Greg L. Turnquist's Blog, page 11

I hate “Track Changes” with a passion

The world of open source has commoditized many things. It’s the key reason my wife and I could move off of Windows and onto Macs without the world knowing or caring. Key apps we use are Chrome and LibreOffice. These tools are free and open. It takes no effort to crank a PDF of a document.

Then we run into the situation with editors. Much of the writing world has invested itself in MS Word’s tools like Track Changes. And so we get back an edited manuscript loaded with tracked changes. “Maintain the changes!” “Submit your changes and I’ll merge them”

Hence, I have to keep a copy of MS Word for Mac on all my computers.

Today my wife got her manuscript chopped up by her line editor, the last of a series of edits. She couldn’t edit it on her MacBook Air. I could on my MacBook Pro as well as the Mac Pro tower. So I relinquished my throne so she could work on the tower computer. I suppose working on software from the sofa isn’t the worse thing. What burns me up is that between all three of these computers were three versions: 14.0, 14.1, and 14.4.

I have no clue what’s wrong!

We need something better than track changes. And we need the writing community to rise up and demand such freely available tools so the pox of MS Word can be lain in its grave. I have done my part by writing Learning Spring Boot in Asciidoctor and leaning on Packt to adopt it wholesale. But I fear that day may never come. And so I hang my head and weep.

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It’s 11pm at night. Do you know where your POV is?

Last night, around 11pm, I wrapped up a long edit on Darklight. Ever since the Clarksville Christian Writers started meeting early this year, I have gotten in gear for cleaning up my manuscript.

One of my fabulous beta readers, a published author, spotted my issue with POV (Point of View). I head hopped all the time and used the style of a narrator. “Clarel heard soldiers approaching”, “Clarel felt people brush past her”, etc. This puts distance between the reader and Clarel and also becomes wearisome. It’s better to write “Booted feet filled Clarel’s ears” and “Someone brushed past her”. Why? Instead of narrating what’s happening and TELLING the reader what is being thought, seen, and heard, you instead must SHOW them through the character’s eyes, ears, and words.

A nice side effect of Deep POV is that extraneous sentences melt away. When showing a scene through Clarel’s viewpoint, sentences that share another character’s thoughts must be purged. If their thoughts, ideas, and motives are still critical, they can be brought back in either dialog or facial expression. It would be maddening if Clarel asked a character a question, and that character pauses! Naturally, Clarel would ask a question to squeeze out an answer. This leads to tension and the type of communication we all embrace everyday.

I also cleaned out a whole lot of “helper” verbs. Grammatically speaking, “helper” verbs are things like “will go”, “could buy”, “and should pick up”. In my sloppy writing experience, I add on things like “seemed to be walking”, “appeared to be want to buy”, and more. I felt guilty at using them EVERYWHERE. In the process of boiling away all these unnecessary words, the story I wrote becomes leaner and meaner. This is also known as tightening up the manuscript. By only providing the minimal words needed to communicate the story, the words that remain become more powerful. I am proud to say that what used to be almost 77,000 words has now slimmed down to 70,000+. 6500 fewer words has yielded what I feel is a MUCH better story.

One of the hardest things for me to pickup were sentence fragments. Years of english taught me to always write complete sentences. But when I picked up and read “Killing Floor” by Lee Child, I noticed that not everything was “perfect”. In many situations he used sentence fragments to punch up the language. The amazing thing is, I didn’t notice! I was too busy flipping page after page. to keep up with the action. Since that’s what I want my own readers doing, I relaxed my own discipline on this arena.

“What are we going to do? He’s coming!” she continued to worry. Cold night. Wet feet. None of it distracted her. She was too caught up in the news she had learned from one of her nefarious contacts. She approached a familiar street corner and slowed down. Snitch saw a group of people from the Raiders gang. She looked behind herself and realized it was too late to back up and find another route.

In the excerpt above, I have highlighted a small bit where I used sentence fragments. Your english teacher may crack your knuckles with a ruler if you did that on a test. But this type of stuff builds riveting acting. People often cite Steven King’s “you must know the rules so you know when to break them.” Steven King taught english before becoming a hit novelist, raking in $40 million a year.

