I was thinking the other day about my positions on various Geek Holy Wars. Then I figured I’d might as well blog about them, since, well, I’ve been a bad blogger lately. It’ll be fun, right?
Star Wars vs. Star Trek: I HATE THIS QUESTION. When people ask me this, I usually tell them not to make me choose between my children. I grew up with both series and I love both series dearly. That said, if I was forced to pick, I’d have to go with Trek, just because it has more sentimental value to me. I’ve often said that Star Trek was a second set of parents to me– and I mean it.
Kirk vs. Picard: This one is interesting, because when I say “I grew up with Star Trek”, what you have to understand is that from, well… from as-early-as-I-can-remember up until I was about 13 or 14 years old or so, what that meant was “I grew up with The Original Series and the movies”. I didn’t really get into TNG until my teenage years. Kirk was my original captain, and the crew of the NCC-1701 was my original crew. I actually have a picture of myself with George Takei somewhere.
…BUT I’ve gotta give this one to Picard. Kirk is who we want to be but never will be, but Picard is who we want to be and can still aspire to. Plus he’s classy.
And drinks Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
DC vs. Marvel: I’m a Marvel fan, sorry all you Batman lovers. Spidey + XMen + Iron Man = No contest.
Now let’s move on to some Linux goodness:
KDE vs. Gnome: We all know by now that I’m a KDE fan, but what most people don’t realize is that this is largely by circumstance. Way back in the day when I was first discovering Linux, it was KDE-based distros that just happened to work with my wireless internet where Gnome-based distros did not. So it was KDE that I started with and became comfortable with.
As time went on I would attempt to use Gnome every so often but I inevitably found it to be very buggy and far from the stable desktop environment that everyone kept telling me it was. It wasn’t until earlier this year when Gnome finally became stable enough for me to use. I used it for about two months because KDE4 was being stupid, and enjoyed it, but switched back to KDE once they had their own bugs worked out.
Currently I use KDE for two big reasons: 1.) it’s familiar, and 2.) I like to customize my desktop to look like a Gnome/KDE hybrid, and it’s much easier to do that with KDE, which is designed to be endlessly customizable.
Ultimately I have no problems with Gnome anymore, as I said my experiences with it used to be pretty universally negative but they seem to have fixed all their problems so I’m okay with them now.
(As an aside I would love to like XFCE but it’s still buggy for me.)
Emacs vs. Vi: I don’t use either very often but when I do I use vi.
“Open Source” vs. “Free Software”: A quick backstory behind this for those who are not aware: “Open source” and “free software” are pretty much interchangeable terms when it comes to a technical definition– i.e., software with the code freely available to view and modify. Where they differ is the political ideologies behind the two: use of the term “free software” implies the belief that “software should be free” and that this is a moral issue, whereas “open source” implies that it is strictly a matter of business and getting good results.
What I have found in day-to-day geek life is that most geeks fall somewhere in the middle of this “belief” spectrum and choosing which term to use largely comes down to just how crazy you think Richard Stallman really is. (Spoiler: he’s pretty crazy.)
As for me, I see both sides of the issue. Yes, I’m a Freetard. Yes, I’d love to see all software be free to tinker with, as an extension of my deep-seated inkling that anything restricting creativity is Bad. But I’m also a realist and, let’s face it, a world based completely off of “Free Culture” is not gonna happen anytime soon. Plus, it’s easier to get this stuff into the hands of people if you can pass it off as a business decision.
Ultimately I use the two terms interchangeably or just call it “F/OSS”.
***
Okay, what’d I miss? I know I missed some epic Geek Holy Wars. Ask me stuff and I’ll toss it up here!
In a bit of a twist today I am going to tell you about a game that scared me half to death when I was a kid, and still scares me today:
This is Jumpman for the Commdore 64 (and Atari, I believe). It looks innocuous enough, doesn’t it? You get to take control of a blocky pixel guy who gets to jump around and collect diamonds.
Then you start to play the game and there are bullets. Just, randomly. Bullets. Heat-seeking bullets. That will make 90 degree turns if they get near you so they can destroy you. They make gun noises. That noise will strike fear into your heart.
