So, June is over. Did I fail at Camp NaNo?
Well, that depends on how you look at it. I didn't manage to get 50,000 words written in a month. Work was crazy, various things intervened, insert the usual excuses here.
That said, I wouldn't say I failed. I did manage to get at least a handful of words written almost every day. For me, this is a big improvement.
I tend to just dive into something, and revel in staying in it as long as I can without coming up for air. Like swimming, when I do come up, I spend a lot of time just trying to catch my breath, then I want to do something else for a while before diving back in again.
I do this in a lot of areas, not just writing. I tend to bounce from hobby to hobby that way too, and I'm left with a lot of projects that are half finished. They all eventually get done, they just get set aside for a while until my interest swings back around to them.
So that's something I got from NaNo this time. Consistency. Getting a little bit done every day is better than getting a lot done once a month. I'm going to try to learn from this, and get a little bit of writing done every day until something's finished.
Right now, I have four writing projects I'm working on. Two of them are done (one of those hasn't been edited at all) and two are still in draft. I'm going to do my best to finish the six draft of A New Threat and get it to my critique group this July. I'm also going to try to write a little bit each day on Wings of Truth (working title) until the draft is done. Then, edit Threat From the Past, then finish An Unwanted Apprentice, and THEN I'll let myself work on book three of the Psygen Chronicles (The Stones of Xernock) oh, that one's going to be fun to write....
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Camp NaNo!
It's July, and that means it's time for Camp NaNoWriMo!
Time to do another 50,000 words in a month! I must be crazy!
This go-round, I'm working on the story that is as of yet unnamed that I posted about last time.
Also, I've added a "Friends" page to my site where I link to the websites of some of my other author friends. Go check 'em out, they write good stuff too.
http://www.aarondemott.com/friends.shtm
Time to do another 50,000 words in a month! I must be crazy!
This go-round, I'm working on the story that is as of yet unnamed that I posted about last time.
Also, I've added a "Friends" page to my site where I link to the websites of some of my other author friends. Go check 'em out, they write good stuff too.
http://www.aarondemott.com/friends.shtm
Friday, May 18, 2012
The Muse is mean, sometimes...
Ive been working on editing, and I did finaly come up with a new name for the Guardians. (You can find it if you poke around here a little...)
In other news, my Muse hit me upside the head with a folding chair when I got out of bed this morning. I really have to edit the books I have written, and finish the others that I've already started, but the Muse was insistint. So, I'm a tad over 4,000 words into a new story... I really do *like* to finish things...
Monday, April 30, 2012
More on names...
I'm thinking of possibly making a word up. (Hey, it worked for Lucas... ;) )
Other than that, I'm also looking at the in-universe explanation for the name of the group. "Guardian" just doesn't cut it. Some back-story (that will be fleshed out more in book four...):
Thousands (or so) of years ago, the world's governments collapsed (for various reasons) and anarchy and chaos reined. The powerful and rich people that were left wanted to restore order (peace is good for business, so is war. Outright chaos, not so much...) so they started a program to create the ultimate super-soldier. There was no one to tell them that any methods were immoral or illegal, so things, um, got a little out of hand. The program was both a complete success, and a complete failure. The first batch of super-soldiers were stronger, faster, smarter, and had powerful PSI abilities. They also had the moral code of a bunch of hungry, maddened, polar bears that had sat on a few too many pointy branding irons.
This first batch, the Alpha group, broke out of the lab and terrorized the world.
The people responsible were hesitant to try again, but they needed something as strong as the Alphas to fight the Alphas. Beta group was a complete failure, none making it to term. The Delta and Gamma groups DNA was toned down a lot though, and were, for the most part, successful. They were raised in foster families, using traditional, time tested parenting strategies from periods in the past that the romantics liked to say produced only gentlemen.
These were the Guardians. They were raised with high morals and ideals, and would not only restore order, as planned, but also save humanity from being exterminated by the Alphas.
So there's the history in a nutshell. As you can see, I doubt the scientists, foster families, or the 'guardians' themselves would really call themselves that. They fill that role in the beginning of "A New Threat", but not when they were first named. So I'm trying to come up with something sounds unique, cool, and would fit the in-universe storyline.
