TheZot

In Dirty Basement Ben batted a fireball aside. Completely different thing. Still, he does have a nifty sword. Poor William has to make do with a more mundane one for a while. He gets a new one at some point, but not quite yet. ("Yet" being a while after Dirty Basement)

More than anything else, William's just not that good a wizard. Someone certainly did... Well, hopefully not, but y'never know. I hadn't planned on this one taking as long as it did. (Though it's a whole lot better for it, that's for sure)

And now chapters 4 and 5 are up.

Is up for your reading enjoyment over here.

Yep, if you look you'll see I've yanked the original version, added some Web Spiffiness, and an edited and somewhat rewritten version is going up. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are up, more to follow over the next few weeks.

The POV shift point is very well taken, and one I try hard to be careful with -- I plop the camera on one character's shoulder or another at the start of a chapter and leave it there. May not be the most sophisticated way to handle it, but it seems an un-jarring way to handle it. Maybe some day I'll get fancy, but for now this works for me. (Whether it works for everyone else is a separate question, of course...)

I always forget that, especially when writing about Ben and William. One of the cardinal sins of writing in the first person is switching points of view. You need to pick one character and stick with him or her -- no changing in the middle. Yes, I know a lot of 'net fiction does this, but it just doesn't work. (If it did you'd see it in commercial fiction, something I had pointed out to me once. I've read exactly two books that have done this, and it didn't work well in either. And if Dianna Wynne Jones can't pull it off, what hope does J. Random NetAuthor have?) I'm used to writing first person, even though I actually don't -- Yankee was first person, but that's it. Doesn't mean I don't think in the first person, which gets me in trouble. When I plot out Ben and William's stories, it's always from William's perspective. (I expect anyone who knows me reasonably well could offer appropriate pithy comments on my character about that, but we'll not go there right now) Except, of course, the stories aren't told from William's POV, they're told from over his shoulder. Which means I can tell them from over Ben's shoulder, too. Even if he is kinda reluctant to say much. That makes dealing with some of the bits of Wild Life a whole lot easier. Including some of the bits that Dio, once upon a time, rightly poked at and noted didn't work. Yes, this was something of a revelation. Go figure.

Aha! Y'now, I've been poking at the edits to the second chapter, and things haven't been quite working the way I wanted. That bit made the difference, if I can only figure out quite what to do with it. I actually do want the characterization to be clear in this, partly because it changes as the book progresses and the characters grow, and partly because I'd like this to be where new people start reading when they dig into the stories. This is one of the tricky bits for me, 'cause I am a D&D player (reader... Feh! ) and a geek, so it's sometimes tough to not technobabble it all. I'm shooting for mostly descriptions of effects, with the occasional bit of exposition when things are quieter and appropriate. I'm trying to keep the 'how it works' stuff to an absolute minimum, putting it out only when it's important to the story. It helps that William's generally the character the POV follows, and he's kind of fuzzy on how it all works. Yep. A legit alternate spelling, I double-checked. I was using both and had to choose one, and this was the one I went with, mostly to be contrary. Heh. Shooting for a biweekly release. Just be glad I'm blocking on Carpe Diem, or it'd be an every four week release... -Dan

Alas for him, he wasn't the most attentive of students. Nor the most enthusiastic. As for the point of the rest of his life to date, well... we'll get to that. He's coming. Gotta get William in trouble first... Hey, it was 3288 words! Not bad as book chapters go, though certainly short for internet serials William's also much older now than he was in school. I may have been a bit too off-hand in mentioning it, but it's been a decade or so since he graduated. (William's in his early thirties at the start of Wild Life) Even vapid troublemakers settle down after a while. Which actually gives me some ideas for stories set later on, but I've gotta finish this one first. -Dan

Urk. Well, combined with the cholesterol issues, you might want to check with your doctor and see if you can get your hypertension meds changed. (Though given the selection you're on there might not be an alternative, I dunno) That's got to suck, though. What're your serum vitamin D levels looking like? If you're staying out of the sun I'd bet they're pretty low, 'specially as most folks in the US are borderline deficient as it is.

