The Leftover At The Bottom Of The Sink

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It was always the same.

Loading the dishwasher was never a glamorous job, but it was something I'd learnt to make the most of. I felt something of a oneness with the dish brush, the handle filled with the vivid purple soap, dispensed through its all-too-worn brushes with a squeeze of the handle. I'd joked that I wanted a new one of these for Christmas. In a way, though, I'm not sure if I could handle that. This brush and I have been through a lot together. A lot of cups with all manner of clabber at the bottom of them; plates with remnants of food I can't even remember eating; cereal, stuck to the bottom of bowls with incredible resolve. They ought to stick those heat tiles on the space shuttle using soggy corn flakes. They'd never have any problems with them coming off, then.

The top shelf was always the easiest. First the cups, once, of course, they'd been retrieved. The ones that had been sipped out while watching TV, left on the coffee table; the ones on the bedside tables that had held our midnight sleepytime drinks; those which had inexplicably ended up in the other room and been forgotten about, sat there abandoned. There was surely some moral about what labor-saving devices had done to our society, here. That so few of us could completely fill a top shelf with soiled cups from one load to another? That seemed something like inordinate extravagance. I remember the "good" old days, only having one cup, one bowl, one plate. If they were clean, I ate. If they were soiled, that was a meal I missed. Nothing was more encouraging than hunger to make sure the chores got done.

The bottom shelf followed, by now, I was well into the swing of it. The plates, encrusted with the remains of the meals, got a cursory rinse and scrub with the brush before getting loaded in, then the various kitchen miscellany; the mixing bowls, the measuring containers, the smaller saucepans, the cheese grater, all jiggling and jostling for position between the tines of the lower rack. A small optimization exercise; it was surely possible to get them all in, get the entire sinkful done in one go. It just needed a bit of creative packing, that's all. This smaller container could go under this larger one; there, plenty of room. Next, the utensils, an easy enough job. Picking them up, meticulously yet subconsciously sorting them, putting the forks into this side of the basket, then the knives, then the spoons.

There it was again. As always, the same leftover in the bottom of the sink. The unidentifiable lid, seemingly always filthy. It must be part of the food processor, but I never knew where it belonged. I scrubbed it briefly with the brush, placed it in an empty slot on the top shelf, put the soap tablet in, closed the lid, and started the machine.

It was always the same. But perhaps this time, I would learn something new.

Unloading the dishwasher was never a glamorous job, but it was something I'd learnt to make the most of. The organizing, the putting away, the making the most of the space we had, all seemed to bring its own reward. The cups and glasses never seemed to fit back in the cupboard where they belonged; the plates balanced precariously; the storage containers were just squeezed in wherever space remained. One day I'll reorganize this cabinet. Not today. And last, but not least, the leftover. The curious lid. I took it and placed it next to the blender. Someone else would know how exactly it fit.

"It's very clean," the familiar voice uttered. "You do such a good job with that, every time."

"Thanks, love," I replied sheepishly. "I still don't know where it goes, though."

"Back in the sink. It's the plug to the waste disposal."

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Writing An Adaptation Is Tougher Than You Might Think

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I recently got my hands on a video game for the Nintendo DS entitled Hotel Dusk: Room 215, for an extremely competitive pre-owned price at the nearest GameStop. It describes itself as an interactive novel, even going as far as getting you to hold the console just like a book and write notes in your detective's notebook using the stylus and touchscreen. One of the most pleasing things about the experience for me was to discover that, perhaps for the first time ever, the tag "interactive fiction" seemed appropriate. Hotel Dusk is not so much a video game with an underlying story, but more a novel that just happens to be presented on a handheld console. It is by no means perfect, but all too often the storytelling in video games is sorely lacking and seems very far down the priority list for the software development companies. In many cases, story is incidental, which is probably why video game titles typically make some pretty lousy movies. In this case, though, the gameplay is secondary to a competent story, certainly one that could stand up with some of the paperbacks you might pick up in an airport bookstore at least. At some point halfway through the novel - yes, I'm not even going to pretend it's actually a video game - I did in fact realize that it would make a good, old-fashioned, dead-tree book, with of course a few tweaks here and there. There are plenty of plot devices that only work within the concept of a video game, and in a book would make no sense, but they would be relatively small cosmetic changes to suit the medium. I began to wonder whether perhaps that had been done by CING, the Japanese development company who produced Hotel Dusk and a couple of other similar titles. Sadly, CING filed for bankruptcy a few months ago, and so it's quite unclear exactly what the status is of their intellectual properties. (If anyone out there does know if there is a written version, I'd appreciate finding out about it). In theory, the story must have already been written during the design phases for the Nintendo version. Would it be difficult to flesh it out into a novel?

This month, while it seems everyone else with writing aspirations has taken leave of their senses and given NaNoWriMo a go, I've been investigating writing at my own pace; looking into suitable tools and software, experimenting with a few exercises, and trying out a few sites. I've been participating in sprints, trying to get as many words down on paper, and even tried a bit of flash fiction, a six minute story or two. Today it occurred to me that the prologue to Hotel Dusk is a video cutscene that takes perhaps about six minutes to run through, and I began to wonder again about a paperback adaptation. In brief, here's what happens in that first six minutes.

