I’m accessing a blob in a MS SQL database that is pretty much nothing more than a JPG dumped straight into the field. I read them and echo them with a jpg header in PHP. All is well. The script runs and parses all the images, doing some caching magic with them. The result is that about a third of the images are broken, seemingly random. Mostly they just “stop” at a random spot over the whole set, but in one image it always stops at the same spot.

I suspected data corruption on input and a refresh on what inserts them in the first place worked, sometimes at least.

Digging down, I saw that the result I get back for the broken images is always 64512 bytes, exactly. That’s 2 to the power of 16. Can’t be a coincidence. Turns out, it isn’t.

I’m using freetds to access the database and there is an entry in freetds.conf that reads something like this:
text size = 64512

Upping that number (and restarting the webserver, apache or IIS) did the trick. The images stored in the database were all around that point, so it looked like a random bug, but thankfully it wasn’t random.

If you don’t use freetds but the mssql extension instead, then this line would be of interest:
mssql.textsize = 4096

Yes the default is only 4 kilobytes.

Maybe the desk will work as a third hand for the triple face palm.

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Of course my sample size is rather small, Flattr is still in it’s early and humble beginnings and many options are still missing from Flattr. But for a first full month, this is a respectable kick off.

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aptitude install psmisc

Works perfectly fine on lenny. Hopefully I never have to look this up again.

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To illustrate I’m using a phrase I caught myself using a couple of times, and no I wont go into detail where and why I used it.

The sentence in German:
Mein Bett, auch Spielwiese genannt.

Very difficult isn’t it? Here a word by word translation:
My bed, also play-lawn called/named.

The word Spielwiese is made up out of Spiel, which is play in general and Wiese, which is a lawn, or grassy field. To give you an idea, this is where kids play on some grass, play soccer, to cartwheels and so on, without anything built over it.

Now that is horrible English, so here a translation that might make more sense and still keeps with the same idea of the sentence in German:
My bed, also known as playground.

You could use a different word, like playpen for example, but the idea (context) behind it is that it’s large, so a playground better conveys the idea. And there we are already at one of the caveats. To translate it properly, the context is utterly important. Nuances are lost or wrong ones gained in translation easy and mostly that’s fine, but still should be avoided if possible.

So now we made this step:
Mein Bett, auch Spielwiese genannt.
My bed, also known as playground.

How about turning back? Say we started with the English phrase and want to go back? Will we get the same German sentence? The short answer: No. Here a word by word translation in German:
Mein Bett, auch bekannt als Spielplatz.

Wait what the hell happened here? Why is it now platz, instead of wiese? That is the problem with direct translation, you get different meanings out of most words, as there are no direct translations for most words, or they are substituted with something else.

This is not really good German either, but good enough for most cases. So here is the entire Sequence again:
Mein Bett, auch Spielwiese genannt.
My bed, also known as playground.
Mein Bett, auch bekannt als Spielplatz.

I chose deliberately a simple sentence, with one word that was a bit special and a slightly more interesting way of saying something, to show you already how hard it might be in this case.

Imagine now to add something to it that has specifics, like it’s a space story, or a fantasy one, special words, names, phrasings that are important, foreshadowing for certain things through subtle hints, there is a gigantic can of worms hidden in this.

So if you can’t translate it yourself, find someone who understands your material very well or someone who is an author in the same sort of stories as you are writing. The more complicated or nuanced your writing is, the more importance you should put on this. If it’s only a manual how to push two buttons, sometimes even Google translate get’s it right (enough).

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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.

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I know a couple technical writers myself, but they all have a full time job to pay the bills and write on the side. Then again their books are technical and expensive, while only aimed at a small group of people. A novel could be for pretty much anyone.

So if you could just stop doing whatever it is you do now, this instant, and start just writing all day long, as much as you want, would you do it? I think if I did it, I would get some more sleep. That always sounds nice and strangely gets nicer the older I get. In short, I’m old. If I made roughly the same money, I wouldn’t have a problem. So if it comes down to the money, where would you make the jump from “secure job that pays the bills every month” to “job where you never know how much you make the next month and probably less than now”. Also if you make 3000 now, would you do it if you only made 2500? How about 2000? Less?

If I could do it, I probably would, but the pay cut could not be over 20% the way I’m living at the moment. I also would probably first scale back time on my usual day job, easing into the whole thing, slowly, over time. But then again, my writing’s will never be good enough or popular enough to generate an income that would allow me to live reasonably comfortable here. So it’s a nice idea, but wont work in reality.

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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?

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If a character says something, the lips should be open. Unless it’s “hmm” or “mmm” or something equally audible with closed lips, they should be open, just like when you talk. Since they are comics, you can also use this not only as expression “this one is talking” but depending on how it’s made, also of how the character is talking. Like thin opening says usually a light voice, or quiet. If its only a corner open, they say it to someone on the side, not meant to be heard to everyone else. Mouth wide open is yelling. Please don’t just open the mouths wide all the time, I have enough yelling going on already.

At the same time the talking also can be enhanced for mood. Sad or happy face saying, or yelling something look different.

Since my number one gripe is proportions, this also plays an effect. Our brains are wired for pattern recognition (proportion is a pattern). So we recognize patterns on faces. When someone is smiling, but their eyes don’t lift, they are either not genuine (the creepy sales rep face) or they have some botox in the wrong places. But if the whole face smiles, we suddenly feel the difference. So if the mouth is neutral but the rest is “happy” this just looks wrong.

The main concern though should be consistency. If your characters always talk with mouths open, keep it that way, don’t mix and match or your readers get that wrong feeling again.

An exception exists of course, which means you can use it as a style tool for example if someone has an extremely large or stupid grin on their face (the chibi smiles in anime for example). But use them sparingly and for exact effects.

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The visual is a (pun intended) no brainer. Look, aha, done. In a comic this means you take a look and you know how the character in general looks. Of course you can do a lot more funky things, show poses, costumes and so on, but the reader is not really imagining how that hero looks like. The reader knows. Same goes for TV and movies of course.

In the cerebral way, there is no longer a “right way” the character looks like. There is a description in text (or by audio) and that’s it. From that and the persons own visual memories, everyone crafts their own image. That might match in many cases, even with the authors image, but there are always a lot of differences.

This is why I like people drawing characters I created in a written story. What they draw is what I imagined, tried to describe on paper and then they re-imagined in their own head after reading those words. Such a result might be horrifying to witness as it often is completely not what the author has imagined, but that’s not really a bad thing. The reader makes the story their own by reading and imagining it, which is one of the best ways to know they like it because they actually enjoy the story enough to get creative with it.

And of course there is a time thing. I watched recently someone live stream how he paints with a tablet, from scratch. Watching paint dry is more amusing. In that same time I could write and edit an entire chapter with half a dozen new characters. This is not “writing is better than comics”, I have been doing both for a long while now, so I know what I’m talking about here and not taking sides. Just pointing out the discrepancy.

If you want the people to have an exact image, you need to go visual (comic, video). You pay for it with time of course (and other money costing things like equipment), while you can get faster (and cheaper) results by just writing.

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