The Library of Dresan – Page 64 – Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis

The Stack is Growing

Published January 27, 2012 by centaur

FROM THE WRITER'S ANONYMOUS 12-STEP SUPPORT GROUP MEETING: Hi, I'm Anthony Francis, and I'm an author. ("Hi, Anthony!") To feed my addiction, I get stuff published.

My first published novel, the urban fantasy FROST MOON featuring magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost, won an EPIC e-book award. It's out in paperback, Kindle, in German as SKINDANCER, and soon to be audiobook thanks to the wonderful reading skills of Traci Odom. The second book in the series, BLOOD ROCK, came out last year to good reviews, and the third book, LIQUID FIRE, will come out later this year. A spinoff series starring Dakota's daughter Cinnamon Frost, HEX CODE, will come out next year, also part of a planned trilogy.

One of my short stories, "Steampunk Fairy Chick," was recently published in the UnCONventional anthology. The story, featuring steampunk adventurer Jeremiah Willstone, is based on a novel called THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (again part of a planned trilogy) which I've got in rough draft form with a possible release late this year or early next year. Another of my short stories, "Sibling Rivalry," was published in The Leading Edge magazine in 1995, but is now available on my web site. I also write flash fiction. One of my flash shorts, "If Looks Could Kill", was just published in THE DAILY FLASH 2012 (pictured above) and another, "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms", was just published in Smashed Cat Magazine.

My nonfiction research papers are largely available on my research page, including my nearly 700-page Ph.D thesis (hork). I and my thesis advisor Ashwin Ram have a chapter on "Multi-Plan Adaptation and Retrieval in an Experience-based Agent" in David Leake's book CASE BASED REASONING: EXPERIENCES, LESSONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS, and Ashwin, Manish Mehta and I have a chapter on "Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities" in THE HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON SYNTHETIC EMOTIONS AND SOCIABLE ROBOTICS.

I have more writing in the works, including a novelette called "Stranded" set in the Dresanian universe from which this blog takes its name, and more writing on the Internet. But what I list above is The Stack At This Time - what you can get in print. Enjoy!

-the Centaur

It’s Better to Be Done

Published January 26, 2012 by centaur

I am very interested in promoting creation. I think the world would be a better place if more people wrote, drew, painted, sculpted, danced, programmed, philosophized, or just came up with ideas. Not all ideas are great, and it's important to throw away the bad and keep the good - but the more ideas we can generate, the more we can test.

One of the biggest problems I see in unprofessional, unpublished or just unhappy creators is not finishing. It's very easy to start work on an idea - a painting, a novel, a sculpture, a program, a philosophy of life. But no matter how much you love what you do, there's always a point in creating a work where the act of creating transforms from play to work.

Whether you stall out because the work gets hard or because you get distracted by a new idea, it's important to realize the value of finishing. An unfinished idea can be scooped, or become stale, or disconnected from your inspiration. If you don't finish something, the work you did on it is wasted. More half finished ideas pile up. Your studio or notebook becomes a mess.

If you don't finish, you never learn to finish. You're learning to fail repeatedly. The act of finishing teaches you how to finish. You learn valuable skills you can apply to new works - or even to a new drafts. I know an author who was perpetually stalled out on a problematic story - until one day she made herself hit the end. Now it's on it's fourth draft and is really becoming something.

The tricky thing is you have got to put the cart before the horse: you've got to finish before you know whether it was worth finishing. This does not apply to experienced authors in a given genre, but if you're new to a genre, you have to finish something before you worry about whether you can sell it or even if it is any good.

You don't need for something to be perfect to finish it. I know too many amateurs who don't want to put out the effort to finish things because they don't know whether they can sell it. No. You've got a hundred bad programs in you, a thousand bad paintings, a million bad words, before you get to the good stuff. Suck it up, finish it, and move on.

Procrastination is a danger. This is the point in the article that I got distracted and wrote a quick email to a few other creators about ideas this (unfinished) article had inspired. Then I got back to it. Then I got distracted again doing the bullet list below and went back and injected this paragraph. The point is, it's OK to get distracted - just use that time wisely, then get back to it.

