Tom 4 – skończony :)

No to napisane.

Skończyłam wczoraj, i jest to na razie najdłuższe tomiszcze (274k słów). Całość 5 tomów ma szansę się zamknąć w 1165k, co da jakieś 4,3k stron standardowych.

Teraz muszę się rozprawić z tym, co już mam napisane dla tomu 5 (ponieważ piszę nie po kolei, są tam kawałki, które powstały nawet w 2020). Trzeba to poprawić, naregulować, przepisać (te części, które mam w zeszytach) i ogólnie dostosować. I mam nieprzyjemne wrażenie, że akt 3 jest dramatycznie niedoszacowany. Ale na razie zostaje jak jest.

Zrobiłam sobie takie śmieszne wykresy trochę podobne do widma (a niektórym, bardzo słusznie, przypominające defragmentację dysku), które pokazują mi, gdzie w książce jako takiej mam największe skupisko ciężkich rzeczy do obrobienia:

Seledynek to kawałki przeczytane przez profesjonalną osobę, które następnie nie były bardzo zmieniane. Może 1-2 słowa..

Zielone to “draft1”, czyli “Napisałam jak umiałam, teraz nie widzę, żeby czegoś brakowało”. Żółte to “followup”, czyli to samo co zielone PLUS coś. Komentarze i dopiski typu “sprawdź cyferki” “różnica stref czasowych” “popraw imiona” etc., czyli ciągłość i spójność. Albo jakieś detale, o których sama sobie przypominam, że powinnam uwzględnić w innym miejscu tekstu.

Pomarańczowe to “uzupełnij” (jasne) i “popraw” (ciemne).

Czerwone to “zero treści”, co mi przypomina, że tu jest scena, w której będzie tyle-a-tyle tekstu i wiem +- co tam ma być, ale na razie tekstu tam niedobór.

Ciemny niebieski to… Wyzwanie. Rzeczy, które już napisałam, ale mają wadę. Albo wali się ciągłość, bo pisałam bez wielkiego zwracania uwagi, albo pisałam na czas (3300 słów na godzinę to jest możliwy wynik, jak mi ktoś wjedzie na ambit), albo pisałam przez sen. Wszystko to podpada pod “dziwne cosie, które mogą mieć jakieś zalety”, więc nie mogę tego tak po prostu wyciepnąć na hasiok, tylko trzeba przejrzeć, podzielić, użyć tego co ma sens etc.

Muszę teraz zdecydować, czy zabrać się do ponownego przeglądu tomu 1, pierwszego znaczącego przeglądu tomu 3, czy może zabrać się za wszystkie komcie do rozwiązania… Czy pisać tom 5 i jak najszybciej dojść do końca fazy twórczej, a potem wrócić do etapu redakcji.

Pewnie skończy się na mieszaniu

Mam też taki cudny wykresik kolumnowy, który pokazuje mi, jaki udział procentowy mają elementy w poszczególnych statusach w każdej książce

Więc tak, tom 5 to jest trochę dramat. Oraz to czerwone prawie na pewno powinno być większe…

Writing an actual novel

There is a girl who knows her city by heart but loses what was the very point of her existence in the most dramatic of circumstances, while gaining quite a lot in exchange.

There is a prince and a bodyguard, sworn brothers-at-arms, guarding each others’ backs since they were nearly toddlers, through thick and thin, school exams, assassin attacks and love woes.

There is a royal widow, a lady of great magical and earthly powers, willing do to anything for her country-by-marriage, but quite ready to see said country to go down in flames, if her son’s good required it.

There is an old city, so old its roots go down to the base rock of the continental tectonic plate, overgrown with intrigue, light, cruelty, beauty, magical exploitation and happiness so much so that the inhabitants don’t even notice how wrong it is anymore.

There is a tiny new country on the Indian Ocean, so new it hadn’t managed to establish itself sufficiently, with nearly no roots and very few actual allies and with a ruler so young people fear he will fall should the time of trial come.

There is an ancient empire that stretches its tentacles towards the little country, hungry for the treasures that grow in its soil and soul, willing to rip them all out and suck the minuscule archipelago dry, taking away their independence and the life of their young prince in the process.

The working title is “For the Price of a Charm” and it’s my novel.

An urban fantasy/magical realism romance, to be specific.

Now 190k of volume one written, should hit 200k and be OK. In Polish, so it’s a more-or-less-ish equivalent of 250k in English.

Volume two is 136k, should hit 230. Which makes it a maybe-290k equivalent in English.

Volume three is drafts and pieces for the total of 20k and not sure if it will ever actually become a book.

So, yeah.

