Jaque Thay's Blog, page 7

Back to the Future with the Devil, our Resident Evil.

In my experience, the best writers are those who are able to draw upon a wealth of media in order to better their work; the idiom I've been repeatedly told is that "good writers read". I don't think this goes far enough. I try to engage myself with as many types of media as I can; I've got a growing library of novels and graphic novels and an extensive DVD collection. From these I can learn from those that have gone before me; I can see how masters of their craft develop their capabilities and understand the tricks and styles that they utilise.

This week I've had the opportunity to watch a variety of films on the big screen; on Wednesday I saw Resident Evil: Afterlife, Friday saw the return of Back to the Future, celebrating its 25th anniversary, and yesterday I watched the latest film from prolific director M. Night Shyamalan: Devil. These are very different films, both in style and intent, but all three have taught me lessons that can be applied to my own writing.

Starting with Resident Evil, this fourth film in the franchise was disappointing for me; it felt like there was twenty minutes worth of plot that was stretched out to fill two hours – it deviated away from its base ground and zombies featured almost as an afterthought. It did however show how not to write a film, and that when continuing a saga you need to ensure that all parts work as stand-alone pieces instead of merely filler between more plot-focused segments.

Next is Devil; Shyamalan is known for his shock twists and artful misdirection. In this film about five apparently unconnected individuals who become trapped in an elevator, the same rule applies. Having seen many of his previous works I found myself calling the twists and second-guessing the plot points before they occurred. Because his style has been emulated and refined over years of directing films it has become known and thus predictable. Even if you cannot guess the exact nature of the twist, you will be aware that they are coming. As a writer this provides a really good lesson to me: vary your writing! Shyamalan has made a career from his predictability, but in recent years his critical appeal has declined as more and more people become aware of his techniques. By changing the way in which we devise stories, plots and structure in our works we can avoid this.

My favourite film of the three was Back to the Future; it has its flaws, to be sure – the early characterisation of Marty's family being one. In my opinion the depiction of them as failures and losers is taken too far, but some humour is derived from that too. In almost all other aspects this film is a classic. From dialogue to resolution it never feels forced, it never seems out of balance and twenty-five years after its first release, the plot twists are still as fresh as they ever were. I think the strongest point about the film is its characters; Doc Brown, Marty, George McFly and Biff are all excellently written – they are all believable within the confines of their universe, and for me that is the greatest praise that you can heap on a creator.

I'm still working to integrate this blog with the main site, but in the meantime you can click here to return.

Catching up with myself

After an exceptionally busy few months I'm finally catching up with all those niggling little side-projects I've got on the go. Promotion for my book Jaque's Magic Beans is going well; I've performed seven signings and readings and one radio interview, sold a good many books and hosted a short story competition.

Throughout that time I've built a following of over 150 people on Twitter and posted over 140 unique pieces of twiction – exceptionally short stories – which have been well received. I've also been asked by Deadstar Publishing to compile a book containing the best of these twictions along with other, previously unpublished, micro-fictions and this is scheduled a release date at the end of November.

Where does that put me now? Well, the novel that I have been working on since summer 2008 has fallen to one side for long enough; I plan to enter Nanowrimo this year and perform a complete re-write which will include many changes to the plot and premise since my original conception of the idea in 2007. A novel that I have been editing, and co-authoring with a friend is coming close to being complete so I want to see that finished before the end of 2010. On top of all that, I have been commissioned to write the first arc in a comic book series; with planning and plot outlining now nearing completion it is nearly time for me to begin scripting. I can't give any more information on that at the moment, but as soon as I'm permitted to, I'll share the details.

You might think that with those projects to continue I wouldn't have any spare time – but thanks to the miracles of careful planning I am still able to take on freelance editorial work, so if you – or anyone you know – has need of my services, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

Until next time, take care! Oh, and click here to return to the site.

Problems so far and things to improve.

The website redesign has been live for over 24hrs and I've not managed to break it yet. That's a good sign. I've also had positive feedback via twitter: "I looked at your old site a little earlier. Your new site has a cleaner layout and much faster loading time." @Jamyama_Media which is a sign that I've taken things in the right direction.

