The project I’ve been working on lately is titled “Death Whispers in the Wind”. I haven’t really talked about it a lot in the blogs, but I’ve talked with my friends and some forum folks. While you’re waiting, here’s a fascinating GIMP tutorial that gives some hints on the premise.

Confession time. I have to say it aloud: this latest story of mine is becoming a little bit personal.

I’m somehow convinced that I need to get this bloody story done. It’s been cooking for quite a while now.

I honestly can’t believe my frigging eyes when I look at the git log. The file history starts at January 15, 2011.

What the heck was I doing back then? Why the heck has a story been cooking this long?

I appear to have sent the story for comments in June 2 in Reddit.

“You used 10k words to write a 3k word story. Cut, cut, cut.”

Yes, I went back to the drawing board. People told me that rewriting some scenes might make the story more compact. I tried out rewriting some scenes. Yes, the stuff worked considerably better, and it took less words.

But I needed some more scenes. You know, thinks don’t work quite as well if I don’t expound on some other interesting details.

So my “3k word story” is now at 22k words.

I guess this teaches the lesson to people to never send be back to the drawing board. Or something. =)

But I think it’s starting to get more justified. I wrote a novella years ago and it was about the same size as the story is now, and it was nowhere near as complex. I guess I’ve managed to pack some more stuff in the same word count.

The writing process has been quite exhausting. For the first time in a long while, I’ve really felt that I need to get this stuff done. I’m pretty certain the story won’t balloon over 25k words and I’m actually able to edit it down a little bit.

I’ve had to talk with my friends about the story and some little details. Tiny changes that have big implications but I just can’t let loose of them. It’s incredible how many things I need to decide to get the story working properly.

There’s so many chapters in the story that still need to be bent to the shape and stuff that needs to be fixed. There’s some pretty big spots that have to be explained.

The whole task is completely frigging hopeless. I have a giant ball of text at my hands and it just isn’t getting any better. I’ve poured so many ideas that I care about to the text, and I feel somewhat… stung when the story just looks like it should be scrapped and forgotten about.

It’s never going to get fixed.

But that’s what they said about other novels.

Good grief. The friends I talked to seem to have the opinion that it’s actually getting a little bit better.

I survived through Nano, which looked like a hopeless ordeal. Dammit, this isn’t any worse. And the story makes more sense to boot.

Oh, the story is going to get fixed. I just don’t know when, or how. I know I’m a little bit stressed about the project, but at the same time, it’s refreshing to have a project that I genuinely care about.

I hope I can get out of the disaster zone one day.

So, NaNoWriMo 2011 is far, far over.

Before the NaNo kicked in, I recommended people to check out org-mode and look at my ramblings on my endless struggles with other writing software packages.

That ramble was a little bit premature because I hadn’t actually completed a major writing project with Emacs. I’ve written a lot of short stories over the last year or so, but due to my increasing self-critique I’ve not actually gotten anything out. And, of course, the fact that I kept switching software probably didn’t help much either. =)

But NaNoWriMo is now done, and bashing out 51,757 words probably counts as some sort of an achievement that gives a little bit of an indicator of how Emacs works as a prose writing tool.

I told people it would work, and dammit, it did. Except for a few small snags.

It’s sad that I haven’t had found the time to comment on my NaNoWriMo progress on my blogs at all. This NaNoWriMo seemed to be a bit more bleak than the last year’s incredibly fun journey, mostly because some of the people I followed last year weren’t writing and I didn’t even get a chance to follow some other people. Also, NaNoWriMo website’s tools were not as fun this year around.

But overall, it was still an incredible journey. Just with a little bit more of proverbial taste of blood in the mouth. I’d say I survived through NaNo this time, not really finished it.

I’ll probably release my book draft later on. As in last year, I’ll release a PDF and possibly an EPUB version. Cover is already drawn, and shown on the right (click for a larger version).

I’ve also made some sort of a video journal. Once I get around to editing it (and doing the EpicDiff run to show how the text mutated over time), I’ll put it to my YouTube channel. This is also the first time I’ve ever produced anything major in Org-Mode, so I’ll also write a separate blog post on my experiences with Emacs as an authoring environment. (Summary: it’s probably the best environment I’ve tried so far, but there are a few snags that I really wish were fixed easier.)

Anyway - the following is basically just a copy-paste of my /r/nanowrimo posts, with some minor tweaks. Hope it’s interesting enough.

It is a lingering doubt, but an important one: Is it time to rethink why I write? Maybe it’s always a good time to rethink why I write, and how I write.

One thing is sure, though: I’m always learning, and the fact that I didn’t get completely depressed again when I recently got some critique is a good sign that I’m probably showing - maybe - some improvement. I think I’ve conclusively shown that the answer to the obvious first question, “should I write to begin with?”, is a resounding “yep”.

Now, I just need to seek some guidance on “how” and “why”.

Somewhere around the previous post, I made an outlandish promise that I might try out Celtx to see how well I could write a story in the “novel mode”.

I think I have to take it back. Because Emacs foiled that plan.

And I still can’t believe it.

Emacs as a prose editor. Bah. Pigs are flying.

It’s that time again - time to rant about software!

All I’ve learned over the past few years is that developing writing software sounds deceptively easy, yet no one seems to get it right.

One of the reasons I like open source is that vendor lock-in is less likely. Often, open source applications are built on open file formats and open standards, and files can be edited in different applications. The reason people stick to specific applications is that they happen to work for them. There’s something in each app that makes them suitable for specific tasks. This is not always optimal; for example, currently OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice is the best implementation of all OpenDocument features (i.e., if you want metadata and templates to work properly, you use these applications, because other applications are likely to mess things up), but if you want to just get access to the file content, there’s plenty of applications that read ODF files and can write ODF format files.

But there is one application that illustrates that you can get into vendor lock-in hell in open source world.

Character design is a funny process.

A lot of people seem to think that it's crucial to design the characters beforehand, write all sorts of character questionnaire forms, and whatnot.

But as a software guy, I don't really believe in that. Just like software is often best designed in an interative fashion - you make plans, implement something, refine plans, refine implementation, and so on - the characters are pretty much easiest to build that. So the "character sheets", to me, are just a springboard.

Okay - here's a completely pointless blog post that's a whole lot of hot air over a non-issue. But dammit, it needs to be said. Sort of.

Here's a frequently heard bit of writing advice: one all-too-often neglected part of character design is the character's sexuality; it crops up way too often in unexpected places.

Here's another frequently heard bit of writing advice: if your fictional characters start talking to you, go see a shrink.

The big question: Are they trying to mess with my head? =)

All I can say is that the NaNoWriMo 2010 was an amazing experience.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The novel didn't turn out to be as good as I expected because I just didn't have time to add all of the neat stuff in, and the beginning of the story ballooned so much that the last part of the story is kind of sparse, but hey, I finished the story. Yay yay yay. There's the remaining 11 months before the next November to finish it up! =)

"Dusts of Avalon" is, contrary to what I've previously written, a military science fiction novel that also deals with some Arthurian stuff. Epic stuff all around! You can read it at Scribd and comment there, or download the PDF from there, or you can also grab the PDF from ye official Web 1.0-compliant website. I'll probably make the story available in other formats (EPUB and plain ol' HTML) later on.

Back to revisions. And, of course, back to writing more Avarthrel stuff!