Finally, sometimes you just need help to finish the first time. The biggest thing is to find a tool which can help you over that hump when it stops being fun and starts being work - some challenge or group or idea that helps you get that much closer to done. To help people finish, I'm involved with or follow a variety of challenges and resources to help people finish:

Write to the End: It's not a critique group; it's a writing group. We meet almost every Tuesday at a local coffee house and write for 20 minutes, read what we wrote, and repeat until they kick us out. We normally hit three sessions, so I usually get an hour of writing in every night - and hear a half dozen to a dozen other writers. Inspirational. Our web site contains articles on writing, including my new column The Centaur's Pen.
National Novel Writing Month: A challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. This seems daunting, but Nanowrimo has a truly spectacular support group and social system which really helps people succeed at the challenge. Even if you don't "win" the first time, keep at it, you will succeed eventually!
Script Frenzy: Write 100 pages of a script (play, screenplay, or comic script) in the month of April - another event sponsored by the creators of Nanowrimo. This is an event I haven't yet tried, but am planning to tackle this year to get back into screenwriting (as part of my 20-year plan to get into directing movies).
24 Hour Comics Day: It's a challenge to produce a 24 page comic in 24 hours, usually held the first weekend of October. I've tried this 3 times and succeeded once. It's taught me immense amounts about comic structure and general story structure and even improved my prose writing.
Blitz Comics: Because I failed at 24 Hour Comics Day, me and my buddy Nathan Vargas decided to "fake it until we make it" and to put on a boot camp about how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day. We produced a Boot Camp tutorial, a 24 Hour Comics Day Survival Kit - and along the way taught ourselves how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day.
Other Challenges: There are a couple of events out there to create graphic novels in a month - NaGraNoWriMo and NaCoWriMo - though both of these are 2010 and I don't know if either one is live. (If they're not active, maybe I'll start one). There's also a 30 Character Challenge for graphic artists to create 30 new characters in a month.

Finally, I want to finish with what inspired this post: the Cult of Done. I won't go too deeply into the Done Manifesto, but from my perspective it can be summed up in two ideas: posting an idea on the Internet counts as a ghost of done, and done is the engine of more. Get your stuff done, finish it, and if it's still half baked, post it to force yourself to move on to newer and better things.

The plane is landing. Time to get it done.

-the Centaur

Credits: The BlitzComics guy is penciled, inked and colored by me and post-processed by Nathan Vargas. Joshua Rothass did the Cult of Done poster and distributed it under a Creative Commons license. This blog post was uploaded by Ecto, which is doing well (other than an upload problem) and is probably going to get my money.

Vibrancy in Social Media

Published January 25, 2012 by centaur

Some social networks vibrate with life: tweets ripple through Twitter, three quarters of a billion people use Facebook, and Google+ grew faster than either of them in their early days. Others, like MySpace or Orkut or LinkedIn, may not exactly be suffering, but they don't have the same buzz and aren't growing at the same rate.

I don't have access to all the numbers when I'm interacting with a social network: I only have its interface to my local network. But there's a side effect to a network's rapid growth and activity: some of that activity will flow through MY part of the network. Now, that's true of even non-social media like newsgroups and RSS feeds, so activity by itself isn't enough.

What's interesting is how likely MY inputs are to garner a response or even start an ongoing conversation. Let's call that the network's vibrancy. Now, the measured vibrancy will be different for different users, different inputs and different times. But we can hold that constant if the user in question, like me, crossposts similar content to different networks.

I do this because I'm an author, and I don't require my fans to be members of Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or to have an RSS reader - so I need to post many announcements to every service that my fans might be on. So what follows is my brief, purely unscientific judgments about the vibrancy of several social networks.

General Social Networking: Facebook, followed by Google+, followed by Twitter. Within minutes of me posting to Facebook, I usually get a number of likes or responses. Google+ is also good, but not quite as fast, or quite as deep. Twitter, while being great for hearing announcements from people I'm interested in, isn't as responsive as the first two. Other services I've tried, like MySpace, Orkut and Buzz, were either less active to begin with or not vibrant at all.

Literary Networking: Goodreads. I've been on LibraryThing for a while, but I haven't yet seen much activity. Goodreads, however, after some unfortunate business with spamming some of my contact list, has nonetheless proved both very active and very reactive to what I have posted.

Business Networking: No winner. I've used Linkedin, but my primary activity on it has been receiving connection requests and there's been very little response to my updates on its interface.

