Matera the Mad

I know better than to compose a long post on the fly and then do something stupid like trying out the totally unnecessary spellchecker. But that's what I did last night. Oh well, typing practice. And I know better than to trust LJ's autosaved draft cowplutch. It left me out in the rain.

On the good side, I'm halfway through the third chapter of a second novel, sequel to the first, and it's starting to get rolling. Meanwhile the first suffers further word-cutting and other tweaks. My elusive beta readers pop up now and then with typos, repeated words, what-the's, and now and then a kind word. That they enjoy re-reading is the greatest compliment.

The current WIP might have been third in line, but my characters staged a rebellion and I had to give up some plot elements they didn't like. It's good to be doing some solid writing again, anyway, after nothing but short stories and editing for a few years.

Typical rough draft moment:

This is hilarious. I have been "friended" a second time by the same botslime luser! "emenanw" is a nowhere pig using automatic phriend-phishing techniques to gain links for ITS sleazy scams. Spam sucks, any kind of spam. The only way to deal with these crawlies is to report them immediately. Unfortunately, they can only be reported once. However, one can go through a slightly longer process to enter a complaint about phishy activities. I have done so. Death to all scamming pigs!

That has led me to sifting through other LJ users' problems...did I ever mention that I have a tendency toward compulsive helpfulness?

This is the first time I have had to completely edit a post--but it served its purpose.

I was not, nor will I ever be, interested in having my blog linked to any international rip-off artist's money-making scheme. Creating a flame post in my own blog was not much to my liking either, but it was the only way I could think of to strike back. I don't know if it had any effect, but it felt better than doing nothing. If necessary, I might have resorted to other means of revenge (don't ask).

Anyhowl, all you LJ spamfrienders out there, be careful who you try to victimize. Some of us don't take it bending over.

http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/bots.bml

The Body Computer: Keyboard Commands

•    Ctrl+C (copy) = Grab pen and paper
•    Ctrl+V (paste) = Scribble
•    Ctrl+S (save) = Stuff note in pocket
•    Ctrl+Z (undo) = Crumple note
•    Enter = Nod
•    Spacebar = Pick nose
•    Backspace = Slap head
•    Ctrl-Alt-Del = Stuff a finger in eacn ear and stick out tongue

The Body Computer: Maintenance routines

•    Download and install updates = Eat
•    Update file database = Check pockets
•    Empty Recycle Bin = Take out garbage
•    Clean out temporary files = Poop
•    Delete cookies = Pee
•    Reboot = Take a nap

© 2009 Matera the Mad

Just a couple of days after I made that last post, the sky fell on my computer. I brought home a hard drive from an old clunker and (stupidly) hooked it up in my machine and booted up. Unfortunately, I didn't have the drives jumpered right, and the little scumdisk booted. Windows95 was surprised to find itself where it was. Since the drive was so full a nematode couldn't wiggle on it, the booger crashed.

When the smoke cleared (so to speak), my own drive would no longer boot. I suspect a latent virus, but it could have been static electricity, grimflits, or an Act of Bog. Ayah-kayah. I was in black-screen country with a farked MBR. The partition table was still okie-dokies, I soon discovered, booting her up from a BartPE CD to take a peek.

My BartPE was only a test-run with no custom goodies, but I had blessed myself with enough other bootable toolkits to manage the salvage job. Working under the assumption that the worst-case scenario would be the default, I spent big chunks of the next three days burning CDs. (Nothing like being way behind in my backups... *rolls eyes*) The Slax Linux live CD has great burning software.

Although it takes only ten minutes to put 6-7 hundred MB of preciousss on a disk, it takes a lot longer to sift, cull, and organize files. I often had to switch back to Bart and run Free Commander off the disabled hard drive to do some of the organizing and to zip masses of files. Zip archiving eliminates the problems of awkwardly long file names and deeply nested directories. Free Commander does it very nicely and didn't crash at all, while A43 (in Bart) and the Linux file manager kept wonking out on me.

Meanwhile, I also salvaged a lot from the 95 platter and burned it to CDs. Then I wiped the sucker and installed it in a different hunk of attic frankenware with Windwoes98, and a second small drive from my collection of old junk. The whole schemozzle was about installing 98, after all. *rolls eyes again* Like that would solve all the problems caused by total neglect and gross ignorance.

