03.28.08
Posted in Rants, Site News, Writing
at 6:38 pm
There were some details posted at Engadget about the consumer fallout over the Sirius/XM merger today; the good news is, the prices aren’t going to go up that much for those folks who might want to listen to both sides of the combined service. The bad news is, “both sides” is a complete and total joke.
According to what got released, subscribers of one service can pay an extra $4 to get the “top 11 selections” from the other service. No choice, no pick-and-choose to reduce redundancy– and worse, no option to get everything of the other service. Oh, sure, you can still get a second, opposite receiver to get everything, but at that point you’re paying twice as much and getting half as much value (owing to redundant stations). Now, granted, I’m willing to believe that there’s only a limited amount of bandwidth that can be used for the channels, so getting everything on one reciever and one service is a little unreasonable– right now. But technology is improving every day, and I’m sure that there are downloadable codecs which can be used to compress the audio further on some channels while maintaining similar quality. Obsolescing recievers isn’t going to happen, but the fact of the matter is that there needs to be a better way to increase channel capacity. Promising a merger of two popular, large sets of channels and delivering virtually none of that content to either side is more than a little deceptive.
It gets better. Part of why I’m psyched for the merger is to get football on my radio; I still follow the Bills and the Browns, but around here if it’s not the Steelers it’s not on TV on Sunday. I bet the Sirius folks would kill to have baseball, too (not to mention the regional weather and traffic– I love that). Problem is, right now, neither side can have both sides’ sports programming. It’s conspicuously absent from the plan details.
(Also, and this is probably just an oversight or I’m missing it, but my favorite XM channel, the trance and progressive The System, isn’t on the XM list in the document. I don’t know if it’s the result of a conflict with Worldspace Satellite Radio, who provide The System to XM, or if it’s just an error, but I’m going to assume that I’ll be losing one of the primary channels I picked XM for over Sirius. XM’s customer support line was as unhelpful as was anticipated. I wouldn’t mind nearly as much if The System went internet-only, but I really doubt it will.)
Overall, I’m just frustrated that something as promising and promised as this could wind up to be more of a nightmare than anyone reasonably expected. I’m hoping that what Engadget has leaked is just a preliminary document, and is outdated, but I’m not holding out much hope.
ANYWAY. I’ve actually managed to procrastinate enough that I’ll be lucky to get even the first scene of the Blueberries second draft done tonight, but I am officially in Writing Mode now. Catch you all on Monday, at the LJ, with the Game Report for March.
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03.26.08
Posted in Site News
at 4:41 am
Things are Happening. I’m not at liberty to discuss more but needless to say I am not in a mood to post anything right now, as my mood usually dictates what I do post. I do not want to regret posting something. Therefore, you get this– at least for now. Maybe, if the situation resolves itself, the day will have a second post. Don’t count on it.
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03.24.08
Posted in Rants, Writing
at 4:15 pm
Setting aside the fact that I did pretty much none of what I planned to during this past weekend, I still feel more or less good about the time spent. I do wish I had had the chance to head home for Easter, but there were good reasons why that was not to be. More to the point, they’re boring reasons, so I’ll skip them and just move on to what did get done.
I just finished getting the outline loaded into StoryMill; over the weekend I had the scene count up to 85, but now it’s at 101 (with maybe three or four of those either being melded together or ‘off-camera’ notes for myself). If I estimate that each scene will run around a thousand words, that’s another 100K words easily, not counting over- or underflow. Since I’m not taking a single sentence from the first draft– not copy-and-paste, at any rate; there’re a handful of good lines I want to reuse– that’s a huge chunk of rewriting to do. But, then again, I’m glad I’m doing this. It’s not nearly as bad as I’m making this sound with all these arguably big numbers.
I was talking with Rick the other day, and he seemed a bit surprised that I would be disparaging my first draft. The fact of the matter is, though, I went through the first draft in much the same way the writers of Lost went through the first couple seasons– just throwing whatever they thought of into the mix, and hoping it makes sense later on when they try to wrap it up. It works great for a television show that now has a following greater than the evening news, but not so much for a novel that’s supposedly going for some degree of plausibility. I fell into the trap that I always fall into– focusing on the protagonists too much, and not letting myself plot out how the antagonist did what the heroes have to undo. This draft is an excellent way for me to look at it from that angle, now, and to shore that up. Because the first draft worked absolutely well until we got to the ending, when I went for the cheap thrills and failed to realize that how I saw it being planned out just plain didn’t work– it could be seen through by a child. And not the mind-reading children of the story, either.
