Taking my little experiment Toreas, the free fantasy book or novel if you like, as a sample, I was in updating hell. The page itself where the book is readable from is an instance of MediaWiki. I chose it for the ease of adding new things, a good and stable code base, but also because I had a lot of experience in extending it. Then I wanted to add notes to each release and of course that looks like a blog. So my number one choice was simply WordPress (which also powers this site), for a lot of the same reasons that MediaWiki was the page software. Twitter is not a software for me, but a web service as such and I wanted to add tweets as soon as there is a new chapter out (even though there probably is nobody reading those). I also have plans to include more services, like Facebook, but I have not yet come around to those.

So, a new chapter is out. I have to edit 4 MediaWiki pages (3 of those templates), one of them I have to calculate newly with a script I have written. So for calculating the statistics I have to open the template (which requires editing the main article first to get the edit link) run from a website a script that calls up each and every page already created and creates the stats out of that in wikitext. Now I copy paste this over from my script to the template and save it. Next I have to login to twitter, post the comment in the right format. And last but not least post the blog post on the page, again logging in, selecting the right category and tags and so on and so forth. All of this made it a horror to update and I frankly found myself thinking a few times to delay an update just because of this horrible (admittedly self induced) process.

Then I stumbled across an artifact in my memory. MediaWiki has an API. Looking at it closely I found that you could login, open pages and edit them. You could do pretty much anything with it, but those were my only requirements. After looking around a bit, I found a class named Snoopy that is supposed to take care of it, but it was still too much “manual labor” on my side. So A quick check on ZendFramework and in the Http Client library I found all the parts that I needed to make this work. I could define one client and use it like a browser. It would even keep the cookies for me and do all that handling.

So I whipped up my own MediaWiki API class, based on Zend_Http_Client. It actually uses the autoloader as well, but that’s because I’m lazy. So now I instantiate it by handing it the api url, a user name and password, and the whole thing is ready for duty. A get function gives me the content (needed for the latest changes, where I kill the last line in the box and add a new one on top) and an edit function that allows me to simply overwrite the current version. All the magic is done behind the scenes and no worries for me. Twitter of course also has an API to which Zend already has Zend_Service_Twitter. Again, three lines and the new status is posted. And lastly, WordPress has an XMLPRC interface, which has had me quiet confused for a while. Now that I understand it (or at least I think I do) I am able to post news in there by just supplying a title and description, while the tags and categories are preset (for this particular thing).

My 20 minutes of monkeying around with everything, plus additional time for writing a blog post if I was so inclined to do, has been reduced to copy pasting the story (then write the blog post) and hit a button. So for the last eight chapters I have lost two and a half hours of time, which no longer happens. Not only do I gain time, but the step to actually publish the next chapter has become pretty much nothing, as opposed to the big process it has been before.

Once I clean up the API class a little, I might even release my code for the MediaWiki class.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

In their latest episode, they have James Dashner as a guest and they talk about pacing.

I have been following the podcast now for a short while and still want to listen to all of the old episodes once I get to that, but I have been very positively surprised a few times already. The surprise is that I often get to hear things that I came to on my own, which was especially true in this podcast on pacing. And I always learn a thing or two as well that I did not know, or at least I learn why something works the way it does, which makes it a lot easier for me to use a certain technique or enables me to use it to a better effect.

To sum it up a bit, the podcast was focused on the way to make pacing work for you in a way that the reader keeps on reading. A couple of things were left out or just mentioned on the side, which also are important bits. The main consensus was that cliffhangers are a cheap trick in this regard. Like you say that a character opens a door and… then you stop. Instead the better way to tackle this would be to make it interesting enough to read on. Like the character opens the door and finds a wet card board box with some strange liquid oozing out of it.

This brought me instantly back to Toreas. Am I actually doing the same thing in Chapter 1, right at the end? I’m not entirely sure, and it keeps spinning in my head now. Another thing is the perspective break. Chapter 2 and 3 are about a completely different character. But then again the setup of the chapter 1 ending is a rather dramatic point where I managed to kill of one of the main characters in the first chapter, at least in the readers head. If they are not shocked and confused at that point and eager to read on, in a “what the hell is going on?” way then I have not done my job right.

Now I have another situation where I’m mulling over how it might play out. I really need someone with good English skills and understanding the finer points of writing to look this over or discuss this with.

What also stuck out on that podcast was the use of chapters. Short versus long chapters was discussed. The long chapters might give the person a reason to keep going until they finished the chapter before putting the book away. In short chapters though the idea was that it’s so short, you “just read another one” once you reached the end of one. That last effect I call “Civilization Addiction”. Especially Civilization III had the effect on me to just play one more turn, just one more. While at the beginning one turn can be over in 5 seconds, later on one turn can be half an hour (if you like playing big maps). This can waste an entire day and night. If you book is that good that people can’t stop reading until they have to because they are exhausted, then it should be an illegal substance.

