Auspicious Signs

The New Year is starting off with a bang! While my packing up the place in Parks is going slower than planned due to the fact that I have a cold, I may already have a buyer. I also got a confirmation call this afternoon for a gig playing at an attorney’s conference in February. (Things are finally starting to move on the music performance front. Woohoo!) And, though I haven’t been working on the novel at all lately, I had a major plot breakthrough this morning. Evidently my subconscious has been toiling away on it, unbeknownst to me.

The unexpected gift from my deeper mind was particularly exciting. The two closing scenes that it delivered up to me as a sort of “mental movie” as I groggily awakened solved several character motivation problems and tied up some loose ends in continuity – no mean feat when you are dealing with beings that bend time and travel between different dimensions. I was ready to start writing immediately, but had to limit my enthusiasm to some brief outlining. Snow is expected here in the high country and I’ve got waaay too much packing and cleaning to do before I have to beat it back down to Phoenix on Friday morning to stay ahead of the approaching storm.

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My Half-Novel

The critiques of “Return of the Shadow Lion” that I have received so far are fairly consistent and there is a relatively simple solution to 90 percent of the difficulties my dedicated readers had with the story. All I have to do is stick Books Three and Four in the series together, and “Presto!” the problem is solved. I should be happy, right?

I am, actually. It’s just that I am feeling a bit daunted at the thought of what I have to do to implement this wonderful solution. Book Four is written; Book Three is not. That means that I really only have half a novel written (where I thought I was just looking at a rewrite) and there will have to be some changes (relatively minor) in the points of view in Book Four to make it fit together with Book Three.

In my efforts to follow conventional wisdom about writing (and selling) stories in the fantasy genre, I planned to divide my epic into a series of fairly standard lengths. I broke the story line at what seemed like logical points. Now, Book Four has proven to be too dependent on story material that is contained in Book Three. Oops.

It seems my decision to start “en media res” was ill-advised, or at least miscalculated. I started Book Four in the middle of a lifetime, forgetting that the whole series spans three lifetimes of the main character… Reincarnation really complicates things.

Of course, by starting the novel at the beginning of [one of] the protagonist’s life/lives, the reader gets to learn about things as our hero grows up and discovers them. All of the details of the society – it’s religion, culture, mores, and history – can be divulged in a much more leisurely way. Believability problems with both story line and character development, particularly with my villains, disappear when I can take more time to reveal incidents and indulge in more descriptive detail.

The more gradual approach takes a lot of the complexity out of understanding an alien world. It also flies in the face of some of the early advice I got about writing to sell: Do not write about a protagonist’s childhood, do not start at the beginning, do not, do not, do not…

Scroom. I have thrown all that nonsense out. Now, my constant question to myself is, “Does this serve the story?” Let the story dictate how it will be told. I’ve spent too much time and effort trying to make the story fit into some supposed profile of saleability and the story has suffered because of that. Odds are, it will never sell anyway. If I’m going to spend the time on it, it jolly well better be for the art and the heart of it!

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Critiques, Confusion, Consternation

I’m so confused…

Having dedicated readers from an online writer’s group critique one’s novel is a whole new experience for me. I’m not sure what to do with all of the ideas, suggestions, corrections, and criticisms. Each person has had something valuable to add; each person has also at some point missed something that I thought was startlingly obvious. My knee-jerk reaction is to rework everything to try and make it clear to everyone, but after much thought, it has become plain that that simply is not possible.

The assessments are in some cases diametrically opposed to one another. I made some changes based on one early reader’s comments – cutting out some episodes with minor characters to simplify a overly complex story line – only to have a current DR wonder where a certain group of characters were…why weren’t they represented? They were, until I cut them out to make more room for the main story line.

In another instance, a DR chided me for the quick emotional turnaround of the main character, thinking that it was an unbelievable episode because it happened in a matter of minutes.  It would have been quite unbelievable if it happened in such a short time.  I thought it was clear that the story had progressed from the middle of the night to morning. Several transitional sentences used a change in action and a visual description of the sunrise to cue the reader.  Or, so I thought.

Such misunderstandings leave me to wonder if my writing is that unclear, or if readers are skimming or simply not picking up on the clues. I sincerely want to write well and plainly.  I want to get the story across in an interesting way that does not underestimate my readers’ intelligence or offend their sensibilities overmuch. At the moment, I’m stumped as to what to do to accomplish that.

