Ophania Media

The mutterings of a half-mad Canuck who writes stuff

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (an almost review)

October 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

You know, for the past week or two I’ve been walking around thinking I’d fallen at the first hurdle with this reading project. In a way I have – in that it’s taken me three weeks or so and I still haven’t finished the first book on the list – but the truth is, I don’t intend to finish it. So there.

I take this as a sign of growth, actually.

I really struggled with this book. I couldn’t force myself to be interested in any of the characters. None of them seem to actually do anything, and it felt very much like work to make myself pick the thing up and read it. Every time I did pick it up, half of my mind was occupied with thinking of things I’d rather be reading.

So I stopped.

I read about a third of the book before I put it down permanently. I’m sure I was probably only a few pages away from something interesting – some fascinating little character quirk or wrinkle of conversation – but I just couldn’t bear the thought of forcing myself past any more boring to get there.

And that’s a real step forward for me.

I used to be of the mind that if I started reading a book, no matter how much I disliked it, I would finish the damned thing. In fact, this is only the second novel in my life that I’ve started and not finished. The first was the fourth book in Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series which was so poorly written that I have to suspect it was published as a practical joke (on readers) or that Ms. Auel had some sort of ‘leverage’ on someone high up over at Random House.

The Death of the Heart is not nearly as bad as that. Bowen’s prose is competent if not terribly interesting and the book isn’t bad per se, it’s just that it isn’t very good, and I have a whole list of very good books ahead of me. So many of them, in fact, that it really accentuates my lack of interest in this one.

And life’s too short to spend it reading books you don’t like.

If you are interested in unsympathetic characters that talk in vague circles about uninteresting things and where nothing much happens, this book is very much for you. As for me, I’m moving on to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad which I’ve already started, and which I’m very excited to continue.

My Dirty Little Reading Habit (book reviews incoming)

August 16, 2024 / / 0 Comments

A while back I had begun working on a series of non-fiction books I called the Book Club Companion series. The idea was to read and review current popular fiction, and then write some pop-literary analysis with an eye towards helping folks who might want to discuss said books with others, but who don’t have the literary background to feel comfortable doing so.

The secondary goal, of course, was to give me an excuse to read more, and in particular read outside of my normal wheelhouse (Science Fiction and Epic Fantasy mostly).

That project has been mothballed indefinitely, mostly because Amazon doesn’t seem to understand what literary analysis is. They allowed me to publish and to offer the books for sale, but then disabled them in all of the stores and made it impossible to actually buy it. They say “our customers generally find this type of book to be unsatisfying”. Oh, well. I only wasted a couple of weeks in writing the first book, designing the cover templates and covers, editing, formatting, and publishing. We’ll just add this to the pile of reasons why Amazon makes me hope Hell is a real place.

In the meantime, I’ve come up with a clever plan to fill the gap. I’m just going to read a shitload of books and then review them here.

But what books to read?

Well, to get the ball rolling, I Googled up a few of those “Top 100 Novels of All Time”-style lists and consolidated a handful of them into one ginormous list. I included a couple of lists from Goodreads that looked interesting, as well as the Reader’s Digest Best Books of All Time list, a list of newer books, and a Sci-Fi and Fantasy themed one from NPR. Then I made a combined ranking to generate a list from best to least-best. Now that I have the master list, I can read them in least-best to best order.

Make sense?

Here’s the list:

