The 4th Guy's Path

iEgo

2011-11-26T19:43:00.001+01:00

I should be the last person to judge anyone. But I'm not writing this blog post to pass judgement. I merely wish to pass observations which might escape some individuals.
Electronic devices are wonderful. You can buy a 10cm^2 collection of silicone, resistors, ect. and house inside them several collections that might otherwise take entire rooms. Good news: being pack rat has become the norm and is now not looked down upon.
But this post is not about being a digital pack rat. That's for another time.

I have observed this many times before. I am on the bus and another person climbs aboard, pays the fare (as deigns any good citizen), and sits down. The person then pulls out earphones from inside their pocket or jacket and puts them on. A few seconds later I'm listening to whatever that person is listening with relative clarity. Sometimes earphones are skipped altogether and the entire bus is treated to this person's taste in music.
I have to admit that I did have this earphone phase I was going through ... I was sixteen. Sue me. Nowadays I read on the bus.
So, what is my problem with this?
Well, for starters, pumping music in your ears is a sure-fire way of saying to a person "Listen, I am not interested in what you have to say." Talking to strangers on the bus is not my hobby, but I don't like closing myself off completely. I feel that when we close ourselves off from communication, we also become more passive, less capable of decent human to human conversation. We revert back to one-way communication.
Second of all, constant noise does not allow anyone to stop and think. Whenever I'm reading on the bus, I stop several times and stare off in the distance. Some thought would have popped into my head and I would think about it. I must look like a damn fool every time that happens, but at least I know that whatever thought occurs to me, I process it.

Human society is very fond of introducing devices into its processes without stopping to think about the repercussions. I am not saying to stop all technological progress, but maybe we should think of how this affects us, our attitudes and our behaviour.

Writing from my new laptop

2011-09-30T12:24:00.002+02:00

Long time no blog guys and gals (that's highly unusual). As you can tell by the subject, I got a new laptop. This post is mainly for me to get the feel of the keyboard on this baby. Well, blogging and playing Typing of the Dead.

I think I've been wanting a laptop for 3 to 4 years now, but I never had felt the real need for it. Now that I need it, I don't really want it. It's basically just another thing to worry about. Such is life.

At school we are given the option to work on and present assignments on our own machines, laptops being the only reasonable choice. I had lots of hassle at the end of the scholastic year when it came to presenting my final project. Two years ago I had to lug around an external hard disk loaded with a virtual copy of windows which was loaded with all the developer tools just because I could not just spend half an hour each lesson configuring and troubleshooting software development environments on different PCs in different rooms. Did I mention that virtual machines are slow? They are indeed. Fortunately last year I did not need to lug around an external hard disk to present my assignment. but it was still somewhat a hassle to set everything up.

This year I found a summer job and I actually had a budget with which to buy the laptop. I originally did not intend to spend the money there, but why leave the money in a bank with the possibility of repeating two years ago? I resolved to buy a laptop at the end of this summer. It's this one by the way.
Stats for nerds will follow, just as soon as I can get through the 26mb file that SiSoft SANDRA generated. I'll do the stats for my desktop for laughs as well.

So far I think it's a pretty solid system. Windows 7 boots fast enough and I don't see the need to replace it with something more suitable to my tastes.

The Fox

2011-09-01T22:10:00.000+02:00

Today I showed The Mask of Zorro (1997) to my girlfriend. She had never seen the film before in her life. Shocking, I know, then again she had never seen Back to the Future (1985) or Star Wars (1977) before I showed them to her. I had to insist on Star Wars, and I only insisted because she is an interactive media student. Star Wars isn't exactly interactive, but some of the scenes were done in early CG (this was before Jabba was chomped in for the DVD release).

I was seven when I first saw The Mask of Zorro. I'm twenty-one, going onto twenty-two this year. It was a pleasant surprise to see something hold up significantly well. I mean, some of the action sequences were a bit too over the top in terms of comedy, but forgiveable. I also noticed that Alejandro (the new Zorro) has no back story except that he is a thief and saved the original Zorro's life when he was around 10 years old.
So what qualifies Alejandro to take up Zorro's mantel? Training given by Don Diego de La Vega, mostly. Oh, and being able to impersonate a gentleman.
Rocky (1976) was the first film to use the training montage, if it wasn't, it was the film to popularize it. In it you see the character working hard and by the end of it the character is the master. The Mask of Zorro uses this but in the middle of the montage Alejandro goes to the soldier's barracks to steal a horse. He manages to blunder through it and lives to continue the remaining of the training montage.

A sequel, The Legend of Zorro (2005), was made some years later. I can't remember much of it, except for the fact that I was probably too cynical back then to enjoy it. I'm a recovering cynic now, but I still have my doubts that the very same passion that went into The Mask of Zorro was poured into the sequel. For one thing, The Mask of Zorro was meant to be a stand-alone story. The proof is in the script: everything comes full circle in the end, which is a story device to bring closure to the story.

The great counter-cop-out plan

2011-08-17T22:40:00.001+02:00

The narrative rewrite of my cognimancer story is done (what is a cognimancer?). Somehow I am still a bit dissatisfied with the story, but the areas that I felt needed improvement, did get improved in this revision. So I'm not complaining too much. Again this is to be stuck in the virtual drawer for a number of weeks before comparing it to the original draft and picking the stronger points of each.
I also plan on using a software to map out the events so that most of the revelations feel more like logical deductions and less like cop-outs.

Here's the problem. According to the timer on OpenOfficeOrg, I've spent close to 6 hours working on this. I'm not worried a lot about that. I believe in this story more than any I've written lately, but I could use some tips in editing a short story. Rewriting the narrative of a short story is not too much of a time sink as, say, rewriting a novel. But if I were to scale up my method, I'd never be finished re-writing a novel.

Last thing: I want to sell this story, so if you know of any magazine that accepts stories that seem noir with a touch of magic, please leave me their name in the comments section below.

I've never written a detective story

2011-08-12T21:52:00.002+02:00

So what happens when you get a guy who has finished summer work and is planning on having a holiday? A sick guy, after two days.
Yep, 2 days after my final day at work I got sick. Not that I'm complaining about being sick, the sore throat gets to you after a while. Oh, and the never-ending loogies.

Today I finally mustered enough self-control to write for a bit. It's a short story that I've already written and I'm rewriting several sections of. For one thing, the narrative is pretty off.
Let me explain from the beginning. My idea was to have a story told in noire fashion (first person, "femme fatal", long coats, ect). The only different thing about this story is that it is about a cognimancer. What's a cognimancer you ask? A magician of the mind. Not sure about the full abilities of the cognimancers, but so far they can tap into the consciousness of other people.

I've never written a detective story before, so naturally the first draft has pacing problems. Specifically when the character has to connect the dots together. He does some pretty good guesses and happens to be too much in the right place at the right time. But the worst part is the "main reveal" where the villain blutters out the plot in a monologue. Sigh.
So, basically, I'm rewriting the story in another draft and then I'm merging the story with the world building of the first draft.

The main problem that the short story is too long. I'll count real quick... 7,667 words.

See, that's also my problem. Most of my short stories are way too long. Streamlining the story will get rid of ~2,000 words, I hope. But it does annoy me that in between world building and story, the word count manages to get out of hand. Sometimes you just remove the extra. But ... it would be nice to have a first draft where you have to streamline the words instead of the narrative. I think its less work.

Arriva's style

2011-07-04T22:19:00.000+02:00

Every Maltese, their aunt in Canada and their cousin in Australia know that the Maltese bus system was due for a big overhaul yesterday. People assumed that it would have happened without a hitch, but boy were we wrong.

Everything has teething problems. Sudden changeover is an invitation for disaster. The main thing is to have a contingency plan. Not if you're a certain company.
No, see, the new bus system keeps only the bare minimum amount of buses and enough drivers. So what happens when over 50 drivers do not turn up for work in protest? Yesterday and today happen.

First things first, the drivers that did turn up for work are polite and patient. If they weren't patient they wouldn't have survived two days' chaos.

I won't go into how or why the drivers did not turn up for work. I did not follow the issue, so I will not comment on matters that I am ignorant in. All I know is that they've already been sacked.

What I will go in is the following:

non-working ticket machines
misinformation on the website
impossible bus schedule
unworked routes
malfunctioning buses

non-working ticket machines
This is the silliest issue of them all. Why on earth would lots of ticket machines not work? There is ample evidence that all the company did was change the contact information on the tickets. In fact, the rate is written as 1,50 as opposed to 1.50. Malta uses the British decimal system, not the Italian one. These things should and could have been tested ahead of time.
The issue has been circumviated by giving free passage to people who are boarding. Granted that people are going to buy a day ticket at some point, the fare should either be free for every passenger or costs money for every passenger.

misinformation on the website
How hard is it to keep this from happening? On the website there is written that we can buy 7-day tickets from the bus driver as we board, but surprise, surprise, it turns out that no, we can't. I don't know who's in the wrong. I've sent an email about this issue. Hopefully it won't be filtered out with the rest of "fuck you"s that are being sent.

impossible bus schedule
When the schedule was first announced, everyone knew that it was an impossible schedule to keep. At the very best, these are very optimistic figures. Even in the best of times, the bus will barely arrive on time at the next bus stop. I know that they're trying to be awesome, but being realistic is also nice. A 55 minute bus ride today took me an hour and a half to complete.

unworked routes
Today I was the victim of an unworked route. Once there was the 65 bus which departed from Imdina and went all the way to Sliema, passing from my home area and San Giljan. If I was lucky, the bus driver would see me on the bus stop. This route has been discontinued and the only way for me to go to San Giljan and back is to catch the 123 bus or walk. Guess what I spent an hour and a half waiting for? In that time three buses should have passed. When I asked other drivers and told them, in increasingly frustrated voices, that I had been waiting for X time, they told me that I was right to feel angry. Gee, I'd better go invest Right in a bank or something. I wonder how much Euro it is worth. If we keep this up, we might be able to bail the whole Euro zone and then some.
It is very true that Arriva are working with skeleton staff and skeleton buses, and they're doing a damn good job of it, but this is not an excuse to drop a route without informing anyone!

malfunctioning buses
Besides non-working ticket machines, the route number boards are not working. Besides that, the worst one is the bus with the broken air conditioner. As any Maltese person knows, the new buses are equipped with air conditioning. It seems that when the air conditioning breaks, hot air gets pumped into the bus. On one of the hottest days in Malta, the air outside was cooler.

On the whole:

Bus drivers are polite and patient.
Teething problems are causing problems with the actual ticketing hardware and buses
Changing over to a new bus service provider in the peak tourism dates is crazy

Challenge completed

2011-06-21T22:23:00.000+02:00

The first draft for that short story has been completed. Now I stick it in my virtual drawer for six weeks (although probably less than that), take it out, smooth it over, give it some sense of direction.

It was a fine experience writing this story. I think I wrote close to 3.5k words today, which is like over a half of it. The final word count is 6.5k and I expect it to be the same between the removal of unnecessarry words and the insertion of descriptions.

This should be good. Even if the story turns out horrible, there are still salvageable ideas in it. I like the idea of these guargel creatures that I put in it.

My current writing project

2011-06-20T21:39:00.000+02:00

I had this idea in my mind for a while: in essence, it's a "showdown" between two people inspired by a song. I wrote that scene in mind, than others came naturally.
I'm still having a hard time writing it, but I hope to be done by tomorrow with a very rough first draft. After that, we'll see if it is sellable in any way.

We're not so smart

2011-06-17T15:14:00.000+02:00

I know nothing

Those are the (translated) words of one of the most influential philosophers of ancient Greece, Socrates.
If you have no idea who Socrates is, I suggest that you do some reading on the guy. For the purpose of understanding this post, you are required to know this:
Socrates practised philosophy by asking questions and questioning the answers given in order to make the person think.
This blog post has nothing to do with Socrates, but it is worth knowing.

Recently I found a blog that investigates some odd behavour of human logic, such as:
Deindividuation
Procrastination
The sunk cost of fallacy
And the article that I want to link you to, the backfire effect.

What is the backfire effect? Logically, when we belive in something and contrary evidence is shown to us, we would doubt ourselves and even change our beliefs. This doesn't happen IF we belive strongly enough in the original idea. In fact, despite the contrary evidence, our original beliefs would be strengthened!

Read the backfire effect on You Are Not So Smart

Origins of Ice

2011-06-16T20:09:00.000+02:00

Summer is approaching in Malta. Usually the hottest days are early August. Those are the days where you eat as many ice lollies as you possibly can (incidentally I don't do that much, WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?!). But I never stopped to ponder on the origins of such an industry. Today I found an article about the origins of the ice industry ... at least in America.

The ice industry was born by shipping blocks of ice that were cut out. The most interesting part was that there was no initial demand for the ice, so it had to be created.

Perhaps it was his Yankee entrepreneurial spirit, or perhaps monomania, but Tudor was obsessed with the idea that ice would make him rich. During the next decade, he developed clever new techniques to convince people that they actually needed ice, including a “first one’s free” pitch.

Last year I took an entrepreneurship course. One of the things that was first mentioned is to create a market you first identify a need (and if it doesn't exist, create it). Of course, once a new market is proved viable, others step up for a share of it.

Back at home, Tudor continued to dominate the scene. By 1847, nearly 52,000 tons of ice traveled by ship or train to 28 cities across the United States.

Continue reading the article on Neatorama

One way or the other

2011-06-03T07:28:00.000+02:00

I handed in my programming assignment last Monday. It should be working ... but something always goes wrong in live demos (which is today).

I think I spent until 10pm or 11pm working on it on a Sunday night. You can that there's something wrong when I work that long on a Sunday night. The website is ugly; but its working. No points for visual appeal will be given. That's why I didn't give a crap about how it's going to look.
Also, I found that automated testing is much easier. Why didn't I look into this before?

These are the two tools that I used, besides the programming and testing ones: Lorem Ipsum generator and Lorem Pixium.

Lorem Ipsum gives me dummy text to work with. I stick it in the page and there's an example of how the page text will look. Much better than wasting my time looking up similarly sized texts.

But Lorem Pixium is the really nice generator. It gives you pictures of anything to be used as design place-holders. Coupled with Lorem Pixium, it is a very powerful tool.

Just for laughs, I included a user in the website:
Username: milo
Screen name: Stanley Ipkiss
Password: mask

I wonder if my tutor will catch the reference.

Small digital victories

2011-05-17T21:16:00.000+02:00

Up until yesterday I was struggling with my programming assignment, but today the tide has turned. How? Persistence.

So there I was yesterday at school, feeling bummed because I was falling behind in my programming task. There is no assigned schedule per se but not having any sort of web pages displaying what they're supposed to, even ugly text, is not a good sign. The guy who is teaching my class was not of much help either. I partially don't blame him, he has a huge class to teach, but I have my problems too.
At any rate, one of my other teachers told us that we could use his period to work on his assignment. I just skipped his class and went home for a well-needed rest after a hectic weekend and to work on the assignment.
And the bitter digital gods mocked me. Yesterday nothing was working. Bogus. Heinous. Most non-triumphant.

I was ready to scrap everything and start over. But the pig-headed side of me refused to give in. Today I had only two lessons, so I skipped school. It takes an hour to go there and an hour to get back. Two lessons are an hour apiece and there's an hour of free time between them. That's five hours. If I went to school I might have done an hours' work. Since I didn't leave the house, I did 5 hours' work. And since programming is like a rolling stone, those 5 hours turned to 7 give or take.
I didn't complete all the tasks that I set out to do for today, but since the ones I completed were considerably more tricky than I had anticipated, it's fine. In the end, it was indeed a most excellent undertaking.
Hopefully by tomorrow I would have achieved my pass criteria. I plan to use the early hours of tomorrow to do some writing. I've been neglecting that because of this assignment and other worries...

Do I really want to do this?

