Manuscript!

First conceived in 1993, a science fiction story I was writing began to gather momentum as I sketched out a basic plotline in January 1994. By February 1994, I was writing the story and inserting elements from previous years' ideas. It was the second semester of my Freshman year of high school, and the urge to be creative was also bringing my grades up.

The story lost momentum in June 1994, though, and writing stopped. And then the manuscript became less of a priority. I devoted my life to Christ that summer. As classes began in the fall, I began to produce "idea books," my 9 inch by 4 inch college-ruled notebooks. Each idea book covered a semester of time and contained sketches, story segments, character breakdowns, and other notes. By the end of my Sophomore year of high school, I had 2 idea books completely filled.

Throughout my Junior year of high school, I continued to use my idea books and filled another pair of them with story components. I worked with a fellow classmate to generate a "crossover" story which included both his characters and mine. Still, the urge to finish the original story demanded attention. I purchased an 8 inch by 11 inch notebook and began writing again. This time, it was an affort to collate my original 1994 draft with segments of story from the idea books. But by the summer after my Junior year of high school, that stopped also.

I graduated high school in 1997. I had six idea books from my years in high school. By the end of summer, I had typed about five chapters of the story and was working on Chapter 6. Thinking somewhat critically of idea books, I decided to determine if they were a crutch that inhibited my writing, or whether they were a useful tool. By the end of Freshman year at Ohio State, I realized that idea books were a worthwhile tool--I kept on developing ideas whether I wrote them down or not.

By August 2001, I had 6 idea books from my years in college. I also had a finished manuscript in my folders on disk and on the hard drive. But the holes in the plot, in the characters, and the rest of the information suggested that it needed a revision. By the middle of March 2002, the idea behind the story received a major overhaul. Characters, concepts, even the appearance of key places were considered "open grounds" for revision. The world of the story grew and changed.

By August 2002, I was writing story segments during my lunch break, transmitting them home by e-mail messages. By February 2003, I was producing idea book story segments worthy of inclusion in the new story, and I had an idea for the story's conclusion. By July 2003, on the pages of my next idea books, I had nailed down key plot events in story segments. 2004 saw continuation of the story in typed form, and 2005 saw the finish of a major event. After a computer crash, my electronic copy of the story was off-limits for six months in the first half of 2006. I persisted, having prepared by taking notes and keeping a backup copy. I hand wrote chapters beginning in March, and by May, I had my final handwritten page. The story itself was over, but the "manuscript" was in two places.

To remedy this, in the summer of 2006, I began typing the preliminary chapters to tie down the loose ends of the manuscript's beginning. By December 2006, I was beginning to revise the manuscript for continuity. By January of 2007, I had revised my way to the very end of all my electronic manuscript. This February, I pulled out my handwritten final chapters. This past week, I pulled some late-nighters doing typing to get the story done.

I finished the manuscript early on Saturday morning.

And now, the fun's just begun. Something has to be done with a completed manuscript, so the road to publication begins now.

D@tabasics Part 2

I decided I'd have a go at creating another database in Microsoft Access. I wanted to practice setting up relationships and see what would happen. I've also had an idea about how a relief organization might track who is assigned to doing what task, how far along is it, and other questions.

This has led down a rabbit hole with a variety of expansions to the original concept. First of all, where is our organization? Where are we housing volunteers? Where do those volunteers come from?

These questions had to be answered first, and for the first time, I realized that it might help if I wrote down a few notes. It looked something like this:

One vs. Many:
1.) One building has many zones,
one zone has many rooms,
one room has many volunteers.

2.) One organization has many buildings.

3.) One volunteer team has many volunteers.

4.) One building has many staff members...

And so I went on, building tables as I went. Not all of the tables are fully constructed, but there are still some questions that I want answered first.

These relationships helped me construct a series of tables that I felt comfortable with. I then went to the "relationships" display and constructed the joins as I felt they should appear between tables. I do not typically construct relationships because the database workarounds that I use at work have never needed them before. This is interesting practice. There might be more to this appearing in later posts.

Seeing Both Sides

After examining the revision work from the early chapters, then moving on to later chapters, I've caught up with an interesting situation. The earliest chapters are written in "limited-omniscient" narration. That means I focus on only one character most of the time. His or her thoughts and experiences are made accessible to the reader, but only those thoughts and experiences.

Somewhere in the middle, the limit is dropped for "omniscient" narration. The story skips between characters and exposes their thoughts.

Toward the end, the limit is enforced again for "limited-omniscient" narration. The story returns to the original "main character" and only focuses his or her thoughts and experiences.

This may jolt the reader to encounter something like this, but I am going to flag that problem as "handle later" in the interest of producing a manuscript. I will "post-revise" after the whole thing is typed, backed-up, and printed. The easier solution to this mess might be to open up to omniscient narration throughout, or to slowly expand which characters the reader is allowed to fully access.

Once I see the pattern in the chapters, and how much work is involved (and how much the story loses by losing the other perspectives) I will decide how to handle this recent development.

I'll get to see where this leads also.