NaNoWriMo 2011 – The Body on the Floor

Posted on October 16, 2011

With November approaching, I thought about giving NaNoWriMo a miss this year. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and the goal for participants is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words over the course of November. I participated in 2009 and 2010, and won in 2009.

Even though all the writing is supposed to take place during November, authors are allowed (encouraged, even) to do some work in advance. This includes coming with characters, places, plot, and whatnot. Until yesterday, I didn’t have any ideas for a plot, and I wasn’t really pushing myself to develop one. Then, one came to mind. Thus far, the story premise is only a couple of paragraphs I wrote to keep track of the idea:

A cell of terrorists (a la Red Army Faction, or maybe some drug dealers) go to set up a safe house in an old abandoned warehouse, when they find a dead body in the middle of the floor. The story goes through the thoughts of the individual members and what each of them thinks they should do about the body.

Do they leave it and not tell anyone? Do they leave it and call the police anonymously? Will they have to find another safe house? How quickly can they do that? How will it affect their operation? How do they notify their contacts if they move? Did the person have a family? Can they move the body somewhere? How long will it be before someone comes looking for the body? Will someone look for the body? Who was this person? Will they be missed?

If one is planning an audacious mission (for good or ill), finding a corpse on the floor of your supposedly safe location would lead to all sorts of problems. Some people might look at it as a bad omen. It would sap morale and inevitably lead to second guessing. How would these people handle it?

Anyway, I think it might be good for 50,000 words, so I’m planning on doing NaNo this year. (Maybe I can get Siri to do dictation).

Fluidinfo as a concordance

Posted on April 6, 2011

A few weeks ago, I started reading the Harry Potter books for the first time (I’ve yet to see the movies). The O’Reilly Fluidinfo Writable API competition started around the same time, and after poking around Fluidinfo for awhile I thought it would be great way to keep track of all the characters. In short, it seemed like it would great as concordance software.

A concordance is a set of notes an author might use to keep track of characters, their backgrounds, what they do in the book, which characters they meet, and so on. Before computers were so ubiquitous, a concordance might be a notebook or a set of index cards. As computers got cheaper, software packages for writers eventually became an industry, and many of these have some system for keeping track of characters, places, and so on. However, fans of books and films also use and create concordances for pretty much the same reason: to keep track of who does what to whom, and where, when, and how it was done.

To test out the idea of Fluidinfo as a concordance, I decided to use the Star Wars films. While it would be great for the Harry Potter series, they’re still too new to me. Star Wars, on the other hand, I can come up with characters, places, and events from the films with no problems. There is a large Star Wars Expanded Universe out there with books, graphic novels, cartoons, a Holiday Special, and more, but I don’t know as much about them. Also, from what I understand, only the things that happened in the films are considered 100% canonical (feel free to let me know if that’s not the case). For these reasons, I limited the project to the films only.

To get started, I began creating objects in Fluidinfo. Anyone can create objects in Fluidinfo without needing to be logged in or create a user account, so this was the easiest place to start. First off were objects for the films:

film:star wars episode i the phantom menace (1999)
film:star wars episode ii attack of the clones (2002)
film:star wars episode iii revenge of the sith (2005)
film:star wars episode iv a new hope (1977)
film:star wars episode v the empire strikes back (1980)
film:star wars episode vi return of the jedi (1983)

It’s possible to stop there and just start tagging those objects with details like places, characters, events, and so on. However, given the level of detail in the Expanded Universe, it seemed like a better idea to create objects for many of these things, then tag those objects with details.

So, I created some objects for different characters:

star wars character:anakin skywalker
star wars character:beru lars
star wars character:boba fett
star wars character:c 3po
star wars character:chewbacca
star wars character:count dooku
star wars character:darth maul
star wars character:darth sidious
star wars character:darth tyranus
star wars character:darth vader
star wars character:greedo
star wars character:han solo
star wars character:jabba the hutt
star wars character:jan dodonna
star wars character:jar jar binks
star wars character:lando calrissian
star wars character:leia organa
star wars character:luke skywalker
star wars character:mace windu
star wars character:mon mothma
star wars character:nute gunray
star wars character:obi wan kenobi
star wars character:owen lars
star wars character:padme amidala
star wars character:palpatine
star wars character:qui gon jinn
star wars character:r2 d2
star wars character:shmi skywalker
star wars character:wedge antilles
star wars character:wilhuff tarkin