2011-05-09T19:47:00.000+02:00

Ever since I was in secondary school, all I wanted to do was to create software. Very ambitious, but it is quite a solid plan, even if it kind of lacks direction.
It is bliss when a computer prints a message on the screen just because you write println("Hello World"); That was 11 years ago give or take.

Now I'm staring at this programming assignment in front of me. I open up the editor and I start working on something. It doesn't work, so I switch to something else. I attain limited progress, but only by changing half of what I did last time.
This is what causes me to question my ambition. It's not very fun to work on an assignment that refuses to sort itself in your mind.

Last year I had absolutely no problem in working on my assignment and I was terrible at databases. This year is just full of pitfalls, and my database skills have doubled if not tripled. *sigh*
The problem, I believe, is the fact that I have to build a web site that interfaces with databases. Last year I had to do a program that interfaced with a database. The presentation of the program itself makes a huge difference. I suck at dynamic web pages. It's something that I have not had much experience with.
I predict asking lots of questions this week.

Job hunt redux

2011-04-23T14:01:00.000+02:00

After the job fair I was called in for an interview on a Monday afternoon. The position was for an activity leader with a prominent English school in Malta (and abroad, but the position is in my country).

So after I skived the last lesson, I went home and changed out of my regular clothes into a brown suit. (I won't go into the arguments that I had with my mother about wearing more comfortable ones vis-a-vis the professional-looking suit).

I had no choice but to walk it to the place, and I still managed to arrive with seconds to spare. "Third floor" I was told, so I huffed and puffed and my knees cracked. But I made it.
Then I faced the option of two doors: one open, one closed. Which one would you have picked? Naturally I picked the open one, but then a Human Resources member retrieved me and guided me through the closed door.
There were three other candidates who were there probably long before I started climbing those stairs. The funny thing was that they were all female.
We were called in together for a group interview, which is an almost sure-sign that says "you're hired!". However, I believe that we were being tested for group working.
I entered first, in the least comfortable seat. I don't think that the office could have held more than the four of us at one go.

Then the usual drill of questions about us; just a little less boring. Since I entered first, I got to be the first to answer most of them. I tried incorporating a bit about my family's past affiliation with the company; our family hosted groups of students years ago, most of which I have forgotten, but the little I remembered was enough to suit my purposes.
Then the questions about how we were going to present activities to these foreigners. Nothing much to report here except that I know that I am terrible at presenting things which I have little interest in: day trips and parties.
Finally, the situations. This was where I shone, I think. I tried to make up for the mistakes I thought I did in the first round by trying to come up with good ideas such as preempting the situations and trying to come up with a level-headed solution to a small crisis.

Over all, I don't think that I did poorly. After the interview was over I asked the interviewer who a particular man was ("Is that man so-and-so?") and I asked if I could speak with him. Long story short, that man was one of my science teachers from 9 years ago. He did recognize my face but not who I was, which is more than I expected.

A few days later I received the contract, which meant that I was hired. I didn't like the hours that were mentioned, but I have had no other offers from other employers.
So, from now until summer I have to fix up my sleep pattern. But yeah, now I'm employed :)

The Job Hunt

2011-03-29T21:03:00.000+02:00

As summer draws near, several students start making plans about what they want to do. There are several things that I want to do, but at the moment I see the necessity of finding a job.

By chance I came across a notice informing that there was going to be a recruitment day at a particular hotel. I sprang on the opportunity and went there armed with a couple of CVs. I expected there to be a presentation about the kind of jobs that are available in the hotel. Except, the recruitment day also had the first interview integrated within it and there was no explanation. I can see the reasons why, but that doesn't change the fact that a) I was under-dressed b) I wasn't prepared for an interview. The email I received contained no information about this whatsoever, save for a broken link. The hotel website didn't advertise the event, of course.
If I were to be honest, I would give myself 85% of the blame for this failure, but I would hold others responsible for it as well. I wasn't surprised that I was rejected, but it did sting a little.

Last Saturday there was a job fair. There were some interviews going on but I was at least prepared for them, even if I were under-dressed. If anyone asked, I would say the truth: "I was doing voluntary work just before I came here, I didn't have enough time to go back home, change into a suit and come back here again." No one made a remark about my clothes, but I did make an emphasis that I was busy working for these last 4 years, just not for a paid wage. One of the interviewers encouraged me to keep up the work.
I applied for different jobs and have already received some interview requests, so here's to hoping that I do manage to find something.

TEDx Valletta

2011-02-19T21:50:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was the first ever TEDx Valletta. Barring the fact that I had to skive lessons just so that I'd be able to attend, it was great. (Except for the strong winds warning of course)

I first found out about this event in December. There was no guest list but I signed up immediately. I enjoyed watching TED talks on the website, so I was willing to take a risk. When the speaker-list was announced I must have been asleep, because I didn't look any of them up.

The chosen theme was Innovation meets Inspiration, so there was plenty of maneuvering room for the topics.

I am not going to repeat what the speakers said, that's what the video uploads are for. Hopefully they'll come soon enough. What I will say is my impression of the talks and what I concluded.

Diana Tirconicu talked about generation Y.
The central theme of the talk was the conflict that happens in companies when they seek people motivated to innovate, but when they are employed they are prevented from doing so due to company culture.
Honestly I can't say that I felt that I was the target audience, because I am a part of generation Y. But the talk did continue to clarify that there is a gianormous gap between what companies seek in the interviews and actually working for the company.

Christoph Glaser spoke on being the change that we want to see in the world.
What it boils down to is: you will strive to find your ideal occupation, but once you do you won't be working because you'll enjoy it.
Christoph is a living example of what he was saying. His good nature radiated throughout the entire talk. I also realize that he's 17 years older than I am. He doesn't look that old in all honesty. That is the power of optimism.

Tim Dobson shared with us management perfection as an art.
His talk was basically telling us that if we are worth 22K pounds at the start of our employment with a company, we should increase our knowledge and skill-set so that we would be worth 30k pounds by the time we leave. That way both the companies that employ us and ourselves benefit from the employment. There are two points of employment that are always going to be present, the period we become a part of the team and the time we leave it. What matters is the experience.
In all honestly I struggle to remember what Tim actually said, it's only came back to me just now. I only remembered his talk because of the graph that he drew with the "Whoa, big pens!" as he called them. He was one of 3 people to use a slideshow to help get his point across.

Craig Goldblatt gave a speech on self belief and opportunity spotting via the story of his great grandfather.
Basically Oscar, an illiterate 17 year old, fled his home country in time of war to go to America. After months on the sea he arrived in England, but was denied passage to America so he went to South Africa. After some time he started selling old boxes which he found and cleaned. Gradually this grew into a huge company.
I don't think that there was much to learn from Graig's talk, but he is a very good motivational speaker. (Or I'll just be honest, there probably was but I don't remember what was written on the large flip chart)

Jo Simpson shared intuitive decision making with us.
What she said was to trust and voice our intuition, and we will find opportunities to help us.
This was one of the more happier-goes-lucky talks in the event. I can't help but think that this is just one success story that came out of following intuition. What about those that mishear their intuition? This was very sound advice, but it's like giving a bazooka to different people. Most of them will wipe themselves out and the only stories that you hear are the people that successfully operated one.

Nitten "Nash" Nair spoke of future innovation by looking at the past.
Briefly Nash recounted 4 stories out of the Indian mythology which when closely examined resemble scientific breakthroughs. Things like the test tube babies, theory of evolution, live coverage (!!) and a bridge that joins Sri Lanka to India.
The first thing I homed on was "Indian Mythology". Nothing else seemed to matter. The science "predictions" were very interesting. I spoke to the man after the event was over (and I had to make an effort to not call Nash Mario [because he resembles this other guy a lot]). Basically I shared my interest of old tales of my country with him. Nash told me that he chose to use the mythology angle because few people knew the old tales, that way he was keeping them alive. He suggested that I would do the same for my country. I had a blog post planned on that sometime in the future; perhaps even a story to write that was inspired by Maltese folk tales.

Dr. Tanya Sammut-Bonnici shared with us that a prepared mind can recognize a discovery.
She walked us briefly through Einstein, Pasteur and Michelangelo in order to demonstrate this. By not having to explain who these people were, Tanya was able to focus more on what they did and why it was important.
This was something that I already had an inkling of, so I didn't learn much on the subject. What I learned was from observation of the way she spoke. She was energetic and constantly moved up and down the stage so that she could get closer to everyone. Personally I didn't like that, but I'm pretty sure that others at the back did.

Finally there was Deborah Webster, the person that presented each of the speakers. My thanks go to her and the people that helped organize this event, including the people that took the time to share with us. Bonus thanks go to people who had to travel a great distance just so that they could share with us.

If you attended the talks and have blogged about them, please tell me so that I may link to your post.

My first real milestone in years

2011-02-06T21:40:00.000+01:00

I've been studying ICT (specifically computing) for years now. I've earned my o-level and my a-level grades, and I'm proud of them; but I'm most proud of my National Diploma in software development.
Why? Well, first of all it was more of a hands-on experience to obtain and second we had to work hard for our grade. Well that or do the dishonorable thing, it all depends on how much you wish to learn.

Before the ceremony, I was kind of pissed that the administration opted to book a conference room in an expensive hotel. The college is in dire need of new equipment, especially monitors that don't have the same effect as smoking illicit substances. But I realized that there was no way of fitting 200 cars within the college grounds and not expect trouble.

There was a long ceremony of certificate presentation. Just imagine, 200 people all having the same certification. It does put a bit of damper on my good mood, considering half of them will be my rivals in the job-hunting department.

During the two years of working on obtaining my national diploma I worked on other things, namely writing. I also built a small portfolio, not of programming per se, but of program interfaces. Writing snippits is out of the question, which is most unfortunate.
I still have to document some of the designs, but it shouldn't be too difficult. Hopefully, I'll be able to present this work to a prospective employer.

So here's to my National Diploma, and to the two years I spent on obtaining it.

Cheers.

Critique request

2011-01-25T22:16:00.002+01:00

I'm looking for alpha readers for a short story of mine. The tentative title is "A new visitant in the Gallery".

The story is primarily about a young sick dancer and her father, who is a painter.
I would describe this as character-based fiction which takes place in a generic city during modern times.
I'm trying to increase my skills, as a writer, primarily in the area of showing instead of telling. Hopefully this story is good enough to be considered for publication in the future.

The story is written in English (obviously), and is under 5,000 words. As I wish for the story to be published, I'm looking for people that are harsh but constructive. Please drop a message or an email (if you know my email) and I'll send you a copy of what I have so far.

Of holidays and assignments

2011-01-08T17:05:00.001+01:00

One of the things that has saddened me over these last few weeks is the few weeks of holidays that we as MCAST students have. We finished on December 23rd and rentered on the 3rd January. I'm not complaining about the lack of holidays per se, although more christmas holidays and less summer holidays are always welcome. What my argument is against the amount of assignments that is imposed on us. One assignment in particular, Systems Analysis, drove me up the wall.

First of all, the assignment was vague. We were given a scenario and asked to perform analysis on it; inventing details that didn't exist. I guess being a writer paid off.

Second of all, we were required to do research. Very well, research is understandable. I can't vouch for others in my class, but personally I spend hours just keeping "up to date" with the latest software stuff. The problem is that we're required to do research ... and we still have to use the notations that the lecture asks us to. So my question is: why do we have to do research? Why can't we get a list of what we're required to use and research solely that?

For one particular criteria, we were tasked with doing a Data Flow Diagram; but I couldn't find the SSADM notation on Visio, the program we were required to use for the diagrams. After 4 hours of researching how to do that I decided to forgo it and use the Data Flow Diagram notation that is found in Visio itself. The lecturer asked me to change it to SSADM using flowchart symbols. It was not a chore to do, but I don't think that the lecturers themselves should be exempt from doing research themselves ;)

Despite this rant, nobody died and the lecturer herself is very helpful. But still ... having an assignment suck up all minus three days of your "holidays" is apt to put me in a rant mood. Holidays are supposed to be a way for students and lecturers to recharge their batteries, in fact some lecturers went abroad, but with this assignment I did anything but recharge my batteries.

True to myself

2011-01-08T16:58:00.001+01:00

I am writing this blog post as a means to remain true to myself.

First of all, I want to change my blogging platform. I'm tired of blogger. It does what I need, but wordpress offers me more control over what I want to do with my blog. I can host it on www.wordpress.com or I could host it myself, if I can get a hold of a php server. I have no idea how to do the latter on a limited budget and the former option would have me pay a yearly fee just so that I can customize the team instead of using a stock one.
With that out of the way, I can move on to other more important stuff.

New year, new resolutions? *Laughs politely* No, if I waited until the new year until I made changes that mattered to my way of thinking or my way of life than I'd probably still be in the same frame of mind of 17 / 18. Usually I find out what I do wrong and work to improve on that. In less dramatic terms, I find out what I can do better and improve upon that. If I'm lucky enough, other people point that out to me; if I'm luckier still, they take me aside and tell me.

Obligatory Christmas post

2010-12-24T17:43:00.000+01:00

Christmas is a wonderful time. There's a general sense of well-meaningness in the air and it is hard not to become "infected". There's one thing that I could never get quite right: Gift giving.
I kind of suck at selecting gifts that are relevant to the receiver, so when I find something that does the trick I am quite pleased with myself. I managed to find one for the girl of my dreams today, but I had help on the idea from my kid sister. Then I gave my girl a box with a paper inside that said

Please help him find a ring for us. He does not know our size or what will suit us

-Your fingers

She loved the idea, by the way, so I managed to find a perfect gift for her.
While we are on the subject of gifts, here is a list of 35 immaterial gifts that you can give. Ignore the word "children" in the title. These are gifts that will work for anybody.

Allow me to go on a tangent now. Every year in Valletta and Sliema, both central places for shopping, speakers get put up that pump out Christmas music from at least 9am to 7pm. I'm sure glad that I don't work in the surrounding shops, I'd have probably gone mad by now.
Around the area, people zip off from one shop to the next in order to buy the next gift on the list. Somewhere in the vicinity, a bell in the hands of a faux Father Christmas jingles as the chains of the commercial slavery are tested each time.
I came up with that last paragraph this Wednesday while going to do voluntary work with Grupp Ghat-Tielet Dinja. I also challenged myself not to buy anything that I don't explicitly need for myself. I think that it is time that I make a conscious attempt at this sort of self-control. Earlier this month I also resolved to try and eat less, as long as it doesn't screw my health. So far I'm managing, kind of.

I believe that I rank up pretty high on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Seriously, I can't think of anything that fits the criteria of something that I absolutely need and something which can be bought. My parents and grandma resort to giving me money because they don't know what to give me and figure out I'm supposed to be mature enough to know what I want / need anyway. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not, but that's a whole other argument. Personally I don't expect any grand gifts, but I know that I'm going to get *something*. I already have the grand gift of everyone that I love and care for.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. May your future days be twice as better as your past days and may they be only half as rotten.

NaNoWriMo aftermath

2010-12-06T08:46:00.001+01:00

So NaNoWriMo ended six days ago. I haven't written anything else since (any stories at least *grin*).
During my writing I switched over from my original intended story to Tall Tales. I don't know how much I added to Tall Tales now, but the total word count is in the 75k region now. Rewrites and additions will start next month. But more on Tall Tales in future blog posts.
***
During NaNoWriMo, I decided that it was time to move on ... blog-wise. I have a single blog into which I post almost exclusively about writing. In reality I should also post about other things, mainly software and computing. I am taking a software development course after all, and I do point potential employers to this blog. So far, I have not decided upon a plan but most probably I'll have two blogs in the near future.

What to write with

2010-10-31T10:06:00.000+01:00

On the eve of NaNoWriMo, I am blogging about writing tools. You probably already have chosen your writing tool by now, so this post probably won't coax you into changing it. That's fine - you are not meant to.

Lately, I have been reading the book titled Focus by Leo. It primarily deals with focusing on your tasks in the current age - the age of distractions. If you want to read it, the ebook is free to read. There is also a premium version with additional material, but the ebook itself is free.

