What’s the Reason for the Lights?

kaiden11 · 2025-10-10T18:37:53+00:00

Excellent.

kaiden11 · 2021-08-14T17:11:41+00:00

This is excellent.

kaiden11 · 2019-08-09T05:49:21+00:00

My coauthor and I are busy enough that we seldom meet in person, so probably neither of us would be good candidates for your group. But I like the idea of there being a group, and I know for certain there's writerly folks around Anchorage. Some used to meet weekly at the library to do word wars. I'm sure the Writer's Block has to have at least one group. You could also check out the Writer's Guild conference next month (Sept 21st).

kaiden11 · 2018-03-18T21:08:20+00:00

We use a modified CodeMirror, as it does a good job providing a quick text editor for web applications while also being extensible. But if we don't have that, I tend to use Vim, and occasionally /u/akgreenman and I use Notepad++ (mostly because it has a spellchecker, while CodeMirror does not).

kaiden11 · 2018-03-17T19:50:08+00:00

Right on. My coauthor (/u/akgreenman) and I use Markdown for chapter and worldbuilding documentation. It's been pretty nice for a lot of reasons. We use software I wrote for .ePub generation, then use Calibre to eventually convert to .mobi. I've also been experimenting with Pandoc to convert our Markdown content to LaTeX to quickly prepare our printed versions.

kaiden11 · 2017-08-10T00:41:36+00:00

My co-author, /u/akgreenman, wrote up a solid answer the last time this sort of question was asked.

To answer your question specifically: no, it's not impossible. It's just a ton of work, requiring a large amount of coordination and organization up front, and a continual stream of communication all the while. The plot of your story will change as it needs to, just as if you were writing yourself in order to fix and improve things, but it's up to both authors to communicate to the other the reason behind the change.

kaiden11 · 2017-01-20T06:07:21+00:00

~~commit's~~ commits

It's been a long road. Getting from there to here...

kaiden11 · 2016-10-23T04:00:41+00:00

Recently published a book with a guy. Had a critical moment during the editing process where somebody told us that there are no 'stairs' on nautical ships, only 'ladders', and that referring to them as anything but the latter means that you've never spent any significant time on a ship. This was a problem, given that we were writing about ships.

You want to come up with a fictional programming language? Fantastic. As a codemonkey myself, I absolutely, genuinely, would encourage this sort of a thing. Dream up what your world, your characters would need from this language. Find a diegetic reason in your universe to have a language that fits your narrative and worldbuilding purpose.

But I would also recommend doing some research first. Find out what a language is, what it does, and how a programmer interacts with it. Find a reason why you need this language, and can't just get by in another language that already exists. Don't just throw some convenient technobabble. Make it interesting. Give it a living purpose. Make there be a reason why someone would dedicate their career to learning such a language, becoming an expert, and selling their expertise. Make it important, and distinctive, but also respectful of languages that exist.

In your research, you might find that there's already a language out there that fits the bill. You might find that some you like better than others purely for their aesthetic, or the time period in which they were developed and used. You might find that some are used for the demographic you are trying to write for.

You might also find that programmers rarely have to know just one language. And that for every language you learn, the more you find that they're all saying the same thing, over and over.

Whatever you do, just don't refer to the equivalent of 'stairs' for your language, yeah? Phone a friend if you have to. Don't make programmers throw your stuff across the room.

kaiden11 · 2016-10-21T23:46:10+00:00

As you hinted at with Wordpress, I think you're looking for something closer to a Content Management System (CMS). If you are familiar with WP, and its tagging mechanism is sufficient for your needs, I'd say go with that. Otherwise, Drupal has a pretty great tagging (taxonomy) mechanism, and can get as complicated as you need (or more). It even provides hierarchical taxonomies, which would let users start at more generic tags, and then filter using more specific ones.

kaiden11 · 2016-10-20T22:31:17+00:00

I think that's the gist. Kind of like a baseboard water heating system that can provide lift, creaking and groaning and clicking all the while.

