Okay, this was news a while ago, but it's been sitting in my inbox while I decided what to do with it: through the magic of Amazon's kindle app store, Zork and other interactive fiction games are coming / have arrived on the kindle.

If you're wiggling your eyebrows at the term 'interactive fiction', think "choose your own adventure" on steroids. There's an explanation at the link, but it's essentially a story-based adventure game on computer, but it uses text only - paragraphed descriptions of everything you can look at, touch or otherwise interact with.  You type in commands like "go north", "take keys", "hit troll" "pick lock with straw" and the game responds accordingly. 

They've been quietly developing alongside more conventional computer games, developing quite sophisticated tools for construction of stories and worlds, and even their own annual competitions, and while the learning curve for producing them isn't gentle, it's certainly a fascinating idea to start blending the line between "book" and "game" so thoroughly on the kindle.

I thought I'd do something crazy, and write about something else I'm working on other than writing.

Some of you may have wandered around this site enough to find the software I'm slowly piecing together - SubTracker, which started as a way to track submissions to publishers, because I got sick of working out which magazine would give me the best price / fastest turnaround / take the least rights for any given story or how much any story/publisher had paid me, and because the excel spreadsheet quickly became very, very unwieldy when I added more than a dozen or so publishers. It grew from that into a concept of something to manage the whole business side of writing - basically project management, submissions tracking, sales, revenues, rights and all that jazz. 

This kind of stuff requires a hell of a lot of thinking to do it properly. You can code up a macro-enhanced spreadsheet and be done with it, but the point of SubTracker is that it's eaisier to understand and use, more powerful and (most importantly) can adapt to different needs. Freelancers need different kinds of things than novelists, indie-publishers need different things to tradpubbers. Then there are the poets, comic writers, script writers, screenplay writers and researchers; the agents, magazines, competitions and grants, workshops and editors, indie-pubbers (Amazon), indie-aggregators (Smashwords) and traditional houses. All of those have different requirements, and I haven't even gotten into rights and contracts, yet.

You would be amazed how much information you're playing with when you try to turn the literary industry into a dataset and a list of rules.We have so many exceptions, so many little by-laws and secret rules. And when you have a problem like that, you have two options: create a simple one-size-kinda-fits-all-with-some-shoving which offers little support to the user, or build a complex system that "understands" the information it's playing with, and verges on "magical".*

I've chosen the second. Partly because, as I said, I want software that will do the mundane thinking for me. But I also want something that will help educate authors about the information they should be dealing with, and what their options are. Something that will point out that there's information missing from their royalty statements, or that some rights haven't been clearly stipulated in their contract. Something that'll help them feel empowered when dealing with the manipulative double-think they'll encounter. 

There have been about four versions that never made it past alpha-release**, because there were show-stopping problems in the way I was approaching the solution - too close to the one-size-doesn't-fit-anyone-properly. I'm currently designing the fifth, and taking a very different tack, and so far it seems to be working well - there hasn't yet been a scenario that this version wouldn't be able to handle, and it gives me a lot of flexibility to do things for the user.

It does mean I have to start small. The first beta-release (I don't release my alphas publically, they have too much attitude.) will be very small in comparison to the final build - just submitting stuff to people, and some deadline/event management, and not even the full-featured version of that, either. There are some fundamental aspects that need to be tested with the first release, like the basic user-interface concept, that take extra time at the start. And thanks to full time work, househunting, novels and short stories (not to mention research for the actual algorithms and coding), I don't have a date for the beta release yet.

But I am taking names for people interested in testing, and I'm listening if anyone has feature requests in the comments. (No guarantee they'll be implemented, but I'm listening.) Will keep you posted.

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*I think I lose points for sucumbing to a Steve-Jobs-ism, but "magic" is the kind of impression I'm aiming for.

**For the development-uninitiated: an alpha-release is like a teenager. Nobody likes it,  if you ask it to do something it's just as likely to do something entirely unrelated, it claims that nobody understands it and may well go sulk in its room and paint the walls black. A beta-release is more like a college student: still got a lot of stupid things left to do, but you can generally get it to do what you want, with the occasional surprise frat prank thrown in and a tendency to skive off to attend random protests. A final release is an adult in the workplace: everyone agrees it's supposed to be working and to not poke it too hard in case it stops.

