NaNoWriMo Day 8

Since I’m behind on the recommended word count, I’ve been setting my own goals. Both so I have daily targets to hit and in an attempt to get caught up gradually (rather than trying a single marathon day of writing).

By day 8, I should have 13,336. My goal for the weekend was 5k, but I ended up stopping 600 words short. I decided to take a couple of hours where I’d intended to write and play some video games instead, and I’m glad I did. I hadn’t played at all last week, so I feel pretty good about treating myself on Sunday.

My goal for today was 8k words. I squeezed in a bit of writing today during breaks at work, and I’m at 5065 words now. I doubt I’ll make a full 8k tonight, but I feel like I’ve been making steady progress so I’m pretty pleased, I’ll be happy with 7k by the time I go to bed.

NaNoWriMo Days 1-7

It’s November and that means it’s National Novel Writing Month. This is my second year participating in NaNoWriMo. I didn’t really have a goal last year, I only decided to participate after the contest had already started and I’d didn’t really focus on it as much as I should have. Despite all that, it was still a good learning experience for me.

This year I’m taking it more seriously. I may not make it to 50,000 words and win, but I’m at least going to dedicate time nightly to giving it a real shot.

Today is day seven, and so far I’ve been doing OK, which means much much better than last year but not as good as I’d like. The first three nights, I got a late start and generally didn’t sit down to write until around 11:30 or later. I’ve also be recovering from being sick, so I’ve only been able to spend about an hour each night before staggering off to bed. The first night I struggled to even get the 603 words down, and the second night was not much better. The third night ended with me getting stuck at the first major plot point of the book, it’s the event that initiates the major conflict of the story, and I just couldn’t figure out how to get it started.

So on day four, I was 3000 words behind where I needed to be, stuck on the plot, and just not sure how to move forward. I didn’t want to take a night off from writing though, because I knew that would break my momentum and likely turn into two nights off, or a week, and before I’d realize it there would be no catching up. Instead of just staring a my screen, I decided to change tactics. I started a new text file and started writing the first thing that popped into my head, which turned out to be a monologue by my main character. While writing like this I came up with how to get around the plot issue I was dealing with. The other thing that happened, is my brainstorming session turned into my story. After an hour and a half, I had 900-ish words and had actually moved the story past where I’d been in my previous writing.

This was great, since I’d finally found a good head-space to write from, but it did mean dumping the 2000 some words I’d written in the first three days from a third-person perspective and starting over with what I’d done in first-person from day four. Decisions decisions.

In the end, I decided to stick with the first-person work I’d done and since then I’ve managed to catch up and pass my original count and hit 3639 words.

I’ve kind of broken a rule of NaNoWriMo by starting over, since what I ended up doing was basically a rewrite. The general idea is just to keep plunging forward and leave any changes for after the 30th, but I hadn’t intended to do more than just type out some thoughts in an effort to work through my plot a bit. I’m still not rereading anything I’ve written or changing anything except for the occasional typo.

In case you’re curious, I’m working in WriteMonkey and using DropBox to keep the text file automatically backed up. I’m keeping notes in Google Docs. I’m reading Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem and Doyce Testerman’s This is How I Get It Done for advice and motivation. I have a copy of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Second Draft printed and hanging above my monitor.

Game Tie-in Books

I finished two game tie-in books, recently. I know it seems like tie-ins are the only thing I read, first there were the Burn Notice novels, and now Mass Effect’s third novel and the Elemental novel. I do read more than that, but usually my non-game/TV related reading are trilogies or series and those are much harder for me to write about.

Mass Effect: Retribution

Let’s start with the sci-fi book. Like the previous two  novels, Retribution is written by Drew Karpyshyn who also writes the dialog for the games and it shows in the quality of both. Set sometime after the second game, Retribution picks up with most of the same characters from Ascension but puts them into a conflict that picks up from the end of the game.

Side note: I don’t think this is a prequel for Mass Effect 3. I can’t be sure but Ascension was not directly related to Mass Effect 2, except for the fact that it featured Cerberus, so I’m guessing it’s not.

As the books opens, we find that Cerberus has acquired Reaper technology and plans to test it on humans. The Illusive Man has a particular human in mind, Paul Grayson, who’s on the run for betraying Cerberus and the Illusive Man. During the course of the book, Kahlee Sanders finds out that Paul’s been abducted and enlists David Anderson to help find him and possibly take down Cerberus.