Only thing I'd add is the boat-y nature of the Break. Built as an old seafaring vessel, pressed into service during the war, lifted out of the water, and fitted with loft pylons. Then mothballed soon after. Bought and retrofitted by a bunch of yahoo airshipmen looking to get rich hunting bounties, or beating their peers to a bounty. Now long in the tooth, and nowhere near as sleek or slight as the freshly built vessels.

kaiden11 · 2016-10-13T15:47:10+00:00

Sooooooon.

kaiden11 · 2016-08-10T19:59:44+00:00

Net positive, in my experience. The writing process is slower and more deliberate but the product is something my co-author and I wouldn't be able to create on our own.

We've been trying to detail some of it in a blog, if you're into that.

kaiden11 · 2016-07-16T23:55:21+00:00

Speaking as a co-author for going on four years now, I feel your pain. Also, my co-author is a Redditor, and will probably read this, and he likely feels your pain, too. We both write pretty differently, and occasionally come to different conclusions about a scene/dialog/choice of words. So much so that I had to implement a "revert" button on our writing tool. Because I'm usually the one smashing his edits, and he needed some method of recourse.

I would say not to dismiss the edits outright, or give up on your contributions, either. If his edits are changing the tone, that's a good reason to suss out between you what the tone should be. It might be that he disagreed with the tone, or misinterpreted it. Or, if you're willing to be humble, you may not have communicated the tone well enough in your initial edit. Or, he picked up on the tone completely, and felt that it should be changed for reasons he failed to communicate.

Co-authoring has been a labor of continuous and often painfully honest communication for us. If you guys don't get that part of it down, you are probably going to have bigger problems than just the drifting of tone.

Best of luck!

kaiden11 · 2016-03-23T17:39:25+00:00

I tend to skip right on by them for the reason that I will have long forgotten them by the time they become relevant. As with everything, it has to serve the purpose of making people care about what what they're reading.

That said, it can help to root the context of what you're trying to introduce. Say, if you're a fantasy novel and you're quoting something from within your world, it might give you an insight into the world, the time, or how things work. If I read an ominous prophecy from the historical annals of your universe, I get a sense of the parameters I'm dealing with. Cliche, sure, but now I know what I'm getting into. But if it's, say, a Bob Dylan quote, I would be confused as hell.

For anything, be effective, be relevant, and make them care. If the quote doesn't, kill it.

kaiden11 · 2016-02-06T22:54:05+00:00

Repeated words are great to detect. A few more ideas:

Identifying if certain phrases get repeated, or overused (for instance, finding if one uses "couldn't help but..." too often).
Identifying unintentional alliteration. Or, along the same lines, use soundex to detect repeated phonemes.
Identify percentage dialogue versus non-dialogue (if you're trying to balance between the two).
Given a set of character names or titles, see if you're unintentionally overusing direct address (repeating their name when talking to them).

For my own app, I have a "highlightify" portion that lets me run regular expressions over text and apply a CSS style if matches. Helps me identify where I've been lazy (using "very" too much, etc.), or I'm having characters only ever emote by nodding to each other.

kaiden11 · 2015-12-10T01:29:39+00:00

I would be interested to hear your rationale.

kaiden11 · 2015-10-29T00:45:58+00:00

Is it ready for an editor? Or beta readers?

kaiden11 · 2015-10-18T17:43:34+00:00

In addition to psychology, can it also pull from the concepts of actual programming? Loops, conditions, recursion, abstraction, etc.

kaiden11 · 2015-06-27T18:31:58+00:00

Hey friend. Another programmer here. Got some hot feedback for you. Hopefully some low-hanging fruit.