I’ve written around 350k words since July. 100k of them in November, making a double NaNoWriMo plan.

How (not) to write computer-related stuff in your story.

My qualifications: degree in Computer Science, 16 years as a software analyst, database specialist, programmer and tester. Also, web design, basic/good knowledge of 10+ programming languages, reasonably good knowledge of two operational system families (linux, windows) and generalised knowledge of How These Things Work.

Also, common sense. And being married to an admin/programmer. Not ashamed to admit I use him as an important resource.

And an ability to spot serious bullshit in stories ;)

How to write about computer stuff?

If you know that shit, you already know how to. Just don’t put too much technobabble.

If you know more or less but not really, only vaguely, read on below.

If you know nothing… be vague. If you had never ever seen anyone using anything more complex than a text processor, write the situation in a nice and generalised fashion. Describe how the person hacking looked focused as they typed rapidly or stared at the darkened screen, deep in thought… Just don’t mention what they have on the screen.

If you know nearly nothing about computers (or at least no more than how to use Windows)

First, for basic reference, watch this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZQz9tkEHIg and try hard to stay away from the more crappy solutions, as per the expert’s comments (so no typing on one keyboard by two people to make it faster, sorry NCIS). Really, being fuzzy and poetic about the hacker’s partner watching them as they struggle is better than making the hacker send stuff from Emacs through Sendmail and have a reader die of sheer second-hand embarrassment.

What you CAN write (these are reasonable scenarios of what can happen)

X spend several hours trying to crack the security on the target server. The certificates were up to date, the passwords changed often and the admin seemed to be more paranoid than average. To no avail. He would have to take the oldtimey route of starting with the weakest link in the chain. The people.

It was a tough job, and no doubt about it. X wasn’t yet ready to throw in the towel, but it seemed as if someone had paid their IT security team very well. He would need to find a new angle of approach. Like, going through the mail server. First, overload the e-mail system. Second… will be later.

After all the trouble he went to, the password was simply stuck to the bottom of the manager’s drawer, on a post-it note. The only thing he had to guess now was – which system did it apply to?

Learning a new programming language was not as easy as some claimed it to be, especially when you had to switch from another, using a completely different logic and syntax. Old habits die hard and X caught herself putting the semicolon in the wrong place yet again, making the whole compilation crash.

The code was pretty complex, with multiple loops and a huge tree of logical conditions branching at several levels. Analysing what exactly went wrong in it would take X several hours, considering the mess Y had made of the comments and the shitty formatting he had applied. First things first. She cracked her knuckles and started to add indents, to make the whole thing easier to read for a human being.

The pop-up window suddenly closed by itself. Uh-oh. Either a virus or someone had quietly taken the control of her system… but how? She had blocked remote desktop connections, her Skype was offline, her… Another window closed. Whatever it was, it must have come from one of the pages she had visited. That was the price of trawling that part of the internet. Quickly, she pulled out the network cable and sighed in relief. The computer didn’t have wifi, so as long as she didn’t reconnect it, no new damage could be done. Hopefully.

Facts and truths

In general, there are some things you should remember, and here I’m listing them based on fanfiction I’ve read recently, mostly MCU (because here people try to get into details in order to give Peter, Tony or Ned some tech content to talk about and fail, a lot – if you recognise your fic or plot device here, pls don’t be angry, just accept that it was an example of how it goes wrong, sometimes hilariously).