Late in the third day after the fall, I got to the worst-case part. With a last look at my seventeen CDs, I blew away my whole lovely setup and repartitioned the drive. What the heck, I had been wishing I had partitioned it differently anyway.

All is back in smooth working order, if a little spare yet in some respects. It won't stay spare, I have a habit of collecting software. Never had a clue as to what bit the MBR.

From now on, I will:

1. Back up the MBR

2. Only boot from a CD when I insert dirty little drives from other people's computers (shakes head at own stupididdity).

Congratulations if you read the whole post and understood any of it.

I haven't done much (fiction) writing or editing in the past week. My mind has been more on websites. My own was badly in need of some updating and touchups. A complete redo would be nice, but at least it is patched. My workplace site is undergoing some treatment too, and it's not so long since I set up a new site for someone else. With all that going on, of course I took a notion to check out some related things.

The Rant

There is a website that had, for far too long, a twelve megabyte Flash file embedded in its index page. The Flash is now trimmed down--a mere two megabytes, still well beyond the limits of decency for an entry page. That is still ALL that is on that page. There are no visible links to anything else, no text, no nothin'. If you drop in with Flash blocked (anyone who hates ads does!), you see a big blank green space. Made in FrontPage, of course.

The Flash file masquerades as a website. It was tossed in half-finished, incomplete, and very outdated. It is not likely to be updated very often, since only its undependable creator can do so. The unfortunate surfer who encounters such a "site" with no Flash blocking is forced to download the whole thing in order to find out that there is nothing much worth looking at and little that is new. Undoubtedly many simply back-button out of there, and most of those who do so will never come back.

Behind that wall of Flash plastic is the sad ghost of a real website, with much more content. Search engines find it, and the pages and images it contains get hundreds of times more hits than the Big Block. However, none of that comes near to the Flash turd's few hits in bandwidth suckage. The old site was constructed using pure HTML and CSS, with reasonable optimization of the images. Anyone could update it, if there was something new to add. But the site owner thought that a solid chunk of plastic would make the site more...appealing?

The only time any of the old material showed a high level of unnecessary bandwidth usage was when an image was hotlinked by some irresponsible twit. The site owner and its current maintainer were apparently unaware of the problem.... Ehh, let's get off the OT sidetrack.

One reason the original piece of Flash sh*t was so big is that there were more than twice as many images in it than were ever shown. That is inexcusable, it is abominably sloppy, thoughtless work.

I used SWF Picture Extractor to extract the images from the big clonker. It is hard to say exactly how much is in the thing, some came out corrupted--again, sloppy, careless work. I do not get results like this from a properly made SWF. If it is bad to clog up a website with a Flash brick at all, it is much worse to toss in a half-baked stopgap and then let it sit that way for who knows how long.

The revised version has had a lot of unused junk trimmed out, but still yields the same corrupted images. It has very little to offer that is new. It is still content-poor and not very informative. The reduction in size has increased the number of full hits on it (read: reduced the number of disgruntled back-outs)--in other words, the bandwidth suckage remains the same. Site usage overall is paltry compared to that of any site with good content.

The "artist" is obviously only concerned with surface appearance. She hasn't a single toe in the door of reality, IMHO. Yet this person touts herself as a webdesigner. Webdesroyer, I would say. She has lost her own domain at least once. I would give up coffee before I would let that happen.

Trust me, this site exists and I know its stats. I am not naming any names for the usual good reasons and some personal ones. If you know who/what/where I am talking about, that is your pain--I am sorry, but you can't sue me.

If you want to see some great examples of bad web design, go to Web Pages That Suck. I visited recently and checked out some of the "Worst of 2008" collection. OMFG. Some of them are unbefsckinglievable. Vincent Flanders has some very good advice for all you wannabe webmeisters. Read his Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015, just for starters.

All websites suck to some degree, even mine and Vince's, but reducing suckage increases usability and therefore increases use and user satisfaction. The Internet is a good place to communicate, and a bad place to masturbate.

A dream ended my inevitable afternoon nap. I have had a fantasy tetralogy rattling in my head ever since. Four short novels set in a world where magic has a unique set of rules I'm still learning. It is almost scary when a world suddenly exists in one's head and one can't avoid it.

