Year: 2016

I really dislike the fact that my computers never last more than about three years.  I really wish they would last a lot longer.  I don’t mind a bit of a slowdown as it gets older, and I’m okay with what software I have…it’s okay if it’s not up to date, as long as it works correctly.

It’s been just about three years to the week since I bought this PC.  My previous one (another Gateway), which I probably had since…(checks LJ entries)…January of 2010.  Which means I bought that one not long after we moved to our present apartment.  And I know the one before that (a Gateway, natch) was bought sometime late 2006 or so, and that one replaced the Dell I’d bought in 2003 back in the old Belfry days.  [I don’t count the various Hewlett-Packards I had before that, because they were all hand-me-downs and lasted a few years at most.]

So yeah, that averages to about three years.

I say this, as it’s May 2016, and this current PC has started acting funky as well.  It hasn’t crashed and burned, at least not like the previous one, but it’s bluescreened at least five or six times over the past two months due to bad overwriting errors.  There’s also been an uptick of sluggishness, especially when I’m multitasking.  It’s also had a few startup issues lately, which is why I’ve been powering down via Hibernate rather than Shut Down.  I’ve already made it a habit of saving everything important on my external drives, and having my documents on Dropbox.

So as you may well imagine, I am grudgingly going computer shopping soon.  Here is my wishlist in terms of what I want it to have or be able to do:

• High processing speed.  I’m not a gamer or a high-level programmer that needs a crapton of processing power, but I’d like something that will let me have multiple things going without slowdown.  Something that can handle MS Word, Photoshop, Media Monkey, and various art and audio software, sometimes all at the same time.
• Lots of disk space.  I like having a buffer where I can save things straight to the PC and have the externals as backup.
• USB slots.  Lots and lots of USB slots.  I don’t mind if they’re USBs, USB2s or USB3s, as long as I got ’em.  I gotta plug my externals and other toys in somewhere!
• A CD/DVD RW drive.  Yes, even in this day and age, I still want/need this drive, mainly so I can rip new cds, as well as watch DVDs if I so choose.  [Hell, if it has BluRay capability I’m all for that, but I’m okay if it doesn’t.]
• Wireless keyboard and mouse.  It’s not essential, but it would help clear up clutter and the way I work/sit at my desk.  Quality speakers might be nice too, but those aren’t a necessity either.

I actually do not need a new monitor at this time — I’m actually still using the widescreen monitor from the previous Gateway.  The power button might be a bit wonky and loose, but it works just fine and hasn’t given me any trouble at all.

So I’m thinking, in the next couple of weeks or so, I may be taking a trip to Best Buy on Geary, or Fry’s down in Palo Alto, just to see what’s available.  I’m willing to put some money into this, considering it’s a unit I’ll be using on a daily basis, sometimes for hours at a time.

And if it lasts more than three years before I run it into the ground, all the better!

[Noted: For those of you who give thanks to the iGods, I have no issues with iThingies in general.  I just never got around to getting on board with them, and see no reason to do so now when PCs work just fine for what I want/need them to do.]

Last night, for the first time, I deleted a complete chapter from a manuscript.  Sure, I’ve deleted or cropped whole scenes before, or shuffled them around to different sections of the novel, but never have I just said to hell with it, highlighted the entire chapter and cut the entire thing.  And just to drive the point home, I went through the rest of the manuscript and adjusted the chapter numbers.

I’d always had issues with the beginning of The Balance of Light, I’ll be honest.  There’s a lot of great stuff in Book 3, but it gave me a hell of a lot of trouble.  I think it was partly due to not giving myself a break.  Back in late 2003, I’d gone straight from finishing The Persistence of Memories to starting TBoL without downtime in between.  I was on a roll and didn’t want to stop just yet, and that didn’t give me enough time to fully plan out the book’s main plot.

Chapter One, in retrospect, felt a lot more like an unneeded prologue or pre-credits opening scene than a good novel opening.  It had a few interesting ideas, but not enough for it to hold the reader’s interest. It served very little purpose other than to set a mood, and while that might work with some novels, it certainly did not work here.  The action actually starts in the next chapter — in fact, Chapter Two (now the current Chapter One) starts in medias res.  This works a hell of a lot better for the novel as a whole, because TBoL is all about the tension.

How did it feel to delete an entire ten pages’ worth of work?  Well, me being the writer packrat that I am, I didn’t delete it outright; I cut it from the working file and saved it to a ‘deleted scenes’ document.  I’ve done that numerous times for my various writing projects, for a few reasons: one, because I usually don’t like to completely destroy my work, and two, I never know if I might want to use it in a different context elsewhere.

But it was a move I didn’t take lightly.  In fact, it took me a few days to finally make the final decision.  I wasn’t happy with the prose, either…it’s painfully obvious that I was trying way too damn hard.

There’s two things to question with this kind of decision:

1. Is it worth keeping?  This is the obvious question, the one everyone arrives at first.  Is there a point to it remaining in the book, or is it just filler?  Even if it’s one of your favorite passages, does it help drive the plot in some way?
2. Will it affect the rest of the plot if I take it out?  This is the less obvious question, one that isn’t always hit upon, but in a way it’s the more important of the two.  If I take out this scene, will it disrupt the evolution of any other scenes?  Is there pertinent information here that is integral to a scene much later on?