Firstly we see the skyline of New York on December 24, 1976. A phone rings in the police department and Detective Kyle Hyde answers it, surprised to hear from someone called 'Bradley'. Next, we see Hyde on the docks, pointing a gun at a character whose back is turned to us. Hyde fires, and Bradley falls into the river, yelling the name "Mila" as he falls. Hyde wakes up from his flashback. It is now apparently three years later. Next, we see a shot of early morning in Los Angeles. An authoritative gentleman named Ed answers the phone and takes an order. he asks his secretary Rachel to get a hold of Hyde; we see Hyde get a beep on his pager and throw it down in the car seat next to him. A slide tells us it's now 4pm in Nevada, where Hyde pulls into a gas station, returns the call using a payphone, and gets some grief from his boss before being told he has a job, to pick up a package and an order sheet at a place called Hotel Dusk. Hyde gets back on the road, passing a young girl in a white dress walking along the roadside. Once he arrives at the hotel, Hyde gives us some exposition as how he quit the New York Police Department and moved out west, and is a door-to-door salesman for an outfit called Red Crown, but occasionally his boss gives him some quiet jobs on the side, while he looks for his missing partner, who apparently he believes isn't dead after all. The hotel door lies in front of him, and a click starts the game (or novel) for real.

There it is, the first six minutes of the title. One thing should be clear; what appears above is not what you would want to read in a book. This would by no means be sufficient for a written treatment. I could have gone into more detail, explained every shot, every camera angle, and every detail that appeared on the screen, but it still would not constitute written storytelling. The fact is, even though something like Hotel Dusk tells a story, it does so with other mechanisms than just words. Furthermore, even if you try to substitute the images, the sound effects, or the music with words, what you have is not a particularly palatable story. (What you have is a description of a video game). At this point, I am desperately trying to avoid using the horrible word "multimedia" - media is, after all, already plural - but there are several key areas where the storytelling medium makes an enormous difference. We should not be surprised. We might expect a good movie to be two hours long, but the book that it was based on might take ten hours to read in actual reading time, perhaps spread over a few weeks' bedtime reading. A good video game may occupy us for as much as forty hours (personally, if a video game doesn't absorb me for as much as that, I feel somewhat cheated by the purchase, and if it goes on for much longer, I simply don't feel like it's worth the effort). Adapting one of these forms to another is not a simple job. This is why screenwriters have to work so hard adapting books into movies. The changes (or omissions) that were made  in the Lord Of The Rings movies, for instance, were not done lightly, but reflected tradeoffs between what the different media allow. It's also typically why adaptations to and from video games are always a bit fraught, simply because there is very seldom as much effort gone into the adaptation. Rather cynically, slapping the movie artwork onto the game cover will typically sell the game, no matter what its quality. Even when there's already a good story to work with, as with Hotel Dusk, writing a book version would be non-trivial.

Let's consider what we would need to do to that "just the facts" description to turn it into a suitable book prologue. That skyline shot of New York needs to somehow be conveyed into words. We have to paint that picture, verbally only. We need to describe the sights, the sounds, the smells; what the weather is like on that day. Do we have to be accurate here? Will some know-it-all go and look up what the weather actually was that Christmas Eve? There are obvious ways we could communicate it was Christmas; perhaps we need to add a Santa character in the street. We similarly have to do the same with the police department, somehow transition our focus to the individual building, get us inside, describe Kyle Hyde, his desk, his co-workers, his surroundings, whether he smokes, a few touches here and there to convince us it is 1976. We have to explain the tone of Hyde's voice; we have to decide what our point-of-view is for this scene. Are we narrating in Hyde's first-person perspective, or from a narrator's viewpoint? We have to be especially careful here; it is quite convenient for a video game to show cutscenes from a third person perspective but the actual user interaction is first person. In a book, it might not be particularly comfortable if we flip between the two. We have all the scene setup work to do again at the docks, another character to describe, events, emotions. This is a relatively short yet dramatic scene in the flashback, and presumably we'll be revisiting it several more times in the story to follow. Then again, somehow, we have to get us to Nevada, and indicate three years have passed, presumably draw attention to some changes in Hyde's character or looks, some other way to indicate the passage of time, then communicate the details about his employer in Los Angeles. Do we even explicitly write that scene in the book? Won't that be awkward, if we intend to write the exposition in first person? (Or will we have some sort of Blade Runner "director's cut" to handle this?).

That's a lot of questions to answer for what ends up being a very tiny bit of the story - the 'trailer' for what is to come - and some of those decisions will radically impact the rest of the book were you to actually go ahead and do so. It's all too tempting for a writer to believe that adapting existing material might be a shortcut. Indeed there may be some elements such as plot for which a pre-existing work may make significant contributions. However, the actual craft of writing still needs to be done; the description, the communication, the physical effort of getting the words down, but above all doing so in such a way that entertains and enthralls the reader. I am still intent on doing my prologue exercise at some time, but I am quite sure it will be considerably more effort than the six minutes it runs for.

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Writing Workshop - Red

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Josie over at Sleep is For the Weak put forward a set of writing prompts based on movie titles - I'm choosing Red as my prompt.

I paused for breath, and kidded myself that the air was getting thinner. It really wasn't that hard of a climb, and the altitude could not possibly be that great, but the side of the hill was steep and the first snowfall of the winter was making it treacherous underfoot. As I rounded the corner onto the final climb of the trail, I look across at the skylift that had been out of operation now for the past six weeks. Anyone who wanted to get to the top of the hill would have to come up the same way I was struggling with. I wondered how many people would try it at this time of year; there were certainly no others to be seen. Not so long ago, there would be people milling in all directions here, but at that moment it seemed I was the only human being for miles around. My fingers and toes were growing numb, the cold was beginning to make its way through the rest of the layers that swaddled me from head to toe. I stamped my feet to dispel some of the numbness, exaggeratedly clapped my hands, and took a slow, deep breath, exhaling, seeing my spirit floating in the air in front of me, until a cutting wind bit across my face, blew the breath away, and started one of the skylift chairs swinging. The creak of the swinging chair broke the silence; in the stillness I heard the sounds of birds who had elected to stay through the winter, scared out of their hiding places by the sound of dislodged snow. A tiny piece of bare metal showed through, painted red.

