Jonathan Lovelace's Blog, page 7

Poetry Book update

In the months since my last report on my “Poetry Book” project, I’ve made substantial progress, but much remains to do, I have a few questions for my readers, and I’ll want test-readers soon.

Report

First, I have a number of illustrations now. I’m aiming for at least one illustration (counting “artistic spacer”-type drawings as illustrations) per poem, since having illustrations can make some of the problems of laying out poems that don’t all have titles somewhat easier. However, I’m not yet half-way to that point, and searching for suitable images is slow going.

I found a command to make the maximum vertical size of an image be the remaining space on a page, but no more. This is far better than the manual tweaking of sizes and placements I had before.

Second, I got my script to generate for the poems from Markdown originals to work. I use some nominally-non-printing characters to designate where I want the incipit to begin and end, the script presumes my standard header (title and author) and footer (link to where it was posted on this blog, for comments, and back to the main index), and there are two problems I couldn’t avoid “solving” with special-case logic. But with those caveats, I consider the problem solved. And I eventually figured out how to make the build script run my script to generate the before trying to use it in building the book PDF.

Third, I wrote a script to produce EPUB, and thence Kindle, format ebooks. The formatting is fairly bad, but I should be able to make the first fairly significant improvements without too much difficulty—the script produces Markdown and uses pandoc to generate an EPUB from that, and tweaking it to produce HTML instead shouldn’t be too hard. The hardest problem I had to solve in writing the script, I think, was getting the order of poems and images from the source, so the EPUB doesn’t get out of sync if I decide to change the order or as I add images.

Fourth, I contributed the beginning of a patch (now included upstream) for poetrytex to allow the incipit in the table of poems to be different from the line in the poem itself. I only need to use this in one place, but the way poetrytex works it’s so generally useful that my compatibility package calls it whenever the poem has an incipit. Unfortunately, the equivalent in poemscol adds the line to the table of poems every time it is called.

Questions

Now, my questions for you, readers.

First, about the dedication. I have particular people in mind, but I’ve dedicated the book to them in terms of their categories (“to the … who … this book is …”). I’ve sometimes thought that I ought to name them individually on the dedication page, but I’m of two minds. So what do you think? Should I name the dedicatees on the dedication page, in the Acknowledgements section, or only in private communications?

Second, as I’ve said before, a single volume of 57 poems now seems a bit short given the rate at which I have (or had) been writing poetry. Should I leave it as-is, include more, or turn the project into a series of perhaps-smaller volumes? And if that last, should they cover a fraction of a year each or several years in total?

And third, as I said a couple of weeks ago, I’m planning on promoting the book with a blog giving a poem a week. Do you have any favorite poems I should try to make sure to include? (See that post for details on what I can include.)

How You Can Help

There are several ways you can help me with this project, if you like.

I will soon need “test readers” to help me revise the prose sections of the book (such as the preface) and to polish the poetry.
I will also need “test readers” of a different sort to help me diagnose and fix rendering glitches with the e-book formats on various e-book readers at various font sizes.
If you find any public-domain black-and-white images that have something to do with the subject of one of the poems in the collection, I might be able to use them as illustrations.
And, as I mentioned above, I need ideas for poems to put on the “A Year in Verse” blog.

Do you have any thoughts?

Filed under: Poetry Book

Writing status update (#26)

It’s been almost two months since my last report, so it’s time for another update.

A great deal of the writing-related progress I made was work on my Poetry Book project, which I plan to report on this Saturday. But let’s look at the goals I set in my last update:

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).

As in so many previous months, I failed to keep the “regular” part of this.

Outline at least the rest of The Longest War by sequence.

Progress—I’m perhaps a tenth of the way through the “third arc” of The Longest War, and was moving quickly when I worked on it at all—but I didn’t accomplish this.

In fractalling the culture of the Empire and the Sunshine Kingdom, get at least to the end of the “Communal Identity” subsection.

I did get to the end of that subsection, but no more than one question farther.

Write at least four character histories.

I finished three … which is, again, progress.

Write at least a couple of hundred words of “actual prose.”

As usual, nothing.

I’m going to reduce my goals for the next month, because I will have other projects demanding enough time I expect to be able to spare little for these. But I will still set goals because I don’t want to slip into stagnation.

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).
Outline at least the rest of The Longest War by sequence.
In fractalling the culture of the Empire and the Sunshine Kingdom, get at halfway through the “Negative Identity” subsection.
Write at least two character histories.
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

We’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#25)

It’s been a month since my last report, so it’s time for another update, which can perhaps be summed up best in a wordless sigh. But to give more details than that, let’s look at the goals I set a month ago:

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).

For the first couple of weeks, I was able to maintain regular progress, but that fell by the wayside the last week or two.

Outline at least the rest of The Longest War by sequence.