Other than that, I'm also looking at the in-universe explanation for the name of the group. "Guardian" just doesn't cut it. Some back-story (that will be fleshed out more in book four...):
Thousands (or so) of years ago, the world's governments collapsed (for various reasons) and anarchy and chaos reined. The powerful and rich people that were left wanted to restore order (peace is good for business, so is war. Outright chaos, not so much...) so they started a program to create the ultimate super-soldier. There was no one to tell them that any methods were immoral or illegal, so things, um, got a little out of hand. The program was both a complete success, and a complete failure. The first batch of super-soldiers were stronger, faster, smarter, and had powerful PSI abilities. They also had the moral code of a bunch of hungry, maddened, polar bears that had sat on a few too many pointy branding irons.
This first batch, the Alpha group, broke out of the lab and terrorized the world.
The people responsible were hesitant to try again, but they needed something as strong as the Alphas to fight the Alphas. Beta group was a complete failure, none making it to term. The Delta and Gamma groups DNA was toned down a lot though, and were, for the most part, successful. They were raised in foster families, using traditional, time tested parenting strategies from periods in the past that the romantics liked to say produced only gentlemen.
These were the Guardians. They were raised with high morals and ideals, and would not only restore order, as planned, but also save humanity from being exterminated by the Alphas.
So there's the history in a nutshell. As you can see, I doubt the scientists, foster families, or the 'guardians' themselves would really call themselves that. They fill that role in the beginning of "A New Threat", but not when they were first named. So I'm trying to come up with something sounds unique, cool, and would fit the in-universe storyline.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Overused names?
I'm still here! The day job has been crazy lately, and my wife just gave birth to baby number 3... Despite the lack of posts, I have been working on editing A New Threat, and I've started book three in the Gaurdian Series. Speaking of the Gaurdians, I think I'm going to re-name them. There seems to be a plethora of books out right now with a group called "Gaurdians" in them. Something more creative would sound more "sci-fi-ish" anyway. So that's been a holdup as well. Suggestions for new names are welcome..
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Good eBook Design
Future Book posted an article the other day about what makes a good looking eBook:
http://www.futurebook.net/content/what-makes-good-looking-ebook-tips-ebook-design-standard-titles
Basically, the article talks about the challenges of making an eBook look great, and having it still look great when it gets re-sized.
As I say in my ePub Tutorial, mostly it's about keeping it simple. I'm going to go through the tips given in the article linked above, and give simple HTML code for doing them in ePub. (I'm just going to give the design element name and the HTML code to do it here. The article linked above talks about why it's best to do it that way and such. For more details on implementing the code snippets shown, check you my full ePub Tutorial.)
Paragraph indentation:
p {text-indent: .3in;
margin-left:0;
margin-right:0;
margin-top:0;
margin-bottom:0;
text-align: justify;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
The above code goes in your CSS file. The first line in there indents the first line of each paragraph. The next four lines get rid of white spaces between the paragraphs, making it look more like a book and less like a web page.
The "text-align: justify;" makes the text justified, or have even margins, instead of a jagged right margin.
The last line sets the font to Times New Roman. You can specify whatever font you want here, but remember to keep it simple. For the best reading experience, especially for works with lots of text like a novel, a nice simple font does the job and doesn't distract from your content.
Section break spacing:
This is what's used to separate sections within the same chapter. In novels, you often see them when the point of view changes mid-chapter. In printed books, these are either little doodles, or asterisks. As the article states, keep these simple.
For a small image, use the <img> tag.
I recommend just using asterisks for a few reasons. They'll re-size along with the text, and they take up a lot less space than an image, thus making the book open faster. To make them look fancy, include a blank line above and below, and center them. The HTML looks like this:
<p> </p>
<p align="center">***</p>
<p> </p>
You could center this by using CSS code, but this is the easiest way to do it, and not all ePub readers support CSS. :( (In case you're wondering, the " " is the HTML code for a blank space. The reason that's in there is because some browsers ignore empty paragraphs, and we want them to show up to set off our section break.)
Chapter heading design:
The simplest way to this:
<h1 align="center">Chapter 1 or chapter title here</h1>
This will make the chapter title big and centered. If you do use an image, don't forget the alt text (that's what makes it searchable):
Chapter heading space:
Same code here we used to space out our section breaks.
<p> </p>
Styling:
You can do this in CSS, but in the interest of simplicity, and the fact that the average novel doesn't have too much of this use the below code:
Bold: <b>Sample text</b>
Italics <i>Sample text</i>
You can use a few other tags to bold and italic text as well. For a more complete discussion on that, just Google "Bold in HTML" and enjoy reading pages of discussion on why one should or shouldn't use a certain tag.
