Vegas

I am back from Las Vegas. The trip was great, although expensive, and gave me some time to catch up on reading and even do a little writing (about 10K words).

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As always, settling back into the real world can be jarring, but such is the nature of vacations.

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Not much else to say than that… back to reality! And hopefully I’ll be a little more productive with my writing in the upcoming week.

Kindle Oasis

I just got my first Kindle last Thursday: the new Kindle Oasis. In the past I’ve used the Kindle app on my iPad or iPhone, but it’s just not the same. I am in Costa Rica a lot and reading on the beach is one of my “ways to unplug.”  Unfortunately, with an iPad it’s a great formula for instant blindness. When I saw this new model had literal MONTHS of battery life and was small enough to throw in my back pocket, I decided to give it a shot.

Here is the little guy:

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Really feels good in the hand, light as anything, and comfortable to hold.  You can turn the whole device upside down to switch hands and the screen flips (and the page controls, to stay consistent). I even tried it lying down in bed and it doesn’t get confused when I am sideways, which is good.

The back-light is great. It can be very subtle, or brighter than I would ever need, and I see very little dent in the battery after some hours use with the backlight.

It was quick to sync up to my Amazon account.  In fact, I am not even sure how it did it.  While I was configuring it, I started to enter my login info, but the moment it had my email it logged me in without a password.  The damn thing must know I just ordered one, and when it saw the same email it took a shortcut. I’m actually a little disconcerted by that, but I have reasonable confidence in the software engineers at Amazon to know what they are doing with that stuff.

It fits in the palm of my hand, though not comfortably for reading, but as a measure of size:

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The reading screen is the about the same width as a standard mass-market paperback, and maybe two-thirds as tall.

Not much else to add! I recommend the Oasis strongly to anyone with older Kindle products looking for an upgrade.

Creativity Fail

Somehow, somewhere, I picked up a writer’s block bug, and I just can’t seem to shake it. As the days became weeks, and now over a month, it has become clear that it won’t pass on its own. Breaking out of this rut will require some deliberation and work.

This hiccup serves as a signpost for me, with two distinct markers mounted upon it.  First, it means I have reached the end of the honeymoon stage in the Lunhina Trilogy. This is not to say the new setting and characters do not still excite me — they do — but it means the easy part is over.  I could write a thousand cool starts to stories.  The start is all about layering intrigue and finding different ways to introduce people.  The questions drive the introduction.  When you exit the “start” of the story then suddenly the plot lines need to go somewhere, and need to follow an interesting path along the way.  I can’t just wing this or throw it off the cuff, and thus the end of the honeymoon.

This also explains the second marker I see clearly before me.  I don’t like free writing, or “gardening” as GRRM calls it.  I was trying it in this book for two reasons: first, it was a reaction to my first story Sapphire Spawn, which had been outlined so tightly, all my characters suffocated before I pulled them through it.  Second, new writers are always encouraged to try different things until they know what really works for them. So I tried it.

It sucks.

That might be little harsh, but it doesn’t mesh with my personality, or my need for momentum. If I don’t know where to go next, I come to a hard stop between each chapter, and that doesn’t work for my style.

I’m in the process of pulling out what hair follicles remain to me as I try to lay down an outline that can carry me towards the endings I have planned.  This is at least productive.  Less productive has been an increase in my own crits with my informal writing groups, and other expenditures of my free time that could otherwise have gone to my story.  No more.  I’m putting myself into a mandatory time-out from all that until I get this sorted.  I hope to pull free in the next few nights and be on my way.

Brandon Sanderson lecture mirror

Brandon’s lectures have been a tremendous help to me, but they are divided into parts, sometimes the color is bad, and in a few cases the aspect ratio was garbage. Being a student of such things, I decided to pull down a copy of all the videos I could find, throw them through a couple quick tweaks in AfterEffects, and re-upload them.  I also added some notes to help people find what they are looking for (something I use for myself too, when I want to see what he had to say about a particular thing). Also, it never hurts to mirror important content, just in case it gets taken down or otherwise blocked.