Umm … no. In fact, I am if anything farther behind than when I started. I did get my outline-by-sequence through the end of the second “volume” of The Longest War, but when it came to the last third, which covers the same time period as the “Game of Life” sub-series, after finding myself stalled for days I realized that my previous idea was not going to work, so I threw it out entirely and started afresh. But that means I need to pick a new POV character or characters for that section and come up with the way the story should go. Or simply move on to a different planned novel.

In fractalling the culture of the Empire and the Sunshine Kingdom, get at least to the end of the “Communal Identity” subsection.

I made some progress, but this proved more difficult than I’d thought. Partly, I hadn’t realized (even though the questions have the word “fractalling” in the name!) when I was preparing my task list that this section drilled down a level further than everything previous.

Write at least four character histories.

I did manage three character histories.

Write at least a couple of hundred words of “actual prose.”

Again, no.

Because my failures (other than the usual) came down largely to “more difficult than anticipated,” I’ll actually make my goals for the coming month the same as they were last month:

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).
Outline at least the rest of The Longest War by sequence.
In fractalling the culture of the Empire and the Sunshine Kingdom, get at least to the end of the “Communal Identity” subsection.
Write at least four character histories.
Write at least a couple of hundred words of “actual prose.”

I do have high hopes to exceed some of these. But we’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates

Poetry Book Update

In the months since my last report on my “Poetry Book” project, there’s been some minor progress worth reporting, and a few questions for my readers.

Report

First, I have a second illustration, and have dropped the idea of using the -native graphics (which never really worked) in favor of more standard graphics-inclusion methods.

Second, I have added a second part to my dedication. (About which also my first question for readers, below.)

Third, I got the scripts I use to turn my “source” into PDFs to build it with poemscol and poetrytex (which are mutually incompatible, hence my two versions) in the same run.

And fourth, because I have been utterly unable to find even a hint as to how to produce an EPUB or Kindle format e-book from arbitrary source (“arbitrary” because I use a great deal of specialized or custom markup for the poetry in this book), I’ve moved every poem into its own file that is “included” into the main text, and begun to develop a script to produce the format of each poem automatically from the Markdown “master copies”—which I should be able to convert to EPUB or Kindle easily enough.

Questions

Now, my questions for you, readers.

First, about the dedication. As it stands, the book is dedicated to those in two categories of people. (I can give the dedication in full if that would help you give better advice, but if not I’d rather keep it under my hat for the moment.) I have particular people in mind, but I’ve been dithering about whether to name them individually on the dedication page ever since I thought of whom to dedicate the book to, so I decided to err on the side of discretion. But what do you think? Should I name the dedicatees on the dedication page, in an Acknowledgements section, or only in private communications? (I intend to send copies, at least electronic, to the dedicatees, since it doesn’t seem right to dedicate a book to someone and have him or her have to pay to read it, and that would necessarily be accompanied by a message explaining why.)

Second, as I wrote in March, given the rate at which I’ve been writing poetry a single volume of 57 poems seems a bit short. Should I leave it as is, increase the number of poems, or turn the project into a series of perhaps-smaller volumes of poetry, covering either a fraction of a year per volume or more than a single year in total?

And lastly, does anyone want to volunteer to test-read and help me revise the front- and back-matter prose and polish the poetry?

Filed under: Poetry Book

Writing status update (#24)

In the month since my last report, I’ve made somewhat-inconsistent but sustained progress for the first time in several months. To give more details than that sentence-length summary, I’ll look at the goals I set a month ago:

Continue regularly working on Shine Cycle development. (Without this, there will be no progress to report.)

I might quibble about “regularity,” because I was definitely off-and-on, but with the amount I got done I was “on” enough to call this a success.

Outline at least the rest of The Longest War by sequence.

(By the way, a few weeks ago I posted a description of my writing process that explains the phrase “outline … by sequence.”)

I’m more than half-way through The Longest War on this level of outlining, but not quite two-thirds. So I would call this a failure, but more on estimating what’s a reasonable goal, or a success except at reaching the goal I quoted.

In my process of fractalling the culture of the Empire and the Sunshine Kingdom, get through at least the rest of the “View” questions.

I did, and got several questions into the “Identity” section.

Write at least several hundred words of actual prose.

As usual, I didn’t write any “actual prose.” However, I did write a handful of character histories, which are closer to “actual prose” than I’ve managed in months, and have been sitting in my task tracker for years.

I should also mention that I started on character histories because I ran out of characters needing “entries” (in each profile in my usual format, the “entry” is the initial paragraph), so at the moment I have no characters with “a name but nothing else.” This will change soon enough, as I have “characters without names” (via a process I’ve dubbed “Anti-Tuckerization”), but it’s a definite milestone. And with these histories in hand, I can now start posting profiles on this blog again.

I’ll set similar goals for this coming month to what I’ve just accomplished (I will be happy to keep the same rate of progress):

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).
Outline at least the rest of The Longest War by sequence.
In fractalling the culture of the Empire and the Sunshine Kingdom, get at least to the end of the “Communal Identity” subsection.
Write at least four character histories.
Write at least a couple of hundred words of “actual prose.”

We’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates