Archive
Invisible Blog is on indefinite hiatus!
This may be pretty apparent from the recent post history, but… I haven’t had the time or interest to write for Invisible Blog in a while. This may change in the future, but I can’t make any guarantees. In the meantime, you’ve got 12 years of archives to peruse if you’re inclined.
Thoughts on First Event 2020
Well, it’s finally happened. After a year of being out as a transwoman in public, but only making brief references to it throughout Invisible Blog, I’m finally dedicating an article to part of my lived trans experience! Not sure the far right/fascist demographics will take it well, but you can’t please everyone.
So as the title suggests – I attended First Event in that liminal space between January and February of 2020. First Event is, in the organizers’ own words, “…one of the longest running conferences in the U.S. for transgender and gender expansive people and those who love and support them.” All good stuff. This wasn’t my first time attending First Event; I went last year, when I’d been out to the public all of one week, but this year, I was not only able to attend more of its events, but also had the opportunity to present my own workshop! I ended up presenting on what it was like to be transgender in the tech industry; if you ask me, I have the personal experience required to appear authoritative on the topic.
This was my first time giving a business/workshop-type presentation, so I was admittedly nervous. I arrived in the nick of time, only to find I had various technical SNAFUs – a laptop with failing wifi (solved by a tether), a misbehaving electrical outlet (solved by plugging into another wall), and a missing projector (which took a while to arrive in a form I could use). That being said, I was able to push through and have a good discussion with the people who arrived. A few points I remember that came up:
- Major corporations are getting better about treating their gender expansive/LGBTQ+ employees with respect and dignity (though there’s a long way to go).
- Transfeminine folk potentially have to deal with more entrenched sexism than transmasculine folk.
- Tech/IT companies sometimes find creating trans-inclusive policies extraordinarily difficult (read: StackOverflow).
Firefox’s default spellcheck dictionary isn’t quite ready for the gender-inclusive language that I need to make these themed blogposts really sing.
Besides being a chance to host a workshop and hand out business cards, First Event was also a chance to meet new friends and spend time with old ones. Now, my trans friends are mostly yuppified urban professionals – not far from my age, more or less well off, probably not especially representative of the trans community as a whole. The organizers of First Event have spent substantial resources on attracting as diverse a swathe of the trans community as possible, and it showed at times. Still, I noticed a particularly large demographic of older, whiter, more affluent, and transfeminine people attending the conference. This is probably a result of First Event’s history. First Event is hosted by the Trans Club of New England. That organization was formerly known as the “Tiffany Club”; it started as a support group exclusively for transwomen in the 1980s, and a very secretive one at that. In their defense, the average person’s understanding of transgender people was… not particularly enlightened back then. It’s kind of fascinating seeing that history written across the community gathered at First Event, but I suspect the ratios will become less skewed over time.
Ultimately, I enjoyed my time at First Event 2020 and feel that I learned a great deal. This isn’t exactly a review, but if you want to take it as an endorsement, feel free.
Recommended tracks: – just kidding. First Event did, however, organize its various workshops into “tracks”; for example, one aimed at transmasculine people, one aimed at transgender youth, one aimed at corporate allies, etc.
Behind the Bitmask has released!
It’s finally time. Behind the Bitmask is available to audiences around the world! Writing this book has been quite the ordeal, but books usually are.
I started working on Behind the Bitmask in November 2016 for NaNoWriMo. Despite the various stressors in my life, I was able to churn out 50,000 words that month, though it took some pre-NaNo planning, including a quick character sketch that might not be canon at this point. The rest of the book took much longer, though; my life grew substantially more event-dense throughout the the years until I reached my current lifestyle. Even then, Behind the Bitmask is almost twice as long as my first (deadname) stab at self-publishing. Hopefully it’s better written, given how much writing I’ve done since then.
Behind the Bitmask is an urban fantasy/sci-fi novel. It’s the story of Charlotte Metaxas, a mild-mannered accountant turned high priestess of a technology worshiping coven in the middle of mid-2000s Minneapolis. When her master is killed by a cruel warlord who then turns her life into a living hell, she goes on a quest to get revenge that takes her across a magical underworld struggling to adopt to the influx of humans trying to colonize it.
This post, for what it’s worth, is less of a conventional post and more of a list of marketing resources that will hopefully enable you to purchase the book if you’re so inclined. Expect it to evolve over time.
