ROW80 Round 2 - 12th Update

Since my update last week, I haven't had time to touch my novella. Which is really annoying, because the story has been kicking around in my brain a bit lately, and I would have liked to spend some time just getting those words on the page. Especially after doing the background work on it last week; I feel like if I'd just had time to sit down and write for a couple of days, I could have cranked out another few thousand words. Ah well. In about two and a half weeks I'll be handing in my final assignment for the semester, and I intend to spend the first week after that doing nothing but writing my novella, though I may also do a few illustrations.

On Monday I had to give my interim presentation to the IT staff at uni. It was fairly informal as it doesn't get marked, but the main purpose of it was to let other staff besides my supervisor know about my thesis and offer feedback or advice. My original topic was eBook interaction methods for fictional eBooks - already narrowed down a lot from my original ideas - but the general consensus was that I should take it a step further. Since I'd mentioned fantasy in some of my examples, and since I'm planning to use the first part of my fantasy novella in my Flash eBook prototype, it was suggested that I focus on what features and interactions users would most want in a fantasy eBook and problems fantasy readers sometimes have with paperback versions. This means my thesis prototype will let me muck around with writing, fantasy, illustration, graphic design and IT/multimedia. I basically get to combine all my favourite hobbies. Could it get any more awesome? I think not. Of course, refining my topic means I have to change my original plans for the prototype and my user survey and interview questions etc, which will involve a fair bit of work. But I think it's work I will enjoy doing.

Over the next week, I'll be working on my conference paper for my IT Research Methods subject, since I have to give a presentation for it on Thursday next week (I've finally picked a topic for it), as well as my Multimedia Narrative assignment. It's the assignment I'm most looking forward to; I'm creating an interactive steampunk story using the characters I drew earlier in the subject, but I still have to create the graphics for the background and interface. Thanks to my inability to just draw the characters and forget about them while doing the original assignment, I have the novel trilogy for them outlined, though I've had to change some key elements of the plot so it will work as a non-linear story. Now I'm just breaking it up so it can be presented as an interactive narrative with multiple paths, which is what I'll be doing for the rest of tonight.

Judgemental Dog doesn't understand the concept of deadlines:

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ROW80 Round 2 - 11th Update

Monday was spent editing my literature review and planning out my game narrative assignment. Tuesday was a write-off because I was at uni all day and at my nan's all evening, though I did tinker around with some world-building for Dark and Silent Waters when I got home.

Today I worked on my novella, went to the dentist to get tortured a bit, and then came home and worked on my novella some more.

Oh, my poor novella.

I was quite happy with the world-building I did on Monday, and I continued dabbling in that this morning as well. I've managed to develop a more thorough understanding of the mythology of the story - especially the laws and forces governing the supernatural characters and realms - and as a result I've fixed some of the plot holes that were in the story.

Unfortunately, this rendered a good few thousand words of what I'd written obsolete.

After the world-building stuff was done, I started reading over my novella so far, finding bits that were now either irrelevant or contradictory to how the world and the story worked. In the process I also found bits that were overly descriptive, bits that smacked of exposition and bits that were just poorly written. My inner writer curled up in a ball and cried, while my inner editor gleefully whipped out her red pen. Thus I went at it like a crazy machete-wielding word-ninja, hacking out paragraph after paragraph of narrative diarrhoea.

Looking at my word count after I'd finished was quite depressing; I'd reduced my novella from the 23/24,000 word mark to around 20,000 words. I don't really know how I could have got around it though, since I'd sort of hit a wall and wasn't sure how to continue on the path I was taking. I just hope that, now that things are clearer in my mind, I'll be able to take more steps forward and fewer steps back.

There's just no pleasing Judgemental Dog:

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ROW80 Round 2 - 10th Update

Ahem...

I FINISHED MY LITERATURE REVIEW! I FINISHED MY LITERATURE REVIEW! I FINISHED MY LITERATURE REVIEW!

*dances a jig, trips over the dog, hurts self, gets up, sits back at desk and hopes no one noticed*

Well, I still have to go through and proofread it and finish off a reference here and there, but essentially it is complete, at a total of 6,205 words and 36 references.

On a semi-related note, I feel that I must branch off into a brief rant.

I had always thought that academic papers - either journal articles or conference reports - were submitted to at least some form of standard control before being published. Obviously some errors will get through no matter how many times it's checked, but you would think that by the time it saw the light of day, it would at least be presentable. Now, I've been reading at least a few academic papers for years - being a uni student I didn't have much choice in the matter - but as most assignments only required you to read 5-10 of these articles, quality was something that generally didn't stand out; we just read the bare minumum, referenced quotes we needed and never looked at those articles again. However, now that I'm working on a thesis - which has required me to read upwards of 50 papers - I'm starting to see that problems in the writing are much more common than I thought. And I don't just mean incorrect referencing or misquoted facts. I mean problems with basic spelling and grammar.