I have only the first paragraph of the first book written so far. It is not (IMHO) a good first paragraph, but it is a good jumping-off place. One thing it has done for me is to clarify one of the dangers in writing a First Paragraph. I may expound on this later. The concept is clear, but fantasy and pizza have muddled things up. Good thing it was too cold to go out and get beer.

Oh, and I changed that character's name again. I can go around the world safely now.

I had several tasks set by my betas. One was changing a character's name. I think I have managed that in such a way that no major nationality will have any problem with any form of it. Except maybe Polish cow lovers. (There's a bad joke in there somewhere, but I can always change it again anyhoo.) The rest of the typos and confusing passages took less time to iron out.

The name change entailed the upload of most of the chapters (each on a separate webpage, for those readers who don't follow my adventures consistently) to the "snecret" preview directory on my website. Now if I could see the looks on some beta-reading faces when they click for the next chapter and don't know who's who any more...*snerkle*.

NOW I can lay back and relax and bust my dupa over what can be cut out yet.

Owoo.

Good Thing 1: Property taxes are paid up.

Good Thing 2: The new furnace means that I can be a little warmer without more fumes and soot.

Good Thing 3: I think I have improved the first few paragraphs of You Know What--a bit of mood.

Radovin and I have our heads together today over a few more tweaks and word-cuts. I think I have found a way around a word that made some trouble--it didn't bother me, but some people have no sense of humor, or think that humor, at least my tongue-in-cheek kind, is out of place in the Stone Age, or something like that.

Just how far can one go, when writing in modern English, to keep from sounding "too modern"? The quibbles often strike me as ridiculous. I will certainly not replace every instance of "shit" with "dung". GMAB! But sometimes I do bend. Ayah-kayah!

Meanwhile, I am in Agent Search Mode again yet. Hey, y'all, anybody want a stone-age fantasy with a bit of murder, a few laffs, and no mooshy romance?

The Ultimate Bad Page
While searching for something by way of images, I hit on an obscenely heavy webpage.

It took hours to load. The main reasons:
* One page of HTML, but over 300 KB
* 1276 images - over 40 MB

I went to bed before it was finished.

That page is a prime example of good intentions gone horribly bad because of ignorance and short-sightedness. I have seen other overloaded messes, but that one took the cake. Apparently it is one of many on a university site. It may be intended for scholars, but it is openly available to the whole surfing world. Some of us would rather not encounter it.

Why Bandwidth Matters

Picture your internet connection as a pipeline, ending in a water faucet (your computer). A high-speed connection is a wide pipe with relatively high water pressure. Dial-up is a narrow pipe. In any case, the water pressure will vary from time to time. The faucet will have its own limitations. A slow computer is like a clogged-up ancient faucet, it doesn’t matter how big the water main is, nothing is going to come out over a certain speed.

Let’s say you want a glass of water. You’re going to have it very quickly, no matter what condition your plumbing is in. But if you want to fill a gallon jug, it will take a noticeable time. Filling a bathtub takes longer. What if you want to fill a swimming pool? If all you have is a small faucet, it will take a very long time, especially if the water pressure is low or the pipe is very narrow. With a wide pipe and a fire hydrant, it’s faster, but you still have to wait a while.

What does that mean in terms of Internet speed and page load time?

Few people want to wait a long time for a webpage. They want that glass of water now, within a few seconds, or they are going to back out and look elsewhere. A page that is light and sleek, with 50 kilobytes or so of code and images to transmit, is a glass of water. At several hundred K, it is pushing gallon-size, and there will be a perceptible waiting time at any but the highest speeds. A megabyte--a thousand (or 1024) kilobytes--is considered oversized by all web designers who still use common sense. Webpages, including all of their supporting images and scripts, should measure in kilobytes.

Most Flash sites are in the megabyte-plus range. I am speaking here of whole websites built in Flash, not those that merely have a Flash intro. A Flash "site" is nothing like a real website. A normal site can have hundreds of HTML pages, each one loading in seconds. Put that same site in Flash, and you do not give your viewers the option of loading those pages separately and quickly. The entire site must be downloaded before a single "page" will show! Flash is a monolithic block of data, a single file. It can not be partially loaded. (I realize that this is an oversimplification in some cases, but it applies to most.) That can mean waiting over a minute just to see if the site is at all interesting. Yo, give us a break.