The natural bridge loomed above me, somewhat intimidating. I still had the most difficult part of the climb to go; the steepest part of the rocks, the most difficult place to find a footing, and a tight squeeze through the crevice between the stone walls. A long time ago, this was the only way up here. There were no steps carved into the rock back then; no cast-iron railings along the side of the path which admittedly still required a significant amount of fitness on the climbers' part. The sight at the top was seen by precious few, but it was not long after those first explorers described what they saw that a way was found to open up that vista to all. I would guess it was the description of the sky bridge colors in the fall that motivated them to create the other way up, so everyone, from the smallest of children to the frail and elderly could take in the view, provided they could overcome any fear of heights they might have. In September and October it was at its most spectacular, all golden yellows and oranges and reds. Yes, the reds.

I had made it to the top, and stood precariously near the edge, next to a tree stripped bare of its leaves. Last time I was here, this tree was aflame. Now it stood here, seemingly lifeless, symbolic of everything that had passed in the two months since the last visit. Two months to the day, apparently. I had not even realized that until this moment. Just two months before, the outlook was incredibly different; breathtaking, vivacious; everything now was sullen in comparison. I trudged onward, more and more dispirited. I paused at that branch. Do you remember the one? Of course you do; it struck us both that day how red that leaf was, the leaf that wouldn't keep quiet and insisted you took its picture? That photograph made the perfect last shot in the photo album, didn't it? No, that's right. The last but one shot. But there was no red leaf there any longer. Anything red on this hillside has long gone. The little red car is not in the parking lot at the foot of the hill; I remember how enthusiastically we had agreed on the color at the rental desk. That little red car, or that little red leaf, or that little hint of red in our cheeks; they simply weren't there any more.

The experience was meant to be cathartic. I had planned to come up here and see that tree, that branch; look down on that parking lot, that skylift, stand where we stood, and bury the past once and for all. Things had indeed changed, just as surely as time had passed. The red that was there was long gone, and seeing this would surely purge those scarlet memories? I must admit, it was hardly the greatest of ideas. The color had indeed disappeared; the first snow had injected some additional finality into the picture, but it was far from final. The tree on the top of the bridge knew all this, and had known it year in, year out. It only seemed to be lifeless; a mere charade, just enough to get it through the darkest of moments. It would survive, awaiting for the return of the warmth, when it would stretch, imperceptibly, absorb every caress of the sun's rays, thrive once more through a spring and summer, and, when the fall colors returned, it would be red once more. Underneath that mantle of snow and ice, the certain processes of life were continuing; underneath the layers protecting me from the cold, a heart was still beating, a heart that knew that not only would it heal with time, but somehow would once again experience joy. At that moment, I knew I would experience the red again, and next winter, it would not fade.

Why not go ahead and join in? Check the prompt page for instructions, and remember to add your link on Thursday.

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Na. No. Wri. Mo. No. No. No. No! #nanowrimo

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In about a week from now, an enormous number of otherwise sane adults will take leave of their senses and begin acting like a bunch of six-year-olds.

No, I'm not talking about Hallowe'en. I'm talking about National Novel Writing Month. All of a sudden, these folks will commit November to putting 50,000 words down on some sort of paper, without editing, in order to be able to say straight out that they are a "writer" and have completed a "novel". There's a perverse logic to dedicating a whole, specific month to the cause. There's brotherhood, and solidarity. Everyone is advised to find themselves a writing buddy, and go out and tell their friends and families exactly what they're doing. The idea is, if you now drop the ball, the embarrassment of not being able to follow-through on something you committed to would be so much, it keeps you going through this 1667 words per day marathon. Oh, that's including Thanksgiving. And Election Day. And National Men make Dinner Day. And Cook Something Bold And Pungent Day. No excuses. In effect, for a month they'll force themselves back into doing Composition homework, just like they were back in school. Family, relationships, presumably work and sleep, might have to get put on the backburner. Understandably, people's opinions vary on the effectiveness of #NaNoWriMo, as to whether it is indeed the right way to get a novel out of someone. Let's face it, everybody has a book inside of them, and for some of us, perhaps inside is where it should stay.

Ironically, there's been an account on Twitter that was intended to do some warm-up work for the November crunch which actually convinced me that #NaNoWriMo was something I really didn't need to be trying. @NaNoWordSprints has been offering timed writing sessions of 15, 20, 30, or occasionally more minutes on several evenings. The idea is, against the clock, get down as many words as you can. It's helped me on a couple of evenings to get over writer's block when I've been trying to get a blog post down, and it's taught me that the actual quantity of words needed to get through NaNo is something that I can reasonably achieve. The quality is questionable, of course, but isn't that the point? But, more importantly, what the sprints have shown me is, if I put my mind to it, it really doesn't matter whether it's November or not. If it's something I want to do, I will be able to get the words out, without a problem. Of course, writing a novel is something I have managed to go through four decades of my life without actually doing so far. If I really, truly, wanted to have a go, I am quite competent and have sufficient self-control to make sure I do it, without any exterior force or artificial time limit pushing it out of me.

In a momentary lapse of reason, I signed up for #NaNoWriMo. It happened just like any other Internet fad, to be honest. A friend gave it a shot last year - a successful shot, it turns out - and this year I heard about it and thought, "Why not?" What of course I didn't do before clicking on that tempting sign-up button was think about a more important question. Why? I don't think I have to necessarily put out 50,000 words of my unedited ramblings in order to be called a "writer", any more than I would have to record a win at Talladega to be called a "driver". I write, therefore, I am a writer. (I drive too, and I'm lousy at that). Whether it's good or bad, or fact or fiction, a novel, a blog, or a grocery list, it's still writing. I don't have a Pinocchio complex - it's not like I sit around all day wishing that I could be a "real writer", while at the same time am worried about whether anyone will laugh at my efforts. It wouldn't have to be a novel, either, if I wanted to write. I tried @6minutestory as well, which is completely the opposite proposition. Take a visual or verbal prompt, write as much as you can in six minutes, and then walk away. I've only given this a try once, mainly because I'm a horrific typist, but I wasn't too displeased with the result. There's a lot of good flash fiction out there, and some writers who are exceptionally skilled in the art of getting short stories written quickly. There seem to be plenty of online publications that are after all kinds of short stories; if I wanted to write one of those, again, it's up to me to just go right ahead.