Thinking about these services, what makes the vibrant ones vibrant is a combination of features: Enough users, enough activity, ease of posting, ease of sharing, and in particular with Goodreads, enough different activities to make the interface a game. With Goodreads, you can post reviews, book progress, shelving and so on and this activity is exposed. Goodreads is like a game played with your literary friends and the fans of the books you're a fan of. To a lesser degree, services like Facebook and Google+ which make image and link sharing and commenting fun do the same thing.

I haven't taken this analysis any deeper. Right now this is just a thought posted to the intarwubs - the ghost of done (from the Cult of Done manifesto) since done is the engine of more. More thoughts after I spend more time researching social media.

-the Centaur

The Centaur’s Pen at Write to the End

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur

I'm part of a fantabulous writing group called Write to the End that meets at Mission City Coffee. This group, which started at Barnes and Noble at Steven's Creek before the economy and contracting book market convinced B&N to cut back on their community programs, has been the best thing for my writing productivity since ... well, ever. I'd even stopped doing National Novel Writing Month until I started attending the WTTE, but now I do Nano every year ... and go to the writing group almost every Tuesday. SO ... it's now time to give back. I'll be doing a monthly column on the WTTE blog titled "The Centaur's Pen." In it, I will write about writing: about why to write, what to write, how to write, how to edit, how to get published --- and how to behave AFTER you get published. Now, I am not a great writer, but I'm trying very hard, I think about writing almost all the time, and I've spent a lot of time talking to other aspiring writers and learning about the art, craft and business of writing. So I hope my insights will be of use to you!

January's inaugural article is on "Learning from Publication:" how seeing your work in print can be an opportunity to improve your craft, even though you can no longer change it. An excerpt follows:

Recently I wrote a short story called “Steampunk Fairy Chick” for the UnCONventional anthology. Even though the story went through many revisions, lots of beta readers, two editors and a copyeditor, when I read through my author’s copy I found there were still things I wanted to change. Nothing major—just line edit stuff, a selection of different choices of sentence structure that I think would have made the story more readable. I can’t react to this the way I would with a draft; the story’s in print. And I don’t want to just throw these insights on the floor. Instead, I want to analyze the story and find general ideas I could have applied that would have improved the story before it hit the stands—ideas I could use in the future on new stories.

To read more, click through to Write to the End and "Learning from Publication." If you want to read the story the article is talking about, click through to Amazon and buy the UnCONventional anthology (in print or ebook). Enjoy! -the Centaur

The Photoshop Filters of Luxury

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur

Following up my previous post on using offline blog clients, here's an example of something harder to do with an offline client: uploading images with the originals as clickthrough.

I haven't quite figured out how to do that in Ecto but perhaps it's an easy thing. Regardless, what Ecto posted was an image resized to the size it would be displayed at, whereas sometimes what you want is a resized thumbnail where you can click through to the original, which is what the standard WordPress interface will do for you nicely:

These images are a comparison of two different filters in Photoshop on the same original.

Amazing what we can do with graphics filters today. -the Centaur -Anthony

Testing Ecto as an Offline Blogging Platform

Published January 21, 2012 by centaur

My ideas for blogging fast outpace my patience for actually blogging them. One problem with systems like WordPress or Blogger is that the interfaces for creating posts are a bit complex and work only online. Simpler "microblogging" systems, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, enable you to post easily, but limit what you can post (and are walled gardens, to one extent or another). So I'm always looking for good offline blogging clients.

Part of the problem is that I'm on the Mac. Nothing against Windows or Linux, but Macs are (for me) more reliable even though the interface isn't quite as easy to use. But working on the Mac limits your software choices. I've tried Qumana, which isn't bad but sometimes has bad interactions with my blogging settings. (I need to update it, so I'm not giving up on it yet). I've tried a variety of Android blogging clients, such as the WordPress app, but I haven't figured out how to make them obey my image sizing restrictions. So I'm trying other blogging clients, starting with Ecto.

Nice category / tagging interface, easy uploads. Doing something weird with carriage returns, which was a problem with Qumana, but it may be fixable. OK, this is enough of a post to try it out. Here goes nothing!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Gabby, my most computer literate cat, in the lap of luxury (as seen through a few Photoshop filters).

UPDATE: Ecto *gasp* did what I wanted. One point for Ecto!

Testing 1 2 3

Published January 17, 2012 by centaur

Trying out a new Android WordPress client... -the Centaur UPDATE (via WordPress's interface): Well, the software shrank my image. And for those who asked, Minneapolis, I think, which is where my connection back from Arisia got rerouted. No, actually I think this might have been from Boston, which had snow when I left. Minneapolis was worse.