So, rather than the visceral blood-and-grossness ending I’d written back in December, I’ve got a more subtle antagonist now. Still prone to the acts of violence that prompt the story’s climax, but far more clever about how he’s made it to that point of control. And it’s this subtlety that works so well in the story’s favor. I set out in October to write the “anti-’psychic kids’ story”, and to do this meant forsaking a lot of conventions of the genre. By the time the story was wrapping up, I’d thrown away those principled beginnings and went for the cheap and easy route. That disheartened me quite a bit, because it took me away from the conflict I’d wanted to be the focus, and moved it into a more stock version. I’m hoping I can avoid this with this draft, and at the very least write the story I set out to.
All that stuff up there is mostly just drivel. The point is that I feel much more confident about this draft because I’ve already got the crap out of my system, I have the story solidly set out, and I know the characters better now and don’t have to worry about them wandering away from me again. Depending on how the rest of this week goes, I might actually start the draft writing before the weekend… probably not. We’ll see– I’m looking to try to finish watching through Kiddy Grade, or at least watch more of it, but I have some errands to take care of early this week as well, and other personal boring stuff. I’ll update as time permits, but one way or another Friday night begins “I Should Be Writing: The Next Gigaloquation”. Catch you all tomorrow.
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03.20.08
Posted in Rants, Site News, Writing
at 4:33 am
I try not to make too much mention of so-called celebrity news around here. Most of the time I’m working a day or so ahead, and as a result anything I have to write about the events in Random Famous Person’s life is usually ancient history by the time it gets publicized. But the news on Tuesday that Arthur C. Clarke had died, though initially unassuming to me, wound up affecting me and really hitting me as I write this (Wednesday morning). So, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that ACC was, is, and will forever remain the man I look up to most as an aspiring sci-fi (or, more accurately, speculative fiction) author.
As I mentioned in the Twitter post yesterday (actually only about twenty minutes ago, for me), I didn’t understand any of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I did only watch the film, but that can be excused due to the fact that it apparently matched the book more or less exactly, both having been produced in tandem. The last twenty minutes of the film in particular are completely inscrutable to me, and I’ve long since given up any pretense of ever being able to produce a work even half as mind-bending as the combined efforts of Sir Clarke and Mr. Kubrick. That’s not why I look up to him, anyway. The answer is just a little bit more simple: Clarke was right.
Though I make no claim to any great familiarity with his work, his legacy is felt throughout all of modern science fiction, from Heinlein and Bradbury all the way to Card and Stephenson. Before Clarke, science fiction was largely the province of re-skinned Westerns; star-spangled adventure stories replacing cowboys, covered wagons, and Indians with astronauts, rocketships, and aliens. Where it tried to be deep, it wound up following the same forumlae as traditional fiction of the time. Clarke, and to a certain extent the other SF writers I mentioned, took a different approach: by seeing how the introduction of world-changing discoveries and technologies would alter the world, and the people within it. The character development was shifted away from the individual scale and moved into the cosmic level. Put another way, future tech like the rocketships and aliens were no longer taken for granted. It was dystopic at times, it wasn’t always sunshine and lollipops, and it very often needed relapses into the “Wagon Train to the stars” formula in order to fund the really thought-provoking stuff (incidentally, Star Trek also struck a wonderful balance between corny adventure and intellect stimulus). It was the birth of punk, if you ask me.
And, like I said, he was right. He was right about a ton of things, even if he fudged some details due to the world-changing events even he couldn’t see– he conceived of satellite communications, space lifts, and maybe a dozen other concepts that today seem, if not pedestrian and commonplace, then distinctly within the realm of possibility. So maybe he didn’t know about the transistor when he first surmised that satellites would have to be manned. It makes little difference in the long run (and actually, I think I would have rathered that satellites were manned– it certainly would have accelerated spaceflight research!). The point is, he saw these things coming, and he could more or less accurately predict how these world-changing things would, in fact, change the world and the people living on it. He could see technology’s effects on human culture.