The relevant chapter is Section 2 chapter 7 - tools for beating distraction.
The chapter itself is too long to quote in a blog post, but not that long. You can read and digest it in 6 minutes or less. In a nutshell, the author gives us aids to beat distraction.
It has convinced me to try writing my NaNoWriMo novel in Typewriter, a program designed to mimic typewriters (sans mechanical parts and noises). Basically you can't erase what you type (not without some jiggery pokery and polarity reversal), so you're more careful of what you write that way.
Should that prove to be more frustrating than I expected, I'll fall back to PyRoom, a more forgiving minimalist text editor.

Where art thine Tall Tales?

2010-10-30T23:27:00.000+02:00

I have come back from the foray to Authonomy beaten and humbled. I was an idiot, but I am a smart idiot; a fool that has learnt something. Thus, like the bard, the journey to know myself has restarted.

Tall Tales was supposed to be published in weekly serials on Authonomy, but I gave up. The reason why is very simple: almost every feedback comment requested that I comment back on the commenter's work. In other words: the game is rigged.
Several comments gave me advice on how to write better but only a handful of people gave me what I was looking for: positive feedback that they were reading and enjoying the novel.
Like the bard in Tall Tales, I gave up on my story. It is, after all, useless to narrate stories to a crowd that won't listen.

I spent several hours pondering the next move. The easiest is to stop, of course, but I find that less of an option.
I have set up a feedback system for Tall Tales here. It will only take three minutes of your time and the feedback gathered from that form will be of immense help to me.

Tall Tales will resume mid-December at the very earliest. I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused to any fans that the novel might have. Watch this space for updates.

In which I answer a hypothetical hardware question

2010-10-28T22:07:00.000+02:00

Today before class I was presented with a hypothetical question: if I could get an iPad for 100 euros, would I?

It was an interesting question, but after three seconds of consideration I ditched the idea. The idea of owning more for less is very lucrative for me, but I don't have a use for it. Sure an iPad is portable, but do I really need it? I believe that buying just for the sake of saving in perceived value is just wrong.
The answer is no. If I were to buy a portable device, I would get a laptop. As a software student, it would pay for itself when I have to show my coding to my tutors. There are several functions that can be performed on an iPad; programming (especially in C#) isn't one of them.

Then the other hypothetical question was: an Apple tablet or an Android tablet? I laugh at this. Apple seems to be closed and Android open in terms of coding. While it's true that Android is open source (although the code contributions are selective), any manufacturer can opt out of including some functionalities and even customize the interface to such an extent that it's not recognizable any more.
Personally I don't have an answer here. By the time I'd have to choose between the two of them, the two platforms would have changed so much that they'd be unrecognizable and would trump any features that might currently make me choose one over the other.

The evolution of speech recognition

2010-10-20T15:43:00.000+02:00

The original Windows Vista voice recognition fiasco

Voice recognition on an Android-powered smart phone

Writing Tools

2010-10-19T17:47:00.001+02:00

Wouldn't it be swell to have a way to keep track of everything automatically so that you can focus on writing your novel? This post is about a set of handy tools that I have just found floating around the NaNoWriMo

Note: I did not write any of these tools, but they are provided for free use by

NaNoWriMo - Last year, one of these "report cards" came in very handy for me and my stride towards a 60,000 word novel. What is the use of "off days" and "catch-up" days when you have to spend time and recalculate how much words you have to write to stay on track?
Fortunately, a report card like this surfaced. First you set the amount of words you want to write (or you can leave it at the default - 50,000 words). Then for every day that you write, you add the total number of words to the spreadsheet. If you want, you can add other details as well. The more details you add, the fancier the predictions become. This is a very useful tool which helps you visually track your progress and tells you the estimated completion date based on your progress so far. Fancy graphs are available on the other tabs found at the bottom.

Outline - We all know the drill behind the snowflake method (and if we don't, a search engine helps us out), but sometimes we need someone to hold our hands just so that we can get this process just right.
First you "program" this spreadsheet with today's date and the period in which you plan to start and finish your novel. Then you fill in each sheet in accordance with the deadline that you are given. Note that there are multiple sheets in this, just click on the tabs titled Step One, Step Two, ect at the bottom.

Character creator - This is probably the most ingenious spreadsheet of the lot as it helps you generate characters that you'll kill off later on in the story. Of course, you can always generate meaningful ones. There's nothing to stop you. This is the only spreadsheet that doesn't really work on OpenOffice, I'm not sure why. If you have a copy of Microsoft Excel you should definitely use that to use this sheet.
Alternatively, if you don't want to install Excel, there are several generators online. The ones that I've used so fare are all available on this website. Forget uploading this to Google docs; it's too large.Set the variables by clicking on the Male/Female cell and press F9 on your keyboard. Simple! Effective! A new character to kill off!

NaNoEdMo - What's the point of writing a novel if you don't polish it? (there's plenty of points, but agree with me for the sake of argument). NaNoEdMo helps you edit that baby of yours in 30 days. So far I haven't participated in it, but there's another report card for this so I'll post about.
There isn't much to say about this spreadsheet that hasn't already been said about the NaNoWriMo report card above. It's that similar and easy to use.

I have have written XX words out of YY words!!

2010-10-19T17:38:00.000+02:00

It's the one thing that we want to really write by the end of NaNoWriMo, where XX is greater than YY.
But if I have discovered one thing since I first participated in NaNoWriMo (2008; yes, I was a chicken) it's that wordcount doesn't really matter outside the challenge unless you're trying to decide whether what you've wrote could be published as a novella or as a novel.
Of course, then comes editing which should remove the excess words and whittle down your wordcount, unless you insert fresh material into your novel. I find adding material to finished works kind of hard to do, but not impossible.
In truth, anyone can "write" 50,000 words; it's called using a Lorem Ipsum generator. So unless what we write means something we would have beaten the NaNoWriMo challenge but we still won't have anything to show.

Same ideas - different cultures

2010-10-14T21:45:00.000+02:00

I have just tweeted:

I grew tired of Western Super Heroes. Give me Tokusatsu heroes any day :)

and I mean it. My experience with Western SH started with Spider-Man and Batman cartoons in the 90s. I have loved Spider-Man since he lifted a truck to crush The Rhino in the alien saga. I've loved Batman since I saw my first episode of his series. Things have changed now.
Since those days, both have received block-buster treatments. In their latest foray to the silver screen, Batman became The Dark Knight and is awaiting another film in the series while Spider-Man became a pussy and is undergoing a reboot. My favorite Marvel super hero film has been Iron Man, but even that seems to lack something (or has something tacked on).

The one thing that seems to be on demand is edgy super heroes. Everything is trying to be edgy nowadays. But there's a problem: you can't have edgy and a PG rating by waving a magic want, you have to work for it. Nolan gave the finger to the ratings and did his thing while Rami tried to serve God and the devil. Is anyone surprised that Spider-Man is getting a reboot? An alien saga with Peter Parker dressing in black and doing a couple of dick dance moves as being the worst offenders? Thanks, but I want my money back.

The truth is that you can have edgy and PG at the same time, you just have to have enough time to feature that but you have cut back on the special effects porn. Look a the Super Sentai series. It's broadcast for Japanese audiences in a morning time slot. The target demographic? Children that will buy the henshin trinkets and action figures. Special effects? Just enough to convince the average viewer, despite the fact that Tokusatsu meaning "special effects".

I spent about a year thinking that I had "grown out" of super powers, but in fact I haven't. I've just outgrown the silly way most Western Super Heroes are presented and handled. I enjoy watching Kaman Rider and the fact that it doesn't try to ram edginess down my throat as I watch it is something that I enjoy.

Of course, Japan is located on a totally different planet than Western culture where mothers make their children bento lunches instead of campaigning to ban prime time television shows that toddlers can watch. That is why it is a great source of inspiration. Lots of ideas are fundamentally different, which allows me to examine different ideas in different contexts.

I'm mature and not on my period

2010-10-14T20:58:00.000+02:00

4thguy.blogspot.com is probably written by a female somewhere between 26-35 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time. (via urlai)

Hmm, 4th guy must have hired a ghost writer for his blog. Well, Tomala tested out as a guy in the same age group so...

My latest short story

2010-10-14T20:54:00.000+02:00

Today I edited the short story that I was working on last month. As a code-name I called it "The Representative" but I want to give it another title so it gives someone who glances at it a feel of the title.

In a nutshell an angel wakes up in a village to spend a day amongst it's people. When he falls asleep at night, he goes away.
I couldn't resist making the setting somewhat tribal, but it doesn't go where Pocahontas and Avatar went (ie falling in love with the Chief's daughter ect) and it's not a super ideal place where one would want to live.

I enjoyed writing the setting and included several homages to Myst in it. In fact, I liked it so much that I'm setting my NaNoWriMo '10 novel partially in this world.

I have a problem though. Word count sits at around 9.5K words, which I think is on the long side if I want to sell the story. And I want to sell it. The problem is that there are only a few hundred words that I can actually cut, the rest are used to describe the people and the setting.

Can someone here offer any hints or clues about short story word count? What about retitling the short story?
(I also want to post a segment of the story online, as a sample, but I'm afraid that it would violate first print rights)

Creating characters

2010-10-09T09:31:00.000+02:00

Usually when I come up with a character, I come up with a physical description a character and a backstory. For NaNoWriMo this year I'm going to try something different.
I believe that characters are best explained through sub-plots and events, not through flashbacks and back story. Those only serve to serve to tell why the character is the way he is.
Believe it or not I'm taking a cue from the Japanese Super Sentai series. Each year there are 50 or so episodes which focus on one or two characters from the whole team at a time. This allows easier scripting of character development and telling the overall story; it is this that I want to facilitate.
Of course giving each character their very own sub-plot would explode the word count meter. Then again, the word count would be chopped down to a more manageable amount upon editing.

My NaNoWriMo novel will have an aspect of the "hunters" become the "hunted" (I'm using these terms loosely here). I think a sub-plot where one of the best hunters of the group recognizes the superiority of their pursuers and falls in Platonic love with one of them opening the door to possible sabotage or outright betrayal. Right now, I can already envision this as a character that doesn't acknowledge people simply because they look at him in the eye. No, you have to show him what you've got and then he will listen.

Planning ahead - events and Events

2010-10-07T20:46:00.000+02:00

In life there are events and Events.
events - occurrences that crop up which you can do nothing about
Events - planned occurrences which you can do nothing about
Note the difference.
Several of these may crop up during NaNoWriMo. With the former you can do nothing except to be prepared (read: be ahead on your daily word count); with the latter you have to plan accordingly.

First of all, there are 5 weekends in the coming November. For lots of us, it means more free time to write. Try gaining word count in these days so that events happen you won't be sent to panic mode because you may miss your 1,667 words per day.
When it comes to Events, it's slightly easier. Let's take me for an example.
I'm a full time IT student. During November 4 assignments will be set loose upon my class: the two in the first week of November are class assignments while the latter two are released in the last week of November and are home assignments (which means that I can postpone work on them by a couple of days). For the class assignments I might need 24 hours apiece to unwind my nerves so that's already two days during which I am certain that I won't write on.
I also work with a Non-Governmental Organisation. Our main work is done on Wednesdays while on Fridays we hold our meetings. I can't just skip these two Events because of a novel-writing challenge (and I wholeheartedly believe that my priorities are well-adjusted) but I can avoid the stress of hosting a Friday meeting so I asked the secretary to not even consider me hosting one during November. Nonetheless, that's another four days that have been removed.
My final event is Christmas Logs*. This is a fundraising opportunity for us as an NGO where we basically churn out 800 delicious Christmas Logs in one week-end. Forget the 800 delicious Christmas Logs for one moment, I just said that I can't write for an entire week-end. That's another three writing days stricken off.
So my tally is: 31 days - 9 Events = 22 writing days.
That leaves me at 2273 words per day in order to beat the NaNoWriMo challenge. Factor in events and I'll have to write 2500 words per day; something which I can easily manage in three hours.

*Feel free to contact me if you want to buy your very own delicious Christmas Logs; we deliver in Malta and Gozo and are currently taking pre-orders.
I hope this post has been of help to you when it comes to planning.

Your art is awesome

2010-10-05T20:59:00.000+02:00

When you do something because it needs to be done, you're a laborer. When you do something because you enjoy doing it in a creative manner, that's art. (yes; a rather poor definition for the word "art" if I may say so myself)

What follows is a true story.
At the annual general meeting of my NGO, we were treated with cake and brownies by one of the members.
"Eat at your own risk," she said, "they did not turn out very good. I almost threw them away." (may or may not be her exact words).
When I heard that, I remembered my mother's cakes. Sometimes when my mother cooks cakes she gets momentarily distracted and the layer touching the baking tray gets burned slightly and has a nasty smell. Heck, sometimes it happens to my grandmother and she's a genius at sweets.
With that warning I bit into a brownie.
Delicious.
I wanted to ask for thirds there and then.

Later, I got a chance to talk to the member. I told her: "Cooking is like art: sometimes you may not like the results, but others will like them anyway." We have such high expectations that any small disappointment is a big failure in our eyes.

Keep this in mind when you feel disappointed by your art.

Save me some sugar

2010-10-05T20:48:00.000+02:00

On an unrelated note to my last post:
I wanted to participate in the Midnight Riders contest but I didn't think I had what it took to win, so I just chickened out.
In honour of the new Left 4 Dead DLC and the release of Left 4 Dead 2 on Mac OS, two winning videos were selected.

You should also check out some of the honourable mentions on the blog post on the Left 4 Dead website.

Sugar

2010-10-05T20:42:00.000+02:00

School at MCAST has officially been restarted since yesterday.
Today I got a live demo of what would happen to me if I ate four slices of bread with a bit of meat suck in between for lunch and then waited until after 18:00 to eat dinner. Basically at around 15:00, my blood sugar level will start to drop and I'll feel horrible. So here I am, after dinner and after having sipped a mug of tea with two table spoons of sugar, with an annoying and weak headache.
I'm going to have an early night. Sleeping two hours earlier should do the trick.

Plotting vs. Pantsting

2010-10-04T22:31:00.000+02:00

Plotting is the practice of writing out a summary of the story, including all the relevant details, before actually writing the story. Pantsting is simply using a seed for the story and then going off to where the writing takes you.
I have written using both techniques and currently my personal preference rests with plotting. I tried pantsting for my NaNoWriMo '08 novel, but I ended up with several lose ends in the end. Basically it needs needs a lot of work. Besides, plotting can go as shallow or as deep as one likes.
Personally I try to plot, I do world building, characters and technologies beforehand. A light version of the plot would also be done.
When I write by the seat of my pants, I would prefer having done some world building. I don't believe that a setting is like The Matrix, where one can load whatever they like.

There are several ways to plot. The most famous for story plotting are: the monomyth, the 3-act structure and 7 points. I also quite like The Fool's Journey. But these don't work for world building.
I am almost ashamed to admit that I am very ignorant when it comes to world building. I tried the snowflake method in the past but I failed to do it properly.
By the end of this week I should have most of the world building ready to show to some people. (I'm crossing my fingers here)

Why participate in NaNoWriMo?

2010-10-03T21:36:00.001+02:00

I cannot give a single reason for people to participate in NaNoWriMo, but here are a few that make me participate:

You can finish with a 50,000+ word novel
It's good writing practice
You can prove to prospective employers that you can keep a deadline
You can prove to yourself that you can keep a deadline
November isn't far into the (Maltese) school year
You have a story idea that you wish to explore
You meet other aspiring novelists (or perhaps there are "real" artists that participate too. Who knows? ;) )

What about you? Can you come up with more 'whys'?

Where can I find the time for NaNoWriMo?