KEEP UP WITH BEHIND THE BITMASK:
Facebook
PURCHASE BEHIND THE BITMASK:
Amazon (Kindle)
Bookbaby (Paperback)
“Critical Mass” Reaches The Masses
So I’ve been hinting at this for a while – I released a full length album for the first time on August 1st, 2017. People release debut albums all the time, yes, but this is still a pretty major milestone on my end. In the interest of having more vaguely promotional material on the internet, Critical Mass is getting a blog post. Just to get it out of the way – your best bet for purchasing this is on Bandcamp, which has the lowest default price, but lets you pay what you want if you’re so inclined. You should be able to find it on a variety of other vendors, though.
A few bits of trivia you might not already know about this album, even if you’ve been good and purchased this album in order to support its creators:
- Most of the actual composition/arrangement/recording work took place in early-mid 2016, and the decision to compile things into an album came about a year after that.
- After doing pretty much nothing in the way of covers through the rest of my career, I started doing a chunk of those as I worked through the content for this album, and several of them lead to DAW/sonic advances that are present on Critical Mass‘s actual songs.
- This album almost featured some more remasters and remakes from early 2015 or so, but I decided to leave them off in favor of newer tracks once I decided to seek out professional mixing/mastering services. Not to disparage myself too much, but I had good results with that route in the past (read: the Polyhedron EP), so I figured I’d give it a shot again.
With that in mind, some notes about the future:
- I’m probably going to take another shot at finding bandmembers to expand Planepacked with sooner or later. Massachusetts is pretty damn good for metal, and I’m conveniently located to get people from all over New England by being close to its center of population.
- Unless something changes, the next major creative project you see from me is probably going to be another book. I wrote 50,000+ words of one for NaNoWriMo 2016, and progress has continued on it since then, if admittedly kind of slowly. I’m hoping to pull off something of a sprint to fill out some of the chunks of that. I’ve already written a teaser for the content of the book, which you can read if you want an idea of the content.
Your normal review schedule will return on August 12th… unless I decide to write an Anatomy of Video Game Music post or something. You usually know what you’re going to get on Invisible Blog, but you can’t deny that there are exceptions.
How I learned to love arrays – featuring Tracker2D
Recently, I’ve been working on a huge update for my pet programming project. Since development is still pretty steady, this probably isn’t much of a surprise – recent commits have included a teleport tile that can send bugs to arbitrary points on the canvas, improvements to the style of menus, limited UI customization functionality, and so forth. I spent much of the last week overhauling Tracker2D’s audio ‘system’ by more comprehensively exposing the HTML5 Web Audio API’s various audio convolution and filtering features. This has been quite a task, and I thought writing about the process would be interesting as well.
News Update – Tracker2D
Tracker2D is a program where a bunch of smiley faces run around a field of colorful dots and cacophonous noise plays.
This screenshot should be at least representative of the program’s general functionality.
It occurs to me that the summary I just wrote for this program may be intentionally inaccurate. Whether Tracker2D is a toy, a digital audio workstation, or a visual programming language, it’s still a browser-based music creation program I’m working on that you can check out here. As of today, it is in very active development with new features being added all the time.
If there’s any one philosophical point underpinning Tracker2D, it’s the idea that a musician’s output is shaped by… well, the shape of their instrument. A pianist is going to have a different approach than a guitarist, or a violinist, or a percussionist, and so forth. More subtle, however, is the influence of your composing tools. Having written a lot of music, I’ll note that I underwent pretty massive paradigm shifts when I made big changes to my workflow – from notation in Sibelius, to step sequencing with Famitracker/OpenMPT, to piano rolls in REAPER, and so forth. Even subtle things like how these programs map keyboard shortcuts to editing functions have probably altered elements as fundamental to how I work as, for example, tonality and rhythm.
You might be wondering what this has to do with the actual software at this point. Tracker2D is nonlinear by design; you cannot determine the order of execution for musical events you input into the software simply by panning your eyes in one direction. Instead, your musicians (“bugs”) travel over a two dimensional field and can end up all over the place depending on what sort of instructions you paint on the field. At this point, there’s even some basic programmatic ability with counters and teleporters; at some point, you’ll be able to create relatively complex musical machines of a sort; how Turing-complete these are depends on how much work I’m willing to do in the future. The entire visual<-> sound relation concept is inspired by Toshio Iwai’s work, especially Simtunes. Tracker2D is intended to be more complex and “useful”, though – it’s going to implement a larger soundset, bugs aren’t tied to specific instruments, you can have up to 8 simultaneous channels instead of merely 4, and so forth. Then again, Simtunes was explicitly marketed towards children, so it was kind of simplistic in a lot of ways. The people whom I’ve discussed this with probably know what I’m talking about.