1. If someone doesn’t know a specific programming language, they aren’t going to learn it in one afternoon. Or a week. At least not to the level needed to write an AI.
2. Writing an AI is a Totally Separate Thing. Person learning programming at school or at the uni, even if they are pretty smart, will not just “write an AI” like that. It requires making a complicated analysis, thinking up the algorithms, writing specification, making a prototype, proof of concept and then a tons and tons of testing.
3. Amount of code one can write and analyse reasonably is limited. One fic I saw mentioned trillion lines of code. Nope. Windows 10 has (estimated) 50 million lines of code. If a person had a trillion lines of code, it would take them 300 years to write them. If they wrote 100 lines per second. Seriously, check your numbers for order of magnitude.
4. When you write code, it doesn’t change by itself on the screen, unless you have a virus in your system.
5. Typing code in the editor does not affect the rest of the code (one already entered). It can affect subsequent reruns of your program, but not the code. Code is a text document.
6. Nobody can debug a piece of software by just glancing at the screen. Unless the error is so obvious that a basic-level programmer would notice it – comma instead of a dot, for example – the issue will usually be found by reworking the code to make it show more messages and tracking where it fails (note: the amount of time needed depends on the complexity of the program itself, language used, operational system and hardware on which you are working).
7. You can’t just interface computer with alien tech and expect it to Just Work. Unless you want the ‘work’ to be limited to ‘go up in flames’, of course. Computer needs drivers to use hardware and Windows 10 doesn’t come equipped with the correct set of libraries to manage a battery that used to be a part of Chitauri ship. Unless there is something about Bill Gates that we don’t know.
8. You usually can’t fix a too-slow mobile phone by cleaning it physically (but it may work with an overheating laptop, especially if there is cat fur involved).
   1. You can fix a too-slow smartphone by closing all 40+ tabs in Chrome (done it recently, not on my mobile)
9. Every deleted data can be undeleted, unless someone plays with a heavy magnet near the drive in question. Usually it will be the data you don’t wish anyone to undelete (while your master thesis will be, without a doubt, eaten by the black void of your disk space)
   1. Freezing the drive and then working it all over with a hammer works lovely as a permanent delete, in most cases
10. Operational systems come in several flavours.
    1. Windows (variety of versions) is what everyone knows. Graphical user interface, but good old MS DOS that is under it somewhere still remains. You can use the clickable interface happily all your life and never touch the text mode window. But you also can do a lot of complicated and/or cool stuff by using Power Shell (which is a program that allows you to type a variety of commands, more complex than just “open file X in application Y”).
    2. Apple MacOS – the thing that you have on your Apple-whatever computer. Graphical user interface. Many graphic designers use it. Never touched it myself, the closest I came to it is my iPhone and iPad (which run on iOS, which is not the same, even if it looks similar and connects to the greater whole of Apple systems).
    3. Unix – usually a server OS, has both text and graphical mode. Really powerful control of the user over the system, if user is admin (root). If user is not admin, user may turn out to not be able to do anything. That depends on the admin’s mood.
    4. Linux – like Unix, only written in Open Software model, free and comes in many many many varieties. Traditional flamewars between fans of Slackware and the proponents of Debian are well-known (the same for any other combination of distribution codenames). Open Software means that every piece of software is distributed to users in an open form, plain code. So if you know the language, you can try learning about the way application works by reading it. NOT an easy or quickly-done thing.
11. Programmers occasionally use other people as rubber ducks, to work through a logical process. They talk to the other person as if they were talking to a rubber duck who knows nothing about the subject, thus going into details they usually would have missed, due to making certain shortcuts and assumptions. The other person may be another programmer (playing dumb) or a non-IT/layman who knows when to ask “but what does that really mean”. Or a rubber duck, as such.
12. Programmers occasionally use pseudocode (not all of them, but some do) in order to NOT actually write the program yet, but to show the logic of it. It may be the equivalent of making a rough draft of a picture or an outline of a story.
    1. Note: I used this method multiple times, mixing syntax of different languages to better envision certain parts of code, adding human-readable text and notes to it. Including doing it on paper, while discussing the idea with someone.
    2. Textbooks on algorithms and similar subjects use the pseudocode to show certain examples and logic in order to not force the students into using specific language, but to remain agnostic to the technology used
13. A bit of off-topic, but many of the same rules apply to maths and physics. If your protagonist is really really smart but doesn’t know the topic of the equation in question or doesn’t know the aspect of physics being discussed, they will not spot the “obvious error”, because persons involved would have already spotted it before.
    1. So, yeah. All the “Peter visits SI on field trip and everyone asks for his opinion and he tells people they forgot the minus here” stories are very much unrealistic. Even in the world of people mutated by a spider bite, certain rules should be kept. Scientists check their work multiple times and they don’t forget to correctly carry the minus. They are not middleschoolers.