Now consider the image-drowned page cited at the beginning of this rant. Over forty megabytes, over a thousand full-size images! That is asking far too much of any visitor to the site. This is a swimming pool being poured out to all comers whether they can handle it or not. Who wants to scroll down a monstrosity like that even if they can load it?

If it were broken down into several pages and the images linked through reduced thumbnail versions of the originals, it would be humanly possible to look through the information provided.

As it is, it is a quicksand-like trap for innocent browsers.

Such a dumpster-page can be loaded without images, by those (few) who know how to control their web browsers. But then what is the point of creating it? Not everyone has the best possible computer or access to a fast Internet service. Yet as soon as someone has the ability to perpetrate a web-horror, he or she joyously uploads it to clog the webways with tons of--whatever. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot. Doing things without considering the consequences is the same as shouting, "Hey, look what a self-centered idiot I am!"

The whole world is looking.

Originally formatted in kPad, a decent RTF editor.
http://www.codeproject.com/wtl/kpad.asp
Fast, free, tabbed multi-document interface, and unlike most other RTF-only editors it zooms for easy reading.
Why use heavy tools for light work?
The formatting did not carry over to this stupid thing, of course, but I would much rather touch it up again than see the ghastly code that Word slobbers everything up with (out of your sight, but not mine!)

I have done critiques, beta-reading, and a bit of mentoring in the last several years. While it has gained me some good friends, a few people have...not left happy. One day I wrote this generic apologia.

To a writer whose first novel I have read:

This is hard for me, and it is going to be hard for you.

I am compelled, by a need to be honest, to point out what I see. My intention is not to hurt or discourage you, but to help you to become more aware of how word choice and sentence structure affect communication. The problem is that by the time I am done marking out all of the bits that don't work the way you thought they did, it probably looks like I have completely torn the story apart and it is hopeless.

I don't think it is hopeless -- I wouldn't spend so many hours poking at it if I thought there was no good to be done. And I certainly wouldn't do it just to make you feel bad. But I know it will :(

I have a suggestion that I hope you don’t take amiss. You do need practice in writing – everyone does. One way to get it is to write simply for the fun of it and post your work in an amateur writers’ site so that you can get comments and critiques. There are lots of good ones. If the work is not intended to be “serious”, you don’t have to feel as hurt by criticisms. The writing process is more relaxed, you have freedom to experiment.

While you do this, continue to study all you can about writing. There are many sites and blogs where agents and published writers discuss the craft and offer priceless free advice to beginners.

Your satisfaction with having gotten something all done *just so* colors everything you see. That is why we all need a few good readers. No one is ever perfectly objective, it’s too hard to see through your own words because they are your own. Awareness grows a little at a time. Work on one problem at a time. Take time off, don't go into Obsession Mode for too long with any one issue or any one story.

I wrote three good-sized novels and some short stories that I had no intention of – and knew there was no possibility of – publishing before I started on a “real” novel. It let me flex my writing muscles, both to loosen up and gain strength; learn more about my limitations; and develop my own style and voice. People enjoyed reading those tales, but I didn’t take any praise too seriously. I worked at becoming my own worst/best critic and had fun at the same time.

Even so, I have been editing that first “real” one for a few years. It would be a lot harder, I think, if I hadn’t played around with fan-fic and just-for-fun stories. My confidence in my ability to write was very poor for most of my life. The lack of confidence was justified to the extent that I was not a good writer until I worked at being one. I was a storyteller, but not a writer.

Don't let unrealistic expectations set you up for pain. It will take time, you have to do all the work and there are no guarantees. Although the craft of writing seems to come more easily to some than to others, it is not an inborn skill that needs no further development. We are born with two legs, but we have to learn how to walk. We have a voice, but need to learn fine control in order to speak and sing. We have a brain, but it takes years to master the use of abstract thought in order to communicate with words.

Writing is another plateau of communication. Maybe it looks more like a mountain range at times, but all you can do is keep climbing. Sometimes it's worth it just for the view ;)

(You have nothing to lose but your chains)

I get the impression that many writers think it is necessary to use a standard manuscript submission font -- like Courier New -- while writing. Even if they don't, they will most likely let themselves be stuck with the default font of their word processor, Times New Roman if it is dear old MS Word.

