Skye Lansing's Blog, page 7

Extra Credits: The History of Writing

Had something completely different planed to go up today, but ended up seeing a video earlier this week that I just loved. It really nicely matches my interests. There are a lot to study when it comes to history, but sometimes it isn’t people or events but the history of specific things that is the most interesting.

It just so happens I found a video that goes into The History of Writing. If that sort of thing interests you, go ahead and click on the link to watch.

Caring and Research

So during my trip to Colorado for my brother’s graduation I ended up reading 4 books during the intervals where I wasn’t driving. This is pretty typical of me during travel, since it is pretty difficult to do much of anything else in a car (or plane), and my Kindle always has a backlog of books just waiting to be read. I’m not a slow reader by any means, and tend to binge read, so a stretch of several days can see me devour several books in quick succession without any problem at all.

Generally I find that most books I pick up have their good points. This isn’t to say I like everything I read. There are certainly books I pick up and feel ambivalent about as I work my way through them, but I’m generally able to understand what the book is and identify why it doesn’t work for me. Often this just comes down to such fickle things as voice, themes, and my mood at the time. People tend to be natural story tellers, we do it all the time, so in my experience telling an adequate story isn’t all that difficult (telling an exceptional one is another matter, however).

That said there are things I see occasionally that just bug me. It ends up showing that the author just didn’t care, and in every case comes down to a lack of research. This is something I’ve complained about before, though mostly in private, because it is the type of problem that is really easy to avoid. In many cases a simple Google search is all that is required.

I’m not going to name and shame here, because this isn’t a problem I’ve only seen in that book, however I am going to use examples from it to illustrate my point. Writing is quite difficult, I understand, but I feel that only makes it more important to avoid the simple mistakes.

Real Locations

Lack of research I typically notice comes down to failing to fact check details about real locations. This is doubly true when a story is set in a definite place in our existing world at a time where we know what the place is like. Obviously a writer is free to imagine how places might change in the future, or make-up details to fill in gaps about the far past. I’m also understanding when fictional locations are inserted into real locations, such as an imaginary bar placed in a city to serve as a hub for a story.

As a cautionary example I’m going to borrow from the story I read. In it the main character is climbing a mountain with a summit at about 14,000 feet above sea level in Colorado. So far so good. Colorado has several mountains that high. However, upon reaching the top the character looks down at the Colorado plains “14,000 feet below.”

Perhaps this is a result of misunderstanding how mountain height is measured, but it raises a real problem:

Apparently the Colorado plains are (at best) more than 3,000 feet underground, but more likely closer to 7,000 feet underground. OK. Wow.

What really gets me is that checking this took me all of five seconds. I literally just hopped on Google, typed my question, and had the answer spat back out at me. The research was so simple, and the answer so readily available, there is no excuse for not having fact checked this detail. And worse still, fixing this error is really easy. Just change the description to talk about how the Colorado plains are “thousands of feet below,” or actually find the real elevation for the real location you are talking about and use that to find the difference instead.

Now I can see someone saying that most readers won’t notice or care about this type of issue. I cannot honestly say if that is the case or not, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that is correct and only 1 out of 10 (or 1 out of 20, or whatever) readers will notice the problem. Is it really such a big deal?

Personally I would say that yes, it is. First of all, even if most readers won’t notice the fix is amazingly easy to apply. This isn’t something that required an in-depth knowledge of geography for me to figure out. I just needed to look it up online. Even if we assume that only 10%, or 5%, or 1% or readers will notice the problem, the amount of work needed to get something like this right is so minuscule that failing to do so is a major problem. It indicates a fundamental lack of care about what you’ve written, and if you do not care why should the reader?

Beyond that, even if only a few readers notice these problems I believe they will tell others—especially if it is a persistent problem. Some fans may not care, but the opposite is also true. It’s true that there are certain things that, once noticed, cannot be unseen. I’d be worried about retroactively losing fans.

Unfortunately I cannot say that this was the only type of error in the book I read, which leads me to…

Incorrect Statements of Fact

One major plot point of the book dealt with immunity, and specifically loss of immunity. Because I got a degree in biology this was interesting to me. The idea of causing a biological attack by removing existing immunity from a population and not introducing a new pathogen is a really clever idea. The author of the book deserves a lot of credit for coming up with that concept because I (at least) have not seen it before. This was a great plot detail.

Unfortunately either the author misunderstood what is meant by “immunological memory” or simply didn’t bother to do any research at all. In contrast to the previous mistake, this one takes a bit more learning to fully understand, but since the entire plot of his book hinges on this detail it is absolutely critical to get this right. We know how the immune system works. You can’t just make something up and expect that to fly.

