try writing a Python script that dynamically evaluates each page and adjusts the threshold as necessary to get the best result. Until then, though, I’m still using Scanner Pro.
As I’m now starting to get more serious about writing novels, I recently made a list of the next few books I want to write after the one I’m working on, and I ran into an unexpected side effect: knowing what the next few items in the queue are has somehow made writing a novel feel far more doable. It’s now a task that has an ending, rather than being something with no end in sight.
Sidenote: I’m not sure how much I’ll talk here about the novel in progress, at least not until I finish a full draft, but I do plan to talk about tools and process. (For example, I’ll write more about this later, but I’m using Vim with a Git repo and a post-commit hook that generates a print-ready proof PDF of the full book via TeX whenever I commit.)