Then some different locations:

star wars location:alderaan
star wars location:bespin
star wars location:coruscant
star wars location:dagobah
star wars location:death star i
star wars location:death star ii
star wars location:endor
star wars location:geonosis
star wars location:hoth
star wars location:kamino
star wars location:kashyyyk
star wars location:mustafar
star wars location:naboo
star wars location:tatooine
star wars location:tatooine:anchorhead
star wars location:tatooine:dune sea
star wars location:tatooine:great pit of carkoon
star wars location:tatooine:jabbas palace
star wars location:tatooine:lars homestead
star wars location:tatooine:mos eisley
star wars location:tatooine:mos eisley cantina
star wars location:tatooine:mos espa
star wars location:utapau
star wars location:yavin 4

As if that wasn’t enough, there are also objects for weapons, too:

star wars weapon:blaster pistol
star wars weapon:blaster rifle
star wars weapon:bowcaster
star wars weapon:death star i
star wars weapon:death star ii
star wars weapon:force lightning
star wars weapon:lightsaber

Deciding that was enough to get started, I started creating some tags. The first was lafnlab/redirect-to. This is sort of a general purpose tag, not specific to concordances or Star Wars. I use it to point to canonical objects. If I create an object, and find I misspelled it afterward, I can’t delete the object. It’s a good idea, but sort of frustrating. By using lafnlab/redirect-to, I can point to the correct object. I sort of hope that there will be a fluiddb/redirect-to tag at some point (hint, hint). In this case, I tagged star wars character:darth tyranus with lafnlab/redirect-to and entered the object for star wars character:count dooku. Someone who opens the Darth Tyranus object will see this tag and the link. If they click on the link, they are redirected to the Count Dooku object. I also placed the tag on Darth Sidious to redirect to Palpatine. However, I kept Darth Vader separate from Anakin Skywalker, figuring there was enough going on with each that they can be considered different people. Of course, it all depends on your point of view.

After that, I created a new namespace called cc, which is short for concordance. In the cc namespace, I made a bunch of new tags:

alter-ego
child-of
fought-alongside
fought-against
in-book
in-film
macguffin
owned-by
owns
parent-of
portrayed-by
sibling-of
spouse-of
student-of
teacher-of
titles-jobs
vehicles
visited
voiced-by
weapons

Again, it’s just a starting point. To create tags or to apply tags, you need to login to Fluidinfo, which means creating an account. Someone else might want to use different tags. Mine are supposed to be sort of general purpose, since I may use them on other films or books.

So what can be done with all of this? Plenty. If someone entered information from all of the books, they could come up with a family tree app that starts with Shmi Skywalker and continues to her great-grandchildren. Run the query lafnlab/cc/titles-jobs matches "Jedi" to get a list of Jedi from the films. Find out how many people did Yoda teach, and how many of those became Sith Lords. These are just a few examples.

The main aim of this post is to show how Fluidinfo can be used as a concordance. It doesn’t have to just be Star Wars. It doesn’t even have to be grandiose. It could be used for anything from a series of seven books (looks at the Harry Potter books on the table) to a one-person play. It only takes the will to create some objects and some tags to tie them together.

Sequels and series

Posted on November 19, 2010

I’ve been watching a lot of sequels lately and trying to do haiku for each film in different series. Sometime after finishing volume 2 of Review Haiku I’ll probably do a separate book where the haiku of film series are compiled. At the moment though, there are a lot of film series where I’ve only watched one or two films, and some series where I haven’t watched any. I still haven’t seen any of the Harry Potter films :-/

One question to resolve is if a series is supposed to have a minimum number of films. There are lots of trilogies, but what about those with two films? Could they really be considered film series? Before Sunset came out nine years after Before Sunrise, but I don’t think it was originally intended to be a series. I think it just occurred the people involved that it might be nice to see what the main characters were up to several years later. Kill Bill is sometimes described as one film in two parts, further muddying the waters.

Another question is what to do about unofficial or non-canonical films. There are many films in the James Bond series, but there are also a few films that weren’t official parts of the series. I’m inclined to include them, but put them as extras or mark them as separate somehow.

