[Filling Your Worlds With Words] Update 18: Chapter structure
11 months ago – Wed, Jan 10, 2024 at 05:34:27 AM

Happy new year!

There are three backers who have not completed the survey on Backerkit; please check your spam folder in case the survey link was sent there. Or follow this link to get a new link to your survey (use the address you use for Kickstarter).

Work on the book continues apace. According to Scrivener, it's got 29,000 words. I had a few insights into the project that made me restructure it, so some of those words will probably go to the great text graveyard, but they will be replaced.

What's the new structure, you ask?

Each chapter (in the culture section, at least) begins with an overview of a general topic, such as intercultural communication, where I define it and give some examples from the real world. This is followed by what I'm currently calling "writer's toolkit," which is a list of questions to ask yourself about the society you're building and how the linguistic topic at hand plays into it. None of the lists is exhaustive, and maybe some of the questions aren't relevant to your setting or story, but that's why I'm calling it a toolkit, because you can take the ones you need and add more if you find them. This is followed by examples from published fiction where the author made use of the topic. The last part of each chapter is a deeper discussion of the theory, frequently via published studies. This section would be optional to read, because I understand that not everyone is interested in reading academic work, but I want to give everyone the opportunity to review the data.

The phonetics section is going to be different; there's no easy way to give an overview, and phonetics is pretty much all theory or applied theory. (Phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are produced and perceived.) There isn't an overview version that fits in a page or two and that would be useful for you.

I would like to put the writer's toolkits together as a preview, once I've gotten all of them drafted out. When that's ready, I'll figure out how to share it with you.

Until next time!

[Filling your worlds with words] essay collection epub updated
about 1 year ago – Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 01:53:59 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

[Filling your worlds with words] Update 17
about 1 year ago – Mon, Oct 09, 2023 at 01:12:47 AM

Greetings, backers!

There are only about 15 of you who haven't filled out your survey, so if you're among them, please go to backerkit and fill out the survey so you can get your rewards.

epub issues

I use Scrivener for my writing, and when I compiled the essay collection as an epub, I tested it in Apple Books (on my computer) and I had friends test it on in the Kindle app on iOS, Windows, and Android. It worked; I uploaded the file and sent it to everyone.

But I got a message on Thursday Oct 5 saying that it didn't work on Google Play Books, they couldn't upload the file at all, could I fix it? Since I hadn't tested on Play Books, but I have the app on my tablet, I tried it on my own and ... it didn't work. Frak. So I went into Calibre to poke around the source (did you know that epubs are basically html in a CSS? I haven't fiddled with CSS in ages) and wondered if the unnumbered list format of the TOC was the problem, so I changed it to paragraphs, exported it, and tried it again. This time it worked, so I alerted the backer and uploaded the new file, and it also worked for them. Yay!

But I got a message from a different backer yesterday, Oct 8, saying that it wouldn't upload to Kindle, did I have any idea what's wrong? So it turns out that Kindle requires the epub to have a TOC in the unnumbered list format, because I sent that backer the old version, and it worked fine.

I think you can see the problem here, with two mutually exclusive requirements for file formatting and the ability to upload only one file to the digital download box.

If you already downloaded the file before Thursday and it works for you, you are not affected. If you haven't downloaded the file yet and have a Kindle, you'll probably encounter this issue. The short story is not affected, because there is no table of contents.

Solution: I can put both files in a .zip and upload that. (Which, tbh, also solves the issue in the future of both pdf and epub of the book.) It's good that I'm getting a trial run, of sorts, with the short essay collection so I can see what kind of nonsense I'll have to face when I have to format the full book. (Spoiler: probably a whole lot)

Newsletter: Words and things

I plan to send the first issue this week. I keep hoping to get news about short stories out on submission that I can add to it, so I keep holding off. I've used buttondown.email as the list host, so keep your eye out for that.

That's all for now!

Until next time!

[Filling your worlds] Update 16: Essay collections sent
about 1 year ago – Mon, Oct 02, 2023 at 05:35:37 AM

Essays

I hit go on the essay collection today, so everyone with a completed survey should have received an email (I hope) with a link to download the file. 

At the moment, I'm checking for new surveys and new additions of the short story every morning (my time), so if you added the story to your cart and haven't received a notification to pick it up yet, check your spam or go straight to backerkit. (From the creator side of things, it looks very straightforward; I hope your side of things is as well.)

Surveys

If you have not filled out your survey: please go to backerkit.com and create an account using the same email address you used for Kickstarter, and you should be able to find it under "My Pledges & Surveys".

This should also be where you can find your digital downloads, if I understand correctly.

Newsletter

I got a lot more people responding "Yes!" to the newsletter than I expected. Thank you! I hope you got an email from buttondown asking you to confirm your subscription; if you didn't, I hope signing you up worked. I'm hoping to send out a post next week. I started writing one about something I think is interesting about the Berlin counterculture, but digging deep into it would need more time than I have at the moment, and I don't know if the surface-level treatment would be interesting enough to send out.

Don't worry, though; I have an alternative planned.

Until next time!

[Filling your Worlds] BackerKit notes
about 1 year ago – Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 03:18:05 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.