Linkage Vol. 2

More posts on editing, this time a list of the editing podcasts Writing Excuses have done. March is NaNoEdMo, so we will be focusing on editing our novels at the Writers Meet in MilkWood. At least, I will be. This post is to give me an easier link to add to my nifty SecondLife notecard. Hope they are a help to you.

Killing Your Darlings
This Sucks and I'm a Horrible Writer
Talking Revision with Moshe Feder(editor at Tor)
Trimming
Working with Editors
Line Editing
Line Editing Dialogue
Critiquing Dan's First Novel

This is my FAVORITE writing podcast, hilarious hosts(especially Dan) and lots of good information.

As to Inky's word count challenge, I've been more of a 250 a dayer than a 1000 a dayer. Family crap and rejections keeping my head in the wrong place. It's a work in progress.

Happy editing!

Dear Mr. Corgan

Billy,

I hope it's okay to call you that. I have been a fan of yours for a long time. I read a recent interview with you in Rolling Stone. My man bought me the magazine to cheer me up because you were in it.

And some would say this is an oxymoron. I'm a total fangirl of yours, and even I have to admit you are a bit cynical and depressing at times. This interview was no exception, but I wasn't surprised or saddened by that. The fact that you had to call them did shock me a bit, but you are right in saying that you have always been undervalued. Sometimes whining is warranted. Not quite so much, but I am emotional to a fault, so I certainly understand you're upset at feeling forgotten.

I have not forgotten you. I still play Stumbeline, both from my repurchased copy of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and on my own guitar. “And what you never knew/Can never get to you”. Those words have gotten me through countless depressions caused by teasing in school. Then there's the song I would use as my wrestling entrance music, Mayonnaise. It has felt like my personal anthem more times than I can count, cause “no one fails like me”.

Except you of course, sir. It has been troubling to watch you since the New York incident, like the Moon card in tarot, secret enemies swirled around you and the music was affected. I love the acoustic versions of anything you have ever produced, but Adore hurt dude. Smashing Pumpkins and electronica refuse to mix in my head, even ten years later. Parts of Machina were great, though, and I Iove Zwan.

I swear I tried to convert others to the cause, my brother, but some of the songs were too damn happy. You confused us, it has been a common fault of yours since the original family split apart in such a violent fashion. In any case, and despite your faults and failures, you have always inspired me.

Thus, I declare you my hero, Mr. Corgan. Sorry to put such a responsibility on your thin shoulders, but no one else has ever come close to motivating me to be better. Motivating me to be depressed, maybe, and some say you do that to them, but not I. You speak so close to what I feel, how I see the world. I don't know how or why, it has always been this way, since the first time I heard Disarm.

That's right, I disagree on which is your sacred song. It ain't Today. That one is chump change compared to Tonight, Tonight. It is all good that you have released it to mainstream to finance further musical journeys. I want to hear them, be inspired to evolve. But please don't let me ever hear Tonight, Tonight in an Ambien commercial.

I'd vomit a bit in my mouth, and you don't want to inspire that sort of thing, now do you, Billy?

Now, how does this tie into the whole time management thing. Yes, I know I was supposed to be all daily about those posts and stuff, and I am still gonna try for that. Weeds got in the way for the past few nights. Awesome show, but I have been staying up too late watching the DVDs and not motivated to post about scheduling in the mornings. Billy said in the Rolling Stone article that he wakes up at seven in the morning everyday.

Well god dammit, then I am too, Mr. Hero.

This is an important step in my quest to have a more defined and productive schedule. Wake up time is now in slices, with a definite start and end, as I already have a ten am start time in place for the boy's lessons. Wake up time begins at seven am now, the end, cause that's what my hero does. I will then have my coffee with eggs and toast. Billy, you do the egg white shit but that's not my style, I'll have grandma's scrambled eggs and toast with butter, spanks. This is my Google Reader time as well, so I will be sure to have the Gmail open first to keep up with my reminders after all is in the schedule. Breakfast and Reader from seven to eight, then read or write from eight to ten depending on the day. As Tiger said, got to give myself options with the time so as to be sure to at least to one of them.

Not the fornicating golf player Tiger, my SecondLife buddy Tiger. All my little sl topic posts get cross-posted to her awesome magazine Slick. I need to get on more content for that blog. Gotta put it in the schedule. First we'll start with rising at my hero's chosen time. Maybe the quiet beginnings of a typical day in the neighborhood will inspire my Soothe. I surely hope so.

If I can stick to my hero worship, a detailed explanation of the entrance of this sliced wake up time will be forthcoming after my eggs and toast tomorrow morning.

Thanks for being an inspiration to me, Mr. Corgan, and I hope you manage to receive the recognition you deserve before you die. You have to know that's why they worship Kurt over you. Dating his insane, untalented ex did not help sir. But I forgive you.

With sincerest thanks,

June Stormcrow

Side Project: Oh Google, Please Help me!

