Private blog of a coder stumbling through creative endeavors…
I’m a moron. Why? Because that story that’s been waiting over a year for a final editing pass–The February Crisis–is finally done! It’s up on my website in full, and it’s being published chapter by chapter on a new WordPress that I set up. (Each chapter is going up the day it happens, modulo 16 years.) I’m genuinely happy with it, much moreso than I was when I finished Zeki’s Folly.
On to my next project, so I can start procrastinating on it!
Well hello, everyone. It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? What have I been doing for the past–er–year and a half? Well, just as I was getting ready to post my next story, I had to drop everything to finish up my time at grad school. Then I just… never got back around to being creative. I did a do tiny bit of gamedev, but I tied that to my work. (Also, I had to drop that because it wasn’t computationally expensive enough!)
Anyway, I’m starting to ease myself back into things. I staked out a small corner of the web on Neocities, where I have uploaded lightly (and, respectively, very lightly) edited versions of The Second Lord’s Madness and Zeki’s Folly. (I’ve also uploaded some ChatGPT transcripts, because I’ve been having fun testing the model’s limits.) The new story, The February Crisis, will be following soon. (I may post a copy here on WordPress as well.) Then I’ll probably go back and finally edit some shorter stories I wrote. After that? No clue.
Sounds like a plan; let’s see if I can stick to it!
Yesterday, the epilogue for Zeki’s Folly went up. I’m truly, finally done with that bear of a story. I wrote up a semi-post-mortem on it when I finally finished editing it., and my thoughts haven’t really changed. Actually, that’s not quite right; that would imply I kept thinking about it. I was and remain so done with the story that only luck had me catch that the posts were ending. Contrast that with The Second Lord’s Madness, which had me checking after every chapter went up. I still think Zeki’s Folly could be something amazing if I expanded it by a factor of three and really got into the characters’ heads, but I’m nowhere near the right headspace to even begin to think about tackling that.
In my last post, I talked about the story I’m working on now, a short story riffing on the premise of Designated Survivor. It’s not so short anymore: I just hit 10k words. My writing speed is slowly but surely speeding up, as I have to look up less and less on .gov websites, such as the size of an en banc session in the Ninth Circuit. (Yes, that’s an actual plot point.) At this rate I’m guessing the final draft will be around 15k words. I still need to figure out a title for the thing; my working one is 3 U.S.C. § 19, which is clever but also awful from a readability and discoverability standpoint. I’ve taken to joking that my audience for the story is Lawfare listeners, but I’d imagine even their writers would pass over a title like that. Maybe Month of the Five Presidents? It’s descriptive but also kind of cheesy. The 2039 Crisis is snappier but also rather generic and has a connotation of military sci-fi. I guess it is speculative fiction in which the military is involved, but still…
Also, it occurs to me that with this all of my stories will have featured regime change as a major plot point.
There’s one other topic I want to bring up . I started writing 3 U.S.C. § 19 as a short story, which means that I never divided it up into chapters. What I have written also doesn’t lend itself to such a structure. Point is, I’ll probably be posting it in one go. I also have the two drafted but (still) unedited short stories in the pipeline. It’d be moronic to create individual blogs for each of these, so I need to figure out what I’ll be doing there. I’m still not a big fan of the writing websites like FictionPress, Wattpad, and RoyalRoad, as they all seem to either lack features I want or be targeted at the wrong audience. Be on standby for me either biting the bullet and creating an account on one of these or cobbling together a monstrosity of a solution via WordPress. Or maybe I’ll just create my own website, which has its own issues.
It’s been a little while since I started posting Zeki’s Folly, so I thought I’d give an update. I’ve been working on the story I described as a riff on the show Designated Survivor. In short, it started in my head as a fix-fic, prompted by my going “That’s not how things work!” several times per episode. (Don’t let me discourage you: what I watched was still fairly fun. It just wasn’t… accurate.) Before I started writing, I switched it to an original story, as I didn’t really have all that solid of a grasp on the show’s characters. I wrote up a few hundred words of introduction… and then got bogged down in editing Zeki’s.
