Good advertisements are entertaining and emotional.  I’ve talked about Audible Australia, which takes famous songs, and ‘audibilises them”. They’re simply entertainment.

There are the reaffirming ads. Like the Dove Real Beauty Sketches advertisement from 2013.

Then there are the ads that truly inspire you and make you feel better about the world, like the recent Shell ad I recently saw on twitter about gravity lights.  As as advertisement, mind you, it worked. Because the first thing I did after I saw the ad was google gravity lights.

I found a TedTalk on the gravity lights, and was so impressed I’m sharing it here.

This is amazing technology, and so simple.

I work in the computer industry (also known as IT industry, where IT stands for Information Technology).  There are a number of basic methodologies for developing software in IT, but the two big ones are Waterfall and Agile.

Waterfall development, also known as traditional development, is a method where you do each step—analysis, design, code, test—sequentially.  The problem with waterfall is that it’s hard to change direction. You don’t know if the whole thing is going to work until it’s done and out in the public.

Agile breaks the work down into smaller tasks. You work on one set of tasks, and then loop around to do the next. In general, this improves the quality, because you’re testing right from the start. It also allows you to change direction quickly if you find something isn’t working.

If we were to use these methodologies in writing, then the process by which a traditional publisher publishes a book would be Waterfall.

• Publisher acquires a book
• Schedules publication date
• Author delivers the book
• The editor edits it
• Author revises
• Cover copy is written
• Cover is designed
• Copy editor edits the book
• Author reviews edits
• ARC is produced
• Book is printed
• Printed copies are sent to bookstores
• Publication day

The list above is not necessarily in order, and it’s only an approximation of all the work that is done.

Authors who are traditionally plotters would also work via the Waterfall method.

• Story idea
• Plot out the story
• Write the story, one plot-point at a time
• Edit the story
• Send to editor

While authors who are pantsers work more to an Agile methodology.

• Story idea
• Start writing
• Edit what you’ve written
• Write some more
• Edit that, and so on until you’re done
• Send completed story to editor

An agile purist would probably be horrified at my analogy, because in reality it’s more like writing a serial, with reader feedback every week.

• Story idea
• Write an episode
• Revise
• Publish
• Listen to feedback from the readers
• Write the next episode, taking into account the reader feedback
• Revise
• Publish
• And continue to do that until the story is done.

My alarm clock died. It was an old am/fm clock radio I’d had for years. Probably at least ten. I mean, how often do you think to change your clock radio? For a while I did the modern thing—used my phone as an alarm instead—but it was tedious having to pick up the phone to see the time when I was used to waking up and glancing at the clock. Anyway, nights were for charging phones, not using it, and the charger was in the other room.

So I bought a new clock.

A new DAB radio, and I could connect through to my phone onto if I wanted to, with lots of features. Want to have a weekday alarm and a weekend alarm? Yes, please. (I know, some people would turn the weekend alarm off, but I like waking to music.)

I followed the instructions. Set the time.  Pre-set stations. Set the alarms.

It was so easy to set up.

It took time to work out what stations I wanted to hear. I want a mix of old and new music, with a bit more emphasis on the new. (Middle-of-the-road if such a term still exists.)  News on the half-hour, weather. Not too much talkback.

Talkback drives me crazy when I’m just waking up.  And before my radio died it only got one station for six months. A golden-oldies station that stopped at the Beatles era.  About then, if I never heard a fifties song again, I’d have been happy.  Especially when they all sounded so tinny on my old, dying radio.

I chose a weekday station and set the alarm.  Again, it was easy.

Now for the weekend station.  What should I choose?

I scroll through my options.  Chill.  What’s that?  I check out the details.  The soothing sounds of world music.

I like world music.  Soothing sounds.  I imagine the music they play at meditation groups and when you go to the beautician.  What about waking up to that?  I can lie in bed and relax for half an hour before I get up.

I listen to half a song. Not great, but okay.

I set my weekend alarm an hour later than weekdays.  I don’t want to sleep in too late, but I want some sleep in.

I’m all done, and it was so simple.

For the next week I enjoy waking up to an alarm I can hear, an alarm that doesn’t play fifties music. Bliss.

Then comes the weekend.

I’m dragged awake by the most awful music.  I listen to it for half an hour and pull myself out of bed. I can’t listen any more.

Next day, it’s the same.

Two weeks of this and I know I have to change it.  I scramble out of bed and find the first station with a song I like.  Bliss.  I’m so happy I go back to sleep.

Next day the alarm comes on.  Guess what it’s playing?

Chill.

This time I go back to the setup guide that came with the clock. I follow the instructions exactly as per the guide.  I select my station, set the alarm.  Next day, what comes up?

Chill.

I change the pre-programmed station, wipe Chill off the pre-programmed stations.  Reset the weekend alarm and wait a week.

Come Saturday morning.

Chill.

It’s as if there’s some malevolent demon inside the clock and really likes Chill music.  But I am not going to let this clock beat me.  I’ll keep trying.

I will un-chill.