Neither font is designed for, or at all good for, reading on a computer screen. There is no need to stress your eyes with these horrible fonts. What is more, your ability to spot your own errors is probably greatly reduced. Your eyes tire and you skim and skip while re-reading (besides, you know that you said it all so well...).

The purpose of the Courier font is not to create a comfortable working environment for a writer. It was designed to imitate an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter. Why? Because it gives a page count that is the same as if you were using a typewriter. Our work is still destined for the printed page. But our choice of font for working with a computer does not have to be based on standards established in the typewriter era. The decision should take into account the actual working environment.

A monitor is not a piece of paper. It is a light-emitting device, not a reflective surface. That makes a huge difference in the way our eyes react to it, how we see details. Fonts on screen are not all perceived equally well. Also, the glaring black-and-white of a word processor page is hateful to the eye -- admit it, eh? And the only simple option is white on blue -- equally hateful to my eyes.

That is why I do all of my writing with a text editor that lets me choose the colors of font and background without affecting the nature of the resulting file. Colors are hard-coded into a word processor file -- what you see is what the other guy gets. I can't have my off-white on cool slate gray in Word without a lot of extra trouble, so I don't use Word except for final formatting.

Adjusting monitor settings for less brightness and contrast is another poor workaround if you do any graphic work. One thing that does help, without getting in the way of printing or other processes, is changing the window background color in the "Appearance" Desktop settings. Unfortunately, many people don't even know that they can attain some control over the ghastly Microsnot interface by right-clicking on their Desktop. You can use a different page background, or even default font color, that is comfortable to work with. ***Warning -- some color combinations may screw up visibility in configuration dialogs and such*** But let's get back to the subject of fonts.

Times New Eyestrain(sic) is a hideous choice for screen reading. It is a newspaper style printing font, designed for reasonable legibility while saving on paper. It is condensed, shortening everything by a large percentage compared to Courier New.

If you need to use a certain font for printing, you are not necessarily stuck with it for actual work on the computer manuscript. Word -- and I suppose other word processors -- has an option called "Draft font". You can choose to view your work in any font that feels good to your eyes.


Now we come to the hard part -- fighting the demons Habit and Belief. You are used to seeing the spindly sticks of Courier. You believe that you must love it because it makes you a Writer.

Bullshit.

It is what you write that makes you a writer, not how it looks. Only the words matter. There is no magic in the font.

Give the agents and editors whatever fonts they want. That's their problem. Don't screw yourself over by using a font that makes your own work harder. You need to see what you have written as clearly as possible. It is one little thing that we all have control over, so take control.

MS Word has several basic "Views", each intended for a specific purpose. It is frightfully easy to switch between them when you need to. Check out the View menu with a file loaded. Now. Do it.

1. Normal is the simplest. Only basic formatting is shown, no layout (positioned things, like text boxes or images, go all woopsy). It is possible to zoom in and still keep all the text within the window -- easy on the eyes while working, less opportunity for errors to hide.

Make sure that in the Tools menu --> Options dialog --> View pane, Wrap to window is checked! Then you can zoom the page to a decent screen font size to read, without affecting how it will print.

2. Print Layout shows the page as it will be printed, all layout set in stone, so to speak. This is for layout freaks, newsletter and flyer makers. Zoom out to get a picture of the whole page, see if all the goodies make a balanced composition and attract the eye.

3. Outline view has the simplified format of Normal, but has its own heirarchical structure. Any section that has a Heading can be collapsed. Level 1 is the highest. Subheading levels collapse with their parent, or individually. If your document has proper Outline structure, you can use the Document Map to navigate in it. No ten-mile scrolls blindly seeking a certain passage to compare it with another. Get it? Outline is great for revision.

4. Reading Layout imitates a book, with side-by-side pages. This may seem like ultimate sillyness, at first glance. A word processor window is not a book, a monitor screen is not paper. However, it has very useful features.

Note--page background color in this screenshot is determined by a global Windows setting.

More important, if your screen is very large, it breaks the text into shorter lines. This is highly useful, because the eye has difficulty jumping back to the beginning of the next line if the distance is too great. Ever wonder why newspapers are divided into skinny columns? It's because you would have a helluva time reading their small, cramped text if the lines were longer.

Try Reading layout when editing and revising -- you will see things that you missed when the lines straggled all the way across the screen (and I imagine that most of you allow the default behavior of opening every window maximized). One more small perk -- at low zoom it can give a single-spaced document a page count closer to that of double-spaced.