Anyways, I might end up sharing some devnotes on the software through this blog, so if that sort of thing interests you, keep an eye on this. You might want to follow the Facebook page, too. If you’re REALLY interested and want to actually help out, check out the GitHub repository and maybe contribute some code. Tracker2D is written in Javascript, with HTML5 Canvas/CSS markup for the UI, and runs best in the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox.
Second Contact Is Worse – Character Art
Another facet of advertisement reveals itself! I hired an artist to illustrate some characters for Second Contact Is Worse, and he recently completed the job, so I figured I’d upload them so that they’d be on the internet. That’s a reasonable course of action, right? These illustrations were made by Łukasz Juśkiewicz from Poland. If you like them, be sure to check out his deviantART page… where you can also see the cover art my book’s going to have upon publication. He’s also open for commissions, so if you think his style is appropriate for your own works, I highly recommend you look to him for work. The artwork you’ll see after the jump (assuming you read this from the front page and don’t click directly through to here) is legally his property, although I made sure to get usage rights, so if you want to do something with this art for whatever reason, please contact him instead of me to get permission.
Hold your mouse over these images for character descriptions. Shrewd readers will note that I do this for pretty much every image on my website, although I usually don’t upload this much text.
“Second Contact Is Worse EP” now available!
My music composition efforts have taken a rather thematic turn lately. Every day, Second Contact Is Worse gets a little closer to release, and a couple of songs I’ve released recently have taken ideas from it as inspiration. I figured it’d be sensible from a marketing perspective to bundle them together, and that’s where the idea for the ‘EP’ came from.
This is going to be a free digital release, like all of my musical efforts so far. Four of the songs I’m planning to include are already available on my Youtube and/or SoundCloud accounts. A fifth is under construction, and will be EP-exclusive for a while in the hopes that it gets the thing more downloads and buzz. It’ll eventually go up in the usual places, but if you want it available to the mass public earlier, you’ll want to flood the internet with buzz for this work, and that especially includes putting this icon I’ve made in every corner of the internet.
June 1st update: The EP exists! Download it here. It comes with cover art, liner notes, and losslessness due to FLAC formats.
Teaser: “Twilight Emperor”
While this project is still in its early stages, I’ve decided to reveal it on the grounds I may turn it into a multimedia project, as vaguely hinted at the last time I did a teaser for a book I’m writing.
Twilight Emperor is currently set to be my third novel. Compared to the First Contact Is Bad For You series, it’s going to be more realistic – it takes place in an alternate 1930s Europe, with some jaunts to the United States of America and perhaps other parts of the world. The point of divergence is close enough to when the book takes place that Europe is slowly but assuredly sliding towards cataclysmic war. In the middle of this is Lawrence Walker, the main protagonist; a foreman at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Georgia who makes the mistake of vacationing in in Belgium when the French are crowing about nationalism and the restoration of their country’s glory.
Currently, there are two side-projects I am seriously considering in addition to the novel (which is currently at approximately 12,500 words):
- A mod for the game Hearts of Iron III, which is a strategy game where players take control of countries during World War II and attempt to rewrite history in their favor.
- An academic paper relating in some way to the actual historical events that inspired me to write this book. By engaging in research to make this book more detailed and plausible, I’ve acquired enough texts to get started. The academic work of Robert O. Paxton is playing a major role here, and I would recommend his book, The Anatomy of Fascism to anyone who is interested in understanding interwar Europe.
To be fair, Twilight Emperor is (in its current form) driven primarily by its protagonist’s exploits – were it not for his touristy tendencies, the setting would be a backdrop at best. Prospective readers should be happy to know that they won’t need to be familiar with the actual history to enjoy this book.
It might take quite a while to get this out – this depends on a variety of factors, such as the progress of Second Contact Is Worse, my out-of-creative-lifestyle workload, and my overall interest in this project. Keep watching your maps, folks.
Desultor – Masters of Hate (2012)
Another relatively new release. Despite what December 2011 might’ve lead you to believe, I generally do not listen to a lot of new releases as they come out – I’m too busy exploring other veins of music. Technically, this was released fairly early in 2012, but whatever.