The other thing that really makes me admire Clarke is the fact that throughout all of it, he’s an optimist. I often joke that my optimism hasn’t yet been crushed out of me, but in truth I hope it never does. Clarke’s work has an underlying sense that in the end, either through internal development or an external stimulus, humanity will eventually do the right thing. The threat of self-annihilation exists in his work, but it’s a plot device– a MacGuffin of global scale and microbial importance. It’s merely the ticking clock, a slight distraction. When faced with the wonder and beauty, the glory of the universe around us, choosing to focus on the petty differences and pathetic weaponry that threaten to divide us seems childish, inane, small-minded, and singularly stupid. Clarke taught us not just to look at the big picture, but to admire it for the single brushstroke that humanity is within it. Science shows us the picture, but Clarke told us that we need to appreciate it and exactly how to.
I think the most important thing to remember is one of his more repeated quotes: “I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.” And given the choice between being wrong 90% of the time when it comes to the big ideas of the future, or being right 90% of the time about the small ideas of the present, I will always take thinking big, because Clarke taught me that the reward is so much more worth it than the risk.
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03.18.08
Posted in Rants, Shameless Self-Promotion, Writing
at 4:31 am
I’ve come to the conclusion that Harvesting Blueberries is in dire need of a complete rewrite. This first draft is disjointed and unpolished, and unfortunately it spews plot threads faster than Lachesis’ berserk sewing machine. Most of those threads are dropped or ignored, and unfortunately the whole thing just winds up being somewhat bad. Not completely bad, and definitely not unsalvageable, but it does need to be re-evaluated from the very first moment. So, that’s the April project… and I’m going to treat it as another NaNo.
You might think that this would be a bad thing, given how much I’m looking forward to Tekkoshocon in the second week of April. But just remember that November had Thanksgiving in the middle, and that worked out okay. Besides, I’m going to give myself a head-start: I’m starting the writing on the last weekend in March, anyway; most likely the 28th.
To this end, I’m spending these two weeks in re-reading the story, identifying the flow of the plot, and actually compositing the plot threads into an overall narrative. (Oh, and gaming every once in a while, too. Can’t let the backlog get too far backed up.) What’s becoming the hardest part, really is making sure that I have an outline that works and that doesn’t get thrown out halfway through. I have the basic flow of the story done– that’s what the first draft was for. Now I have to cut the crap out and add in more of what’s good.
Another part of this is that I’m using a new piece of software, after having tinkered with it for a little bit. StoryMill turned out to be a pretty useful tool in giving me the overall view of the plot that I needed, and so I’m going to try using that for the full rewrite. If nothing else, it should help me with making sure I keep character details consistent– I honestly don’t recall what color Chloe’s hair is anymore. I’m also really digging the Timelines view. It has a bit of a learning curve– but then, what software doesn’t?– but it offers some tools that make working with it not just easier, but a genuine joy. And, as we’ve established with the Reclamation List and the Backlog List, I’m a numbers junkie and can’t seem to work very well without having some concrete measure of progress to show for it. (StoryMill is Mac-only, but I believe Pez had found a Windows program that accomplishes much the same thing– hopefully he will share its name and link with us.)
So, really, there’s three phases that need to be done. The first is to “import” the existing sequence of events into StoryMill so that I can make sure I have the general events together. Then, I need to devise a revised sequence of events and see how that impacts the plot– I already know one major thing that I’m going to change, and one plot thread that’s going to be picked up far earlier than it already is. Finally, I need to sit down and write this second draft, hopefully without requiring too much in the way of re-revising the plot. I expect to be done with Phase One by Easter.
Overall, and this is the harder part, I need to make the story far denser than it already is. Blueberries‘ first draft has huge swaths of text (tens of pages in some cases) where nothing pertinent to the plot happens, and all of the actual plot stuff is off-stage. I would say that it’s being done in the name of characterization, but it’s not– it was just stalling for time and words. Phillip (the protagonist) needs to take a more proactive approach; when I realized this in the original story, his action took the form of a letter. A good start, kinda, but just wasn’t enough. I need to speed him up there, and slow down the actions of another individual so that I’m not constrained that badly.