A Toast to 2011

Published January 1, 2012 by centaur

It's the last post of 2011, but I give you no year end summary, no predictions for the future.

We've celebrated a lot, but there's not even a party today, just chilling with my wife, remembering good times.

I just send you good wishes, and wish you happiness in the holidays, however you find it.

Because, Lord knows, there are a lot of ways, now more than ever.

So from all of us at the Edge to you and yours, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

-the Centaur

Yosemite puts the awe in awesome

Published December 14, 2011 by centaur

Awesome is a word I overuse, wearing away its original meaning of "breathtaking."

Yosemite, now Yosemite is breathtaking.

Hey human, get off my lawn.

Unlike the Grand Canyon, which is overwhelming in its detail, Yosemite's beauty comes from its sheer variety packed so close together.

Truly God's Country.

-the Centaur

Teaser for Steampunk Fairy Chick

Published December 14, 2011 by centaur

The UNCONVENTIONAL anthology is now available on Amazon, featuring my story "Steampunk Fairy Chick" starring Jeremiah Willstone, heroine of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. The editors of the anthology, Kate Kaynak and Trisha Wooldridge, have made teasers of the first few pages of each story available, and you can read the start of "SFC" here. If you can't wait for that, you can see the first two paragraphs below:

Please enjoy! -the Centaur

Aptera … Gone

Published December 4, 2011 by centaur

I am SO not surprised. This will be a bit ranty for me; it's taken from an email I sent to friends and lightly edited for tone so I don't get sued. For those of you who don't know, Aptera was a manufacturer of a proposed electric car, and they've gone belly-up. From a recent article in Wired:

The truth is, Aptera always faced long odds and has been in trouble for at least two years. The audience for a sperm-shaped, three-wheeled, electric two-seater was never anything but small. It didn’t help that production of the 2e — at one point promised for October 2009 — was continually delayed as Wilbur ordered redesigns to make it more appealing to the mainstream. Aptera had a small window in which to be a first mover in the affordable EV space, and that window closed the moment the Nissan Leaf andChevrolet Volt hit the market. At that point, Aptera teetered on the brink of irrelevance. Eventually, though, Wilbur realized the 2e would never be anything but a niche vehicle and switched gears, something potential investors made clear must happen. They wondered about the market demand for such a funky vehicle and the long-term viability of the company if it didn’t expand its product lineup.

I don't want to get off on a rant here, but let's be clear about this. I WAS GOING TO BUY THE CAR, but couldn't because Wilbur ordered a redesign. So his company was out $20K that went to Toyota (actually the Toyota was more expensive). A lot of other people had plunked money down for the car - more than 3000. They had to refund a non-trivial number of deposits. So Wilbur ordered a redesign of a vehicle FOR WHICH HE ALREADY HAD PREORDERS keeping it out of their hands. I read a prescient article, somewhere on an Aptera board or something, in which a ranting techie unexpectedly nailed it: Wilbur came in, changed the car to "prove" his auto design chops or something, and killed the company by derailing the ongoing production. Oh wait I've seen this movie: Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Now, I wasn't on the inside of Aptera, and I don't know what Wilbur faced, so I cut him some percentage of slack as an armchair quarterback. "That having been said," it seems clear that a driveable electric vehicle was delayed to market for reasons as ridiculous as enabling users to go through a drivethrough.

For months we have been receiving important feedback from you, our depositor community, and we have come to realize there were flaws in our initial product assumptions — specifically as it pertains to satisfying the needs of real-world consumers. Our greatest degree of learning came just a few months ago when we asked all of you to participate in a brief survey. This critical piece of research requested insights about your expectations for our company and our products, and we discovered a notable disconnect between our product plan and realistic expectations. Some modifications had to be made. For example, you helped us realize that some trade-offs for convenience (like being able to grab a burger in a drive-thru) might be necessary to make the ownership experience more palatable, even if it cost us a couple tenths of a point on our drag coefficient.

