Something to consider in the next plagiarism scandal.

• Contact someone with a similar name, even when it’s clearly the wrong sort of organization — say, a student writing club and not the bookseller that’s been causing them problems.
• Ask a blogger for a job application for a company mentioned in the post.
• Ask unrelated tech support questions on a blog post because they used the wrong search terms for their problem.
• Ask for help creating Flash animations on a forum dedicated to the Flash super-hero, then get indignant when people have the gall to point out that they’re in the wrong place.

Now, usability guru Jakob Nielsen reports on a study showing just how much people don’t read. In the average visit, users only read 28% of your text if you’re lucky. You have to drop way down — to 111 words — just to count on visitors reading half of it.

Depressing, but it explains so much. And it suggests there’s a benefit to highlighting key phrases. If they’re only going to read ¼ of the text, you may as well make sure it includes the important stuff.

Open Standards, One Web, and Opera – Just why are standards important, anyway? (via Opera Watch)

Speaking of Opera, their EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft has been making waves. Responses at CSS3.info, Web Standards Project, Slashdot (edit: more Slashdot), Asa Dotzler, Opera Watch, plus a Q&A w/ Haarvard. My take: Good luck on unbundling, but if they can force Microsoft to catch up with the rest of the market in terms of standards support, I’m all for it.

Nissan vs. Nissan. On my way to work I saw a bumper sticker on an XTerra that said “In support of our freedom, it’s my last Nissan.” Huh? There was clearly a web address below it, but it was too small to read at that distance. So I looked up the phrase, and apparently there’s been a long-running dispute over the domain name nissan.com, between a small computer business named after its founder, Uzi Nissan, and the Nissan car company. The dispute was eventually resolved (correctly, IMO, since he has a legit reason to use the name) in favor of the little guy. On the other hand, I don’t see why the site makes such a big deal about Nissan’s “French Connection” to Renault.

Balkanized North America: what if every region that started independent had stayed that way, and every region that threatened to secede from the US or Canada had succeeded? (via ***Dave)

Enter Sandman: Who wrote “Footprints”? You’ve probably read the poem, or heard it, in which the narrator dreams of walking along a beach with God, and looking back and noting how many sets of footprints there are at different points in their life. It turns out at least four people claim authorship. (via Neil Gaiman)

Retro-Future: To the Stars! Science-fiction illustrations from 1930–1970, many of them from Soviet/Eastern Bloc countries. (via Slashdot, though I noticed it popped up again today on The Beat)

My Son’s Food Allergies: Danger Every Day: An essay on a family dealing with their toddler’s serious (i.e. life-threatening) food allergies. I am so glad I didn’t have things this bad when I was younger. Fortunately for me, mine didn’t get really dangerous until I was around 17 or 18—just in time to go off to college and get exposed to all kinds of strange food! (Found on CNN)

Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam (CAUSS): volunteer group that tears down unsightly (and illegal) signs stapled to telephone poles and such. I saw their site a few years ago, but had no idea that they were not only still around, but had expanded to multiple cities. (again, via ***Dave)

Ah, well. I know I can do it, since I finished last year. And I’ll probably write some more on this story, in which case I’ll keep updating my profile. But I’m not going to worry about writing 1,700 words a day, or finishing 50,000 words this month.

I won’t have a new novel at the end of the month, but I’ll be a lot less stressed out dealing with everything else.

Then on Day 3 I tried to do some Flash updates before picking up the novel. I needed to look up a URL, and got distracted by the TV Tropes Wiki. It’s just as insidious as Wikipedia, and I lost several hours just reading through it. In the end, I only got one of the two Flash updates I’d wanted to post, and with dinner and grocery shopping, I didn’t get started writing until around 9:30.

Because Nanowrimo measures your daily progress by the time you update your word count, it’s possible to write several thousand words in a day but have it show as nothing because you managed to post it after midnight. I actually got bitten by that once last year, so I make an effort to update whenever I finish a session, and several times in an evening. Unfortunately, the site was down yesterday evening. I kept checking, and was lucky that it came back up around 11:30, at which point I kept updating every 10 minutes as I got closer and closer to 5,000. I finally hit it just at midnight, so depending on how closely their clock matches mine, I may have been officially back on track for day 3.

