Those Magnificent Victorians

AoE has moved into the test reader phase. As you'll recall, the main character is trapped in virtual reality. The A stands for Avatars. More on E later. I still haven't decided whether to run the book through this or not. I tried it once before but never received feedback on step one.

In the book there's a Victorian house. Sample images here. It's not a big part of the story. Specifically, it's an Eastlake Victorian "with modifications". Since I've learned more about that style of house, I may change it to a Queen Anne in the final version. The house in the book has a tower. Towers and turrets seem to be a bit of a staple with Queen Annes. Regardless, it's a setting in virtual reality and not a main part of the story.

It turns out I quite like the Victorian style. I've decided, when I'm rich, my house will be a custom-built, modern Victorian. I saw this company on This Old House. They make reproductions of old houses. I don't see a Victorian in their lineup, but if they specialize in old houses, someone else does, too.

I really like Victorian woodwork. After studying pictures of it, the individual pieces look relatively simple. A door frame might have three grooves carved into it. The trim around the gutters isn't very complicated. Patterns might be circles, starbursts or simple swirls. Individually, they're not very impressive. When the pieces are all put together, however, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. They create a luxurious feel that feels like home to me.

Of course, in my modern one the rooms would be bigger. The stairs would not be too steep or narrow. Wood paneling would be minimal at best. Wallpaper. I used to hate wallpaper. I'm still not a fan of every style of it. However, when it's done right, it adds to the luxurious feel of the house. There would be some wallpaper. I think the problem with wallpaper is two-toned paper. For it to start looking decent, it  needs at least three shades of color to give it depth. And it can't be too busy. Three color values creates dimensionality and makes it feel more like a piece of furniture than a flat two-toned paper.

After researching Victorians and then seeing a modern home, the modern ones feel sterile and empty. Even in an empty room, the woodwork in the Victorians is a decoration on its own. They don't have an empty feel to them. I watch some of the house hunting shows. In modern houses, if a room is empty, it's really empty. Whoever is viewing a house has to work to imagine the space being beautiful. They have to speculate on paint colors and furnishings to even be able to imagine living there. Or the real estate has to do the thinking for them. Or the seller has stage the house with furniture that is sometimes rented just for that purpose. When the owners move in, they have to fill the space with knickknacks and tchotchkes to make it "feel like home". And they take all that for granted without realizing how sterile modern houses really are. In the Victorians that feeling of hominess is build into the house already. Furniture is almost a bonus. A million decorations to imprint the owner's personality into the setting aren't necessary. It's kind of like the house itself says it all. Maybe the house represents the owner's personality instead the knickknacks. I'll have to think about that more later.

So, this has been the summer of distraction. I mentioned a while back a path for my life God may have shown me, very distracting. I'm still waiting for some kind of solid confirmation. This week has had another distraction that I can't talk about now, but it looks like it will be a major announcement in the next week or two. More on that then.

Have a great weekend.

AoE Status

I finished going through AoE, the next book, again. I'm not sure it's "perfect", but it's in decent shape. There will be at least one more going through after tester feedback. I'll probably run it through Novel Boot Camp writing workshop. I tried that last year and never got any reply to the first submission, which was the beginning step, so I'm less than enthusiastic about trying again. There was a bit more unpleasantness with lack of updates and direction, but I'll keep that to myself. Let's say it seemed a bit disorganized from the outside looking in. Maybe this year would be different.

At the moment, AoE has been uploaded to CreateSpace. I'm still waiting on them to approve the file. Once they do, I'll order paperback tester copies. Once those arrive and are checked to make sure they printed correctly, I'll mail them out. There was that time CreateSpace sent me a copy that was so wrong it was obvious they didn't even look at it before shipping it to me. I had to eat the cost. Despite that, they're really easy to work with and a great way to get physical copies that aren't too expensive. Sending a file to testers is free, but I much prefer a real book. Reading off a screen is not the same as holding it in the hand. And it's a little souvenir they might appreciate. The book should be in their hands at or before the time Novel Boot Camp starts, which is the 31st. Assuming I actually participate in that. Would it be more of a nuisance(like last time) than a help? I'll have to think about it.

I'm not sure, when AoE will be out, but it shouldn't be too much longer, if I can figure out a cover.

It's about time to start going through the mystery/romance again. It's shorter than AoE, which is about YA length. I expect it to be reasonably fast depending on how much dialogue versus prose there is. Being a different genre, I think it had more prose than AoE. We'll see. Maybe turning some of the prose into dialogue would be a good direction.

I'm a bit pressed for time this week, so I'll let you go.

Have a great weekend.

Cat Whisperer

A stray kitty has been coming around some. I feed him dry cat food and every once in a while wet. I'm not completely sure he's a stray. He's really friendly now that he's used to me. Maybe I'm a cat whisperer. He's pretty thin to belong to somebody, though. At some point I decided to call him something besides new kitty but wasn't in a hurry. I finally looked up popular names from the 1880s to the 1930s. It's amazing how many of my relatives and other people I know have or have had names on the lists. After two or three days I narrowed it down to Nelson. That's a good solid name, and I don't have any relatives named Nelson. I started calling him that.