Yes, the Aptera should have been able to receive a burger at a drive through. But at the mythical 300mpg why didn't you just SELL ME THE DAMN CAR and iterate on the next version. Heck, the first Prius was butt-ugly, not the gorgeous (and spacious) Kensington blue mouse I currently drive. No, you don't want to sell a car that will catch fire or anything, but you can't fix everything - and if you try, you lose. The best is the enemy of the good. And the marketing language we see above is classic, CLASSIC spindoctoring which sounds SO similar to the "we've made our decision and we're going to stick to it no matter whether it really makes sense" situations that I *am* personally familiar with. Interestingly, I've heard similar stories about tech leaders who focus on the appearance of their product to investors ... or, sometimes, just its appearance. I don't mean Steve Jobs focusing on pixels in icons because he wanted the experience of his product to be perfect; there are some wannabe Steve Jobsen clients-from-hell in the Valley who focus on the pure appearance of the product and not what it actually did or how it affected users - and things always get derailed as a result. Worrying about whether consumers will like the door of your car is appearance. Worrying about what investors will think about the marketability of your car is appearance. Sixty million dollars in potential gross revenue from three thousand prepaid customers was reality, and Wilbur threw that money on the floor. Aptera, you're missed. Your cars, which I never even got to drive, most of all. -the Centaur Pictured: the Aptera prototype on its visit to The Search Engine That Starts With A G. And no, I never got to drive it.

Victory, Official

Published November 25, 2011 by centaur

Well, the team at Nano are handing out winner's certificates now, so it's official: I've won Nano, with an official word count of 55,492 words. I'm still writing more of the story, but am switching to work on STRANDED tonight. I didn't get much done over Thanksgiving, but I did get this chunk written either Wednesday night or this afternoon (don't remember):

I shoves the monster back, between 5 and 6, dinosaur legs scrabbling, towards the loading dock shared with 7 and 8, hurling it backwards through the pedestrian rail which snaps with a tong as Mister Gargoyle falls on his fanny into a Dumpster of yesterday’s garbage. I’m about to leap down on it and rub his face in it, yes I am, when one of those clawed extra-thick raptor legs flies out and connects with my tiger chin. I yelp, shake it off, but when I’m back to snarlin, the monster’s runnin, holdin’ its shoulder, limpin’ off into the night. I stands on the loading dock and lets out my best bloodcurdlin’ roar. I mean, I knows he’s a gargoyle, but I hopes it gives him blood just so it can curdle. But the tiger doesn’t want to give chase, and neither does I. The two of us are of one mind: we gotta go save All Hours Todd.

I've captured almost all of my notes on the story, so it's hopefully safe to shift gears. Though I have to admit it's hard to shake the momentum.

But I have deadlines ... in this case, Tuesday of next week, to get a draft of STRANDED to beta readers in time to get a final to my editors by January 31, 2012. Onward! -the Centaur

Chuggin’ Chuggin’ Chuggin’

Published November 23, 2011 by centaur

Well, Instant Upload is weirdly busted so you get my smilin' mug instead of coffee. HEX CODE is now at 55,000 words:

I'm taking it a little easier now than I was before I hit 50,000 words ... taking more time to read and catch up on email, even taking time to review notes on STRANDED.

But I do want to dump the rest of my floating ideas for HEX CODE into the document while they're fresh, so I don't lose them. From tonight:

I saw this thing earlier, out of the corner of my eye. It easily kept up with me, lopin’ along, twice as fast now that I think about the angles, using its superior speed to keep good cover between it and my line of sight. My only hope is to sit tight and hope it leaves. Then the dragging noise I thought was a trashcan crackles right up behind me. I’m on quadruple frozen now, concentrating on not even moving my tail—harder than you might think if you’re not a cat and don’t got one. I gotta breathe now, but I’m taking it in slow-like, through the mouth, in and out, so that my gut hurts from clenching.

Onward! -the Centaur

Viiiiictory for the Paper Tiger

Published November 22, 2011 by centaur

Once again I've completed National Novel Writing Month. This year, I finished 8 days early. Or, put another way, THIS is what happens if you turn off the Internet during Nano:

I've had a number of interruptions in Nano in the past and this year was no exception. I know I can finish 38,000 words in 10 days and I was initially trying to push to finish at twice the rate, or perhaps finish two books. Well, that didn't happen because of the Galaxy Nexus launch and you can see that in my progress here:

That chasm was the Galaxy Nexus launch (and a few other things tossed in there). But I made it through that, and ultimately succeeded today, sitting in a Starbucks at Santana Row here in San Jose (actually pictured is Michael's Gelato in Palo Alto because the pic from Santana Row hasn't uploaded).

