Monthly Archives: February 2015

Uncategorized, General, Life, Publishing, Writing, Live Writing, Method

The Novel Continues

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

Another week of class just about done with another two live writing sessions complete. Finished up chapter 15 of my NaNoWriMo 2014 novel Avatars & Identity today. The past three days have seen more writing on my part on the book than I’ve managed to do in the last month. I’ve muddled past another difficult story section and I only have a few major plot points left to hit. I’m not holding myself to the 50k word target for NaNoWriMo for this story though. It will be how ever long it ends up being.

The physical proofs for Transformation came in today. I’ll finish reviewing tomorrow, a last check to make sure everything is good before approving the book to go live. Very excited to finally have the second book done!

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Busy Bee

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

I’m five weeks back into college now and this past week was a busy one. My first midterm, first full paper, and a ton of reading. (A given when 3 out of 4 classes are English/Literature.) The cover for my second novel, Transformation, was also finished. So I spent a couple of hours giving my Word doc one last look for any glaring errors, added some sample chapters from the book I’m writing now (Avatars & Identity), and sent it all to CreateSpace. Provided there are no issues I’ll be ordering proof copies tomorrow or Monday and hopefully (HOPEFULLY) the book will be live for sale by next weekend! Super excited about finally getting my second book up. After that I have four short stories that also need covers, a little editing, and then publishing.

I’ve been struggling still with Avatars. Partly because I haven’t been sure where I want to take the story and where it will end. For my first two books I knew quite well where they would stop. I do broad outlines for my books with just the main points I want to make sure I hit sooner or later in the story. I don’t hold myself to the order I put the points down but let the story dictate when and where they get included.

I think the other reason I’ve been stalling is because I wasn’t sure how I was going to make the story last to 90k+ words. For some reason I just had this thought in the back of my head that it had to be as long as my first two books. Silly me! Thankfully I’ve woken up and realized that isn’t the case. It will be as long as it needs to be to tell the story that I want. I realized this was one of my biggest problems because of a little post by Dean Wesley Smith:

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/killing-even-more-sacred-cows-of-publishing-1-novels-must-be-a-certain-length/

Once again Mr. Smith has come through! I love his Killing the Sacred Cows series and I’m excited he’s starting a third one. It’s funny how this first chapter is so very pertinent to my current situation. I also didn’t know the so-called standard novel length was created as padding by traditional publishers. Gah! If I ever get a book published by one of the big guys I will not accept any contracts that restrict my novel sizes. Avatars & Identity will be shorter than my first two novels because there isn’t as much to tell right now. I wanted to branch out and expand my Shrouded World to include some new characters, themes, and ideas. NaNoWriMo came along and it was a great opportunity to get at it. Hopefully now that I feel better about the length of Avatars I’ll be more inclined to finish it so I can move on to the third book in Stephen’s trilogy.

 

In other news I’m being introduced to founder of UW Madison’s Creative Writing program. I am both nervous and psyched about this and hope that it leads to more awesome things!

Writing, Live Writing, Method

The Quest for the Perfect Streaming Site

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This entry is part [part not set] of 5 in the series Live Writing

Now that I’m all settled into my weekly routine with college I feel like it’s time to get back to writing. To that end I’m planning on restarting my live writing sessions and doing them at least twice a week. The only problem is figuring out which streaming site to use. My basic requirements are thus:

– Must support at least 720p streaming. Anything less and you can’t read the text as I’m writing

– Must support live chat. There’s no point doing live writing if people can’t chat to you about it as you’re doing it. Also would prefer chat to be enabled whether or not a user has an account with the site.

– Prefer support for streaming my audio output along with my microphone. This enables people watching to listen to my writing playlist live and negates the need to add a soundtrack to the video later.

– Prefer free or inexpensive services. I’m a poor student now so I can’t really afford to pay for some fancy streaming service.

– Prefer the site to not be primarily a game streaming site.

 

That’s it really. So with those requirements I’ve been checking every streaming site I could get my hands on. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

 

Google+ Hangouts On Air:

Very easy to use and you can stream individual application windows rather than all or parts of your computer screen. You can schedule events and invite people from your circles to join. This would be my ideal streaming service/tool if it weren’t for two HUGE flaws. It doesn’t let you stream you audio output (i.e. the music you might be listening to) and it’s chat function doesn’t function. I’ve tested this numerous times and no matter what I do people who join the Hangout can’t see the chat window. Just the video. This pretty much defeats the purpose of doing a live writing stream in the first place.

 

YouTube Live:

I have the XSplit streaming software that I picked up some time ago to stream my World of Warcraft multiboxing sessions and these both work quite well together. The only problem is there’s no chat interface at all. None.

 

Twitch.tv:

This actually hits all of my requirements and is the service I used during the 2014 NaNoWriMo event to live stream my writing. My only concern here is that it’s nominally for live streaming gaming. This is definitely not gaming and thus wouldn’t be of interest to people browsing the site. Right now it’s my only real option though I’m hoping to find a better one. Twitch also lets people chat without an account, so bonus there.

 

Livestream:

I had quality issues with my stream coming from XSplit. They also want you to upgrade to a paid account if you want to use chat or any other basic feature beyond streaming.

 

FC2Live.us

Looks like it might work but appears to be used mostly by folks outside of the US. I definitely want a US-based site at this point.

 

UStream:

Another paid streaming site, this one geared towards enterprise or business users. Not for me.

 

hitbox:

Gaming site again. Le sigh.

 

UVlog.com:

This might be an alternative to using Twitch.tv but so far there isn’t much there. I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how the site evolves.

 

 

So there it is, the list so far. I’m going to keep searching for the best site for my purposes but for the moment it looks like I’m stuck with Twitch. I’ve had some thoughts for fixing at least one of the Google Hangouts issues but the chat one is a total deal-breaker. If they got that fixed I could find a work-around for the whole audio streaming issue. I might send a message or two out to some folks I follow who stream regularly. They might have some ideas. Either way my goal is to start live writing again this Thursday!