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Topics - the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh

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16
Author Craft / through draft done
« on: December 24, 2009, 08:19:57 PM »
..on my biggest WiP. 491,000 words, thirteen years working on it off and on, and yesterday i finished the epilogyue. it needs a mass of consistency checks and the like, but still, worth noting.

I have a number of other things to do (one needing a through pass and resubmission, one needing some People Stuff done to confirm it's OK to submit it where i want to, and one needing a quick last check before I send it to a congenial expert on the historical period in question who has offered to give me a read-through) before I come back to this; I hope that clears my head enough.

17
Author Craft / mechanics of faith in urban fantasy: a notion for a project
« on: April 27, 2009, 02:40:33 PM »
Something I am kicking around for a project that may be the next thing I do once the current WiP is done:

Lots of urban fantasies, including the Dresden Files, have faith as a power working such that, for example, a devout Christian can drive away the forces of darkness by wielding a cross which they have faith has power over said forces.  And where magic requires the caster to believe in it in order to work.

I'm interested in a universe where the way that works is inverted.  Where what matters to drive a vampire away with a cross is not what the person holding the cross believes, but what the vampire believes and how strongly.  And where the efficacy of spells depends entirely on what the subject believes.

The consequences here are IMO interesting.  For one thing, it would mean black magic works  equally well on devout Christians as devout Satanists, and not at all on rationalists.  It means that the more you know about magic, the more experience you have of using it and working with it, the more vulnerable you become to its effects.  It means that rationalists will be immune to magic unless they see something happen that for which they can't find a rational explanation, in which case having to acknowledge that makes them more vulnerable.  It means that it's essentially impossible to use magic against someone unless they know you are doing so.  It also adds a whole new weight to the dynamic of not telling people about things for their own good.

Thoughts ?

18
Author Craft / most productive day ever
« on: July 27, 2008, 06:13:19 AM »
Well, today was actually my second most, by raw wordcount: 8400 words first draft, writing from about 16.30 in the afternoon to about 1.30 in the morning, with I'd guess somewhere under an hour's break for dinner.  (This may or may not seem less good contexted with hardware problems that mean I essentially have not been able to write for three weeks).

My all-time record is 10,500 words, June 20/21 of 2004, Saturday lunchtime to 9.30, going out to see a show that didn't happen after waiting around for it for an hour, getting home furious just after midnight, and writing for three more hours. (I count that as a day. YMMV.)

So what was your most productive individual day ?

19
Site Suggestions & Support / Request for thread split: "Day Off" thread in Spoilers section
« on: May 07, 2008, 08:29:01 PM »
This thread has turned, in the last few posts, into a discussion about what SF can and can't do differently from mainstream that I would be interested to continue but that's distinctly off-topic; I think that that last page and a half or so would be appropriately moved to Author Craft or possibly Media Favourites. 

20
Site Suggestions & Support / occasional garble of buttons, links, reply-to text boxes
« on: December 11, 2007, 06:38:35 PM »
I don't know whether there's a sensible answer to this beyond getting a more up to date browser (am using Mozilla 1.0.1) which would be unfortunate as I'm not in a workplace that allows that, but I've been having an intermittent problem, most often with long-ish threads, where beyond a specific point on a page, and on all subsequent pages, there will be some garbling of post titles, quote and modify buttons and so on when I mouse over them, and when I attempt to reply, all the buttons above the text window are garbled and some or all of the text in the text window, both mine and the post to which I am replying, will be invisible. 

I mention this now because I have an example; it appears to be consistently happening with page 4 of the "Reasoning behind political views" thread in the Touchy Topic forum, from the top, and also affecting page 5 of that thread.

It doesn't happen very often and I can come back to threads from home eventually anyway, so I'm not asking for this to be a high priority, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

21
Site Suggestions & Support / logged in "forever" query
« on: May 09, 2007, 04:30:33 PM »
When I log in and set the time I want to stay logged in to "forever", how long does the site actually keep me registered as logged in ?  I ask because I was a bit surprised that it had logged me out over the weekend.  This isn't a request for anything to be changed, I'd just like to know.

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