These books are a bit different from more game tie-ins that I familiar with, because they don’t involve the main protagonist from the game or ever do more than peripherally reference events in the game. Instead these books are more about filling on more of the background of the Mass Effect universe and developing some of the ancillary characters. This is nice since, if you have read them, then the world in the game is that much more alive and there are some oblique references to book events, but they’re not required reading by any means.

Destiny’s Embers

Leaving aside all of the drama around the game it’s tied to (you can Google it), I thought that Destiny’s Embers was a fun book. It’s written by Brad Wardell, whose the programmer for the game Elemental and the CEO of Stardock. So while it’s not a great book; it isn’t an awful book either. It was a fun read that kept me interested enough in the characters and plot to overlook any rough edges, and that’s not something I can say about every fantasy book I’ve picked up recently.

I would caution anyone who’s grammar sensitive that you’ll probably not enjoy this book as Brad’s style includes a frequent use of commas. This is not something that bothered me, but it is something to keep in mind. If you’re curious but not sure, then check out the except on Amazon’s site (or get the Kindle sample).

The plot itself is fairly standard epic fantasy: good versus evil. Most of the characters are either good or bad with few shades of gray. There’s a hero’s journey in search of a mythical item, a big battle scene at the climax, and an ending that sets up the game.

Kindled

I’m not a fan of DRM lock-in in any medium, but especially not with books because I like to keep and reread them, sometimes more than ten years later. With music, I didn’t start spending money on MP3s until Amazon came out with their DRM-free store.

That said, I ordered a Kindle.

Why a Kindle and not a Nook?

First, I tried out a Nook in the Barnes & Noble store a few weeks ago when they announced their price cut but the touch screen felt a little laggy to me. Second, I’ve tried out both the Kindle and Barnes & Noble software on my phone, using it to read some free samples, and I liked the Kindle version better.

So what changed my mind?

Well, I’ve been tempted to get one before out of sheer gadget lust, but always managed to make my saving throw. Until my wife asked me recently about what we would need to stream Netflix to the TV. My wife suggesting a gadget purchase is a rare event, so I was pretty excited. Thus, while I was on Amazon ordering a Roku box, I somehow ended up ordering a Kindle as well.

So I actually haven’t changed my mind, I do think that I’m taking a risk of having to buy some books multiple times because of DRM, but hopefully by being aware of that and making some decisions about what I buy in which format, I can avoid getting burned in the future.

I’m intending to be fairly choosy about what I buy electronically. If Amazon ever decides to get out of the ereader business, I’m at their mercy to remove the DRM from my purchases so I can transfer the files to text or to different hardware (assuming I don’t break the law and find away to do it myself). Honestly, that not something I see publishers ever allowing though.

Being choosy means that I will get Kindle editions for things like programming books, since they get outdated within a few years,  and any vacation reading, like the Burn Notice tie-in I read recently. Certain authors will continue to be hardback purchases: Jim Butcher, Patricia Briggs, and Patrick Rothfuss, to name a few. Basically, anything that I’m likely to reread or collect.

The big challenge for me will be the convenience and immediacy of getting Kindle editions. For instance, if I’m chatting on Twitter and someone mentions a book, I can order it from my phone and start reading it during my lunch break at work. Something I’ve actually done recently.

I still don’t like that you can’t use readers on planes during take offs and landings, but I very rarely travel so that’s always been a picked nit on my part.

I ordered the new Kindle 3 (wifi/3g) but they’re back-ordered right now, so I have to wait until mid September to see how much I actually like it. In the meantime, I’ve bought two BlackBerry development books and the Elemental game tie-in, Destiny’s Ember, and I’ve been reading them on my phone (which is great for downtime at work) and on my desktop PC.

Burn Notice Debrief

Like I mentioned when I talked about The Giveaway, I’d ordered the other two books based on the Burn Notice TV series, The Fix and The End Game, to read during my vacation earlier this month.

I could definitely tell that The Fix was the first novelization from the series. Having read the third book in the series already, it was noticeable how much more comfortable Tod Goldberg has gotten with the characters. Most of the issues I noticed were small repetitions and odd word choices in the dialog, nothing that interfered with my enjoyment of the story.

The one major problem I had, with The Fix, was a difference in how Tod handles changes in perspective from Michael to Sam and Fiona. The book sets it up like Michael is still narrating based on what Sam told him afterwards, but it didn’t feel quite right to me and leads to some confusing chronology.

The End Game was much closer, in quality, to the third novel than the first. Tod drops Michael as narrator when switching to sections focuses on Sam and Fiona. There were also less of the small repetitions and odd word choices in dialog that popped out at me in the first book.

