I’m not sure if anyone besides my brother visits this site on a regular basis, but if so then I’m sorry about being AWOL lately. I’ve been meaning to post about my absence for a while, but things have been stressful and hectic for all kinds of reasons. I honestly don’t think anything I wrote at the moment would be worth reading anyway, but this site was never really about that, so I suppose that’s beside the point.

To break it down, I am writing a PhD thesis. It was supposed to be submitted by now, and that isn’t the case. Until it is submitted I really need, no matter how much it is killing my soul, to be in technical-writing-mode. When it is all finished and done then I’ll be trying to get back in the groove here. Unfortunately the PhD is far from being the most stressful situation I’m in, so if I’m being honest I can’t see the post-a-day thing starting up again straight away, but we’ll see.

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All that said, I’m trying not to let the writing stuff slide completely. I have found a couple of self-publishing avenues for the novel recently, one in particular that seems quite promising. I don’t know what’s happening with the editing situation there still, but I’ve been working on sorting out other neccessary things like a cover and a version of the world map that is suitable for printing. The overhead is so small on this priniting method that when it all comes together I’ll be getting a few copies no matter what. When this plan gets closer to fruition I’ll hopefully be able to take pre-orders and make sure that anyone who wants a copy gets one.

As yet I’m still unsure how the free CC-licensed online part of this will all play out, but it will still definitely be happening. Perhaps a serialised version after the people who pre-order get their nice shiny hefty meatspace copies.

More news as events unfold.

Reality is made worthwhile only in the sharing. This is largely because of, and largely hindered by, the fact that no two people agree on what reality is.

It is widely accepted that there are great truths, although fewer than one might suppose. It is widely ignored that the chances of even one of these truths having been hit upon by even one person in the history of the world is astronomically small. This is further confounded by the fact that the opposite of any great truth is also likely to be true. There is probably no way of proving that something is a great truth, but many mere ‘facts’ can easily be shown not to be great truths by virtue of the fact that they contain the words “but”, “except”, or “assuming”.

And, so, we construct bubbles of approximations, assumptions, half-truths and flat out lies and proceed to call this conglomerate ‘reality’. This process is called ‘growing up’. Everything we see from inside these bubbles is distorted by their shape, and tinted further by the worst assumption of all: that the inside of every other bubble either is or should be the same as our own. Every injustice perpetrated by humanity can be explained by this, and it is only natural therefore that we are wretched.

If we are worthy of elevation above this status it is only because of our ability and our willingness to build bridges between these bubbles, to attempt to understand their contents and see the world through them.

Apologies to any IE users who visited the site before today. I had completely forgotten to test the compatibility of the site with your browser, and nobody had told me how horrible it looked. I’m going to pretend that it was due to a combination of being distracted by my PhD and wishfully thinking that nobody uses IE anymore. Anyway, whatever the reason for my lapse so far it should look okay now. I couldn’t get it perfect, but almost. If you use Opera or Safari or Lynx or something else and there are problems, let me know and I’ll do what I can.

Oh, and if you dropped by to check out the Random Saying Generator and clicked through to the main site, welcome! Hopefully a few of you at least will find something of interest here.

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Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that Tuesday marked the momentous occasion of the first story actually completed on the new site. I can’t promise this will become a common occurrence, but at least now there’s a precedent.

The stuff that gets posted on the story blog is, for the most part, posted without editing of any kind. When I finish whatever I’m writing, I submit it. If there are glaring mistakes I will go back and fix them, but beyond that nothing is changed once I hit post. This is actually a conscious decision, because the primary aim of this outlet is to get me writing again. I know what I’m like, and the lack of editing, the jumping back and forth between stories and one-off snippets, and the lack of any “quality control” (which is to say that if I write something for the page it gets posted whether I think it’s good or not) are all specifically to stop me from getting stuck on anything.

That said, the eventual goal of all this is to start producing full, edited, quality-controlled stories again. There are at least three novels waiting around in the wings to be written, including the sequel to Nadir. (To be honest it’s more like seven, but three are out ahead right now.) To that end, if and when I finish stories here I will re-post them in their full, stitched-together glory in a separate section somewhere. I’ll do my best to get that sorted in the next few days, and while I’m at it I’ll try to fix the “old stuff” section. When I stitch the stories together, I’m going to let myself edit and polish them. Realistically the degree of polish each story gets will probably depend on how attached I am to it, but I can live with that.