So how’s it going now? I hear you ask. Well, hypothetical reader, it’s like pulling teeth. One of my key conceits about the story is that it is supposed to be accurate to actual US law. I’m more legally literate than the median American, but I’m also no lawyer. I’m certainly no expert in constitutional law. Consequently, I’m spending as much time researching as I am actually writing. Can a Circuit Court immediately jump to an en banc appeal? What are the details of the military’s Chain of Command? Should I use the normal rules of capitalization, or should I capitalize Important Words like they do in the Military and Government?
I’m about 6k words into the story, and I can see it lasting another 5k more. However, a few hundred of that is literally quoting the Constitution, so who can really say how much farther down this rabbit hole I’ll be going. I’d originally hoped to have this out by Independence Day today, but unless I magically get a time machine, that won’t be happening. Currently, I’m going at about ~250 words per day, which is way lower than my normal. Curiously, it’s also about the number I hear essayists cite for their writing speed. I guess that kind of makes sense though: I am basically writing a dramatized paper on the flaws of our Continuity of Governance schemes.
As I write this, the sixth (or eighth, depending on how you count things) draft of Zeki’s Folly is being given one last once-over for typos. With any luck, I’ll be finished with that by the time I post this. (EDITOR’S NOTE: I did! It’ll be posted here.) So how is it? I give it a “meh” out of 10. I’ve taken to calling it a dorodango–one of those polished mud balls that they make in Japan. That’s my honest opinion: I polished the piece fairly well, but at its core it’s fairly… well, weak. As I transition to my next project, that means I have to do something rather unpleasant: introspection.
Oh boy, here goes nothing!
When I started Zeki’s Folly, I wanted to do something different from The Second Lord’s Madness. That had been a fairly conversational piece of work, one with a fairly tight point of view and that was primarily character driven; I found this type of story very natural to write. As I’ve said before, I am not (and do not wish to be) a professional writer–but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve. Since you (mostly) grow by stepping out of your comfort zone, that meant Zeki’s would have to be the opposite: a detached, third-person tale, with events occurring at a much larger scale. In retrospect, this was probably a tad overly ambitious. The paradigm shift was abrupt, to say the least. As a result, a number of my first few drafts were technically garbage, haphazardly drifting between half-baked, overly opinionated reportage and the original conversational writing. I mostly purged these deficiencies from the text, but it took me a solid four-to-six drafts. Even now, I’m still not quite happy with the result. In some areas, the prose became stiff, and in others the casual tone still every-so-slightly pokes through. However, I’ve been editing this beast for so long that I had to call it good enough.
Actual technical difficulties were only half of the problem. The other had to do with the plot. I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to write about: the founding of a colony. A premise, in other words, but not much else. Shortly thereafter, I tacked onto that what I then called the chromatic folk, my strange attempt to rationalize away the existence of humans with anime hair and eyes. (Looking back, since I’m basically writing weird fantasy, I’m not sure why I thought people with naturally green or pink hair needed explanation, but oh well.) Next came my characterization of Nulvatch as a despotic hellhole; then Zeki as a green bureaucrat; and so on. Hopefully you get my point: I was making it up as I went along. I had no clue where the story would end, or even what its middle would be.
Pantsing–what I was doing above–is a legitimate way of writing. However, it’s my understanding that very few people practice it in its purest form. Why? Unintentionally, Zeki’s Folly became a study of that question. What I determined is that pantsing lends itself to emergent stories. By that, I mean that you have some number of well-defined agents–maybe characters, maybe factions, maybe even the world itself–which you then drop into some scenario and let loose. In effect, you’re running a quasi-simulation. Of course, if you just run a simulation, the story can very easily wander into areas you have no desire to write about. In my case, I didn’t want to stray from my original premise all that much, whereas my agents wanted to do anything but. The end result was that my first draft was a hot mess of contrivances, inconsistent characterization, idiot balls, and straight-up plot holes. Patching these was a rather horrific ordeal–and I refactor code for a living. Ultimately, I didn’t quite succeed. There’s still an idiot ball or two scattered about, along with a few pieces of characterization that were introduced out of the blue. I think I got all of the plot holes, though.
