As you may remember from last year, September 7th is Woodvale Day–the holiday people in the School Kids SG universe celebrate as the founding of Woodvale. In honor of Woodvale Day 2011, here’s some world-building for you all, namely an update to the Towns of the Prattcorn Valley list. Enjoy!
First things first–I’d like to remind you all of that $2 book offer I’ve had up for the last week or so. You can click on either the obvious ad or the normal link to the Store, both of which are just a few pixels to your left. Go on, go for it!
If you’ve been coming to this site for a while, you may remember seeing mention of the document-scanning project I’ve been working on for well over a year now. The most daunting thing about it that I haven’t brought up before is that I’m constantly generating new papers that need to be scanned, in the form of memo books and other handwritten notes. This leaves me with a conundrum: on the one hand, if I decide that I have to scan everything, I virtually guarantee (a) that I will be scanning stuff forever and ever, and (b) that I will wear out my scanner long before its time. Besides, constantly scanning or typing things up usually feels like a big chore–most nights, I’d rather be writing new stuff. But on the other hand, if I don’t scan everything, I risk accidentally losing a portion of my work irrevocably (due to fire, theft, or something else horrible), and as long as all my notebooks are the only copies of themselves in existence, I absolutely have to keep them all around in my apartment, which really isn’t big enough to support the amount of paper I generate indefinitely. I’d thought for a while about using that travel laptop I bought to replace any and all future notebooks, but I just couldn’t get around the fact that I like writing longhand.
My solution: the Livescribe Smartpen.
For those of you who aren’t friends with me on Facebook, where I just posted this same thing, here is a hint at what stylesheet-editing a book feels like.
So yeah, I guess I’m writing book five now. And working on getting book one back up for sale. And working on editing together the disparate pieces of book four. And doing a bunch of other things that aren’t even related to SKSG. I’ll be surprised if one of these days I don’t just collapse with a poof and turn into a pile of sand. But it’ll be happy sand.
Today, I want to point you in the direction of one of my creative inspirations, David Willis. Actually, a post about how much I’m (over?)working myself is a pretty apt place to bring him up again–this is a man who is simultaneously writing Shortpacked!, daily toy news, something related to Transformers, and now Dumbing of Age, a reimagining of his previous two comic series, It’s Walky! and Roomies!. He’s my hero. I’m surprisingly excited about DoA (ha!) and I really want it to take off, so please do me (and yourself) a favor and go check it out.
It’s funny…I had started to feel like I was creatively stagnating there for a while, but now that I’m working on book five, I’m realizing how long it’s been since I’ve drafted something new (as opposed to editing something that already existed). I think the absence of that might have been the culprit. Creative types, take note–always keep making new things! How else will you surprise yourself?
As you may have seen on the SKSG Canon Calendar (now in hi-res, finally!), September 7th is “Woodvale Day,” a holiday observed only in…Woodvale! Most people celebrate it as the anniversary of the town’s founding, when the Borough of Woodvale was carved out of the then-much-larger Township of Columbia. I like to think Woodvale is just over 100 years old, having been incorporated as a borough during the New Jersey “Boroughitis” phase of the late 19th century. That article is actually pretty interesting reading.
How would you celebrate Woodvale Day? Me, I put up that new calendar viewer!
Saw this while walking through Queens earlier. Thought that Hurricane Earl had finally arrived.
Still writing a lot. Book one should be back up for sale before too much longer. I randomly wrote a chapter for book five (!) today–I felt it coming and figured I should just go with it. You’ll see it in…a couple of years, I guess. Um.
Sorry for the lack of a real post today–I’m visiting my parents in New Jersey, which provides an excellent opportunity to test that laptop I bought. For the first time in my life, I can write for real (and update my website) on the road! I’m typing this from my little sister’s bedroom! While she annoys me by shoving gay video game porn in my face! It’s a very interesting experience (working with my travel laptop, not having pornography forced on me) and I’m glad the money I spent on this new computer wasn’t wasted.
Here’s a photo from my cell phone of the computer booting up while I look over the manuscript-in-progress I brought along with me:
So something’s been bugging me lately.
My writing directories (as in folders of computerzied files) are getting too huge to easily back up. I find myself having to pick and choose what to copy to my thumbdrives, or to a DVD+R, at any given time. And if I really want to back up everything at once, I have to do it in multiple phases, which takes forever. I know it must seem ridiculous that my writing files exceed the capacity of a DVD–this is due in large part to my artwork folder (which contains book covers, high-quality versions of website images, etc.), but Microsoft Word loves to choke my SKSG folder with hidden, temporary files, so that’s not as small as you’d think, either. And in any case, sometimes it’s hard to remember what I have or haven’t backed up recently–I’d never have to worry if my directories were small enough to back up all together, every time, without it taking like an hour.
So I’ve started contemplating a major directory reorganization, one that would not only allow me to easily target and clear out stuff I never use or look at anymore (e.g. the design for this website circa 2003), but would also make it easy for me to switch between writing on my main computer and that miniature laptop I just bought without getting confused about which draft of something is the most current. Basically, each story would get its own folder, and every draft would be named not by the story’s title, but by the draft’s date, in the highly-sortable format I once used to update The Trio of Triumph. For example, a draft dated today would be named 20100816.doc; you’d only know which story it was a draft of based on which folder it was in. This is more or less already how I handle stories on the verge of publication (it’s how I finished up books one through three of SKSG, in fact), so I know that it’s useful, and would be even more so if I codified the process a bit more.
Referring to the pencils seen in this post, of course. Sorry, I know this is kind of a lame excuse for an update, but I’m on fire right now and I don’t want to stop! I’ll make it up to you with a cute anecdote about my parents’ backyard pool later.