While it's not anything like a 100% solution, get out and get as much sun as you can manage, as well as some exercise. Cholesterol is one of the precursor molecules used in the synthesis of Vitamin D and the steroid hormones including testosterone. Sunlight stimulates Vitamin D production (which most people are low on, especially in the winter) and exercise tends to increase testosterone production. Lack of sun exposure (because of lower intensity sun and less skin exposure) is probably the major reason cholesterol levels tend to be higher in the fall and winter for most people. Wikipedia's got a reasonably nice page on cholesterol, and while I don't have a link to the JAMA article on seasonal cholesterol levels, there's a readable summary at Medical News Today. Exercise tends to be good for mood (and there are some studies that indicate UV exposure is too), and has a pleasant side-effect of helping drop a few pounds, which is good. So, y'know, get out and walk in the sun for as much time as you can. Won't fix things all by itself, but it certainly will help.

The Blue Moon Room Synthetrix Walking with Strangers The Birthday Massacre

Not productive, mind, but fun. Being a Computer Geek in real life, when I did up the new layout for Wild Life, I wanted it simple to splat out new chapters without me having to fiddle much with the generated HTML, while still having it look good. The looking good bit was tricky (and it turns out that IE7 has a busted CSS box model, so my outdented chapter tabs didn't work, dammit! No tabs for you, IE users!). I knew what I wanted it to look like, but I've never done any CSS work, so it was a bit of a challenge to get going. Luckily what I wanted was actually doable (well, except in IE) so I'm happy. That, of course, led to managing the actual content. Up until now I've been writing in Word, saving as HTML, and running the result through a perl program to strip out the crud. Then there was some hand-editing (with a 20% error rate, alas) to patch it up and send it out. Needless to say... yech. I didn't want that for Wild Life, so after the CSS got nailed I wrote some PHP to generate the boilerplate HTML, which led to some PHP to handle the overall page generation, which led to some more restructuring, which left me with a nicely data-driven set of pages. You can't see it, but the main PHP code for the Wild Life pages is entirely generic -- the body is in a separate data file, and there's a file with the chapter numbers in it, so uploading a new chapter's a matter of changing that chapter file, sending up the actual new page data file, and cloning the main php file to a new one. (I could do it with a single PHP file with a ?chapter=whatever tail, but I think that's icky looking) All the existing pages get the new chapter numbers on their side tabs, and it's good. It's all nicely automatic, and since the html that Scrivener generates is pretty clean, it doesn't even need much post-processing, and I can do all the post-processing with a little program. That's cool, fewer things for me to make whoopses with. Getting Wild Life spiffed up like this, of course, meant cleaning up the short stories, which meant more PHP fiddling (No easy grouping by filename), as well as a bit of messing around with redirects in meta tags so the old URLs still worked if anyone had them bookmarked. Simple enough. Since consistency is a nice thing, I did the same thing to Yankee, and after a few rounds of genericizing the code the actual PHP for Yankee and Wild Life chapters are identical. They share all the library files, all the main PHP pages are the same (just copies of one another with different filenames), with the only difference being the data -- stylesheets, chapter lists, and chapter contents. As it should be. The index page doesn't auto-generate yet, but I probably ought to tackle that, as soon as I figure out what its style should look like. That's where I should've stopped, of course. The trouble here is that to check things out I have to do a quick scan of the text to check for bad characters -- untranslated em dashes, smart quotes, elipses, and suchlike stuff. There was also some screwed-up parts of the text, words missing, bad punctuation, and mis-spellings. Scanning leads to reading, and reading leads to wincing, and, well... I should've stopped. Really. Yankee was my first novel, and while it isn't horrid, it has some issues. The style's inconsistent in spots, Justin's Asperger's isn't handled properly everywhere, the word choices are awkward some places, and the last two chapters are a bit phoned in. I'd leave it alone, but I'm supposed to write its sequel, so I feel the need to fiddle. So... now I have the whole thing, all sixteen chapters, pulled into Scrivener, ready for rewrite. It should, hopefully, be fast enough to do. Couple of weeks end to end, and I think I'll pull the old chapters down (or off the index page, at least) while I re-release the updated version. That should segue into Carpe Diem's release, though that won't be done nearly so fast. I am so going to owe Joe for web whacking above and beyond the call 'o duty when this is all done...