Normally I survive Nano by taking the whole of Thanksgiving week off for a nine day writing intensive. But this time, I've finished early. I still have more to write on HEX CODE, of course, but I now have the luxury of leaning back and thinking through a few twists to the plot, with 50,000 words under my belt making the story solid. So ... I can actually take this vacation ... as a vacation.

So without further ado I present a snippet of the story that was written today ... raw Nano, unfiltered except for a little reformatting and removing some author's notes.

When I found out that Ben was human, or more accurately that elf meant human with special sauce, blabbermouth old me just had to go tell Mom. Then blabbermouth old me had to make up a story of how I found out, which involved a clever lie about school. Not so clever. That just called Mom’s attention to the fact that she now had two underage wards in need of schooling. Getting me into the Clairmont Academy was a pain in the ass, but now they all love us, so getting Ben in was as simple as selecting a school uniform. And boy, does he look hot in it. Hot hot hot. The points to his ears and the green in his skin and the red in the sweater, it’s like Christmas, and that poofy green helmet makes him look like a school uniform tree—when girls aren’t comin up to tousle it. They’re all lookin’ at him. I was sure he had a glamour, but now I’m thinkin it made him look scary. Now he just looks like a boy, a hot boy with funky green hair the girls can’t resist. A passing one does it again and darts off, and I feels for him! He winces, but he clearly likes it. “So, Cinnamon,” Surrey says, setting her tray down, “will you—oh, hello.” “Hello,” Ben says, and there would be a dotted line in the air between their elfin eyes. Surrey’s too frozen to sit down, so Ben stands up, takes her hand, and kisses it with a flourish. “Greetings from the halls of Appalachia, oh princess of Scandinavia.” “Oh, siddown,” I says, and Ben sits down with a plop. He glares at me, but I ignores him. “Ben, this is Surrey Eddington, one of my best friends. Surrey Eddington, this is Benjamin Damon.” My smile grows mean. “He’s my house elf.” “I swear, Cinnamon Frost,” Ben growls, “by the gleaming halls of elfland—” “By the power of Greyskull,” Megan says, sitting down next to the still-smitten Surrey. “Oh, hey, what are you?” she says, and Ben near jumps out of his seat—then plops back down again as Megan scratches her head and says, “Wait … I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

Next up I plan on ... chilling out, having a nice dinner, and joining my writing group for the evening to review my outstanding projects. First up is probably finishing the edit of STRANDED for my beta readers ... and then finishing Dakota Frost 3, LIQUID FIRE. Or perhaps I'll just chill out and clean up my library for Thanksgiving, and thank God I have it. Good luck in Nano, all! -the Centaur

Why You Need to Turn off the Internet in Nano

Published November 19, 2011 by centaur

HEX CODE has an epigraph, a quote by Cicero. I'm not sure whether it will stay in the final book, but it sums up the theme of the book for me perfectly:

Nature urges Man to wish that human society existed and to wish to enter it. —Marcus Tullius Cicero, first historically verified werewolf.

The quote is my own tweak of a couple of different translations of this quote by Cicero - and of course Cicero wasn't really a werewolf. But I wanted to look up something about him, some damn thing about his tomb or whatever (not knowing at the time he'd been assassinated by the state and probably has no tomb) and made the stupid mistake of checking on Wikipedia. The sorry result, 30 minutes later, is what you see above. I'm turning off the Internet now, and I hope if you're doing Nano you do too. Because I think XKCD put the problem with Wikipedia best:

Wikipedia is a wonderful thing ... but browsing it isn't writing. Get back to work, nanoers! Onward! -the Centaur

Back on Track

Published November 19, 2011 by centaur

So, now that the Galaxy Nexus site with its snazzy 3D viewer has launched, now that I'm on my long lonely but highly productive 9-day Thanksgiving vacation, now ... I'm back on track. I hit 40,068 words in HEX CODE today, 38,524 added this month in Nano. So I've got 11,476 words left to go for HEX CODE. Since it's early in the day and I have two more writing sessions to go, I hope to actually finish that this weekend, or at least by Monday. Then, unless I'm going gangbusters on HEX CODE, I plan to go back to STRANDED to send to my beta readers, and after that try to finish LIQUID FIRE. Doubt all of that will happen in November, but I want to go from juggling 4 novels in my head to having 4 novels with beta readers! Oh, I almost forgot ... a snippet of HEX CODE:

The three will-o-the-wisps comes together, their colors merging as they swirls around each other into one big ball. The sphere brightens, shimmers, intensifies within its formless shield of mist—the light coming together with a ring and a dark spot, which whirls to face me. O.M.G. The three will-o-the-wisps have formed together into a giant eye. “Remember!” the Huntswoman cries. “You can hurt it with your sword, but not enough. It has a shield. You can defend yourself with your shield, but not enough. It has teeth. But it has one more thing, and that is the key. Find that, and you will find your victory.” “Oh, great,” I says, hefting my dumb little wooden plank blade. “Thanks. Even Yoda sent Luke after dreams before Vader.”