My eBook tutorial full discusses the e-book only elements that the Future book article talks about.
Go check it out.
http://www.futurebook.net/content/what-makes-good-looking-ebook-tips-ebook-design-standard-titles
Basically, the article talks about the challenges of making an eBook look great, and having it still look great when it gets re-sized.
As I say in my ePub Tutorial, mostly it's about keeping it simple. I'm going to go through the tips given in the article linked above, and give simple HTML code for doing them in ePub. (I'm just going to give the design element name and the HTML code to do it here. The article linked above talks about why it's best to do it that way and such. For more details on implementing the code snippets shown, check you my full ePub Tutorial.)
Paragraph indentation:
p {text-indent: .3in;
margin-left:0;
margin-right:0;
margin-top:0;
margin-bottom:0;
text-align: justify;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
The above code goes in your CSS file. The first line in there indents the first line of each paragraph. The next four lines get rid of white spaces between the paragraphs, making it look more like a book and less like a web page.
The "text-align: justify;" makes the text justified, or have even margins, instead of a jagged right margin.
The last line sets the font to Times New Roman. You can specify whatever font you want here, but remember to keep it simple. For the best reading experience, especially for works with lots of text like a novel, a nice simple font does the job and doesn't distract from your content.
Section break spacing:
This is what's used to separate sections within the same chapter. In novels, you often see them when the point of view changes mid-chapter. In printed books, these are either little doodles, or asterisks. As the article states, keep these simple.
For a small image, use the <img> tag.
I recommend just using asterisks for a few reasons. They'll re-size along with the text, and they take up a lot less space than an image, thus making the book open faster. To make them look fancy, include a blank line above and below, and center them. The HTML looks like this:
<p> </p>
<p align="center">***</p>
<p> </p>
You could center this by using CSS code, but this is the easiest way to do it, and not all ePub readers support CSS. :( (In case you're wondering, the " " is the HTML code for a blank space. The reason that's in there is because some browsers ignore empty paragraphs, and we want them to show up to set off our section break.)
Chapter heading design:
The simplest way to this:
<h1 align="center">Chapter 1 or chapter title here</h1>
This will make the chapter title big and centered. If you do use an image, don't forget the alt text (that's what makes it searchable):
<img src="picture.jpg" alt="Chapter Title" align="middle">
Chapter heading space:
Same code here we used to space out our section breaks.
<p> </p>
Styling:
You can do this in CSS, but in the interest of simplicity, and the fact that the average novel doesn't have too much of this use the below code:
Bold: <b>Sample text</b>
Italics <i>Sample text</i>
You can use a few other tags to bold and italic text as well. For a more complete discussion on that, just Google "Bold in HTML" and enjoy reading pages of discussion on why one should or shouldn't use a certain tag.
My eBook tutorial full discusses the e-book only elements that the Future book article talks about.
Go check it out.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Book 2 is done!
The first draft of "The Guardian Chronicles, Book 2: Threat From The Past" is now finished!
It's really rough, lots of polishing to do, but the rough cut is done!
Now I'll be working on another edit of the first book in the series, then, after letting it rest for a while, it will be time to start editing the rough draft into somethong readable. ;)
It's really rough, lots of polishing to do, but the rough cut is done!
Now I'll be working on another edit of the first book in the series, then, after letting it rest for a while, it will be time to start editing the rough draft into somethong readable. ;)
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
New Years Resolutions so far...
So far, I've not been doing that good on my new years resolution to write more. I got a big chunk of story done today, and almost finished the scene, but....
... it's the first time I've really written anything this month. :(
I've got to be more consistent, and what's worse is I know I can do it. Perhaps if I set an alarm to go off each day...
As to the scene I worked on, it's almost done, and after it's over I'll just have a few more wrap up scenes and Threat From The Past will be done! (Well, the first draft anyway, then the real work begins.) After I get that finished, I'm going to set it aside and let it percolate for a while while I edit more of A New Threat. There's a few scenes there I want to tweak, then it's out to the sharks again.
I'm hoping to get it ready to publish sometime this year. The current plan is to self-publish both that and the sequel at the same time...
In other news, I also tweaked my ePub tutorial a little bit. I've fixed a few minor errors and typos and color-coded some of the code examples. Hopefully that will make it easier to follow. Check it out if your curious about how to make your own eBooks. Coming this summer, I plan to expand it to cover making eBooks using Sigal, and possibly a few other tools, to help out those who aren't quite so hands-on with their file formats (and it's MUCH faster to make a good book with Sigal than by hand... not to mention the built-in error-checking.)