Never underestimate procrastination as a motivator. It's amazing how much you can get done when you're supposed to be doing something else entirely...

Ah, it's only ~3K words. And homework's overrated anyway.

And of course it turns out that IE has a busted CSS box model so the spiffy layout (the one that worked nicely on WebKit and Gecko rendering engines) doesn't render quite so well in IE. Bah, computers suck, and so not in a good way. An updated version is off to Joe for fixing whenever he gets a chance.

Chapter one of Wild Life is up for your reading pleasure. New chapters should come every two or three weeks, if all goes well. One thing that's new with this is some bonus prettiness. As I'm sure anyone who's read my stuff's noticed, the styling I use in the HTML-converted documents is... minimal. (Well, okay, nonexistent) That's been on purpose -- I've enough trouble making sure all the crap that Word stuffs into a document is stripped out, and I've never been good at making things look nice on my own, so I've left it be. With Wild Life (and hopefully Carpe Diem) getting released, though, it's about time I spiff things up. While completely unstyled HTML is better than a lot of what's out on the Web (I particularly hate the layouts that have small fixed width areas for their content -- you know the ones, where you get fewer words horizontally than a paperback book, but making the window bigger does nothing, and upping the font size just makes it worse, since the text area doesn't get bigger when the font does) but pretty is nice. So, after much head scratching, a bit 'o cash (I rather like O'Reilly's CSS, The Missing Manual), and some swearing at PHP's completely random naming conventions and deeply sucky documentation, I'm done. Woo! It's not really flashy -- that requires more art skills than I have -- but I have a layout I like. Sidebar menus, pleasant color scheme, automatic content generation (so I don't have to update old chapters, or re-validate all the pages when I twiddle the sidebar), and a Scrivener HTML stripper to generate the raw data to feed into the system. It's just attached to Wild Life right now, but I'll probably go back and redo Yankee, as well as the shorts. I only hope it looks okay in browsers I don't have. (Safari and Camino both like it, as does IE7, but I'm not sure about IE6. But, then, who is?) Even better, the layout's all relative sized, so if you're a fan of large browser windows (as I am), or larger text, or both, it scales right. It may lack Teh Shiny

Wild Life is Ben and William's first novel, the story of how they met and the fireworks that ensue. It takes place before Firegrass, Coming Home, and Dirty Basement, so reading those isn't necessary to read Wild Life. (Though it never hurts) Chapter one is up for your reading pleasure.

There's more to serialization than just the time between chapters. That's what people think of, but in some ways its the least important bit. When you're writing for serialization for real you write differently than if you're writing a novel. Chapters in a story that's meant to be serialized are more like linked short stories; you've got a beginning, middle, and end (of sorts), with a hook to make you want to wait around a week or three for the next installment. Chapters in a novel, on the other hand, usually don't have that -- you don't need it, since the next chapter starts on the next page. In a lot of cases stories written for serialization don't read as well all in one go -- Dom's stuff is like that, for example. Plowing through all of one of his stories in a single sitting's tough, because there's just too damn much extraneous stuff in it, but it all works really nicely as a serial, where you read a chapter at a time. (This isn't a mandatory feature of serialized novels. Charles Dickens' works read well in a single sitting, even though they were written for serialization, though you can see the spots where collecting them into a single novel didn't work as well as you might want) Novels that're released chapter by chapter, on the other hand, have the problem where it's tough to keep an audience with widely spaced releases, since there really isn't that hook to drag people along. For those you really need to have more frequent releases, or expect that people won't really follow along with any interest until you've got a half dozen or more chapters out, since you need that much story for it to stick. As a reader, since I tend to want to read big chunks, I prefer novels to serials, but I read a lot, and with enthusiasm. For folks that're more casual readers the serials work better. As a writer I write novels, but I release chapters since I need the extra nudge having an unfinished story out there gives to my writing. I just do it knowing that there won't be as much interest in them as they go out as there might otherwise be, but that's okay. (Though with my stuff I do finish what I start, so short of me getting hit by a bus I'm not leaving unfinished stories lying around)