  1. The Death of the Heart – Bowen, Elizabeth
  2. A Visit From the Goon Squad – Egan, Jennifer
  3. The Space Trilogy – Lewis, C.S.
  4. The Xanth Series – Anthony, Piers
  5. Falconer – Cheever, John
  6. The Kite Runner – Hosseini, Khaled
  7. An American Tragedy – Dreiser, Theodore
  8. Perdido Street Station – Mieville, China
  9. A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement – Powell, Anthony
  10. Doomsday Book – Willis, Connie
  11. Americanah – Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
  12. Under the Net – Murdoch, Iris
  13. Lucifer’s Hammer – Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry
  14. Loving – Green, Henry
  15. The Mars Trilogy – Robinson, Kim Stanley
  16. The Caves of Steel – Asimov, Isaac
  17. Wuthering Heights – Bronte, Emily
  18. The Assistant – Malamud, Bernard
  19. The Sportswriter – Ford, Richard
  20. A Fire Upon the Deep – Vinge, Vernor
  21. Sunshine – McKinley, Robin
  22. Dog Soldiers – Stone, Robert
  23. The Color Purple – Walker, Alice
  24. The Illustrated Man – Bradbury, Ray
  25. The Recognitions – Gaddis, William
  26. A Death in the Family – Agee, James
  27. Little Women – Alcott, Louisa May
  28. The Elric Saga – Moorcock, Michael
  29. The Outlander Series – Gabaldan, Diana
  30. The Berlin Stories – Isherwood, Christopher
  31. A Handful fo Dust – Waugh, Evelyn
  32. The Thrawn triogy – Zahn, Timothy
  33. The Sheltering Sky – Bowles, Paul
  34. The Year of Magical Thinking – Didion, Joan
  35. The Book of the New Sun – Wolfe, Gene
  36. The Codex Alera series – Butcher, Jim
  37. Call It Sleep – Roth, Henry
  38. Hamlet – Shakespeare, William
  39. The World According to Garp – Irving, John
  40. At Swim-Two-Birds – O’Brien, Flann
  41. Anathem – Stephenson, Neal
  42. Herzog – Bellow, Saul
  43. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Murakami, Haruki
  44. The Crystal Cave – Stewart, Mary
  45. The Culture Series – Banks, Iian M.
  46. The Adventures of Augie March – Bellow, Saul
  47. The Sot-Weed Factor – Barth, John
  48. Between the World and Me – Coates, Ta-Nehisi
  49. The Eyre Affair – Fforde, Jasper
  50. The Malazan Book of the Fallen series – Erikson, Steven
  51. The Man Who Loved Children – Stead, Christina
  52. The Stranger – Camus, Albert
  53. Wicked – Maguire, Gregory
  54. Housekeeping – Robinson, Marilynne
  55. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Bradbury, Ray
  56. The Day of the Locust – West, Nathaniel
  57. Deliverance – Dickey, James
  58. The Dispossessed – LeGuin, Ursula K.
  59. Money – Amis, Martin
  60. The Kushiel’s Legacy series – Carey, Jacqueline
  61. The Right Stuff – Wolfe, Tom
  62. Rendezvous With Rama – Clarke, Arthur C.
  63. Appointment in Samarra – O’Hara, John
  64. Tropic of Cancer – Miller, Henry
  65. The Diamond Age – Stephenson, Neal
  66. Old Man’s War – Scalzi, John
  67. The Confessions of Nat Turner – Styron, William
  68. The Moviegoer – Percy, Walker
  69. The Legend of Drizzt Series – Salvatore, R.A.
  70. Pale Fire – Nabokov, Vladimir
  71. A Journey to the Center of the Earth – Verne, Jules
  72. The Heart of the Matter – Greene, Graham
  73. The Way of Kings – Sanderson, Brandon
  74. The Golden Notebook – Lessing, Doris
  75. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Niffenegger, Audrey
  76. The Farseer Trilogy – Hobb, Robin
  77. The Conan The Barbarian Series – Howard, R.E.
  78. Rabbit, Run – Updike, John
  79. The Shannara Trilogy – Brooks, Terry
  80. Ubik – Dick, Philip K.
  81. The Golden Compass – Pullman, Philip
  82. Lucky Jim – Amis, Kingsley
  83. The Night Watchmen – Erdrich, Louise
  84. The Riftwar Saga – Feist, Raymond E.
  85. Play It As It Lays – Didion, Joan
  86. The Giver – Lowry, Lois
  87. I Am Legend – Matheson, Richard
  88. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Clarke, Susanna
  89. A House for Mr Biswas – Naipaul, V.S.
  90. The Sword of Truth – Goodkind, Terry
  91. The Painted Bird – Kosinski, Jerry
  92. The Joy Luck Club – Tan, Amy
  93. Under the Volcano – Lowry, Malcolm
  94. The Mote in God’s Eye – Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry
  95. Going Postal – Pratchett, Terry
  96. Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon, Thomas
  97. The Vorkosigan Saga – Bujold, Lois McMaster
  98. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao – Diaz, Junot
  99. White Teeth – Smith, Zadie
  100. Rubyfruit Jungle – Brown, Rita Mae
  101. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever – Donaldson, Stephen R.
  102. Red Harvest – Hammett, Dashiell
  103. Small Gods – Pratchett, Terry
  104. The Book Thief – Zusak, Markus
  105. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Chabon, Michael
  106. The Forever War – Haldeman, Joe
  107. Wide Sargasso Sea – Rhys, Jean
  108. The Last Unicorn – Beagle, Peter S.
  109. The Age of Innocence – Warton, Edith
  110. World War Z – Brooks, Max
  111. Homegoing – Gyasi, Yaa
  112. The Crying of Lot 49 – Pynchon, Thomas
  113. The Power and the Glory – Greene, Graham
  114. Cryptonomicon – Stephenson, Neal
  115. Stardust – Gaimen, Neil
  116. American Pastoral – Roth, Philip
  117. The Hyperion Cantos – Simmons, Dan
  118. The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Wilder, Thornton
  119. Death Comes for the Archbishop – Cather, Willa
  120. And Then There Were None – Christie, Agatha
  121. Contact – Sagan, Carl
  122. Childhood’s End – Clarke, Arthur C.
  123. Out of Africa – Dinesen, Isak
