Do what you do and fortune may smile

Just read that David Choe, the drop-out grafitti artist paid in shares for decorating Facebook's digs, stands to become a bazillionaire when FB goes public.

Was Dave looking to get rich? How could he imagine in his wildest dreams that a college hook-up site would swell in popularity enough to become the third-largest country on the planet?

I think Dave was just doing what he does, painting walls, and Lady Fortune pointed him in Zuckerberg's way. Which just shows, you can only do what you do and love, and hope that the lady notices you.

A vital point about character development

 Chekhov is always reminding us that every person is the hero of his or her own personal narrative.

Giles Harvey reviewing a performance of Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard.

NaNoWriMo 2011 Aftermath

There it is. 26,221 words, most of them crap, in 30 days.

What surprised me most was how easy it was to crank out three or four hundred words on my iPad while crammed into a bus seat. I discovered that the best seat for writing on my regular B.C. Transit 410 bus was in the back corner on the driver's side. I get lots of elbow room, I can prop my feet on the little rail on the metal support under the seat in front of me, and I'm not sitting right under the helpful but really loud speaker that broadcasts upcoming stop announcements from the little lady trapped somewhere inside the bus.

My kit worked pretty well, WriteRoom on the iPad, Metapad on the desktop and Dropbox to sync it all up.

I figure I got about 25% of the way through the story, which is about right, if a typical 350 page novel runs to about 90,000 words. As someone on the NaNoWriMo forums pointed out, 25,000 words works out to about 80 or 90 pages.

So now I'll take a couple of days to think about how I'm gonna get Moe to meet Jinny, so they can start planning their attack on Jannes. I also have to get Kokabiel, the malevolent AI, into the story sooner and with greater impact on the main characters.

Even though NaNoWriMo 2011 is a wrap, there's still much more to do!

If the Shoe Doesn't Fit

For NaNoWriMo this year I had what I thought was a killer concept and a title to go along with it: The Ten Plagues of Moses Ryan. I conceived of a techno-thriller about a rookie FBI agent, Moe Ryan, swept up in a race to prevent a malevolent cyber-virus from wreaking ten modern plagues on the world - Blood, Frogs, Cattle Disease, the whole schmear.

Then, as the reality of the three act structure common to all dramatic narrative since Aristotle sank in, I realized there was a really good reason so few novels had the phrase "Ten Plagues" in the title. It's really hard to shoehorn ten epic disasters into three or four dramatic climaxes.

So I'm gonna have to modify the ten plagues theme. Maybe some of the plagues will be minor hiccups along the way, not huge set-pieces, like blowing up the Hoover Dam... hmm...

It's Just a Novel, for Pete's Sake!

In the giddy gallop to get going, a summary of sobering advice from someone in the biz:

1. Take it seriously
2. Don't expect what you write to be brilliant
3. Push yourself to go further
4. Be smart with revisions
5. Have a life

That last one's the kicker, especially if you don't want to spend December sleeping on the couch :)

Thanks to Soil-Net.com for the thundering photo!

And They're Off!

After a deep breath and an "OMG, can't do this," banged out 359 words in 30 minutes on the bus this morning.

Lessee, that works out to 718 words per hour, divided into 50,000, is 69.63 hours - that's about 2 hours, 20 minutes and 15 seconds per day for the next 30 days of NaNoWriMo.

I can do it.

Maybe.

Yarny

One of this year's NaNoWriMo sponsors is Yarny, which bills itself as "Novel writing in the cloud". Yarny's developers have pulled together some of the best features from desktop writing apps like Scrivener and yWriter5 into a well thought-out and easy to use web-based application.

The actual Yarny editor page is on a different URL (yarny.me) than the main web site (getyarny.com). When the editor first loads, an overlay of help bubbles explains what all the buttons and menus do. The interface is well designed, putting the minimum controls needed to organize your story near to hand.

The real magic begins when you start typing: everything except the blank white page gently fades away, allowing you to Concentrate on Deep Thoughts and Write Them All Down. Yarny discreetly tracks your word and character counts along the bottom margin, a key feature for NaNoists. There's no bold, no italics, no bullets, no color, no markup, no formatting - you can't even change the font. It's just words.

For story structure and planning, Yarny sports features like top-level categories for organizing People, Places and Things, tagging and searching by tags, versioning, colour-coding, auto-indenting,  an outliner/organizer for text snippets, export to text... what's not to love?

First, there's no mobile app, and apparently none planned at the moment, which, as a bus-commuting iPad writer, disappoints me. I use a combination of WriteRoom and Dropbox on my iPad, then sync up with Dropbox on my PC when I get home, where I continue editing in Metapad, a simple notepad clone. On the other hand, if I decide to use Yarny all the time, I guess I've now got an excuse to upgrade to a shiny new 3G iPad 2... but wait, there's a new iPad coming out soon, maybe I should hold off for a while.

Second, Yarny's in "free beta" right now. I hope that doesn't mean whoops, we might lose all your hard work, sorry.

Third, as I wondered how these clever guys intend to make money, I noticed "Free forever plan" and "Paid plans beginning in December" listed in the "Features" side bar, so it looks like they'll be monetizing with the tried and true freemium business model. While there are a lot of free online alternatives, like Google Docs, Writeboard (geek note: from the folks who brought us Ruby on Rails), the minimalist Writer from Big Huge Labs, and Zoho Writer, none of them appear to combine fiction-writing features the way Yarny does.

Finally, I found the auto-indentation annoying, and I couldn't control-shift-arrow key to select words to the left or right (try it in a text editor, you'll see what I mean), I could only shift-select with arrow keys one character or one line at a time.

In any case, I'm gonna give it a pass until there's a reliable way to use it offline, or Yarny buys me a 3G iPad :)

Thanks to iambrianna for the awesome photo