Scary thing #2 about this game: When you die, the game makes this TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE NOISE. It sounds like somebody doing very evil things to a synthesizer while you watch your lifeless ragdoll body plummet to the ground, bouncing helplessly off of every obstacle in the way. The guy in the video I posted dies a couple of times if you really want to see and hear it. (You don’t.) It’s horrific. NO PIXELS SHOULD HAVE TO GO THROUGH THAT.
Did I mention it was stupidly easy to die in this game? One misstep and you’re toast.
Scary thing #3 about this game: When you ran out of lives the game would start flashing red, (cue seizures here), as this fanfare played. Except it was like a reverse fanfare because most fanfares sound like they’re leading up to something good. This fanfare sounded incredibly foreboding, as though it was leading up to something impossibly terrible. And all this while the screen is flashing red. I can’t express to you how terrifying this was to me as a three year old kid. (I tried to find a video of this on YouTube but sadly I had no luck.)
Now let me tell you about one of the earliest nightmares I can remember having. I must have been about three or four years old, and in my dream my dad and my uncle were playing Jumpman (cause they used to do that when I was a kid), and somehow I just knew that if they got a Game Over the world was going to explode. I tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen to me. They got a Game Over, that terrible fanfare and the flashing screen came up, and the world exploded. Then I woke up.
AND YOU WONDER WHY I AM SCARED OF THIS GAME.
As for the game itself– I guess it was amusing enough if you could get past the whole thing about being maddeningly scary. The premise was pretty silly… apparently the Jumpman is actually an alien or space ranger who saved the planet or something? I don’t know, that’s what I worked out from watching my uncle beat the game (I figured he must have been some sort of god among men for actually playing through the whole thing), but then again, this is Commodore 64 we’re talking about here.
All I know is that no scarier game has ever been made. Eat your heart out, Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
At least the cover is hilarious.
'Well on MY planet, 80s fashions are still cool.' *whips out Walkman*
This was an NES game that involved a little light gun that you could actually shoot at the screen. I played this game a lot. I seem to recall being pretty good at it, too, for being six years old or however old I was.
Mechanical watches are sort of a big deal these days, for a lot of reasons, including the emerging popularity of steampunk crafts and the like. Spiffy looking pocket watches are turning into an “in” thing, and skeletonized wristwatches are becoming more and more popular. I figured I would set up a guide that would function as an intro, of sorts, to people who are new to this world, especially since a lot of folks I know around the ‘nets are looking into it.
DISCLAIMER: While I probably know more about this subject than most people in my typical friends’ circle, I’m still kind of a nub. Horology is a BIG topic. That said, let’s begin:
First off: how is a mechanical watch different from any other?
The vast majority of watches these days are “Quartz Watches”. They are powered by means of a battery and electrical pulses that are sent through a quartz crystal tuning fork, which resonates at a very steady frequency. This is then counted and “translated” into seconds– this is how the watch works. Because of their accuracy and low cost, Quartz watches became a big deal in the 70s and now that is most of what you see.
Mechanical watches are made the way they made them before the idea of Quartz watches existed. SUPER QUICK PHYSICS LESSON: A pendulum, if it does not lose any energy, will always swing at the exact same rate. This is where pendulum clocks came from. A watch does this by way of a spinning wheel called a balance wheel, which spins back and forth at a constant rate thanks to energy provided by way of the mainspring (and various other interesting mechanisms). A mechanical watch does not need a battery, although the mainspring will always need to be fed power by being wound up.
If you are unsure which your watch is: If it uses a battery and the second hand ticks exactly once a second: it’s probably a quartz. Mechanical watches (with few interesting exceptions) do not use battery power and most of them tick several times each second.
We good so far?
Okay. Moving on!
Some World History:
Lots of people all over the place made watches throughout the 18th century, but during the 19th century the British watchmaking industry all but died out for various reasons. Watchmaking continued in Switzerland (cause that is totally their thing), and in America. The United States produced a LOT of really high quality pocket watches throughout the 1800s and very early 1900s, as any vintage pocket watch collector would love to tell you all about.
