Steve Cooper

I’ve made my first fiction sale! Hub Magazine have publishing my 600-word story, Brainfish [pdf)

Two things you should read; this coilhouse post introducing “The Decline of Fashion Photography”.

The main article traces one art form from the fifties to the present-day in twenty-eight photos and comments. Her argument is that the form has descended from a heyday to a low point nowadays, with either too little art, or too little fashion.

In a wider sense, it’s interesting to consider whether art forms generally go through such rises and falls. This has to be quite focussed; I think arguing for a golden age of cinema, or of music, would be ridiculous; but arguing for the heydey of zombie explotation movies, or mod, or house music, that’s possible.

For me, the interesting question is around sci-fi short fiction. Recently, it’s been argued and riffed on that science fiction short story mags like Analog have been declining in circulation; does this mean that form of written, printed short fiction drawing to a close? Is it being transformed by the internet? free electronic distribution of magazines like hub, reworking the form into flash fiction, and changing the medium by podcasting (eg pseudopod) suggest the forms mutating rapidly and that the classic sub-10,000 word, printed paper story might well atrophy away. After all, while people might not be comfortable reading a whole book on a screen, they’ll read an awful lot of short pieces.

PS: I’d recommend coilhouse; it’s a interesting art blog focussing on alt culture.

I’ve been thinking about writing software for a while now; first Ariadne, and then several little projects.

One that’s been at the back of my mind, not fully developed but nagging me, is the idea I’ve come to label The Amazing Expanding Sentence.

Here’s the idea. Let’s say you’re a writer and you want to write a novel. You start of with a single sentence

A wonderful tale of a rebel who overturns
an evil empire.

Well, that sounds pretty cool. So we want to expand that sentence. Somehow (and this, of course, is the trick I’m looking for) we ‘overwrite’ this sentence with two or more sentneces.

We meet Jake, a folk singer, who has a 
dead-end job. He learns a terrible secret
about a senator about to become president.
He runs across America, and finally corners
the senator in his Volcano base.

Well, you get the idea. The first sentence has expanded, but the old one is there. You keep expanding, hopefully until you’ve detailed the whole story, moving through one-line summary, synopsis, treatment, chapter summary, scene summary, and novel.

There is probably some horrific flaw to the whole idea.

I’m writing fiction at the moment. Which of course means I’m wasting time fiddling with formatting in Word.

A neat manuscript requires a word count on the first page. MS Word will give you a neat word count if you try the Insert menu, then Field..., choose NumWords, and hit OK.

It’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s very precise; it gives you a count that looks a little too autistic; ‘7672 words’. What you’d rather see is an approximation to, say, 100 words. Something more like ‘7700 words’. It’s fiddly, but you can do it. Save this off in a template somewhere and you’ll have automatic, neat wordcounting for ever after.

1. use Insert | Field...
2. Click the ‘Formula’ button

3. Type what follows and hit OK.

   = round ( 666 / 100 , 0) * 100

   You should see ‘700′ displayed as the approximate word count. This is 666 rounded to the nearest hundred. Change 100 to 1000 in the line above to round to the nearest thousand. To get your story’s count…

4. Right-click the number 700 and choose ‘Toggle Field Codes’

5. Select the number 666
6. Hit ctrl-F9. The number now reads { 666 }

7. Delete 666 and type NumWords instead.

   { = round ( { NumWords } / 100 , 0) * 100 }`

8. Right-click the grey field and choose ‘Update Field’

9. Voila! A neat wordcount, rounded to the nearest 100 words, and always up-to-date. The awesome power of a computer, neatly rounded.