Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

News from the North - Jan 29

Erotica? On My E-Reader?
With e-readers like the Kindle and Kobo lines, sales of erotic literature has soared. Canadian e-publisher eXtasy had sales take off in 2010 and double in 2011. Part of the advantage of the e-erotica (e-rotica?) is that no one can tell what is being read. There's no lurid cover to have to hide. And, it looks like my NaNoWriMo project from last year may have a potential publisher.

Dial Up Internet For Cheap
The National Capital Freenet is still around and still going, providing cheap dial up serivce and inexpensive DSL. The NCF was one of the first providers in Ottawa and still has over 4000 subscribers and is a good example of a community-based ISP.

--Scott D

Why You Shouldn’t Keep Your Projects A Secret

As someone who works with intellectual properties, and someone who knows a lot of people who also work with intellectual properties, I can safely say that a lot of us like to keep our ideas to ourselves.  There is a fear that if your idea is leaked, then there’s a team of coordinated and efficient coding enthusiasts that will take your idea and do it faster than you.  Probably better than you too.  And they all wear sunglasses and matching black leather uniforms with lightning bolts...

Where was I?  Oh, right, the fear of being copied.  This fear has a less-paranoid-but-still-paralyzing twin: the fear of someone coincidentally doing the same thing as you, making you look like the copycat nonetheless.

My advice to you is to fight that fear and show off (or at least talk about) your works in progress.  There are several reasons why this will help you rather than hurt you.

Nothing is Lost

“Take chances, get messy, make mistakes.”
- Ms. Frizzle, “The Magic Schoolbus”

I’m one of those writers who gets really emotionally attached to their characters and settings.  I don’t like to let anything go.  As you can probably tell from these blog entries, I am also one of those writers who describes everything in far too many words.  Editing is hard for me.  However, it is a necessary step, as writing is just as much about pruning words as it is about cultivating them.  Writing more than needs to be written merely ensures that there is a lot to choose from.

Anyone out there ever study design?  Every assignment insists that you come up with a minimum of five different designs before you even take one of them to rough copy.  I always thought that was a huge drag, but I have to admit, my fourth or fifth ideas tend to be way better than my first.

Therefore, everything you do, especially those creations that never see the light of day, are incredibly necessary.  Nothing deleted is ever lost.  Those preliminary designs maybe be invisible, but they are indispensable for getting you to the final draft.  Your ultimate product is carrying on for all the drafts and false starts that came before it.  It is enriched by all you learned in creating its predecessors, no matter how distantly they are related.

-Tamara Hecht

Magrathean Diary #5: Organiz-ized, Pt. 1 (Getting Organiz-ized)

When I was a kid, my idea of organization was about the same as any other kid’s: throw everything into the closet and worry about it later. Or throw everything into the rollout bins under my bunkbed, and dig them out only after a centimeter-thick patina of dust had grown on them. I forgot assignments, mislaid money, lost library books. In the latter case, one of the volumes that went missing for the better part of a year was a skinny little thing that ended up sandwiched between the pages of a much larger book that I rarely opened. I’d used it as a bookmark in a moment of haste.

I’m a lot better now, not just thanks to computers (Outlook’s to-do feature is a godsend), but thanks to my own willingness to develop the right habits. Write things down. Keep things sorted. Create action items and takeaways. Learn to separate forest- and tree-level details. (“Do my taxes” is not a task; “sort out my expenses for the year” is.)

Most people are able to get some semblance of organization into their own personal lives. It isn’t hard for most of us to stay on top of our bills, our phone calls, our social obligations, and what’s playing in the theater. But the idea of creating a whole world, or a whole universe, and staying on top of that—it sounds like a tailor-made way to intimidate yourself. If heads of state and chroniclers of history can’t stay on top of their own respective nations’ narratives and policies, how is li’l ol’ me supposed to do that?

And what’s more, how do you get into something like that if you’re not the most organized person to begin with? How do you organize something as massive as a world—or a universe, depending on your ambitions—without either a) dying of old age from trying to tabulate all that detail or b) going batfruit insane from same?

The first step is the part everyone hates: getting organized. Or, for you Taxi Driver fans whose eyes lit up when you read the title: getting organiz-ized.

Far more systematic and diligent people than I have written books about the virtues of organization. Most of what they agree on, as far as it applies to what we’re doing here, can be distilled down to a few basic points:

1. Record-keeping and metadata.

Make maps, keep lists, write things down. But most importantly, find a way—your way—to make all this stuff searchable and accessible. You’re reading this on a computer (I presume); don’t use old-school technology when you’ve got the new-school variety staring you in the face. If you don’t know how, I’ll talk more about that in a future installment.