5. Web Layout shows what the document would look like as a webpage (God forbid you should do web pages in Word. Please, please, please don't -- please!). Kind of useless most of the time.

If you want to know more, RTFM! Word's Help is actually quite helpful. Sometimes you just have to know what the question is first. I hope this helps.

Character Assassination


It was my day off.

On my way to the Café Verité for a cuppa to celebrate my freedom, walking because I wanted to, not for any good PC reason, I made one big mistake. The cop cars, the ambulance--you'd think I would know better and take a detour.

"Hey, Nick!" Officer Mulligatawny hailed. "Something in your line."

Too late. I waved back and veered in her direction. "What's up, Rose?"

"We got a dead writer here," she replied, her voice quieter now that I was close. "Mary Sue Kaczfraze. Did you know her?"

"Can't say I did. Why?"

"Cause of death." Rose Mulligatawny shook her head and shifted her stance. I quelled my usual thought of how I'd like to see her out of that uniform. Completely. Cops shouldn't have that kind of shape, or top it with blonde curls. She continued, "The autopsy should tell us...but I thought maybe you'd have a clue. You know, like, was she suicidal? We're combing the apartment for empty bottles, but there's nothing obvious. Lot of paper, though, and her computer's on. Looks almost like she died writing."

"Huh." That's why she thought I'd know, but.... "No, the name doesn't ring a bell. What sort of stuff did she write?"

Rose shrugged, making her holster twitch. Very unbecoming. "Not my department. I hoped you might take a look...." She grinned. I was hooked.

#

The body was long gone from the small but nicely furnished apartment, and the fingerprint hunters nearly so, but Mary Sue Kaczfraze still looked over my shoulder while I riffled through a stack of printed sheets. It was a novel, apparently part of a series, your typical fantasy saga. Epic by the pound. I glanced over my shoulder. The photo on the wall stared back. The eyes had been touched up to match the description of her main character--emerald green. I was beginning to see a pattern here.

It wasn't the pattern I was looking for; not yet, anyway. Nothing in the manuscript that would indicate she had any problem with living. Writing, yeah. It was lukewarm syrup all the way. If there was a plot, I hadn't found it yet....

"You'll want to look in here too, huh?"

Mike-the-Geek caught me by surprise. I squinty-eyed the computer with distrust. "Yeah...I guess." Why the hell they couldn't still just use perfectly good typewriters...Mike gave me a grin that would've been a perfect fit on a watermelon. I probably looked like I'd bit a lemon.

He slid off the chair and pulled over one from the dining room table. "I'll hold your hand, Nick."

"Thanks," I growled.

An hour or so and a lot of Microsoft-bashing later, we had half a clue. The other half was in the wastebasket. Cops can look at crumpled pages all day and not see anything but bits of unfinished story. What I saw was pretty scary.

The computer docs were--as far as anyone could see--the same stuff, with minor differences, as the heaps of printouts. She had done some revision and note-taking, leaving a lot of chaotic odds and ends of renamed files. There was also a lot of temporary junk; the weird-named files that come from crashes, as I had learned fom Mike before. Mary Sue probably never saw any of them, Mike said, because they were "hidden". Makes you wonder.

All of the crumples ended at the same point. Some of the temp stuff, reclaimed by His Geekness, didn't. It looked like she had been trying to print, Mike said, and each time MS Word had crashed, leaving an unfinished page and one or more of those ~$-thingies.

In those last paragaphs of what would have been "Saga of the Worlds Beyond -- Marisu Triumphant" (sequel to "Marisu Crowned"), were fragments of a tale of horror. I read on despite the intense pain, over and over:

Out of the forest came the tall, dark figure that she had but briefly glimpsed so many times during her journey. As it drew nearer, into the light of the clearing, the sun light revealed the handsome face of Vaguery, the warrior-mage. Marisu drew herself to her full regal height. She felt outrage that he had thus tricked her into thinking that some evil creature had followed her, and yet her heart throbbed with joy at the sight of his lithe body.

"Vaguery!" She cried. "What mean you by this trickery?"

"My lady, I mean no harm." He replied, smiling at her look of outrage. How beautiful she is, he thought. "My only desire has been to see you safe to your destination, and to your glorious destiny."