2010-10-02T21:50:00.000+02:00

To participate and beat the NaNoWriMo challenge, one needs dedication and to make sacrifices. Some more than others. The sacrifices include reducing time otherwise spent doing other things, namely hobbies. The time needed to be sacrificed boils down to one main thing: how quickly you can get your words on paper.
For example, once I wrote a 1,000 words in 30 minutes but I usually do around 750. At the daily requirement of 1,667 words per day for NaNoWriMo I could reach my daily requirement in an hour to an hour and a half.

I am quite sure that I can find two hours per day during which I write. It's a matter of cutting back on some things. Do I really need to spend time playing Left 4 Dead? Do I really need to beat that Portal challenge today? Finding time to write is just about figuring what needs to be done today and what can be left for tomorrow (unfortunately doing dishes can't be postponed)

NaNoWriMo post from your friendly liaison

2010-10-01T22:24:00.000+02:00

Over the past two years I have participated in the NaNoWriMo challenge and won. This year I'm participating, but I'm also liaisoning for my region (Malta). Honestly I didn't plan for this but there was no one else that was willing to step up, so I'm taking the challenge.

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. (link)

I am planning a series of blog posts which lead up to NaNoWriMo. As expected from me, the posts are going to be a cocktail of different areas that are related to NaNoWriMo; from links to blogs about writing to general advice.

For this first post, I'm going to give you a brief guide of the terminology that is used in NaNoWriMo (adapted from What does it all mean (literally)? by Nora Coon, Intern Extraordinaire). Please skip to the last two paragraphs if you don't need to read the definitions.

30 Covers, 30 Days: a November challenge for designers. Each year, designers selected by the OLL (Office of Letters and Light) create covers for 30 different NaNoWriMo works in progress during the month of November. The covers are posted on the NaNoWriMo blog. (link)

Come write in: A program that encourages bookstores and libraries to host groups of writers participating in NaNoWriMo.

Createspace: Amazon owned print-on-demand and publisher that serves as a NaNoWriMo sponsor and provides every winner with a free copy of their manuscript in paperback book form. (link)

Donation Day: A single day in November when participants are challenged to meet a fundraising goal. OLL staff members offer to embarrass themselves on YouTube to encourage fundraising efforts.

Donation Derby: An international fund-raising contest to benefit NaNoWriMo. Regions are sorted into six divisions. There are two winners per division: the region with the highest donation rate, and the region with the greatest average increase in per capita donations. (link)

Donation Station and Store: The place where anyone can donate money to the Office of Letters and Light and / or purchase merchandise related to NaNoWriMo, YWP, Script Frenzy, andthe Office of Letters and Light. (link)

facebook.com/nanowrimo: A Facebook page for NaNoWriMo where users can find updates on new programs, special contests, and giveaways, photos, and videos. (link)

Free proof copy: A winner goodie given each year through CreateSpace. Winners can receive one copy of their manuscript in paperback book form, also known as a “proof copy”. (link)

Kick-off party:A social gathering at the beginning of November to meet local participants and talk about your novel.
I wrote a novel, now what?: The NaNoWriMo website page that contains the winner codes for any special offers, advice on revision, links to similar events and advice on publishing. Meant for post-November. (link)

Meet up: When Wrimos “meet up” anywhere. These usually happen in coffee shops, libraries, parks, homes, or cafes.

Municipal Liaisons (ML): volunteer chapterheads who organize local writing events.

ML appreciation day: A day in November (the 19th) when participants celebrate all the hard work that MLs put into making NaNoWriMo happen. (I'll give you an address so that you can send in brownies)

NaNo rebel: Any NaNoWriMo participant who writes something besides a novel for NaNoWriMo. NaNo Rebels are largely self-defined.

NaNo University: A NaNoWriMo initiative offering advice and resources for post-secondary students and instructors who participate in or teach National Novel Writing Month. (link)

NaNoMail: The private messaging system through which users can communicate with each other on NaNoWriMo.org. Participants must be logged in to read and send NaNoMail. (link)

NaNoVideo: Videos produced each fall by the NaNoWriMo staff and posted on the site, containing advice, encouragement, answers to questions, and amusing miscellany. (link)

Night of writing dangerously: A fundraiser and writing marathon that benefits OLL programs. Takes place each November in San Francisco; tickets are limited to the first 250 fundraising Wrimos who collect 200 dollars or more (link)

No plot? No problem!: Chris Baty’s book, published in 2006, that explains NaNoWriMo and offers advice for successful participation. (link)

Novel Validation: The process of confirming that a participant has written at least 50,000 words in November, through the website’s word-count validation system. Takes place from November 25-30 and can be found under “My NaNoWriMo” --> “Edit Novel Info” when a participant is logged in.

Office of Letters and Light (OLL) Blog: The blog of the Office of Letters and Light, NaNoWriMo’s parent organization, where staff members post photos, news and interesting miscellany related to OLL, the neighborhood, and literary ventures in general. (link)

Regional Lounge: A special forum where members of a region can see a calendar of upcoming events, discuss regional matters, and learn about their region and MLs. (link)

Script Frenzy!: NaNoWriMo’s sister program, also run by the Office of Letters and Light. Challenges participants to write a 100-page script during the month of April. (link)

Thank God it's Over (TGIO) Party: A end-of-month celebration for all regional participants.

The Office of Letters and Light: The nonprofit organization that runs NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy, and the Young Writers Program. (link)

The year of big, fun, scary adventures: An annual post-November challenge to NaNoWriMo participants, in which participants post their adventurous goals for the year ahead.

twitter.com/nanowordsprints:A Twitter feed, maintained by NaNoWriMo staff, that regularly offers timed word sprints. Sprints happen year-round but are most frequent during November. (link)

twitter.com/nanowrimo: The official NaNoWrimo Twitter feed, which posts short news snippets, responds to Tweeted questions, and offers encouragement year-round. (link)

Winner Certificate: A downloadable certificate available to NaNoWriMo participants who validate their novels. Certificate design changes each year; winners receive a link to a congratulatory page after novel validation. Winners can find it here.

Word Wars: A common activity in which two or more people or groups compete to see who can write the most words. Word Wars can be timed (i.e. 5 minutes, 1 hour) or can be ongoing contests between groups or regions.

WriMo: A National Novel Writing Month participant.

Write-In: Any event in which NaNoWriMo participants gather in a location and write their novels. Often held at, but not restricted to, bookstores, coffee shops, and libraries. Usually organized by MLs (but can be organised by others, if they want to).

Young Writer's Program (YWP): NaNoWriMo for kids and teens in grades K-12. YWP participants can set their own word count goals, interact with each other in monitored, kid-friendly forums, and access a host of resources like workbooks. Educators can find lesson plans and teacher forums here.

I hope that helped get your interest. If you're Maltese and are participating in NaNoWriMo, give me a shout out in the comments section below. If you're participating but you're not Maltese, give me a shout out anyway. I love hearing from fellow participants :)

Are there any specific topics that you would like me to tackle when it comes to NaNoWriMo? Give me a shout; if I can write about the topic, I'll be happy to oblige.

Speak loudly giveaway

2010-09-24T17:07:00.000+02:00

Every piece of art that appears to push boundaries is challenged by well-meaning people (or not so well-meaning if it's a piece of art that threatens their power).
Speak is a young adult novel that forms a part of the former group. On it's tenth year it was challenged and called softcore pornography and was asked to be banned in American schools. Considering that banned books week is coming up, it would be a perfect thing to do a giveaway of said book. The giveaway is here.

Feeling fulfilled today

2010-09-22T21:31:00.001+02:00

Before going to sleep yesterday, I had two things on my mind:

Wake up early
Clean out my room
Create backup DVDs for the laptop

I'm satisfied to say that I managed to do both, the latter to an extent.
For my father, clearing out the room is just taking all the visible clutter and shoving it into cupboards or other places where it would be out of sight. Not for me. Out of 8 cupboards I emptied 3 and reorganised and 1 of them was already organised the way I like, so that's 4 cupboards that are cleared.
When I say reorganised, I mean that I took a really hard look at what was inside the cupboards and tossed out the stuff I didn't need. Basically, I had an "it's all garbage" moment. Despite my statements, there are some small items that I decided to keep. These are mainly single issues that would define me at several points in my life. Having never kept a journal before, this is the second best thing.
I'm throwing several stuff out tomorrow, but if you live nearby (read: Malta) and want any of the following items, I am willing to meet and hand them over gratis.

Lot of old (90s) PC magazines
Lot of English magazines (Current Sep/Oct 2003 - May/Jun 2005)
Lot of Italian school mags (Lo Stivale Oct 2003 - Jun 2006)
Mirage F1 CT/CR & F-111 "Aardvark" models. Partially assembled - with original boxes and instructions
Lot of Cereal freebie CDs; assorted; many duplicates
Lot of Ubuntu CDs (old versions from ShipIt)
Lot of old Quest posters (includes one with a basic program written on it

After clearing out those 4 cupboards, I did DVD backups for the family laptop and uninstalled the gunk that came with it (free games, software trials ect).

Then chirpilittle showed up and we went to my grandma helped her to get her internet connection up and running. Earlier in the day she called our house for help, so I feel kind of guilty for not dropping by beforehand (especially since she lives quite close by).
I gave my grandmother two DVDs of Doctor Who, the first episodes. I think she was quite pleased with the blast from the past and we used the DVDs as an excuse to show her how to work the media player. So far she seems to get it.

Lunch at my house and then TV shows.

Instead of a siesta, I dedicated my time to cleaning out my hard disk (an activity which I had placed on my agenda later in the week, so it's now ready). I'm doing a reinstall of my Operating Systems on my PC since a) Windows borked b) I want to change the hard disk partition sizes.

After chirpilittle left, I took some time to read my RSS feeds. I've started to ignore them lately, but I don't feel a drop of guilt. I can't read every single item that is posted, it's not like some cybercop is going to fine me.

After I finish this I wish to do some creative writing, but only 2K words maximum. Even with that maximum restriction, I hope that I will finish up to 75% of my current short story, then do a quick pass over it and increase today's word count by 10%.

Even if I don't manage, I've completed my goals for today so I'll still be fulfilled.
Signing off, for now.

Descriptions (two minute read)

2010-09-14T20:35:00.000+02:00

If you struggle to add meaningful descriptions in your writing, this post is for you.
Anyone who has read my earlier writings will realize that I'm a dialogue-oriented person. I write good dialogue, but there's a catch: the character's don't move, they are frozen in their previous positions and the room isn't affected. This means, indirectly, that I suck at descriptions.
Consider the following piece of writing

"Hello," Mark said as he walked over to John.
"Oh, hi. It's been a while since we talked."
"I have little time left for socializing. Work is killing me, and for what? Three euros an hour!" Mark said.
"Three euros an hour?" John was shocked, "How did that happen?"
Mark looked around and then dropped his voice. "Well, it started like this ..."

All right, it leaves to be desired, a lot, but it serves my purpose. Let's dump in the descriptions, shall we?

"Hello," Mark said as he walked over to John."Oh, hi. It's been a while since we talked," John said as he stepped to the side of the pavement.
"I have little time left for socializing. Work is killing me, and for what? Three euros an hour!" Mark said. The bags under his eyes confirmed to John that this was no mere bluff.
"Three euros an hour?" John's eyes widened, "How did that happen?"
Mark looked around. Satisfied that no one else was eavesdropping, he dropped his voice. "Well, it started like this ..."

Not a masterpiece, but much better than the original.
I guess my writing needs to be done in layers. During the first pass I put down the dialogue and the general actions and then I sprinkle the descriptions in.

Suspended Beauty

2010-08-30T20:21:00.000+02:00

Beauty lay in suspended animation at the top of the commanding ship the abandoned space fleet. Everyone else had either vanished or fled in the face of a distanced attack, sowing legends of a princess floating away in the midst of space. Until one day; one day a prince blasted through the thick escort of ships that accompanied Beauty's ship and boarded the commanding ship. At the top of the tower he found Beauty, seemingly asleep. He kissed her, but she did not awaken. Only when he decreased the suspenstat from infinity to one minute did she awaken from her 100-year suspended animation.

An entry that I thought of yesterday for the fairy tale blogfest (yes, I've been watching Battlestar Galactica)

The Writer's Hell

2010-08-25T21:34:00.003+02:00

Over the past few days, I've been stuck with Writer's Block. I know that there are several writers who don't believe in Writer's Block, but I do.
My kind of Writer's Block isn't a lack of ideas, thankfully I have plenty of them and if I did lack any suitable ideas, the fantasy plotter would provide me with a suitable one with a couple of clicks. Some of my best idea came to me when I was delirious in a bed in Naples.
A Writer's Block is much more serious than that, it's having several neat ideas and not knowing how to express yourself. Maybe the story lacks descriptions or maybe it doesn't feel right. Over the last few days, I have tried editing, writing from scratch and continuing other works in progress. I have tried the afore mentioned plot generator for new ideas. No dice.
Just now, I have written this piece about A Writer's Hell. I hope you enjoy it.

The Writer woke up from a deep refreshing sleep. He was so full of ideas that he was itching to get to work. With that same eagerness, he leapt out of bed ... But wait a moment, where was he? This was certainly not HIS room; his room was not covered entirely in wood paneling. This was not his bed.

Around the room, several objects were scattered. A bucket of paint and a brush; pen and a large blank book; a computer and several other items that looked too advanced for him to grasp their concepts.
'What on Earth?' the Writer said.
'Welcome,' said a voice from behind the Writer.
The Writer spun around and looked for the source of the voice. The bed had disappeared and there was a short man where the bed was. Or was ther ever a bed to begin with? The Writer was confused.
'Fear not,' said the man, 'for I have seen the wonders of your craft, and have brought you here so that you can work on it.'
'Are you my muse?' the Writer asked.
'Something like that,' the man said as his eyes darted around the room, 'if you want you may begin to work. I trust that you have plenty of ideas.'
'Yes!' the Writer said.
Immediately, the Writer rushed to the computer, sat down, and started typing like a madman.

After a quarter of an hour of writing non-stop, the Writer stopped and reread what he had just written.
'What on earth is this garbage?' the Writer said, 'I'm lucky enough to have used prepositions, there isn't even an adequate line of description anywhere in this.'
The Writer pushed the chair back and got up. He cracked his back and decided to try and write another idea by hand. Yes, maybe it would work.
Again, he sat down and started to write on the blank book with the pen.
His writing was faster now, more fluid; his words were colourful and the dialogue impeccable. But there was no single line of description. The Writer sighed, tore out the words that he had written and started to rewrite the same scene again, with added description.
It didn't work. The descriptions felt forced and flat. He couldn't write any description that seemed to fit the scene. The Writer ceased his writing and started to draw a part of what he had tried to write.

The drawing itself was fine at first but as soon as the complexity of the scene started to increase, the drawing became horrible. The frustrated Writer stood up and the chair toppled over with a thick crashing sound as he pushed it back. His ideas must be commited to a surface, any surface, no matter what!
There remained only one option. The paint. Paint was something that was very difficult to draw in, but the Writer had to try. The ideas didn't stop coming just because he couldn't write them down. His thoughts were going to drown in ideas if he was not going to get rid of them.
He snatched the brush and saw that the paint was still sealed. That was going to be a bitch to open, the Writer realized, but he did not lose faith in himself.

Oddly enough, prying the lid off the can of paint proved to be easy. Something told the Writer that there was a problem here, but he didn't take heed and dipped the brush into the paint and started to draw on the wall.
Half an hour later the Writer could be found huddled in a dark corner, hugging his knees whilst rocking back and forth.

'A bashful sorceress and a sailor seek a legendary ring in this tale of comedy,' he said.
'A besotted peasant has something that belongs to a mysterious satyr, and silliness ensues.'
'A brash ghost and a dairymaid seek a legendary spell in this tale of wacky hijinks.'
'A brash stableboy blackmails a band of elves. The result is romance.'
'A cantankerous satyr offers to help a grumpy alchemist, and pandemonium ensues.'
'A dwarf raised by merfolk learns a secret from a young satyr.'
'A headstrong farmer has something that belongs to a wicked sailor, resulting in romance.'
'A lonely peasant and a stableboy seek a legendary map in this tale of pandemonium.'
'In this story, dragons and robbers clash with a brash shepherdess stuck in the middle.'
'This tale of melodrama begins when a headstrong satyr has something that belongs to a charming sorceress.'