Word count: 5009

This progress gauge below should pick up stats from the Nano website, though I’m not sure how frequently.

Edit: It looks like the progress meter was removed after the end of November.

I managed to put together 1,859 words on day one, so I’m actually ahead of schedule!

I’m going to have to start writing earlier in the evening, though, so I don’t end up staying up until midnight every day.

Word Count: 1859

I never got around to making more than a few minor changes in last year’s novel, so as November approached, I began thinking: do I really want to do this again? I’ve proven to myself that I can, but I haven’t done anything with last year’s, and I’m going to be busy enough without trying to write 1,667 words a day. So I decided to skip it, but take the time I would have spent writing and use it to revise last year’s.

Then I stumbled across something that reminded me of an idea I had several years ago. I started thinking about it, and while I’m not sure the concept can fill a 50K story, I’m going to give it a shot. Heck, I’m already ahead of where I was last year, when I started 2 days in with no idea what I was going to write.

I guess I’ll have to make an effort to finish a bunch of things before the end of October, since I’m not going to have much free time next month.

It turned into a fantasy novel with elements of time travel, though over time I moved away from the initial experiments in non-linear storytelling.

This past Sunday afternoon, I finished the story at about 47,000 words. So I’ve been going back, looking at areas that needed more development (and there were some significant character changes that I had glossed over initially) to fill in the remaining 3K.

About 15 minutes before tonight’s Veronica Mars, I finished a scene and checked my word count. It was 50,145. On Sunday, I had compared the OpenOffice and NaNoWriMo word counters and calculated the difference at 50K would be 144 words. I figured, what the heck. I saved it to a text file, scrambled the letters as directed, and uploaded it.

50,000 exactly. I have officially completed National Novel Writing Month.

I have no illusions as to the quality of those 50,000 words. But it’s only a first draft. I’ve never written a first draft of a novel before, so that’s pretty cool!

The main things I’ve learned are:

1. I actually can sit down with no idea of what I’m going to write and come up with characters and a story.
2. Discussing writing issues with another writer, even in vague terms, can help solve problems and crystallize ideas.
3. When I really get going, I can write about 800 words an hour (at least on the computer).
4. I can actually sustain a story over ~110 pages.
5. I need to do a lot more research on medieval Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and snow.
6. Writing follows a bell curve: it’s hard to come up with ideas when you’re starting out, gets easier in the middle as you start running with things, and when you get near the end, it’s hard to pull everything together and wrap it up. (added)

Next step: sleep. After that, start revising, and figure out how soon I’m willing to let beta readers see it.

I’ve been making regular posts on the Nano writing process over in my LiveJournal, if anyone’s interested. (And if no-one’s interested, they’re still there.)

Harken, lads, and listen to my tale. It is the tale of the FyreFawkes, a vessel that turned the tide in the never-ending battle for the high seas.

In this day, shipping lanes criss-cross the ocean like a Web, and in years past, that web was commanded by the Fleet of the Navigators. Wherever ye wanted to go, a Navigator ship was there to take you. But the wealthy My Crows’ Loft Company controlled the ports, and knew that if they did not take command of the high seas, someone might use the Navigator Fleet to build their own harbors, outside My Crows’ Loft’s sphere of influence.

So My Crows’ Loft built their own fleet, a fleet of Explorer craft, and after a great trade war, their fleet dominated the ocean. The Navigators’ fleet shrank, nearly forgotten.

But My Crows’ Loft grew complacent in their victory, and the Explorer fleet aged. Worse, the vessels had weak spots and leaks that pirates and brigands of all sorts knew how to attack. What was once a pleasant voyage across the sea became a journey fraught with danger, with spies, phishermen, and great wyrms lying in wait for the unsuspecting voyager.

The Navigator’s craftsmen, however, had not been idle. They toiled away on a great hulking vessel called, after a beast of the Orient, Mojira. Some sailors took heart in Mojira’s promise, though some ports would not let them dock. Yet few captains and fewer passengers took interest.