Overall, the increase in detail on this last rewrite has gone over well.  Except for the sex. One reader said, “Too much.”  Another said, “Too little.”  Another one said, “Wrong kind.” I throw up my hands and say, “I have no idea how to write sex scenes.  If they weren’t integral to the story, I’d cut them all out!”  Kind of hard to do when the story revolves around the trials and tribulations of a couple of soul-mates, so I’d better learn.  Sigh.  Let’s not even talk about how I need to do a better job of making the physical details of an alien race’s sexual mechanics understandable…much less the differences in mores and cultural expectations.

It’s a good thing I’ve got 157,000 words down in a fairly readable form. I’ve gone too far to turn back now!  And, really, much of the critting of the manuscript is spot on and useful.  Several of the DRs put in considerable time and effort.  Wrestling with their critiques will make me a better writer and will improve the story.  It will also harden my writerly hide and force me to make some tough decisions about how to best tell the story.

For now, I’m considering all the different viewpoints and letting it cook while I wait for the last few crits to come in.

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To NaNo or Not to NaNo, That is the Question

I’m still debating whether to take on NaNoWriMo this year.  I want to, but I am still up to my eyeballs with moving and jobbing and everything else I’ve got going.  I wouldn’t even consider it, except that “RSL” is complete and being critiqued. I don’t expect the crits to be done before December, so I have no other writing projects going right now. My fingers itch for the keyboard…

Will this blog be enough?  Oh yeah.  Flamencophile.com languishes for lack of attention, too.  Maybe not.

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On the Track and Picking Up Steam

It’s been over a week since I last posted, so I thought I’d do a brief update at least…

I spent most of last week in Phoenix job-hunting and apartment-scouting. I’ve got a line on a guitar teaching position at a music store, which I will know more on at the end of this week, and I’ve narrowed the search area considerably for housing. Good progress and the weather was gorgeous. And, as always, it was a joy to see my friends.

Despite my dismal practice record of late, I got a Tangos and a Sevillanas vocal at my guitar lesson. I nearly made myself hoarse practicing the vocals on the way back to Flagstaff and I’ve gotten them memorized already because of that. Best of all, the lesson seemed to turn around the musical block I’ve had going for weeks and I’ve been practicing every day since. Funny. Practice really does seem to make a difference…

I’ve been back home for a couple of days now and have gotten the “Music by Ariel” site up and running with Drupal. Flamencophile now has blogs, a calendar, and a forum operational. It’s still in development and behind schedule, but it’s progressing. I’m roughly on track with my novel edit, too, only about two days behind my schedule, and I’m hoping I can get caught back up by the end of the week.

My exercise program has been wavering a bit, but is not forgotten. Lifting boxes and the amount of driving I did last week has been a little hard on my legs, so I’m still at the earlier level and taking it all very easy. I expect that to continue until I actually get settled in Phoenix. I have lost two more pounds in the last month, however, so my old rate of weight loss seems to have returned, which makes me quite happy. I’ve still got some more to go, but at this rate I’m within a month of having lost 40 pounds. Yeeha!

While I was gone, the temps took another dive into the 20’s. My maple tree turned red and dropped most of its leaves while I was in Phoenix. The aspens up on the San Francisco Peaks are turning golden and I hope to take a drive up that way in the next few days before it’s back down to the Valley for another round…

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Living a Real Life

Got a post up in another blog carnival… This time “Jump. Fall. Fly.” is over on http://thetallpoppy. blogspot.com, who is this week’s host of the “Living a Real Life” blog carnival.

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NaNoWriMo Looms

Ah yes, NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer’s Month – lurks just beyond the horizon. I got an email that they are reworking their website in preparation for an October 1 kick off.

Has it only been a year? Close to it, anyway, that I scrapped the screenplay I was writing and started fresh with the novel that is currently being read and critiqued. Wow, a lot has happened in one trip around the sun.

Guess it’s almost time to pull out the outline and notes for one of the other novels in the series and see if I’m up for another round of the insanity of writing 50,000 words in one month.

NaNoWriMo is what convinced me that I actually could write and that I had enough material to push ahead and attempt a novel. Wonder what I”ll learn from it this time?

More writerly news: Another blog carnival – the Happiness Carnival on thinkhappythoughts.com – has one of my posts listed. This time it’s “Jump. Fall. Fly.“

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Love and Promises

Writing is what’s on my mind today. My post, Nakedness, is listed on the Personal Power Blog Carnival at Pinkblocks.com. Last night I sent out my revised Part One of “Return of the Shadow Lion” to my Dedicated Readers, or DRs as they are known in Critters.org/critique.org lingo. The critiques, or crits, that came back off of last week’s submission of the Prologue and first three chapters of RSL were very helpful and gave me a lot to do and think about during the revision. The “Critters” (another critique.org term) not only made great comments, and asked insightful and pointed questions, they also gave me an unexpected gift.