It doesn't matter what kind of writing it is. Novels, short stories, even blog posts. The only thing that is preventing me from achieving any of them, is me; not whether I have signed up to some site or not. So now, right now, I'm actively chickening out. #NaNoWriMo? No, no, no, no.

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Is yWriter 5 The Novel Writing Tool For You? #nanowrimo

Whether you're new to novel writing or have had some previous experience, one thing is quite certain. You are unlikely to get very far with such a complex project if you simply decide one day to simply "go for it," open a new file in your favorite word processor or text editor, and simply begin typing. There is a lot of planning, organization, and discipline involved in managing what can very easily become a very unwieldy task indeed. Most text editors are very useful when it comes to editing words and lines. They are not quite as convenient when it comes to chapters and scenes. And - perish the thought - keeping your entire novel in a single file is asking for trouble. What if your computer has a hard disk failure and the file cannot be opened?

Spacejock Software's yWriter 5 is a freeware answer to many of these problems, using a software engineer's perspective on the file management problem. Computer software is typically developed by dividing the project into many small files, and keeping all associated information with each component together in one place. Moving the components around within the project is then relatively simple. In yWriter 5, the same idea applies to the various scenes that make up a novel. Each scene is a separate text file that may be edited standalone (in either the built-in or an external text editor), and then scenes may be ordered, moved or assembled as required into chapters. Editing tasks such as moving a scene earlier or later in the book becomes a very simple task indeed. many of the menu options suggest that the software has been regularly used for entrants in National Novel Writing Month, and as such, features have been added in response to users' wishlists. The yWriter program is available for Windows, but by using the Mono emulator software, it can also be run on Linux and Mac OS X platforms. It requires a rather large .NET package from Microsoft to already be installed, but most modern Windows installations will already have this present, required by other common software.

If your experience with word processors is limited to gargantuan office software, the word processing features of yWriter 5 may seem a bit spartan. The editing environment is quite reminiscent in simplicity to simple programs like WordPad, for instance. There is limited support for formatting and editing, and even though there is a spell checker, the option to enable this comes into effect only when a scene is saved. There are no squiggly red or green lines appearing beneath your text as you type here. This is intentional; the point behind the software is to free you from the technical details and just allow you to simply write, as undistracted as possible. Nor will yWriter write the novel for you. It does not provide any creative input for you, write your plot, or come up with a story - that is all your responsibility. All the software attempts to do is to make the technical and management aspects somewhat easier, and give you easy access to some useful tools that will help you write your latest blockbuster. One thing to remember as well is the program is designed only to manage the "getting the words out of your head" part of the writing process; any paper output it produces is purely for preview purposes. Do not expect pretty output from this program; that is way beyond its scope.

However, yWriter 5 does more than allow you to write text in scenes. It serves as a place to gather and collate all your ideas relating to your novel as you write it. For instance, you may keep track of characters, locations, and items as they appear in each scene, and keep track of whose viewpoint each scene is written from. You can add notes, reminders, even images that can serve as your inspiration or research for each part of the novel; jot down ideas about goals, conflicts, outcomes, and the time at which each scene takes place; mark up the scenes as they pass through the editing process, and even rate them subjectively on up to four user-defined scales for such metrics as tension, humor, or quality. The software is cleverly designed to make all of these features available, but purely optional; furthermore, the features may be used in the way the novelist wishes, rather than forced into a particular usage pattern. For example, one user of yWriter submitted a translation file that converted the novel-writing program into a tool that writes sermons. At this very moment, this review is being written in yWriter, with each paragraph in its own file. This allows me to check the word count to make sure I am writing a review that's balanced and sufficiently informative.

The best things about yWriter 5 is the author - not only a software developer but also a published novelist in his own right - evidently encountered a lot of the common issues with the development of a novel and put his software development abilities to finding suitable solutions, rather than marketing gimmicks that do not help with the task at hand. The most important feature for a writer surely has to be to present an undistracted environment in which to write, and the yWriter editor certainly satisfies that. It is easy, almost immediate, to get to use and the management of scenes and chapters is exceptionally intuitive. However, along with that simplicity are also a wealth of features which are not just there for added complexity, but are genuinely useful. I must admit, the more I use the program, the more features I find and the more uses for them. What is more, the features have evidently proven useful to a community of both amateur and professional writers alike. It can read your scenes aloud, which is an interesting means to identify issues. One impressive feature is the program can be run from a USB flash drive, allowing you to easily move your work environment from one machine to another. The program automatically makes backups of your work, as well as automatically checking for software updates. It prints out reports, including a work schedule, so the writer knows exactly how much effort is required to meet that deadline - or listen to the whooshing sound it makes as it passes them by.

With so many features, the elements about yWriter 5 that I did not like seem relatively insignificant. There were some times, for example, when closing the text editor, that the parent screen did not regain the focus and reappear as the next logical place I'd like to give my attention. This caused me to have to go look for it in my taskbar, which broke my concentration in a program that, as much as possible, allows me to focus on the writing and not so much on the minutiae of operating a computer. There's a preview window for scenes on the main window, which in fact I can place a text editing cursor, but text cannot be typed there, although it would seem that would make sense. I'm a little curious about the decisions to automatically backup the files in the background as the user works. The files seem to always be compressed into zip files' this seems not only a little awkward to retrieve the files in case of an emergency, but also somewhat dangerous - a corrupted file might render all the contents irretrievable. On the one instance where I did purposely crash the computer in order to test this feature, finding the file to recover was not an intuitive process. One thing to remember, this is a free program. The help files are a bit skimpy, although the program is supported by a fairly active - and quite enthusiastic - e-mail group, which may be able to answer any questions.