'So ... many ideas,' the Writer said as he continued to rock back and forth. 'So much potential, such a waste.'
A smile broke onto the Writer's face as he stopped rocking and looked at the ceiling. 'A brilliant writer is trapped in a room by his muse. This results in his personal hell.'

Giving credit where credit is due, the block of ideas that were given in the story were generated using the fantasy plotter.
Apparently, for me, one way to combat a Writer's Block is to write a story about Writer's Block. With a sigh of relief, I hope that I'm right. If I'm not, I can say that I came up with an interesting story during a Writer's Block.

(cross-posted on my deviantArt account, here)

"Loco Local"

2010-08-21T17:23:00.002+02:00

Wouldn't it be funny to write a story where the protagonist kills everyone at the end? How would that story start? Well ... how about the protagonist is initially paranoid that everyone's out to get him?
I've been doing some research, and found a lecture that was given by Dan Wells (available on YouTube, here). It introduced me to the 7 points concept. I won't get into the concept here, but basically it's:

Story Start
Plot Turn 1
Pinch 1
Midpoint
Pinch 2
Plot Turn 2
Story End

Any story that has been, or will be, written can be represented using that model above. In an effort to keep this short, I won't explain the how and why here. Check out Dan Wells' lecture, he explains it well enough.
Returning back to the story, I decided to write the idea. The first thing to do was to add the plot elements, like so:

Protagonist is paranoid that everyone is out to kill him
Protagonist is taken for some psychiatric care
Protagonist is assaulted by hoodlums
Protagonist vows revenge on hoodlums
Protagonist is recognised
Protagonist discovers that he is wanted for murder
Protagonist kills everyone

Not the best of examples for the system, but it works. In addition to the "Protagonist kills everyone" plot, I decided to add another plot that unfolds in parallel, a "Protagonist doesn't know anyone" plot.

Protagonist doesn’t know anyone
Protagonist meets people
Protagonist is assaulted by hoodlums
Protagonist is recognised
Protagonist injures nurse to get away
Manhunt is mounted
Protagonist kills everyone

Notice that there are several repetitions.
Now we plot them side by side.

	Character arc	Relationship arc
1	Protagonist is paranoid that everyone is out to kill him
2	Protagonist is taken for some psychiatric care
3		Protagonist doesn’t know anyone
4		Protagonist meets people
5	Protagonist is assaulted by hoodlums
6	Protagonist vows revenge on hoodlums
7	Protagonist is recognised
8		Protagonist injures nurse to get away
9	Protagonist discovers that he is wanted for murder
10	Protagonist kills everyone

Such a happy ending [/sarcasm]
Then I set to title the story. After several puns on paranoia, I decided upon "Loco Local" and named the protagonist Luke. So far I'm still on the first segment "Protagonist is paranoid that everyone is out to kill him" and progress is slow but I think I can get to the second segment tomorrow.

What do you think of the outline? Do you think it won't work as a story? Would you read such a piece of literature?

The writer's cycle

2010-08-17T17:58:00.000+02:00

Believe it or not, writers have their cycles as well. Writers oscillate between writing long fiction to writing shorter fiction to just bleeding story ideas with no idea what to do with them. Currently, I'm bleeding ideas, which means that I haven't added anything to my draft of Tall Tales in days.
My ideas tend to be on the "concept" level, meaning that I get an idea for a setting or a world. The only time I get a scene concept is when I dream and remember that dream.
Currently I have several ideas that are fighting for attention in my head, the problem is that I don't know on what to focus, or how. Allow me to draw a parallel here. When I had to do a proposal for a software project, I was requested to come up with 10 features for my project. After I handed in several drafts, my teacher told me that I spend too much time focusing on "the hairs on the back of a fly" in the room and not enough on the scope of the system. That's how I react to story ideas as well.

Currently I have the following ideas in my head:

Fantasy heist (after watching Inception several people, me included, would be severely tempted to write a book about dreams; aka: rip-offs. Why not just change the setting altogether but keep the story style?)
A retelling of the Pied Piper set in the Tall Tales
A clan of fairies who are stuck in human bodies (this needs a lot of work, but the premise is a curse and the theme is racism)
Upon birth everyone is given their own version of the truth and from that truth comes their destiny. Some follow their destiny, others rebel.

Then there's these "first sentences" that I wrote for a contest:

After we managed destroy ourselves, another form of intelligent life decided that it was time to have a shot at being the tip of the food chain
Anyone who could afford to have a child in this sterile world should also invest in it's safety; they should invest in a Big Brother (TM).
Don't give me the "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" crap, times were bad enough to warrant Project Excalibur to be launched.

What I plan to do with the ideas, so far:

Fantasy Heist - For NaNoWriMo
Pied Piper - A novella most probably
Truth - Short story for now
Big Brother - Series of loosely connected short stories
The others, I simply don't know yet.

Contest time once again

2010-08-13T17:13:00.004+02:00

In order to feed my ever-increasing addiction to books, I regularly enter contests. Here's a list of those that I have entered today:

How Would You Like to Win Some ARCS? I've Got 7
(Book synopses for prizes in the link)

ARC Giveaway! (Clockwork Angel, Paranormalcy, Delirium and more)
(Choice of 7 prize books to celebrate 400+ followers)

Birthday Giveaway: The Sequels!
(Celebrating a 20th birthday by hosting a book sequel giveaway, how nice of her!)

Films that have surprised me

2010-08-11T22:31:00.001+02:00

I love surprises, especially when said surprise involves a film which I believe I'm going to dislike (or not like so much), but in fact end up liking very much.

The Secret of NIMH
All right, how good can a 1982 cartoon about a mouse trying to save her family be? Plenty, if you know how to tell the story. Originally I watched this film because of the NostalgiaCritic's claim that this is one of the 11 best animated features of all time. I was sceptic, Doug and I don't see eye to eye on several films but I gave it a go when others recommended it.
Not only was it good, it forced me to re-examine the way I write stories. The film impacted me so deeply that I knew that I had to let the story influence my writing.

Moulin Rouge!
I expected a film about showgirls and some love story sprinkled on top with musical numbers added to taste. Boy I was wrong! It's a good film, if you haven't watched it go now. I won't tell anything else.
This film was full of surprises. The music wasn't boring (most of it), the cast was likeable and the scenes sometimes grew hectic (just like real-life). The biggest surprise of all was the simplicity of the story, which in it's purest form is "girl and poor guy like each other; rich dick wants girl for himself". Simple, right? Forget epic battles, sometimes it's the small stories that matter.

For the record, my favourite scene from Moulin Rouge! was this:

Which nails all my points for liking this film.

There are several films that have surprised me, but I can't recall them right now. What do you think about my choices? What about your favourite film surprises?

My recent book purcheses

2010-08-11T21:48:00.002+02:00

It occurs to me that I have never done a post about book purchases. I know there are several blogs that are solely related to reading and reviewing, so I'll take a leaf from their book and try something of the sort here.

The Devil you Know by Mike Carey
This is the first of the Felix Castor series. It is a supernatural noir about an exorsist. I'll let the back blurb do the rest for me.
Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist, and London is his stamping ground. It may seem like a good ghostbuster can charge what he likes and enjoy a hell of a lifestyle--but there's a risk: Sooner or later he's going to take on a spirit that's too strong for him. While trying to back out of this ill-conceived career, Castor accepts a seemingly simple ghost-hunting case at a museum in the shadowy heart of London--just to pay the bills, you understand. But what should have been a perfectly straightforward exorcism is rapidly turning into the Who Can Kill Castor First Show, with demons and ghosts all keen to claim the big prize. That's OK: Castor knows how to deal with the dead. It's the living who piss him off...

Vicious Circle
This book is the second Felix Castor Series.
Felix Castor has reluctantly returned to exorcism after a successful case convinces him that he really can do some good with his abilities---"good," of course, being a relative term when dealing with the undead. His friend Rafi is still possessed, the succubus Ajulutsikael (Juliet to her friends) still technically has a contract on him, and he's still dirt poor.
Doing some consulting for the local cops helps pay the bills, but Castor needs a big private job to really fill the hole in his bank account. That's what he needs. What he gets is a seemingly insignificant "missing ghost" case that inexorably drags him and his loved ones into the middle of a horrific plot to raise one of hell's fiercest demons.
When satanists, stolen spirits, sacrifice farms, and haunted churches all appear on the same police report, the name Felix Castor can't be too far behind...

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
A collection of short stories whose underlying theme is magic.

The prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope
On a jaunt to the small European nation of Ruritania, an English gentleman discovers that he bears more than a passing resemblance to the King. Through a series of intrigues and adventures, he finds himself impersonating the king to defend him from a trecherous plot...and falling in love with the king's love, Princess Flavia.

Dragonfly by Frederic S. Durbin
A reading suggestion from a friend. I trusted his judgement (and mine based on the first four chapters) in this purchase.
A young girl is drawn into the strange, spooky underworld in the basement of her uncle's funeral parlor.

Treasure at the Heart of the Tanglewood by Meredith Ann Pierce
One could say that this is a kind of book that I wouldn't usually seek out. It's young adult and the fantasy themes push the boundries of suspension of disbelief. It's not the "best book evar", but I didn't mind reading it as I found a few fresh ideas in the book.
Hannah, a healer with unusual powers, leaves the wizard she has always served and, along with her animal companions, begins a journey which uncovers the truth about her real nature.

King Rolen's Kin: The King's Bastard by Rowena Corey Daniels
I did not acually buy this, but I won it fair and square in a contest held by the author. Heck it's even signed by her and has a depiction of my “4th guy” icon with the signature.
The Kingdom of Rolencia sleeps as rumours of new Affinity Seeps, places where the untamed power wells up. By royal decree all those afflicted with Affinity must serve the Abbey or face death. Sent to the Abshy;bey, the King's youngest son, Fyn, trains to become a warrior monk. Elsewhere others are tainted with Affinity and must fight to survive. Political intrigue and magic combine in this explosive first book in an exciting new fantasy trilogy.

Tall Tales is now live

2010-08-02T23:24:00.000+02:00

Four weeks ago I stopped updating Tall Tales on my deviantArt profile. At the time I said that I wanted to shift the project over to Authonomy and promised that the bard's tale would return today. Today is finally here.

Although it would be a long wait for some (and a shorter wait for others), I decided to step back from the weekly serial format and go behind the scenes for a break. Yes, I needed a break. Suddenly, the project had become a chore with no fixed goal in mind. The short break allowed me to do two things:

it allowed me to get my writng ahead
it allowed me to go back and add some spit and polish to the story

Going ahead has hardly been a success, I have barely managed three updates ahead of the last segment that I posted. I need to devote more time for that and finish up until the end of November with Tall Tales. After all, I can't work on NaNoWriMo and Tall Tales simultaneously (unless NaNoWriMo '10 IS Tall Tales).

My biggest achievement has been going back and restructuring most of the story, then applying spit and polish. When editing, you're supposed to bring the word count down but my writing always lacks so enough description and detail that my first draft should be titled "draft 0" and those things will have to be inserted upon the first edit. What can I say? It's the one thing I hate about my writing.

One final thing: delivering the first four chapters of Tall Tales - Fool me once has been made possible due to the efforts of chirpilittle and TwistedHarbinger, who provided suggestions to errors they have encountered on chapters 1 and 2. Go ahead and give them a thumbs up. Any errors found in chapters 1 and 2 are their fault while errors found in chapters 3 and 4 are my fault.

Without further ado, here are the first four chapters of Tall Tales

More Tall Tales? head asplodes

2010-07-30T11:48:00.000+02:00

Yes, more Tall Tales. This is a sort of summary post regarding the project.

Tall Tales: Fool me Once will return on the second day of the next month; next Monday. I will post the link when it launches. I will also post some information about the novel on this blog. People of deviantArt, fear not: I will post some chapters on deviantArt and monthly links for updates.

I would like to have some cover art to show off on Authonomy (i.e.: to catch other people's attention), but so far I have none. I might be a bit bold to ask: is anyone interested in doing some simple cover art gratis? You'll be given credit for this, of course, but currently I don't have money to spare.

Now that that is over with, allow me to post some real updates on Tall Tales.
Over the course of this week, I have written two (2) chapters. One of them I am very happy with and the other not so much. Quantity not quality though, so I'm mostly content.

Throughout the novel, there are several references to the Inquisition; allow me to explain what it is. I wanted to give a deeper meaning to Tall Tales as it's essentially a story about a man who tells the stories. One way is to write some stories within the stories. Of course, there's only so many stories that can be told within a novel structure and pacing would become a problem with the longer of tales.
I came up with the idea for the Inquisition and wrote a novella based on it. In contrast with Tall Tales, the story told is dark fantasy that is riddled with magic and has different races within; a very huge contrast with Tall Tales which is a light fantasy that has references to magic and different races.
Hopefully, the Inquisition stories are going to be a series of novellas that will be formally published, I even have an outline that is "almost ready". Unfortunately I was supposed to have written three novellas by the end of Summer, but I've been too busy with Tall Tales (and that blasted heat!)
So far I've given a draft of "The Searing" to four different people, and I'm still awaiting an answer from three of them.

break; keep it short, keep it simple

2010-07-24T12:11:00.001+02:00

People that know me will realize that I am a very thoughtful person. My given skills, and those I choose to develop usually have to do with brain power. Creativity (or my lack of), socializing and teamwork/teambuilding are all results of my very active thirst for knowledge and skills.

But sometimes it's time to kick back and relax. In fewer words: I need a break.

When I was 8 years old, my idea of relaxing was very simple: find a shady spot outside (preferably on a beach, under an umbrella) and keep a drink with a cocktail umbrella in it.
I'm 20 years old now, going on to 21 in October, and I realize that idea of a break is unattainable for me. But that does not mean that I don't need a break.

For the last two years, I went abroad for two to three weeks to do voluntary work overseas. It's not taking a break in the most literal of senses, but it does allow my brain to unplug and recharge some of it's juices. Let's put it this way: in those weeks spent abroad I have dreamt a lot as opposed to the almost 12 months that I have spent at home. For various reasons this year, I'm unable to make it.

So, that's the problem. Now onto the solution.

Let's consider the facts:

I'm a heavy brain (ab)user, so my chosen activity needs to be more physical than mental
I already do voluntary work in my country. Increasing the time I do it does not mean that I'm taking a break, it means that I'm doing more voluntary work in the same environment.
I'm almost always in my room.

So: I need a physical activity that gets me out of my room and which is not considered as work.

In an effort to keep this post short, I'll continue this in another blog post. Meanwhile, if you have suggestions, feel free to tell me about them. Since I already have an idea of what I want to do, I might accidentally overlook options that you might be thinking of. Who knows, they might be better than mine!

A tale of Tall Tales

2010-07-20T20:27:00.000+02:00

As people who read my blog should know by now:

I author a weekly web serial
It's on hiatus until the first Monday of the next month
It's being edited and revamped

What I haven't shared so far is the process that gave a start to Tall Tales. After the reasonable success I received with my original story, I wanted to do something that was bigger and better. After much thought, epic battles with inner demons and false starts, the serialized novel Tall Tales debuted with it's first slice on deviantART on the first of last March. This is the story of the process that led to that start.

In the earliest draft (1729 words) that I have, the bard sits at a tavern. He does a coin trick on the bar tender, and naturally the bard cheats. In the scene after that, the bard sings in the streets in an attempt to earn a living. As you can tell: no plot, just an experiment on what I wanted to do.

