Archive for November, 2009

50k+ words

14 years
by in Uncategorized

earlier this week I crossed the 50k line on Ziggy’s second book. As I ramp down on this and switch back to editing the first book, I’ve been thinking about the different categories of editing. There are several different groupings- Technical, Stylistic, etc… I’m sure there’s an official english language checklist somewhere, but until I find it, I’m gonna try and write them up.

Why? Because when it comes time for other people to edit my books, it would be nice if they kept these changes in mind and maybe color coded them so I’d be able to tell what is what.

Technical

  • Spelling/Punctuation
  • Sentence Structure
  • Paragraph Structure
  • Chapter Structure
  • Book Structure

Fact Checking

  • Consistent character naming
  • Consistent timelines
  • Consistent Distances
  • Consistent motivations
  • Consistent aging

Naming

  • Map up to date
  • Location names consistent with races/area
  • Locations named
  • Characters named
  • ALL names pronounceable

Personalities

  • Consistent character naming
  • Consistent motivations
  • Consistent aging

Perspective

  • Maintain 1st person
  • Clue reader in on Ziggy’s perspective, other party perspective, and reality
  • Validate stretches of logic
  • Explain moral choices

Let me know if I’m missing a group or need to flesh something out.

Outstanding

14 years
by in Uncategorized

So a coworker just shared a fun story with me- His bank, we’ll call it Pursue Bank, had a nice little glitch in their payment system. when he tried to change how he paid his mortgage. Said bank then charged him not one, not two, but three mortgage payments against his checking account. Then charged him overdraft fees.

It’s nice to see someone else suffer from the bad code issues that I see on a weekly basis. The only downside is my mortgage is also through said company. Jackie and I have been thinking about refinancing since our interest rate could be a bit lower, so this was a good kick in the rear to get away from these guys.

Update: Site migration, Nanowrimo, and Marble Maddness.

14 years
by in Uncategorized

Migration

Ok, so as the past two posts have hinted, Jackie and I have migrated most of our sites to a new host, Midphase. I compared 50+ packages to find a baseline for what we needed and rough cost. The initial round checked out

Disk Space, Monthly Traffic, Uptime SLA, Setup Fee, Price / month, SSH access, OS, MySQL databases, Dedicated IP addresses.

From there we narrowed it down to a dozen or so packages by eliminating overly expensive packages, bizarre limitations, required domain transfers, etc.

From there we checked Live Chat support, Statistic aggregators, Cron access, and Ad Credits.

The end result was Midphase- they had the features we needed, little chance of overrunning bandwidth or storage limits, and the best bang for buck value. Half our sites are already migrated, with OSC and Ian’s site next on the list.

NaNoWriMo

Also started NaNoWriMo this week- just hit 20k words around midnight. Last year I was closer to 30k words at this point, but I suppose it’s to be expected that I’m not as amped up about the second book in the series when I haven’t completed the first. It’s all good though- I’ll still power through it and get it done by christmas- that’s the goal, not sure how realistic it is.

Marble Maddness

One of the reasons I’ve been behind is Ian’s relatively new obsession with a marble maze- we bought him a $20 kit and he loved it. The only real problem was some of the parts that clipped togetherdidn’t give the included marbles enough clearance- either by poor design or manufacturing defect. anyways, I got it in my head to build him one. I started small- 12″x8″ zigzag and he went nuts. Within a few days he was asking me to build him a bigger one, which is what I’ve been working on. the new one is 30″x28″ and an absolute monster. Fortunately you don’t get Mesothelioma (lung cancer) from aluminum shavings, just Alzheimers (I’ve been cutting and shaving aluminum rails for the marbles to use).

I’ll have pictures when I’m done.

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