Actually make that 40,092 words ... I wrote some more when I went to grab the excerpt. Enjoy. -the Centaur

It’s ALIIIIIVE….

Published November 17, 2011 by centaur

I avoid talking about work on my blog as a matter of principle - even to the point of never directly referring to The Search Engine That Starts With A G by name, unless I'm talking about a product - but in this case I think I have to make an exception. The Galaxy Nexus phone from Samsung and Google has launched, and the marketing site contains a 3D model of the phone developed by my team (pictured above). Guys, great job. I'm proud to have worked on it with you.

I have a lot more I want to say about it, but at this point (2am) after an 14 hour day ironing out all the wrinkles in this launch I look about how I feel. Time to GO HOME and tackle this again tomorrow, make sure no fires are going ... and then, celebrate! Oh, and please enjoy the phone and all its Androidy goodness! -the Centaur P.S. My opinions are my own and are not that of my employer, even if I do think my employer is awesome. And I don't speak for my employer, though I did run this by them first to make sure they were cool with it. Some restrictions may apply to your limitations. Do not taunt happy fun ball.

Life Intervenes

Published November 12, 2011 by centaur

So I was going gangbusters on Nanowrimo ... until life intervened. I work at the Search Engine That Starts With A G. It's a fun but tough job that nonetheless leaves me with a great work life balance. I have time to work, time to write, and time to spend with my wife and cats (friends tend to get short shrift though :-P). But we have a software release coming up, and as usual for software development schedules (but unusual for The G) everything was under-resourced, the project was late, and no time was left for integration. This was a last minute project, a great opportunity for my team that came up at the last minute, so this is a bit understandable. But it's still been a bear. I was still writing though. Half my team's out sick, on trips, whatever, and I'm still writing. I'm doing the lion's share of the integration, the rest of the team doing the lion's share of the coding, and I'm still writing. Then we get down to the wire ... and still have showstopper bugs. At this point this week we were supposed to finish, attend a research symposium, and then join our research colleagues on an offsite. My boss was reluctant to bail on this, but I told him I was planning to skip the symposium and the offsite, to work on Saturday if I have to ... because there just wasn't enough time for me to finish my work otherwise. Not even if I temporarily dropped Nano.

Nano got dropped anyway. My bosses agreed with me, we mostly bailed on the symposium and almost all of us bailed on the offsite. For the time of this last push, my Nano tracking sheet lists zero, though I'm sure I got a couple of hundred words in that day (just didn't track them). We worked long into Friday night ... and nailed all our P0 bugs. But actually I didn't get any words done that day - I'd forgotten to charge my laptop. I do a lot of writing at breakfast, but without the laptop I had to break out my notebook and plan the story. It's become much more elaborate recently, and this gave me a chance to think. We came back and tackled the project again today Saturday, nailing all our P1 bugs and some of the P2s. I packed up my computer for the office move and prepared to leave, when my boss had a brainflash about fixing the first of our customer requests. He asked me for pointers on how to fix it ... but I knew how, my laptop was already open in my lap, and I could do it before I could explain it. So I did. My boss pushed the code to the site ... and lo and behold we'd nailed the first of the customer's requests, transitioning from bugfixes to pre-launch polishing in a 40-minute last-minute push that was faster than everything that came before it. Boo-yah. So when I went to dinner tonight, I gave myself permission to have a great meal, go get some great coffee, to chill out, and not to Nano. I'm ahead, and can get back to it tomorrow, which is completely free thanks to our hard work and my previous time getting ahead at Nano. But I'd forgotten to charge my laptop Friday. I'd written notes; I'd ruminated on them all night. Not even meaning to. And so, when I sat down for coffee ... the words, they just started spilling out. And I easily made today's word count. Double boo-yah. Here's a sample:

“Sinny and Tully, sittin’ in a tree,” Mom says. “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” I finishes. I turns red as a beet, looking over at Tully and Ben. Tully’s just leaning against the rail, watching Ben fume as he scrubs the floor on his hands and knees. “But while we’re there in the orchard, this fae comes by, offers us some fruit—” “I swear,” Mom says, “I will slap you through this phone if you ate that fruit.” I holds the phone an arms length away again. I don’t know all of Mom’s powers. For a moment I’m scared she can do it.