So… yeah. Zeki’s Folly was an utter bear to write. I’m long past ready to move on. But move on to what, you ask? Well let’s see:
As you can see, I’ve got quite a bit in the pipeline. I’m not even going to try setting out timelines; I learned that lesson well enough when I said Zeki’s would be done in April. Still, I look forward to getting them out and experimenting more with my style.
The Second Lord’s Madness is officially done! It’s my first actually completed story. I’m sure it sucked, but I finished it, edited it, and otherwise did all of the things a writer is supposed to do, so I’ll call it a win!
If you’re my one regular reader, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s next. Remember how I said that I was working on another story of similar length, tentatively called The Expedition? That is… let’s say 90% done. I finished my “zeroth draft” of that back at the beginning of February, but I decided that large segments of it needed to be expanded and reworked. I finished that, my “zeroth draft v2,” almost exactly a month later. That, however, had so many consistency errors that it needed another round of rewrites, which I finished last Friday. That, I finally decided, was my “first draft.” Mind you, I’d say it’s a good deal more polished than a typical first draft–y’know, since it’s really a third draft–and most of what I have left to do is just polishing prose. It still needs a lot of that, but I’m hopeful it’ll be ready by the end of the month.
Also, it’s name changed to Zeki’s Folly–like Seward’s folly. (Please tell me they still teach that in US history.) Somehow, I ended up on Ethiopian names, but I don’t really use the aesthetic in any other way; it’s a very different type of story. An appropriate summary might be “Fantasy North Korea suffers their own Darien scheme.” (Please tell me they still teach that in world history.) I intentionally went for a more removed, exposition-heavy style, rather than the conversational first-person of The Second Lord’s Madness. I personally like stories in this style, as they offer lots of room for worldbuilding tangents to shine. I’m not so sure how I feel about writing it, though–it came so much less naturally to me.
Beyond that, like I said in my last post, I have a first draft of a much shorter story done. I haven’t started editing that yet, however, and won’t be starting until Zeki’s Folly is across the finish line. My next “longer” story will probably be some experiment in outlined writing, or at least less pants-ed writing. I’m thinking that a mystery might suit that well. I’ll also probably set it in a different world or continuity.
And finally, speaking of continuity, the “chromatic folk” I intermittently mention in The Second Lord’s Madness play a larger role in Zeki’s Folly, but they will be doing so under a new name. I realized that I recycle the chromatic designation in at least one other place that I haven’t yet written about, one where it’s much more clearly connected to RGB/CMY(K)/HSV/actual color theory. (The current ones just have anime hair and eyes.)
The first “arc” of The Second Lord’s Madness is up. I’m not sure if you can divide such a short work into arcs; maybe act would be better. Either way, it’s been up since last Friday, and I haven’t died from embarrassment yet, so I’m counting that as a win. So far, going by WordPress’s analytics, a few people (maybe three) have read at least a portion of the story, which is three more than I had expected. I’m annoyingly caught in a bind of wanting to get better, for which I need comments and thus readers, while also not wanting to play any of the algorithms’ games, since this is supposed to be a (mostly) fun hobby. I may try retooling things going forward.
At this time, I’m working on two separate stories, which should be coming out soon™. Both are set in the same nebulous universe as The Second Lord’s Madness, which I haven’t yet decided if it warrants a proper name. One is looking to be of similar length (20-30k words) and is in the process of being heavily revised. Unlike The Second Lord’s Madness, for which I knew the climax from the beginning, this next story, tentatively titled The Expedition, ended up being an experiment in pantsing. I had a premise and let things go from there.
This ended up being very unpleasant for me to write.
I’m still trying to refine what I have into something more cohesive; right now, it’s primarily a number of world-building posts strung together by a rather thin plot. I haven’t decided if this is fundamentally bad. There are a number of areas that either need to be expanded or cut entirely, which keeps giving me the feeling that The Expedition should either be a short story (<10k words) or a full novel. We’ll see what I come up with.
Speaking of short stories, the other piece I’m writing is one. It’s a loose sequel (spin-off?) to The Second Lord’s Madness following a character who gets named in the epilogue. I started it as a palate-cleanser while editing The Expedition with the intent of keeping it short. It’s not been edited–I just finished the first draft yesterday–but at 5.5k words, I think I succeeded. Unfortunately, my utter lack of training really showed in its ending, which is… open. I think the story still works on its own, but in many ways it also feels like the prologue to a longer plot.