After I sent out the first section, I sat back and reflected on what I’ve learned so far. That’s when I saw the real theme of the fantasy novel that has consumed so much of my time lately. Love and promises. Oh, I’d known that was in there, but several sub-themes and the necessary obsession with detail that is required for the editing process had distracted me from the primary point.

For all of the ordeals that I put my characters through and how much they suffer for their goals, this one thing became quite clear. Down to the last malakh, good or bad, honorable or scoundrel, the quality of their lives and their legacies is determined by one thing–whether they act out of limited self-interest or for the good of others. Their fates are sealed out of that fundamental choice of whether or not to live out of love. All else, their promises and commitments, and how they choose to fulfill those, flows from the fount of what lies deep within their hearts. And it isn’t always black and white, or obvious, what drives some of them. That’s the suspense and the surprise of it. It’s also a lot of the fun of the writing of it, too.

It is often the ones that suffer the most for their choices, lose their lives for their commitments even, that have the highest quality of life. They are the ones who love well and deeply; they die the same way. Their legacies are all different. They may come to their demise with grace or groveling, end up variously respected, vilified or redeemed, but the one constant is love. Love and promises.

Whatever happens with this book, whether it eventually finds a publisher or languishes on a CD-R in my office closet, matters a lot less to me at the moment than my happiness over having written something with a transcendent message. I do feel some obligation to help it find a larger audience than just me and half dozen critiquers, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the message it contains won’t allow itself be limited by either the vagaries of the publishing industry or the limits of my writing skill. Heck, it isn’t limited to the written page at all. That’s just this one messenger’s particular medium. The message itself flows into, fills, and overflows all of our little boxes, just as it flows into, fills and overflows our lives–if we let it.

Those are my thoughts on this blustery morning in Parks, Arizona. It rained last night and the San Francisco Peaks are sporting a wreath of clouds as I write this. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the first snowfall of the season dusting the higher elevations once the clouds lift. Today, I’ll be immersed in more editing and hammering away at flamencophile.com. I may even get a few boxes packed. Until next time, this Ariel Laurel Strong for the Cloud of Unknowing on WordPress.com. Posted on Sunday, September 23 at 18:59 UTC.

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Wordprexy

I’m all for open access to the Internet, so I was prepared to be somewhat lenient in my views towards wordprexy.com in their stated efforts to get around Turkey’s ban on WordPress. What I wasn’t prepared for was to go onto my blog on wordprexy’s mirror and see porn ads. Enough already.

Freedom of speech and open access or no, and I do make my allusions from time to time, bethonged buttocks and promises of 3 more inches in three weeks are not what I think my readers expect to see here. I’ve sent in the email requesting to be removed. After today’s spammer/scraper trench warfare and hours of research on copyright issues, plus several buggy things on my Drupal dev project, I’m done in for today. I hope that they really do remove my blog, but I’m tired and cranky enough at the moment to be more than a little cynical.

Even if wordprexy’s actions are for the stated purpose, I just don’t want my work being used in that way. Did they think it through first or try to come up with a better solution? The vitriol in the comments on their blog makes me wonder at the whole premise. Get a sponsor or a recognized NGO to help ahead of time…something…find a way to do it right, folks.

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Web Para-sites

Now I’m really getting cynical. I did my Alexa search and after half-a-dozen pages of seeing my scraped writings (and with more to go), I got angry all over again. I clicked on one of the sites for “free guitar lessons” and saw pretty much what I expected with my content. Gee, I didn’t know I wrote for “Guitar News.” (This is not the site’s actual name, just what they are using in their scraped pages. I don’t want to malign any legitimate site that may use that moniker.) My evil twin must be ghost-writing out in cyberspace.

I went to the home page of the site and saw they’d gone one better on their AdSense links. They’d used CSS to turn a row of AdSense titles into navigation links! Gotta give them one for deviousness. I was impressed enough to go in and look at their page source. What an education! They’d stolen and/or repurposed numerous scripts and plug-ins, and had some fairly sophisticated javascripting going on, as well.

Well, well. What do you do when you are sailing in pirate infested waters? There’s no turning back. I’m already adrift on the bright blue sea and I’ve gotten plundered more than once. This deserves some real thought and considered decisions. It will definitely affect how I promote and monetize http://www.flamencophile.com and other sites I develop.

I keep going back to the original premise of the scraper sandwich I devised – humans can scan and discern genuinely valuable content when they want to. I can only conclude that the people that click on the scraper sites ads are being lazy and clueless, and that the scrapers do not have as good a click-through rate as a truly worthwhile site. It is the “volume” paradigm at work as opposed to the “value paradigm.