14. Being very smart doesn’t mean you can understand a complex algorithm immediately. Just faster than others. But never at a glance. You will not fix someone’s AI at a glance. At a glance you can see stuff like:
    1. “You forgot to give an ending condition to this loop” (this means some operation will be repeated infinitely, see also: Magician’s Apprentice)
    2. “This if clause else seems to be ignoring all negative numbers” (so it will not show any result for some values, making the program crash or do something idiotic if certain conditions are met)
    3. “You used single = instead of ==” (and yeah, it’s a problem in C and C++; “x = 7” is “let x equal 7”, assignment; while “x == 7” is a comparison operator, “is x equal to 7” – https://www.includehelp.com/c-programming-questions/what-is-difference-between-assignment-and-equalto-operator.aspx)
    4. “it’s an off-by-one-error, this loop runs one additional time” (common issue in many, many languages and probably every programmer has done this at least once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error)
15. Being experienced will make the programmer more knowledgeable about the types of algorithms used, so it may potentially give such programmer the ability to spot approaches that won’t fit the problem (less effective sorting method, wrong regular expression)
    1. Sometimes it may turn out that a change of programming language will help with solving the issue more effectively
16. If you want to write scary shit, mention Internet of Things (smart fridge that orders for you) affected by something common (smart fridge that orders food for you but you forgot to turn it off when you went for vacation so the delivery guy kept dumping food on your porch for 2 weeks, in July, because the fridge was empty…)
    1. It doesn’t have to be a HAL-level intelligence, it can be a dumb smart fridge that will eat through your credit card and make your house smell of mold, old cabbage and rotten meat. It’s already BAD, we don’t need a whole space station full of bad.
17. Destroying the monitor doesn’t mean the computer isn’t working anymore. It still is and if there was a virus eating the hard drive, it’s still munching away on it. Unless it’s an iMac or a HP that has the central processing unit in the butt of the monitor.
18. If the user (player) manages to convince the game to let him get out of the boundaries (survive while dropped off the map etc), they will not find themselves in an unexpected, wonderful no-rule level. Most probably, the game will just freeze on them, not knowing how to handle the exception. Unless the game is being live-developed by an underlying AI (Hi, Ender) and so every attempt to break out of the standard is anyway monitored and immediately cushioned against, there is nothing for the player to explore – if it wasn’t written by the author, it won’t exist.
19. If you ever manage to find yourselves (your playing character) in such a weird place in the game, be assured – the authors planned it and it was put there on purpose.
20. Human and human-similar beings can’t catch a computer virus. Unless the being in question is Nebula, but she probably keeps her antivirus software religiously up to date.
21. Virus, trojans and other backdoors don’t need graphical representation to do damage to your computer. In fact, unless we move to ones that are supposed to be scary and not just fisking annoying or dangerous, the majority of viruses and so on are quiet and tell you nothing about themselves until they are done damaging your stuff or want you to pay for the safety of your data.
22. The Jurassic Park One: “It’s unix, I know this system” – NOPE. You wouldn’t sit in front of a computer running complex genetic experiment and say “Oh, it’s Windows, I know how to click it” and proceed to easily gain control over a power grid of a park full of dinos. Nope. No.
    Just, no. Sorry, Lexie.
23. You don’t need 7 separate computers for 7 separate chat windows with 7 separate people, unless you can’t use browser window tabs. Sorry, Sherlock.
24. It is possible to snoop on anything people do in your wifi network. There were cases of hackers setting up access points that simulated Mc Donalds or other places with free wifi and then logging all the traffic in order to trawl for usernames and passwords.
    Happy browsing next time you eat a Mc Chicken.
25. The thing you write in is a programming language. To do this, you use an editor. You can write any kind of code using Windows Notepad or Linux pico editor, but it will be annoying and slow. Specialised software with highlighting and automatic formatting make it easier to work with code.
    Think about it like writing text. You can write the same story in Word, LibreOffice, Notepad, Wordpad or OneNote. The story doesn’t change, just your ability to publish or share it changes. You can write any kind of text in Word – a poem, a short story or a novel. Or you can write it in Notepad, but it will be… not as comfortable! And then there is specialised software like Scrivener that makes it so much easier to organise. Right?
    Same rule applies to coding. So the fact that someone’s screen is showing Notepad and not fancy multicoloured text in cryptic editor doesn’t mean they aren’t programming. It just means they are stubborn and use the most primitive tool available in Windows system ;)
    I could use Notepad to write the code of a webpage in HTML, a perl script, a bash script or a Python program (perl, bash and Python are programming or scripting languages). So the tool in which we write doesn’t affect the general ability to create code, just the comfort.
    Not many people write their own language just to code something special, unless the payoff of creating a whole new language (with all required dependencies, libraries etc – huge amount of hassle) is significant and will give them some kind of large benefit.
26. SPOILER!!! EDITH in Spider-Man FFH
    Seriously, FFS, not FFH.
    I mean.