Never eat the fruit of elfland ... unless you're a smart little spellpunk who specializes in tricky logic problems. So, back to HEX CODE, and here's hoping life continues to stop intervening. Onward! -the Centaur

20,039 Added Words (4,344 of Them Today)

Published November 6, 2011 by centaur

This post should be titled "wheew". I've now just reached the point where I've caught up with my crazy goal of writing at twice the normal rate. I've written just a notch over the required 3,333 words a day, churning out 20,000+ words in HEX CODE (and that's NOT counting the 1500 word seed I started with).

I had hoped to be this caught up last night, but I erred and went to one of my favorite coffee houses and found it closed an hour earlier than I thought, cutting in to my writing time. I could swear these hours are new, but maybe I'm just hallucinating.

And when I got home I had to play with the cats, such as the cute little monster above, a feral, stray or perhaps just terribly surly cat that just might be our orange cat's father (or mother - I didn't get close enough to enquire). Regrettably, since we already have too many cats, they mark, and feral cats have been trying to get into our home, I had to shoo Mister Orange Cat away, gently touching him with my flashlight, which freaked him out as he didn't know what it was - no matter how much he whapped at it, it didn't react. He actually looked OFFENDED as he scrabbled away atop the fence. I'm sad to have to do that, but his possible son below is more than enough trouble - we can't take in any more cats.

The point being, I was exhausted, but by the time I did all my cat triage, I just fricking collapsed into blissful unconsciousness. Today, however, I had no plans. While I overslept for church, as I irritatingly often do, I still got up reasonably early thanks to Daylight Saving's Time. So I had an extra hour to get out, get to a Panera ... and get caught up. I got my day's writing done pretty quickly, got a notch more ahead, and then went home, fed the cats, cleaned the pee left when the rains discouraged one of them from going outside :-P and resumed writing with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the background. A friend called, I hopped in the car while talking with him, and by the time we were done I was standing outside Chipotle with only 250 words to go. Short story, by taking the laptop out first and turning the internet off, I made it to 20039 words.

Now I'm freezing my ass off in a surprisingly chilly Barnes and Noble, sipping on a Frappucino (yeah, I know, cold drinks on a cold day, shut up, there's a reason my Top Gun name is Iceman) and taking a short break. Soon I'm going to dive back to it and try to finish another thousand words or so to give me a comfortable buffer. If all goes well, if I can keep up a bit less than the pace I've done so far, I should be able to coast through the second half of November. Maybe, just maybe, if I get done early enough ... I can go see The Thing again. Onward! -the Centaur

Ahead of where I need to be, behind where I want to be

Published November 5, 2011 by centaur

Well, I'm ahead of schedule for Nanowrimo ... or am I? I've been determined and lucky enough to complete at least 1667 words every day, so I'm ahead of where I have to be. But I'm trying to be crazy this year. At first I thought I would do TWO books, but now I'm thinking I want to do ONE book at twice the rate. Why do this to myself? Well, one reason would be to finish early. I could start a second book if I wanted to, or finish the first book, or, God forbid, actually use the week of vacation I've taken Thanksgiving week as a fricking vacation rather than a writing marathon. Or maybe it's because it takes Nanowrimo out of a safe place. Unlike 24 Hour Comics Day, I've succeeded every time I'd tried at Nanowrimo. Trying to write twice as fast takes me out of that comfort zone. If I fail, well, I'll still almost certainly succeed at the Nano challenge. If I succeed, well ... then maybe I can write 100,000 words in a month. And the most important thing about writing is writing. The more you write, the better you get. (The second most important thing is getting prompt, high quality feedback; the third most important thing is taking the feedback seriously and acting on it. But I digress). I've finished today's quota of 1,667 words. But yesterday I slacked, also only writing about 1,667 words. To keep up the accelerated pace, I need to catch up, to write almost 3000 more words today. But it's only 3:52 in the afternoon, and I have the whole day ahead of me. So here's seeing what I can do ... and I don't think I can lose, either way. -teh Centaur