The playlist is up with his 2010 JordonCon lectures, and most of the 2012 BYU lecture series.  I’ll also be posting the 2013 and 2014 lectures when I finish with 2012.  Enjoy!

Court throws out lawsuit against FAA drone registration

4/25/16 UPDATE: The cited article below is mistaken. Thanks to John for checking into that!

I’ve been following this case since early January when a Maryland man named James Taylor filed suit against the FAA for a new law that requires all of us drone owners to register our information in a public database.  I’ve been waiting patiently (without registering) to see how this settles, and unfortunately, the outcome is not good:

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2016/04/19/federal-court-dismisses-lawsuit-against-drone-regulations

The basis of the lawsuit was that the new regulation violated Section 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which stated that none of the regulations the FAA might set forth could be applied to model aircrafts, elsewhere defined to mean aircrafts used for entirely hobby purposes.  That being the case, it didn’t make sense that hobby drones were suddenly compelled to operate under these new regulatory codes. There was also some concern about the hasty and over-reaching manner the FAA employed to get this law on the books before Christmas of 2015.

My own biggest issue, is that of privacy. I don’t want my information and address public, nor the fact I own a drone. This isn’t a handgun we are talking about, it’s a toy for taking cool pictures.  Sure, it can be abused, and idiots might fly it over a highway and crash, but you get irresponsible people in every walk of life… since when has the answer been, register everything publicly so it is traceable?

Well anyway, that is my rant of the day. Now I just need to decide what I do… register, or let this thing sit on the table for a while. *sigh*

Here is a details analysis of Section 336.

Walking in the dark

I’m continuing to make progress on the Lunhina Trilogy, discovering the plot as I advance. While I am enjoying the process, I find it a lot harder to break into a new chapter. Without a clear plan forward, my confidence holds me back as I second guess the best place to start, the best info to drop, and the best place to end.

I think the reason for this is I know I could write the same chapter a dozen different ways… so how do I pick out the best one? I don’t want to keep rewriting the same chapters with different directions just to see, so I am relying on intuition. I suppose like anything else, this is something that will strengthen as I go. I’ll lean on feedback from my writers group to help me focus.

The other interesting thing I am finding is when I do finally lay out the plan for a chapter, it ends up becoming two or three when written. It seems that I overestimate how much I can get done in just a couple thousand words.  I am curious to see how all this pans out as it goes out for feedback, as it could be a sign I am laying words with a heavy hand, or it might just mean the organic nature of the character’s movement requires more time to complete.

Final POV locked in

Status Report: Lunhina (d1) 14,075 words.

I finished writing the first scene with my fourth POV: Svaran. I am reasonably happy with all four voices, although a little concerned the “narrator” leaks through.  Really, I should change my style of description and even my vocabulary from POV to POV, to make them fully unique.  I am not sure I can pull that off, though. I’ll wait and see what alpha feedback I get, then decide if that is necessary.

I had fun with Svaran. I gave myself a challenge, one that originally stems from Brandon Sanderson’s online lectures, and it was this: write the scene with the character and don’t EVER mention (in inner monologue or in exposition) what the character is doing. See if you can write it so that the reader figures it out on their own.  This simple-sounding exercise was quite fun and really changed the way I approached the chapter.  In the past, I would write a scene in order to communicate a specific plot step to the reader. That works, but readers enjoy figuring things out, it is what humans do in life and in social situations, and we like it.  So with this exercise, I wrote the scene without any regard for the reader, instead I just planted myself in the character’s head, and watched her do her thing.  It was surprisingly natural.

I think I got it down and I am excited to share it with my informal writing group to see how early on they can tell me what Svaran’s “deal” is.  Or if they get to the end, and can’t, well then I dropped the ball.

Anyway, it is one of a few POV/voice exercises I am working on to try and get my character voices stronger and more story-driving.

Well, that was unexpected!