I promised this one to a friend some time ago but I've been procrastinating because it truly is a huge topic and I don't think I have the brain power to really do it justice. But I've been thinking that for the past few weeks whenever I thought about writing it, so that probably means now is as good a time as any.

My friend is in the middle of developing a software package, and the whole intent and purpose of said software is that it be simple and easy to use - it's not just an advantage of it, it's the whole point of that software existing. Because the software it's competing against has a monster of a learning curve. Creating software that's truly intuitive - especially for abstract concepts - is much, much harder than it sounds. But you can take steps towards it, steps that are (to me, at least) so bloody obvious, yet so few developers seem to bother with them. And they're based - hell, they're pretty much copied verbatim - from the principles of good technical writing.

I have a book that became a trilogy that became a series. Or a trilogy-of-trilogies. Though probably more a series, because I'll be switching protagonists. All of which is difficult and perhaps a little laughable, given I haven't actually written the first one yet. (Well, not a lot of it. I've had to pause to reinvent some world that I hadn't painted in because I didn't think I'd be using that bit. But I digress). Though if J. K. can have seven books in her head before her train reaches the station and she's penned a word, I don't see why I can't have nine before I've finished writing the first.

The thing is, the plotlines of a book, a trilogy and a series are different. Or not different per se - they still follow the same principles. The difficulty is in the layers. (Obligatory Shrek reference here.) Plot are like onions. Or like onions would be if they grew with layers twisted over on themselves so that the outside layer was also the third layer from the center, and if you peeled it then you'd also peel all the other layers because they were all connected, and if you dye one green, another one goes purple. So not really like onions. But I'll explain:

My mother's recent guest-post (which I gleefully titled “A Writing Bucket Of Your Very Own”) made a strong case for keeping all the snippets of ideas, the writing games and exercises and half-finished stories. And not only keeping them, but keeping them in a place where you can easily get to them and reread them. They need to be things that can be found.

If you're a pen-and-paper type person, then what you really need is a physical bucket (or ten) and a fast-and-loose categorising system. One that puts things into general piles so you know where to start looking for something, but doesn't crimp the edges of your creativity. Filing by genre, general theme, mood, common 'things' or even length or snippet 'type' (writing game, idea, half-baked story) could all work (though not all at once).

If your writing have moved into the digital realm*, then there are literally thousands of software packages that can help you. Finding one that works the way you want to work is the trick. I'm going to break them down into broad categories with some examples of each.

*If you're half-and-half, then make a decision already. Storing things arbitrarily in two places is just a way of creatively losing your work. Either transcribe it all to computer, or print it all out and get a bigger bucket. 

Nano update: How're you going? Life has well and truly gotten itself in the way for me. Though I have managed to keep noodling along, I'm far behind where I planned to be - my catch-up week didn't really happen, I was too busy being ill and chasing other things up, and with seven days to write 35,000 words, I'm no longer fussed about the deadline. I can write eight thousand words in a day. I've done so before - the last novel I finished I wrote the last two chapters in a flurry of 9000 words in one day. But it took me most of the day to do it, and I have things like work to attend, exams to write, games stories to plan and lectures to prepare. 

I don't consider it as 'failing' Nano, though - and if you're in a similar boat to me, neither should you. The only thing that matters are the words you did write, not the ones you didn't. The important thing is what you have achieved through Nano. Personally, I've filled in the blanks at the beginning of my novel, and worked out what on earth's happening in the first half of the dreaded middle section - to me, that's a pretty solid achievement, I'm happy with that. My goal for the rest of November is to have written those scenes that I've planned out, and plan out the second half of the middle.

Writing tools and tips from other people

I've been sent two LifeHacker posts about writing. One of them's their usual collection of "Top X Blanks, as suggested by our readers", in this case, the Blank being low-distraction writing software. Personally, it's not the software itself that I tend to be distracted with - it's all the other things I could be doing with my computer, or the things on my desk, or in another room, etc. But others may find the ability to fiddle with character profiles or whatever worse than a man with a treetrimmer next door.

Their other article - 10 tips for better writing - I have some disagreements with. First and foremost that it should more aptly be named "10 rather randomly selected suggestions that might work for some people written as if they'll work for everyone". If you're including scheduling, planning, grammar, journalling, motivation and research in the one list, then either you've no idea about your subject matter, or you were really in a hurry.