Also, I can’t exactly create an entire separate blog for it, so I definitely need to rethink how and where I post things. Here, on WordPress, I could create a separate blog for shorter works, but that also seems somewhat unwieldy. Suffice it to say that I am not a fan of things getting jumbled together. Moreover, WordPress in general is a bit of a pain to work with: I can’t even figure out how to edit my sidebar, which is stuck just listing that failed serial of mine. I really should be using a dedicated writing site, but those all seem to have problems of their own. Fictionpress is dated, AO3 is clunky, Wattpad skews too young, and so on–or so I’m lead to believe. I’ve only ever actually used AO3, and that was a while ago. Ideally, I would just try some out, but keeping everything synced sounds unpleasant, which is something I want to avoid. Hobbies are supposed to be fun after all.
Ugh. I certainly understand that getting better at something requires time and hard work and challenge, but sampling different websites can be so miserable. Maybe I’m just overgeneralizing from my experiences with my IRL work–I certainly hope so–but more likely than not I’m just procrastinating on something slightly less interesting.
I don’t like ending on such a glum note, so here’s a possibly-fun fact: my next challenge is to come up with a story that involves restoring a rusty spork as a plot point.
Hello there! A few months ago, I started writing again. Well–I’m not sure if you can consider the brief attempt I made at writing a web serial as meaning I was previously a writer, but still. This time, I finished the story first. It’s just under 24k words according to Google Docs, but for some reason while I was writing it I started breaking it down into single-scene chapters. (A few were longer than that, but the point stands: they’re excessively short.) It’ll go up here every MWF at 5:00 PM EST.
I actually finished this story the day before the insurrection, but since the story involves an unstable ruler and oppression and a few other topical spoilers, I got cold feet. Also, the first act feels like it relies on shock, and there’s one morally atrocious character who I wasn’t sure was portrayed negatively enough. Finally, I drove myself crazy over a bunch of grammar points, like whether a conjunction followed by a subordinate dependent clause should be followed by a comma. (Ex: Bob was hacked, but [,?] since they shared accounts, Alice was too.) In general, I seem to have a problem with including too many commas; I also seem to capitalize Important Words even when they’re not Proper Nouns. But I think I fixed most of the typos. As for everything else? I got over myself. I’m just writing for fun; thankfully, nobody cares what I post.
If anybody reads this, however, do let me know if and how I messed up, along with what I did right. I’m not a writer, but I do want to improve!
Dark Continents 5 will likely make reference to the number of people displaced by the African Blight. Figuring that out ended up being a lot harder than I expected.
First, I had to know how much area the Blight covers. Easy, right? As we all recall, the Blight began Dec 9; to May 5 is 4 months and 26 days. At 11 km/day, that’s 1617 km. Except it’s actually 1666 km, because 11 km/day is rounded down. Also, under the 30-day month convention, the spread was 4.87 months times 340 km/month, or 1655 km. And of course, it hasn’t simply spread in a circle: the Sahara is serving as a buffer in the north.
So, with that vague spread in my, I set out to find how many people were in it. I found this “Find Population on Map” tool. (I think it’s for 2015.) A 1666km circle centered at Kemba got me 242,524,500 people, a generous overestimate. Attempting to use the polygon tool got me around 195 million, likely an underestimate. Finally, adding 200km to the circle for preemptive evacuations got me 348,817,400. Erring on the high side, I thus guesstimated 275 million would be displaced, in today’s population.
To get to 2037, I needed population growth estimates. Most of what I found were 2050/2100 estimates, but the UN’s World Population Prospects had sufficient detail. In 2017, Middle Africa has a population of 163,494,885 people; in 2037, it’ll be 285,422,821. This growth rate, 1.75, sounded about right; indeed, most of the Blight is roughly in Middle Africa. Thus, applying the rate uniformly, I got a corrected estimate of 480 million people displaced.
This has lead me to a realization: I am a monster. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the freaking Mongols—all are mere amateurs before my genocidal grimdarkness!
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