2. Habit-building.

If you’re not in the habit of writing stuff down, get in the habit. Easier said than done, to be sure, but this is where having someone else to bounce your ideas off comes in handy. They can help remind you to commit all those wonderful spur-of-the-moment insights or involved digressions to something more reliable than your own memory. That way less and less slips through the bottom of your mind, and more and more of it ends up recorded somewhere. And you also need to get into the habit of mopping up after yourself, which brings us to …

3. Maintenance.

If you throw everything into your closet for long enough, eventually you end up with a Fibber McGee Avalanche when the door is opened. If your note-taking and record-keeping isn’t cleaned up and systematized over time, it turns into a big ball of mud—an unmaintainable pile of stuff that has no particular organization or intent. Maps may need to be redrawn, not just to add new information but because the old ones are a mess of fold lines and scribbled annotations. Character summaries need to be rewritten to accommodate new aspects of the story. Plotline summaries almost certainly will need constant touching-up. The point isn’t to do all this stuff at once, but to commit to a regular rolling schedule of doing so. Clean your closet.

Each of these three things involves you and the work in different ways. The first involves the work itself; the second involves mainly you; the third involves your handling of the work.

Next time I’ll start going into detail about the exact organizational methodology I adopted for my own work, and how you’re not obliged to do the same.

-- Serdar Yegulalp

Lost in Translation 20 - Cyberpunked

The 80s were a turning point in media. Between the heyday of the music video, the breakout of shows like Miami Vice, and a new crop of writers. the approach to storytelling changed. One of the literary movements of the 80s was Cyberpunk, a mesh of man and machine in a distopian world where corporations have become monolithic and governments exist only at their pleasure*, where people outside pleasant society act as go betweens and expendable assets for the corporations and for the criminal organizations. The vanguard of cyberpunk was "Johnny Mnemonic", a short story written by William Gibson** and published in 1981 in Omni magazine.

The title character of "Johnny Mnemonic" was a data courier, with the equivalent of a hard drive*** implanted in his head. He ran into a problem with one client and had his bacon rescued by Molly Millions, a razorgirl with mirrorshade eyes and razors implanted under her fingernails. The criminal organization from whom the client stole the data now in Johnny's head wanted the data back and traces of it eliminated, sending a killer who had more replacement parts than original body to clean up. Johnny and Molly turned to Jones, a war vet dolphin with a smack addiction, to retrieve the passcode for the data and to the Lo-Teks, a anti-technology gang, for protection while sending a snippet of the data to the criminal group to get them to back off. The killer, meanwhile, has tracked the duo down and takes on Molly on the Killing Floor.

In 1995, Gibson worked with director Robert Longo to bring the story to the silver screen. Althought the original script was more an art film, desogned to be made for under two million, they pair went with Sony who saw the Internet as a potential draw. Sony provided $30 million. Several changes were made to the story. Because the character of Molly was already licensed out to another company, she was replaced with Jane. Unlike Molly, Jane was on her way down, having been infected with Nerve Attenuation Syndrome (NAS). The criminal organization was replaced by a pharmaceutical firm that had discovered a cure for NAS but wanted it buried because their treatment program would be more profitable.***** Johnny, played by Keanu Reeves, became the main mover in terms of plot and action, where as in the original short story, he directed the plot but left the heavy lifting for Molly.

With Gibson and Longo working together on the movie, what could go wrong?

Executive meddling. According to William Gibson himself, the movie was recut at the last moment by the American distributor, and recut badly. The flow fell off. There was some criticism of Keanu Reeves's acting ability, but, in retrospect, he managed to portray a man who had part of his brain removed and altered to become a data courier believably. Unlike How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Johnny Mnemonic didn't keep the creator in the loop at a crucial stage in editing, and the movie suffered as a result.

Next time, a summary.

* So, all we're missing today are USB ports in our heads.
** Other early cyberpunk works include /Neuromancer/ and /Mona Lisa Overdrive/.
*** I really hope IBM isn't going this route with racetrack memory.
**** Superconducting quantum interfence detectors.
***** Okay, cyberpunk waned because it started to look good compared to reality.

Magrathean Diary #4: What Worldbuilding Isn’t

For the first few installments of this diary, I’ve been touching on all the things worldbuilding is and what it requires. Now I’m going to talk about what it’s not.

Worldbuilding is not a dumping ground

Worldbuilding is not about finding excuses to insert things that you’ve been dying to use somewhere.

Well, to some degree, it is—hell, I do this all the time, gleefully. We all want to find a place for that perfect comeback line, that zinger of a description, that amazing bit of alien technology.

But I can’t throw in stuff like that blindly. And you shouldn’t do it without performing at least some kind of test of fitness for the material. There are some elements that will complement your world—and, by extension, your story. The more worldbuilding you do, the more obvious it becomes what fits and what doesn’t without having to break your story (if only in a given draft) in the process.

Worldbuilding is not a work-avoidance exercise

I’ve touched on this before, and I’ll keep harping right on it until my tongue flops out of my head: The best reason you engage in worldbuilding (and for some folks it’s the only reason) is to make your storytelling work—to create the place where your story happens, and to give it a living environment to unfold in. If you catch yourself using your worldbuilding as a way to avoid writing, to duck out on word-count quotas or to forestall writing that really difficult clash of wills between protagonist and antagonist, quit kidding yourself.

