I know I haven’t done much in terms of blogging this past week, but this is something I plan on remedying to. Somehow, this mini-break was a good thing anyway.

In the meantime, I’ve found (completely by chance) a few interesting things in Second Life. I’ve had an account there since the summer of 2004—I like building houses and creating clothes, it helps in furthering my graphic-related abilities—and although I’m a casual player most of the time, there are moments when I like to explore and see what the world has to offer. This is how I stumbled over a system called THiNC, that allows a player to create and distribute their own book in world.

It’s not regular writing, of course. The book itself must be made of textures, which means that one needs to prepare it offline in images before uploading it all, and this can take a lot of time. Albeit very basic, the result is interesting enough—a book that can appear as an item, and which pages can be flipped. Nothing to do with simple text, since the author can give it whatever look and paginating s/he wants.

Another interesting tidbit: last summer, Cory Doctorow allowed his book Someone comes to town, someone leaves town to be distributed in Second Life, under the shape of an animated book and under the Creative Commons license.

Reading this way is special, to say the least, and I’ll still prefer printing a PDF of the book; on the other hand, it’s interesting to see that the online boundaries of writing don’t stop at websites and blogs, but also extend to other means of distribution.

Y Tags: books | second life | writing

These days, I try to isolate and understand a few more writing matters, that I hadn’t perused before, and I’ve been wondering if it’s very unusual for an author to find herself, to say it simply, not wanting to finish a story? Not for fear of failure or rejection, that is, but for the sake of keeping the characters ‘alive’ for a little longer.

Coming from a RPG background and from campaigns/chronicles that would last for months if not for years, I think I took a few bad habits, in that I want to keep the story going for as long as possible before putting an end to it. However, this doesn’t work well for novels, lest for short stories. When I find myself in the position of reader, part of me wants to world and characters to go on existing, yet part of me also wants the whole plot to get to a conclusion at some point—no neverending series of a gazillion of books that tends to all look like each other after a while.

With my Internet connection behaving in quite a hectic way during the past week or so, I hadn’t really kept up to date with many posts, blogs and the likes (as could be seen easily enough—it’s Murphy’s law in action: when the connection drops dead, it’s always from 6pm to the next morning!). This is why I only saw this today: a nice little review on BloggyAward. What needs to be said is a warm “thank you”, I guess!

I know that what matters is the execution, not only the basis idea, but isn’t it very frustrating when you’ve come up with an idea, either for a novel or a short story, only to realize, a few days, weeks or even months later, that someone already worked along the same theme in a book or a movie you weren’t aware of?

Sure, it won’t prevent me from writing, it won’t make me give up my story if I believe in it (and if I didn’t believe in my own stories, wouldn’t this be sad?), but it keeps on irking me, to know that ‘someone else thought of it before I did’.

Fate has a twisted sense of irony.

Y Tags: ideas | writing

No kidding, I must really be doomed when it comes to short stories.

I’m working on a quick plan for a text in French, one that I will send to the Harfang association. I don’t have that many hopes, since everybody here knows how much I suck at short stories, but one needs to start somewhere, and if I don’t try and practice, I’ll never improve.

Now that I’ve found an idea, I don’t know how to begin the story.

I’m hesitating between first and third person. However, and this is way more of a bother, I keep on feeling like I should write it in English. I’m on the verge of banging my head against the table, because this is so very stupid. For once that I decide to work on an imposed theme and try to see if I’m able to pull it through, I’m hindered by the choice of the language.

I don’t doubt that in a few days at the most, I’ll be able to go past this block and write the story for good, but this is aggravating all the same!

Y Tags: language | short story | writing