  124. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Spark, Muriel
  125. Neverwhere – Gaimen, Neil
  126. Of Human Bondage – Maugham, W. Somerset
  127. The Once and Future King – White, T.H.
  128. The Silmarillion – Tolkien, J.R.R.
  129. Revolutionary Road – Yates, Richard
  130. The Left Hand of Darkness – LeGuin, Ursula K.
  131. East of Eden – Steinbeck, John
  132. Infinite Jest – Wallace, David Foster
  133. White Noise – DeLillo, Don
  134. Ringworld – Niven, Larry
  135. Middlesex – Eugenides, Jeffrey
  136. The Mistborn Series – Sanderson, Brandon
  137. Brideshead Revisited – Waugh, Evelyn
  138. The Mists of Avalon – Bradley, Marion Zimmer
  139. Naked Lunch – Burroughs, William S.
  140. The Belgariad – Eddings, David
  141. Love Medicine – Erdrich, Louise
  142. The Road – McCarth, Cormac
  143. Blood Meridian – McCarthy, Cormac
  144. Go Tell It on the Mountain – Baldwin, James
  145. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – McCullers, Carson
  146. The Chronicles of Amber – Zelazny, Roger
  147. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – le Carre, John
  148. The War of the Worlds – Wells, H.G.
  149. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – Fowles, John
  150. Flowers for Algernon – Keys, Daniel
  151. Interpreter of Maladies – Lahiri, Jhumpa
  152. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Thompson, Hunter S.
  153. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Verne, Jules
  154. To the Lighthouse – Woolf, Virginia
  155. Light in August – Faulkner, William
  156. The Time Machine – Wells, H.G.
  157. Ragtime – Doctorow, E.L.
  158. A Canticle for Leibowitz – Miller, Walter M.
  159. Cutting For Stone – Verghese, Abraham
  160. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Heinlein, Robert
  161. Native Son – Wright, Richard
  162. The Blind Assassin – Atwood, Margaret
  163. Dragonflight – McCaffrey, Anne
  164. Charlotte’s Web – White, E.B.
  165. Watership Down – Adams, Richard
  166. All the King’s Men – Warren, Robert Penn
  167. The Sound and the Fury – Faulkner, William
  168. Starship Troopers – Heinlein, Robert
  169. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
  170. The Sandman Series – Gaimen, Neil
  171. I, Claudius – Graves, Robert
  172. A Passage to India – Forster, E.M.
  173. Cat’s Cradle – Vonnegut, Kurt
  174. The Martian Chronicles – Bradbury, Ray
  175. Possession – Byatt, A.S.
  176. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass – Carroll, Lewis
  177. The Fault in Our Stars – Green, John
  178. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Hurston, Zora Neale
  179. The Stand – King, Stephen
  180. Selected Stories – Munro, Alice
  181. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Clarke, Arthur C.
  182. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – Rowling, J.K.
  183. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Eggers, Dave
  184. The Dark Tower Series – King, Stephen
  185. Mrs. Dalloway – Woolf, Virginia
  186. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Dick, Philip K.
  187. The Corrections – Franzen, Jonathan
  188. Angela’s Ashes – McCourt, Frank
  189. Frankenstein – Shelley, Mary
  190. The Kingkiller Chronicles – Rothfuss, Patrick
  191. Great Expectations – Dickens, Charles
  192. Stranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein, Robert
  193. I, Robot – Asimov, Isaac
  194. In Cold Blood – Capote, Truman
  195. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Kesey, Ken
  196. The Wheel of Time Series – Jordan, Robert & Sanderson, Brandon
  197. The Princess Bride – Goldman, William
  198. Gone With the Wind – Mitchell, Margaret
  199. Pride and Prejudice – Austen, Jane
  200. American Gods – Gaimen, Neil
  201. Atonement – McEwan, Ian
  202. The Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck, John
  203. A Wrinkle in Time – L’Engle, Madeleine
  204. The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov, Isaac
  205. Lord of the Flies – Golding, William
  206. Things Fall Apart – Achebe, Chinua
  207. Brave New World – Huxley, Aldous
  208. The Sun Also Rises – Hemingway, Ernest
  209. The Shining – King, Stephen
  210. A Song of Ice and Fire – Martin, George R.R.
  211. Portnoy’s Complaint – Roth, Philip
  212. Valley of the Dolls – Susann, Jacqueline
  213. Ender’s Game – Card, Orson Scott
  214. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Adams, Douglas
  215. Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, Leo
  216. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – Lewis, C.S.
  217. The Big Sleep/The Long Goodbye – Chandler, Raymond
  218. Midnight’s Children – Rushdie, Salman
  219. Never Let Me Go – Ishiguro, Kazuo
  220. The Great Gatsby – Fitzgerald, F. Scott
  221. Snow Crash – Stephenson, Neal
  222. On the Road – Kerouac, Jack
  223. Neuromancer – Gibson, William
  224. The Catcher in the Rye – Salinger, J.D.
  225. Lolita – Nabokov, Vladimir
  226. Invisible Man – Ellison, Ralph
  227. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. – Blume, Judy
  228. A Clockwork Orange – Burgess, Anthony
  229. Catch-22 – Heller, Joseph
  230. Beloved – Morrison, Toni
  231. The Handmaid’s Tale – Atwood, Margaret
  232. Farenheit 451 – Bradbury, Ray
  233. Animal Farm – Orwell, George
  234. Dune – Herbert, Frank
  235. To Kill A Mockingbird – Lee, Harper
  236. Slaughterhouse Five – Vonnegut, Kurt
  237. 1984 – Orwell, George
  238. The Lord of the Rings – Tolkien, J.R.R.