That was where it came to a sudden end on the crumpled sheets of paper. The temp files didn't stop there; each one continued in a different way. In each one, the heroine's TD&H lover, sometimes abetted by several minor characters, refused to follow the script. One after another, the scenes ended with her mangled body littering the ground after she persistently refused to listen to the other characters' pleas for independence.

What could I say? I looked at Mike. He looked at me. We shook our heads.

The coroner would probably rule that Mary Sue Kaczfraze died of a heart attack or a stroke. That was close enough to the truth to pass, but I knew what had brought it on. Fear. Frustration. Rage. Call it what you like. I call it character rebellion, but I'll keep that to myself. Crazy, I'm not.

Case closed. Another wasted day in the life of Nick Wortschatz, Private Critic.

---

The first story in this (now apparent) series, Dead Sentences, was written several years ago in reaction to an amateur writer's rejection of my well-meant advice. A few odds and ends of fan-fic also reside in that back room of my site known as Roadkill Camp Tales. Take your saltshaker along if you go there.

Post a snippet, that is. From Chapter 27 of A Drum Is Empty, the scene in which Ottavar is kidnapped. This is where things start to get interesting fast. Also a bit rough on poor Ottavar.

---

"Where is he?" Ottavar scrambled up another slope behind the boy, panting. "Hai!" He stumbled and went down on his hands and knees. The boy kept going, over the rise and out of sight.

"Hai! Hai! Come back here, ah?" he called when he picked himself up. No answer came back. He moved on anyway, following the trace of the boy's passage through the grass.

The boy had woken him out of a sound sleep and hauled him out here with a tale about Radovin getting hurt, needing him right away. What could have brought Rado way out here across the stream and over the hills, when he'd promised to--Ottavar stopped with a jolt. No. No way, he wouldn't have. Damn! But what if--Wake up and think! he told himself. He closed his eyes for a moment.

He heard wind and birdsong...and footsteps, and a voice he knew too well from memories of unpleasant encounters in summers past.

"Don't move!"

Ottavar didn't need the harshly barked command to hold him in place. Three spears aimed at him served very well. Oh, Good Spirits, you dung-biting idiot, you trusting suckling calf, you unthinking hind end of a mare in heat. His hands hung at his sides, empty and impotent. No one could outrun spears. He glared at the men one by one, assessing their mood and relationship. Their eyes told him which one led this remnant of Pavolen's raiders--not that he couldn't have guessed. "Good day, Vasho," he said.

"Shut up." The man moved a few steps closer, spear poised to throw. His younger companions also shifted their positions.Ottavar shut up. He had a brief glimpse of frightened eyes as the boy reappeared for a moment off to one side before running homeward. "Put your hands behind your back," Vashoner said.

One of the younger men tied Ottavar's wrists together behind his back. Vashoner took his belt, with his knife. They didn't remove his medicine bag--probably afraid to touch it, though the bag held only herbs and other materials for treating wounds in an emergency. It was held down tight by his bound arms. The leader of the pack smirked at Ottavar, then spoke to his accomplices. "All right, you two go tell Old Herself we've got one of 'em. I'll see him to the meeting place."

"You sure you want to handle him alone? He could bewitch you with a word."

"Pah! you're a bird-plop, Fredo. But you have a point. Hold him still." Vashoner yanked Ottavar's breechclout off. Using Ottavar's knife, he cut a piece off one end. He wadded the soft deerskin and forced it into Ottavar's mouth, then wrapped a thong twice around his head to hold it in place. He pulled it tight and tied it.

"There, he's safe enough. Now hustle along, boys. The good lady will need some time to get there before dark."

Ottavar watched Fredolen and Harolen disappear over the last rise he had crossed. Spears pointed at him had made his stomach go watery. Being alone with Vashoner with his hands tied was no improvement.

"Move, smoke-rider." Vashoner indicated the direction with his spear, then emphasized the command unnecessarily with a sharp jab to Ottavar's back.

If he veered from the correct course, Vashoner struck him with the butt of his spear or prodded him with the point. Ottavar felt blood trickling from numerous small wounds. Because he couldn't use his arms to regain his balance, he had to concentrate hard on where he placed his feet. Twice he fell, and gained a few bloody wounds and bruises from Vashoner's impatience.

Funny, the things you think of when everything goes wrong and you can't do anything about it. Ottavar was thankful that he had worn a clean breechclout.

