Progress Report, also MileHiCon

The first draft of Brass and Steel: The City of Glass is proceeding, and it's developing its own feel, which is good - if time consuming. Here's a quick tidbit. Annabel and her sister Josephine are the main characters of this story.

Annabel gets up to look out the window, down at the streets below, at the elevated train as it slides by silently on tracks stories above the street. A brigade of steam melters slowly advance down the street, melting snow with steam, vacuuming up the water, heating it in their specially designed autoboilers into more steam. She looks down casually with her mystical eye, and realizes they’re strictly machines. No human being guides them. They roll along, low slung black boilers with brass fittings gleaming against the snow and muddy water. As she watches, squads of them divide off from the main brigade to pursue side streets. Hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands, and each one apparently controlled by a Dejstrøm engine the size of a wartime Dope brain, without the bound soul to animate it. Probably rectangular, as most are now, to facilitate bolting them to the regular shapes men seem to favor when they build. She looks out further over the city, past more elevated train tracks and ignores the prickle of her scalp.

Also, I will be attending MileHiCon on October 18, 19, and 20, 2013. I have not yet been told what I will be doing there besides being a fan, so watch this space for more information.

-JRS

Quotable Quote

From David Foster Wallace: “When you write fiction,[…] you are telling a lie. It’s a game, but you must get the facts straight. The reader doesn’t want to be reminded that it’s a lie. It must be convincing, or the story will never take off in the reader’s mind.”

Architecture

Yeah, City of Glass is about a city, so I have to learn at least a passing familiarity with the architecture of the time. Burnham I can deal with. Sullivan I can at least understand. I think it likely that Frank Lloyd Wright, in my world, was fatally stepped on by a cow before he could produce any significant work. Wright's Prairie Style is /awful/ - and in the real world, ubiquitous. All the faceless, soul-less brick-facade buildings that so typified 1970s Cheyenne, Wyoming were clear examples of it. Unimaginative, boring, unadorned, without any sense of style. And flat roofs, in the midwest and west? Insanity.

-JRS

Scrivener - Important Safety Tip

Okay, just had a bit of a scare. I was tinkering with and re-reading Brass and Steel: Inferno and wanted to see how many words I'd changed, so I clicked on targets, and got 93,000 and some odd. What's the problem, you ask? Inferno is a 118,000 or so word novel. It meant that somewhere a great swath of the novel was just… gone.

Don't panic, I told myself, even though clearly I already was. Check your compile targets and make sure you have the whole novel selected. Er… yes. I did. Okay, NOW go ahead and panic.

Then I happened to notice that some chapters' little icons in the scrivinings list didn't have any text in them. This is how empty chapters are represented. Surely not, I thought, but I clicked on those chapters to make sure the text was there. It was, and as soon as I touched the chapter, Scrivener noticed the text was there and reset the icon accordingly. And my word count jumped. Once I had touched all the empty icons in the list, my wordcount was back to normal.

I was imagining 'sure, one of the agents I was querying will naturally want the full manuscript while I'm figuring out how to recover what's missing, or if I was grossly miscalculating the wordcount before. It always goes that way. It didn't go that way this time.

I'm a little puzzled why this happened, and it doesn't give me warm fuzzies that it did happen, but this file's been through a lot. I have A. Edited the bundle. There was a lot of stuff in there from dropbox syncs gone bad. I had removed them. I have B. Touched the file with scrivener for windows running in Wine on my Linux machine. That failed to work, so I also installed the unsupported Scrivener for Linux on that box, which did.
C. My desktop mac has been showing a little flakiness recently, booting into safe mode rather than normal. The disk checks out, and from the log, I think it's an inexpensive USB hub and constantly switching that hub between the work machine and the play machine. Terrifying moment to think I'd lost a great chunk of the novel and that I wasn't even sure where. Yeah. Better backups in my future, for sure.

-JRS

Separating work from play, update 2.

There's been a lot of discussion in the news lately about the harsh blue light of lcd screens making it hard to sleep, etc etc. How much of that is actually true, I don't know. By way of an experiment, however, I have put a bright daylight beach wallpaper on my work machine, which I use mostly during daylight hours, and a night cityscape on the play machine.

Does it make a difference? I don't know. I do notice that I get the same "ugh! Daystar!" reaction to the day wallpaper at night. Whether it helps or hinders my sleep, I have no idea. I figured it can't hurt.

Separating Work from Play, Update #1

For those who wondered, I'm still using the Linux box for gaming. It's still going well. I've switched from 32 bit Ubuntu to 64 bit Mint/Cinnamon (Olivia, apparently.) and things are remarkably less clumsy. I've also moved my uber-video card to the PC, where it works just fine despite being a mac version. The 5870 is quite a boost from the 9600. Also, when friend Jeff Duntemann sold me this case out of his junk box, he left the dead motherboard, still with a presumed-dead 2.4ghz quadcore in it. On a lark, I tried that presumed-dead CPU in my play machine and it works just fine. While I read over and over that a dual core 3ghz chip with 1333khz frontside bus will always trounce a quad-core with a 1066mhz frontside bus in gaming, I haven't noticed any particular difference. The game I play is so GPU-bound that my processor is seldom saturated either way. When running multiple apps, however, the difference is pronounced, just as one would expect. So now my junk-box PC is roughly the equal of my mac in its gaming heyday - quad-core 2.66ghz, Radeon HD5870 card (pc people feel free to chuckle. It's the best card that would go in my mac, and even then it was sickeningly expensive). Cost? Less than a hundred bucks. And I've missed screwing around with the hardware of my computer.

-JRS

The Next Big Thing, In Pencil

I've been busy doing something I've never done before: laying out a novel before it's written. One of the things I learned at Taos is the art of storyboarding, which seems much less restrictive than an outline, if only by breaking it up into easily modifiable chunks. With 6 or 8 of us working on it, we storyboarded out one brave member's novel, fixed where the plot hung up, and built the story line all the way out to the end. It took us about 4 hours, as I recall.

I gave myself a month.

In the planning, I've had all the usual plot problems. Things like, "Why is it bad to be a Doppelgänger?" "Is the main character causing this action, or just being dragged into it?" "Does this bring in the themes I want to bring in?" "Argh, the cast is getting too big!" and so on. The advantage is that instead of having thousands of words committed by the time these problems come up, I have one or two pages of hand-written notes, so changing things isn't that painful. I can revise, relocate, and rethink to my heart's content. It lets me lay out plots more complex than I can hold in my head at once. So far, so good.

A word about writing utensils: There's something very comfortable, not to mention focusing (no twitter in a legal pad) about using a jumbo #2 pencil, the same as most folks my age and older used to learn writing in kindergarden; about the smell of the cedar shavings and the moment of thought while I sharpen; the ease of erasure; having a nice big eraser; the joy of twiddling a pencil in my fingers that coaxes the ideas out. Maybe the cedar shaving and graphite smell smells like schoolwork.

Naturally I roll these storyboards into Scrivener when they're done, and have Scrivener give me a dump of all of them in order to move forward. Naturally, I'll have these storyboards at a keystroke when August rolls around and it's time to actually lay down the prose. I'm looking forward to writing this one, even though if anything it's rougher and nastier than Brass and Steel: Inferno. I call this next novel, Brass and Steel II: The City of Glass.

-JRS

ps: if you find yourself looking for the jumbo #2 pencils of our collective youth, it's surprising to find that they're not in most stores with back-to-school supplies. M found me some at Wallmart after much searching, and I mail-ordered about 48 of them in a batch from Costco, so I'm set for a while. I do go through them quickly though.