I’m looking forward to reading quite a few of these – some for the first time, more than a few for the second or third. In many cases I’ve read other books by an author on this list, but not the specific book listed. There are a few of these books I am very much *not* looking forward to reading. I remember loving A Wrinkle in Time when I read it as a child (I was probably 5 or 6 years old at the time). I tried reading it again a few years ago and found it unreadable. I’ll do my best to give it another shot. I have never liked The Giver. I taught it once to an ESL class of teenagers. They seemed to like it. Every page was like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Again, I’ll see what I can do.

There are a few books on the list that I haven’t read, and that I suspect I will not enjoy. I will do my best to finish all of the books on this list, but I’m not going to punish myself by forcing myself to read a book I actively hate. I may bail on one or two of the books on the list. Maybe even three.

As always, you are cordially invited to read alongside me as I make my way through the list. I will be going through in the order listed above, so you’ll be able to figure out what I’m working on at any given time. Hopefully, there will be some lively discussion in the comments of each review. And speaking of comments, let me know what you think of my list in the comments below.

Happy reading!

Map News

August 7, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Just a quick update today on the progress of my little world building adventure – the one I mentioned in this post.

I have just finished setting up the initial structure of my world’s map, a job which I suspect will feel the most like work of all the worldbuilding things I have to do, and now all that’s left is to put all the things that go on the map on the map, and to start writing all the articles that will explain all those things.

Initially I’d decided to use a fairly basic (but pretty) map of London published in about 1815. This was, of course, 70 years before my world is set, but I was willing to accept the inaccuracies this caused. I couldn’t find a better map that I could use legally, and I felt I could explain it away with the idea that my world is an alternate version of the real one and is under no obligation to be historically accurate in any but the most passing of ways.

So that was the map I was using, and I’d gotten quite a ways along in the process. I’d laid out the Metropolitan Police districts, located and pinned most of the police stations, marked out several of the neighborhoods and gang territories (some authentically, and some.. creatively), and I had each section of the main map linked to a more detailed, higher resolution map of just that part of it.

It was pretty nifty.

And then I discovered that there actually were downloadable images of Charles Booth’s Poverty maps of London (1898-9) which were both far more detailed and informative than the map I’d been using, and also within a few years of when Lunden is set.

You see, dear reader, early on I’d found on online version of the poverty maps overlaid upon the very shiny Google map of the same area that allows one to phase back and forth between antiquity and modernity. It is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anywhere on the site to download the original map images. Not until, on a whim, I decided to Google for a downloadable version and found myself in a very odd section of the LSE website, behind a sign that read “Beware of Leopard”, where the original images were just sitting there, waiting for me to grab them. And grab them I did.

That’s where I encountered an even bigger problem with using the Booth maps. It’s maps. Plural.

So I spent the next three solid days in Krita, cropping, stretching, layering, adjusting, and attempting to get all 12 separate pieces of what I hoped I could turn into one map to line up nicely. I almost succeeded, and in the end I decided that almost was probably good enough. There are a few places on the map where you can see (if you zoom in closely enough) that things don’t quite line up, but on World Anvil I’ve used a lower resolution version of the whole map (the full res version is more than 360MB) where you can’t really zoom in that far anyway, and clicking on that map links you to the appropriate panel which, of course, looks perfectly fine.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, head to https://www.worldanvil.com/w/lunden-ophania/map/349848d9-cda8-49e4-8f71-fce2ad4957d1 and see what all the fuss is about. It’s been an enormous amount of work so far, but entirely worth it in my opinion. Oh, and if you want access to all the material this map represents for roleplaying , writing, or just reading purposes, pop by my Patreon and sign up. You’ll be supporting my work, and getting early (or exclusive) access to a whole plethora of awesome stuff.

I Think I’ve Finally Set Up Subscriptions Properly

August 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The title says it all, really.

Some of you might be aware that once upon a time I was using Feedburner to run an RSS feed so that people could subscribe to the blog. Google, of course, has now yeeted their support for Feedburner (several years ago, actually, but I haven’t exactly been maintaining the blog properly these past few years so it took me a while to catch on) which left me not only with no way to let people subscribe to the blog, but also with no one who was previously subscribed to the blog still subscribed to the blog.

Annoying!

So then I did some Google-fu and discovered that WordPress includes a built-in email subscription thinger, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I hadn’t just used that in the first place. So I set that up. And then I found out why I hadn’t used it in the first place (and why no one uses it, as it happens).

It doesn’t work.

Oh sure, you can set up the form. You can put it in a widget on the sidebar of every page. You can enter an email address in it. It will even send you a confirmation email asking if you meant to subscribe. That’s as far as it goes, unfortunately. It doesn’t record your email in a list anywhere, and it never sends you another email to let you know I’ve posted a new post. Which is sort of its only job.

I also didn’t realise it wasn’t working until a few people told me they’d subscribed to the blog but weren’t getting any posts delivered to them.

Now, if you’re reading this, you’ll notice that there’s a form in the top right of the page that lets you enter your email and subscribe. It looks different to how it used to look. That’s because it is different. This one works. (I think)

In order to get this new subscription thing up and running I had to sign up for a service, edit the DNS information on my web host, create forms, create lists, create email templates… it was an awful lot of work for what you’d think should be a pretty simple thing. It wasn’t at all a simple thing, and so I hope you’ll consider making use of it and subscribing to the blog.

I’ve set it up to send out one email a week (on Thursday) with all the new posts from that week. The way I see it, more often might get annoying and less often won’t give me the attention I so desperately crave.

What’s In My Toolbox?

July 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

If anyone ever asks me a question about my writing process, I like to think they will probably ask me what tools I use to get things done (or fail to get things done, as is more often the case). No one has ever asked me this question, or really any question about my writing, but nonetheless in this post I’ll go through a quick list an exhaustive list of the things I use in my writing, with a brief description of why and how I use them.

Just in case anyone ever wants to know.

Pen and Paper

Yes, that’s right. I’m old school.