In the second draft (6217 words), the bard sits in a tavern and does a different form of scam on the bar tender. He gets a room but a strange man shows up and gives him a message to deliver to Woodville and plenty of money for the trouble.
In the middle of the night the bard escapes the murderous bar tender, who wanted the money for himself.
Now on a journey, the bard encounters a traveller on the road and they share a simple meal of salted meat but they part ways.
Once in Woodville, the bard attempts to deliver the message. The stranger shows up once again and tells him that the message is for himself. The bard reads it to discover that he is to serve as an escort for a woman who is going to be married to a wealthy farmer.

The third draft, which became the Tall Tales that I posted, starts off in the same tavern with the bard portrayed as being a drunken fool. A stranger arrives and forces him to leave the village. The bard agrees, but does not leave before he cons the entire tavern. He flees to save his life and makes it to Woodville, where he meets up with an old admirer of his.

For length constraints, the retelling of the third draft is heavily summarized. For the full story, please read the whole thing *laugh* . Of course, if you have managed to come this far without reading it, I suggest that you do not read it now but rather wait for the "revamped" version (or "remastered" as some people might put it); but in the end it's all up to you.

This "remastered" thing puts me in a dilemma. On the one hand, I don't want people to stumble on the old version, read it, hate it and never look back (with the possibility that they'd like the edited version being lost). On the other hand, time and time again I've said that artists should make the original work available for historical purposes (in case you are wondering, I'm talking about the original Star Wars trilogy specifically). So far it looks like I'm going to keep the original; maybe it's address will change, but at this point I can't say.

To be fairly honest, I had forgotten about my first two attempts at Tall Tales, but chirpilittle reminded me about them and commented how she liked the second draft and could not understand why I had started the third one (to date she's the only person other than the others in my head who have read it), but I wasn't satisfied with it; I believe that a drunken bard has more potential. The similarities and differences that lie between the two different drafts surprised even me when I was rereading.
The most interesting point of the second draft is that both the original village and the tavern both have a name. I omitted them for the final story for a reason: I wanted to portray the bard as someone who came from nothing. Being a drunk and coming from a nameless village accomplishes that.

So that's what I wanted to say about Tall Tales. You might ask what the point for this post was, and so did I until now. This post is basically about the history of Tall Tales and the process that I developed and use in order to write long stories, not just serialized stories but any kind of novel. More on that in another post.

Too hot to write?

2010-07-15T21:36:00.000+02:00

Today I tried to write, I succeeded a bit but I ended up with about 1,000 words. It was very hot, even with a fan I find it very hot. I don't know why the heat is affecting me so much this year, it seems that there is a heatwave in Malta.
Of course, heat is not the sole culprit of my lack of writing. I procrastinate a lot and procrastination is made easier with insupportable heat. The heat does not affect my actual writing per se. I would give up on it if that were the case, but the heat does affect my creative process.

What hinders you when it comes to writing?

Latest updates on Tall Tales

2010-07-05T21:38:00.001+02:00

As some of you may already know, I am writing a serialized story which I release on a weekly basis. If you don't know that, then you must be new here so the next paragraph is for you.

Tall Tales is a weekly series that follows the exploits of a bard as he goes on a journey to find himself once again and overcome the redundancy that was attributed to his kind by the invention of writing.

Up to last week, I was releasing this on deviantART, and I was quite happy with the way things were going. Unfortunately, the dA format posed some problems.

dA is by design a portfolio website; writing does not actually fit in a portfolio (more like a scrap book). Hence, literature is at a disadvantage on the website.
"Look at 20 pictures or read something?"; It is much easier to look at pictures rather than to read something. This wouldn't be a problem if few people are willing to take the time to read and comment or critique in the first place.
There is no easy way to publish a serialized story.

Please keep in mind that I don't have anything against deviantART, but I'm listing why it doesn't work for me specifically. There are some wonderful people on deviantART, and if it weren't for them Tall Tales would never have made it this far. But I have found a website (authonomy) that somewhat counters the above problems.

It's by design a novel website; the target audience can be reached much easier and is willing to read and your work is actually ranked. The only disadvantage is the obscurity of my work, but I think I am smart enough to counter that.
As it's a novel website, more people are willing to read and some of them are willing to comment. If they don't want to read, they're on the wrong website.
The website is practically designed for serialized stories, baby!!

Finally, if the story is popular enough, HarperCollins would consider it for publication. I obviously know that it's a long shot, but deviantART does not even allow you to order a printing of text (for obvious reasons).

As you can guess, this means that Tall Tales will be moving towards authonomy in the near future. Meanwhile, there's other things for Tall Tales at work in the background.

Chapters are being merged and expanded; some more character work is being done on the chapters. Characters actually move in these updates.
Pacing will be improved, hopefully.
Story will actually have an outline that I will more or less follow. So far I've been kind of winging it.
Final story should exceed the 66,000 word mark.

This does not mean that I will abandon dA for good. I still plan on posting some of my shorter work there.
Of course, this is where I pose a question. Should the story posted on dA so far receive the same update treatment?

Unfortunately, this upgrade does not come for free. This might probably mean that I will loose a chunk of my fan base but I have no choice. The story publication will be put on hold while I can work these updates. Tall Tales will return on the first Monday of August, 02/08/10

It-Tina Biskuttina

2010-07-04T13:32:00.001+02:00

+ Verbum Dei Caro Factum Est: It-Tina Biskuttina
I heard this song four years ago. It's a Maltese folk song, so people that can't read Maltese won't understand it.
You can find an audio version on Youtube, here, but the quality kind of suffers.

Entering another giveaway

2010-07-03T09:13:00.000+02:00

This time for Did someone say GIVEAWAY????, who gives me extra points for a blog post dedicated solely to itself.

First prize is:
Personalized, autographed copy of The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting
some awesome The Body Finder swag
a $5 Amazon giftcard

Runner up:
Personalized, autographed copy of The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting
chocolate

Conest here

Contests

2010-07-03T09:00:00.001+02:00

With apologies to some of my followers, I'm going to enter a few contests, some of which require me to make a blog post about it. It's ok though, since now you'll know about them as well and participate too! :P

The first contest is that of Sumayyah who has just purchased a new domain name http://www.theravendesk.org and is throwing a contest with three prizes:

One book cover for a manuscript
an original soundtrack cover
a blog header

Second and third winners get to choose two and one of them respectively.
Contest here

The second one is of Kristi, who's apparently doing it for fun so hurray for her.

1st place - $25 gift certificate to Amazon
2nd place - $15 gift certificate to Amazon
3rd place - $10 gift certificate to Amazon

Contest here
The third contest is of Noelle Nolan over at 'Noelle Nolan: A Life Rewritten'

$10 Amazon Gift Card

Contest here

Another contest by ERICA MITCHELL-SPICKARD at CHAPTER BY CHAPTER. Prizes are all books! :)

Raised by Wolves
White Cat
The Book Thief

If you enter this contest, please make sure that you tell her that I sent you.
Contest here

Oh yeah!

2010-07-02T10:50:00.001+02:00

The day has finally arrived. The day where my CreateSpace proof copy for NaNoWriMo '08 has arrived. As you can see by the preview on the right, it looks ... decent. Click on it for a full-sized picture.

Also, please note that this does not mean that I got published (like my mother thought, but she was exited for me so I'm happy). But hey, it has my name on it and I can flaunt it a bit. Heck even my dad asked me what it was about, so score one for me.

Of course, there are some printing errors. For instance, the back cover repeats the first 12 words again, so it's like:

When two friends go in search of a cure for one of When two friends go in search of a cure for one of their bullies ...

There's also some page breaks after one line because thats' when a chapter ends, so I have a page with one line.
What takes the cake, though, is a page titled Chapter 102, and the text starts on the next page. A word processor screw-up and a revelation that I didn't check the file thoroughly. Meh.

On a more positive note, my kid sister was more exited than I was about this. She gave me the honor of entering her "to read" list and bumping me up to the next item. Wow, kid sisters rock.

On Writing pt1

2010-07-01T12:44:00.000+02:00

Hey there people, long time no blog post! I could give all kinds of reasons and excuses, but here's one that must be said before: I'm lazy. Onto the next one: lots of reading, writing and editing going behind the scenes here.

This morning I was working on a novella inspired by the character of Solomon Kane. Before anyone asks: inspiration is the proper word to use there. If I wanted to read rip-offs I'm sure there are plenty to find on the internet, and they probably even have different levels of legibility. I can start at 'readable' and work my way up as if I'm working on a draft and refining it. :P
Basically what I took from the story was the style of character (bad-ass) and a trait which I think is only present in the movie adaptation: the vow of non-violence. Except, I twisted this in a vow of non-killing so my character can beat people up for information *grin*.
Personally, I think that I'll be finished on the second draft today. At least I hope so, there's some people I wish to present a printed copy for review and I'm not sure if stationaries who accept digital files are open on Saturdays.

One thing that I'm missing is a proper title. Not sure about how to come by a good one. I mean, for my first draft I gave it the title "The Rise of Darkness". I knew that it was cheesy, but I went ahead with it anyway. One friend commented on its cheesiness, so I tested his comment with the rebuttal 'So isn't "The Lord of The Rings" cheesy?' The reply was that, yes, it was cheesy but it wasn't cheesy back then. Ouch. So yeah, put me up for a new title.

I have started to read several blogs on writing, and one of the most interesting things that I have picked up is called the elevator pitch. Currently I can't find the exact blog link, so I'll have to link to a Wikipedia page. (forgive me blog author).
Here's my attempt at writing an elevator pitch.

Fearing that he lost his daughter to dark forces, a greedy father rides out with evidence to find a witch hunter. Unable to find a witch hunter, he is apprehended and placed on trial with evidence against his daughter used against him.

Not too sure how well that would attract interest of any potential publishers, but I try my best.
Maybe you can give me some examples that can help. What do you think?

Website status

2010-06-21T09:06:00.000+02:00

All right, I have stuff to present in a couple of hours. My nerves are reaching an all time peak, despite the fact that I know that I've done things right. This would normally call upon the ancient and mysterious powers of emoticons, but slamming my head to the keyboard repeatedly will have to do.

Some time ago I had given up on building a website. Although designing and building a website would have been a fun thing to do, and would have added to my portfolio, the end result would not have been worth it.
On the other hand, Wordpress 3.0 has been released. While it's tempting to find a server and move my blog over to there, again there is little payoff to be gained. The feature that I seek from WP would be to host pages that are not a part of this blog, and blogger already has it.
It is clear to me that I should be doing better things with my time, such as actually finding a job or actually writing (which incidentally reminds me that I have a Tall Tales update to post tonight, must get down to writing it).

Bye for now.

Kinda like a blog, only on paper?

2010-06-20T08:49:00.001+02:00

Recieved this via email yesterday from Al Lowe's Cyberjoke3000

A twelve-year-old boy received a journal as a birthday gift. He looked at it carefully, but was mystified.
"Mom, what's the deal with this book? All the pages are blank."
"That's called a journal," she explained. "You write down interesting stuff that happens to you."
His face brightened as he caught her drift. "So it's kinda like a blog, only on paper?!"

Alas, it's so true. People with access to the Internet have replaced written journals with digital ones, personal journals with open ones. Is it good? Bad? Neither.
For me, the purpose of a written journal is for me to be able to practice my cursive writing. That is something which I can never do with a digital journal. In my eyes, the purpose of a digital journal is that it can be easily edited and published on the Internet; I believe that writing a personal digital journal would defeat the concept.
I have played with the idea of writing a journal many times. Often I get discouraged when I see pictures of beautifully illustrated journals in films and games, reasoning: "I can never achieve that level of artistry!" But the real reason is much more plausible. I am afraid of what I can say to myself.
What CAN I say to myself? Plenty, if I want to listen. But it seems that I'm much more content to allow myself to play with character that I make up, in writing and even in my head.
Of course, there's the one-sentence journal that I can keep ... in fact, I think that I might try that.

Excerpt from an interview with @neilhimself

2010-06-17T11:12:00.001+02:00

So I've just read a report on an interview with Neil Gaiman. The pieces that are posted here are my most favourite ones, and are posted here under fair use. A link for the article is provided at the end of this post.

TC: I remember being a child in the 1980s, and the books that have lived with me from then are probably Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett’s. Because their worlds came from completely elsewhere, they required no prior knowledge.
NG: Yes. And they were not prescriptive, they were discovered, they were anarchic. The discovery of what Douglas Adams could do to a sentence, what Terry Pratchett could do to a plot…

This excerpt kind of convinces me to continue writing the fantastic and stories that are not of this world.

TC: Do you feel it is a good time to be a young writer?
NG: It’s an amazing time to be a young author. Your options are almost infinite. The playing field may not be perfectly flat, but it’s really so much flatter than anybody every believed. The truth is, if I were starting out right now, writing short stories or whatever, I would build my little off-the-peg website, no need for a publisher at that stage, maybe never. Although I’m fascinated by how many mainstream publishers keep an eye on the web for people who are good. But just the idea that I could get stuff done and out like that, that I wouldn’t be dependent in any way on any other gatekeeper.

Superb words of encouragement if I've ever read them.

TC: I think a lot of older authors have sour grapes about it: it was rather cosy to be removed from that messiness. It makes me feel we’re getting back to something like the early days of newspapers as scurrilous rags, and of authors hawking their wares, their stories, on the streets and by subscriptions.
NG: I love the messiness of it. I think in some ways we’re back even earlier than that, at the point where you turn up at the village and you say, give me a meal for the night and I’ll tell you stories. So, yes, it is a good time, a really good time to be a young writer. Any time that all of the rules are changing is a good time.

Insert "Tall Tales" reference here. :)

The rest of this insightful interview can be found here.

Details in Fantasy

2010-06-16T15:27:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I stumbled upon an article (well, actually it was fed to me by an RSS Feed Reader) about parasites. (article in question is here, by the way). This article, although short, has made me re-evaluate the way traditional Fantasy is written, and pretty much every piece of fiction.

What dangers did Frodo and Sam have to face? What about Merry and Pippin? Or Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli? They had a great many dangers to face, and they came close to perishing lots of times, but how many fleas did they encounter? As far as I know, none.
"Who are you to critisise the much-beloved trilogy?" you might ask, and you are right: I'm just some guy who dreams of getting published. But think about it for a moment: in the kind of world in which the Felowship resided in, it is impossible to not run into any parasites. Heck it's impossible for me to stay away from fleas because I have two dogs.

Small problems give the stories a sense of realism, but they are shadowed by larger ones (the Quest in this case). Let's be a bit realistic here: who would want to read about a flea infestation in the Hobbit's feet when there are much more exiting things that we could read about?

I don't know if Tolkien ever considered these small nuisances or whether he thought they'd be silly when placed next to the Quest.
For me tLoTR is a fine piece of fiction despite the "omission" of common problems. What do you think?

Sparks

2010-06-12T17:35:00.001+02:00

Currently I have some decent ideas that would make some half-decent story, but it seems as if I am missing the spark to actually put down the half-decent stories.
I'm not at all worried about this, although personally I wish I could just get them down. I want to submit these stories to online magazines and they have deadlines that are drawing nearer and nearer.
Hang on, I know what to do.
*sacrifices a plot bunny*
Hmm, that didn't work.
*sacrifices another plot bunny*
Nope ... let's try again.

I think I've caused a plot bunny extinction.
(in actual fact, no plot bunnies have been harmed to bring you this post)

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Douglas Adams

Assorted Journal list

2010-06-12T10:45:00.001+02:00

Last night I made a blog post which touched lightly the subject of journal keeping. Today I'll add the assorted links that I found here:

Why journaling is so powerful
15 different types of journals to keep
Starting Points for Journal Entries

This pages lead to:
Journals as Writing Resources

I found lucid dreaming rather interesting:
How to Sleep Better by Using a Dream Diary
Lucid Dream Techniques

What I am grateful for

2010-06-11T22:43:00.001+02:00

Earlier today, I saw a blog post about journal-keeping and the types of journals one could keep (it's here, http://www.ridgenet.net/~mimi/getstarted.html). Despite the fact that I don't actually want to keep a journal, one of the entries caught my eye and is now the title of this blog post.

I am grateful for a great many things, but I do not voice the gratitude. Perhaps it's because I'm surrounded by so much negativity that the bad overcomes the good. Perhaps I'm just a whiny person; perhaps I still look at the world as if I'm 16 years old and not 20. I cannot say for sure.

I am grateful for all the patience people spare me: parents, siblings, other relatives, girlfriend, friends, class mates, fellow NGO workers, teachers.
I am grateful for the material wealth that I am allowed to use, because without that I am able less time worrying and more time being creative.
I am grateful for my creativity, I am grateful for people that appreciate my creativity, I am grateful for people who criticize constructively, I am grateful for people who criticize just to have fun, I am grateful for inspiration
I am grateful for the children and youths that I get to work with on a weekly basis.
I am grateful for libraries
and I am grateful for you who took the time to read this and a great many things that I probably can't remember right now.

What are you grateful for?

The future

2010-05-27T21:33:00.000+02:00

There are several things I should be doing, there are other things that I want to do and there are others that I would like to do. Unfortunately, I don't feel like / have the means to / want to do them, so I'm writing this blog post. I wanted to write it at some point, so might as well be now.

I want a website. It's as simple as that. Everyone desires one at one point or another, but I think I might actually need one. In the past I have said this, and I contented myself with a blog. I just needed a space to post my thoughts and I got it. Now things have changed. Almost four years have passed since I wrote my first blog post. At that same time I started to become interested in writing, which was something I hadn't given a thought to in five years. I quickly moved on to deviantART in search of fame and fortune, and to sell my then "wow I can't believe I wrote this!!" novel. Fortunately the latter never happened and the novel is now guarded by five separate SWAT teams and a SEAL unit.

The former however has happened, to an extent. This year I set out to write Tall Tales, a story about a bard who is trying to find his place in the world, I go over the moon when I receive comments on it and even when I receive comments from my 'usual' fans, it's still a nice surprise.

deviantART has helped me a lot, and I believe so far I have milked out anything I would have been able to without shelling a single cent.

But the problem is that a dA portfolio can be hard to navigate if one is not used to the site structure. Add a little disorganization and *bam* people will be turned off. I'm not going to act humble, but in actual fact it's not turning away prospective fans that bothers me. It's turning away prospective employers.

This is where I stop for now, I'm not going to publish the post yet as I'll return and work on it tonight.

Wow, managed to not think about this for 24 hours.

Besides promoting my writing abilities (or lack of, depending on how harsh your criticism is), I want to also promote my web design skills; this is something that is difficult to do on a blog. Since my needs aren't too large, I should have the necessary skills to do this on my own.

Finally, I could host a semi-cv on the website with actual links to examples embedded into it.

Basically, I need to find a web host and a domain name. I have a domain name in mind, and a webhost would ideally be able to host ASP.NET as that is the only dynamic web language I know so far. (Do I need a dynamic web page? I don't know, probably)

Characters and novelettes

2010-05-08T14:46:00.000+02:00

Although I still have school assignments to do, I normally reserve the weekend for things that are not school-related. 5 school days is enough for me, and besides I really do need a break.

I've finally finished reading my NaNoWriMo '08 novel (circa the last blog post) and I haven't given it serious thought since that day. But it's time for me to criticise my own characters.

There are several character types that fit some archetype or another. And there are several different races.

The first is the protagonist (Beauty) who is a goody-goody, asks questions and tries to help out others.
Then we have the standard bully (Bark); I wish to add a follower to this one as a sort of "companion" (Bite, it's a small joke), but I don't know how to add such a person exactly. It probably would break the story at this point.
We have the popular character (Pixie), who fears that if a piece of information about it leaks, it's popular days are over. (At this point, the bully understands the popular one and vice versa)
There's a follower of the popular character (Bolt), also insanely jealous of the character at the same time), who goes with the main character as the story progresses.
Another characters is a friend to the main character (Blue), but moves on with its life after a point.

Finally, we have the old mentor who is senile enough to forget names.
And that's it for the first race.
From the second race, we only have one character that can be considered a protagonist.

This character (Spiga) simply wants to escape from the monotonous life that it lives, and does so at the first opportunity that presents itself)

I've had enough of writing about characters, so I'll continue to write this tomorrow. I'll write about the story itself. Let me warn you, it's kind of weird.

The story opens up when Beauty is born. As it goes out into the world, it runs into several characters. The death of one of these characters forces Beauty to go on a journey. On the way a friend (Bolt) hops on board and they meet two new species. The Flowers and Spiga's race...

Great Scott. This sounds stupider than I thought it was. At this point, I think some sort of rewrite is in order. I don't know; maybe I've lost faith in my abilities or maybe the story is rubbish. I'm going to fix up the inconsistencies and grammatical mistakes and then I'll give it to some relatives and friends to see what they think about it. Hopefully they'll either agree with me or beat me up in order to teach me how to appreciate an honest story.
If you consider yourself to be my friend (and you're interested in this) feel free to contact me for a copy of the story. I'll be more than happy to receive your feedback on this.

Of draft reading

2010-05-02T14:19:00.000+02:00

So today I have finally finished the read-through of my NaNoWriMo '08 draft. Originally I started two weeks ago and intended to read it in "1-2 days max". Life got in the way.
I was quite surprised with the quality of the writing. Given the fact that it was written in a mad scramble to get 50,000 words stamped down in 30 days, the narrative was quite consistent.

The story was ok, for the most part; except that there seem to be more Deus Ex Machinias than I liked. For instance there is a character that is a spirit and can translate from one language to another automatically (a babal fish), another character that translates using sign language. Finally there seems to be an "evil mastermind" from a world beyond. Oh, and a character rises up from the dead thanks to the "evil mastermind" (but its corpse is rotten, so it gives the protagonists a reason to set out in the first place; additionally, it does not serve the purposes of the "evil mastermind"). Personally, these issues that I have mentioned don't seem to be screaming "look, I'm a Deus Ex Machinia" to the potential reader, but they bother me.

Moving on to the characters. There are several characters that can be dubbed as the protagonists. Keeping up with these characters wasn't too hard, even if they seem to be all over the place. Their objectives are somewhat clear. Some more characters need to be upgraded, meaning that they need some more layers of character. At this point I'm quite confused about what I want to do with the characters, who needs to meld into the background and who needs to be pulled out from there.

The epilogue I was quite satisfied with it. There were a couple of continuity mistakes in the narrative, but if those are overlooked it would work out. I was also thinking of cutting out a part of it involving solely two characters and
continuing their story. But at this point I'm not sure.

I would like to continue dissecting my work, perhaps I could go into detail about the characters and races; perhaps in another blog post.

bloggers, iPhones and journalists

2010-04-28T22:35:00.001+02:00

This week, some posts of protest have appeared on Internet journals complaining about the raid of a gizmondo editor by the police. This person allegedly managed to get his hands on a misplaced iPhone 4G prototype and posted a thorough review which Apple, it seems, isn't too happy about.
I'm all for freedom of press, but I believe that a line somewhere has to be drawn. While it was fun to look at the next model of the iPhone (and probably awesome to be able to use it), I can't believe that the persons responsible for the awesome article didn't believe that they could get in trouble for it.
Think about it for a moment: you find something (in a bar) which is not yours and you know who the owner is for sure. You boast that you have it in your possession and the owner finds out. What do you think would be the course of action of the owner? All right, I firmly believe that a police raid is excessive (and I hope the guy gets his stuff back), but we're dealing with industrial secrets.
Sure you can say that you have journalistic immunity, but let's use our grey matter for a moment: you kept a gadget, knowing who the owner was, for a journalistic scoop. That's not uncovering a murder plot, is it?

Why I haven't printed out my NaNoWriMo '09 novel yet

2010-03-26T18:03:00.000+01:00

Let's get this out of the way: I am lazy. Having said that, I have something else to say: I am not lazy because I didn't print out the NaNoWriMo '09 novel draft yet. It doesn't take much effort to transfer that baby to a storage device, go to a printer and tell them "set me up baby"; neither does it take much effort to load up my printer with a liter of ink and 100 pages before hitting "print, baby". I am lazy because I haven't started to really edit yet.

My NaNoWriMo '09 draft, apart from being stuck with a shitty "temporary" title, needs a lot of work. I hear you say "But every first draft needs work!", and you are right. But, I now realize that what I wrote seems more like a framework for a two-part story; a three-parter is very likely as well.
I don't pad (not to my knowledge) but in a novel that spans an excess of 10 years on one character, I believe that some serious character development is needed. For me, there is too much down-time. Will there be down time? One can't narrate a story that spans 10 years with the detail of every day of the week written down, on the other hand 5 years of down time is a bit too much.

Ammount of RAM in PC in the 10 years I've owned one.

2010-03-20T08:16:00.000+01:00

Impressive, right?

So, I was rejected

2010-03-19T11:57:00.001+01:00

Last week I went to a job interview and yesterday I received the rejection email (it's the new rejection letter, baby!). I honestly wish to say that I am disappointed (in fact, I am), but the thing is, this is actually a step up!

My first real job interview left me for weeks wondering just what on Earth was going to happen, and when I finally did phone in I discovered that the person who interviewed me was no longer working there (which dramatically decreased my chances of actually getting employed there) and that the position was given to someone else.
The second was more of a test and after _months_ of waiting for the result, I finally get a rejection email.
The third, stupidly enough, was downright idiotic. Any cleaning company worth their dustbins in salt should have the decency of giving you an outright yes or no, but apparently good manners cost too much even for a successful cleaning company. I was stuck phoning in almost an entire Summer, to the point where the first paycheck would have been used to pay the phone bills (that is, if I wasn't blessed with kind parents). Finally, one week away from school starts I received an assignment to start cleaning up the following week. Yeah, thanks for playing with my hopes and wasting my time. I hope your prospective clients will treat you the same way you treated me. No hard feelings, what goes around comes around; right?

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I was rejected, and the email was worded well enough to at least not make me feel bad about myself. I liked the part where they said they had a hard time choosing between the candidates. Flattery? It is probable, but then again these people have more manners than a bank. Working with them was a dream, being rejected by them feels like an honour plus they told me that I was free to apply again should I see another advert.

Rewrites

2010-03-07T21:32:00.000+01:00

Once again I set out to edit my NaNoWriMo '09 novel into something that resembles a coherent narrative. Currently, it is a coherent narrative but it's the style that I don't enjoy.
For instance, back in November I glossed over five years in order to get to the part I wanted to write. The problem is that those years are crucial to the development of the main character, so I'm chronicling them, adding characters and introducing characters earlier. Right now I have a sense of deja vu, so I either have written about this already or I'm losing my mind.
Originally, the plot went something like this:
Act 1: main character grows up
Act 2: main character goes through the rest of his life
But, I have decided to split the stories into three acts. Three different stories that are linked together by the same character. So, hopefully, I'll have:
Act 1: same, just more detailed
Act 2: first part of the act 2, expanded to make it more realistic
Act 3: the last part of act 2, which will remain mostly untouched story-wise.
I have also decided to tone down / fix some of the 'magic'. It's going to be like opening can of worms, but hopefully tomorrow I will find time to write in here about the problems that poses.

An open apology for an open insult

2010-02-15T06:34:00.000+01:00

I have recently wrote things,
things that now I am not too proud of,
things that felt genuine when I did write them,

first of all,
pardon me for the free verse,
it is the only way I can say this,

back to the issue at hand,
I owe 55 people a huge apology,
yes, even people which I did not insult,

When friends seemingly abandon me,
I tend to freak out at them when it happens,
especially when I believe that we are close,

The simple truth is this,
too little time without true friends,
has made me want to keep hold of the few I have,

which is ironic,
considering that with my actions,
I have pushed away those very few I have

furthermore, to add insult to injury
I have involved others that are not part of this,
and it is also to them that I ask for forgiveness,

but, first and foremost,
I have to ask for forgiveness,
from the very people that I have wronged,

these people are perhaps,
the truest friends I have ever had,
and the ones with whom I would want to retire with,

I understand that what I did,
was unforgettable, in a bad sense,
but that will not stop me from saying,

I have been an idiot,
I have been self-centered,
and all I can do, is ask to be forgiven,

Out with the old

2010-01-19T22:07:00.000+01:00

Out of the blue (or possibly after reading Neil Gaiman's biography in Smoke and Mirrors) I have decided to change my "biography" (assuming that there is a lot to tell).
The original went something like this

4th guy is aspiring programmer & writer. In his free time he attempts to reprogram his two dogs & make any computer he comes across sentient

It says that I'm an aspiring programmer and writer, but does not say much else (anything of any use at least). Making computers sentient and reprogramming living beings is a joke that has been used once too often in my opinion. It's not as sexy as

Initially 4th guy wrote creative plots for world conquest, but has had better luck with prose. He has 2 dogs, who cry in corners after reading his latest stories

Much better! This one pokes fun at my (so far, failing) desire to change the world and highlights that I'm much better with more subtle things such as prose. It also says that I have two dogs who hate my writings, alas dogs are evil that way. Overall, in my opinion, I believe that the new biography will be more memorable, or at least entertaining.

Burned out

2009-12-20T21:33:00.003+01:00

I enjoy writing, but sometimes my muse works overtime and I hardly work at all. Ideas come to me, the good and bad, and I sift through them categorizing them into ideas that are worth pursuing 'now' or 'one day'.
My current problem is that I have written too much fantasy in too short a span of time. (I think, my NaNoWriMo draft is stealthily approaching the 70k mark). The problem is not that I have too much to write, but rather too much to write about.
In my original NaNoWriMo draft, I just arrived to a point where I skipped ahead five years, and then another 15 years. Authors do that all the time, but those initial five years is too long a time to skip. Those five years are there so that the characters can forge relations and their knowledge of the world is drastically expanded. Now I'm at the point where I have to go back to that period and fill in some of the gaps.
To date, this is my most ambitious writing project; I enjoy, and am proud of, the fact that I grew this world from scratch and it works. So maybe the economy won't work in a real-life setting, but the characters give colour to the work.
But, my fantasy muscles are exhausted. I think they were flexed too much (they had been flexing since mid-summer, when I had my initial idea, and continued to work up to now); mind, I'm not giving the project up. I'm just going to finish the current segment (i.e. the five years) and then put away the novel to rewrite the second half of the draft.
I had the idea, I actually want to, write something that is realistic; set in the real world. So far I've never written anything like this and have mainly focused on fantasy and surrealism. There's nothing wrong with fantasy and surrealism, but I can not call myself a fiction writer if I'm unable to write a story without resorting to magic or faeries so that my characters would be able to pull themselves out of a fix. If I refuse to try something beyond my boundaries of fantasy and surrealism, I'll be a fictional writer instead of a fiction writer.
I have a couple of ideas for such a story, but I want to make sure that the idea is plausible in a real world context, but more on that later.

Would you like some description with that?

2009-12-10T10:05:00.003+01:00

I've started to work on editing the story I wrote in November. Usually, the way I write, I try to get dialogue in. Descriptions of people, places and actions I put in when I'm editing. You can literary tell an entire story with just dialogue, but the story itself feels kind of flat. There's no emotion.
The problem is that I find it hard to insert descriptions afterwards. It's not an impossible task, but its a tedious process for me. Sometimes, editing is fun. On other occasions, it isn't. Personally, I would like to take my current document and restart the edits, making sure that I have the descriptions all in place. It looks like I'll have to work over time for this one.

Oops, we censored your reprints!

2009-12-08T18:37:00.002+01:00

Reprinting material is hardly a new thing. It's done all the time for publishers to re-cash in on those successful story. Something which is 100% acceptable. After all: consumer gets a copy, publishers and authors get the money. Fair trade and all that. That's what Harlequin said that they were doing after all.

