minimal uptime

Snapping Links is back, if only through the end of February 2003. I’m hoping to spend some of my downtime going through the archives that I have from then until sometime in mid-May, and getting them into shape to be imported. not sure how that’s going to go.

and I realized last night that it was totally stupid for me to have manually broken my novel apart into individual word files…I should’ve converted it to XML and created a “scene” element. lots of fun could’ve been had from there. but I digress. 🙂

upcoming downtime

not for this site, but for me personally. there’s a long story, but the short version is that we’ll be w/out phone for as much as a week, and w/out broadband for possibly longer. those who already have my number will get the new one when I have it. (how much do I hate qwest? oh, so much.)

what’s bugging me right now…

is that I know I wrote another (better!) version of scenes 7-14 in part 1, after I had a better grip on the idea of explaining conversations that the narrator doesn’t actually have the language skills to comprehend. I’m hoping, vaguely, that it’s somewhere on paper. yeah, that’s the ticket.

from the original main draft…

105 scenes in four sections, something around 90,000 words. still four chunks of alternative text, two or three of which may be identical to either each other or the main draft, one of which is in Open Office format, which I don’t (yet; it’s a humongous download!) have installed on this computer. (must find pictures I took of new computer, btw.) probably some text in my ailablog and my paper notebooks as well. I’m guessing that in another week to two weeks I’ll actually have all the text in one place, reasonably organized. then I want to focus on three places, which in my mind are fairly well connected: all of Part 2, which is in general a mess; similarly the flow of Part III, and then the abruptness of the ending (it just sorta comes to a halt).

not that anybody except Kat, or maybe C, knows what the hell I’m talking about, but I wanted to make a note of it.

a little project

A little while back, Kat decided to try an old idea again…in our writers’ group days (a long story), we did something called a “round robin” — everybody starts a story, passes it to the next person, who writes some, passes to the next, etc., until it’s done (then, we had a time limit on it, and a minimum number of authors, IIRC).

But since she’s not in a group that is right for that anymore, she emailed me and our friend Joe (who lives in LA now), and proposed trying it long-distance. And since she started hers in her blog, it seemed like the blog was the ideal format this time around.

It’s only the three of us right now, so we’ll probably keep handing off until we get done:

* Book
* Fantasia in Green
* Mad World

(Kat and I helped Joe through starting his blog.)