With Toreas I want for shortish chapters, sometimes breaking out and making them a bit longer and sometimes very short, as the situation needs it. Important here is that I need shortish ones, to be able to release them relatively soon. This has also an effect on pacing. I’m mostly telling a small arch, a step inside a bigger one, in each chapter. So once the chapter is done, there is a step being made that in itself is done. It can have effects on other things later on or be affected by previous encounters, but the chapter is always a small unit. It also makes it very tempting to leave the chapter off with something interesting to push the reader to want to know what happens next a bit more than if I would just write it all in one big chapter. And of course it has the handy advantage that I can edit each chapter easier, as I have a limited number of things to keep track of in that one chapter.

At the same time, I have to keep track of the overall story arch. I’m currently pausing writing new chapters until I have at least two more edited chapters out the door (I should always have more chapters released than on hand), but with 11 sequential chapters written down, I still have not introduced one of the major players in this story. He will appear in chapter 13 or 14. By that time the reader will have read about 30’000 words, which is a good way to a novella already and about a tenth of some of the more epic fantasy stories out there. Of course I don’t plan on stopping at 300’000, maybe never. So while pacing out the chapters and the action I still need to keep the whole story in mind.

I’m confident that I’m on the right track, but it would do a lot of good to have some constructive feedback from someone who knows writing fantasy well. Any takers?

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

In the failed quest for said plugin I came across multiple solutions for writers. Many of them even opensource. I came across one I would like to link but have lost the url for. The gist of this free tool is that you write scenes, not pages or chapters. Then you group scenes into chapters. Now moving scenes or chapters around is rather simple. Myself for example, I currently have each chapter in it’s own text file. Now moving a chapter is rather ugly, as I have to rename everything to match the correct numbers. So that scene approach sounds like a good plan, even though I don’t think I’ll do it that way.

See, the biggest problem here is the style of writing. If you write a book, your goal is to produce this large block, that you release as one solid thing. The book consists of tons of scenes, chapters, maybe even multiple parts. But as long as you have not released the book, you can move around pretty much anything as you like, write and rewrite things as you damn well please.

With a series of books you get into a problem though. Once book 1 is out, you have laid certain things “in stone”. You can change anything you want in book 2, but everything you have laid out in book 1, you better stick to it or some clever reader will find it and rub your nose in it (and everyone elses too). Unless you write a south park episode, nobody cares how many times you kill Kenny then. So although you have a monolithic (and often chaotic) writing inside the one book, the second book has to follow sequential rules.

Now Toreas is an even bigger problem in that regard, as it’s sequences are chapters. So once I have released something in a chapter, I might be able to get away with correcting some spelling and grammar, but I can’t save a character or kill one, just because it would benefit my writings later on. This is very sequential work and makes editing a nightmare.

Writing is for the most part a very creative thing. The time thinking about the story, rereading it and chaning it, outweighs the typing by far. Writers block is all too common and people who paint also know the same feeling under the title artists block. So when the muse strikes, it’s neccessarly at chapter 2, but could be somewhere in chapter 200. Although you want to finish and publish chapter 2, the chapter 200 thing needs to be written down. You feel it’s good and you want to write it, so you do, but again, chapter 2 get’s delayed. Currently I have 5 of the first 9 chapters either done, or near done. I also have 21 more chapters in a raw written form, without any editing done to them yet.

So although the writing process is rather chaotic in nature, the release process is rather sequential. In Toreas to the extreme even. So sometimes, it can take a long time for one chapter to be released, even a short one, but sometimes it could happen that multiple chapters are released together. My goal is not to have a regular update schedule, but rather have a good story out there, at the moment I decide it’s worth to publish it.

I have to keep track when I released which bit, so I can see how my release speed is doing over time. That might be a good section for the statistics about Toreas.

So since this is so sequential, I decided to change the strategy on how to handle the files behind the scenes a little. The chapter that should be released next will have it’s own file, but everything else is in mostly one big file. In that big file, I can write short story bits, then expand upon them. I can move around content, decide where to draw the lines for new chapters and so on. I might keep some blocks of new chapters, like say I wrote a sequence of 5 chapters for the far future, in a separate file though and maybe just write a note in my work file about what happens in that block and how I named it. If this works out, I should be more agile in writing the sequential ways of the story rather than fall back into the chaotic ways of writing a book.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Fantasy is great, but I always hate it when they come to an early close. There are few short stories I like a lot, and with short I mean maybe one book. Elantris was one such story. But I like stories that give you a lot of time to get to know the characters and experience their journeys a lot more.

And so I have finally decided to release a story I have been carrying around with me for decades. Take a look at it and let me know if you like it.

Best of all, it’s entirely free. You can read all of it for free. And it’s released directly as public domain, so you can take it and do whatever you want with it. So please share it with anyone you think might like it!

Read Toreas

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.