Luckily there’s plenty of time to decide. Until then, I’ve got plenty of movies to watch.

Adventures in self-publishing, pt 2 – workflow

Posted on October 16, 2010

I hadn’t intended on doing a post like this, but it makes more sense to do it as a separate post, rather than repeating information in subsequent posts.

When coming up with review haiku, the process starts with watching movies. Usually, they are DVDs, but sometime they are streamed online, or shown in a theater. Sometimes, I download them from Something Weird Video or similar companies. Most of the time, I write the haiku after watching a film, but sometimes I write them while watching a film.

I don’t write the haiku directly to the blog. Instead, I have three text files. The first and most important of the text files has haiku for the films in the order that I watched them. This is the file that I use for the blog, because the blog also (mostly) has the haiku in the order that the films were watched. For each movie in this text file, I have the name of the movie, the director, the haiku, the star ratings, and the tags. This information is helpful when posting to the blog and when writing the books.

The second text file has the same haiku, but they are arranged alphabetically by movie title. In this file, I don’t worry so much about the tags, because this file is mainly to help me write the books, and the tags are mostly useless in a book. The third text file is the director’s index. The director’s are listed alphabetically by family name, then their films are listed alphabetically underneath their names. This index is also useful in writing books. After the haiku are written in the first text file, I post them to the blog.

Since I’ve only got one book out so far, the remaining parts of the process aren’t as refined as those listed above.

When I was close to 500 haiku, I started putting them in a Word document. Ideally, I wanted one review on each page, so this is the way it was written. In an ebook, it’s not a problem, but in dead tree form, it’s a waste of paper. While I haven’t done a dead tree version yet, it’s possible in the future, so I try to keep it in mind. Anyway, one review on each page. Some films have more than one haiku, so I planned on putting all the haiku for a given film on the same page in Word.

After the Word document was done, I created the director’s index. I didn’t bother with a table of contents. My computer has Adobe Acrobat, so I was able to save the file as a PDF. This became the first version of the Review Haiku book.

As I’ve mentioned before, this version of the book didn’t sell. At all. There are several likely reasons for this, but I thought that if I could make the book available in different formats, it might help sales.

PDF stands for Portable Document Format, PDF files can be read by many different devices. However, some people have problems with the format from an intellectual property standpoint (it was created by Adobe), while others have problems with the fact that it’s page oriented, and not text oriented. Because of these arguments and others, a new ebook format was developed – EPUB. I’ll get into the details of EPUB in another post, but creating an EPUB is briefly covered below.

Since EPUB is becoming a new standard for ebooks, I decided to create an EPUB version or Review Haiku. With the Word document and PDF file, I looked for a way to convert either format into EPUB format. EPUB is very text-oriented and when I tried converting the files to EPUB, the formatting got screwed up. Previous experiences with converting files of one type to files of another type showed me that conversions often have problems, and this was no exception. I was determined that if I couldn’t get it right, it wasn’t worth doing.

After a bit of research into EPUBs, I found Sigil which is a WYSIWYG EPUB editor. Sigil is currently in beta-testing, but anyone can download it and try it out, which is what I did. The downside is that Sigil doesn’t do conversion, so I ended up writing the whole book yet again. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but I think the end product is worth it.

In summary (now that you’ve read this far), the workflows go like this:

• watch movies -> text files -> blog
• watch movies -> text files -> Word -> PDF
• watch movies -> text files -> Sigil -> EPUB

A diagram would show that more nicely, but it would take longer to create it. Maybe some other time.

Adventures in self-publishing, pt 1

Posted on October 9, 2010

All the way back in March, I self-published Review Haiku at Lulu, and while it would be nice to say it was an enormous success, it wasn’t. The sole copy that was sold was one that I bought so I could see how the purchases would work. At this point, I would be glad if it were even moderately successful or mildly successful, but that would mean I sold the book to someone other than myself. Still, I’m not discouraged (whine).

There are a whole lot of reasons for why the book was less than successful. Poetry doesn’t sell as well as other forms of literature. That’s probably one of the key reasons for the non-existent sales.

The book didn’t have an ISBN, which limits how widely it can be disseminated. ISBNs are a standard for tracking books, and are used by libraries and bookstores to find books to stock.

