Battling the Blacklist, and a new kind of Snowflake.

No, it’s not the kind of Blacklist run by editors.

Today, over at Nanowrimo, I found out that somebody had tried to register for Stringing Words, and told that they couldn’t join because their email address or domain had been blacklisted. It turned out that somehow gmail.com had been added to the black list in the User Settings control panel. If you’ve tried to register and gotten this message – please come back! Gmail.com is welcome at Stringing Words!

But even though the fix to that issue was simple once I knew where to look for it, it brought home the fact that I don’t understand as much as I’d like to about the way the Stringing Words codebase works, especially the registration process, so I’ve started to pore over the php source code files and navigate the treacherous route that will one day take me to the mysql database. Stay tuned for updates on that front!

I’ve also been working on one of the goals that I set myself for December – writing an outline for an urban fantasy idea that I want to get ready to submit to the CSSF Novel workshop for this summer. This time, I’m going to start with the modified Snowflake method that I learned at a Brian Henry workshop last winter, and then maybe extend it with a few parts of the classic Snowflake method that stretch further than Brian’s version.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Step 1: 3 sentence paragraph.

Will is an ancient languages expert who is sent a BCE manuscript that is actually a text on magic, and the local witches’ coven tries to steal it, but he’s able to use the manuscript to escape with it. One of the witches, Emelia, tries to get to Will by befriending his girlfriend, Amanda. To find the ultimate secret of magic and get Amanda back, Will has to follow clues in the manuscript and race Emelia to a long-lost temple.

Step 2: Central question.

Do women have the right to keep the power of magic to themselves?

1 year of Kelworth Files

Well, looks like I was so busy with rewrites and starting off the ‘Harry Potter’ review series that I missed a milestone – this blog turned one year old on June 10th. Happy Belated Anniversary to me!

So, to commemorate the occasion, I’ll link back to three of my favorite memories for each month, June 2010 to May 2011.

June

The very beginnings of my blogging journey.

1. My very first (and most popular) Beat Sheet – Serenity!
2. My trip home from Toronto CSTS 2010 and the G20 riots.
3. The prologue debate.

July

1. Who could forget JulNoWriMo?
2. The Polaris convention!
3. Sharing a rejection letter.

August

1. Travelling up to Hunstville.
2. Fan Expo!
3. CritMo on Stringing Words.

September

1. I got awards!
2. Another beat sheet – The Simpsons Movie!
3. How to take criticism.

Another Brian Henry exercise to share.

Well, I figured that again, I’d share one of the little passages that I wrote at the Brian Henry workshop last Saturday, which was really fun, especially his slightly tweaked version of the Snowflake method.

I’m not sure if looking at an exercise like this is really the best way of judging what I’ve learned at a workshop, by the way, but they’re fun to write, and probably show a bit about how I was thinking about the workshop topic. For this one, in the morning, we were talking about how to structure short stories, and how they can grow up around a very small seed or prompt. This was based on a prompt that somebody called out, which was: “By the time I got to ______, the turtle wasn’t there anymore!”

————

“Purpose of the trip?”

I was taken by surprise at the fact that they actually asked the question outside of tv shows and movies. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, after all, they have to get cliches like that from somewhere. But it wasn’t like I was used to dealing with customs and immigration officials. Heck, I could still count the number of times I’d left Massachussets on the fingers of one hand.

“Umm, well, I’m looking for a – that is to say, business. Or education, more than anything else – or educational business. It’s a student field research trip.”

The uniformed official considered this. “So you’re being sponsored by an American university?”

“Yes.” I dove into my carryon looking for something official with the Harvard letterhead on it, until I was waved down, a gesture that I took to mean that I shouldn’t bother. “Is there a local school that you’ll be working with?”

“I… I’m not sure,” I said. “A local zoologist, at least – Doctor Hector Guerras. I think that he’s with the Institute of Reptile research in Daracas, not an instructor at a school.”

“Very good. Is the Institute arranging for your lodging?”

Going down the Snowflake, part One.

I’ve been wanting to prepare a bit more than usual for starting my National Novel Writing Month piece this year, and a few days ago found an article for the Snowflake method and decided to try it.

The snowflake method is an approach for developing a book idea that starts with a very simple premise and then adding more detail to it – analogous to building a snowflake fractal by adding more triangles pointing out of each line in the earlier design. This idea appeals to my sensibilities as a computer programmer – it’s what’s known as top-down algorithm design in the software field, starting with a statement of the goal and then breaking it down into steps and substeps until each element is trivial to implement.

So, here are the first two layers of my snowflake design:

Step 1: (One-sentence summary)

A dead man, sent back to Earth to do the Angel’s work, falls in love with a living girl and runs away with her.

Step 2: (One paragraph summary, 5 sentences)

Richard is sent to Buffalo by Angels to stop a chemical explosion from going off at the University. In the process, he meets Jessie, and infatuated with each other, they decide to run away once the job is done. The head angel, James the Elder, tracks them down and tells Jessie that Richard has more missions to do, and that he can only stay on Earth by taking somebody else’s body. James switches to another body, a coma victim, and works another mission, unaware that Jessie ‘met’ the true owner of his first body, and likes him too. In the end, Richard has to figure out if he must leave Jessie, fight for her, or let her make her own choice.

 

Not perfect yet, but that gives me an idea of where it’s going. Step 3 is short character sketches, and it’s probably the point at which I won’t be including the full results here in the blog, but I’ll do my best to keep you all informed of how it’s going.