He’s baaaa-aaack

I speak, of course, of the Wesser. Back and in full computer-crashing style.

I decided this AM that I was sick and tired of editing and prepping books and solving web problems and I was by golly going to start writing and writing what I wanted to write, not what I thought was most likely to sell. (I’m never right on that front, anyway.) So…I began Homecoming Games, the next step in the ‘NetWalkers saga.

I knew kind of how it began…one of Stevie’s infamous dream sequences. Then, a shift to a waking Stephen and Anevai. All is cool, all is developing with a proper degree of creepiness…then…Anevai used a Word. A Word in conjunction with herself and Dr Ridenour. A word that startled heck out of me…and, I firmly believe now, seriously pissed off the Wesser.

I stared at that Word. I tried to delete it, but deleting it went against everything I believe about writing. When the characters surprise you, you ask them why, you don’t just delete something that doesn’t, so you think, belong.

I decided, instead of deleting, to save the file, realizing at that point I’d been writing for about an hour (GO, ME!) and it was still an unnamed, unsaved file. (Oopsie!) So, I go to “save as”, try to create a new folder for Homecoming Games…

And WordPerfect, which never and I mean never crashes on me…crashed. Deader than a mackerel.

ARGH!!!!! I did a restart…and there wasn’t even an autosave!

HORRORS!

But the Wesser will not win! I resurrected the two scenes (bwahahaha) and The Word is still in there! (Double Bwa, Smith!)

And so, I plan to begin every day with at least an hour of actual writing!  You have no idea how good it feels to say that!

April 14, 2011 | | 9 Comments »

Locus review of UpLink

I just hit the Kindle publish button on UpLink. In honor of that step, I thought I’d share the review Faren Miller wrote for Locus all those years ago. It’s posted in its entirety with the blessing of Locus (thanks, guys and gals!)

Faren’s reviews of this series kept me going through the era of Warner’s refusal to send out review copies. She had to buy her own copy of at least one of them (Harmonies, I think…had I known, I’d so have sent her one!) In this case, she nails the big problem…GT and UL truly are one book. Harmonies starts a new arc. One linked to and built on the fallout from the first two books, but GT and UL are a complete arc and should have been presented that way. Unfortunately, Warner  just wasn’t having anything to do with a book that large…at least from a new author.  A lot would have been solved had they simply admitted GroundTies was the first of three…on the cover, in the book, I don’t care. Just  play fair with the consumer! But they didn’t…and so readers were left wondering.

Be that as it may…I share now Faren Miller’s review:

Speaking of conclusions…UpLink is the missing second half of Jane Fancher’s first novel, GroundTies. Together, they make a complete and satisfying book, steeped in the combination of tension, ambiguity, complex politics, and injured innocence that has become the trademark of Fancher’s friend/mentor C.J. Cherryh.

GroundTies introduced the planet HuteNamid, the mystery of its attraction for researchers (including one vanished pair), and a host of characters including the enigmatic Stephen Ridenour —the novel’s Cherryhan Young Man Under Pressure, a role he retains in UpLink, while Admiral Loren Cantrell is the Woman in Charge (and under considerable stress herself). As for the reader’s condition, there’s still plenty of nail-biting suspence here, but this book is the payoff, the one where the questions get answered and fates of several worlds are resolved or explained. As almost equally perplexing puzzles, Ridenour and HuteNamid gradually yield their secrets—which prove to be connected in interesting ways.

Reviewers spend a lot of time carping about endless series and needless sequels. While Fancher may go on to chronicle further adventures of Stephen Ridenour et al, GroundTies and UpLink should be regarded as a single entity, self-contained despite the annoying separation into two volumes. If you can handle close to 800 pages of almost unmitigated tension (there’s at least one breezy character to ease you through the tight-jawed crowd), read the whole thing as one book. No padding or wheel-spinning here—just the genuine article.

Thanks again, Faren and the whole Locus crew!

April 3, 2011 | | 6 Comments »

a lovely little undocumented feature….

of Adobe Digital Editions, one of the more widely used epub readers. It won’t create italics by simply canting the font. If you embed a font which doesn’t specifically have an ital version… it defaults the font to one that does. Tracking this little gem just cost me two solid days. Other epub readers have no problem doing this, but not ADE.

I believe from scuttle I’ve now heard on the internet that this is a conscious decision on Adobe’s part, not a problem inherent to the program, and brings up an interesting question: does an ebook reader have the right to make such a determination on the aesthetics of a book? I say, no. That’s the creator’s decision. An ebook reader’s job is to do its damnedest to present the file it’s given. Period. For a company to take this kind of stand, to deliberately deviate from the maximum compatibility is, IMO, arrogant.

I’m trying to create a document that will read nicely in many different readers, not all of which support embedded fonts. Therefore, when I put in a section that is handwritten, I want a default font to show in italics, so what I did was use an upright handwritten font and surround it with italics. That way, the handwriting looked fine and if it was defaulted, it would still be in ital to set it apart.

Unfortunately, ADE defaulted this combo of code to the default font. Adding to the problem, sigil seemed to randomly (I’m sure it was triggered, but it appeared random) insert its own ital code, which had to be carefully tracked down and eliminated. Tracking this problem down involved hours of changing one thing in the epub file, saving, bringing it up in ADE to see if anything changed, then deleting it from ADE and starting all over. I posed a question on Mobileread and one of the darlings finally found an answer, as I narrowed the problem down. Once we’d solved it, someone else came on and explained that ADE doesn’t create ital…which I’d kind of already figured, but it was really nice to have confirmation.

Granted, I should have just let it go and put in simple ital, but by that time it had become a mystery to solve. In the end, the solution is more elegant and more easily adapted to other formats, but I still think ADE should have such an idiosyncracy clearly documented, with suggested workarounds.

Anyway…that was my weekend. :face:

August 31, 2010 | | 19 Comments »