There are a handful of scenes in the first draft which are brilliant (in my opinion)– they really serve to highlight the characterizations and to give the reader a good sense of who these people are. That’s something I’m particularly proud of: this is the first story I’ve written where the characters feel far more alive than the scenery. More than that, really, they’re quite unconventional; the orphanage runner is a single man not even in his thirties yet, the high-powered executive is a young woman who doesn’t use her gender as a crutch, and the enforcer is a scrawny guy hiding behind sunglasses. Unfortunately, they got to be this in-depth at the expense of the plot’s adherence and coherence. So, there’s that problem solved: now that I know how the characters would react in these situations, I can plan ahead a bit more. One of my favorite parts of the draft actually affected the plot, and it’s perfect enough that it stands a very good chance of making it into this second go-around. It fits how the characters involved would react to the stimulus that prompted it, and it wasn’t forced or contrived. It then led very naturally into how the other characters would react, and so on and so forth. That’s one of the points where the characters seemed to stop resisting my attempts at forcing them into the plot and started flowing with it, started generating plot on their own. Good for the pace of writing and for inspiration; bad for sticking to an outline– I wound up writing by the seat of my pants for the last seventy-odd pages of the book.
So, rather than talk more about it, I figure it’s best to actually just, you know, do it. Ciao, folks.
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03.17.08
Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming
at 9:51 pm
At 10:45p, I cleared Stargazer Coliseum, the final challenge in Pokemon Battle Revolution on the Wii. This is the eleventh game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Band of Bugs (XBLA), followed by Phoenix Wright: Justice For All (DS) and Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation (GBA). Final clear time is 13:45.
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03.14.08
Posted in Bailout, Rants, Site News
at 9:13 pm
I did not forget to write a post today. I was merely prevented from doing so. I am also very very upset with my router. This state of displeasure will persist until I am distracted by good news, however, because the router died before I could think of a creative, cathartic, and satisfying way to execute it myself. Yeah. Worst case scenario is that of all of the people who are going to be participating in tomorrow’s Brawl event, I won’t be among them. Best case scenario is that I come back from the store this evening with a router that works.
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03.12.08
Posted in Bailout, Writing
at 2:30 pm
Sorry, folks, but again I must resort to Bailout and the explanation that I’m working on a bunch of writing projects and other things in spare time. I was going to give an overview of the current progress of the editing of Harvesting Blueberries– because despite my procrastination, that is something that’s going on– but as it turns out I spent too much time over lunch actually reading it over and making notes than I did writing the post about editing. Which is good for the book, but bad for you folks, I suppose. Anyway, all apologies, and hopefully I’ll have an update on the writing on Friday. Tomorrow on the LJ I have notes on Brawl, so, yeah. Catch you later.
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03.11.08
Posted in Game Cleared 2008, Gaming
at 9:11 pm
At 10:00p, I completed The Subspace Emissary, the single-player campaign of Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii. This is the tenth game cleared in 2008. The next game that is queued for completion is Band of Bugs (360), followed by Phoenix Wright: Justice For All (DS) and Super Mario Galaxy (Wii). Final clear time was 9:02 over three days.
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03.10.08
Posted in Gaming, Rants
at 3:59 am
And it was good. I’ve got a couple of characters unlocked, I’ve played with a few of the new combatants, and I’ve become slightly proficient with Pit… and the best part, really, is that I’ve only just barely scratched the surface of the game. One trip through Subspace Emissary will be enough for the Game Clear, but I am so going to be playing this consistently for quite some time.
On a completely bizarre note, playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl has me getting in the mood to play through Wild ARMs 5 as my next “major” RPG. There’s a very simple reason for this– two that I’ve discovered so far, actually. They’re two music tracks that were arranged by WA’s primary composer, Michiko Naruke. I’m not understating it at all when I say that her style is completely divergent from any other composer’s in the game, and that her take on the Ocarina of Time Medley and Donkey Kong Country’s Bramble Blast aren’t just distinctive, they’re emblematic of her work while still retaining the core melodies and phrases. (It doesn’t hurt that Bramble Blast was one of my favorite tracks from DKC, either.) Contrast this to, say, Motoi Sakuraba’s contributions– they’re good, and he was responsible for another of my favorite of the Kirby tracks, but they’re just not really “his”. (Of course, I’m just bitter because I absolutely adored the orchestral version of “Fountain of Dreams” from Melee, and that didn’t make the cut to Brawl.) Oh, and to my great surprise, the Kid Icarus tracks are phenomenal.
Yeah, so I’m geeking out over game music today. I think I could be excused.
See you tomorrow.
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