In the case of question 1, no.  Maybe a ‘shot’ or two, a short bit of character interaction that I works well, but it’s not important enough to keep it.  I can always insert those shots somewhere else and achieve the same response.

In the case of question 2, yes, but it’s easily fixable.  The chapter starts out with Denni sensing a recently awakened Mendaihu from across the city, before the action ‘pulls back’ (to continue the film references here) to the Warehouse.  This same Mendaihu shows up again about three-quarters of the way through the book* but their two minor scenes can easily be revised or rewritten.

Even more interesting is how this decision affects the mood of the book.  I knew deleting Chapter 1 was going to affect two future scenes, but I was also conscious of how starting with Chapter 2 would do the same.  Instead of starting on a quiet but tense moment, I’m starting with a punch to the head.  Which is good, because now it’s given me something to aim for in terms of dramatic arcs.

And that, my friends, is my One Weird Trick I use when editing: know your story.  And I mean that in the context of knowing it like you know your own life: inside and out, how everything interconnects, how each event affects other events.  This is precisely why I did about a year’s worth of rereading the three books: so I could know it intimately enough that, if I made a decision on one thing, I’d know how it would affect everything else.

*I will totally admit I was flailing at that point.  I was having some serious writers’ block and thought reintroducing an extremely minor character would shake things up.  I’d thought about having this character join Vigil at one point, but it never panned out.  The end result reads as one would expect: an obvious shoehorning of a character for no other reason than ‘oops, I forgot about them, better squeeze them in somewhere.’

If the Mendaihu Universe has an actual origin point, it’s Vigil, that jacker group of digital anarchists that form the unseen backbone of the Bridgetown Trilogy.  They’re the earliest characters I’d created, dating all the way back to the original story in 1993.

[Technically they go back further; their 1993 incarnation is a mashup of the original characters in my Infamous War Novel from 1984-86 and an unnamed cast of characters from a short dystopian story I started but never finished in 1988.]

Q: What is Vigil about, anyway?

A: The idea behind Vigil was to create a group of people whose raison d’etre was to influence the actions of others. I always saw them as deliberately removed from everyone else’s reality, by their own choice.  The original soldiers in the IWN were literally drafted into their situation and fell prey to their isolation.  The punkers in the unfinished story deliberately chose to distance themselves from the status quo (as all self-respecting punkers should).  The Vigil of 1993 were a bit of both: living within the construct of mainstream society, yet working outside of it on their own terms.  The Vigil of True Faith expanded on that. They resurfaced as behind-the-scenes characters in The Phoenix Effect and even more so in the trilogy.

Q: What is their origin within the MU?

A: I can’t say too much without giving it away, but let’s just say they’ve been around for quite some time.  This question is answered in The Balance of Light.  I can say that their reason for wanting to influence others is a just cause; they do in fact have a connection to the Mendaihu and Shenaihu, and their main concern is to assist the One of All Sacred — on a nonspiritual level — to ensure the two sects remain balanced.

Q: So, is that why we always see Matthew in a workstation cage, perpetually distracted by whatever’s scrolling by on his multiple screens?

A: Exactly.  He’s a datacruncher of the highest sort and is constantly watching what’s going on so Vigil can act (or react) accordingly.  He’s been doing that every single day for at least fifteen years so he’s got it down to a science.

Q: Who is in Vigil?

A: We meet its leader, Matthew Davison, early on in A Division of Souls.  We know he’s the only son of the former Provincial Senator Gregory Davison, who had been assassinated a decade previous.  Matthew chose not to follow in his father’s political footsteps, instead becoming a software engineer of some renown.  He did, however, follow his father’s wishes to continue his work with the Mendaihu and Shenaihu.

There are other members, who we meet in The Persistence of Memories; in particular is Jenn Underwood, a childhood friend of Matthew’s.  She holds a day job at the Data Research Library and has an amazing memory.   They are essentially the two co-leaders of the group.  Others will show up in Book 2 and 3.

Q: Anything else?

A: Matthew, at least in the trilogy iteration, was partly inspired by Corey Feldman, specifically in his role in the TV show The Crow: Stairway to Heaven; he has both his hoarse voice and his scruffiness.  [He’s the only Vigil member based on anyone in particular.]  Despite all of Vigil’s personal quirks and irritations, they’re quite a close-knit family and look out for each other.  Funding for all their electronic toys is mainly from two places: Matthew’s day job, as well as his inheritance from his father.  Their penchant for constant attention to small details, sometimes to the point of distraction, is partly from my own work ethic in both writing and my day job.  I’ve wanted to change Vigil’s name for years, as it sounds a bit plain and uninspiring, but I just couldn’t come up with anything else that fit them so perfectly!

Okay, I admit I’m cheating here, but I actually have nothing to add here for the last three letters of the alphabet!  [Well, that, and I have a busy weekend ahead of me and may not have been able to get to the last two posts.]

So instead, I’ll hand it to you, dear readers:  what would you like to know about the Mendaihu Unvierse that I haven’t touched upon yet?  Any questions on what I have gone over?  Explanations, curiosities?  Anything?  Bueller?

Feel free to drop your comments and/or questions in the comments field below!  🙂