Zen Master: Blog

One of the guys I asked to look at IC was someone who had never read any of the Swarm Cycle stories. I thought that this might help make it more "mainstream", as I realized that it was written for Swarm fans, people who already knew all about what a Sponsor or a Hero was. Once he gets back to me with all of his "What does this mean" questions we should be done. The first thing to be posted should be the Glossary of Terms file, but that's the part that keeps changing as we realize the reader doesn't know an HEZ from an ECR and needs a translator.
-ZM

Independent Command is finally complete, and it has been sent to the wolves to be ripped apart, uh, has been offered to the Swarm Authors' Mail List for proofreading. Some of the last parts are still subject to argument, but I should have it back soon with edits. I'm publishing anyway if they dawdle. The first few parts have already been accepted by a jury of my peers, so I'm going to start re-posting them, one part per day (after the overhead stuff) so they have plenty of time to tell me where I went wrong if they want.

Back in the 1700s, the Royal Navy could not yet afford Xerox copiers. The shore-based establishments could use printing presses when appropriate, for sending every ship three copies of their regulations or their secret code book as an example, but the ships themselves did not carry printing presses, either. This meant that, when some admiral decided that he needed 15 identical copies of some order to be sent out to his 15 captains, some poor Midshipman, respectfully referred to as a "snottie", had to manually write each copy.
Now, we are talking about youngsters who "had their letters" but didn't necessarily understand the deeper meaning of what they were writing out, and that meant that any time this was done, some unfortunate lieutenant with better things to do had to supervise/babysit/proofread their work. I don't remember if it was CS Forester's "Hornblower" series or Douglas Reeman's 'Alexander Kent' books or some other author, but one of them had a long episode that included exactly this evolution, with the lieutenant exclaiming at one point "Good God, sir! Would anyone outside of Bedlam say that?" to one of the kids.
I volunteer as an editor here on SoL as well as some other places, and I think of that scene just about every time I get asked to read a new manuscript.

On a related subject, a few weeks ago I had to kill some time at an airport but didn't want to deal with laptop, cables, connectivity, _secure_ connectivity, etc, etc, etc. I bought a pair of magazines and the latest Clive Cussler adventure. That's what the cover says, "The Tombs, a Fargo Adventure". Well, I don't know this Fargo guy, but I used to like Cussler's early work, so what the hell.
Frankly, I feel cheated out of whatever price I paid. With no respect intended to Mr. Cussler's unquestioned abilities as a writer, I don't believe that he wrote that book. The publisher obviously has expert proofreaders, as all sentences were complete, all words spelled right, etc, but it was in no way as engaging or believable as his early work. Something important has been lost, here. One wonders if he turned his early works over to a nephew and said "Here, you write the next ten. I'm going on vacation."

To tie these together, a couple of days ago I got asked (via the SoL editor's availability service) to proofread and edit a new author's first work. Now, I didn't expect much, but I'll try to be polite. When people first start out doing something new they aren't very sure of their skills, so you have to baby them some so they don't get discouraged. You learn to say "Perhaps this might be improved a little" instead of "What is this shit?".
This guy, however, already has a fun read. Yes, it's rough, he definitely needs a proofreader and then an editor and it's gonna be awhile before it gets published, but it's _already_ a better yarn than "The Tombs", and I told him that bluntly. I'd rather pay for his next book than for Mr. Cussler's next book.
Someday, there's going to be a Zombie/Survivor story come out from a new author, hopefully here on SoL, and I will suggest that anyone who likes that sort of thing try it on for size.

On the Swarm front, I am about a quarter of the way through the last chapter of Independent Command. However, I've learned my lesson. I'll have to re-release the current posted chapters as I had to make some changes dictated by the rest of the Swarm authors to make sure it fits with the rest of the Swarm stories, but I'm not sure I want to do that until the story is completely completed, if that makes sense.

-ZM

Wow! People really pay attention to blogs! I have not posted a single thing for several months, but put up all these blog entries and I already have three feedback emails today.