Lunhina: 10.8% Draft 1

I had my first genuine “wow, I didn’t expect that” moment while writing today.  It was quite extraordinary… something I have read in other authors, but did not quite believe.  How can a character really tell you, the author, what is going to happen?

Well, turns out they can. Without an outline, you really become the character as you write, and you live with them in the moment, documenting what occurs. I was doing this in a Kinius scene, and I arrived near the end of the scene where he is injured on a boat, understaffed, and running for home.

I knew I couldn’t end the scene there… something more needed to happen, something interesting or character building at least. It seemed to me the enemy needed to find them before I could close the chapter.

BUT, I don’t want them dead! I need these characters still. How can a Galley of a hundred men catch a longboat of five, and the five come out alive (more or less)?

I stared at the page for a while on that one, and then stalled a bit by writing Kinius as he squirms and thinks.  And then— BOOM. Idea. It came from his mind as I was playing it out, not my authorial-outlining mind.  I went with it, cleaned it a bit, and I like it!  This was not in my outline at all, but it worked great.

Discovering Discovery Writing

Lunhina: 9.8% Draft 1

For the Lunhina Trilogy, I am dipping my feet into discovery writing for the first time. It is refreshing and exhilarating and makes me feel like a blind man with no idea which way is up.

To be fair, this is not a total discovery project. Every character has a start and a finish point in my outline, as well as one or two major scenes along the way. I also have a general start and end for the book, and for the next two books.  So in that sense, this is still outlined, but compared to what I did for Spawn, it is a whole different ballgame.

Right now, I have no idea what to do in each chapter, where it has to go, or how it has to get where it is going.  All I know is “eventually” I need to reach certain things, but that is really it! I finally understand what writers mean when they say that characters show them things as they write. I get it. You just write what makes sense while you are in the character’s head, throw in a twist, and roll with it.  None of it was choreographed, none of it was outlined. It is real!  But it is also meandering and random sometimes. This will take some work to get right.

In any case, I am so far enjoying the process. I suspect I will hammer in a few more details on my outline as I work into the characters, to try and find a good balance between discovery and architecting, and we’ll see how it goes!

RIP Spawn

Well, it is official.  After many weeks of considering the pros and cons, and breaking my way into my next project, I have finally decided the fate of Spawn.

I always knew going into this project that it would be primarily a learning experience, and maybe also something publishable.  I am busy revising the last 8 chapters from draft 1 to draft 2.5, and I have finally come to accept that I am fully comfortable with Spawn becoming a testament to my maiden voyage into writing, and never giving it to the light of day.  It is hard to explain how much the process taught me, but the truth is it is only one of many stories I want to tell, and not even a particularly well organized one.

I will continue my revisions to version 2.5 through the ending, and I will continue workshopping until chapter 32, then I am putting it on the shelf as a commemoration of the work that got me started.  Maybe, in a few months, I’ll come back and incorporate all the beta feedback, but most likely I’ll just let it die quietly, and steal any bits I liked for other works.

The primary factor in the decision has been my explosive excitement around the new project, the Lunhina Trilogy. Worldbuilding, character development, and outlining for this project went from 0% to 100% in a matter of days, and I have already planted the first 5700 bricks towards the project. I have no doubt alpha readers will bring me off cloud 9, but if I do say so myself, this is going fantastically compared to Spawn. It feels more alive, the characters feel more real, and the story is more organic.  I am not fully surprised by the different, considering how much I learned in the first round, but I am surprised by the momentum.  In a matter of days, I fell fully behind Lunhina and lost almost all interest in Spawn.  Some of that is just excitement at a new project, but it is deeper than that.  Spawn has served its purpose, and done so admirably, paving the way for a much better project.

Once I get all chapters to d2.5 and workshopped to 32 (of 41), I’m turning it in, and calling it a day.  Lunhina is a different kind of story. This one I would like to sell and publish… that is the point. Last time that would have been an added benefit, but the point was to learn. The stakes are higher now, and I’m aiming for the outfield.

Lunhina Tranist
Phase:Writing
Due:4 hours ago
5.7%