In the book, immunity was wiped out by a drug which caused temporary amnesia, which would then remove the person’s immunity by making their brain forget how to fight off infections. This bears absolutely no resemblance to how an immune system works. This concept is absolute nonsense, and it actually hurts me to think that someone is basing a story on such a misrepresentation of immunity. It hurts especially hard because I can think of perhaps three different methods of destroying immunity just off the top of my head (but I’ll spare everyone the details).

Now let me be clear, I am aware that science fiction often has to speculate about how future technology might work, and as such can date itself when its speculation is proves to be incorrect. That is fine. So long as the ideas presented seemed reasonable with the information available at the time I have no problem. I also don’t have a problem with bending or breaking particular facts to make sure that a story can actually take place (Star Trek can’t very well take place without Faster-Than-Light travel, for example).

Completely misrepresenting things that we already know, however, is just unforgivable. If the workings of a human immune system are central to your story, you had better learn how things really work. There are books that cover this topic. I’m sure that if you searched YouTube you could find a video. There are probably college professors who would be happy to answer your questions. And your story will be better for it! The ideas will be that much cooler because they are feasible. And when the expert in your story explains what is going on, he won’t sound like a blithering moron thereby completely destroying all his credibility.

I understand that it is possible to take this sort of thing too far, to start nit-picking extremely minor, inconsequential details to a story, but I’m not asking an author to be an expert on everything and avoid all factual errors in their writing. I’m merely asking for care to be taken when a writer makes a statement of fact. When you give a number, double-check that you give the right one. When your story revolves around a topic, actually learn about that topic.

Back Home

I have returned to Indiana. I actually got back on the 18th, but have taken it easy as there was a fair amount of driving involved with this trip. Not much happened with me during the time I was away, however it seems like a good time to update since I’ve effectively had 2 weeks off now.

Brother’s Graduation

My brother got his PhD, which was the reason for the trip. Technically he still has to defend his thesis, but I doubt that will be a problem. It is going to be interesting to see where he ends up once this is all wrapped up. Personally I think he’ll end up in California, because he seemed to like the internship he worked at over there, but he seems to be avoiding any hard plans for the moment. Wherever he ends up, I’m sure he’ll do well for himself.

The graduation itself was a graduation. One thing I’ve always wondered about these things is why there are so many speeches before. This one was fairly light in that regard (thankfully). If I had to guess I would say that the goal is to inspire graduates to go do greater things, which is well and good but I wonder how useful that actually is.

 

Stellaris

This is a 4X strategy game that recently came out, which I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. Probably too much, to be honest. The game is still pretty bare bones, but I expect it will go the same route as Crusader Kings 2, with plenty of DLC adding more functionality in the future. I’m still not 100% sure how everything works, to be honest. I have around 50 hours in the game so far (which given how recently I’ve gotten home should tell you how much I’m enjoying it).

The biggest issue for me atm is just that I’m playing it far too much, letting it cut into my writing time. Today I decided it is time for that to end, so I’m forcing myself to cut way back. Which leads us right into the next bit of news.

 

No Writing Done

So during my trip there were problems with my power cable that made writing basically impossible (in addition to just being unable to write given the environment I had). Fortunately it is an easy problem to fix, I bought a new one that is working out just fine. However it has seriously dented my productivity and made me wonder if I should push back my deadline for the book. Decided against it as this time was basically a trail, and I hope to get back to 4 hours of writing/day.

On Hiatus Until 22nd

Intended to get this notice up on Monday, but forgot to schedule the post. Oops.

I’m going to be traveling soon to visit my brother for his graduation. Will still be working on my next book as much as possible, but no blog posts until I return.

May Plans

Things were pretty hectic last month, and although they are calming down now there is still some churn happening. It shouldn’t be too bad (at least that is my hope), but there is a period of about a week where I’m now sure how much I’ll be able to work since I’ll be going to see my brother’s graduation. That said, here are my overall plans for the month:

Productivity

Currently I am only very slightly behind where I want to be with my book’s progress. My main goal is to not fall any more behind until all the current nonsense is behind me and I can finally dedicate all of my time to writing once more. To be fair, as things stand I wouldn’t finish too late even if I didn’t make up the lost work, however I would like to keep to my original deadline if possible.

Reading

I haven’t been able to really read much for the past two months, which is something of a shame. The big problem here is that I am a binge reader, and I don’t have very much free time as it is. If things were going the way I wanted them to, then I could simply dedicate a day to reading a book here or there, then make up the lost writing time over the week. Unfortunately that isn’t possible as things stand, I am barely able to keep up with things as is and that involves moving heaven and earth to get time to write.

