View Single Post
Old 04-15-2013, 05:43 PM   #9
Katsunami
Grand Sorcerer
Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Katsunami ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Katsunami's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,111
Karma: 34000001
Join Date: Mar 2008
Device: KPW1, KA1
Quote:
Originally Posted by barutanseijin View Post
If you don't absolutely need to write this, i guess the questions i'd ask myself are: why is a reader going to want to read this? Am i giving readers something they can't get elsewhere? I'd want to have good answers for those questions.

I get the "it'll bug me if i don't write this" feeling. Me too. By and large, i'm comfortable with silence. But something nags at me if i don't write; i get to sleep easier after a good day of writing.
I've been looking a long time for something to create that may be interesting to other people, and writing may be the "easiest" to do so.

It's certainly "easier" than creating a website: at first, I'd need to design and write the website, or at least modify a standard package such as Wordpress to fit my needs, and then maintain it, all of which would take a great amount of time already. When that's taken care of, the content needs to be created, which takes even more time. And what content should/would I create that other people might find interesting? While I'm (quite) knowledgeable with regard to certain topics, I don't feel that I'm enough of an expert to start writing about them; and *if* I'd write about them, the information I have to offer is already out there.

While I enjoy music and play the Hammond organ (and have a very passable knowledge of music theory), I'm one of those guys that plays from sheet music, and totally collapses when you take the sheets away. I'm not a composer. I've tried it, and I can't do it.

Lastly, I take pictures, but because of several reasons, the main one being not having a car (and not being allowed to drive one because of a visual handicap), I cannot go to the places worth taking pictures of that would be interesting to someone else but me. Therefore I don't go out shooting "poster-worthy" material.

Writing requires nothing but a vivid imagination, a computer that's less than 10 years old and of course good understanding of the language you will be writing in. I have the computer, I think my understanding of English may be good enough to not make a *complete* ass of myself, and I think I'll be able to come up with (some) original stuff.

While talking with a friend, he pointed me to some manga he was reading and anime he was watching. I saw one of the characters, and *poof*: a new character for my story just presented itself, even including a few scenes it should be in. It will not be 1:1 copy of the anime character of course, but it definately gave me some idea's to get started with. Because of the type of character it is (race, behavior, living environment), a part of the world basically created itself in no-time in my head. If I split the story into two books, I already know both endings, and (most of) the first chapter of both books....

The only thing I'd need to do is sit down, put these ideas down, and then actually expand upon them, and write the friggin' story.

Maybe, if it'd ever get finished, the story/stories could be uploaded to an eBook store for $1 a piece. In the mobile world, people got rich and whole companies got founded on $1 software or games. It's worth a shot. Why not?

And even if the work is never sold once, then at the very least, I can put the results somewhere to download for free and have the satisfaction of people maybe reading it when they come across it. I would have actually, finally, *created* something. (Outside the programming I do for work.)

===

Now... I've been looking into Scrivener, as I will definately need some software to organise stuff. In another thread, I'd said it would be best to write in Sigil directly instead of something like OpenOffice, but Sigil has no organisational capabilities; and I've already found out that I definitely want that, to organize a book like a project.

There are other programs such as StoryBook and yWriter5, but it seems Scrivener is used the most, looks to be the best supported, and the only one that exports to clean epub. While playing with the trial, I must confess that I like it. (Luckily, there's now a Windows version.)

Actually, I've found a 20% discount coupon for Scrivener, bringing the price down to €25. That would get me 4-5 eBooks. I've got almost 100 books in Calibre that I've not read yet (they're all on my TBR-list), so I don't need that €25 for more books right now.

Maybe I should just buy Scrivener, start out, and see where this ends. If worst comes to worst, I've blown €25 and some time. I can handle the €25 (I know people who blow €50 a week on cigarettes or whiskey; no offence intended to anyone) and if not spent writing, I'd use the time on some of my numerous other hobbies anyway.

Starting the story instead of this post would have provided me with over 900 words; about 5000 characters, or 2 pages in a standard mass market paperback. That's 10-15 of the first chapter already.

===

What the hell; I'll just try it.

Last edited by Katsunami; 04-15-2013 at 05:56 PM.
Katsunami is offline   Reply With Quote