Worldbuilding is not a way to justify lazy storytelling

This is a parallel concern with #2 above. Don’t use worldbuilding as a wholesale way to avoid blatant deficiencies in your story. If something happens that is obviously a cheat, don’t try to change the construction of your world to accommodate it.

Note that this isn’t the same as using life’s own inconsistency and incompleteness as part of the story itself. If you have a character who has an eccentricity which you can build on and maybe make part of his social background, that’s one thing. If he has an abrupt about-face of motivation, don’t try to explain that way with the same trick. Fix it on the appropriate level in the story.

Worldbuilding is not for showing off

This may seem paradoxical: What part of worldbuilding isn’t meant in some way to impress the reader? Don’t readers respond that much more to an author with vision and imagination? (I’m going to be addressing this particular canard in a future installment as well.)

Some of this, you can indeed get away with and make your story that much sexier. But when you start flirting with elements that only justify their existence as attention-getters and not as genuine story components, you need to pull back.

A random example of this is when you have a 19th-century setting that has some stray piece of 20th-century technology (e.g., radio, lighter-than-air craft) thrown in for the sake of making things snazzy. Unless you’re prepared to defend how every single one of the several hundred allied technical discoveries required for such a thing were somehow present in your setting a good century before they were ever feasible, leave it out.

Since this last rule is largely a matter of applying discipline to one’s imagination, that’s how we’ll segue into the next installment ... wherein I’ll discuss what we talk about when we use that rather overused word.

Magrathean Diary #3: What’s Kept In And What’s Left Out

Martin Scorsese once said cinema was about what’s in the frame and what’s out of it. Storytelling, and worldbuilding, are the same way: what you leave out is as important as what you keep in.

Many people assume the editing process is confined to the story itself—that the world is like a darkened room, and the story is like the flashlight you shine around that room to illuminate it selectively. This is true, and it’s a useful analogy when you’re actually writing the story.

Magrathean Diary #2: Why Worldbuild?

It seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? Why worldbuild, indeed?

I asked myself the very same question, and answered myself with a diffident little shrug, the last time I started working on a major novel-length project. Big fat mistake. It took the near-collapse of that story to get me to confront a great many misconceptions I’d had about worldbuilding, about my story, and about my own work habits.

Lost in Translation 16 - You Win or You Adapt

George RR Martin is a prolific writer, having writen numerous novels, short stories, even teleplays. Along with writing, he has been an editor, notably on the Wild Card series of anthologies. In 1996, his latest work, A Song of Ice and Fire, was released beginning with A Game of Thrones. The epic story follows the upheavals of Westeros and its peoples as the status quo is once again upset with the death of Robert the Usuper, who had taken over the throne of Westeros after killing the previous tyrant. The books follows the politics, the maneuverings, the desires of the various pieces on the board, from pawn to queen, with chapters written from a different character's point of view. A Game of Thrones sets up the upheaval, showing how members of House Stark (led by Lord Eddard), House Baratheon (formerly led by King Robert the Usurper), House Targaryen (the family of the deposed King Aegon), and House Lannister King Robert's death. Allegiances are made and broken. Characters are promoted or killed. Script immunity is non-existant. There are children crippled, respected characters killed, and foul men who avoid karmic punishment. The plot and the characters pull the readers into the world and leave them wanting more.

In 2011, HBO takes a chance on adapting the novels. The cable channel's success rate with adaptations of late has been excellent, with True Blood, based on the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, and Deadwood, based on the historical western town, having received critical and popular appeal. The TV series A Game of Thrones was no exception. The first season followed the events from the first book. The adaptation was relatively faithful. There were a few cuts of minor scenes, and several characters were aged up, notably the younger ones. The aging made sense, though - what was acceptable in the era portrayed in the book would result in serious criminal charges today. And, being an HBO production, a little extra sex and nudity was added, though nothing that wasn't implied in the novel.

So, was the first season a success? HBO believed so, enough to renew the series after the first episode. The minor changes mentioned above didn't detract from the story. Casting of the roles worked brilliantly from Sean Bean as Lord Eddard Stark to Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister. The format is perfect for the story - a miniseries format with no need to expand or contract to deal with the vagaries of a 22 episode season or a two hour movie. Successful, indeed.

Next time, could this be something recent?

Magrathean Diary #1: Worldbuilding 101

Fans of Douglas Adams’s cosmic comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will remember the planet Magrathea. That’s the world where whole planets were once custom-made to order … back when there were still people around the galaxy who could afford such indulgences.

There being no Magrathea in this universe where we can blow several trillion Altarian dollars (at least, not as far as I know), we have to go about creating new worlds the old-fashioned way. We dream them up.

Most everyone engaged in one kind of creative endeavor or another – especially fiction, gaming, comics or anything where there’s some semblance of a story – has heard the term worldbuilding. We know what it means—at least in an offhand, dismissive way. What we don’t always know is what it’ll amount to, to take on the task of creating a whole world with all its oh so many moving parts.

The most obvious question comes first: what is worldbuilding?