---

The novel is in a prolonged final editing stage, tweaks and small fat-cutting. I need to tune up my synopsis collection and get the appendix in order. Then...heh, we'll see.

---

I'm not much of a blogger, as you may have noticed.

Ehhhhhhh... take a Saturday night in February, add roaring wind and dropping temperature, the kind that makes cracking noises. Around midnight -- a bit before it gets really below-zero bad -- introduce the silence that follows the clunk and fart of an elderly oil furnace running out of fuel.

Hokay, I'm writing about people who live in the Ice Age, I know how to cope. Atmosphere! Grease candles and electric heaters find niches and I cuddle bottles of hot water. It's soup and blanket season.

Act Two of My Week: Fuel oil arrives, Old Grumbler the furnace has his line bled and starts cranking out the heat and fumes. House warms up to a balmy 50°F. Grumbler falters. I think -- huh? is my ear infection kicking up? No. The short bursts of silence come faster until all is quiet again. G. does not respond to my gentle entreaties.

Next day, after some bullet-biting, pride-swallowing, and phone calling, a nice young man visits. He lays on hands. Grumbler arises from the rusty dead. Should last until the new one can be installed.

Then the property tax axe falls.

Are we having fun yet?

Raven laughs.

After a harrowing morning dealing with my own computer's sudden hardware indigestion, things are back to what passes for normal. Whatever made my sound card become a silent, invisible terrorist is past and done with for now. The final solution was taking it out and putting it back in. I couldn't boot into anything but Windwoes Safe Mode until I got down and performed that small ritual act. Even Linux refused to materialiuze fully!

I did not even start the paperwork I had planned to do, of course. Eh. My files are safe and sound, what else matters?

Might as well post something, I thought, since I logged in for other reasons. I will start preserving my cookie so I don't have to log in any more. Not sure if that will work for a Blogger comment, but it's worth trying. As I said once elsewhere today, I haven't seen everything yet but I'll try anything.

Post Scriptum: I remind myself to get a more solid cookie. Check the little box, Matera. Squint and find the little check-box...oy

Late yesterday I dropped in at the Absolute Write forum and found out about Nathan Bransford's "Essential First Page Challenge." I am not normally into contests, but I couldn't resist this one. Gad, what a battle, trying to load the blog comment page with over 400 entries in already. I gave up after a while and e-mailed it, an option I did not want to resort to if at all possible. Owoo! It's in now, NB is a sweetie.

The hilarious thing is, I rearranged two paragraphs right then, because it struck me that something was out of order. I always end up doing last minute edits when posting in critting forums too.

I read some of the other entries while trying to re-re-re-(insert infinity symbol)-load the page. There were some that made me wince, a few that could lure me into reading more (genre considerations aside). I didn't get to bed until around three, thanks to all the fun. At least I got a useful edit out of it.

Neh-heh-heh, I feel this awful bubble of frivolity rising within. Every post doesn't have to have meaning. Whose blog is this, anyway?

Lack of proper punctuation tells me two disturbing things. Number one, the writer is not conscious of what he is doing. Number two, he does not consider the viewpoint of the reader. To rephrase all that in a nutshell, he is self-centered and self-ignorant.

The only excuse would be dyslexia, autism, or other diagnosable variation from the so-called norm. There is no shame in having an inborn reading/learning "disability" that gives one difficulty coping with the rules of language structure. Goodness knows the school system is only capable of dealing with good herd members, "average" sheep. It denies and represses diversity of any kind. Too often it discourages learning. Teachers are not taught to recognize and work around differences in learning style. Geniuses can be labeled idiots because they despise the taste of and can't digest hard, dry pellets of Student Chow.

Amateur writers go through a gradual process of skill improvement. Some have farther to go than others, and all progress at different rates. Nobody is perfect and nobody is ever done learning (I hope). However, lapses that are excusable in "normal" beginners are out of place in the writings of adults who aspire to be - or already claim to be - published authors and who do not admit to any extreme of mental diversity.

Punctuation and grammar rules are not a straitjacket, they are the only true pathway to freedom of expression. Structure makes communication possible. The bones of language are what allow us to make it work, just as our skeletons support our muscles and give us leverage to lift heavy weights.

In short, make sense or eff off.

Um...let me know if I screwed up the puctuation.