Morgajel.net

If you ever see me talking to myself, I’m just working through ideas for my book, honest… Here’s a good example of what I’m chomping on right now.

So I’ve been thinking, why does Ziggy’s Aunt Makuran hate Ziggy so much? Why does his cousin resent him?

First off, Ziggy is adopted, so take that into account.

Originally I thought it was because she was upset that Keltrem was made chief instead of her(since she’s female), and resented him for it because she is the eldest child. When Keltrem’s biological son died, she knew her son Gunthorm would be the next chief. When Keltrem adopted Ziggy, she blamed him, and raised her son to hate them both.

…but that didn’t Gel. Why didn’t Kinnon, Marukan’s husband hate Ziggy? There was power to be had if his son became chief… unless it wasn’t his son.

What if Marukan’s first husband was killed in battle by Keltrem’s decision? That is a much better reason not to forgive her brother. But why would Gunthorm share that hate? He was the son of the first husband… and Kinnon adopted him and had another child with Marukan. Kinnon would feel empathy towards Keltrem’s plight with an adopted son, and give ziggy the benefit of the doubt in private, but be distant when around Marukan.

Marukan’s second son (Agaleron) was fathered by Kinnon, and doesn’t care about all that crap, but since his older brother hates ziggy, he hates ziggy as well.

Gunthorm doesn’t empathize with ziggy being adopted because he doesn’t see Kinnon as a father figure, he sees him as a guy who married his mom. There’s tension there.

Lets back up a bit. Keltrem and his wife Zimissa had a son named Botulf. When Botulf was very young, he wandered near some contaminated turnips and ate one, then died of poisoning. That’s what everyone things. … but did Marukan have a role in that? intentional or unintentional?

Zimissa was heartbroken. Keltrem comforts her. Years later, she becomes pregnant again, but miscarries several months short. (did Marukan have a role in that? just how evil is she??)

Zimissa is devastated, tries to commit suicide (did Marukan have a role in that?) She does so by walking past the dark curtain into the plane of chaos. Keltrem follows, but watches her die, unable to save her. Kinnon (the best tracker in the tribe) witnesses this.

Keltrem is despondent, returns to the tribe, only to walk away without saying a word. Marukan takes command of the tribe much to the anger of the elders.

Keltrem wanders, finds Ziggy, thinks it’s a gift from the gods for his loss.

Keltrem returns several days later, tells all what happened. They accept this as truth, and kick Marukan to the curb.

This adds much more depth to the family dynamics.

This is what I was thinking about this morning.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on?

• Round of layoffs at work
• Friend diagnosed with cancer
• Another round of layoffs at work.
• Jackie became a pampered chef consultant
• Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground.
• 10% paycut at work
• Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them.
• Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book
• Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2
• started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

So I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve finished the cleanup of the first two chapters of book 1; hopefully I’ll finish the rest shortly, but it’s very slow going. We’ll see where things head in the next few months- I expect more crappiness.

I recently crossed the 100k barrier and came to a realization- this book is way too long. I think I’m gonna chop it after section 7 (90k words, 360 or so pages) and split it into two books-

The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Rise
The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Fall

This means that the first book is technically complete and ready for a revision. I’d like to finish the rough draft of both books before I proceed with a second draft of the first.

Jackie is about to start working heavy on revising the first section- hopefully that’ll mean I’ll have something for you guys to read soon.

muahahahahaha.

So I’ve started on another book- this one however isn’t a novel, it’s a notebook for guitar students. The first two pages contain a layout of notes on the fretboard, commonly played chords (open, barred and power), pentatonic modes, and relationship of the guitar and tablature to standard musical notation.

The rest of the book will follow a simple format, allowing notes, sketches and some notation on the left page and the right containing 6 tab staffs similar to this:

e|----------------------------------------
B|----------------------------------------
G|----------------------------------------
D|----------------------------------------
A|----------------------------------------
E|----------------------------------------


If you can think of anything else that should be added to the first two pages of cheat sheet, let me know. I also need a name for this beast, something better than "Morgajel's Guitar Notebook".


Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those.

Family

The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now. He’s just now to the point where he’s taking his first steps. He’s a smart kid, very inquisitive, but stubborn. Within a few years he’ll be learning how to read and write- I’m guessing it won’t be long until I’m teaching him how to program. He’s got an eye for any type of electronics, but goes nutty for my blackberry or laptop. Yeah, he’s a geek in training.

Jackie’s been doing fairly well, all things considered. She’s been staying home with Ian rather than going back to work, and it’s driving her a little stir crazy. To help ease the cabin fever, she got a laptop for christmas- Ian wasn’t letting her stay in the office, so now she has a way to keep in contact with people from the living room.