I have an A4-sized (8.5×11 for the North Americans in the room) clipboard with a small stack of copy paper (80gsm for those keeping score) on my desk at all times. My pen of choice is the Uniball Eye (or the Snowhite Galaxy which is a clone of the Unball) 0.5 roller pen. The part number is Mitsubishi UB-150 if you’re interested in picking some up.

I find I plan a lot better on paper than I do on a screen. Ideas flow more freely and are of a generally higher quality when I’m handwriting. Oh, and yes – I write in cursive.

Software

ClickUp

I’m an idiot who can’t seem to focus on fewer than 5 projects at a time, so I need something to keep track of all the bits and bobs I’m working on. This is where ClickUp comes in.

The free version is honestly more than enough for a single person operation such as myself, but I pay for the first paid tier just so I can have Gantt charts. I love me a Gantt chart. It’s a pretty straightforward project management platform, and it keeps my tasks available to me on all of my devices. I’d be lost without it.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a fairly straightforward markdown editor. It is also one of the most flexible and powerful note-taking and knowledge management systems ever created by mortal man. I have to admit I’ve drunk of the Obsidian kool-aid.

I have no regrets.

I use Obsidian to keep track of story ideas, plot structures, stuff for my day job, information for online classes I’m taking, information for online classes I’m creating… Basically, anything I don’t want to have to keep in my brain all the time, but that I’ll need to have in my brain at some later time goes into Obsidian. I don’t want to take the time to go into details on its use here, but it is so very well worth the Google if you are at all interested in learning things and keeping track of information.

Scrivener

I mean, of course I do.

I’ve thoroughly tested played around with other options: Wavemaker Cards, Obsidian (for drafting of prose rather than just for knowledge management), yWriter, iA Writer (for writing on my e-Ink Android tablet), and even some online services, though I am fundamentally opposed to storing my work only in someone else’s cloud. Basically, if it comes up as an alternative to Scrivener in a Google search, and it isn’t Apple only, I’ve tried it. I keep coming back to Scrivener. Even though it doesn’t run on Android (more on that later)

Aeon Timeline

This is a recent addition to my process (like, yesterday recent) and is largely the impetus for this blog post because it forced me to reconsider my entire writing process from start to finish.

Aeon Timeline has been around for a while, and I actually bought version 2 back in 2016, but didn’t find it useful enough to bother with it much. Enter two of my current flock of projects: “Tomorrow”, and my Interactive Fiction Lunden novel.

Tomorrow is a set of three concurrent novellas whose characters never directly interact (much) but whose storylines affect each other a great deal. I will need to make sure that all of the various things happen in a logical timeframe relative to each other.

The Interactive Fiction novel is, as the name suggests, interactive. I’m also planning to write four different stories, with four different protagonists, where all four interact with each other and the reader can choose which of the protagonists to inhabit. That means it’s going to be rife with complicated interactions that are dependent on reader choices. It’s a total mindfuck to plan. Aeon Timeline should help tremendously in keeping all the details sensibly organized.

Twine

Speaking of the Interactive Fiction novel(s) – I’ll be writing them in Twine. Twine is a piece of software designed for the creation of interactive fiction. I haven’t done any more than install it and poke around randomly a bit, but it looks like it’s exactly what I need in order to do what I want to do. I’ll keep you updated as things develop.

Hardware

Keyboard

I take my keyboard very seriously. About two years ago I took a deep dive into the world of custom mechanical keyboards. I tried just about every style and variety of case, switch, keycap, and layout you can think of to find out what exactly works best for me.

My overall favourite is the Keydous NJ80-AP with Keychron kPro Mint 65g switches and my Autumn Fog clone OEM keycaps. I own three of this keyboard, though I built one of them out with Outemu silent whites for when I’m working in an environment that wouldn’t appreciate my clackitty-clacking away.

This will all make perfect sense to any other keyboard nerds out there, and absolutely none to anyone else.

For when I need to be portable (though I almost never need to be portable, I have Keychron K7 Pro (reds, of course) which is surprisingly useable stock. It’s tiny and smol and I like it more than I thought I would.

Computers (traditional)

I have a desktop computer with very beefy (for three years ago) specs and dual 27″ monitors on swivel arms (and a third 13″ monitor in my vocal booth) because I do video content creation as well as writing.

My laptop is a Acer Swift 5, which was one or two versions behind current when I bought it. I chose the older one because it had a less powerful graphics card which means an hour or two more battery life in real-world use cases. It also does video out via usb-c, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s a tiny little thing and replaces my old Dell XPS 15 which now lives in the music room and is used for music production almost exclusively.

Computers (non-traditional)

Display

In combination with my tiny little laptop, I use a pair of XREAL Air 2 Pro AR glasses, generally with the Beam accessory. This is why it was important for my laptop to output video via usb-c. The glasses project a very large, reasonably crisp screen in front of me, and with the beam I can anchor it in space wherever I choose. The pro 2 version (which replaced my old version 1s) also have electrochromic dimming, so when I’m writing I can darken them completely and focus on my main screen and when I’m doing admin work I can clear them up and go dual monitor with my laptop screen.

If I’m gonna write science fiction I should go full cyborg, right?

Tablet

I have two Boox e-ink android tablets. The 10″ Note Air lives in my vocal booth now, and I use it for scripts and books I’m narrating. My 13″ Max 3 is my workhorse. It’s A4 sized, so I can read most pdf files at native resolution. I can also split the screen and put something I’m editing on one side and take notes on the other. The handwriting recognition is almost flawless, so I can actually do a lot of planning and that type of work on it and then export my work as copy/paste-able text which I can then throw into scrivener or obsidian. Hell, it’s a full-fledged android tablet. I have Obsidian installed on it. I can write stuff directly into Obsidian.