I understand that some of these articles are written by people whose first language is not English, but since they were eventually published in an English journal or conference, shouldn't they still have undergone editing and checks for quality and coherence? While some of the errors were minor, some of them were quite substantial, either completely changing the meaning of the sentence or just rendering it impossible to understand. And it's not like it was just one or two sentences; there were at least three or four entire articles that I had to give up on reading because they were impossible to decode. They just did not make sense. I just have to wonder, how do these publications - or academic authors - have any credibility when they can barely string a few words together? Then again, I suppose it will improve my chances of getting my conference paper published later this year...

Okay, so that wasn't exactly brief, but it's a subject that frustrates me. Poor grammar irritates me enough coming from the general public, but from academics who are supposed to have a proper grasp of this sort of thing, it's unacceptable.

Anyhoo.

I'm not going over my literature review tonight, because I'm sick of looking at it, and even one more glance of a paragraph about eBooks will be enough to send me off on a homicidal rampage. Instead I shall try to bully my poor mushy brain into belting out at least a few hundred words of my novella, since apart from a short scene I wrote on Wednesday, I haven't really touched it for a few weeks. Tomorrow I'll look over my literature review before sending it off to my supervisor. I also really need to start on my two final assignments; a narrative game prototype and a conference paper. Though they're not due til early June, they're going to be massive assignments, and I also have to find the time to put together two presentations and keep tinkering with my eBook prototype.

I'm gonna need a lot of energy drinks.

I'm also hoping that this time Blogger doesn't throw a tanty and delete all my comments :\

He's a harsh taskmaster, is Judgemental Dog...

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ROW80 Round 2 - 9th Update

This week has been fairly good on both the academic and novel-writing front. Over the last few days I've been having some fairly persistent ideas for my novella, so I've been chipping away at that and managed another 800 words or so of that since the weekend. The scene I wrote is fairly dark, but it's one of those scenes that somehow came out exactly the way I wanted it to; some nice brooding on the protagonist's behalf without coming across as wanky. If only that happened more often...

I've also reached a milestone with my literature review, cracking the 5,000 word mark. I'm at 5,013 at the moment, so I only have another 987 to go and it's finished. I could probably crank out another few hundred before bed tonight, but I've been writing all day and I can't be bothered. I won't have time to work on it tomorrow because I have class all day and then I have to get some other stuff ready for my supervisor meeting on Friday morning, but after that meeting I'll have nothing on my plate til the following week; I'm aiming to finish it by Friday night, or Saturday afternoon at the latest (mainly so I can show it to my supervisor at least a week before the deadline and correct any mistakes she finds before I hand it in).

I also took some time out to read a new book (Hell's Bells by John Connolly), so I'll be posting a review of that on my good blog in the next few days as well (for now I'll just say that I quite enjoyed it).

Seems that Judgemental Dog is somewhat vain about his appearance:

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ROW80 Round 2 - 8th Update

Though I haven't really made any progress on my literature review or novella over the last week or so, I have nevertheless been busy. Along with my noir comic assignment and my statistics assignment, I've also been working on designs for my Flash eBook prototype, which I will begin making soon. The aim is to develop it over the mid-year break and then begin user-testing in the first week of the second semester. Since I'm doing user-testing, this means I also have to write up survey and interview questions, as well as filling out an ethics form (all 30 pages of it; anyone would think I was doing drug testing or something). I also got distracted for a while by the release of the final book in one of my favourite series by one of my favourite authors, which I reviewed here.

I don't know if I'll post again on Wednesday. It depends on how much work I get done and how much time I have. I have no assignments due this week so there's no immediate pressure, but I still have a lot to get done by the end of semester. But I will at least try to visit everyone else's ROW80 blogs, since I haven't had a chance to comment much lately (not sure if Judgemental Dog counts that as a nippable offence or not).

Be patient, Judgemental Dog. Be patient.

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ROW80 Round 2 - 7th Update

Bleh. That is all I have to say about this week. Or it would be, if I wasn't prone to vitriolic rants about the unfairness of life etc (melodramatic? Perhaps. But I've not had an energy drink in more than a week so everything Sucks with a capital S).

No new writing on either my literature review or my novella this week. That said, I have had other huge assignments, all of which were due this week, so in all fairness I haven't really had time for much else. I made a four page noir comic and wrote a 1,000 word report to go along with that, and also finished off a monstrous statistical analysis assignment.

If anyone's interested, here's the comic (hopefully it won't take too long to load):




(models sourced and arranged in Google SketchUp, post production work done in Photoshop)

And something in my upper back/neck/shoulder area seems to have gone out of kilter for no reason, because it now hurts whenever I move/sneeze/yawn/exist. On the bright side though, Rex (Judgemental Dog, to the writers out there), who was suffering from bad arthritis in his paw last week, seems to have responded well to the cortizone injection the vet gave him. He's back to his happy, bouncy, judgemental self, and he should keep getting better since he has to have another shot every week for the next month.

Now I have to finish some other junk I'm meant to present my honours supervisor tomorrow, as well as filling out 30 pages of ethics forms... *headdesk*

I think Judgemental Dog means business :S

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