Then the 20th century rolled around, and suddenly the United States was too busy dealing with various World Wars to continue much in the way of watchmaking. Leave it to good ol’ Switzerland, though, with their blissful neutrality, to pick up the slack. This is why today Swiss watches are a Big Deal (we’ll talk about this more in a bit).
When Quartz watches started showing up– cheaper and more accurate than traditional watches– the Swiss watchmaking industry, reluctant to let go of hundreds of years of tradition, was dealt a near-lethal blow. They were saved by Swatch and a guy named Nicolas Hayek, who died a few days ago, by the way *bows head*
ANYWAYS, they managed to float on that for a little while and then the “luxury” market for super expensive, super technical watches appeared and now you have mechanical watches making a comeback because we humans tend to be a nostalgic race. Spiffy, huh?
Now that I’ve told you all of this, we’ll move on to the real “meat” of the watch…
The Movement:
The movement is the name for the whole inside mechanism of a mechanical watch. Basically, if you take the case away, the movement is what is left.
Also it is gorgeous!
Movements are exceptionally complicated pieces of engineering, largely because they are so very small. Most watchmakers have to go to school for a few years before they can even think about building their own. The reason I am telling you this is because if you see a watch being sold on Etsy or some other craft site, I can guarantee that the movement itself was not made by the crafter. Rather, the crafter ordered the movement from somewhere else, and then modded up a spiffy case for it.
Independent watchmakers, who build their own watches from the ground up, do exist, but they invariably spend about a year on each watch and then sell them for tens of thousands of dollars. (You would, too, if you were building one thing a year as your profession.)
This is why it is important to be aware of the various types of movements and their quality when you are buying a mechanical watch. For example:
Swiss Movements: These guys have been doing this for centuries. They know what they’re doing. For the most part you are going to get solid and reliable performance. The downside is that they tend to be expensive, and the more complications you add to your watch or the more reliability you want, the pricier it’s gonna get.
Swiss movements are considered by most watch aficionados to be “the real deal” and watches that have them will say they do, right on the dial. It’s like having a super expensive brand name car or something.
Japanese Movements: Lack the “prestige” factor of Swiss but are also pretty solid.
Chinese Movements: China is the other big producer of watch movements right now. They’re still kind of learning but they’ve got some really good stuff if you know where to look. The main thing to look out for is the cheaper and super-mass-produced Chinese Movements. If your mechanical watch was dirt cheap (i.e. one of those $1 ones on eBay), it’s probably got one of these. In that case it’s sort of a grab bag box-of-chocolates… you never know what you’re gonna get. You might get something good or you might get something that breaks in a few weeks. You never know.
That is just the super condensed version of it. The whole movements story and what it means is pretty multi-layered. The main thing to get out of this is that, for the most part, you get what you pay for.
The Care and Feeding of Your New Mechanical Watch:
Because nobody likes a sad timepiece!
So you decided to buy one. Awesome! Doesn’t it make a lovely ticking noise? <3
Here are a few things to be aware of if this is your first:
1.) At first, it is probably going to run fast. It might run very fast. You might be worried because two days after getting your new watch you already have to reset the time. Don’t panic. New watches tend to run fast because the lubrication has yet to spread throughout the springs. Give it a bit of time.
2.) Store your watch in different positions. This will help a lot in the beginning, especially, with helping to get that oil going. Take your watch off when you go to bed and let it sit overnight upside down, right side up, crown up, crown down… just in a different position every night. This does wonders for the accuracy of the watch. (At least, it did with mine, which went down from +15 seconds a day to probably +5. Which is pretty dang good for an entry-level mechanical.)
3.) Get it serviced every 3-5 years. Your watch is a machine that is constantly working 24/7. It has lubricants that are going to dry up and these need to be reapplied every so often.
4.) Be careful – mechanicals are tough but they can’t take a ton of abuse. You might want to take it off if you’re doing some extreme sport or something. (Unless you have one of those watches that they made specifically for said purpose.)
Pike, I didn’t need that whole entire ramble. I just want something pretty!
Search Etsy or eBay for mechanical “steampunk” style pocket watches. A really big selection is going to turn up. These watches will do very nicely for a costume or to simply look gorgeous. They may not have staggering accuracy and they may not last for decades, but they will work decently enough and will certainly fill the bill that you want!
Pike, I didn’t need that whole entire ramble. I just want something accurate that tells the time!
Get a quartz watch; they are cheaper and very, very accurate. They make quartz pocket watches now, too. I even have one! *nod*
Or, you know, just check your cell phone for the time… but that’s not as fun, now, is it? Is it??
Pike, I want something that is pretty, is going to last a while, and is memorizing to watch (no pun intended).
Then, my friend, you have come to the right place. It’s hard to explain all the charming little idiosyncrasies of a mechanical watch without actually owning one, so you’ll just have to try it out. I don’t know, but to me there is something delightful about the noises it makes when I turn my wrist, or the shifting weight of the spinning rotor when I move my arm, or the way you can sometimes unexpectedly hear the ticking noise if you’ve got the watch tilted and your ear tilted juuuust right. Throughout the day, the watch gives you little reminders like that– that it is still there– and as dorky as it sounds, you don’t feel quite so alone. :3
Now there’s a good chance you’re looking at the title, scratching your head, and thinking “Space Cadet Pinball, what the heck is that?”
…does this ring any bells?
You know what I’m talking about now. The game that came with early versions of Windows. Come on, you got bored and played it too, right?
Now, Pinball is awesome. I’ve always loved it. I never got to play it very much, though, because you had to actually go to the arcade or the pizza place or whatever. So when I was a kid, I decided to make my own pinball machine out of random parts laying around the house, and I sort of drafted up how I was going to accomplish this, but then I got distracted by something or other and never got around to it. Fail Pike.
Never fear though, VIDEO GAME PINBALL is here! The object is simple, right? Keep the ball from slipping between the flippers? Yes, but guess what, there’s crazy amounts of depth. That is the beauty of Pinball. And Space Cadet could trap you for hours once you figured this out and learned how to operate the little switches with the bumpers and get upgrades.
Little Known Fact: The game was originally published by Maxis. Yes, that Maxis.
That’s all for today, folks. Just a quickie because I’m moving today so I have stuff to do. Like attempt to get Linux and Wireless to play nicely. If I disappear from the internet, send a search team after me.
Yesterday I decided to update my Kubuntu to the latest version. I did this whole process from within the operating system itself.
However, I, knowing that Linux will be Linux, was very prepared for this. I burned a copy of the newest version to a CD, fully expecting that everything would be broken and that I’d have to clean install. I backed up my entire /home folder to an external hard drive, a process which took about three hours by the way. I started early so as to give myself the entire day to fix my computer if something went wrong, which I was sure something would. I mean, this is Linux, after all.
Then I hit the Upgrade button.
Two uneventful hours passed while the upgrade did its thing. I tried to stay away from the computer at this point, because I worried I would do something to mess it up, but to be honest the computer was nice and usable the entire time. After the two hours were complete it asked me to restart the computer, so I did.
…
…EVERYTHING WORKED.
I was in shock. I honestly couldn’t believe it. The upgrade had gone flawlessly. It even cleared old kernel versions out of Grub for me. What’s more, it seems to have fixed the sound issues I’ve having since a few months back (where half of my sound/music related programs one day decided to stop working.)
Oh, speaking of which, Amarok is now scrobbling correctly to Last.fm. It hasn’t done that in MONTHS. I would burst into hallelujahs at this point but I’ve already moved on to Clementine which is Amarok without the new over-the-top interface.
The only thing I had to fix was that upon logging in for the first time the bottom panel was missing. I solved this problem by right clicking on the top panel, selecting “Add Panel” and then dragging the various widgets there that I wanted. That was it. Five minutes, tops.
I couldn’t tell whether I wanted to be happy or horrified. Like, I wanted to scream “WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH LINUX” at the screen. Regardless, it’s a big victory for what the Ubuntu folks want, so that’s pretty exciting.
This cracked me up.
The ultimate test will be when I move in a couple weeks and have to set up *gulp* wireless…
The great thing about liking Lady Gaga’s music is that regardless of peoples’ opinion on her I have an awesome excuse to listen to her. If the person I am talking to thinks she is brilliant, I can nod my head and agree, and if the person I am talking to thinks she is terrible and most awful thing ever to happen to the world, then I can remind them that my musical taste is absolutely horrible and that I’m that person who listened to Dragostea din Tei on repeat for about a month. Win/win situation!
Haha, ok, pocket watches. My taste has changed over time, perhaps like it would for a fine wine or something. I used to just want the pretty ones, now I want the vintage ones. My idea of beauty in a watch has shifted from physical beauty to the beauty of design and a mechanical device being able to run for over a hundred years. That said, if you can find one that is beautiful in both ways, please let me know. (So I can cry, because I obviously won’t be able to afford it.)
Blogging about cake inevitably turns into blogging about Portal. My sister’s birthday was a couple weeks back and she got a plushie companion cube. I was jealous.
Her cake also looked like the one from Portal. It was kind of a Win Birthday all around.
It doesn’t even taste like spaghetti. Which is possibly why I like it, because I was never the world’s biggest spaghetti fan.
Horrible musical taste, and horrible food taste. I’m on a roll!
@softthistle: “i want you to tell us just how AWESOME you are!”
This is hard, because I have terrible self esteem. Even when things happen that seem to imply that I might be a slightly interesting human being, I counter it with my brand of logic. When I was a little kid, I mean really little (like five or six) I went through this battery of tests and it got me into a school for “gifted kids”. I never quite understood why. I have a distinct memory of telling my parents a few years later that I had no idea why I was going to school with all these smart kids, because “all I can do is read.”
That same sense of uneasiness haunts me today. I’m probably an above average writer, but you know what, SO IS EVERYONE ELSE ON THE INTERNET, at least in my friends’ circle. That’s why they’re blogging. Since I am merely doing something that everyone else can do, it negates any sort of specialness and makes me a pretty average person. So, there you go.
@kerrsplat: “Tesla coil inside a Faraday cage turned into a pocketwatch! Go!”
You guys know me all too well. <3
I wonder if it would even work, though. Well, there's only one way to find out >.>
I had to google this. I guess the players are revolting or something? (…”revolting” as in the verb, not the adjective.) Well that’s just silly, becauZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
I’m pretty sure I need this in my life, post haste.
@Rilgon: “Ayamiss and how awesome of a wasp she is.”
Rilgon’s wasp is big, orange, huggable, and awesome. It’s also no longer tame-able in game. Apparently Blizzard doesn’t want you to tame something that shares a model with a raid boss. Which is really too bad, because I would like to tame the following creatures please: Shade of Aran, Curator, Nightbane, Void Reaver, XT-002, and Heigan the Unclean.
A Curator mount is fine too.
@scouris: “the current political situation in Cambodia”
I had to wikipedia this. Turns out they have a king, a prime minister, a parliament, political parties, et al. I couldn’t find anything particularly exciting here but maybe I was just looking in the wrong place.
Back in the day, though, they totally had cool wars and stuff.
@Slash2Rustee: “Thoughts and Reflections on Whats eating Gilbert Grape the movie.”
I actually had to watch this movie in tenth grade. I remember all of two things about it: Somehow it tied in with “Of Mice and Men”, and Leonardo diCaprio was in it.
…okay, just wikipedia’d it. Apparently Johnny Depp was in it too? Shows you how much I know about movies. *sobs*
@lufitoom: “Being naked and eating cheetos while playing WoW.”
Man, that would make such a mess! Orange dust would be everywhere. On your keyboard, on your mouse, on you… not sure I wanna try it.
@faeldray: “‘i want you to tell us just how AWESOME you are!’ – seconded!”
Bah, fine, you’re not going to let me get away without doing this, are you??
