I've been writing. · 1:41pm Oct 24th, 2014
I've been writing.
Last May, I took a piece of advice: "Just start writing".
I'm now over 222,222 words into a novel, and counting. You can see my first chapter in my account at DeviantArt at http://datapacrat.deviantart.com/art/S-I-Book-One-Chapter-One-Re-Awakening-489185968 , or at the story's eventual permanent future home at http://www.datapacrat.com/SI/ . (Note: The sample chapter there is NSFW due to containing an image of tasteful female nudity.)
"S.I." contains a protagonist who is transformed by Science! into a humanoid rabbit in the first chapter, and I'm told it compares favourably to my previous, now-cancelled attempt at long-form writing; so if you liked "Myou've", you're likely to like "S.I.".
One thing I don't have is an editor. I know I have a number of flaws as a writer that need correcting: for example, when left to my own devices, I tend to go for dialogue instead of description or action, and the story isn't as good as it could be because of that. Does anyone reading this know someone with a good set of editing skills?
I could also use beta-readers, who comment on everything from typos to how to tighten up my prose to plot holes to larger issues. If you're interested in helping me in this fashion, the current draft of S.I. is available to comment on in Google Docs starting at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AU8o3wSAiufh-Eg1FtL-6656dNvbCFILCi2GbeESsb4/edit .
What about Myou've?
2553024
The crossover universe that it was part of has changed so dramatically since the last time I participated, that I'd have to re-read several hundred thousand words just to start catching up. I don't predict that I'll be adding anything to Myou've in the foreseeable future.
I'll give it a look as a beta reader, but do to the currant situation in Canada, I don't have the time, nor willpower to be an editor. Sorry.
2553032 Just branch off on your own, finish the story as you envision it. But... well, I do want to see our cow's story reach a conclusion. You know, for closure.
I kinda grew attached to him/her, and now there's that loose end...
2553034
I'm in Canada myself, if not the armed forces; and I completely understand, and wish you the best.
2553035
If it helps, I currently imagine that one time-travelling version or another of Missy eventually found a way to break free of the Chessverse's original timeline, and has since started exploring the larger multiverse. (In fact, I tried to write up a version of that for inclusion in "MLP Loops", but my submission didn't pass muster to be included in the official compilation.)
2553041 Thank you, and keep yourself safe.
2553046 At any rate, I love your work, and I'd be privileged to get to proofread for ya.
2553046
I'd be glad to do it, although I don't exactly consider myself the best there is. Still better than a single viewpoint though. Besides, something off yours might brush off on me.
2553035
I second this.
I would also like to request that you make another blog post here when you're done with S.I., since the odds of me finding any updates to it are very slim otherwise.
You lie - that's a rabbit. Also also, yay for writing!
EDIT: Also Myou've is canceled?! No! It says 'Hiatus' still ...
Oooh, I saw SI on Spacebattles and it looked good so far. A bit thick, but that's what I'd expect from you.
Myou've is cancelled? Could you mark it as cancelled, then, for future readers?
2554684
> Could you mark it as cancelled, then, for future readers?
I didn't realize it hadn't already been. FIMFiction is giving me lots of errors today, but when the site's stable, I'll do that.
Somehow I didn't realize you were Canadian, whereabouts are you located so I can
stalkpotentially get to meet you at a Pony con or somesuchs.I'm potentially game for helping out, I'll see about checking out the beginning and let you know, assuming you still want folks to give feedback.
2557141
I generally don't specify my location online more accurately than the Regional Municipality of Niagara.
I still want all the feedback I can get - just today, a new beta-reader pointed out a few plot-holes I need to go back and clean up.
2557278 I'd be worried if you did XD I'm located near Toronto, so not too insanely far. Maybe I can get a meetup going and harrass you irl.
I don't know if I have good editing skills or not; I've never been graded on them, or really got any real practice, applying them to a story. I have however, read tons of fan-fiction, and I usually tend to find myself thinking about the story as a thing to be improved, rather than a thing to only be read. I think I'm okay at finding the smaller scale errors, such as spelling mistakes, places where the wrong word was used, grammar and punctuation. I only speak English though, unless you count maybe fifty random words at most, in Japanese, without a clue how to string together a working sentence. I might know a lot of words in Italian too, if only because there are so many types of pasta, and I watch cooking shows. (Do the name of foods count as words? Haha...)
