Lazlo Zalezac: Blog

It has been a while since I've updated people on what is going on with my writing. There's so much to tell, particularly since I'm working on four story lines at the same time. I know that it is a little frustrating to have to wait for a particular story to come out, but I'm not going to apologize for it.

William Redman Carter Part I and Oscar Meyers Part II have been written to completion. They will be posted over the next few weeks as I finish the final edits. I've written drafts of the first four chapters of Part II of William Redman Carter and the first five chapters of Part III of Oscar Meyers.

There are two chapters left to post of A Different Sort of Lifestyle. As soon as Drahkan has finished editing them, I will post those chapters on SOL. A few days after that I will start to post it to ASSM. I will also correct the typos that managed to creep through a couple of edits.

I have four chapters of General Sid that are written and there are about six chapters that I have yet to finish. I may add a chapter or two to the outline, though.

I also have two new stories that are in development. Once I finish General Sid and A Different Sort of Lifestyle, I will start posting 'The Quatyl.' It is a light hearted SciFi story that is pure entertainment. No heavy messages and a few funny sex scenes. The second story is 'Hunter'. It is a novel about politics in the USA. I'm sure that lots of folks won't like it, but I've been using it to explore my feelings about the state of politics.

Onto the Golden Clitorides Awards. It is that time of year when nominations are being taken. Souvie, bless her heart for running the awards, has informed me that people have nominated a few of my stories for awards. My first, second, and third reactions have all been the same - Wow! I'm not campaigning for a win, but it is always nice to see that a story has been nominated.

A Different Sort Of Lifestyle has been nominated for a : Best Long Story of the Year. This story will be finished in time for the nomination to count.

Also nominated for a GCA is General Sid in the following categories: Best Science Fiction Story and Best Story in a Shared Universe. I'm pretty sure that General Sid will be completed before deadline, but it will be a race.

The last two GCA nominations are for the Damsels in Distress Universe in the best Shared Universe category and John Carter for best Series. I seriously doubt those nominations will even make it through to the finalist stage.

Let me make my position clear with regards to the Golden Clitorides Awards. I don't think that authors should be in the business of nominating stories or voting. I view it as a reader driven award. I'm not even sure that an author should campaign on behalf of their stories. It all just strikes me as a conflict of interest. (I know, my comments above seem hypocritical considering that I just finished bragging about my nominations. I've justified it by convincing myself that I'm not begging people to vote for them, just expressing my pleasure at being nominated.)

That being said, there are some very wonderful stories here on SOL and ASSM. If I felt that authors should participate in nominating stories, I would have nominated Naked In School, Greenies, and Take Me Out To the Ballgame. I was really surprised by the Take Me Out To the Ballgame series because I'm not even a big fan of baseball. One category that I think readers should really consider voting in is the Best New Author. What a great way to motivate a good writer to continue.

As I was uploading William Redman Carter Chapter 46, I realized that this chapter put me at over 11.5MB of text on SOL. Somehow I missed noticing when I went over the 10MB point. I don't know if this landmark means that I'm prolific, but it is a lot of text.

That got me to thinking about other things associated with writing. Assuming an average of 6 characters per word and 10 words per sentence, that means that I've written almost 200,000 sentences. I figure that is a lot of story telling.

I get a lot of e-mail pointing out errors in my text. By errors, I mean a wrong word here or there. A typo creeps in. I use the wrong name for a character. Sometimes I might have minor inconsistencies in timeline. Writing feed and water when the proper order is water and feed. It is also common for me to substitute homonyms for the right word. There are a lot of ways that a mistake can enter a story. I don't mind that readers point out errors to me and usually I will go back to correct the error. The fact is that I'm not a professional author, my editor is a volunteer, and there is not an entire staff on hand to produce publication quality work. I do this as a hobby.

I figure that with a 1% error rate, that I would have approximately 2000 errors in the text that I've generated. I don't know if 1% is high or low, but I figure that is probably about right for the average amateur publication. With 435 chapters now posted, that is about 5 errors per chapter. I can live with that, particularly since there aren't lives depending on it. It is possible that my error rate is about 1.5%. That would mean between 7 and 8 errors per chapter. It has gone down since Drahkan started editing them for me.

In measuring typing speed, they use a measure of 5 characters per word. I haven't measured my typing speed lately, but I imagine it is around 100 words per minute although when I'm writing it is probably around 25 words per minute. A real rough calculation is that I've spent around 1500 hours writing the material that I've posted on SOL. Throw in editing and other activities associated with keeping that much text together, I figure that we can add another 1000 hours or so.

I'm not even going to try to guess the time that is spent in research, most of which never appears in a story. For example, I read the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran while writing Oscar Meyers. I studied satellite imagery and photographs of Afghanistan for about eight chapters of the book. For Ed Biggers, I read three books on mineralogy and two on geology.

I started writing near the end of 2003. That means that between 10 to 15 hours a week is spent typing up the stories. In three years, I've created:
- The John Carter Universe (13 stories)
- The Damsels in Distress Universe (4 stories so far)
- Glen Wiseman
- Thunder and Lightening
- A Different Sort of Lifestyle
- Several Short Stories (1 which was posted on SOL)
I like to think that each group is a different kind of story that isn't rehashing the same old ideas. I've tried to keep the story lines fresh.

One other stray thought came to me while I was uploading that chapter. In particular, I took a moment to appreciate that SOL makes it very easy for me to post my stories and have them presented in a nice manner. As I said, this is a hobby. I have a full time job with deadlines that often require me to work 12 to 16 hours a day including weekends.

SOL has saved me about a half an hour of work per chapter. Back when I was trying to maintain a website of my stories, it took about a half an hour per chapter to update the webpage and to upload the chapter. It may not sound like much, but it would have taken away from me the time that it took to write about half of the Happy Harry stories. I really appreciate all of the effort that Lazeez has put into making SOL very author friendly. I'm also an avid reader and am currently tracking 151 serials. As a reader, I really appreciate the fact that SOL tracks stories for me.