Indeed we need to learn things like Deep POV, show-don’t-tell, and proper usage of grammar and words. Because once we master it, we can then bend, twist, and put language to work for us.

Don’t forget to sign up for updates about Darklight.

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Announcing @SpringSocial @Ecobee 0.1.0.RELEASE

Greetings Spring community,

Spring Social Ecobee is a community project lets you connect to your Ecobee Smart Thermostat. Right now, it has a handful of functions like looking up all your thermostats, getting sensor readings, and posting status messages to your thermostats. Ecobee’s REST API has a plethora of functions such as overrides, programming, home/away settings, and more. Support for these will be added to Spring Social Ecobee as time progresses.

Releases are published to maven central. Visit the project site if you need details to work with snapshots.

Project page:  https://github.com/gregturn/spring-social-ecobee

Discussion: https://gitter.im/gregturn/spring-social-ecobee

CI: https://travis-ci.org/gregturn/spring-social-ecobee

Version: 0.1.0.RELEASE

Sign up for my newsletter!

Happy coding!

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Darklight joins @pinterest

I recently got excited about Pinterest. My wife put together a great board for her debut novel, that is being published in July. I had a small set of pictures related to Darklight, so I took the plunge and signed up. To the right is a link to my board. I had a couple images based on my thoughts. But most of all, I spotted a woman decked out with a style that perfectly looked like the Snitch I have been writing about since 2010. Enjoy!

Follow Greg’s board Darklight on Pinterest.

If you’re interested, be sure to sign up for the Darklight newsletter.

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It happened just like this…

Last night’s night’s writing prompt:

* * *

Manager dropped the problem in my lap. I look up at my screen start typing. Hmm. How do you do that? I look over at my book shelf. My finger runs across the six books I have. I fish one out, flip to the chapter that has that stuff, and spot the nugget of code I need. Problem solved. Next day, I run into a weird issue. Trying to remember the function, I scan my repertoire of books. None of them cover that. Scratch that. I need to stop by the book store and get another one. Imagine that process day after day for some time. Then suddenly, this new website pops up. I hear people in the hallway chatting about it. “What the heck is a Google?” someone asks. I go back to my desk and type google.com. This plain old white page with the word “Google” appears at the top with an empty box in the middle of the screen. What is this? Why is everyone talking about this? I type in “array comprehension” and the Python reference manual pops up with a dozen links to blog articles showing how to use it. The next day, I find myself constatntly pulling it up. Nothing will be the same again.

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World building can be a bugbear

It’s always entertaining to see how different authors handle world building. In case you didn’t know, any story needs to paint a backdrop. The closer the world is to our own, the easier this can be. Adventures on alien planets with alien beings wielding alien artifacts can be the worse.

I have been reading The End of Eternity the past few days by Isaac Asimov. It’s one of his titles that isn’t so well known, and hence never found in bookstores. It is only in this digital era that I stopped to buy an e-book version. The story is incredible. The world is very different, but as always, Asimov paints just enough world to pull me in. And he leaves just enough out to surprise me along the way.

Fantasy books often dig into this arena. The risk is that by slowing down to describe the physical surroundings, the rules of magic, the history of the people, and everything else, you will slow down the action of your story. In an interview with George Lucas, he clearly fires a shot at prior science fiction movies as wasting too much time “showing off” their world. After hearing this, I’m convinced he was thinking directly about 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In that movie, they clearly show off the future when a space-aged flight attendant walks around with velcro shoes, when a ship does the “waltz” of aligning itself with the landing platform, and when Dave Bowman runs through the centrifuge of the ship to exercise. These bits did little to advance the story, but instead focus on world building. Us geeks dig it, but when I talked my wife into watching this movie, she found it BO-RING!

Regarding Darklight, I have a detailed collection of notes with the backstory of every character. I have a detailed history of where this world came from, where the relics and magic come from. And how these things are intertwined with each other. But I can’t just lay it in the reader’s lap. Instead, it is up to me to release bits and pieces at the right spots, using the context and understanding of the characters at hand. This is truly a challenge and something I have edited MANY times. My goal is to have an exciting canvas to paint this story and many more across. I didn’t realize there were a couple dozen sub-gre

Happy writing!

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