Zompist Bboard Again

sasasha wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 3:52 pm

alice wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 2:23 pm All four outstanding songs now have workable arangements. This means that not much remains beyond merely playing the bits over and over again until they sound right.

That’s great!

Any chance of hearing them, or are these private enterprises?

Err... part of me would like them to stay private unless there are any lyricists/vocalists out there with nothing better to do.

Unfortunately I haven't gotten far in the main text of my novel, but I've managed it to write a few scenes for which I had already gotten ideas. Together with the few chapters I want to use from my earlier draft, I now have 12,339 words. Given that I plan for the entire thing to be near the lower bound of novel status, at around 40,000 to 50,000 words, I think that's not bad.

Anyone interested in being a beta reader for a quarter of a novel?

I should warn you that it's science fiction, it's a bit unusual compared to much of today's science fiction (no dystopian nightmare, at least in my opinion), and it's heavily influenced by my political views.

Looks like I'm more of a pantser than I had thought I'd be.

Two things I think I learned:

First, in almost any specific time period you've set aside for writing, things get faster after you've typed the first few lines.

Second, if you don't know how to handle a specific thing - how to get a plotline from A to B, where to have the whole plot go for now, whatever - it can be useful to think of every little fictional fact you came up with about the setting, story, and characters. Perhaps a little quirk you gave a specific character a while ago without thinking much about it might play a useful role now.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:20 pm Anyone interested in being a beta reader for a quarter of a novel?

Yes, I'd be interested.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:30 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:20 pm Anyone interested in being a beta reader for a quarter of a novel?

Yes, I'd be interested.

I'm not entirely comfortable with putting all of what I've written so far out there in the open, so I'll try to handle this by PM. I assume that I can trust most people here.

alice wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2026 2:52 pm Err... part of me would like them to stay private unless there are any lyricists/vocalists out there with nothing better to do.

I have things to do, but not necessarily better...

After a while of not really doing much work on zeptoforth, I'm now trying to make smaller changes to things that I have largely deferred up to this point. Examples include adding replace mode to zeptoed, adding online help to the block editor, and turning off FAT32 filesystems in blocks storage by default on the PicoCalc (as it is not really of much use after all on the PicoCalc as the PicoCalc already comes with SDHC card storage out of the box, so it can be freed up for traditional Forth blocks storage). I am planning on accumulating small changes for an eventual 1.17.1 release rather than making many tiny releases that would be much more time-consuming to prepare overall.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:20 pm Anyone interested in being a beta reader for a quarter of a novel?

I'd enjoy it, but I'm not sure how useful I'd be.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Thu Sep 24, 2026 12:27 pm the fourth part of the Derek Banas series went into amazing detail: https://youtu.be/0W6IhL3rcFo

I mapped out the claims about which dialogue types clash: https://snapshotsofthelabyrinth.photo.b ... -dialogue/

I haven't fully checked it for mistakes yet.

Lērisama wrote: ↑Mon Oct 05, 2026 1:48 am

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2026 3:20 pm Anyone interested in being a beta reader for a quarter of a novel?

I'd enjoy it, but I'm not sure how useful I'd be.

For the public record, I did, in fact enjoy it, and quite a lot. I can definitely recommend it to anyone who thinks reading fragments of a novel sounds like fun, rather than irritating.

(Raphael did ask me to send this, but only after I sent a much longer and just as positive version by PM)

Now about half done. Se here: https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?t=1781