I must admit, in a very short time I have become quite a fan of yWriter 5. I am very much in agreement with its concepts of how to manage and handle projects; indeed, it is now something I use daily for even small projects such as writing this very review. I'm discovering more and more features as and when I need them. and have yet to find the software lacking. Perhaps yWriter 5 is precisely the tool that you are looking for. Check out Spacejock Software for more reviews, details, and to download. As the developer himself claims, without yWriter, he would never have become a published author.

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Review: How to Write a Blockbuster Novel With Storybook #nanowrimo

Why Novel Planning Software?

November is just around the corner, which means National Novel Writing Month is fast approaching. Whether you're planning to take part in NaNoWriMo, or whether you are perhaps entertaining the idea of writing a novel for any other reason, it might be a good idea to take a look at what tools are available. Even though NaNoWriMo is supposed to be blitz writing without editing, you would be well advised to plan your novel ahead of time. There are some software packages on offer out there that allow that, and Storybook is one of them. One of the most appealing factors about Storybook is its price; it is open source and available for free. 

Storybook is novel planning software; specifically, it allows you to put characters in locations and scenes and arrange them into chapters. This is all done using a visual representation of all the scenes in your masterpiece, almost like moving index cards around on the table. The scenes can be ordered and placed into chapters, and progress on the actual writing can be done within the Storybook program. 

However, it's important to note that Storybook is not a text editor or a word processor. The text entered into Storybook should be of the form of short notes, not your actual text itself. You will still need a text editor or word processor to do the actual work!

Installing and Using Storybook

Storybook is available for both Windows and Linux, and requires that you have Java 6 already installed. (If necessary, visit the Sun Java web site to download the latest version of Java appropriate for your computer). The installation process is relatively painless, with a one-click install available for Windows platforms and a single file to unpack for Linux. By far the most common reason for an installation failure is not already having the correct version of Java. 

Once the program is started, you will see the main Storybook screen. A demo project is available, illustrating Storybook's main concepts. Storybook is all about the arrangement of individual scenes; a scene typically takes place in a single location and is occupied by various characters in the novel. The characters and locations can have some background information, and the scene can be outlined. Scenes typically take place on a line of narrative called a strand; while there is obviously a minimum of one strand, more complex stories can intertwine multiple strands, for example to present multiple viewpoints or sub-plots. Scenes are then assigned to chapters, and, in effect, the planning is done. 

A novelist planning their novel with Storybook will typically create their characters and locations upfront, and then write a brief synopsis of each scene that is required to tell the story. Once all the scenes are planned, correctly ordering them and locating them into chapters to ensure the novel is correctly paced can be quite a challenge. Storybook allows this to be done in a reasonably visual and intuitive manner. It can also be used as a repository for notes, and is a good place to record details which need to be referred to several times during the writing process, such as the description of a character or a location.

What's Good, What's Not So Good

Storybook reasonably impressed me with the way it attempts to focus the novelist's mind on those important details that it is very common to lose track of when writing. For example, when defining a character, it is an option to specify that character's date of birth; it is all too easy when time passes within a novel that the character's age gets forgotten about. Similarly, it ensures that the author puts some thought into other important plot devices such as locations; no matter what the novel, it is all too obvious (and annoying to the reader) when there are inaccuracies that illustrate the novelist did not bother to do any research. 

However, Storybook did also seem to have some considerable failings. As far as I could tell, scenes in the book could only be assigned a date, not a time. This made several scenes that took part on the same day very cumbersome, and in situations where attention to time might be important (such as writing a murder mystery) it would appear more granularity was required. Similarly, there is no easy mechanism to ensure scenes on a strand appear in the correct order when assembled; although it occurred to me that may not necessarily be a desirable feature depending on an author's preferred narrative style. It was not entirely clear whether some of the interface elements were clickable or not; there were many places I wanted to be able to click and drag, or right-click, but it seems that wasn't always intuitive. Above all though, my biggest concern with Storybook was that the planning file becomes another artifact that the novelist would have to keep in sync with their external edits. Once writing starts, and presumably even more once a novel is edited, chapters and scenes could be rearranged, and it seems like it would be difficult to keep the Storybook file up-to-date. It seems it outlives its usefulness once writing actually begins. 

There may be some of Storybook's advanced features that writers might find particularly useful. Several reports are available, such as on the occurrence of characters and locations within the novel plan. This may be a means to eliminate potential conflicts at the planning stage, and also denote whether or not each of the characters gets a sufficient amount of "air time" in the completed work. There are export facilities that allow you to print your completed plan and use it as a guide when it comes to writing your masterpiece.

Conclusion

Storybook certainly serves a role; it might well be a valuable tool for you to use when planning your next novel. One thing is for certain, there is no right or wrong way to write, or even to plan to write, and so you might want to give Storybook a try, and see what it has to offer. 

Visit the Storybook website at http://storybook.intertec.ch, where you can download it, read about features, view tutorials, and see if Storybook is right for you. It may just be the tool you need to plan your next blockbuster. It is just up to you to provide the time, motivation, talent, and the hundreds of other character traits you'll need to be a successful novelist!

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• Murder Plans at the Wild Notes Karaoke Bar #fictionfriday (reinventingme.posterous.com)

You looked over my shoulder #searchenginesunday

A quick look at Google Analytics a couple of days ago found a strange phrase that someone had typed into a search engine, that somehow had brought them to this page. You looked over my shoulder. Perhaps they were disappointed when they found this blog, but no more. Here's a post written to precisely that title.

"You looked over my shoulder!" I spun around in the office chair, expecting to see Russ pranking again. Instead, I found myself looking into my manager's eyes, and smelling his breath. Shit. If it wasn't enough that he knew nothing about the industry, he was now here to micro-manage? It was going to be a long day.