And so the craftsmen of the Navigator and Mojira designed a new vessel. Light and fast, she was, and a beautiful ship. FyreFawkes she was named, in honor of the Phoenix that rises from the ashes. Captains took interest, and tradesmen, and soon passengers and harbor masters began to sail aboard her. A new fleet was built, and for the first time, the Explorer fleet began to shrink.

On this day, the Explorers still control the greatest part of the ocean, but the FyreFawkes and other vessels are growing their fleets. Only time will tell who will rule the seas.

(Styled in honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day.)

This runs up against a belief of mine that I’ve termed “the Six-Year-Old Doctrine:” if, in order to fully enforce a law, authorities would need to prosecute a fair number of unwitting six-year-olds, that law is in need of changing. With respect to copyright and derivative works, every first-grader who draws a picture of Dora the Explorer or Barney or Bugs Bunny is technically in violation of copyright law. Realistically, no one is going to issue C&D letters to a classful of fans, or sue their parents for damages. Sadly, the owners of the depicted property do have that right.

Copyright law is quite black and white, but feels incredibly gray. And no wonder, with the fineness of the dividing lines between legal and illegal. You can dismember a Barbie and copyright the photograph you take of the result, but you can’t repaint or remodel one to look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, if you repaint and remodel one as above but don’t say in any tangible form specifically what you were aiming for (perhaps labeling the result as Kristy Swanson or Sarah Michelle Gellar rather than the character), it would be tough to make any suit stick. You can record an audiobook for a class project, but you have no right of ownership on the recording, even if you created really cool sound effects for it. (If you record the sound effects separately, you have a copyright on them. If you don’t, I’m not sure what your rights are.) If you’re recording the audiobook for anyone’s sheer entertainment, then unless it’s readily identifiable as parody, it’s not fair use and you’re in violation.

Fan videos are a special case in that they involve two separate domains of violation: video and audio. Unless the video involved has been specifically OK’d for use (as with the current studio-sanctioned Farscape video contest) it’s an obvious no-no. But with the music, you have to get into the DMCA. As rap music and MP3 cases have proven, CD-quality recordings and bits thereof are protected. So if you taped your song off the radio, you can probably use it with no fear. However, if you tape your song off a CD you own, distributing the result, even for free, goes beyond the scope of the right of first use and you’re in violation. This is directly related to giving all your friends copies of the CD you just bought, which is also bad no matter what the quality. I hope the Farscape folks are prepared to handle any complaints from the music studios about this contest. Actually, I hope there aren’t any, but it never hurts to plan for the worst.

Saying that any unauthorized derivative work is illegal from the first mark on paper, or sound, or keystroke is like saying that anal sex is illegal. If you don’t bandy it about that these things are being done, whether by you or by someone else, chances are nobody’s going to go door-to-door looking for evidence. The right to protection against search and seizure, coupled with the sheer amount of effort it would take to prosecute every copyright violation, is all that keeps well-meaning artists, filkers, and ficcers from being shut down. I hope copyright-holding corporations and the government never realize that creating a task force to find and stop derivative works in all their forms would create an incredible number of jobs. Oral traditions, anyone?

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So I’ve got this running tally. Last night, I added one to it and another character–there’s no other way to describe it–got jealous. I’d thought after seeing the Hulk movie that Eric Bana might have a place in my head. After seeing Troy yesterday, it’s confirmed: he’s definitely Vance. Now, you’d think this would inspire me to work on something he’s in, but due to my current license plate chase, I’ve been working more on Prophecy. I tried last night to review and revise some bits and found it incredibly difficult, due to characters getting uppity. Seems Temin got wind of someone being cast and decided he wanted to be played by Alexis Denisof. Which is totally wrong, but I couldn’t convince him. All the already-written dialogue was coming out Wesley, and everything I came up with for revisions was following suit. Eventually I gave up.

I was complaining to Kelson a bit later and tossing around the idea of picking stars we like and trying to cast them. Keira Knightley came up, and I thought there wouldn’t be a place for her, but then remembered a story I had written maybe a paragraph of, where she might fit. A second later, I’d cast Amy Acker as her older sister, the main character.

This morning in the shower, they started arguing in my head. It took fifteen minutes to transcribe. Maybe story 5 will get written after all.