This device, by the way, is the reason I’m annoyed that Scrivener doesn’t have even a bare-bones Android version. The e-ink screen on this thing is a joy to use. I can connect my keyboard to it via Bluetooth and type away on a screen that doesn’t hurt my eyes (even over the course of an entire day). If Scrivener had a useable Android app, I’d have my end-game writing setup immediately sorted.

Phone

When I replaced my phone last time, I made a move from my OnePlus 7tPro, which was my third OnePlus phone in a row (and I don’t upgrade my phone more than once every 4 years or so ) to the Samsung Galaxy S22+. I did this for one simple reason: Dex.

Dex is a feature of (some, most… I’m not sure) Samsung phones that provides the user with a full desktop computing experience when the phone is connected to an external display. My XREAL glasses are an external display. It is a beautifully functional pairing.

If I’m on the go and I have my phone and my glasses (almost always the case) I can connect them and have instant productivity. I don’t have Scrivener on my phone, of course, but I do have google docs. I also have the microphone built in to the glasses and I can set the phone to work as a trackpad when using Dex. This means I can open up a google doc, and dictate through my Google keyboard’s speech to text option using the microphone next to my face. If I have a scene I want to draft, or some ideas I want to flesh out while I’m on the go (something more involved than just a list of things, which I can do more easily with just the phone), this works exceptionally well.

As a bit of an aside, once I had the phone I decided to replace my fitbit with the Galaxy watch 5 and got a pair of the Buds 2 pro because I wanted to see what an Apple level of device integration felt like and I will never willingly use an Apple product. Reader, it changed my life. I highly recommend it. It almost makes me understand Apple users.

Okay guys, it’s time to wrap it up…

So that’s all of the tools that I use regularly to get my writing work done.

This kind of blog post is what I do when I’m avoiding actually doing any of that writing work.

If you are interested in more information on any of the individual things I mentioned here, drop me a comment and let me know. I’d be happy to go into more detail. Also make sure to subscribe

to get my future posts delivered right to the burner email address of your choice.

Oh, also, if you want to gain unlimited access to all of my world building resources (for a writing project of your own, perhaps) and a minimum of two new short stories a month from yours truly, head over to my Patreon and sign up for one of my reasonably priced tiers. You’ll be helping to support my work and helping me to entertain you all at the same time and all for the price of a coffee or two a month.

Cheers!

Something Nifty This Way Waddles

June 30, 2024 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been chipping away lately at several aspects of a number of inter-related projects that, collectively, make up one doozy of a major endeavor and I thought it might be fun to update both of you on what those projects are and how they inter-relate. Or something to that effect.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here previously or not, but I’m taking a deep dive in to world building. At the moment I’m building out the world for my Bloodlines novel – 1885 alternate-timeline Victorian London with monsters and magic. It’s called Lunden, and I’m having a glorious time fleshing out my map and deciding which things should be historically accurate, which things totally unique, and which things somewhere in the middle.

This worldbuilding project is happening on World Anvil, and will include a bunch of tools to help other writers write stories in my world, as well as materials for TTRPG players and DMs to run campaigns in good ol’ Lunden. I’ll eventually have stuff for Pathfinder (d20), Open d6, and FATE role-playing systems.

The reason I’m doing all this world-building work is partly to help me with my writing, but also so that I can offer access to it via my Patreon, which I’m currently in the process of setting up. In an ideal world, I’ll get enough financial support from my patrons that I can really focus on writing and other creative things.

In order to promote the Patreon (and my work in general), I’ve also started streaming again (or will have done by the time you read this). I’ll be on Kick and on Twitch, as well as on YouTube live (I think – I haven’t gotten that working yet).

I tried streaming some world building sessions here and there over the past few weeks, but I wasn’t happy with how that worked out. I really need deep concentration for world building in a way that I don’t need as much for writing. When I’m writing I can dip in and out without losing too much momentum, but for world building I really can’t work that way. I’m also (and this is probably a more important issue) bouncing around between multiple windows and so forth much more when world building than when I’m writing, and that makes it awkward to live stream. So I think I’ll stick to writing live streams and leave the world building stuff to when I’m all by my lonesome.

And on the topic of writing, I have a new writing project that I’ve just started actively working on (plotting and story structure stuff) today.

I had initially planned to write a series of more-or-less unconnected short stories set in Lunden as a way of exploring the world and establishing the look and feel of the place. I have forty or so loosey-goosey plot outlines locked and loaded, ready to go. I spent weeks organizing and tidying them up. So naturally I’ve decided to do something completely sideways to all of that and I’ll be writing an interactive novel (or novella – I’m still not at all sure how long it’s going to be) that has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned short story plot outlines.

The plan at the moment is to write four separate versions of the story, each allowing the reader to “play” a different main character who is navigating the same general set of events. My plan is to publish each of the versions separately, and then to combine them into one mahooosive omnibus version where the reader can choose which character to play at the beginning. I’ll be using Twine to write and publish the stories, and hopefully will be able to publish them in a few places. I’m even going to look at how I might package them up for the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

So yeah, that’s what I’m up to these days. Big things are starting to happen and I can only hope that I’ll be able to keep a good head of steam going on all of these moving parts. I’ll try to keep you all up to date on my progress as I progress.