I had previously mentioned to my mom I was going to name the stray cat. When I told her he was Nelson, she had a fit. A woman she used to go to church with lives across from a widow whose deceased husband was named Nelson. So what? I can't name the stray kitty Nelson, because it might offend somebody she doesn't even see any more? I ran through some of the other names on the list until I found one she didn't object to: Patrick. We have no relatives and know no one named Patrick. So, I started calling him Patrick. He seems to recognize that that's his new name, although I'm not certain yet.

So, I was talking to my mom yesterday. She's had a change of heart. She's not sure he should be named Patrick. /facepalm You know what? If I have to change it again, I'm changing it back to Nelson. The moral of the story is you can't worry too much about what other people think. If your stray cat should be named Nelson, that's what you should call him.

Guess what Facebook told me today. "Matthew, we care about you and the memories you share here." Really? They care about me? Me? Then why can't I set preferences for the news feed? How come they won't stop showing me Buy and Sell Groups Near You, when I've Xed them all out I don't know how many times trying to get it to stop? Why do they keep recommending other pages to me at all? Why won't they stop showing me what people on my Friends list "Like" or "commented on" or were "mentioned" in, etc.? I don't care about any of that. Why won't Facebook stop showing me "Suggested Post" listings? I did a search for a car in Microsoft Edge this week. Now in Google Chrome, I'm seeing "Suggested Post" ads for that car and the website I used for the search. How is that possible? I went to a website for some Victorian era research I was doing. I'm seeing ads for one of those sites, too. "Matthew, we care about you..." Sure they do. When an older man on my Friends list is now Friends with the 100th underage girl, I don't want to see that any more! That's not caring about me, Facebook!

A bit of a rant there. The Zuckil made me do it. But seriously, I'm really starting to hate Facebook.

So, I finished up the second round of AoE and began the third. It's not going as fast as I'd hoped, but progress is being made.

Taking Advantage of Fluffertunities

This week was spent on AoE, the next book, doing polishing and looking for opportunities to add fluff to fill out the descriptions. Let's call them fluffertunities. I've been through it once and most of a second time. Being YA, it's shorter than a Messengers book. Not as many fluffertunities came up as I wanted. I got too distracted with polishing and trying to track the days. The story's about a girl who's trapped in a virtual reality spy game. As part of the story, she has a 365-day benefit package she earned in the game the previous year. Along the way, the number of days she has left for the benefits is occasionally mentioned. This gives the reader a sense of the passage of time, and it gives me a way to track it, too. Keeping up with the passage of time can be a real problem. Some days can take multiple chapters. Some take a fraction of a chapter. When references to time show up in a story, it might be for the author as much as the reader. I expect to go through it one more time before sending it to test readers. This time I'm going to try to focus on the fluffertunities and not whether the words are "right".

Like last year, this has been a cool summer so far, because of all the rain and clouds. I didn't have to run the air conditioner in June at all. This week was the first time I've had to turn it on. There's no central air. It's a window unit. During the winter, I had an insulation panel in the window to keep the cold out. I took that off one night and turned the AC on. It worked great. The next day, I was eating something in the living room. My cat Cici looked up near the ceiling behind me, eyes open wide. It was really cute. I thought she heard something outside that was reflecting off the wall. Then I heard it, too. I looked around to see a big, black snake climbing the wall.

Apparently, something was loose at the bottom of the air conditioner in the window sill. I fixed it later. It took about an hour and a half to figure out how to get the snake back outside. It was five or six feet long. You never want to look around behind you and see a snake, especially indoors especially high up on the wall. Fortunately, it was very passive and easy to work with relatively speaking. It didn't strike at the mop handle and piece of spare baseboard like they do on television. I finally got it into a laundry hamper and carried the hamper outside with the end of the baseboard. Whew. I didn't need the stress.

Book2. How do I fix it? That's a good question. Part of the problem with it is it's set 3.5 years after book 1. I'm thinking about moving the timeline back to maybe 3.5 months after book 1. Or at least closer. That eliminates the need to fill in the backstory for the last 3.5 years. I thought the backstory slowed things down and felt awkward at times. On the other hand, Joe and Ceinwen, Etan and Kayley, and Marion and Genia all have kids after 3.5 years. If I move the timeline, what about the kids? There's a whole subplot around them. They were really important to the story. Could I really have the girls running around fighting the forces of darkness while pregnant? That might be clunkier than 3.5 years of backstory.

So, I've put some thought into different ways to approach it, but it might require fundamental changes to the story. However, I think I can keep a good bit of it such as the political and military situations. When certain things occur isn't very important as long they do occur. It's going to take more thought.

Have a great weekend.