Monthly Newsletter

This is going to come out a few days late, but it is a priority to get out. Again, completely unavoidable because of the nonsense involved in getting ready to move. I could have gotten it finished early, but I already skimped a bit on the last one and wanted to avoid doing so again for this month. In any case, will go out during the first week regardless.

 

Shooting Myself in the Foot

Going to make a prediction that will probably bite me in the rear, but I think the worst of my distractions will be over either this week or next (time will tell). Hopefully that means my writing productivity will be going back up. For now, however, I’m just feeling pretty worn out.

In any case, book progress is continuing. Feeling pretty good about that, even if it is slower than I would like and I have the odd day where I can’t seem to get any writing done. Overall I’m happy with how things are going, though. The book is more or less on track and I feel like I’ve got something of a handle on my life for the time being.

Lessons of a Time Crunch

So since the beginning of this month I’ve been under something of a time crunch because of events in my life. It isn’t exactly unexpected, things that are happening are mostly things I’ve expected would happen sooner or later, but it has seriously cut into the amount of time I have to write lately (although, admittedly, time I have free to write is not necessarily time I have used to write). Overall this has seriously hindered my ability to work on my second book.

That said, all is not doom and gloom. While the amount of writing I have done has been halved, I am learning through this process. It isn’t so much lessons that translate well into a list of things to do so much as mental discipline. I’ve learned that when I have time and ability to write I need to pounce on it and push hard. With less free time, I cannot spend as long waiting to “feel” like writing, so when I have time I go through my preparations and just start writing while trusting that the inspiration will follow. Largely it has.

So far the dividends have been limited, but it is teaching me to write faster without any dip in quality (at least that I can notice). Usually it takes me ~2 hours to write 1,000 words. Now I can sometimes do that in an hour, although not reliably. Usually it takes closer to 1hr 15min. Still, this means that once time frees up my productivity should really ramp up as well. I don’t think ALL of that can go into a single book, but that may just mean I start seriously taking on multiple projects at once, switching between them over the course of the day. Either way, it means more stuff will be coming out faster than I anticipated so long as I can keep this mental frame.

Unexpected Week Off

So my last blog post talked about how I was having bad dreams, but how there was a slight silver lining with it giving me an idea for a story. At the time I wrote that I had no idea just how much that would consume my time. As I expected it took me away from my book for basically the entire week, but the experience was ultimately very good for me.

In roughly 24 hours I wrote about 12,000 words, which is frankly absurd. My usual pace is about 2,000/day, so this was over 6 times that. I was actually writing so much and so fast that I had these cold shivers and my body was trembling, and although the result is pretty much a trunk story I feel like the writing actually came out remarkably good considering how fast I got it out. Showed it to a few close friends and all agreed it is quite emotionally intense.

Also probably the closest thing I’ll ever write to horror.

Anyway, once the writing was done I just couldn’t let the story sit, so I ended up spending the rest of the week tweaking and revising it over and over until I had something I was happy with. Made many changes to soften the story from what happened in my dream (dreams being dreams, there was a lot in there that I think was just random sadism thrown in to make the dream worse), and made a major change to how I was writing to focus on a single perspective and give the story more focus.

In the end, I think I learned a lot about this. While I doubt 12k words/day is a pace I can keep up day after day (this experience felt like it was literally killing me in some ways) it was a lot of fun in a way. Plus it showed me that I am fully capable of writing faster than I currently am, so maybe my goal of eventually hitting a consistent 4k words/day isn’t as insane as I initially thought. Got to play around with the first person perspective and a flow of consciousness narrative style too.

Back to working on my book as of tonight (I just pushed 1k words into it), and that feels good too. Never expected this to happen, but honestly maybe I needed to let my muse have it’s head for a few days.

Bad Dreams: Pros and Cons

So for the past couple days I’ve had some of the worst dreams ever. No surprise, my life is pretty much in flux now and I like stability. Still, it has kept me from getting sleep, and from writing (as much as I want).

There is a silver lining though. I feel like it has given me a wonderful story idea. Well, wonderful isn’t what I would call the story since it gave me nightmares, but it should be a gripping story. Not something I can sell—probably the definition of a trunk story. But it is one I feel like I have to write.

Might even be good for me, although I expect it will take time away from the second Honor’s Path book until I get it out. Luckily it should be merely long-short story length. And I know the entire story, more or less, since it was my dream. May not take too long to bang it out.

Crazy Week

Things are crazy now, thus the late blog post. Going to keep this short and save details for next week’s post. Suffice to say I’ve been very busy, which has cut into all my time (including my writing). Not sure how long this will go on, but I’m gradually learning to cope so hopefully it won’t be too disruptive.

It might delay the monthly newsletter, however I will do my best to avoid that. If necessary I’ll just keep this month’s short.