Okay, the three awesomest things about me:
1.) I taught myself to read and write before I was three years old.
2.) I got 5’s on the two AP English tests. I didn’t study and I was taking the tests the morning after spending the night in the hospital because I had a bad case of influenza or something. I also hadn’t eaten in probably 24 hours. It was great.
3.) I got a 104% on my Algebra II final. (All questions plus the two extra credit questions correct.)
…I really can’t think of anything else about me that is particularly awesome, sorry >.>
Also let it be known that this is probably the only time I will ever talk about supercool things that I did. *retreats back into humility hole*
I actually saw a really neat video clip this morning about a fashion designer in New York who is making his own nuclear fusion reactor at home in his spare time. He said his reasoning was trying to discover an efficient new energy source. I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but I think that’s an awesome idea. I’m one of those people that misses the days of anyone just up and inventing the Next Big Thing in their garage. The Wright Brothers did it, The Woz did it, but it doesn’t seem to happen very much anymore. Free energy devices? I’m all for it, and I wanna see it invented by some goggles-wearing geek somewhere.
@Nim_Ankh: “write about how awesome an idea [asking twitter for questions] is.”
I’m a pretty big fan of this idea myself. I’ll have to ask Twitter for blogspiration more frequently.
Things I cannot do: Blow bubbles with bubble gum. Every so often I get some bubble gum just so I can try it and see if I’ve stopped failing yet, but it’s all to no avail. I also can’t curl my tongue into a little roll. I heard somewhere that this was actually a genetic issue (which wouldn’t surprise me, since I am basically just a bundle of awkward recessive genes), but then I read something else refuting that, SO I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE ANYMORE.
(As an aside, I swear, 50% of what I learned in high school science classes has since been refuted. Remember back in the day when Biology was simple and you got to do things like play “Evolution: The Board Game”? Don’t get me started on my rant about the poor game design on this, by the way. Because you could only win if you evolved into a human by the end. So if you evolved into a dinosaur halfway through the game you were done, GAME OVER MAN. But at least you get to be a dinosaur, I guess.)
@Doug_Williams: “If you were a hot dog starving in the desert, would you eat yourself?”
Alright friends. Pretty much all I have to do is post this video and the nostalgia shall overcome most of you like a wave. And that is how it should be.
Back in the day, Capcom was a god among game developers. Like, if you loaded up a game and it started with the Capcom jingle, you knew you were in good hands.
They had a lot of really good games. They had a lot of really good underestimated games as well. (Mickey’s Magical Quest anyone?) And Mega Man 2 was possibly their best (I say “possibly” because, well, Street Fighter.)
Anyways, they got basically, let’s see here… everything right with Mega Man 2. Stages and boss fights that were very challenging without being impossible. A really fun and unique play dynamic with the powerups and suits. Oh and the music. Did I mention the music? Can anyone really talk about Mega Man 2 without talking about the music? The answer is “no”, by the way. Just amazing stuff for coming out of the original NES. Last I checked, Dr. Wily’s theme was the most remixed song on OCRemix, and for good reason.
Dr. Wily is also the father of the Okkusenman song/fad. Okkusenman being Japanese lyrics set to the song. And for all the song’s Super Cool Factor, the lyrics actually tell a pretty heartbreaking story about growing up and losing your childhood. Seriously, watch this, I mean really watch it, and not get teary-eyed, I dare you.
…but depressing lyrics aside, this is, by far, the best version of the song:
WARNING: Listening to this version of the Dr. Wily Theme may cause your computer to spontaneously implode with dangerously unstable amounts of awesome
…yes, the Internet has been won. We can all go home now.
LONG STORY SHORT: Mega Man is awesome. Everyone should play Mega Man 2. If you haven’t played it, you should find it and play it. This is one of the all time greats, and even if you can never quite beat it *cough me cough* it will make your afternoon happy. True story.
Editing was a difficult beast to wrangle with. I’m not sure if it’s because there was no real National Novel Editing Month graph to ride my butt, or if it actually was simply more difficult, but I’ve basically been locking horns with editing for the last six months. (By contrast, the actual writing process took about a month and a half.)