    Yeah, Peter took her back from Beck. And yes, there was no “handover” from Beck to him, so why the hell did EDITH even obey? Or what? Tony hardcoded Peter as superuser?
    (that’s why an IT analyst and a security specialist should not be watching movies about teen wannabe hackers, we get migraines)
    Why EDITH didn’t identify Beck as a dangerous wacko on sight…? She was so ready to read everyone’s e-mails and texts on the bus and NOW she gets shy? Also, how come she didn’t react when someone used her to attack her designated superuser…!?!
    Yeah, IT-related plotholes make me break out in hives.

27. More electric power doesn’t mean more computing power. The fact that you connect your computer to stronger source of electricity won’t make it calculate the password faster.
28. You can’t compress very well an already-compressed file. You can’t just compress files infinitely, making them fit on a smaller disk space. Sorry, Mr Finch.
29. There are the following types of data carriers:
    1. USB pen drives – common, cheap, you can buy them everywhere, many companies, many sizes
    2. Memory cards – same, physically smaller, require a reader to get data from them
    3. DVDs – these round ones, can hold ~4,5 gigabytes of data
    4. CDs – also shiny round ones, a bit older, can hold ~750 megabytes of data
    5. Floppy disks
       1. 3,5’’ – the ones that look like the Save button in your software – can hold 1,44MB of data (which is an enormous amount of GIF files, really astounding number of karaoke midi files or 4-8 games from the 80’s); the drive for these is the one with a small button to push the floppy out
       2. 5,25’’ – the bigger, softer ones – up to 1,2MB of data (slightly less than 3,5’’); drive for these is the one with a switch that moves 90 degrees and locks the floppy in
    6. 8’’ – even bigger, also up to 1,2MB of data, I’ve never seen the drive for this with my own eyes; last new model of the disk introduced in 1976
    7. Tapes – Spectrum, Commodore and several other computers used tapes as source of software. Very funny noise you at some point learnt to interpret as “this is loading” and “this is not loading at all, damn it, just wasted an hour waiting…”
    8. There is always an option of carrying around a full-sized hard drive and connecting it to a computer though a specialised enclosure that uses USB.
30. Hackers (the more social ones) use USB drives left in random places like meeting rooms of a company to fish for stupid employees – people tend to plug in “found” usb sticks to see what’s on them; this is the best way to lose access to your laptop and give your company’s data to the Bad Guys.
31. Other data carriers usage in text should depend on when you put your story and where. At my uni in early 2000 we still used floppy disks (3,5’’) for various purposes, but CDs (both Audio and data) were in use, too. CD writers were slow, clunky and ate a lot of memory
32. Theoretically, if you are very patient, you can connect to a dial-up by whistling.
33. There is no tech available currently that would actually read your thoughts as such. Electrical activity, yes. Content of the thoughts, no.
34. Even if we put our story in a world with magic, high-tech with no explanation and near-magical inventions, still some reason has to be applied to the way this all works. Unless a machine is programmed and prepared to do something (perform certain task) it will not do it correctly. The more specialised the machine, the less likely you are to be able to use it for a purpose it was not intended for.

A bonus story that is here just to explain why I’m so sure about some of this

It was late evening (maybe 22:30, 23:00) and I was sleepy, but my boyfriend was sitting over a piece of code that was just giving completely buggy results. I was falling asleep propped on his shoulder, he was torturing the keyboard and muttering. I finally asked what the problem was and he started explaining.

(Background: it was our 4^th year at the uni, me studying computer science in econometry and he studying just plain old good computer science at one of the major unis in our country, he had much bigger experience in programming than me, but I wasn’t exactly an idiot; just sleepy)

So he started explaining that this part does this, and this is that and I was yawning and squinting at the screen and finally, being – as I said – rather sleepy, I asked “but does the table start from 0 or from 1…?”. It turned out to be the solution (at least to that error).

Now, in order for this to work, you need BOTH people involved to have a non-zero experience in programming and the one needing help to be in a hurry or really distracted. If he had had time to go over it (see “rubber duck”), he would have found the problem. I, on the other hand, had had already at the time a good dose of theory and experience in programming using at least 5 different languages. The concept of the table of data having first element at key = 0 was common among them, and so was the error of people assuming it should be key = 1, just because it seems more natural.

It was an example of an Off By One Error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error

When it won’t work? When the person who is looking doesn’t know shit about coding or has minimum experience just putting stuff together in one language and has no theory basics.

In summary: It’s not enough to just be bright. You also have to learn stuff before you are able to do it.

How to check your texts before publishing

As I’m reading (and publishing) stories on three different sites, I see a range of various problems that FF authors have with writing correctly. Some of these can only be resolved by application of a beta reader, unfortunately. Some would even require a writing lesson or two, to make sure the author is able to correctly pace their story.