“Death metal with clean vocals”, some call this. I would not be so certain. The song structures are almost consistently basic verse-chorus, and the riffs are often modal in a fairly typical way. I’d probably put this down as an extreme sort of power metal that doesn’t really dabble in a lot of the fantasy cliches associated with the genre. Labels are kind of imprecise anyways with this sort of music. The vocalist relies mostly on clean vocals of the “power metal” sort, but occasionally backs it up with mid-range shouts. He’s got a bit of what is most likely a Swedish accent, but there’s nothing innately wrong (or right) about that. It did make this album stick out in my mind a bit more than expected, anyways.
After a while, I realized that the riffs were drawing me back. I do feel they could use reorganization into more advanced song structures, but there are some seriously good riffs on here. They’re mostly very simple, based on intervals and tremolos, but in a way it’s a triumph of minimalism – the guitar parts are memorable and intense, and trace out some interesting melodic lines. They also seem to work well with the aforementioned vocals – on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being complete non-coordination (not necessarily bad) and 10 being John Arch era Fates Warning, this is probably about an 8 or 9; the score would be higher if both were more complex. The vocalist of Desultor does not move around so much in his vocal lines; instead the guitars move around him.
Anyways, this is a rather rapid release in terms of its pacing; it finishes up in about 30 minutes. A few of those are dedicated to fillerish keyboard instrumentals – nothing offensive or cheap sounding like some of Morbid Angel’s attempts, but one could easily remove them from the album. They are the only areas where the keyboardist is used – while it would be difficult to incorporate the synthesizers into what is already a fairly dense sonic package, it could yield good results. In general, work on varied and more complex songwriting would elevate this band (at least musically) into top tier stuff. Whether or not that would translate into increased album sales is questionable, but it’s worth a try, and would definitely be worth doing in an attempt to write ever better music. Desultor remains a fairly young band, and I hope to see a second full length from them.
Highlights: “Caged”, “Division Insane”, “Masters of Hate”
Incidentally, it’s nearly 2013. I hypothesized at the end of 2011 that this year would be the “Year of the Retard”, mostly due to the hysteria over Mayan calendars. However, the intelligence of humanity, despite the many challenges it faced, remained unchanged (mostly due to these challenges also being highly prevalent in 2011). A few bits of planning:
- Music reviews should continue so long as I am alive, assuming without intentional ending of this blog. It’s not like I’m going to run out of material, even within metal alone, although I may end up doing more solicited demos and independent records if my notoriety increases.
- Pickup Lines That (Probably) Won’t Work will continue for a few months, depending on the willingness of that author to keep churning them out. Whenever they end, I will probably make my own metal-themed installment.
- Rise of the Third Rome will be updated as frequently as my work ethic allows for. Unfortunately, unless I really prioritize it, that may not be very often.
- Your duties for 2013 are to promote this blog voraciously, to the point of fanaticism. What do you mean I don’t have the authority to make you do this?
Either way, it should be a funny year. I will have graduated from the University of Rochester by the second half (slightly earlier, since the semester ends earlier).
Publication Notice – “Scramble for the Americas”
I started a new ‘series’ of fiction, one I’ve been intending to try my hand at for a long time. “Scramble for the Americas” is a work in which everyone discovers North America earlier and colonizes more aggressively, with history changing results. If my writing were to be placed on a spectrum of seriousness, this would be rather close to the ‘realistic’ end of things, being an attempt at a plausible alternate history. For the record, my fanfiction tends towards the zany, while First Contact Is Bad For You and the always gestating webcomic project are hovering somewhere in the middle. Check back occasionally – a new installment might be up.
Currently, we’re in the first loose arc, in which I introduce the major players.
Scramble for the Americas #1 – “Lions of the West”
Scramble for the Americas #2 – “Natives and Norsemen”
Or, if you want to artificially inflate traffic to my web presence (and believe me, you do), read it at deviantART.
Publication notice – Price Reduction
In the next few days, I plan to slash the price of First Contact Is Bad For You. It’ll be the same book, but you can get it at half the price! Isn’t that great?
This is not just a sale (like Barnes and Noble have occasionally done by putting the price down to $7.99), but a permanent reduction. Within a week or so, the price of the book should be only $4.99, making the purchase less of a gamble if you haven’t been convinced by this blog’s writing prowess.
Anyways, you may be interested to know of some related projects.
1. I am working on the sequel. It’s going fairly slowly, to be honest – I started work in earnest in November, and most of my time since then has been taking up with all sorts of college related tasks. Suffice it to say: “Drug diplomacy” – a good deal of the book takes place on Earth.