... it's the first time I've really written anything this month. :(
I've got to be more consistent, and what's worse is I know I can do it. Perhaps if I set an alarm to go off each day...
As to the scene I worked on, it's almost done, and after it's over I'll just have a few more wrap up scenes and Threat From The Past will be done! (Well, the first draft anyway, then the real work begins.) After I get that finished, I'm going to set it aside and let it percolate for a while while I edit more of A New Threat. There's a few scenes there I want to tweak, then it's out to the sharks again.
I'm hoping to get it ready to publish sometime this year. The current plan is to self-publish both that and the sequel at the same time...
In other news, I also tweaked my ePub tutorial a little bit. I've fixed a few minor errors and typos and color-coded some of the code examples. Hopefully that will make it easier to follow. Check it out if your curious about how to make your own eBooks. Coming this summer, I plan to expand it to cover making eBooks using Sigal, and possibly a few other tools, to help out those who aren't quite so hands-on with their file formats (and it's MUCH faster to make a good book with Sigal than by hand... not to mention the built-in error-checking.)
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
SOPA and Protect IP Protest
Today, many sites on the internet are going offline to protest two bills currently trying to worm their way through Congress: SOPA in the House, and Protect IP in the Senate.
These bills are backed by Hollywood, the music industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They would give the government the right to shut down websites, block sites DNS entries, and otherwise restrict what content is and isn't allowed to be on the web, and what content citizens are allowed to access.
No, this isn't happening in China, these bills are currently working their way through the United States of America congress.
Although I am a copyright holder myself, and agree with the idea of stopping people from stealing other people's works and not compensating them for it, the fight against piracy CANNOT compromise the freedoms that the United States was founded on.
From the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." (emphasis added)
"Well," you might say, "The government should certainly have the right to take anything that's been stolen!"
How about the 4th Amendment?:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I certainly agree with prosecuting people who have stolen things, but shutting down sections of the internet or blocking peoples access to it just in case they might steal something is just plain wrong.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
More information on the bills here:
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/18/morning-bell-an-internet-blackout-over-sopa-and-pipa/
To contact your elected officials, go here:
http://sopastrike.com/
These bills are backed by Hollywood, the music industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They would give the government the right to shut down websites, block sites DNS entries, and otherwise restrict what content is and isn't allowed to be on the web, and what content citizens are allowed to access.
No, this isn't happening in China, these bills are currently working their way through the United States of America congress.
Although I am a copyright holder myself, and agree with the idea of stopping people from stealing other people's works and not compensating them for it, the fight against piracy CANNOT compromise the freedoms that the United States was founded on.
From the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." (emphasis added)
"Well," you might say, "The government should certainly have the right to take anything that's been stolen!"
How about the 4th Amendment?:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I certainly agree with prosecuting people who have stolen things, but shutting down sections of the internet or blocking peoples access to it just in case they might steal something is just plain wrong.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
More information on the bills here:
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/18/morning-bell-an-internet-blackout-over-sopa-and-pipa/
To contact your elected officials, go here:
http://sopastrike.com/
Friday, January 6, 2012
Holidays are over, back to writing...
Well, I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and a happy new year. I know I did. Lots of fun with family and friends, and now, back to writing.
Let's see, 51,000 some odd words in November, 100-ish words in December, and zero so far for January. Looks like I'm not starting out the new year that well as far as writing goes.
Which leads me to this years resolution: I'm going to write more, and get at least two books ready for sale by the end of the year. Actually, I'm aiming for closer to May or June, but that gives me some leeway for editing.
In other writing related news:
Articles like the one below always encourage me. If some committee thinks that Tolkien isn't a master story teller, then I can just ignore any hurtful criticism that comes my way. Some people obviously don't know what they're talking about.
Tlkien denined Nobel prize for...
Let's see, 51,000 some odd words in November, 100-ish words in December, and zero so far for January. Looks like I'm not starting out the new year that well as far as writing goes.
Which leads me to this years resolution: I'm going to write more, and get at least two books ready for sale by the end of the year. Actually, I'm aiming for closer to May or June, but that gives me some leeway for editing.
In other writing related news:
Articles like the one below always encourage me. If some committee thinks that Tolkien isn't a master story teller, then I can just ignore any hurtful criticism that comes my way. Some people obviously don't know what they're talking about.
Tlkien denined Nobel prize for...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)