He was a Navy man, apparently, all neatly starched shirts and a jacket with very, very shiny buttons. He'd stand up, stretch his arms out in front of him, make some indescribable noise through his lips and then demand to know if everything was "shipshape". He'd been brought in to bring some order to the chaos; to somehow get a bunch of twentysomethings to produce video game software. And so far, his best suggestion had been for us all to turn up clean-shaven and "get your bloody 'air cut!" He had impeccable credentials for the job; he'd been buddies with the new part owner of the company, who had recently bought his share to bail us out of some serious trouble.

And now he was about to tell me how to write code. This could be fun. "So, what are you doing, then? You haven't typed anything for the last five minutes. That's all this job is, right, typing?"

As soon as I heard that, part of me died inside. "It's not as easy as that, sure, I know you'd like to think it is," I grimaced. "I currently have what we in the 'business' call a 'bug'. You might have heard that term before. You know, named after that story about how insects had actually crawled into the first computers and frazzled up the valves. You know, those clever fellers up in Manchester, or down at Bletchley Park." I wasn't sure whether I'd been sufficiently patronizing for that to be a justified response to the mortal sin my new boss had just committed.

"Of course I know what a bug is, young man," the boss responded, craning his neck in a manner which would, within a couple of days, be impersonated by every wag in the company. "But, it's a completely logical process, isn't it? I mean, there's only so many lines right there in front of you. You go through them, one at a time, until you find the incorrect one. Then you fix it." I hit the right control key, and the text editor scrolled to the beginning of the file. I spun around in my chair, while holding "page down". Page after page of assembler blurred across the screen and reflected in the old boy's eyes.

"Harumph," he retorted. "Don't try to bedazzle me with bullshit - no matter what you say, it's still a linear process. Be systematic, and you'll find it. I have every confidence in you." He pulled up another chair and perched on the edge of it, intent that something was about to happen in the next few seconds. When nothing did, he became restless again. "So, what is it, precisely, that you're doing here?".

"It's display code," I explained, intent on showing that if sarcasm didn't work, straight-out honesty would at least bore him to tears. "What you see in front of you, on the screen, that's what's called memory-mapped. Every one of those pixels - yep, pixels, you can call them 'little dots' if you want - is represented by an address in memory. But, when I write to the display, I can only see 65,536 of those memory addresses at one." I saw him raise his eyebrows and begin to ask a question, but I continued. "The display, well, this one at least, is 640 pixels wide. Which, since that doesn't go into 65,536 exactly, means I have to do some clever fidgeting about to write some of the lines. Actually, I ask the display driver for what the screen geometry is and build myself some nice tables upfront, then, when I have to do anything with the screen, I just look everything up in the tables. It's very quick, on this machine, it takes something of the order of sixteen nanoseconds."

The question that had been eating him alive for the last couple of sentences of this explanation finally got to the surface. "Why 65,536? And how can you possibly remember that number?" "That, sir, is why I'm a code monkey, and you joined the Navy," I gleefully replied.

At that, he left my desk.

Feel like joining me? Have a go at writing either to this title, or one of your own, and list your entry in the comments. Have fun!

Murder Plans at the Wild Notes Karaoke Bar #fictionfriday

Annie at Write Anything put up this challenge for Fiction Friday #171. Given her first draft piece from a previous week, featuring an exceptionally loathsome character, kill him off in a sequel story. Here's my effort.

"You know?" Marco coughed. "It would probably count as a mercy killing. Or that he just needed killing. A bit like in Murder On The Orient Express. I figure you could get enough people to volunteer for it." Linda craned across the bar table, trying as hard as she could to glean as many as Marco's words over the noise of some large blonde girl in the middle of the room doing her best to yell out I Will Always Love You. "I thought they'd outlawed wailing," she quipped, and laughed for the first time in a week, the first time since she was here last Friday night with Marco. They couldn't hear a single word each other was saying while the music played, and that suited her just fine. She was just glad to be out of the house. Albert wouldn't have noticed.

"Or it could be like Strangers on a Train," Marco carried on. "You know, perfect murders. You and I swap; you get rid of Ang, and I'll off your Albert. Perfect." He took a good slug on his beer and began to giggle uncontrollably as the sympathy applause for the Whitney Houston wannabe died down. That last line had rang out across the table, clear as a bell. Angela Torrisi leaned over the table and told her husband to quit being such an ass, laughed, kissed him tenderly on the forehead like he was a guilty little boy, and reached out for Linda's hand. "Seriously, love, we need to do something. Come with me in the morning, OK? We'll get your hair done, you'll feel like a new woman,"

"I know that feeling, doll," Marco interrupted. "I feel like a new woman too. A nice big round one. With a bottom. You're too skinny, Ang. You look like Joan Rivers." Angela gave him the middle finger as a middle-aged couple with a Kenny Rogers beard and a Dolly Parton wig started murdering Islands In the Stream. Apparently, the resemblance stopped at the beard and the wig. Linda suddenly felt self-conscious of her own hair; she realized she hadn't even run a brush through it all day, let alone washed it. She'd ran across to Marco's while she was out running errands earlier, decided on the spur of the moment that yes, she'd come out to the club again with the young couple, and she'd barely had a chance to stop to put a change of clothes on before sneaking out the back door. Of course, "sneaking" was pretty much figurative. The surveillance cameras had seen her every move, seen her leave the house. Once, Albert would have checked the home surveillance tapes when she didn't respond to his request for another beer, but somehow she had a feeling he was past caring any more. Something else would catch the equipment's unwavering attention, like the dog barking at number five, or possibly half of some toy boy's backside bobbing up and down through the blinds across Mrs Forster's window. Linda leaving by the back door was just another transient image that would be backed up for posterity.