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Oh, and speaking of quality control, the Jenny and Mug theme song has been stuck in my head for four solid days now. Yes, there is more to it than I posted the other day. No, I probably won’t record it for you guys. I did consider it, wondering if perhaps that might get it out of my head, but on reflection I think that’s unlikely.

He was a scientist,
She was a journalist,
He got turned into a mug.

He could no longer take courses,
So they both joined forces,
And went out to catch them some thugs.

It’s Jenny and Mug!

So if the movie goes well, there’s talk of talk of syndicating it to a television series. They wanted to go the animation route, but I said to them “This has live-action written all over it. If you can’t do a convincingly realistic CGI mug I’ll hire someone who can.”

The idea is to go Star Wars on this sucker and just merchandise the hell out of it. Starting with mugs, of course, then t-shirts, action figures, lunch-boxes. The whole deal.

I know there’s a lot of speculation out there about who’s playing Jenny in the movie. Frankly I’m astonished that we’ve made it this close to release without anyone letting the cat out of the bag. The only thing I can say here is that the studio is making an announcement within the week and it’s going to be big.

This morning I threw together a quick site that, in mashing up well known sayings, really succeeds in mashing up my geekery with my love of non-sequitur. Thanks go to Tony for the inspiration. Sorry the html itself is a bit of a quick hack, once I got it not-ugly I figured it did well enough for the purpose.

Adding options to the generator is a very simple matter, so if there’s any sayings you think are conspicuous in their absence (which admittedly would be quite hard for you to verify given the random element) let me know and if I’ve got a second and I think they fit the bill I’ll add them.

Enjoy the Random Saying Generator

I love Bookfest.

The second pass of my novel edit is finished. It’s an improvement, definitely, which is something I was a little concerned about, having grown so used to how it was before. I think the distance I had gained from not reading it for a year and a half helped. Plus, even though I still wasn’t writing much in that time, I feel that my writing improved a lot. It’s not a technical proficiency thing, it’s an attitude thing – one that I can’t put my finger on exactly, but I feel it when I write now. There is still the chance that I’m so attached to some things there to see that they need to be done again from scratch. These edits weren’t structural, because I don’t feel that structural edits are needed, but I could be wrong.

So.

If I’m being honest, an external editor is needed. Not because there is necessarily anything wrong with what I have, but because I know I have blind spots and I have to allow for that. I’ve had a few offers. I don’t need someone to read it to offer opinions or check spelling, though, I need someone to read it with scalpel in hand, whilst still understanding what this story and these characters mean to me. I only trust one person with that job. Which means that, for now, I’m going to tag this one as work in progess. Don’t give up hope, the novel is closer to seeing the light of day than it ever has been, but I want this done properly.

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I’m not sure if anyone’s following this show or not, but if you are you will have noticed that the new website layout is up and going strong. Categories have been purposely separated into ‘Blog’ and ‘Stories’, so you can just track one or the other if you wish, and the story blog is getting (so far) a post a day. The only restriction I’m putting on myself at this point is that at least one hundred words get posted to it every day, but for now that schedule is just for me, not any potential readers I may or may not have. Some of the pieces fit together, and are categorised as such. Some don’t fit together yet, some never will.

On that note, I have a story post to write.

The first pass of my novel edit is finished.

For anyone who is interested, this ‘two-pass’ system I’ve mentioned before works like so: The first pass is focused mostly on reading. This is particularly useful in the case of the novel (which I last read straight through nearly a year and a half ago), in that it makes the narrative fresh in my mind. I read out loud, partly to test dialogue for authenticity, partly because it forced me to actually pay attention to each word, and partly for another reason I’ll touch on later. Anything that stood out as awkward or a break in the flow, I marked, noting any suggested changes alongside the text. Anything that stood out as wrong, of course, I changed then and there.

The second pass will be going back to the yellow bits. I have a tendency, during edits, to stress over synonyms and phrasing and even punctuation. It is necessary, of course, but it is time consuming and it is disheartening. Hopefully I now have a road-map that tells me where it is worth putting that effort in.

So now I have a manuscript filled with yellow highlighting and parenthetical suggestions. Honestly there is less yellow than I had suspected. All in all, I’m very proud of what I’ve managed to do with this novel. The characters really are the most important for me, and the vehicle does most of them proud.

One thing that does occur to me, and it’s a hard one to catch in a technical edit, is that maybe it does better by the characters that are my favourites. Mind you, that means five out of seven main characters. There are no really standout moments for two of the characters, though I think they are characterised well. I could be wrong, people who end up fans of those characters might find plenty to enjoy, and certainly there are things that happen down the track that will vindicate them, but perhaps they need more page time or at least some dialogue tweaking here and there.