I think the article is pretty much right. I also think it's descriptive, rather than prophetic -- that is, it's pretty accurate describing what's happening now, not what must happen. Something that really needs to be emphasized is that guys, at least in the US, are not taught how to maintain a relationship. I expect this is true pretty much everywhere, but I don't know that for sure. Women, on the other hand, were (at least for the longest time) expected to handle it. Relationships require nurturing and attention, and that's what we tend to teach girls, both directly and by example. If you have two people in a relationship that don't know how to keep one going, well... they tend to not go. Also, a lot of what he talks about in the article has nothing to do with the fact that it's a gay couple, and much more to do with the fact that it's a guy couple. This was brought up a little, but not nearly enought. Men and women, on the whole, deal with conflict differently. You get a different dynamic between two men than you do between a man and a woman, or between two women. Yes, people are people (mostly) but the subtle things aren't the same, and that means you need a different emphasis sometimes, or you need to work harder on one or two things. The mention that guys tend to not do well on the fixing up afterwards was one of those. Finally, as Graeme pointed out, you can't discount the effect that kids and/or legal recognition have on a relationship. Been there and done that, and it makes a huge difference. It won't make bad things good, but it's definitely an extra bit of support and encouragement to try to fix things, rather than to walk away, and sometimes that's enough to really work out the problems in the relationship.

I've got the first chapter of Wild Life done, and it needs a quick read-through to make sure I haven't made any truly egregious grammar errors or used the word 'moment' more than eight times in a paragraph. Anyone up for frowning at it for a bit, and maybe the next chapter too if I finish it in the next few days? (I'm looking to have a backlog of both Wild Life and Carpe Diem chapters done before I start posting them)

I'm not sure I'd mix OTC with your prescription meds. It's probably OK, but definitely talk to either your doctor or a pharmacist before doing so. You'd really hate to have a nasty reaction or end up neutralizing one of the medications. Yogurt is good, as is cranberry juice in some cases. If you've had the yeast infection for more than a week or two, I don't know that I'd wait another two weeks for a follow-up if it's not responding to treatment. Fungal infections (and yes, yeast is a fungus) can be pretty nasty once they get systemic. We don't have the fungal equivalent of antibiotics -- it's mostly a matter of knocking them down and hoping your body fights it off. What can help is to get your immune system working better. Take a multi-vitamin daily, get out in the sun (or supplement with extra vitamin D if you can't), and exercise strenuously for half an hour or more a day. And yeah, you want to sweat when you exercise -- that level of exertion has, for most people, a significant positive effect on your immune system. (It's also handy to do for a week or two before flying, which isn't exactly apropos, but true nonetheless. I usually get sick if I don't)

Busted was never linked to from my authors page. It's only on the blog, and only in first draft form. (If shopping it around doesn't get me anywhere I'll start serializing the finished form on the site) I should sit down and put together the CSS for the site -- while I'm not looking for anything near as flashy as the zen garden stuff, some sane navigation, proper side bars, some background art, and stylesheets that are pretty enough would be nice. Maybe next week...

Since it's looking a little dated. 1993 dated, back when the best you could do with HTML was colors and text size. (Yeah, yeah, I remember building one of the original versions of Mosaic from source, and the NCSA http server. Hey, y'damn kids, get off of my lawn!) Given that tests the limits of my graphic arts prowess, it's not something I poke at much. That needs to change, though -- with Ben and William's first novel starting, plus Carpe Diem (finally!) starting up, and Busted getting shopped around as soon as it's finished I really need to get it spiffed up. This is where I always grumble at my geek aesthetic. I just don't have the style genes to make things look good, which is damned annoying. I mean, I know you can make web pages look nice (see, for example, the myriad different faces of the CSS Zen Garden to see what someone can do with just images and css) unfortunately I can't make 'em look nice. Or if I can I just don't have the patience or inclination to do it. I don't suppose anyone knows a web designer looking to reduce the amount of Ugly on the internet...

Ah, I need to double-check my board settings -- really sorry I missed your posting, Corvus. I'm glad you liked the story. Shorts like that are odd to write. They all come out in a rush, but only after sitting around and stewing for ages. Dunno for sure when the next one'll come around, but y'never know...