Um, one of them suggested that I learn to use unicode so that I could do fancy things like long dash and the copyright symbol. He even gave me a short tutorial on how to do it using the ALT key and the numeric keypad on the right side of my keyboard. Very helpful, really, if it was in any way a good thing to do on a public forum like SoL.
I started to write a polite "are you fucking kidding?" reply, but no, this kind of thing belongs in my shiny new blog where everyone can see the answer.
His suggestion is useful in a single horrible situation: where you, and everyone you know, is hopelessly mired in Windows(*) and uses Word(*) to the exclusion of all else. I mean, Ford makes good vehicles, but what would the world be like if Ford was the only vehicle manufacturer in the whole world? Detroit is in the fix it's in right now because they sat on their fat asses and raked in the profits while the rest of the world innovated until they built better vehicles.
Two of my favorite authors argue publicly about emacs and vi. Frankly, I think they are just doing it for the attention, but it's a data point. Not everyone uses Word. Really? Emacs?
Not even talking about different word processors, editors, or publishing tools (the three are NOT the same), there are many different platforms. Neither my linux box nor Win7 laptop implement that old BIOS shortcut the same way my Win98-SE game machine do. The laptop _might_, if I plugged in a normal keyboard, but I don't always do that. Certainly, the built-in keyboard doesn't support that BIOS feature "correctly", and it was designed with a Microsoft OS in mind.
Let's move on to non IBM PC computers. Has anyone ever heard of Apple? They are a new and growing company that has started to build computers. One of their claims is that their computers _don't_ act just like IBM's computers. Who knows, maybe they are better. Kinda like a lot of people would trust a Corolla from Toyota before they would trust a Lincoln from Ford. Similarly, I hear that someday someone will invent some kind of electronic book reader that you can load documents in and read just like a paper book. Who knows what hardware, OS, or reader software those things will have?
The bottom line here is that there are a lot of hardware platforms, there are a lot of operating systems, there are a lot of document formats, and there are a lot of programs that claim to render your document the way the author intended. Hell, a lot of people even use their web browser program to read documents. Every combination fails, except one: Any platform, any OS, any program, will properly render an ASCII text file, usually identified by a ".txt" extension. No other file format can be expected to be properly rendered across all platforms, OSes, and viewers. If the file contains anything other than a simple stream of one-byte characters with values between d001 and d127, it isn't ASCII text, and it is useless to anyone without the same platform as the author.
Isn't this public knowledge? It's _why_ SoL expects all files uploaded to be in raw .txt format. They will take simple html (and I think RTF), but they will refuse to take anything else. It's just too certain that it won't come out right. Save your unicode for your next PowerPoint(*) presentation.

(*)All three copyright that ICBM target in Redmond, WA.

Update the next day: I have gotten quite a few emails about this particular 'rant', split about evenly between "Right on, ASCII isn't only the lowest-common denominator, it is still the _highest_ common denominator" and "You moron, the whole world except you uses Unicode. What the fuck is YOUR problem?"
Apparently, mentioning "StoriesonLine" several times wasn't enough to clue many readers that this 'rant' is specific to stories written for, uploaded to, and read on or downloaded from this website, so advice on how to use it in other places really isn't applicable.
The problem is that on the one hand Unicode is pretty much in universal use anywhere that "Word Processors" or "Desktop Publishing" is done but that there is still considerable confusion about different character sets, and this particular website chooses to minimize problems caused by this (among several other problems) by saying "text only". It _does_ allow some formatting and special characters, but since no two readers will see the same thing if you go very far down that road, I choose to stay at the highest level that ensures that all readers everywhere will see the same thing. Simple ASCII, or as close as I can get to it with modern software.
I have tried several different options. At the moment, I am encoding my files in "UTF-8" and making the strongest possible attempt to not use any characters with a value higher than 0x7F, with my Linux box set to use "DOS/Windows"-style end of line markers. If anything I publish like this comes out looking squirrely on any reader's platform, I would really appreciate hearing about it. Some older files were published before I realized how important this was, so if you see anything in the older files, please tell me about that, too.

Finally, I have decided that there's no good answer to my refusal to deal with a blog at first. I've been keeping everything that _should_ have gone on the blog in a file until I figured out how to deal with them. I give up, I've gotta just accept I was wrong and start a blog. All the previous entries are up now, and from this point forward this blog should be live.
If it matters, the paying project I've been working on for the last half-year is done. I got paid a lot, and we spent almost all of it catching up on bills. I have returned to being retired and that means that I not only have time to write but have no money to do anything else. My wife doesn't care about the first and is freaking out about the second, so I don't think I'll get to stay retired for long. I'll do everything I can to finish First Command and Independent Command before I go back to work.