This is quite indicative of one of the reasons that the first pass is a good idea: reading every word out loud really gets the novel as a whole solidly in my short-term memory, and lets me see things from a broader perspective. As far as the character thing goes, I don’t really know that I can make a call here. I’ll need an external opinion for that one. In terms of the narrative, though, I feel that the order is spot on, and the pacing is too for the most part. Hopefully by the time all the yellow is gone it will be spot on too.

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So, let’s talk other writing stuff.There have been two additions to the website: It Rained and A Tale of Yores.These additions probably went unnoticed even by people who were paying attention due to failings in the current layout. The writing pages were never meant to stay as they are, but I’ve been tossing around various solutions to the problems as I see them and I think I finally have an answer. The problems are as follows:

• Stories need individual comment pages
• Stories need to be arranged by date, so that the newer stories are obvious.
• Some way of alerting people when I add a new story is needed.
• Some of my stories aren’t really stories. They are pieces of stories – some stay as single pieces, some gather other pieces around them.

The solution, as I see it, is to tweak this blog so it is more suitable and use it as the back-end for the site. I should be able to use tags to keep posts like this and the creative stuff apart, and to keep linked story pieces together, plus there is a perfectly serviceable comment system and RSS feed already here. I’ll have a go at fixing this as soon as I get the chance (I’m supposed to be working on my PhD right now), and the two stories I posted today will be the first on the new system, as they are most definitely pieces. There are other pieces hanging around for one of them, too.

This “pieces” thing is actually an end in itself, too, for I am forever coming up with little snippets that never get attached and never get read. I would like to add some new piece of writing here every day. At least a hundred words. I’m not going to claim a daily update schedule yet, I know that would be folly, but if I get it running and manage that for a while then I’ll try to make it a permanent thing. Watch this space.

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There was one more thing. I’ve been thinking about podcasting. I haven’t been thinking about podcasting because of podcasting, I’ve been thinking about podcasting because of Daniel Kitson. If you don’t know who he is, go see him the next time he’s in your town. What struck me the most after watching his two latest shows was not how funny he is (very), but that it was still possible to get up and tell a story. I look at how shows like Firefly get cancelled and shows like Big Brother are in their nth season and I sometimes despair that any significant proportion of people give a damn about stories or characters at all. And, let’s be honest, that’s probably the case. But if the stories are good enough, then there are people that care. Enough people that as unlikely a performer as Kitson is (No offense meant Daniel, if you happen to read this. I’m not saying you’re not a brilliant performer, I’m just saying I doubt your guidance counsellor predicted it.) he can tour the world on a regular basis, get up in front of sold out rooms of people and tell stories.

There are things that can be done with voice that cannot be done with written word alone, and vice versa. Part of the reason I read the novel out loud for editing was to see what it sounds like. It sounds pretty good. There is a part of me that is considering podcasting an audio version alongside the chapters as they are released online. There is another part of me that realises that if something is to be read aloud you should write it to be read aloud (Slithy Toves was written to be read aloud, if you were wondering). I’ve been experimenting a bit with that voice, and I think it’s something I can do. Hopefully something will come of it. Then, one day, maybe you’ll see me in front of a room full of people.

Neon Winter (2.0?) has launched. Sort of.

The main site (www.neonwinter.com) has a layout (a ‘flavour’, if you will), but no new content as yet. By ‘no new content’, I mean that most of the ‘old’ content is back (and yes, by now I am partly just enjoying seeing how many parentheses and ‘quotes’ I can put in this paragraph) and as exactly the same as ever.

Some of the prose is embarrassingly æsoteric, some embarrasssingly angsty, some embarrassingly awkward, some embarrassingly awesome. There are two main reasons it’s here, though. The first is that it’s true, and that’s important. To go back to the garden metaphor of my first blog post, this stuff is in the soil. It is organic matter, composted and fertile and it lives in some form in everything written since then. It has earned its place here, though I imagine it will be moved away from the light once new things start to sprout. As for why it is currently on the surface, I’m coding the site to be modular and adaptable: I want to be able to update by just dumping a text file on the server, not recoding every page like I used to have to do back in the day. That interface is to an extent already up and running, but to get a decent idea of how it works and fine-tune it properly the site needs content. This content will do as good as any other.

And, frankly, I’ll be as proud of Slithy Toves and the Francésca story in sixty years as I was the day I wrote them.