I didn’t do a lot to publicize the book. Aside from a few tweets and a blog post (on a very light traffic blog) that was the extent of it. To be fair to myself, it’s always been more of a hobby, but it would have been nice to know that someone thought it was worth buying.

Also, all of the content is available on this blog (and at gottahavacuppamocha.mobi/haiku). That might have something to do with it, but considering how little traffic this blog gets, I don’t think that caused any lost sales.

Over the past month or so, I’ve been rethinking my coming up with strategies about generating sales. The first step was to figure out why there were no sales, which I’ve mostly outlined above. The next step was to fix them.

Haiku is poetry, so I can’t really get away from that. However, I can put it in categories other than Poetry. Each online store has different categories for books. Some allow a book to be posted in multiple categories, while others don’t. Placing the book in categories such as Entertainment, Film, Film Reviews, etc., might help sales.

I also got ISBNs. A big step. ISBN 9780983066200 is for the PDF version and ISBN 9780983066217 is for the EPUB version. At the moment, these don’t turn up anything in searches, but it make take a few hours/days/weeks to get indexed.

Next up is publicity. This is multifaceted. First is to submit the book to multiple ebook vendors, not just Lulu. The book has been submitted to Apple’s iBookstore, but they can take up to 10 days to put it online. I’m also planning on submitting it to Smashwords, Fictionwise, and some other sellers. When I submitted it to Amazon, their EPUB-to-Kindle translator kind of wrecked the formatting, so I have to figure out something else there. The change was so drastic, it wasn’t worth publishing for Kindle. I’ll try to get something done for that soon.

I’ve also added the book to GoodReads. While GoodReads is mainly for and by readers, seeing authors on there gave me the idea to add myself and my book. Also, it’s impossible to be an author without being a reader first. There are other, similar sites, but I haven’t done anything with them… yet.

I have some other ideas for publicity, but they still need work. Mainly, a Twitter account just for Review Haiku or for Gottahavacuppamocha. BTW, Gottahavacuppamocha is my “publishing company”. The website gottahavacuppamocha.info, which I’ve mainly used as a testbed, would be a good place to promote the book, but it’s a matter of setting it up for that.

More posts on adventures in self-publishing to follow (famous last words, I know).

Some Review Haiku statistics

Posted on August 3, 2010

With 700 entries for Review Haiku, it would be easy to assume there are 700 haiku, but there aren’t. There are 737 haiku. On some entries, I created more than one haiku. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a movie was so good that it moved me to write extra haiku. It’s more to do with how I write haiku – coming up with phrases that are five syllables or seven syllables, and trying to put them into some sort of coherent order. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I end up with extra lines that go into the extra haiku.

On top of the 737 haiku there are two tanka. A tanka is like a haiku, but a bit longer. The tanka were in “honor” of Branagh’s version of Hamlet, which was four hours and seemed worthy of something extra.

With this many entries, it’s interesting to take a look at them in different ways to see if there are any patterns. I’ll be doing some of that over the next few days, but here’s a start:

• 5 stars: 19
• 4 stars: 327
• 3 stars: 326
• 2 stars: 26
• 1 star: 0

Almost all of the films are either three or four stars. These star ratings are based more or less on Netflix rating system:

• 5 stars = I loved it
• 4 stars = I really liked it
• 3 stars = I liked it
• 2 stars = I didn’t like it
• 1 star = I hated it

As I explained a little here, I normally see films I think I’ll like. Even with “bad” films, it’s possible to get some enjoyment out of them.

Before I ever see a film, I assume I’ll like it, so it’s more or less an automatic three stars. If a film surprises me and surpasses my expectations, it might get four or five stars. However, if a film fails to meet expectations, it might earn one or two stars. I haven’t met a film I’ve truly hated…yet, but it’s possible this may happen in the future.

A few days ago, I finished Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies, which is subtitled A film critic’s year-long quest to find the worst movie ever made. The premise of the book is that the author (Michael Adams) viewed at least one “bad” movie each day for a year. Sadly, he doesn’t give us detailed reviews of each film, but highlights some of the films he saw each month. He has interviews with some directors, and provides some rationale for how he scored the films he saw, so the book is pretty entertaining. On my scoring system, it gets four stars.