"Here's what we do," Marco continued, oblivious to the fact that some of his words might be overheard in the quieter passages in the song. "You go down the garden center, OK? Get yourself some bug killer, I honestly don't know how toxic it is, so you might have to take a while, slip a bit of it every day in his dinner, just a little bit. It'll get him eventually. And, I know what you're saying, that'll show up in a post-mortem." Marco belched. "That's why you have to burn his ass. That's OK, easy enough, you just turn the gas on and leave it running for a while. It'll blow up eventually. Usually when there's an electric spark when the thermostat kicks over. They do that a lot in the detective shows on TV, you know. Pilot lights, they're good too. But here's the trick, before you do that, get yourself a dead dog. Some roadkill, OK? Put it in the house before you torch the place, otherwise they'll know it's arson. They find a burnt dead dog, they'll assume it's your pet, and so must be an accident." The country couple finished up. "Nobody burns their own pet dog. I'd kill him for you, given half the chance." Once again, those last words floated across the crowded bar. "Marco, you pissed bastard," Angela scolded. "You've had enough, it's bad enough I have to prop you up and walk you home, but if I've got to clean your sick up and put you in your pyjamas again..." The next singer was getting ready to belt out Material Girl, and the opening bars were deafening. Angela shrugged once more, extended the middle finger towards Marco for the second time in five minutes, grabbed Linda by the hand, and pulled her out of the chair. "Come with me, love. I need a smoke," as they stepped out of the bar's back door onto the patio.

"Ignore Marco, he can be such an idiot," Angela started, as she took a cigarette and lit it, extending the packet towards Linda who absent-mindedly took one, although she hadn't smoked in the thirty-odd years she'd been married to Albert. He wouldn't have tolerated it. Linda took a deep draw as Angela continued. "Seriously, Lin, you've got to do something. Look at you. No offense, babe, but you look like shit. It's one thing that he doesn't care for you, you've known that for years, but you've given up caring about yourself. Marco's uncomfortable; that's why he cracks those lousy jokes about putting Albert out of everybody's misery. One of these days someone is going to overhear what he says, and fortunately, everybody thinks he's just yet another drunk prick. Linda, look at me. What are you going to do about him?". Another non-committal shrug of the shoulders. "You've got to do something."

"I already have," Linda murmured. "Albert is dead. Since last week, actually." Angela coughed and retched as she inhaled far too much cigarette smoke. "What the hell are you talking about? He gave my old man some aggro this morning when he tried to dump some trash in his bin. Ours was too full. Marco came in mad as you-know-what."

"No, Angela," Linda slowly and deliberately shaped each of the words. "He just thinks he saw Albert today. Just like the police think they got a complaint about that effing dog from him today, or a bunch of schoolkids think they got yelled at by him for throwing stuff in the yard this afternoon, or any one of the several hundred exceptionally predictable and well-documented pieces of Albert behavior that everyone sees, day in, day out, that's been repeated day in, day out, for the past week, even though he's been stiff as a board the whole time. It was an accident, if you must know. I'd had a few too many last week down here, and he started his bullshit no sooner did I get in the house. He swung at me, the uncoordinated fat bastard missed by a mile. I reached out and grabbed the first thing I could lay my hands on and brought it down on his head. It was that anniversary clock we'd got for twenty-five. Twenty-five, Ang. I'd have got out in half that if I'd killed the bastard in the first place."

"You're joking, You're friggin' joking, Lin. You need help."

"No joke, no joke. It's relatively easy to make it look and sound like someone's still alive when they record absolutely everything, you know. It's all there, every belch and fart, every flush of the pot. Every one of the neighbors on the street thinks Albert's still in the house, still alive. Even your old man, sadly, yes, even your old man, who I'm pretty sure has got quite some Dutch Courage queued up this evening. He might go ahead and do something about it. I hope he does. Because that's the bit I was trying to figure out; how do I dispose of someone whose meds I've been poisoning for the past several months? Leaving the gas on was the easy part. The finishing touch though was the dead dog; Marco had that bit right. They'll never believe I set fire to my own house with the dog in it. Even the folks at number five will assume that's Albert calling the pound again. All I need is your old man to take a dive for me. And he will. Nobody would ever dream it was me, because, after all, I love Albert so much."

Angela Torrisi pulled away from Linda in absolute shock, aghast. She looked at the shell of a woman in front of her, her eye sockets black and lifeless, her face gaunt, her hair straggly. The woman had already died inside, a long time ago. Suddenly, it didn't seem so unreasonable that she might have killed the abominable man she was married to. The noise abated from inside the bar, and people began to come out of the door, squeezing between Linda and Angela as they made their way out. In Angela's purse, her 'phone rang. She shuffled through her possessions to get it, placed it next to her ear, and looked up. Linda seemed to have evaporated into the crowd. "Doll?" Marco's voice sounded on the other end of the 'phone. "You'll never believe where I am. Gawd, it smells in here."

Angela sighed. "I believe I would, Marco. I believe I would. Get the hell out of there, before..."

The line went dead.

Review (and Six Tips For Writing) A Six Minute Story

I've become quite a fan of the Twitter hashtag #fridayflash, signifying a smorgasbord of wonderful short story creations every Friday, and easily showcasing the great writing talent that abounds on Twitter. A couple of weeks ago, I was giving the usually enthusiastic @inshin a little bit of grief, because his #fridayflash story hadn't appeared this week. Busy weeks creep up on all of us, it seems; but it seemed unusual not to see his latest contribution to what has become an ever-growing collection and wide variety of short stories on his blog. While he told me he missed doing his #fridayflash for the week, he did shortly share a link to something different he'd tried. A six-minute story.