Now for the problems; I'm not a natural programmer so what I've put together took longer than I'd have liked and it's still not quite finished. My lack of coding knowledge has also had an unintended side effect: I didn't know that different browsers display websites in different ways. All the testing that I did was based on Internet Explorer 8 (yes, I know some of you are probably hissing at me… but it's the software that I'm used to using) and I didn't know that I should have checked it on other browsers. Since the site  switched over to the new design I've been told these things and I've had the chance to look at it on IE6, Chrome and FireFox. Unfortunately all three of these have issues that need to be addressed. I'll sum them up momentarily.

The other issue that I wasn't immediately aware of was tracking and analytics. The previous version of my website had it all built in, and naively I overlooked that factor; I've now corrected that by signing up for Google analytics and inserting their code into all of the pages on the site. It shouldn't have any negative effects on the pages… but if you spot something that's gone wrong, please let me know via comments or through the contents page.

Right; the errors that I'm aware of… starting with IE6 as that's the shortest list – everything seemed to work here except for some odd justification in paragraphs. This wasn't consistent across pages and I don't know why. I think it can be fixed by using a justification tag, but I don't know if it's worth doing if text displays normally on all other pages.

Chrome: the only error that I'm aware of in chrome is that tables and text that should be centred aren't. Both of these features were implemented using css in the header of each page – which is the way that w3.com suggests it should be done. I'm not sure how to fix this, but will look around for any guides I can find.

Firefox: the same error with non-centred tables/text exists in FireFox. There is also a second error regarding linking. I was taught that you could reduce bandwidth use and stop false analytic data from being reported by using relative links when working within a website – in layman's terms, instead of telling a browser exactly where to look for a page you could tell it where to look relative to where you are currently located eg. if you are at www.jaque-thay.com/fake_page1 and you wanted to link to www.jaque-thay.com/fake_page2then you could tell it to look for "\fake_page2″. This should ask the browser to go up one level and then down to the correct page and in Internet Explorer and Chrome it works as intended. In Firefox you end up with the following: www.jaque-thay.com/\fakepage2 . Of course this link doesn't go anywhere and thus you have a problem. I could fix this issue by renaming all my internal links but then my analytics software will think that you have entered the site afresh every time you click on a link and makes analysing data much more difficult. There probably is another way to do this, but I don't know it… so that's another issue that I need to look into.

If you notice any other issues please let me know and I'll look into them.

Moving on; there are still improvements that I want to make to the site. I want to replace two of the images that I use – now that is fairly easy, I just need some time with a camera and a willing photographer. I'll have that done within a few days. The major feature that I want to incorporate… and at present I have no idea how to manage this, is to integrate this blog into the main website and to have the sidebar automatically update with links to my most recent blog posts/items in the store. That is a feature that the old layout had, and it was one of the reasons I chose the old layout in the first place. I've had suggestions from other bloggers that I should completely redesign the site around a wordpress template… but to do that seems a little counter-productive when I've spent so long building the current design. The better solution is thus the far more complex one; learn to code competently enough to achieve the desired result. Obviously this will not be a quick process so in the mean time I am open to suggestions… or offers of help!

Once I've made some progress I'll post again and explain a little of what's happened and how it affects the site. I'll also be putting a post up in a few days with the news that I mentioned from my last entry. For now though, I'd better give you a way to get back to the site. Happy reading!

Return to www.jaque-thay.com

It's finally here!

Months have passed since the site last had a public update. Behind the scenes things have been bubbling along for a long time. I've actually redesigned the site twice… but you never got to see the first redesign I did.

There are still things that need work; the logo on the entrance page is in need of some work, and I've still got the issue with the blog and sidebar to fix. They need to be intergrated into the main site but that's beyond my humble skills. I'm working on it… but it isn't a quick thing to fix.

How're things going with the writing? Well I've now got over 140 twictions on twitter, my book is available pretty much anywhere in the UK and I'm working hard as ever to write new material.

Check back in a few days and I'll have some more news for you. Till then, happy reading! Oh, and to get back to the site… just click here.