A group of us were sitting around this morning, discussing our parents getting old, some of the problems that caused, and how we can alleviate them.

Loneliness is one problem.

Many of our parents had lost a partner, lost many of their close friends. Or their friends have moved away. For us, a friend moving, say, two suburbs away isn’t much, but when you have limited mobility it becomes a major problem.

Many older people lack mobility. They can’t walk as far, or as fast, due to problems with hips or knees or their back. Many of them can’t drive any more due to vision problems.

Lack of mobility makes you housebound. It becomes harder to go out and do things, which makes it harder to talk to people, which in turn ends up making you lonelier. It becomes a vicious circle.

This is not just old people, by the way. It impacts everyone. It just happens that we were discussing old people, our experiences, and some of the problems.

A lot of the things we could do to make lives better for our elderly parents took place during working hours. Exercise classes, craft sessions, friends getting together. Which we couldn’t get to, because we were working.

We talked about how not being able to give our parents their freedom made us feel helpless.

Giving up your job, your life, to look after a parent is sometimes the only thing you can do. But most of the time, that’s not optimal. There’s the money aspect, of course, but there’s also the dignity, the freedom for the older person. They don’t want to be reliant on you. (Or our parents didn’t, anyway.) They want their own life, but they want it to be happy and fulfilled.

They certainly don’t want to have to rely on someone else.

It’s one reason I can’t wait for self-driving cars.

Seven years before Mum died she lived in a small country town which had a post-office/shop and that was it. Even the local pub, which used to be open Friday and Saturday nights, had closed down. She drove 100 kilometres for groceries, and she was losing her sight. So we moved her across the state (a move of 400km) to be closer to her family.

If we’d had self-driving cars, she could have stayed in her own home longer.

Mum left most of her friends behind when she moved, and while her new town had family, with her limited visibility it was still hard to go out and do things on her own. She had to wait until one of her children was available to take her shopping. There were exercise sessions she was encouraged to go to, but she had to take a taxi to get there. She couldn’t go to places like craft classes, because most of them were in working hours.

She was tied to our schedule, not her own.

If we’d had self-driving cars she could have gone where she wanted to, when she wanted to. It would have given her back mobility, which would have given her back her freedom.

That’s no small thing.

(Mum moved into an aged care facility six months before she died. She loved it. There were people around to talk to. They ran classes. They had concerts, and excursions. She could do things again.)

Book news first

We have one more interview online for Stars Uncharted, if you’re interested. It’s over at PaulSemel.com.  In the interview we talk about who we’d like to play Nika and Josune if they ever made a movie out of Stars Uncharted, and we talk about how the show Firefly didn’t influence the writing of the book. No, we go way back further than that, to Star Trek, Doctor Who and Blake’s Seven.

Now, back to the main post

I did a presentation at work the other day, myself and two others. It was a good presentation. At the end we did a demo.  After the demo we answered questions for around fifteen minutes. 

Up on screen, the final page was left up while we talked. And all I could see was the typo I should have fixed.

“What we dont’ …”

All in big, dark letters because it was a sub-heading.

The first thing I did when I got back to my desk was fix it.

The fact is, when you’re writing, you make a lot of typos. Errors you don’t pick up, even when you read a piece of writing again and again. One of the advantages of co-writing is that another person is reading your work all the time.  They pick up things you don’t see.

I know that when I’m writing, I’ll often change a sentence, but not go back and delete words that made sense in the context of the original text, but don’t any more. And the funny thing is, even when I reread the sentence, I don’t pick up all the errors.

No matter how often you read your own work, you miss things.

Right at the end of a story we like to read our novels aloud. This is after more than twenty rounds of edits on the book. Even so, it’s amazing how much we change in that last round.

And we still miss things.  There are the typos which mostly get picked up by the editor and the copy editor, thank goodness.  (Although, there were five thousand copy editor corrections on Linesman. Admittedly half those were serial comma issues, and many of the rest were Australian/US spelling, but that still left a lot of basic typos.)

Less often, there are basic logic errors.  For example, as one of our readers pointed out in Stars Uncharted (Thanks, Ian) that a measurement is tiny.

Alejandro’s meddling had taught her early that she had to build in safeties. Especially after they had started using the exchanger and she’d come back to her own body once to find that while he’d been in her body he’d redesigned it to add twenty millimetres to her bust and to remove the same from her waist.

Yes, well. Twenty millimetres.  That’s 0.8 of an inch.  Just a bit over three quarters of an inch. Not quite what we had had in mind.

We originally had it two inches. (For those of you who have read the book, Alejandro would have tried a small amount first, to see how far he could go, which is why we chose two inches.) Everything else in the book was in SI units (metric), so we changed it.  Except, two inches is 51 millimetres, not twenty. We should have made it fifty.

Ouch.

Stars Uncharted is now officially available.

Our thanks to the team who helped us create it. Our beta readers, our agent, our editor, the artists and designers, the copy-editors, marketing, all the assistants and everyone else along the way who was part of it. Thank you. We didn’t do this alone.

Enjoy.