The Price of Demand Edit & The Fast and the Dead

The Price of Demand edit is ongoing; I’ve got outside help assisting so it’ll be a bit longer yet. I have LOTS to fix. I love the story, but there’s a serious price to be paid for writing it as quickly as nanowrimo demands!

The Fast and the Dead is causing me some concern. I could almost literally keep that story going on forever. It’s at over 14,000 words now, which is huge for a short story. I may have to break from it for a bit and figure out a faster way to get them to the ending I have in mind.

The Price of Demand Edit in Progress

Just a quick update tonight. I’ve been working on the editing of The Price of Demand all day. I finished the first draft review on paper, and as suspected, there was an awful lot to fix. I used a LOT of ink crossing stuff out and writing notes!

Since then I’ve been doing the second draft pass in Scrivener, folding in the changes from the first round and doing further edits as I encounter things I missed.

If all goes well I expect to have the third draft complete tomorrow, and at that point I’ll begin converting it into an eBook as well as posting the update to the Draft Stories blog.

And now back to it…

A New Challenge

I’ve decided to take up the challenge of present tense. Ever since I wrote that first post about my brain having difficulties with present-tense works, I’ve been thinking about it a great deal, and so I’m going to go ahead and give a solid attempt at reading the first book in the Spellsong series by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Maybe I’ll get into it; the concept is a fascinating one, which is why I was drawn to the book in the first place. I expect it’ll be tough going at first, but this past year has all been about challenging myself in various ways, and so far I’ve risen to every challenge, so I’m sure I can manage it.

In other news, my fascination with reddit.com continues to grow. There’s a fantastic community of communities over there, including several for writers that seem really interesting; particularly /r/write. Keep your fingers crossed that things will work out there. There are interesting plans afoot.

The Editing Process, Part 2

My quest to maintain an entirely digital editing process has encountered a bump in the road, and I’ve resorted to printing out stories on dead trees to go over with one of those archaic writing implements people used to use decades ago. Pens, I think they’re called. Ah well.

On the plus side, the delay that this struggle caused me has left me almost completely cut off from The Price of Demand, the story I’m currently editing. It was the first Prices story I completed back in November, and this last month that I’ve spent in zombie land has been very kind to my ability to edit the proto-steampunk material I wrote before.

Reading The Price of Demand makes me realize just how many bad sections there are, but also how much there is that I still genuinely like about it. Over all I’m kind of encouraged. I’m not ready just yet to tear the whole thing up and throw it away! This is progress.

I still think most of the editing will be done digitally, but I bow before the ability of paper to make things look really different. I’m going to have to redouble my efforts to eliminate the paper from the process though, simply because I’ve been all digital so long now that I really am not equipped with enough free desk space to work with sheets of paper comfortably.

The next big challenge in editing awaits me, and that is making sure that I don’t spend far too much time in Minecraft and/or Star Wars: The Old Republic. They’re way too tempting. 

I figure once I’ve edited each story and gotten it into an ‘improved/revised’ state, I’ll post the eBook versions to the site for download too. I haven’t done that yet because I haven’t been completely happy with them so far. I am a bit of a perfectionist though so I’ll have to restrain that impulse and just treat those eBook versions as rough works too.

Stop SOPA/PIPA

As I write this, something remarkable is happening around the world. Mostly in the US, I suspect. English speaking students are trying to do homework the only way they know how — by visiting Wikipedia.org. Instead of the usual wealth of questionably curated content they’re used to, they’re being greeted by a blackout page that’s denying them the use of the site for 24 hours.

Wikipedia’s not the only site blacking out today; Google’s logo is blacked out, Reddit.com will be going down for 12 hours starting in several hours from the time this is written, and many other sites will be blacking out in various ways. The other site I write for, GeekBeat.TV, will also be observing the blackout.

I’ve been following a Twitter search for the last several hours, completely transfixed, that’s looking for tweets containing the terms “wtf wikipedia.” There are a LOT of them. It’s kind of awe-inspiring to see just how much awareness Wikipedia is raising with the blackout, and a little disturbing how much UNawareness there is out there.

SOPA/PIPA are important issues for any content creators to understand, even ones like myself who don’t live in the United States. It seems on the surface like people in other countries wouldn’t have anything to worry about, but if major sites got pulled and they’re sites we still use, that’s one small impact.

A bigger impact is that the very purpose of SOPA at least is to allow American companies to deal with sites they deem infringing but that they can’t legally touch specifically because they’re outside of American jurisdiction. Under SOPA, they could have made such sites appear to disappear from the Internet. (Could have, because the technical trickery that would have made that possible is no longer part of the bill, thankfully.)

It’s still very important to raise awareness of these issues because you can bet there will be more bills of this nature coming out in the States for consideration, and I’ll be surprised if similar things aren’t brought up in Canada and more countries too. Know about it and be watchful about online freedoms, and hopefully we won’t have to worry about it.