Me and time management have issues. I am very much an all or nothing sort of individual, and it makes scheduling anything difficult for me. My brain doesn't want to work along those lines, ignores my pleasant paper reminders. I tore down the "Get Out of Debt Plan" a month ago. It's not like the man or myself sticks to it at all. We both made sincere attempts to reduce spending, but a more realistic plan needs to be worked out. Like, with actual numbers and stuff.

Life is cluttered beyond the finances though. The root of the entire problem is that we aren't the best at scheduling our days. I have a firm block schedule in place, but in practice, I am finding that it is not enough structure to me. The blocks need more slices, clearer defined times. Yet, how do I do this without walking away and ignoring it like I do my other lists?

This is where my call to Google for help comes in. I have tried the Calendar function before, but it didn't translate in more motivation to take nature walks or hit the Absolute Write Sci-Fi chat like I had hoped, due to a complete lack of checking that email address for the reminders. As I am now quite fond of Gmail and Reader, this is no longer a problem.

How far do I go in my slices, however? My other efforts to schedule often suffered from being too detailed, and thus, too hard to follow without feeling I had put myself in a straight jacket. The current "schedule" consists of six blocks of time: wake up time, morning school, lunch, afternoon school, dinner, after dinner. The after dinner section consists of two slices already - family time and after kid's in bed time. I thought this obvious openness would give me some structure without overwhelming me, after a long period of life being too chaotic to even dream of scheduling it. It has helped me bring structure, just not enough. I flail in the mornings and evenings, so many things that I could do overwhelming me and leading to inevitable shutdown, fried brain mindlessly roving SecondLife, Twitter, or Reader instead of writing something, ANYTHING, or doing one of a hundred things around the house.

Housework is never "done". It's one of the reasons I despise it.

I feel an overwhelming need for more balance in my life. Over the coming months, I hope to use the Google Calendar to its fullest, bending its functions to my will and slicing the broad divisions of my schedule into more structured pieces of a whole that will be more productive. Today I am about spent after weeks of insomnia, agonizing over how to better organize my time. Seriously. Being less productive than I feel I could be makes me depressed, until I burst in flaming tears. Tomorrow I'll come to a conclusion about how to divide my broad blocks, following my friend's suggestion of "give yourself a choice". All slices of time will have two options. It works with the boy's schooling, it could translate to the rest of our time.

Where does Google fit into all this again? I hope to use its connection of Blogger, Buzz, Reader and Gmail, along with the Calendar and Document functions, to make my real life and online life more streamlined. Let's see if email reminders work when my lazy ass actually checks the email account they go to, shall we?

Full Steam Hunt

Just got back to me office after checking out a few places on the 2nd Annual Steam Hunt, a grid-wide scavenger hunt that has shown me all the various awesomeness the steampunk culture has added to our virtual home. A few of these places were fixes by the owner, and two others were in hopes of being able to find some well hidden gears. I succeeded in finding one that had eluded me.

I have been on a few other scavenger hunts since I rezzed a few months ago, stumbling upon the first at the shop of one of my friends. The Bitten and Frost Hunt was a great idea, and did introduce me to many cool things on the grid, and other hunts, but the two path concept lead to confusion that the organizers and store owners could not seem to eradicate. I eventually gave up about 50 stores into the Bitten Path, having been lead astray by other hunts and non existant snowflakes quite enough for my taste. I dabbled in various Christmas hunts, and my inventory exploded with much higher quality free stuff than I was used to.

I had to take a break from hunting during the Valentine's season, though I do have a few bleeding hearts in my collection from stores I frequent anyway. The Steam Hunt is very well organized. I happened to be on late last Sunday, so received the notecard containing all the landmarks in a group notice right at midnight on the first of March. You can join the hunt group yourself and receive the hunt information here. They are also on top of fixing any broken links in the chain of stores.

The purpose of these hunts is for there to be a benefit for all parties involved. The theory is, by hiding a small object - usually associated with the theme of the hunt, the Steam Hunt uses bronze spinning gears - you keep the hunters in your store long enough to count towards the traffic rating of your shop and also, long enough for things to rez properly and customers to be won, groups joined, and landmarks picked up because the hunters wish to return another day. But why let yourself be exploited in this way?

Well, the contents of the gears are not your average freebies. Some joker put in this crazy, oversize, mechanical steampunk bonnet, but overall, everything I have opened has been fab. The dress at Arieala Andel & Serrita Ember Store has garnered ten compliments this weekend. The jewelry set from Amaranthus is high quality as well, my avatar is wearing the earrings. This is a stretch for me in any life. Jewelry has to be perfect, or I just won't bother.

There are plenty of adornments for male and female avatars. +ezura+ even has a guys' suit in their hunt gift, as do about half of the clothing designers participating. I have two new pocket watches to try out, and all bracelets and necklaces seem to have male and female versions, at least in terms of size. Gadgetry and fantastic buildings abound as well. Builder's Brewery created an awesome Steampunk Cottage just for this hunt, and the Tripod house from Enzo's is a green windowed whimsical dream. The monocles from my favorite dark Alice in Wonderland store, ..::Rasetsukoku::.., and Mire, an excellent men's store, are perfect for any aspiring inventor or creator.