I'm good enough at HTML (XHTML being near-identical) and CSS to put together a good looking web page whose function is to display the text of a story in a way that doesn't put additional strain on the reader's eyes. I don't touch scripts though, unless I have to. I cannot currently read or understand JavaScript, but I could put it in a page, and follow well written instructions to 'hook it up' to stuff. Heh. My favorite type of font family is serif, for large bodies of text. Sans-serif is best left to displaying things like titles and headers in my opinion. If only I were good at PHTML and/or JavaScript, I would suggest using PHTML to do the link things at the top and/or bottom of your chapter pages, to get to the previous or next chapters. And yeah, I read the first chapter of your story "SI", on the website that I'm assuming you coded by hand.
I'm going to go ahead and recommend http://alistapart.com/topics for a place to find good advice on the design of a web site, if your looking for that kind of thing, and haven't found that site yet. I know other good places to learn things making a web site if your interested. Just ask, I'll at least respond eventually, and if I don't, try again, because I've had messages somehow disappear on their way to or from me, between other people on FIMfiction before.
I hope I have not caused you pain with my babbling...
I beg forgiveness, I am needing the sleep.
Edit: Also, I forgot to mention that I liked the first chapter of SI enough to be looking forward to reading the rest of it. I am disappointed though, that the Singularity didn't go the way I would have preferred it to go. Though I suppose I don't have many details on it yet, from just chapter one.
(After seeing that you had posted the full story so far on google docs, in the comments...) I have read everything you have so far, and I intend to read it again with the goal of looking for things to fix or ask about, in mind. I want to know if you would like me to use the suggestions feature to give all the areas marked with slashes, italic formatting. (I will mention now, that using asterisks to mark a word or words as being emphasized, is a more common practice than using slashes. Common enough for Wikipedia to mention it. I was a confused early on, by the slashes found throughout the story, and thought that they were just typos. I eventually realized the slashes had meaning, and what that meaning likely was.)
Italicizing some sparse bits of text wouldn't cause me significant trouble while I'm already looking for things like errors. I'm asking beforehand though, to see if it would be problematic for you: partly because I saw a comment on the Book Seven document, that was discussing the creation of an automated script to turn the story into HTML, with an implication somewhere, that changing the formatting conventions you had been using up until then, would be bad.
PS: I really like the "suggestion" feature on google docs. I wish there was a feature like that on every fan fiction—or web fiction for that matter—website I use. It seems like I'm always finding things to fix while I'm reading. Fimfiction.net at-least has formatted comments, but Fanfiction.net has a lot of limitation on it's comments and private messaging system, that make it very inconvenient to send fixes to the author.
2758157
Using slashes to indicate italics dates back to the days of Usenet and of dial-up BBSes, if not before; there's no need for you to mark every instance of it in the GDoc. At least for purposes of S.I., it's as much a part of the writing standard as using Canadian spellings. :) (Speaking of which, I still need to double check for some of those, such as grey/gray and meter/metre.) And speaking of said standard, I don't have a link handy - silly phone browser - but you might want to take a quick skim of the non-dictionary parts of the "Jargon File" at catb.org.
(I can't wait until I have a proper WIMP interface back so that I can start interacting with Suggestions on GDocs again...)
2759407
I'm not sure what, if anything specific, you wanted me to find, but I did come across an explanation of "mu". This pleased me, as I had been interested in the word ever since I first heard of it while reading Myou've. It seems likely I'll find other interesting things there too, when I look at it more.
2759716
After skimming it myself, I think I've found a single sentence containing exactly the overall idea I was hoping to impart:
> There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to the effect that precision of expression is more important than conformance to traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or lose information they can be discarded without a second thought.
2760542
And with that, it all falls into place. I take it that you place a higher priority on avoiding ambiguity, than on "following tradition; because it's traditional", as a general approach, and using slashes instead of asterisks was a way to do so, because asterisks could mean either bold or italic.
I have a hunch that you are, possibly, defending you decision from me, because I seem to have attacked it by going into detail about it. If that is how it happened, then this is another case where I wish I knew how to fully convey tone-of-voice with just text. I have a habit of going into more detail (and off into a greater number of tangents) than most people I know, and I worry sometimes that people think I am attacking them, when I only mean to ... advise them (?) ... criticize something they said (?) ... something like that. My charisma stat is not as high as I'd like it to be ... but then again, I'd like all my stats to be higher.
If you happen to know of a way to communicate tone-of-voice more fully, with just text, I'd be interested...
2760728
> If you happen to know of a way to communicate tone-of-voice more fully, with just text, I'd be interested...
Well, depending on how much effort you want to use, an astonishing number of emoticons are now part of the Unicode standard, and you can even get an alternative soft-keyboard for the iPhone with them. Some egs,