However there are some purely technical corrections you can try to make your text more palatable:

1. Check capitalisation:
   1. Make sure the names of persons are all correctly starting with capital letter
   2. Make sure there are no common nouns or other random pieces of text that are capitalised, when they should not
   3. Names of places should definitely be capitalised
   4. Beginnings of sentences would be nice, too
2. Check name spelling:
   1. Bingly, Pembereley, Benet, Longborn – neither of these should show up in P&P story
   2. The same goes for all X-Men and their allies and villains. You wanna write Magneto in, you learn how to spell Lehnsherr
   3. Real-live places also deserve proper spelling
3. Check interpunction:
   1. Correct dialogue markers for your language (“, -, ‘) and their proper usage, including strategically applied commas
   2. No spaces inside brackets “(this is the way)” and “( this is not the way )”
   3. No spaces before !, ?, . or ,
4. Make sure you’re writing in the same tense – switching between past and present tenses is annoying, unless you’re aiming at some artistic outcome.
5. Add “the” and “a/an” in front of all the nouns that deserve it
6. Run spellchecker in your editor. If you don’t have a spellchecker in your editor, download Libre Office (free office suite) and LO Writer has it.
7. Paste your text to Google Docs. Their spellchecker will have different level of sensitivity. It may point out something that LO Writer might have missed
8. Open grammarly.com and paste your text into a test box. Check for the suggestions (missing/unnecessary interpunction, wrong verb forms, mistaken words!). You don’t have to agree in all cases, but please, do review the list.
   Try also https://sentencechecker.com/ – it offers modes for UK, US and other types of English, points out words that don’t fit in that particular English and catches various other errors. May be a bit overzealous, so of course don’t apply all suggestions :)
9. Open http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ and paste your text. Check the suggestions (overly complex sentences, passive voice). Again, you don’t have to follow the suggestions, but maybe something will spark.
   Try also http://www.repetition-detector.com/?p=online – it will check the text for repetitions. Really useful if you’ve been reviewing and re-editing and now you have no idea what is where.
   Other, not that useful tools:
   1. https://www.scribens.com/ – will give you stats of your text and calculate Readability Index
   2. http://www.grammerchecker.net/english-grammar-checker/ – uses Grammarly and is not working now anyway
   3. https://virtualwritingtutor.com/ – not very helpful, but will list the vocabulary profile of your text.
10. If you have it, run One Note. Paste your text to a new text field and mark the whole as EN-UK. Switch to View and then Immersion Reader. Let the reader read this to you. Listen whether the sentences sound natural and make sense. This is actually what makes me correct a lot, still, after other methods.
    Other options:
    1. “Learning Tools” in MS Word (same as in One Note, but for me works better for some reason)
    2. https://ttsreader.com/ – a text-to-speech site
11. Read it aloud to yourself. This way you’ll read slowly. Pay attention to where you put pauses and breaks and check if you have . and , there. If not, consider adding them. This way you will also notice repetitions. It is possible you will hear when your dialoge is too stiff or too unnatural or when the narration sounds weird.
12. Do not fall in love with your text. It’s not a baby, or a kitten. It can be changed, remodelled and corrected. If it was a book, that is exactly what would have happened.

If you can, get a beta. A merciless one!

Music to write to

I work better if I have some music playing, but my brain apparently got a bit ossified a bit since my master thesis (I listened to a loop of 4 songs for that time, made me type faster) and now I can’t write if I’m listening to something I can understand.

So, choices, choices. I tried, and these worked for me:

1. Classical music. A lot of Vivaldi. Can’t be too fast, or too slow, or to dour. Just so. Goldilocks, me.
2. A lot of stuff that’s marked “60 BPM”. Apparently listening to this is relaxing and helps thinking. I have to admit, it does help with relaxation exercises, but unless it has some character, I end up searching for replacement soon.
3. Loituma. As in the band, not the celery twirling girl clip. Yes, including Ievan Polkka. Why? Because I don’t speak a word of Finnish (except for handmade terms, and they rarely sing about wool or knitting needles)
   I use these two playlists (if I’m not listening to my own ipod):
   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvO3h-Y-0Ec2KOe72RXyf0jgn9cSg_K8L
   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvO3h-Y-0Ec0Nq1t6S5hkL5cCmRYLHXVZ
4. Irish trad. The actual Irish, meaning, Gaeilge. Which, lately, is mostly Altan or Julie Fowlis for me. And I made myself a pretty little playlist on YT that features female voices: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcglXWrRrn8PI5JlKMXtFiVM4DPK-4BJ2
   Some of these may be in English, but mostly it will be Irish. The same explanation as point 3. I don’t understand it at all, and I love the style (in general).  Helps me write, even if I have no idea what they are singing about.

Otherwise, sometimes, when writing English and listening to it at the some time doesn’t conflict, I indulge in the guilty pleasure of listening to this group of cuties: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcglXWrRrn8OH4oOHOdC7tL3gI2EFkOSF (especially Emmet Cahill, who is by far the best singer of the set – here the last singing of the four men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jae_vPZAjI).

For some reason, despite mostly lack of vocals, I can’t work listening to soundtracks. May be I’m focusing then on what was in the movie at that moment. Exception: Jurassic Park theme. This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8zlUUrFK-M (and if pressed, I can whistle the whole damn thing…)

“POV” markers in FF

…and why I have them.