The First Draft

February 15, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The other day, during my quasi-random internet wanderings (probably on facebook, really) I stumbled upon this quote, which is attributed to Sir Terry of Pratchett.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Sir Terry of Pratchett

At first blush, this seems just another empty, insipid bit of pop-inspirational drivel – like most of what so many people circulate around the internet. But Sir Terry is one of the wisest and most insightful people to have put words to page over the last two centuries. Sir Terry wrote 41 novels in the Discworld series, 39 of which provide deeply cutting satire and an incisive examination of various aspects of Western society that the vast majority of people take for granted as “just the way things are” (all while simultaneously being absolutely hilarious and charming and lovely), and 2 of which were hamstrung to varying degrees by his dementia and, in the case of the final novel, by having been completed by someone who was not Sir Terry (which in no way tarnishes his legacy). Sir Terry doesn’t do drivel. Sir Terry doesn’t do insipid. If Terry Pratchett said a thing, then it is worth considering that thing, and so I did. And it changed how I think about writing in a pretty fundamental way.

You see, I’ve always been very much a plotting sort of writer. I love me an outline. This is something that’s true of many writers, and in particular of full-time professional writers (something that I still aspire to become). If you are writing for a living, you need to be organized and focused. You don’t have time to faff around for months hammering out a sloppy mess of a first draft, most of which you’ll have to throw away anyway, right? You need to know where you’re going, and you need to get there in a reasonably efficient manner. Pantsing your way through a first draft might possibly be fun and interesting and whatever, but it is not efficient. Outlining gets you there faster and more easily.

I’m fond of saying that everyone outlines, it’s just that some people do it differently. Plotters outline by using bullet lists or the snowflake method or various other tools to cut through the cruft and get to the meat of their story quickly so that they can get down to the business of actually writing that story as quickly as possible. Pantsers also outline, but they do this by wandering their way through hundreds of pages of prose. A plotter’s outline looks like the skeleton of a story, a pantser’s outline looks like a story. But it isn’t a story – not yet – it’s just an outline that’s shaped like story. I mean, I’ve always felt that by building a well-thought-out outline before starting my first draft, I was even taking care of a lot of the work that a first draft is supposed to accomplish. Effectively, my outlined first draft should be the equivalent of a pantser’s second or third draft, right?

But that’s not what an outline does.

An outline doesn’t remove the need for a first draft, because the first draft is just you telling yourself the story, and an outline doesn’t tell you the story. An outline just shows you the shape of the story. Outlining might help you produce a more focused and cohesive first draft, but at the end of the day, both the plotters and the pantser’s first drafts are doing the same job.

One analogy I quite like for this is a sculpting analogy. I’m skeptical of those (like Stephen King) who claim that their stories already exist in the universe and that the job of the writer is to uncover them, to dig them up from the dirt of the ether and present them to the world, but I find this sculpting analogy compelling. It goes like this: the first draft is the writer gathering the raw materials, the marble or whatever that will become the sculpture. Once the materials are gathered, the writer’s job, to paraphrase Michelangelo, is to chip away all the parts that aren’t the story.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be sticking to my outlining and my planning. I find it gives me a much better idea of which parts of the first draft are the story and which ones aren’t. Pantsing gets you your block of marble, but plotting gets you a statue-shaped block of marble and I’d rather start that much closer to where I’m trying to go. Going forward, though, I probably won’t spend nearly as much time nailing down the details in the outline. The level of detail I have historically put into my outlines is largely a waste of time, because the outline is not the place where I should be telling myself the story. That’s what the first draft is for.

Breaking Bad – Season 2, Episode 1

January 16, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The first episode of a new season is an interesting sort of animal. It has a lot of different hats it has to wear (yes, that was on purpose) and some of them are contradictory. Starting off a new season, it’s important to capture, or re-capture, the interest and excitement with which you ended the previous season. In this type of show you also need to raise the stakes in some way. On top of all that, you also need to lay the groundwork for the upcoming season’s storylines, character development, plot twists and cetera. Oh, and all of this needs to happen with a story that is already in progress.

Tall order, that.

The opening scene is a pretty effective, though perhaps unimaginative way of accomplishing the first task. Replay season 1’s closing scene and use it to remind the audience of exactly where we were when last we met. It reminds us that when it comes to the evils in the world, there are levels. It also reminds us that Walt and Jessie are now very firmly in over their heads, but it reads a bit differently at the beginning of a season than it does at the end of one. As the ending of a season, it comes across as “Oh, holy shit, now what?”. At the start of a season it’s “Oh, holy shit, now what?“. It’s an important distinction. The stakes seem to have been raised significantly and our focus is subtly shifted from what just happened to what’s going to happen next. Walt and Jessie are now playing in the big leagues and they will either rise to the occasion or they will be utterly destroyed.

Now, when it comes to the groundwork for the upcoming storylines, I have a bit of an admission to make, dear reader. I haven’t quite managed to keep my knowledge of the show as spoiler-free as I would have liked. I have stumbled across the odd bit of information here and there such that I know there was a plane crash, though I’m not sure specifically how that will play into the plot of this season. I did catch, however, that the burned teddy bear in the swimming pool was detritus from the crash, and I’m pretty sure the $737,000 that Walt calculates he needs is a reference to a Boing 737. I also know that at some point there will be characters named Saul, Mike, and Gus Fring (thanks a lot YouTube algorithm), though again I have no idea when they show up, or what role they will play in the story.