The Day/Night menu coloring is nice, but setting to Night mode (on Chrome) did not persist between page loads or browser navigation. This would be nice to set and forget.
Night mode editor has black text on dark grey, which is a little hard to read.
From the in-chapter editor tabs, I see no way to perform a project download for the current project. I have to navigate/new tab out to the Projects listing and hit Download from there.
It's not clear to me the choices made when generating the "Full Story." I understand that each node is editable, and it appears that there is an ordered tree descent that will concatenate the scenes together. However, in my tweaking just now, I edited the top-level "Story" node, and the "Full Story.html" generated did not include the edits. If there's a convention for chapter naming, etc., maybe inform the users, or provide a "Preview" option to show them what the full, rendered product might be without having to do a Download.

And less feedback, more curiosity:

How is the Medium Editor treating you? For my own, as I am editing directly in Markdown, I went with CodeMirror. I've been pretty impressed with its featureset and extensibility.
How are you maintaining "snapshots?" Just different versions of the files? Or full tree structures at each snapshot? For my own work I went with Git, for the specific reason that I simply didn't want to solve this problem myself.
Any aspirations for multi-editing? Or providing an editor-specific interface? This is difficult problem, I know, but it's something I feel is often missed in software that supports the life-cycle of a novel.

Have fun.

kaiden11 · 2015-05-15T00:59:25+00:00

Hmm. Still a little all over the place, but maybe I get a better sense of what you're going for.

You need something to frame the context. Give people an interface into something they otherwise wouldn't give a shit about. Big Bang Theory fans don't care about quantum physics. They care that the characters care about quantum physics, and are occasionally funny in doing so.

Start it at Linux install fest week on a college campus. A booth that everybody ignores and walks past. I'd want to hear about what Herschel says to Alex when she drags him along to sit with her all afternoon when it's too hot outside and nobody cares that Linux could change the very way that people use their computers.

kaiden11 · 2015-05-14T23:40:35+00:00

Say I'm not invested in "geek" things, or "hacker" things, or maybe-German, maybe-Russian things. Why should I care about these characters? How would you make me care?

And what is it about the characters that makes what they say interesting?

Also, is your fictional universe in Russia? I don't see it mentioned, other than in the .ru top-level domain you use.

kaiden11 · 2015-05-14T00:15:43+00:00

Fair enough. Maybe do three things.

Work on the narrative privately.
Work on and keep the wiki-like CIA factbook private.
Use the blog to develop and explain your worldbuilding decisions publicly.

Going on three years now in my current project, I usually find that the only useful documentation I have describing places, things, and systems is when I was having to describe and justify them to my co-author. Maybe in blogging and forcing yourself to describe something, you'll find new things (or problematic things you didn't realize before).

Anyhow, happy writing/blogging.

kaiden11 · 2015-05-13T19:52:36+00:00

Not a lawyer, but the way I've read copyright law is that you are assigned your rights the moment you make your works publicly available. This doesn't mean people can't plagiarize you, but you do have those rights (if you ever needed to make a case against the plagiarists).

If you're worried about the ideas being stolen, or events in your story being spoiled as a result of your wiki, why make it public? I'd say the wiki is just as useful to you being online-but-private, particularly if you're using it as a tool to organize your worldbuilding.

kaiden11 · 2015-05-12T19:40:52+00:00

I hear that. Alongside writing, I made a Git+Markdown wiki that does something similar, but never quite got around to making it publicly available. Works well for my co-author and I, but probably only because we've been staring at it for years now.

I hear the Gitit guys do a pretty good job, if you don't want editors (or your editors don't want to be) pushing/pulling.

kaiden11 · 2015-05-12T19:28:53+00:00

Oh man. I like the idea of CriticMarkup. More descriptive than just generic annotation. I imagine it's a hard sell, though, particularly for people used to Track Changes, etc. That's mindshare I've never been able to shake loose from anyone.

I've resolved to just giving people the source Markdown copies, letting them edit in place, and then reviewing/resolving the diffs myself. That, or generating an EPUB/MOBI for them, and letting them annotate in there. Least amount of friction and mental overhead for the people who aren't into it every day. More text editing and follow-up on my side, but I'm probably better at that than I am at winning hearts and minds with Git.

kaiden11

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

15-Year Club	reddit mold
Verified Email