Because they are lazy. I mean, really, people.

If you can’t write the narrative clearly enough for your readers to recognise whether you’re writing John or Sherlock POV, maybe you should reconsider taking your hands off the keyboard and taking a break?

I’m not perfect. I can’t say I haven’t used some kind of “pointer” as to whose POV I’m writing. But I at least try to be subtle about it.

Case in point: “But if you can still dream” – the POV is in the title of each chapter.

Another: Double Pride Double Trouble – no indication written, but I add “####” in heavy scene changing places AND I added font change for “parent” POV in earlier chapters.

You can do so many things with formatting, markers and titles, especially if you’re changing the POV on chapter level. Go fancy with the titles. Add first line with feeling. If you start the chapter with “John felt his heart could take no more” then we know it’s plainly John’s POV. If it starts with “Molly had never before performed an autopsy on a friend and never wanted to do it again”, well, the hint is, it’s not Mycroft’s POV, right?

Personally, I prefer adequate narration as the indication. Second is chapter titles.

But readers are SMART so if you can write it, they will understand. Without needing a big neon reminding them who is the main character right now.

If you can’t, well, then POV tags tell us “here there be dragons, don’t read any further”.

…and another little peeve – flashbacks. Dear Lord, people, think. Use italics. Use bold. Use scene breaking markers. Don’t just write FLASHBACK SCENE. It’s not a bloody movie scenario. It’s a story. When you read a book and a character thinks about their past, do you get a “FLASHBACK” there? Where the heck did this come from, stupid cartoons? Because, really. There are ways to form your narrative and to introduce the “memory” naturally in the text, without hitting your reader on the head with a big label.

You can use some smart introduction, like:

Mycroft sighed, looking at the broken figure in the hospital bed. It was just like always, like every time he had to pick up the pieces. It was just like that first time he had to take responsibility for someone his brother had accidentally endangered.

It was just like that boy – what was his name, Victor? Victor had looked just the same as John did now.

…and then put in some remark showing the time/place. The readers are smart. They will work it out.

Yeah. I’ve been reading way too much FF lately. Mostly Johnlock, so sue me.

Why characters should sometimes do something

Or why they should not. And on a various ways of speaking.

I’ve gone on a FF reading binge again, this time diving deep into the “X-Men: The Movie” category on FFNet, and I’m coming up with some pearls of wisdom. Feel free to ignore, criticise or simply glare at me for my audacity of trying to lecture others while my own style is still limping sometimes.

To the point:

Pearl 1: Make your characters do something.

What bugs me sometimes is that these poor guys in the stories only walk, sit, stare and speak. Really, people. Sometimes the girls sigh. From time to time someone screams.

Correction: Make them do something that makes sense AND is connected to what they did before.

What I mean is that the characters are people. They should do stuff, even when they are discussing weather or planning a strategy. Make them pick their noses when they forget themselves, roll their eyes, tap fingers, snort, yawn, blink, even stomp around in a fit of nerves. Just make sure what they do is more or less consistent with the context (don’t make a girl yawn and then be bright and sunny in the next sentence OR make someone sit down as a picture of serenity and start screaming out of a blue – of course not applicable if you’re describing a mental asylum).

Paying attention to what they say, the faces they make, the movements around the room/table/field will make the story more fluid and more connected and not just a bunch of disjointed paragraphs.

Also, don’t make your characters do things totally out of character (unless you lampshade it properly by someone else commenting on weird behaviour). Try to redo or describe better necessary weirdness. One of the most common means of furthering the story is someone (preferably a young lady) running out of the room/house and collapsing by the nearest bench/pond/window for our hero to save her or whatever is on his agenda. Make sure her behaviour, EVEN IF DISTRESSED, makes sense.

Yeah, I’ve written a “run out, fall down, be almost ravished” scene myself. When I was 16. It seemed like a good idea at the time and I had no other way of making Her see Him finally. Which was a totally lame way of progressing the events, now that I re-read it.

Pearl 2: Don’t make them do single-action, separate things.

Don’t fill in every gap in dialogue by someone doing a separate action.

“Ugh” she said.

He walked to the mantle.

“I’m not very sure” he said.

He picked something up. He turned it around and put it back on the shelf.

“I’m very sure” she said.

She stood up. She threw blanket behind the sofa.

You see? Awful. Like something from a kid’s book. Make longer sentences. Make things connected with each other. “She stood up, throwing the blanked behind the sofa she’d just vacated” makes this description much more dynamic.