So how do you get all this great free stuff for your very own? You go hunt about the stores, of course, searching high and low for those elusive spinning bronze gears. Some stores have hints, some do not. Some participants try to hide the gear near their steampunk inspired creations, others shrink it and hide it behind, or even embedded in, their displays. The hiding of the gears is at the participating creator's discretion. Now, I will admit to not being the most observant person in the world, and I found 127 of 130 gears. You can too.

My favorite friend while on a hunt is my camera controls. If you do not already have them up on your screen, they are under View in the upper taskbar (unless you are using the Beta of Viewer 2.0, in which case they are on the bottom). The control to the left rotates your view, the slider in the middle is zoom, and the control to the right moves you side to side and up and down. You can only zoom so far, so sometimes you will have to play with the two crosshair controls to see behind things and find the gears, or whatever object is being used for the particular hunt you are on. There are at least ten hunts going on gridwide at any one time. Linden Lab would do themselves a favor by adding these scavenger hunts to their main site, it's a good way to get a new person oriented with the controls of their avatar and the true vastness of this virtual world we call home.

In short, if your inventory has been feeling a bit lean, you feel the need to get out of the house on a LOW budget, or you just want a slew of new things to play with, head over to the start point or any of the stores listed in this blog and get yourself full of steam, like my clockwork squirrel buddy and I.

Beta is Crashtastic!

I started writing this blog post while waiting for my inventory to reload on 1.23 viewer. My beta testing of the new 2.0 viewer for SecondLife was FAIL in a lot of ways, yet it succeeded in showing me where Linden Lab is very shortsighted.

I also have a greater sympathy for those that have a lot of problems crashing on the current viewer because they have older systems. I am going to be in their shoes if I am forced to use 2.0 to stay involved on the grid. It is how "games" go, though. The new versions always require the latest hardware, no matter what they say in their minimum requirements. Now, you say, SL is not a game.

When it comes to its use of computer resources, oh yes it is. Which brings me to the point I would really like to discuss in this blog. How is this viewer going to improve the new user experience when their hardware is not going to be able to handle it?

I spent a lot of time on Myspace. I met a lot of cool people there. I did not, however, meet a lot of people with high end systems, unless they were a power gamer, or needed the functionality for their work. The average, casual user of the internet has a computer relatively close to mine in specs, which in SL terms means at the very minimum of listed requirements for Viewer 1.23(my current choice), and if my experience with 2.0 is any indication, below the minimum needed to run Viewer 2.0. Shoot, the one friend I almost got on SL with tales of a virtual wrestling federation had issues with 1.23 crashing the second time he logged in.

He hasn't been back. He went to City of Heroes, better customer support and better game performance on his machine. This a dude who would have spent hundreds of dollars here over time, and gotten his father's business a presence on here as well. All lost because Linden Lab expects casual users to have top of the line machines. More to the point, his machine is only a year old and had issues. You can't retain users like this. You can't live in an imaginary world where everybody has top of the line computers and expect to get new users. Do the Lindens live in SL and pay no attention to the average net user? I believe that is the truth of this matter, since the Facebook style of the chat is an obvious push to get some of that crowd.

If the problems of this viewer crashing on lower end systems are not solved, this may be the death knell for SL in the internet media. If they succeed in getting new users over here from Facebook with their "noob" friendly interface, they're going to lose the majority of them at the first crash. It's that simple. People expect the magic box to just work, dammit. Those are 75% of your heavy users on social networking sites. If they had computers set up to play the newest bells and whistles online game, they would be there, not building up plots on Farmville. I know this, because I have a lot of friends that try to get me to play the Facebook apps with them. They'd be here if their system could handle the viewer.

In conclusion, the UI is perfect to lure in the noobs, but the push will fail the first time they crash. For those with a real urge to join the grid, they might give it a few more tries. I have crashed about 20 times in the past two days trying to test out the features of the new viewer. Media on a prim is great. The sidebar smooshing my view of the world is not. It crashes my graphics card. It would also be nice to use my inventory at all. I'm not sure if my full inventory has downloaded ONCE during my beta test experience. I am pretty sure it hasn't. The most consistent thing that threw me into FAIL? Searching my inventory. As soon as I type a letter into the search bar, it is instant shutdown. I could try to toss it off as just an issue because I use Linux, but I don't think that is the case. Said example friend is a Windows user. In fact, 1.23 never crashes on Linux for me, but if I try to run SL in Windows, I join the legions of crash abused.

Sorry Lindens, but new users aren't going to run out and buy a new machine so they can spend enough time in SL, without crashing, to get hooked. You need to make the sidebar an overlay or you're not going to retain the majority of the new users you're looking for. So sad that you have made most of your current residents irate over a viewer that won't work effectively for the audience it is targeting. So sad. Get out of the techgeek bubble you live in and learn about what the average internet user is running to access the web. Then build a viewer that will actually work well on their machines. If you don't, I may have to leave the grid. I have never been fond of watching anything die.