Parasites. Hey! “Para” – “sites,” that’s for sure. “Para-” meaning alongside of, beside, similar to or resembling. Definitely parasites – the tapeworms, liver flukes, and cattle bots of the web. Just have to be a hardy enough host to withstand a few, I guess.

That’s all for now. This is Ariel Laurel Strong signing off for the Cloud of Unknowing on September 21, 2007, at 17:20 UTC.

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Vigilante Blog Justice…How to Out a Scraper Bot

It all started out innocently enough. I just got mad about my content being scraped over and over. I’m all for humans using technology to eliminate drudgery and expand opportunity. What I don’t like is humans using technology to use other humans.

After railing about the injustice and applying a few ineffective remedies, I decided to try something else. What follows won’t work against every scraper site, but it does alert users that they are reading stolen content and asserts your claim on your intellectual property. It’s kind of funny, too. Note: This is mainly for a hosted blog. If you have access to the server where your blog resides, there are better remedies.

I used two simple principles to design a “spam sandwich” to bait a scraper’s spider:

1) A human can quickly and easily scan to see if content is relevant and interesting. A human can also skim over the irrelevant parts and extract what was meant for human consumption only.

2) An automated scraper bot cannot. Do use care, however, in designing your “fly in the ointment.” Legitimate search engines can flag “over-optimized” content which is designed to alter search engine ranking, and could confuse your “spam sandwich” as an attempt to crank up your ratings, but with a little writing skill you can avoid getting penalized by Yahoo! or Google and still target your intended quarry – the dreaded Spiderbotus scraperus stinkerii.

Here’s the bot bait I designed using the above two principles: Three Great Ways to Increase Your Site Traffic

Here’s the result of the experiment: Open Season on Scraper Bots

There are lots of ways these ideas could be improved and refined. I’d like to hear the results of any similar experiment you conduct. The possibilities are endless. And of course, if you choose to indulge in this sort of behavior remember these words of wisdom by John Steinbeck:

“It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.”

In the meantime, if you like the idea, by all means use it. Just give me a link back, okay? (https://dangerousangel.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/vigilante-blog-justicehow-to-out-a-scraper-bot/)

Happy hunting. :-)
Ariel Laurel Strong on dangerousangel.wordpress.com

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What a Difference a Year Makes

My more usual optimism has returned this evening, leaving the melancholy of midday to fade away into memory. As I drove to Flagstaff to have dinner with my friend Margie, I realized how reclusive I have become the last few months – two trips to Flag in a week feels positively extraverted. Between the novel edit and the intense effort on developing the Drupal-based websites, I’ve spent many, many hours at the keyboard lately. Despite Elmo the Wonder Cat’s attentions, I was in real need of human contact.

I realized some other things today, too. As one of my correctives to the earlier mood, I looked back some more over the last year and thought of all that has happened. It wasn’t so much a “count your blessings” sort of thing, though that was part of it. It was more of an evaluation, an assessment of how far I’ve come, in an effort to have more perspective on how far I have yet to go. I’ve been so busy projecting into the future and seeing how far I had to go to reach my goals that I was a little overwhelmed. The glance behind gave me a much needed shift in point of view.

Wow! A year ago I weighed 37 pounds more than I do now (down another pound this morning, in fact) and I still had several areas of complete numbness on my right leg and foot. Today, there’s only one little spot left on my big toe and even that has some feeling that has come back. I still have to work around the residual nerve damage at times, but it gradually continues to improve.

A year ago I had a regular job that I enjoyed and which paid alright. It only used a fraction of my skills, however, and would prove to be short-lived. Today, I work for myself. That demands every bit of skill and knowledge I have to grow my business. It’s fun, exciting, worrisome at times, and definitely a challenge. By the hourly rate, it’s great compared to my job a year ago. Now I just have to get more hours…

A year ago, I was into the fourth week of the beginning flamenco dance class at Coconino Community College and having a blast. I’d just been down to Tlaquepaque to see Mosaico Flamenco perform; I came back all enthused and determined to study guitar again. This past Friday, I accompanied the class for the first time, using what I’ve learned in taking guitar lessons from Gaetano, the lead guitarist of Mosaico. I had some trouble keeping the Sevillanas even at the slow speed and I’ve got quite a ways to go before I will feel comfortable accompanying the baile, but it’s a start and something I had no idea would come out of signing up for a dance class. I’ve gotten my guitar dreams back and even had a couple of performances in the last few months.

A year ago, I had a bunch of scenes strung together in a somewhat confused and disjointed screenplay and no idea what to do with, about, or to it. Today, I have a novel written and the first few chapters out to an online critique group. I’ve received some encouraging feedback and concluded that it’s less than half bad. The hours and outlines and preliminary writing on the other novels in the series start to look like a semi-reasonable investment as opposed to an insane waste of time.