In terms of threads that have been unplucked from the show’s frayed hem in this episode and are ready to be unravelled over the course of the next 11 episodes or so: we have Walt almost spilling the beans (also on purpose – sorry, not sorry) to Skyler; Walt leaving all the money in the box of diapers where Skyler is almost certain to find it (thereby forcing Walt to finish spilling the beans); the identity of the people who are surveilling Walt and Jessie (probably the big players that Hank mentions, whose toes are likely to get stepped on by someone who needs that much precursor); and of course the abduction of Walt and Jessie by Tuco, who probably thinks those big players are out to get him as he likely doesn’t know what happened to Gonzo other than that he suddenly disappeared.

I’m a bit less interested in the whole Marie/Hank/Skyler shoplifting storyline. It feels a bit tacked on to me, like it was meant to be a piece of smoke and mirrors distraction in season 1 and now the writers aren’t sure what to do with it. It’s important that we not lose sight of the fact that this is all happening as the result of Walt’s choices, and that rather than saving his family, those choices are more or less destroying it, which Skyler’s breakdown in front of Hank demonstrates, but adding in the conflict with her sister really only serves to muddy the waters unnecessarily in my opinion.

All in all, a solid episode that felt a bit slow in places, but laid some very interesting groundwork that I hope to see pay off handsomely in the next several episodes.

Breaking Bad – Season 1, Episode 7

January 7, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Interesting widening of the scope in this episode. We have Hank’s illegal Cuban cigars, Marie’s shoplifting (presumably some form of compulsive kleptomania-esque behaviour), Walter and Jessie’s chemical robbery and meth production, and then Tuco’s sociopathic murder of one of his own henchmen. As Joe Rogan is fond of saying, “there are levels to this”.

We are presented with an interesting spectrum of law-breakage. As Walter says, “it’s interesting where we choose to draw the line.” We, the audience, are also being invited to decide where we draw the line. What are we willing to accept? Is it acceptable for a DEA agent to use his position to get goods that he could arrest another man for possessing? Few people take the boycott of Cuba very seriously these days, but how do we feel about Hank’s abuse of power and position? Is it acceptable for Marie to steal from shops? Does it make it more acceptable if she is mentally ill and unable to control herself? What about Walter’s activities? Do his motives make a difference? Do we believe that his motives are what he says they are?

And then there’s Tuco. While the other three examples could realistically be seen as examples of generally lawful people transgressing the law – pushing the envelope in some way – Tuco is a clear example of someone who lives entirely outside of the law. Jessie’s description of him to Walter in the RV is spot on. He lives outside the law, and outside of society. He represents the extreme end of the spectrum of transgression.

There is also the theme of the forbidden fruit tasting the sweetest. Walter and Skylar’s back seat rodeo was “so damned good”, as Walter points out, because it is illegal. The risk of getting caught adds some spice to it all.

Walter’s conversation with Hank about the arbitrary nature of deciding what is legal and what is illegal is, of course, the flimsiest of strawmen. It is obvious that some things are illegal for very good reasons. It is a halfhearted attempt to justify to himself that what he is doing “isn’t really so bad after all, is it?” His question to Skylar near the end of the episode about what she would do if it had been him shoplifting tiaras is a pretty clear indication that he knows he can’t keep his new hobby a secret from his wife forever. At the very least, if all of this money is going to go to his family she will find out about it at that point. Her response is also telling. I’m looking forward to seeing how that dynamic plays out over the next few seasons.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this episode, though, is the expression on Walt and Jessie’s faces at the end of the episode as they watch Tuco’s driver load the body of the other man into the car. The stunned horror on their faces is a clear indication that this is their first clear glimpse of how deep the depravity rabbit hole goes. What a great way to end the episode and to end the season. Season 2 looks to be very compelling.

Breaking Bad – Season 1, Episode 6

June 7, 2019 / / 0 Comments

There are two major things I feel are worth talking about from this episode; the flash-forward (that’s the technical term for when foreshadowing and spoilers have a baby) at the beginning of the episode, and the masterful way in which Walter White’s internal conflict is manifesting in the world.

They are kind of the same thing, actually.

I recently read about research into the actual effect spoilers have on an audience. Turns out, knowing the ending actually enhances the enjoyment of a story. I guess that’s why Shakespeare is still popular after all these years. The reasoning behind this idea is that when you know what’s going to happen, you are free to enjoy the journey more. You can pay attention to the subtle nuance, the interplay of characters, you can appreciate the sheer inevitability of events and oh my god, the tension you can build.

I spent the whole episode knowing that, despite Walt’s admonition of no more violence at the beginning, he was going to end the episode with a bag of money in his hand and a building of exploded scumbags in the middle distance behind him. Every event in the episode, every decision, that image was brought back to mind in the back of my head. When Jessie called to say he had an in with Tuco, when he told Tuco he wanted money up front, when Walt found out what happened to Jessie…

That feeling of inevitability is what makes the anguish Walt feels at the end so effective. He didn’t want to be ‘that guy’ – he doesn’t want to be ‘that guy’. But he is that guy, and he had no real choice about it.

I still really expect that at some point Walt is going to embrace that part of himself, but until that time I’ll enjoy the hell out of his internal anguish.

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