Despite the small problems mentioned above, I would still recommend these books to anyone who is a fan of the show and wants to experience a bit more of Michael Westen’s life. They are all quick reads and make excellent vacation reading. Tod has a fourth book The Reformed due out in January, according to Amazon, that I’m looking forward to picking up.

Burn Notice: The Giveaway

There are two bookstores between the office where I work and most of the places where I eat lunch. This means that usually once a week I stop in at one or both places and browse the shelves. This is a bad habit of mine because of have a pile (which is not an exaggeration) of books that I want to read but haven’t gotten to yet, so buying more books is really not something I should be doing. Still, it’s a daily temptation to stop in and see what’s new and twice in recent weeks I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

My latest surprise was finding a Burn Notice novel called The Giveaway. Partially because it was in the Science-Fiction/Fantasy section (I’m guessing someone changed their mind and left it there). The show is one of my favorites, but my initial reaction was, “Bleh, a novel?” Out of morbid curiosity, I opened it up and read the first page to see what it was like. It starts out with, “When you’re a spy…” and then goes into one of the show’s trademark voice-overs by Weston. So now I was curious and decided to buy it and give it a read.

It was a quick read, took me a day or so, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Enough, actually, that I ordered the other two books The Fix and The End.

The plot is a typical one for the show. Friend Barry, the money launderer, needs a favor. He has a friend, who’s a retired bank robber, that did one last job but ended up ripping of a motorcycle gang and now needs help cleaning up the mess.

The dialog, monologues, and action are all very true to the show. The book does bring something new to the series though, there are a couple of chapters written from Sam and Fiona’s viewpoints. This is not something that the show does and I’m not sure it would very well if they tried it, but it worked well in the book and made for interesting insights into the characters.

Crafting IRL: Drinking

After the brewing and the bottling, there’s the waiting, and then the drinking. After bottling a homebrew it takes about two weeks for the yeast in the bottle to carbonate the beer.

I usually try a beer around that point to see how it tastes. With stouts, it’s recommended to wait another two weeks to age a bit, and I like to have a before to compare to the after.

This beer was bottled June 12th, so it’s almost six weeks old now. The first beer I drank (around the 27th) was well carbonated but the taste wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, it was a little too sweet and felt a little thin. Happily, the beer I’m having tonight is much better, it’s still got some sweetness to it but it’s balanced better with the bitterness and leaves a nice aftertaste in the mouth.

That’s one of the great things about bottle conditioned beers, usually if they’re a bit off you can just let the yeast work a little longer on it.

Crafting IRL: Bottling

Last week I left off with my beer just starting fermentation (which was May 29th). Checking on the fermenter a few hours later, I was seeing a few bubble in the airlock already. This is good, the bubbles are CO2 and it means that fermentation has started. At this point, things get pretty easy: check on the fermenter once a day or two, make sure the temperature is reading around 70F and see if the airlock is still producing bubbles.

Some time between 7 and 10 days the fermentation is usually done. In this case by the following Sunday, there no bubbles in the airlock but my weekend was a bit busy, so I put off bottling until the following weekend (June 12th). It’s not a good idea to leave beer in the primary fermenter longer than two weeks because the beer can start to pickup astringent flavors from the yeast at the bottom of the bucket. Some beers require secondary fermentation or just additional time, and that’s when people will siphon over to a secondary fermenter (usually glass). Making a low gravity, low alcohol, stout is pretty forgiving though. (more…)

Crafting IRL: Brewing

Besides PC and console games, reading books, and sleeping, I like beer. I’m not talking about PBR (be thankful if you don’t know what that is) or Bud Lite, I’m talking about the good stuff: Guinness and micro-brews and such. I don’t drink a lot, and haven’t had a hangover in years, but I do enjoy a good beer or two.

I’ve wanted to try making my own beer for a long time, but I always thought it required having a basement because it would stink up the apartment or house and required cool temperatures. Neither one of these is true. Well the temperature thing can be true if you’re making a lager but it’s not true for making ales.

I started brewing in 2007 and have done seven batches (mostly stouts). I’m an extract brewer, which is a little easier than all-grain and requires less equipment and skill.

I realized recently that I hadn’t brewed in quite a while (August 2008), let’s blame fatherhood for that although it’s probably just laziness, so last month I decided it was time to get back to it and picked Saturday, May 29th. My favorite recipe that I’d made so far was a milk stout which is called that because it has milk sugar in it, lactose, which yeast cannot convert to alcohol. This makes a sweeter stout, and I’d really enjoyed my first batch (beer number 5) but it was almost gone. (more…)