A year ago, I never would have guessed at all that has happened since. As I look ahead to my move and all the uncertainties of the coming year, reason tells me that I am in the same position once again. Who knows what the year ahead will bring? After seeing how far I’ve come in the past year, the distance ahead doesn’t look that far after all.

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Thank You for Reading

Those of you who’ve read other posts here probably already know that I take a certain geeky pleasure in my blog stats. I get a kick out of seeing what new country shows up on my Sitemeter map and it’s a big deal to me when I hit a personal record of some kind.

A few new countries in the last couple of days: Croatia, Lesotho, Qatar, and Tanzania.

Today, I had my second highest traffic day ever and it coincides with my coming within a few hours of hitting 6,000 page views. I started this blog last November and it took a little over eight months to reach 3,000 page views; it’s only taken a little under eight weeks to double that. I’m getting about 20 times the traffic now that I got in April.

Granted, I’ve started doing a few promotional things here and there, but not all that much. A few links, comments, and a couple blog carnivals is about it. And all of those have really just been simple and sporadic experiments, tests of the techniques I read about on how to be a more successful blogger. The main thing is that I’ve just been writing more.

That seems to be the key lately, in every current endeavor. Just keep at it. Do a little bit more each day. Don’t give up. Build it and they will come.

This isn’t even about the numbers so much as it is about testing and demonstrating my belief that what I am doing has some benefit and value to others. A personal blog can easily become a type of navel gazing and a refined (and boring) inspection of belly-button lint. I don’t want that. I want this blog to be something that, while personal and individual, ultimately connects people, inspires or instructs, and offers a supportive voice to others involved in their own quest. I want to say, “Hey, look, I’m doing it. If I can do it, you can too.”

The journey isn’t easy. And, many of us lack the company of like-minded others on the trek up the mountain. Sometimes we just need a little encouragement, a friendly thumbs up, or bump in our web stats, to feel like we aren’t quite as solitary as we thought. Thanks for reading.

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Three Great Ways to Increase Your Site Traffic

Now that I’ve gone to putting at least one link back to this site somewhere in every post, I’m finding lots of my original content scattered around cyberspace. I’m not getting trackbacks, either; I’m finding the posts off of referrers coming into this site and to Flamencophile.com. They don’t even have the decency to give me a byline. Oh. Silly me. Such web denizens are not generally known for their well developed Internet manners.

The funny thing in all of this? My most recent blog posts with “web design,” “internet,” and “web development” tags are the ones that are getting hits the hardest (that was deliberate – read on, high volume readership – ha!) and it’s already sending lots of traffic to Flamencophile, which isn’t even out of development yet. (When a website isn’t even live yet, “increase in site traffic” is a relative term.)

Wonder if that title optimization will grab a few more of them. I hope so. And, I hope they use unmoderated bot-powered posts, too. That way, any human that happens to read this without an author’s attribution, or elsewhere than The Cloud of Unknowing on WordPress.com, will know that the blog or website they are on is posting content without the permission of the creator and in violation of intellectual property rights.

Itsy bitsy spiders crawling the web trying to find search engine optimized blog posts…but they do have certain built-in limitations. A computer program simply cannot do what a human can in filtering the written word for meaning and relevance. If you read this only slightly tongue-in-cheek article carefully, you can get an education in SEO. It could even be title d how to make money writing a thousand dollar blog post with web designs on how to get the highest traffic possible for search engine robot bait.

I learned many years ago in studying martial arts that an aggressive or offensive posture can often get you hurt easier than a neutral, or even a defensive, one. Save your energy for the big battles and use the attacker’s own momentum and energy against him… There’s more than one way to captcha the little web crawlers for one’s own nefarious purposes.

See, I didn’t wish a virus on those maddog scr*p#rs and sp^m$rs trying to make thousands of dollars, double their traffic, and earn high AdSense revenue off the work of honest bloggers like Ariel Laurel Strong. :-)

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Wiki Mind Map

Geek fun. Well, flamencophile.com is going to have to have one of these… WikiMindMap is a free, open source Flash browser that organizes a set of links into a mindmap. Too cool. It’s written in Java using the Swing toolkit and it’s compatible with Drupal, too. Try it out on Wikipedia.org by clicking the picture to the right. The link I’ve included will take you to a mind map on “John Steinbeck”, but once there you can enter anything you like in the search bars at the top of the page to play with it some more. See other posts on John Steinbeck: Quotes on Writing by John Steinbeck Three Steinbeck Quotes

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