Now that I’m gearing down on editing and getting ready to actually move on to the scariest part of the writing process– publication– I have compiled a list of things I wish I had known, well, six months ago. By popular demand!
1.) Print It Out
Reading your book on the computer is, on the one hand, very handy because it means if something needs to be changed you can do it right away and eliminate the middleman, so to speak. The drawback to this is that if you change something, and then on the next page realize why you did what you originally did, you have to go back and change it back. (And yes, this happened to me a lot.)
But the main villain here, in my opinion, is distraction. If you are at your computer then you have e-mail and Twitter and everything else sitting right there distracting you. So unless you can turn off the internet or have rock solid willpower, print your book out, put it in a binder, and take it somewhere comfy with some pens and post-its. Speaking of post-its…
2.) Post-It Notes are Awesome
During my first editing pass, I just scribbled my notes and changes in the margins of my printed copy. This seemed to be the logical, straight-forward way to do it, and it worked fairly well. I noticed something interesting, though– namely I started to stumble across more and more writing sites that suggested using something like index cards or Post-It notes during the editing process. I wasn’t sure why they were suggesting it, but it seemed like a legit idea, so I tried it out with my latest editing take.
Pretty much immediately I realized why everyone was making Post-Its such a big deal. Aside from giving you more space to write your ideas down on, the real benefit becomes clear during the actual editing process on your computer, allowing you to quickly and easily flip ahead to the next Post-It, do your change, and then pull it out. No more having to wonder if you already performed a change or not, because your Post-It actually isn’t there anymore if you did. I dunno, I thought it was a great idea.
And everyone loves Post-Its, right?
3.) Your Book Does Not Suck
This syndrome seems to afflict a lot of people who write & edit so I am going to warn you all about it right now. What happens is you see all the problems that your book has, so you convince yourself that you are a horrible writer and have accomplished nothing of worth and it’s the end of the world as you know it and you don’t feel fine.
Okay, well, I suppose there is a possibility that all of the above is true, since I don’t know your writing abilities, nebulous readership, but I like to assume the best, so let’s assume it’s not true. Convincing yourself of this is harder than it would seem. This is what I did to pull myself out of a rather pessimistic slump:
I pulled out one of my favorite books of all time and started reading. Because I was still in hardcore editing mode, I hadn’t hit the bottom of the first page before I found stuff I wanted to change and “fix”. At this point I came to the conclusion: You know what, if I want to scribble in red pen all over one of my favorite books, which got published, by the way, then my own stuff can’t be too bad.
Try it out if you hit your own editing slump. You will be surprised how many books are abandoned and not completed.
4.) Test Readers are Valuable but Not Gospel
This one was difficult for me to balance out. See, you’re riding a fine line here by reading test readers’ comments. Some of their comments are actual things that you should probably change, and some of their comments are opinion, and learning to sort out which is which will probably eventually come down to a.) how many other readers shared said thought, and b.) gut instinct.
Basically, you don’t have to incorporate every suggested change, but you don’t want to ignore them, either. Let new ideas that your readers suggested percolate in your brain for a while. Play with them and see if you can do anything with them. Learn to ignore your initial defense strategy of “I can’t believe they didn’t like [insert element of book here]” and figure out why they possibly didn’t like it and if it would be worth it for you to change it.
Also, remember your demographic. If you are writing a kids’ book, see if you can get actual kids to read it and then put more stock in their feedback.
Another tip: compile all the positive feedback you get into a text file somewhere and read it when you’re feeling down. Works wonders. (Thanks to Tami for this suggestion!)
5.) Don’t Spend Too Much Time Comparing Yourself to Other People
Millions of people want to write the next Harry Potter. We sit around and dream of movie deals and gigantic online fan communities making wikis for our book universe. And you know, it’s a very nice dream and an admirable (if a bit luck-based) goal. But that doesn’t mean you should try to change your book to make it more Harry Potter-ish. Now you’re probably thinking, “of course I wouldn’t do that!” but lemme tell ya, when you’re tired and you’re knee-deep in editing and your frazzled brain just wants this whole nightmare to be over and that dream of being the next J.K. Rowling dangles itself in front of your eyes again, you will be sorely tempted to change your word count or change your demographic or change something to make it more like [insert dream book here]. Because your subconscious figures it’s your best chance to climb out of the editing hellhole.