Pearl 3: (from a recently-read P&P fanfic)

For God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t let them run into a soliloquy.

When they talk, let them talk, and by this I mean exchange information. If one person just blurts all their innermost thoughts in a 4-paragraph soul-searching and mind-wrenching expose, all others would normally flee or faint. Don’t make them do this. Let them have a bit of dialogue.

In the case of this specific story, Wickham spewed the whole “Darcy sucks” story in the VERY FIRST SENTENCE to Elisabeth. Well, PARAGRAPH, not a sentence.

Now, monologues are OK. if you’re a Danish prince (and even then they are a bit pathetic), but for normal people (with normal fiancées) it is not the preferred method of communication. The preferred method is, in fact, the exchange of ideas. You say something, I answer/comment, you do something, I open my fan, you stomp, I criticise and so on and so on. Mix a bit of movement into the dialogue and let it be an actual dialogue and not an exercise in a debate club.

How to be a nice author

I’m not going to tell anyone how to be a good author, because I’m not such myself and obviously should not advise anyone else until I am.
However what I am aiming to be for my audience (however limited it is) is being a nice author. Nice author is someone you want to go back to and read more even if they aren’t overwhelmingly inspired, because their texts aren’t painful to read.
Some pointers in this direction:
* Keep your AN, N/A etc. (whatever you put at the start of the story) mercifully short. Nobody wants to read a WHOLE SCREEN of you explaining why and how and the weather and… Just keep it short.
* Make sure your author’s note is in a different font (italic is enough) or in some way separated from the actual text. This will allow people to skip it when they come back for a re-read.
* Do not make “POV” markings. Just… don’t. Try to write your narration in such a way that the reader notices the switch from the text. You don’t see “POV” markings in books (unless it’s GRR Martin and he keeps the POV the same for the whole chapter!)
* Do not put surprise Author Notes inside the text. If you MUST communicate some intricate solution you used, put it at the beginning of the chapter or try to explain it in the text itself. A AN in the middle of actual story is CHEAP.
* Do try to get a Beta. Or at least a spell-checker. Install a dictionary in your browser, it will help you to correct texts inside the blog or other form.
* Do not use a lot of fancy formatting but do, please, include line-breaks.
* Read up on the correct way to mark dialogues in your language. Remember that there are different rules for different languages, so check if you are writing in non-native one if your markings are ok.
* Do not blackmail readers for Reviews with a threat of “no more chapters”. If you write well, they will come. If you don’t, nobody cares about your next chapter anyway.
* If you write a songfic, do not feel the requirement to include the whole song in the text.
* Keep consistent formatting across your whole story (in websites like forums this is sometimes very important).
* Do not ever add space before punctuation marks that should be flush with the letter before. Do not add spaces inside brackets.
* No more than three “?” and “!” combined per expression. More means you’re keyboard crazy.
* Make sure you check your text for words that only sound the same. Someone fainted lying “without conscience” breaks the mood like nothing else.
* Do not change tenses from past simple to present and back. Use correct “one tense back” if needed. Present simple makes text look more dynamic, but if you start it like this, KEEP IT LIKE THIS.

That’s just random set of pointers which I’ve collected during last week of reading FF on several sites. It’s most certainly not exhaustive and will be growing.

Bad ideas – repetition

So, as I warned, sometimes it will not be fiction, but my writing-related ramblings. I’ve posted this on G+ long time ago, so, just to start the new category, here it comes:

Oh, come on!

I’m reading a perfectly good story, which has a reasonable plot, no typos, no out-of-character actions, but… IT HAS REPETITIONS! And I don’t mean in the nice way, when one person says X, another says X and so on. Or the Department of Redundancy Dept. No. I mean like this:

The other girls cleared the room and just left Meredith and Carolyn alone. “How are you dear?” Carolyn asked. A lot had happened since they last saw each other when Derek and Meredith were in New York. The engagement, the ferry accident, and so much more.
“I’m great. A lot has happened since we last saw you, but we’ve gotten through it and now I can’t wait to marry Derek. Have you seen him today? Is he ok, he’s not getting cold feet is he? Cause I don’t think I could make it through him leaving me at the altar.” Meredith said, freaking out.

The italics are mine. Now, if it’s once – author slipped. Twice – sounds lame. Thrice – run for your lives, this one just can’t write!

Now, I understand the need. Sometimes you write the narration and afterwards the dialogue just seems to repeat everything. It’s ok. No problem. Just get back to the freaking narration and edit the repetitions out!

I’m not saying my texts are perfect, but as a reader (of innumerable kb a day), I have gained a certain experience in how the texts shouldn’t be written. This one is a tiny leedle pet peeve of me, to tell the truth.