Weddings

This was the year of the wedding… Brad and Erin, Jordan and Beth, Matt and Carrie, William and Charleen, Jackie’s friend Joslyn, Jackie’s sister Lori, and Paul and Kristen. I only made it to 4 of the weddings, but I was standing up in two of them. The ones we went to were all in Grand Rapids, so we had the joy of driving back and forth 155 miles each way, with the added bonus of dropping Ian off somewhere along the way

Work

Work started off pretty rough. I have a habit of reflecting the attitudes of those around me, and my supervisor at the beginning of the year was pretty negative. That coupled with Ian’s birth and all the associated expenses turned me into a pretty miserable person. Fortunately the supervisor left and was replaced with a cautious optimist. Things got better- so much so that I just passed the 1 year mark at my current place and still find it interesting and entertaining.

Technologies

I’ve played with many new technologies this year- Jboss, Netscaler and CentOS being the three foremost. I’ve dug back into ruby with a couple of new projects, as well as LDAP and a plethora of new utilities. I even picked up a bit of python. This trend doesn’t look like it’s gonna let up, so the job should be exciting and interesting for some time to come.

Projects

This year saw me move away from music and go back towards software (although I have been playing harmonica in the car at stoplights on the way to work). I joined the Luma team as head cheerleader and started the QT4 branch. After becoming frustrated with the python, qt3->qt4 transition and the codebase in general, I started an unofficial sister project, Ruma. I still sit in the Luma channel and help when I can, but I’m gonna sit back and wait until we’re ready for QT4- hopefully we’ll scrap the entire codebase and start fresh.

Right now I have two other developers “working” for me on Ruma, Lars and Hiro. They’ve put a lot of effort into bringing this bad boy to life, and I’m thankful I’ve had their help. For those of you not aware, Luma and Ruma are LDAP administration tools. As a System Administrator, I use LDAP a lot, so having specialized tools can be helpful.

Another project I started this year was competing in National Novel Writing Month. I finished the rough draft for my first book, Sinblade, a week early. It’s only 150 pages or so, but not a bad start all things considered. Jackie’s (sorta) working on revising it, and once she’s done I’ll open it up for others to start giving me feedback. I’m excited and nervous about it. If it takes off and people like it, I have 6 or so more books that I’m interested in writing.

The money situation is still pretty tight, but it’s getting better. Hopefully next year will be as much of an improvement over this year as this was over last year.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display:

It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book:

• Rough Draft: First complete version of the story.
• First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked.
• Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged. English is checked. Plot is evened out. Facts are checked.
• Third Draft: Spell-checking, punctuation, and formatting.
• Fourth Draft: Repeat of third draft with different audience.
• Final Draft: What’s sent to Lulu.com for printing.

My goal is to get the Rough Draft done by December 1st, and that seems a easily reachable goal. Next is to get the First Draft (the first copy to leave the house) out the door for editing and revising by the end of December. I’m not sure how reasonable a goal that will be- I have some catching up to do on my neglected Ruma project. As for the rest of the draft, there are no hard and fast rules- I suspect I’ll be lucky to get to the second draft, let alone the third or fourth.

The end goal is to self-publish through Lulu.com, a print-on-demand book service. This means you’ll be able to buy an actual paperback copy of my book! How cool is that?

Seeing as how it’s now 40 minutes into Thanksgiving, I think I should send out some thanks to those that have helped me:

• Jackie: for bearing with me through another time-consuming project. Hopefully this one will make money.
• Ian: for mostly behaving when I was trying to write.
• VP: for encouraging me to compete in NaNoWriMo with his books, Shining Star and Pulling Strings
• yojimbo, dev_null, mylo, my coworkers, and everyone else who offered to help me: I’ll be taking you up on your offers to help revise

Thanks again everyone for the support! Wish me luck!

Update: Don’t take this post as an example of my writing- it was 1am.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.
The contest started yesterday, and I managed to get off to a great start with 4000 words on the dot- you can check my progress here.

ok, now back to the important writing.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

One thing I really like so far is the Scaffolding system- once you create an object model (say, a Photo) and have it generate the table to store it in, it can auto-generate the web interface to allow you to create/edit/delete entries without having to muck with it. The coolest part is if you make any DB changes, the interface is automatically updated. That was something I’ve always hated- updating interface code to reflect DB changes.
At DP I wrote a minor system to do something like that in ASP, but it was still pretty crappy (and dangerous). Dendrite had created a system at SPX called Skel which was hideous (his words), but did sorta the same thing. The main project I worked on there (before it was cancelled) was a replacement for Skel that was very similar to this, but for perl. Now I really wish I woulda kept up with ruby because had I known of rails, I could have essentially ported it to perl and saved a lot of time.

I’m hoping that the rest of rails is as cool as this scaffolding code. It’s taking me a while (5 hours broken up) to wrap my head around it, but it’s finally starting to make sense. I’m looking forward to finding out more about it.