There is no comment system set up on the main site, though I think I will try to get that sorted in time, but if anyone cares enough to have opinions I want to hear them. I’m talking mostly in terms of the site, not the content, but of course any constructive comments are always welcome. The chances of me effecting a rewrite on any finished piece currently on the site are slim to nil, but I can and will take comments on board for the future. As for the site, what do you think of the layout and the style? Any suggestions for features or changes? I have plenty of ideas myself, of course, as it is far from finished, but running a site and using it are not the same thing and there’s little point running a site that’s unusable. Leave all comments here, for now, or send me an email over at zane@neonwinter.com.

As for new content, there is some around. A few stories written in the intervening time between websites, and more than a few unfinished pieces. I’ll start to gather the finished stuff together and trickle it onto the site, and if anything new gets written/finished it will make its way here as well.

* * * * *In other news, yes, I am editing the novel. Getting in the mood for that when taking a break from editing my PhD is difficult, but I’m trying to push it and I think my new two-pass editing technique is helping that. I’d suggest I’m just under halfway through the first pass, and that is the quicker pass. When I finish my second pass it could use an edit from someone who isn’t me. Since I can’t really pay anyone for that at this ‘give it away for free’ stage, I’m looking at a couple of options there (one of which is “fuck it”). Not sure which way it will end up going but I’ll keep you updated.

One thing I was considering was the possibility of starting to release some ‘special features’. There are myths, character profiles, a sort of annotated atlas and various other bits and pieces that might interest readers. I’m less convinced they will interest people who aren’t yet readers, but reacquainting myself with the world probably can’t hurt – it exists in a lot more detail than will ever make it into the novels.

It started with love.

It always does, of course. I’ve wondered about that, and I think it has something to do with love being the only truly spontaneous emotion. Love, the kind of love that starts things, doesn’t need any ‘because’. You like things ‘because’. You hate things ‘because’. When you love something, even though you may say ‘because’, it exists even when you take away the because. Love is the because of other things. The turtle. All the way down.

I’m not here to write about love in any explicit way, though. (Insert standard “If this be false, and upon me proved…” caveat here.) I’m here to write about stories.

I can only assume everyone starts out life believing all stories are true. I’m no chemist, so I’m not going to call so few data points a trend, but it just seems natural to me that people come into the world that way. Maybe that’s some kind of species memory, maybe it’s simple naïveté. I tend to think that it bleeds in from somewhere else entirely.

The next step is the whole ‘harsh reality’ kick. Toughen the kids up so they can be ‘functioning’ adults. Tell them that stories aren’t true. That stories aren’t real. We lose most of them here, of course. It’s to be expected. And when it comes to it you can’t really blame the ‘functioning’ adults. It’s very hard to imagine things from a different perspective than your own, so if that’s how you function that’s how you think it’s done and that’s what you teach the children in your care so that they can function too.

Steps three and four are part observation and part speculation for me — I left the path at step two. Still, even if I’m wrong and even though they’re optional I still think they are instructional so I’m going to include them anyway. Step three is when you realise that some stories are inarguably true. Maybe that happens when you start coming across books and movies of true events, more likely it’s when you figure out that people think and communicate in stories. When you figure out that news is stories, that decent conversations are stories, that lives are stories. That puts a crack in the “stories aren’t real” theory, and it’s enough that we get some of them back at that point.

Step four seems to usually happen around university age, though that is not a hard and fast rule. It’s part arts-kick, part philosophy-kick, and it boils down to the thought: “All stories are true, for a given value of true.” Many people who reach that point just feel smug and leave off there. Some go on to the much better: “All stories are true, here and now, for a given value of here and now.”

It was love for a character, you see. I don’t even remember which one. Maybe even love for a place. Love, the kind of love that starts things, for something that most people wouldn’t even consider real. And look, I understand that. I do. If you’re reading this and starting to form the opinion that I’m crazy, let’s agree to disagree. Because I understand your position. I respect your position, even. These things aren’t real in any useful way to most people, and to most people that amounts to the same thing. It’s like Pluto. People got all up in arms about it because people like to get up in arms about things, but when it comes down to it most people don’t care whether Pluto is a planet or not because to them Pluto might as well not be real. And keep in mind that there’s physical evidence for Pluto. Faith without evidence is just plain faith. Faith without impetus is scarily close to madness. So, yes, I understand people that don’t consider these things real. I’ve even been known to get along with people who don’t consider them at all. But they are real to me.

I have love for places. The sprawling castle of Gormenghast. Hogwarts. I have love for characters. Alice. Peter. Dozens more, besides.

That’s what started it. It was love.