I can almost hear the gasps in the background. A story, in six minutes? It shouldn't be unusual, perhaps. In a previous era, ad libbing tales around the fire was perhaps a little more common than it is today. The art of making up fiction on the spot seems to be perhaps something from a bygone age; but there is something to be said for the skills that are needed to do this; they're skills that would certainly help in more conventional writing. It is certainly an invigorating exercise for the mind - and for the fingers. Such is the intent of Six Minute Story - a "microfiction experiment". It's quite a simple concept. As soon as you opt to submit a story, a prompt appears (perhaps a word, a phrase, or a picture) to suggest a story to write, and a timer starts ticking down from six minutes. Once the timer gets to zero, you can't write another word. It turns out attempting to do this is quite an adrenaline rush, and, I must admit, I failed to write anything remotely submittable at the first few attempts. Nothing ventured, nothing gained - and no need to submit if you don't quite manage it.

I was drawn to write a review of the Six Minute Story site immediately on seeing it, and reading the delightful FAQ - without a doubt, even if this seems an unusual concept, the site distinguishes itself immediately by having one of the most crisp, clean, bold, elegant and above all readable designs I have seen in a long time. All too often these days sites manage to fill themselves with so much annoying clutter to make them look hideous and unusable, particularly sites that have a "social" angle - which Six Minute Story does. You can follow other members of the site, look out for their submissions, upvote contributions and leave comments; and the site has managed to include all that functionality very, very cleanly. What may not be immediately apparent is that the design of the site - bright colors, large, legible text - actually appears to achieve a lot towards improving the writing environment. This is something you can only experience if you give it a try. If you find the Six Minute Story environment inviting, and you are at all a serious writer, you might wonder why on earth you're trying your craft in an over-featured, over-grown word processor with microscopic fonts.

The experience of crafting a submission is certainly worth trying; it will, after all, only take you six minutes to discover if this is for you or not. The very clean and uncluttered writing window appears, with a panel on the right which will, once you start, contain the "prompt". Prompts come in several forms, and the site developer is looking to increase even further on the variety and selection. Most of the prompts I have seen have been intriguing still photographs, with just the right amount of ambiguity to lead to quite a variety of interpretations. Another type is the definition of hero, villain, and goal. On Fridays (quite convenient for #fridayflash, methinks) the prompt is freeform, allowing you to write about anything. Of course, as the FAQ points out, nothing is forcing you to write to the prompt, but writing to that constraint makes it a challenge. Below the text area are a few other entry fiends for a title and selection of a license. Creative Commons is the order of the day here; and, quite rightly, the site makes it clear that if that's not for you, then by all means post your stories elsewhere. Hopefully most of us can be reasonable about this, and contribute to an ever-growing, shareable collection of spontaneous stories. All these entry fields below the text can be left until after the story is complete; so be warned, as soon as you click in the text field, the prompt will appear and the clock will begin ticking.

How on earth do you write a story in six minutes? It turns out to be remarkably challenging, particularly if your typing skills, like mine, are two-finger hunt-and-peck and your ability to think on your feet is, well, never been tasked like this before. After a few failed attempts, I thought I might share the following six tips on how you actually get a story written in six minutes. If I can do it, I'm sure others can:

1. Are you sitting comfortably? Believe it or not, this seemed to make an enormous difference. Lounging on the bed or with the laptop where its name suggests actually doesn't work. Sit up, in a good chair, at a good table, with a good keyboard, a good distance from the screen. It matters. And, as I hinted before, if this matters for this experiment, then it matters for your daily writing, too.
2. Don't worry about how "good" it is. Probably the easiest way to completely lock up while attempting this exercise is worrying about whether or not what you're writing is any good. Don't. Just completely, utterly, ignore it. It appears worrying about whether your work is any good is probably one of the main things that might make it awful. Seriously, just eliminate this from your mind; you might actually be surprised how good what comes out actually is.
3. Don't even think about editing. This is pretty much an extension to what's above. You won't have time to go back and edit; in fact, I somewhat doubt you'll have time to move the cursor at all. The editing gets in the way; just let the words pour out, stream-of-consciousness style. Again, you might be surprised about how coherent you become, and your work is freed from death by revision, as the FAQ gleefully states.
4. Think three-act play. Act I needs to be finished in two minutes. If you're going to have time for a story, with at least some plot development and resolution, you're going to have to have all your characters brought in within the first third of your time. Yep, two minutes. One hundred and twenty seconds. My advice would be to try to avoid being artsy-fartsy here and give them names pretty quickly. The first sentence would be ideal, wouldn't it?
5. You should know where you're going after those two minutes, too. After those first two minutes, that gives you four minutes for the plot and the conclusion. Do yourself a favor here and at least have some idea of where you're going by here. Don't try to write that conclusion and then join the two ends up; that's not writing stream-of-consciousness. Just have an idea of how deep a situation you can dig; and exactly how you're going to dig your characters out in the closing act. Oh, and don't even think of finishing with And then I woke up. It was all a dream. You haven't done that since fifth grade, right? That's the sort of excuse for running out of time you don't need. Just because you're short on time, doesn't mean you can't plan.
6. Save yourself a few last seconds. You'll need them. This is just wise use of your time. Keep that concluding sentence in the back of your mind, as soon as it comes to you (hopefully somewhere around two minutes) and know you'll have to rattle that out in the closing seconds. Much better to have a story that ends, than one that doesn't.

Once it's done, fill out your title, keywords, choose your license, and submit it. Here's mine. No, I don't consider it a great work of literature, but it was certainly an experience, and an exciting one at that. Considering the time pressure element, I thought the result was surprisingly good - or is it because of the time pressure element? Quite possibly, this method of extricating fiction from the most difficult type of human on the planet - a would-be writer - may actually have something going for it. I'd very strongly recommend anyone with any level of writing expertise or ambition should give this a try; after all, it'll take no more than six minutes of your time. You might just discover something very much to your liking.

Visit Six Minute Story, and while you're there, check out darlingman1970. You can also follow @6minutestory on Twitter, and suggestions are always welcomed.