The assignment: Go through our publication list (from Day One!) and look at the accompanying covers. Choose six books and reprint them, EXACTLY AS THEY WERE THEN, as a small collection to celebrate our sixty years in business.

What is the problem? Let's scroll further down the page, shall we?

Now for the books: Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior—such as hitting a woman—that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years. But that did entail a text edit, which we had not anticipated. AND, we had to clear those adjustments with the current copyright holders, if we had been able to locate them.

(underlining by me)
It smells of irony, and (sadly) censorship. I believe that in this case, the publisher has no interest in the readers, only in its public image and the money that it could potentially rake in.

Another MusicMonday - The Beatles Never Broke Up

2009-11-30T22:39:00.003+01:00

Some time ago I stumbled upon a The Beatles album from a supposedly alternate dimension. While I'm not teh greatest The Beatles fan that ever existed, I appreciate these remixes. As anyone who listened to these songs (and other The Beatles recordings before this) can tell, they are remixed versions of existing The Beatles songs, with added material from post The Beatles albums by the members of the split-up band. After all "All the solo stuff we've done would have been on Beatle records." George Harrison said that in the late 1990s, so it's only fair :P

Feel free to download the album for a listen. Meanwhile preview has been embedded above for your listening pleasure.

MusicMonday Sweet Victory by David Glen Eisley

2009-11-30T22:36:00.003+01:00

So, I've achieved my 60,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo, time to celebrate in style!!! I give you Sweet Victory by David Glen Eisley, rendered popular amongst younger generations thanks to Sponge-Bob Square-pants

My experience at the Malta book fair

2009-11-13T07:49:00.001+01:00

As I said on my Twitter account, yesterday I went to the Maltese Book Fair. One of my first observations was that there were a bunch of stalls selling almost the same local books. Some were also selling the same foreign books (read "Twilight saga"). I also saw an older book (c. 1991) with a similar premise to Twilight being sold. It's cover redesigned to grab Twilight fans' attention...
Anyway, I just continued to confirm how bad some Maltese book cover designs are. Some of the titles were practically illegible. "Inbid ta' Kuljum" comes to mind as the cover was a group of concentric green and white circles and superimposed on top of them was the book title's title written in the same shade of white as the circles. I don't like to judge a book by it's cover but then again I could hardly tell what book it was thanks to that genius cover design; cudos for creativity - it does grab your attention, but you wouldn't want to squint at it in the poor light that was available. If you don't believe me, look here. On-screen it looks much better.
The activity advertised as starting at seven didn't start at seven, more like 7:15-ish so I wasn't able to make it to even the first half-hour.
I also thought that the shuttle service would be free of charge in attempt to coax people into coming for the Book Fair, and as a service to people who can't walk stretches of distances form the event back to the bus stop. I guess not.
That was the worst of it, now that I've gotten it out of my system, I can focus on the good parts:
I discovered that there's an Italian institute in Valletta. Idiotically enough they had a Dylan Dog poster but didn't have anything of Dylan Dog at the stand, but I'm hopeful there would be at the actual institute itself.
I got 3 books:

The Doctor Who Storybook 2008 for 2euros
Angel - city of A novelization for the first episode in the Angel: The Series series (makes me dizzy saying that) for 1euro (second hand, so I'm recycling! :{) )
Soul of the Fire (Sword of Truth, Book 5) this hard-cover bad-boy cost me just 2euros! (another second hand book)
All in all, the total was 5euros (and I helped the environment by refusing bags given to me [/smugness])

I also met an old man on the bus stop who shared some stories with me about his failed publishings. I don't remember most of the details, but we did end up agreeing that the market is unfortunately limited.
Finally, I discovered just why there were certain local books on an extreme sale. PEG Ltd. declared bankruptcy just around three weeks ago

Music Monday - JT Bruce

2009-11-09T18:22:00.000+01:00

Welcome to another instalment of Music Monday.
Today we're going to be talking about JT Bruce. So far, he is my most favourite artist on Jamendo, since it's no secret that I like guitars, especially electric ones. Upon visiting the page, you will immediately notice that he only has three albums. Hopefully this will encourage you to listen to all of them.
If I had to pick only one album for you to sample, I'd pick The Dreamer's Paradox since I consider this Bruce's best work to date (of those on the website so far).

Problems during writing

2009-11-04T15:51:00.002+01:00

Since it's NaNoWriMo, I've been doing lots of writing. Sometimes I feel as if I write too much in a particular scene or too little for another.
It actually bothers me as character and world development is either hindered or lost when a scene is stretched or shorted. I'm doing a story about a group of people who are conscripted into the army and are sent to the City in order to learn and serve.
The main problem is that I have a hard time actually coming up with the lessons themselves. Sure there are rewrites, where I can basically add or chop pieces from the story, but I am kind of stubborn I guess.

Music Monday - SaReGaMa

2009-11-02T18:09:00.000+01:00

Ah, Monday; dubbed as Music Monday on Twitter. It's also November, so there are plenty of people who are busy hammering away at their keyboard in order to reach the fabled 50,000 words by November 30th.
When writing, I often try to find something to inspire me. Some sort of soundtrack to block out the other noises in the house. Last year I found Jamendo. Jamendo is a website which hosts music that has been uploaded by the original artists under the creative commons license. In a nutshell, free music for you to listen.
One of the first artists I found on the website is the strangely-named SaReGaMa. SaReGaMa can not be classified under one category because each and every album has a different feel to it. Upon visiting the page, one may immediately notice that there are several albums to download, an might be discouraged. In my opinion, the album Honkey Fonky is a good place to start, just don't be afraid to try the other albums or other artists for that matter. Now, back to writing...

Stop-motion animations!

2009-10-15T19:48:00.004+02:00

I was going to post this on Twitter, but I'll be damned before I'll post this without commenting.

CARDBOARD a cardboard animation! is an excellent short animation filmed in public places utilizing the stop-motion technique. I found it quite bizarre but the animations were so intriguing that I had to continue watching!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU is another excellent short animation this time painted and filmed on public walls! It's quite long, and in my opinion much less interesting than the previous one, but kudos goes to the people that worked on it. Their effort is noticed and appreciated.

November is coming and with it NaNoWriMo

2009-10-11T16:43:00.002+02:00

Well, November is fast approaching and I have selected the novel that I'll be working on during that month.
I only have one problem left: I have a partial outline of the story and a partial outline for the world. Most of the organisations that will be present are already there, unfortunately I still have to implement details like proper names (I want northern-like names to fit my chosen settings), hidden organisations and some form of legal mechanism. Hopefully I will have enough time on my hands that I will be able to hammer the world design issues out in class (Google docs, y'ere a life saver!)
Those of you who want to read my (rather poor) synopsis, can do so on my NaNoWriMo profile. I really should expand it a bit more though, I don't believe it catches the "feel" of the story just right.

The "One Story a Day" project

2009-10-06T08:25:00.003+02:00

I think that stories are important for man to thrive and advance. For almost any period in human history that we can find traces of, we have also found some form of story: be it a religious one, a historical one or a tale of the bogey man (and his nose-picking habits)
Nowadays we find stories in every medium. Check someone's Facebook page or Twitter account; catch up with the latest episode of Doctor Who, True Blood or Bleach; go to the cinema and watch the latest instalment in an action film where the story is just an excuse to crash cars and helicopters; go to the Opera house; go to the Theatre; listen to a song; play a damned video game; gossip; read a book. There's also story reconstruction where investigators try to piece the sequence of events, but I won't get into that. They are all ways to tell a story, and each one of them has it's merits and weakness when it comes to telling the story.
The "One Story a Day" project aims to tell one story a day, or at the very least write one. They can be long tales or short tales, contain one sentence or a million, have a twist or not have a twist. It's all up to the writer. Everyone has small ideas for stories but rarely do people have the time to jot them down. Let's try to stop these stories from being lost; lets declare October "International Story Telling Month", or InStoTellMo if we want to mimic another popular one-month long event.
I know it's on day six of October, but the challenge not whether or not you write 31 stories in October or 25; it's whether or not one finds interesting things to tell. In the end you may find yourself retelling your childhood memories, and when your memories and stories are shared with someone else you will be immortalized in their thoughts.

Pretty damn pleased with myself

2009-09-14T21:50:00.002+02:00

The one thing that has principally been on my mind in these last few weeks has been NaNoWriMo. I've been doing three things:

work out the world and its' lore; setting the basics will stop me from coming to a dead end in November hopefully
trying to develop a role-play system for it; this will also help me to keep the characters balanced
actually develop the story line.

Actually developing the story line has been a real problem this time around. At the end of this NaNoWriMo, I would like to end up with something that is remotely publishable; so I have to set up the entire plot beforehand. Now I actually had a plot, but unfortunately I did not have a decent kick-start to the story. My three options where as follows:

Tale of redemption; the Main Character goes back to the City to clear his name
Tale of revenge; the Main Character's life is destroyed by raiders in the first chapter
Tale of fulfilment; the Main Character goes to the City to fulfil his role as a Citizen as ordered by the law

I must say that I actually have introduction outlines for all three types of tales, and as one may tell from even just these summaries, 1 and 2 are actually kind of boring and won't work very well unless I'm a master storyteller who is able to keep readers hooked by means of wonderful visual imagery generated by words alone. 3 still needs a good storyteller to tell the tale, but is a bit less cliché and will, hopefully, keep readers interested.
Having settled on a the introduction, I wrote a short story which is a way for me to study how combat works in this world. The result is decent enough, I'm pleased to say. Maybe I'll even post it online later this month.
Finally, I managed to write out a one hundred word synopses of the story - something that to date I've been unable to write when it came to long stories. I have to admit that I find the fact that a 50,000+ word novel (I'm aiming for at least 60,000 words this year) can be synopsised in just 100 words a bit worrying, but I am almost certain that I can do it. The synopsis will definitely be posted on my NaNoWriMo novel page this year...
The one thing that is glaringly missing is a good title; and an actual motivation for the villain.

Lots of ideas

2009-09-02T09:51:00.003+02:00

When I went to Naples, I had ideas for one short novel and another longer novel (which I planned to do for NaNoWriMo). I was also working on a very short story.
But, while there, I had another idea for a long novel; this ended up replacing my other planned NaNoWriMo novel.
Then yesterday, while on the bus, I had another idea related to the first NaNoWriMo novel I was planning to write.
So, the score is:

One short story	Finished; awaiting a reread
One short novel	A bare bones outline that needs to be fleshed out
My original NaNoWriMo novel	Another bare bones outline
One long novel; My new NaNoWriMo novel	The "brilliant" idea I had in Naples; Needs an outline and a good backstory to build upon
One long novel	Ties to the NaNoWriMo novel that was intended for this year

Le sigh.

Went there and came back again

2009-08-27T19:23:00.004+02:00

Just like last year I went to Naples to help the Sisters of Mother Theresa.
Honestly, I don't feel that there is much to say. I went and helped them with what they needed to be done, plus I got to see some of Naples; nothing big within the grand scheme of things (but it's all part of the Master Plan so that I can get to brag).
Also, anyone recognise this little fellow?

Brainfuck

2009-07-30T21:39:00.004+02:00

When it comes to story plots of ANYTHING, I am literary in love with plots that spread your brain around the place in a gooey mess.
These kinds of stories start out with a conflict and a good group and a evil group. Then the story and conflict complicate themselves when the evil group is shown to have their own reasons for persisting; almost making you believe that they were right all along. As an effect, not only the line between good and evil is blurred; it becomes non-existing!
One of the best brainfucks I've seen is in the Legacy of Kain series. Specifically in Soul Reaver 2 where Kain has the opportunity to give a five minute monologue. I loved every second of that. After the monologue is over Kain an Raziel are still enemies, however the player is left with an odd feeling of understanding.
Another I've just experienced is in the anime series Blood+ where Saya, the protagonist, is told the "truth" regarding her family; although a heavily modified version.
Ultimately, I don't know if one day I would include something like this in my writings. They give a nice effect to the story, but when done wrong the story can be sent spiraling downwards at a very rapid pace. Still... they offer a nice break from absolute good vs. absolute evil (yes, I'm looking at you Star Wars).

So... about that compensation

2009-07-29T22:21:00.004+02:00

First of all, please read this article.

Here is a run-down of the facts:

Service was lost for 6 hours
The only accessable websites were the Times of Malta (until 12:00) and the company's website
Home users had to postpone their internet activities
Buisness users lost production time
The fault lay with Wind, who provided the link between Melita and Sicily
Melita offers unlimited downloads as compensation

Unfortunately, unlimited downloads is not the correct kind of compensation that should be given here. It would only benefit the heavy downloaders, and would affect the service of regular users who don't download as much (this is a Cable network after all). In the end, it implicitly promotes downloads of illicit-obtained media; I'm pretty sure that there will be little or no people downloading the source of the latest open-source software!
Clearly the users who lost the most were the business users, and unlimited downloads would not benefit them unfortunately; but besides a service reduction fee for a number of months, there isn't anything else that I think would compensate.
I must ask the general public. Why should Melita compensate us when Wind was, in a way, to blame for the outage? I will not pretend that I a have more information than the rest of the general public has, but this sound suspiciously a lot like misinformation (or a lack of).
Finally, there are a few suggestions for Melita, should this ever happen again:

Instead of attempting to connect to a remote server when a connection is known to be not possible due to faults, please redirect the traffic to a page explaining that there is a problem. This might help ease the calls to the customer support line.
Give a correct estimated time. I phoned in twice: the first time I was informed that the service would be restored by 12:00pm, but instead I lost the connection to the Times of Malta website (the only website that I could open). The second time I was told that it would be up "in an hour". Two hours passed before TweetDeck chimed to signify new tweets.

Finally: don't put adverts on the customer support hotline. Just don't. It gives everyone a bad impression. And no deafining "calming" musing blaring through the telephone either.

Worst video game ever unearthed

2009-07-26T07:12:00.001+02:00

Oh dear, Alice in Wonderland is Tim Burtonised

2009-07-22T22:48:00.002+02:00

The trailer does not offer any information about the faithfulness of the story to the wonderful book, but the visuals are very much the same (except for Alice and the Mad Hatter). I wish Malta has an Imax theater. Is it March 2010 already?

Why I deal in fantasy; or not

2009-07-21T22:28:00.002+02:00

Ah, fantasy. Enchanted swords, maids in distress and fantastic creatures; an author's dream. I don't write things set in the real-world, but I don't write in fantastic worlds as I have previously described.
The kind of fantasy I write is marked with rules regarding this and that. The rules do not hinder me much, but they don't allow me to give the protagonists a jet of flame sprouting from their asshole when they're forced face-first into the ground. In essence, they aid me in my writing.
These rules allow me to create a more or less believable world where differences from the real world are somewhat logical. For example, when I was writing about vampires (don't worry if you didn't read this, I've only shown this to one other person), I didn't reinvent them but I gave them abilities that would enable them to survive.
Vampires need blood but imagine what would happen if they all went on a rampage to obtain their blood: they don’t need brute force, they need stealth and cunning. So, I gave them the ability to smooth talk people and stand out only when they need to plus some agility bonuses.
I base the rules, which I use in my stories, on the rules for proper Science Fiction (that is: no Star Wars or Star Trek). Proper Science Fiction uses the real-world as a basis, and then builds upon that a platform of possible technology / creatures / abilities.
Besides the world rules, I also try to come up with a believable cast of characters. Characters will never be believable if they immediately manage to solve every problem they run into. I also try to give them a routine and a small biography. Most of these things aren’t evident in writing, but they help me tremendously when I’m writing.
That's they way I write; that’s the way I enjoy writing.

CPU?

2009-07-10T16:33:00.002+02:00

No wonder some students are failing!

"I found this from my (exam-board approved) IT textbook while revising for an upcoming AS exam," Ross Masters, "Thankfully I had alternate notes for this section."

Beautiful, but depressing

2009-07-07T21:38:00.000+02:00