2. More immediately, I’m working on a video game that acts as a sidestory to the game. It’s going to be an old style point and click adventure game programmed in Stencyl, although the graphics are probably going to end up looking more like a JRPG on the SNES – Think Final Fantasy VI or such. It’s intended to have a more farcial tone than the rest of the series.
The latter I hope to get out before I return to college for my senior year.
Advertisement: “That’s Unoptimized!”
One of my friends has, after much prodding in my general direction, decided to start a blog of his own. Isn’t that great?
http://sounoptimized.wordpress.com/
He has, as far as I know, a great deal to say on such subjects as programming, game design, crack fiction, and so forth. Considering how new it is, content may be a bit limited in quantity for a few weeks, but if need be, you can go there and demand more.
Note: As of 2013, this blog never updated. Why not check out something on the blogroll instead?
Satan’s Host – By The Hands Of The Devil (2011)
Man, it’s hard to believe it’s almost 2012. To get it out of the way, I hypothesize that due to all of the crazed jabbering we saw about the Mayan calendar and so forth, that it will be the “Year of the Retard” (2021 Jess: Yikes!), in which human intelligence reaches its nadir as people halfheartedly try to cause and prevent the apocalypse. Fun.
But let’s ignore that for a brief moment. This here is By The Hands of the Devil, the latest studio album by Satan’s Host. It’s where the band’s previous extreme blackened death metal reunites with the accomplished power metal vocals of Harry Conklin. Seriously – the guy has excellent range, tone, and his melodies are well written. He has everything – high tenor, Rob Halford style falsettos, a powerful midrange, and a small portion of screeches and growls backing him up. Quite frankly, the performance is impressive, and it acts as an excellent case for the incorporation of clean vocals into more extreme forms of metal. Obviously not everyone wants them, but when used right, they (of course) add depth to the songwriting.
Anyways, despite his presence, this is basically still full on black/death for its duration – there are a few nods to more traditional forms of metal, mostly during the slower sections. The riffing tends towards the more melodic side of the genre, with a relatively low amount of chromaticism and/or pentatonic chord progressions. In contrast to the last covered album, the drumming is far more dynamic, and definitely more audible.
So this album is one of powerful riffing, with varied song structures (there are some verse/chorus type songs, but even those have a variety of sections), and so forth. Lyrics are about as satanic as you’d expect from a band named “Satan’s Host”, which is to say they’re up there with Marduk and Dark Funeral. This would be a flaw on any other album, but the way they’re delivered makes them sound a lot better than they probably are.
Highlights: “Black Hilted Knife”, “Revival”, “Shades of the Unlight”
So anyways, you might want to know what 2012 holds for this blog. A few major points:
- Don’t expect any “Best of 2011” list or anything. I didn’t actually listen to enough albums from the year to make a good decision about it.
- Expect to see some First Contact Is Bad For You paraphernalia. Not sure what yet. It could be some short stories set in the universe, some comics, a video. Don’t know. The sequel is being written as we speak, but progress is slow.
- Flying Pillars Across The Universe is still ongoing. Check it out.
- I am preparing storylines and such for a webcomic project unrelated to any of this stuff. Currently, I am searching for an artist; I could do it myself, but that would take a lot of time, and my interest in drawing things is not very high at the moment.
I also want to draw attention to a particularly laughable bit of junkmail I recieved recently. With the subject “Permanent Blog Post”:
I was looking at your site invisiblesandwichtm.wordpress.com today, especially the (blog, news, post) that talks about (online games, entertainment, hobbies). I was wondering if you could place a link on your site towards the site of my client. How much do you charge for this?
I shouldn’t have to tell you how that’s sad, but suffice it to say that the ‘client’ was not named in the email. Happy 2012, people!
On detainment paranoia – a possible antidote
So there’s been a lot of buzz lately about a relatively large amount of detainees on 9/11 related paranoia. Suffice it to say that now is a very bad time to live in the Western world if you have even the slightest drop of Arabic blood in you. Technically, you should be careful if it’s enough to alter your appearance, since your average person isn’t going to consider the universal ancestor fallacy.
More importantly, I may have figured out a way to hold the wrath of such police at bay. It’s very simple – just pass a law that requires the government to pay a significant amount of money to anyone who was detained by law enforcement officials, and later found out not to have been wanted/guilty of any crimes, or having the intention to commit such. Exactly how much money I’m not sure of. It should probably relate to the severity of the charges, and the overall ranking of the officials (I.E someone who is wrongfully accused of first-degree murder by an FBI agent should be compensated much more than if they’re accused of possession of marijuana by a normal cop). Most importantly, it should probably be limited to more serious, rare crimes, especially relatively simple, clear cut ones in which a bad ruling would indicate error amongst law officials, rather than legitimate ambiguity, like a hung jury. Amongst other things, if the amount of money is large enough, the governments would hold their police to a higher standard, because the alternative would be losing cash. In addition, the victims could put the money received to various uses (most likely hedonism, but if we’re lucky, they could do something productive like starting a business). Of course, if the amount of money is large enough to be effective, we might see people trying to game the system. It’d be hard to prosecute to a point.