It is 100% okay to be influenced by your favorite books. It’s 100% okay to include homages to things that inspired you. I went in to my book wanting something that felt like the “His Dark Materials” series, not in plot or character, but in general feel, for lack of a better word. I wanted something that was science-fiction-ish without being afraid to do a few things that veered more toward the fantastic. As such, one of the greatest moments of reader feedback for me was someone who didn’t know that this was my intent, telling me they got a “His Dark Materials” vibe from my book. Gosh, what a rush when I read that. I knew I had succeeded in at least one of my goals.
It’s okay to have a goal like that. You just want to be careful that your desire to emulate your favorite authors doesn’t consume your own creation. If you think back to a lot of the books you like, I bet a lot of them were different. Being different is scary, because you don’t know if the publisher is going to like “different”. But think about something like “Watership Down”. You can bet the publishers were scared to publish “talking rabbits”, but now it’s one of the most popular books ever. And as an aside, has anyone else noticed the deluge of talking-animals-with-their-own-vocabulary-and-mythology books that mysteriously appeared soon after “Watership Down” did? I read a few. None of them were as popular, though, because they didn’t really do their own thing.
Let your story and characters be who they are. Comparison will come later.
And hopefully your comparison does not involve either of these two things.
Well, that’s it for the “Five Things I Wish I Had Known Before [verb-ing] My Book” posts, at least until I get published, at which point I plan on finishing the series. Might, uh, be a few years… don’t hold your breath for the next installment anytime soon… *cough*
There were FPS games, and there were platforming games, and then there was Jet Force Gemini for Nintendo64, which decided to try to be both of them at once and somehow managed to pull it off.
This was a sci-fi game that had you visiting various (themed, of course) planets, blasting bugs with plasma guns and saving little fuzzy Ewok-like creatures. You could play one of three characters– of which the best was a cybernetically-enhanced dog with a machine gun on his back (because come on, that’s just awesome). The characters have a sort of cute, doll-like appearance, which is promptly tainted by all the guns and blood and flying alien parts after you’d blasted them to kingdom come. Sounds fun, no? It was.
The FPS/Platformer hybrid aspect of the game was accomplished by having you see and control your character platformer-style most of the time, and then when you pulled out your gun and targeted something the camera would zoom in on your character’s head, which would become translucent, allowing you to slip seamlessly into “FPS mode”. It took a bit of getting used to at first, but once you did you’d wonder why you ever had problems with it.
Another of the game’s big triumphs was the inclusion of multiplayer co-op. See, partway through the game’s story a little flying robot with lasers started following you around. His name was Floyd (the Droid. Eh? Eh?). He would default to being controlled by the computer AI but at any time someone could press Start on the second controller and take manual control of Floyd. Floyd didn’t have the same versatility as the actual playable characters and playing Floyd was basically playing a shooting game on a track, but boy was it ever helpful to have someone play Floyd for you when you were on a difficult boss fight.
I played this game a lot when I was younger. But I never beat it. Why? Because it was a Rare game that ultimately fell prey to the DK64 Collectathon Syndrome, but in the most horrible possible way. See, up until about, oh, two-thirds of the way through the game, saving all the Ewoks was a good idea, but ultimately optional. Which was fortunate because they were a gigantic pain to collect. It was much more fun to just focus on bug-blasting your way to the end of the level.
So anyway two-thirds of the way through the game an NPC informs you that in order to pass you need to go back to the beginning and go through every level, again, and save every single Ewok.
Yeah, um, guess who stopped playing the game?
Bad Rare! Bad! No cookie!
Still, other than that little slipup, I look back on this game with nothing but memories of awesome. Why this hasn’t been given a sequel or the remake treatment yet is beyond me. Cause I’d be first in line.
