Thursday, January 29, 2015

Fencing Academy now available for pre-order!

It's like preordering video games, except instead of getting a videogame, you get a book. Isn't that lovely?

Damn, March 23rd can't come fast enough!

If you are inclined, you can preorder here.

For those from Blighty.

Fencing Academy Cover

BTW, I promise you, this blog won't turn into being just about my books. I'm still working on AIF.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Writing Your First Book, Pt. 3

You. Need to, revise. - Christopher Waulken.
How you revise your work is pretty much going to dictate how you should write it.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. You need to revise your work, and you should know that before you even start writing. I know a lot of talented people who never revise their work, and that's the reason they'll never become great writers. You know who you are.

You.

Need.

To.

Revise.

Are there any more ways I can say that to get you to understand?

1) You need to revise.
2) Necessitas a editar.
3) .esiver ot deen ouY


Revising is a crucial skill of any writer. And it's not just to pick out errors like like this one, but also to prune out awkward, flowery strange sentiments that just take up space and go on and on forever and are just structureless blobs of excessive verbosity. Like this paragraph.

The art of revision is corrupted by how we teach writing, at least in America. In student works we have a mandatory word count and so revising often means we're looking for areas to insert superfluous content rather than remove it. This is where many people pick up appalling writing habits. You could probably populate a bestiary with the individual offenses, but I won't here. This is, after all, a series on how to write your first book, not how to write well.

Revising is rarely about putting stuff in. It is nearly always about taking stuff out.

Revision doesn't happen in isolation, either. It is a constant process. You finish a sentence, you reread it. You finish a paragraph, you reread it. And so on for every page and every chapter. After you finish the book, you reread, not once, but multiple times. You read it again and again until you begin to loathe your own work slightly. That only means you need to step back for a week or so, and come back to it with fresh eyes.

Everyone has their own style of doing it. For example, I inserted this paragraph after the third revision, after reading this to myself and realizing that I had not given any concrete examples on how to effectively revise. A common method is to read what you are writing out loud to see if it feels natural as you say it, which is what I'm doing right now. This is useful for refining your style. However, this edit is an example of fixing a structural issue -- I noticed that I hadn't covered some important topics, and so I went back and inserted them in. Such an omission can only be noticed by someone willing to reflect on what they've just written. You have to ask yourself: have I communicated the ideas I intended to communicate? Is there anything that isn't necessary to this article?

It's not just your eyes, it's other people's eyes, their fresh, fresh eyes. (1) (4)

A complete writing team includes at least: 1 Writer, 1 Test Reader, 1 Editor.

If you are self-publishing, there is an awfully good chance you can't afford a professional editor. Good editors are expensive, and while some are "worth every penny", there are amateurs available who either don't have the critical skills available or use their leverage over you to be nasty. There are still other "writing grognards" who have a crystallized view of what constitutes "good writing" and pretty much take the hammer to Writing Heresy. (5) And yet, the editor is every bit as valuable to making a piece work as the writer themselves; they are the ones who will make your writing good (6) there are things that you just can't see but they can. It comes down this: you need an editor, but you can't rely on the editor to make your writing good.

And nor should they. Turning opaque prose into something readable is just exhausting. You'll find your editors dropping out of the sky if you send them off your first raw, unrevised draft. Even if you use an editor, you need to make sure your work is pretty well refined by the time they see it. If you need your editor to rewrite everything for you, just do everyone a favor and hire yourself a ghostwriter. (2)

The test reader is a friend, family member, or significant other that loves you enough to put with your work. The test reader's primary job is to be honest where others might be a little diplomatic. In other words, they tell you when you suck. If you're going to put your work out commercially, developing a thick skin and professional attitude is a must, and if you can't be your own worst critic you definitely should get your actual worst critic as a test reader.

Everyone writes shit that blows. Where the skill comes in is deleting said shit before anyone has a chance to read it. (3) (7)



(1) This joke shamelessly stolen from Hanon Ondricek.

(2) BTW, I'm going to start an indie editing and ghostwriting service in the future, so if you're looking for one email me.

(3) This article was revised four times. This is a very low number.

(4) This joke worked better when the previous paragraph didn't exist, but since it exists now the joke doesn't quite work. However, I've decided to keep it to illustrate exactly what I mean by revision.

(5) I've inappropriately inserted my own pet peeve when it isn't relevant to the paragraph, and at this point I haven't expounded on the virtues of a good editor so it seems like I'm discouraging people from getting an editor.

(6) Awkward sentence please revise.

(7) Now the number is five times and fuck it, it's done.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

What is the AIF Toolkit Recipe Book?

During my post on my New Year's Resolutions I said that I was working on an AIF Tookit Recipe Book, a companion to the Inform 7 Recipe Book. These would cover topics that don't exactly deserve their own extensions, but probably deserve a mention. I get some feature requests that, while reasonable in their own right, are either specific to a particular game or have very simple means of implementation within core I7. The ATRB would have examples of doing these things. The ATRB also has sex scene templates - I've got three so far - which you can just paste into a project and fill out all the relevant texty bits and poof like magic you've got a fully-fledged sex scene.

This is where you come in. Do you have a particular question or subject you want answered or covered? I'll almost certainly include it in the ATRB.

Here's a brief list of subjects I've covered/planning to cover:
  • Making background and partially interactive NPCs.
  • Body parts with interesting names.
  • Writing good understand clauses
  • Clothing and clothing descriptions
  • Boob cups & body measurements
  • Modifying the arousal system
  • Unlocking new actions ala Master of the House
  • Using willingness as a variable
  • Give it to me! (contextual sex commands)
  • Achievements
  • Dynamic outfits
  • Solving memory issues
  • Using scenes and positions
  • Conversational commands
  • Commands by kind
Is there anything else? Pretty much anything AIF related is on the table.