I’d like to hear your opinions on this. Like any raw idea, it needs further input. As far as I can tell, we especially need a clearly defined scope for people and cash, but anything else is appreciated.
PS: With this in mind, it strikes me that attempting to hijack a plane or otherwise engage in acts of terrorism on a plane is a particularly foolish idea, especially because of the heightened security measures of the time. Anyone with a shred of creativity can think up all sorts of mayhem that doesn’t require boarding a plane (or even getting near one). I’d share my own ideas, but that’d defeat the purpose of getting you to use your mind, am I right?
First Contact Is Bad For You
What’s First Contact Is Bad For You really about?
Primarily, I’d say it’s actually about how people take advantage of technology. It’s also about how various peoples respond to intrusions from foreigners, how powerful people try to mold society to suit their interests, how private enterprise can drive (or inhibit) progress, and how people cope with hardships in their lives.
Also, one of the protagonists (Ted Decker) is an cybernetic bear with a human brain. How many literary protagonists have that in their favor?
First Contact Is Bad For You is my debut science fiction novel, released in August 2011 through Bookbaby. If you’re into the more irreverent sort of speculative fiction (see Terry Pratchett, Neal Stephenson, etc.), you’ll definitely find it entertaining. Currently, it’s only available as an ebook (DRM free) , but if sales are good, I might bring out an actual paper edition. It costs $4.95, although I’ve seen Barnes and Noble occasionally list it at a lower price. Thanks to Bookbaby, who provided the distribution, and the cover art.
Bookbaby now distributes to more stores than I can conveniently link to! If you see it for sale in an odd place, check Bookbaby’s list of distributed platforms, as I have opted into letting them send it anywhere they wish. Most of them should provide free samples, giving you the first 10-20 pages or so. Note that this also includes Apple’s iBookStore, but I can not conveniently link to that, unfortunately.
Notes:
Here is a link to an early storyboard from May 2008. If you’re interested in seeing some early ideas I had, definitely check it out, although it’s substantially different from what this eventually became.
A sequel is in the works. I’ll post about it on this blog when it’s nearing completion.
Check out my other works by clicking the “Published Works” button at the top of the page.
I am currently not doing any public free distribution of this book. In the past, I ran a small giveaway on the official forums for ZDoom, a modified version of the engine used in the video game DooM. Check back occasionally – I might do this sort of thing again in the future.
Publication notice
Fans of this blog (Shouldn’t it be “The fan”?) might be interested to know that I wrote something for Dead Homer Society, a blog that advocates the ending of the Simpsons on grounds that the newest episodes are a travesty to the brand. You guys should read it; more importantly you should read what the main writers have to offer, on grounds that they know what they’re talking about and come up with a great deal of humorous/informational things.
Not much else to say. If you haven’t read it yet, do so. If you have, do it again.
Note: A better link is in order now that it’s been off the front page for some time.
More novel buildup: An early storyboard
This comes all the way from late May, 2008 – the novel has changed hugely in the intervening times. However shrewd (insane?) readers may be able to guess at what’s coming, and once the book comes out, see where certain ideas may have come into play. The actual draftwriting was a very slow process (I was lazy), so the book had ample opportunity to morph into something far different. To prevent inconsistencies, improve the writing, set up the formatting for eBook forms, I’m doing substantial revisions, but the plot at this point has basically frozen into its final form.
Anyways, take a look; you might find some interest.
A few things I find interesting:
1. The mentioned locales had wildly different names (foreign sounding ones) – more importantly, I hadn’t decided to put the distaste of extraterrestrial languages in the Earthers.
2. There’s a few tinges of wacky magic (or at least, technobabble supported science) in there – one of the ideas I was bouncing around VERY early on was Bob and Decker would be sci-fi guys working on a fantasy planet.
3. I use Halo references to refer to stuff, even though I’ve never been a fan of the series.
4. There are much more clearly defined antagonists in here. Also, Decker remains a relatively protagonist flavored character in the final work.
Invisible Blog 