The only fault I have with it is the lack of a list of all the movies he saw during that year. I’ve seen a few bad movies that he didn’t mention in the book, so I don’t know if he didn’t see them, or if they just weren’t mentioned.

Tomorrow: more statistics.

700 films

Posted on August 2, 2010

There’s no Review Haiku today. However, if you’re really interested, you can hop over gottahavacuppamocha.mobi, where Review Haiku continues daily. The haiku over there aren’t new – they’re reruns, in a sense – but if you want a daily Review Haiku, that’s the way to go for now.

Still, on this site, there’s no Review Haiku today. It was bound to happen at one point or another. I usually watch 3 – 4 movies a week, so it’s hard too keep up a pace of daily Review Haiku. I’ve been able to stretch it a bit, but I’ve come to a good stopping point. It’s more like an intermission. The haiku will continue in the future, but this is a good time for a break.

As of yesterday, this site has 700 entries of Review Haiku. That’s quite a few. Since there will be no new haiku for awhile, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some statistics regarding Review Haiku.

First off is the 700 entries. Almost all of these were DVDs from Netflix. Most of these were movies – the archetypical cinematic stories of the silver screen. A few were “concert films,” which sort of stretches the definition of “movies”. Some were television series or specials, proving that even the boob tube has some worthwhile stories on occasion.

As an aside, television series sort of stymied me at first. The Wallace and Gromit shorts were each around 30 minutes long, but I did a Review Haiku for each one. For most of the television series I watched, the individual shows were longer than 30 minutes, yet I only did one Review Haiku per series. I’m not sure why. I thought about doing different Review haiku for different seasons, but didn’t. Again, I’m not sure why.

Also, for the entries tagged “television,” sometimes television was part of the topic, rather than the medium of distribution.

Tomorrow, I’ll get into the more straightforward statistics.

Review Haiku, now in a book

Posted on March 7, 2010

Five hundred movies
Briefly reviewed in haiku
Bite-sized for film fans

I finally did it. The first 500 reviews have been put in a book and self-published as an e-book through Lulu. Review Haiku, Volume 1 contains reviews from 1941 to Zero Woman: Dangerous Game and all the Review Haiku posted from February 2007 to December 17, 2009.

You can get your copy of the e-book here.

Yes, it’s $6.99, but in addition to the five hundred Review Haiku, there are also thirty-eight pages where the films are indexed by director. This is pretty handy if you want to find out what other films that they’ve directed and I’ve reviewed on this site. The price is sort of a compromise. It’s affordable for most and it’s a PDF file that can be read on just about anything. The e-book can be read on multiple devices by buying just one copy. If you’ve got an e-book reader, or a similar device, you can read the bite-sized reviews just about anywhere. Waiting in line at the grocery store? Read. On the train? Read. In the bathroom? Read.

Now that Volume 1 is out, Volume 2 should be out when I have enough haiku for it. At the current rate, this will probably be late 2010 or early 2011. I’m looking into doing a dead-tree version, so people can buy them in bookstores, but 500+ pages is a lot of paper. That means the price would be pretty high, so I’ll have to think about it.

Haiku to go

Posted on January 31, 2010

Last year I bought the domains gottahavacuppamocha.info and gottahavacuppamocha.mobi, but haven’t done much with them. A few weeks ago, I set up another WordPress blog at the .mobi site, but one that only has the haiku.

Since starting this a few years ago, I’ve seen over 600 films and done a review haiku for each one. I’ve toyed with the idea about putting them in a book, and that may still happen one of these days, but until then it seemed like a good idea to create a separate site just for the haiku. This way, a person can read through the haiku, without having to read the other posts.

The site, http://gottahavacuppamocha.mobi/haiku has over 200 haiku at the moment and I’ll be posting more in the days and weeks to come. Since I’m also learning about iPhone apps, it’s possible there may be an “app for that” in the future.

Review Haiku – Y tu mamá también

Posted on December 17, 2009

Looking for a beach
Two teen boys learn life lessons
From pretty teacher

Y tu mamá también at Rotten Tomatoes
Y tu mamá también at IMDB

Rating:  

According to my calculations, this is the 500th movie for which I created a Review Haiku. I may put them in a book at some point, but at the moment, there are still many more to come.

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