They do have some good notions - their suggestions for motivation, reading widely, journalling your progress and recognising your own errors is sound advice - although probably more useful if taken a step further than they did. Knowing what mistakes you often make in story and character will save you far more work than common spelling mistakes.

But Numbers 1 and 2 especially I think is a matter of personal taste and opinion. When I'm stuck, I find the best thing is to just write the next bit any old how, in any direction. It usually ends up being not where I wanted to go, but in the process of discovering that, I figure out where I do want to go, and usually some other ideas as well. If I waited until I had it all planned out, all the fun would be gone. I'd know how the story ended. And the key of a real story is in the details, the little twists and turns that you can only discover as you're writing the thing, not planning it. So sure, outline things if you want to, but don't feel that you have to.

As for scheduling, I've never been able to keep a writing schedule. Possibly because my life has never had a regular schedule, but I'm just not a schedule person. If I write down that I'm going to do something at 9am, and something else at 3, you can bet I'll be trying to do them both together at 5pm. Or possibly tomorrow. The closest I can get is to make a list of things to do in the order I'm going to do them, and then I'll stick to it 90% of the time. Well, maybe 75.

I find my best writing times are the times I didn't expect to be writing. When my doctor's appointment's been moved half an hour, or the service guys are going to take an extra hour on my car - whip out my laptop and write. So I find their rule of "you mustn't write outside your scheduled time" to be ludicrous and unrealistic. Life does not run to a schedule, and life is what you have to fit around when you're trying to write. It's hard enough as it is without handing yourself a golden excuse of "oops, I missed my writing time, oh well, no writing for me today". Pah. By all means, make yourself a schedule if you're a schedule person. But don't ever tell yourself that you're not allowed to write. Unless, of course, you're doing so for reverse psychology - that can actually work. But preventing yourself from salvaging otherwise-wasted moments for writing time is not doing yourself any favours.

Last week I was sent a link to something interesting - Scrivner, writing software package that I've long been interested in (and just as long been miffed that they were mac-only) was holding an open windows beta*. It is, unfortunately, not a beta of their Scrivner 2.0 version, but an earlier version (I say unfortunately, because some of the stuff in Scrivner2.0 for mac looks very problem-solvy for the few shortcomings I've found) but I downloaded it, dutifully went through their introduction video and tutorials and had a play.

I should mention, before I get into this, that Scrivner's having a promotion at the moment - anyone who enters and wins Nano gets Scrivner for windows half-price.

Like yWriter, Scrivner is writer's software that knows its place - which is to get the hell out of the way of the writer and let them write. There are no questions, character profiles, location profiles, goal mapping, etc (though you can certainly - and easily - set those up as a template if you want them), no pre-structured outline or expectation that you're going to write a certain way. It's designed to be broader than yWriter - for people writing research papers, screenplays, articles, anything - so Scrivner avoids anything that would centre the software as "software for novelists". This may be a turnoff for you, if you want something that feels like "Novel Writing Software(tm)", but I find it refreshing. It means the software can't have preconceptions about how I'm going to work.

A while ago I wrote a review of yWriter, the little software package I use (mostly) to write novels. I praised the fact that while it had an impressive array of useful features, almost all of them could be completely ignored without much detriment to your work process - this is a good thing. It means you're not spending hours farting about with something that feels like writing but actually isn't. That's far too seductive a game to play.

Liquid Story Binder is a beautiful software package that does exactly the opposite. You can have plot trees, character dossiers, galleries, timelines, mindmpas, outlines, journals, project goals, colour schemes for your work area, a music playlist, multimedia organiser, storyboarding, scene 'building', and a host of other things, most of which sound like things I've already listed but are apparently something completely different. It sounds wonderful - so many things you can do with your writing!

Oh - it also has a word processor. Yeah. The thing you actually use to write.

I'm a techy-kind of person. I love programs that promise to organise my ideas, or give me fifty new ways to arrange and look at the same collection of concepts. I've tried most of the writing software out there, played with it gleefully for about half an hour until I inevitably realise that while I love all the crazy wacky things it does, that's just not how I work.

yWriter is one of the very few programs I've found I can actually work with - and not only can, I prefer to. Compared to yWriter, word documents are giant marshes of forgotten plot points, misplaced notes and vanishing character arcs. yWriter keeps my stories organised without me having to actually spend time on the organising part.