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Every time I “finish” a project, such as last week getting Journals of Fedran[1] to a stopping point, I spent a week or two working on the little things that had to be done. Some of these are just items that accumulated while I obsessed about a writing project or the detail-oriented items that have to be done in the project.
It is amazing how little items add up. I've only been working on Journals for two months and I had over a hundred items on my to do list (written in Markdown, of course).
But, I've been plucking at it for a week and managed to get it down to 73 items. As they were little things, it feels like I haven't gotten anything done.
Because Journals is going to be Creative Commons licensed, I needed to figure out how to create the website for it. This is something that would have to be done by the time I was completely done, but I ended up doing it this week.
Redoing the website also meant I revisited the style of the Fedran[2] sites and trying to get something a bit more cohesive across all of them (including Sand and Blood[3]. That might take longer, but the results are pretty good so far. I'm using a common Git repository for the shared style, so updating the other sites will be easier.
3: https://sand-and-blood.fedran.com/
I know I probably shouldn't post Journal at this point, but I wanted to ask for alpha readers and it was easier to post the link to them when they are on a website.
To work on that, I created two Github projects to help support it:
https://github.com/dmoonfire/fedran-jekyll-website
https://github.com/dmoonfire/fedran-journals-website
I think I'm getting to the point I need a critique partner or two. On the first, Maggie Stiefvater[4] posted a critique partner hookup. I found two people who might be in the same genre/area as me. We'll see if they'll work.
4: http://maggiestiefvater.com/blog/2015-critique-partner-love-connection/
Part of this comes from the success of the writing group[5]. There are a lot more people there, which means more people asking to submit their entries. Because of my writing output speed, I have set myself as a “if no one else wants it, I'll take it” so others get a chance, but it also means I'll go long periods without being able to submit.
Finding someone willing to alpha read is important to me. And I think I'm at the point where it has become something I need if I want to keep going.
As part of this process, I ended up doing a longer critique. It was fun seeing another person's writing, everyone finds a different ways to say things and that is one thing that makes writing fun.
One of the little things that had to be resolved with Journals was creating a calendar for the non-desert culture. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but this week ended up being a good one for doing that. I like the results, though I'm definitely getting a world-building fatigue when I do too much of it in a single shot.
Another part of the world is Miwāfu[6], the first conlang for the desert folk. I got a little work on that done this week, but the website isn't ready either.
6: https://github.com/dmoonfire/miwafu
https://github.com/dmoonfire/fedran
Because Journals is licensed under by-nc-sa as is the Fedran site, I decided to move the wiki over to Github also. I don't really expect anyone to jump in and start documenting what I wrote. I wanted to support Creative Commons in some way and this is a way of being more public about it.
In a different byline, I've had fan art and fiction before. It's a great feeling seeing it out there. I'm hoping the same thing will happen with Fedran, though I'm hoping it doesn't take fifteen years like before.
I think Creative Commons is a better way of indicating acceptance toward fans than something like Amazon's shared worlds does. I know there is a “gray area” when it comes to fan art, but I'd rather be explicitly open to it instead of saying “no” to start with.
A Russian friend asked me to come up with “more English” lyrics for their metal band. I said yes and wrote five song lyrics. I'll find out in a few weeks if I got the right feel for it, but it was fun coming up with fantasy metal lyrics.
I learned the hard way that ownCloud[7] doesn't play well with Calibre[8] as well as Dropbox. I learned this when my main ebook library corrupted right as I was reformatting my machine. Since I wanted to pick up Adam j. Whitlatch's[9] new book, I had to get it up and running again.
Interestingly, when I pulled the Calibre library to my Linux machine, it managed to recover most of the files for me. Adding in the last of the books, I migrated everything to a Windows 7 machine and got it hooked back up to serving OPDS file.
The main reason I like OPDS is that I can have a server at home that let's me download books. Calibre's server also lets you sort by date entered (something that most places don't seem to add), so I can see what's new to pull on my phone. Overall, it's nice for having books on demand.
Since I decided to put my conlang, Miwāfu[10], on Github, I went with a wiktionary-style Markdown files. This is good for individual pages, but less so when I'm trying to find a word while doing translations. So, one lunch, I wrote a Perl program to take the individual files and create a dictionary. This is a pretty generic process, which means I might be able to provide it as a library for other conlang tools.
10: https://github.com/dmoonfire/miwafu/
I did format two ebooks and posted one. Fun things, but they didn't take too much time to figure out and finish.
Beyond that, there are little things that worthy of a to do list. Things that need to get done that sometimes are just a chore. But, I got a lot done.
This next week is going to be a scattered one. Maybe I'll knock a few more items off my to do list before I jump into the next project. Since I have two outstanding writing projects, I'll probably switch to the Markdown library and see if I can get that to a finished state.
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