Between, roughly, 1982 and 2004 I was writing SF stories. As one priest (yup, met even one of those once, dad's once coworker - to run a peasant's cooperative in 1957 you took anyone literate enough, even a priest) said - "if you want to read something of value, well, sit down and write". So I knew how to write, to an extent, and had weird ideas at the time, so...
Only the first one was written on paper. Somewhere between #6 and #9, and bits of #16, I printed and took the prints with me to leave the house machine (including early incarnations of zmajček) to the girls and get a different sort of inspiration, when faced with ink (or baked-in soot) on paper.
Most of it was written at a keyboard, and some later pieces in various variants or precedents of zod.
Here's the postscript to #6, "Ghost in the machine" (redacted to conform with Notes):
most thankful to Sting for the title, to the grand masters for the City, and to my dear for constructive mockery. I hope this has enlarged the global collection of general tropes.
written in mid-eighties in INES editor on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum; retyped into Atari's 1ST Word in february 1991, transferred into ventura Professional using a program written in fox 1.02 on 30th of March 1991. Uploaded to sezam 1992, and downloaded back when the original vanished with a crashed disk. Sent to Oreska BBS and from there to Boban Knežević's contest before any copy went to print. According to Oreska's sysop (username broker), won the 2nd prize (confirmed later by Knežević). By the end of '94 transferred to Word 2.0 somewhere in Hungary. Eventually, on 25th of January 97 transferred to .html format using a couple of macros done in Word 7.0, and finished up in Word 97
The first English version done in Netscape Composer 4.03, finished 4th of February 98. Translated by the author himself, don't judge the language too hard. The layout of this version was redesigned in FrontPage 2000, and the translation was (hopefully) slightly improved. Almost done January 17th 2000, but then in november discovered that FrontPage messed things up, and restyled it almost manually, keeping the HTML pure and systematically deleting any of the unwanted stylesheet and other stuff.
Classifying this among apps, as they were, ahem, written by a programmer.
For those extremely interested, here goes
Or, a related article from the blogue, as published there on 2011-10-09T18:14:00.000+02:00
How to love writing?
I used to write SF. Was crazy enough, and had some ideas, and I just wrote. Only the first one was on paper, though - the very next one went into a computer, on what machine I had then - I used REM lines inzx spectrum (am: timex) in lieu of a real editor, then bought (unheard of, in those days) a real editor, then carried the stuff over to my atarist, then used WordStar (never WordPerfect), then Word, then some other editors... and then stopped altogether. Not really stopped, but slowed it down below the threshold, when I can't say seriously I'm writing. The reason for this is twofold: one is writer's block. At some point in mid nineties I got hold of the remaining books of Ursula le Guin which I couldn't find before. And there I found most of my ideas, or what I thought were my ideas, written far better. I guess I saw where her other books were leading and came to the same place.
All the same, I was sort of dumbstruck - not even my ideas are original, and the inventor herself has packaged them far better than I ever could. Which is because I'm not a professional writer - I don't have the time to do all the groundwork, to build personae, research, build a plausible plot, re-read my stuff and hone it all to the level I'd like to read. I just can't be good enough to please myself as a reader.
The other reason was publishing. I even put two of my books on Lulu (OK, one book and one story - and the story was already published in 1984, I just translated it), and then nothing - the number of readers remained below a thousand, even after I dropped the price from $5 to zero. I guess I just wanted to have proof of copyright, in case what I suspected in 1993 happens again (the script for the "Brainstorm" movie bears a heavy resemblance to a story I wrote and uploaded to a BBS at about that time - having no firm dates written down anywhere, I can only whistle).
To make your book read, for free or paid, is a tough sell. You practically have to "aggresively promote" your book, which means becoming a traveling
salesmansalespersonseller. I'd rather dig ditches than sell stuff. You also have to make the book presentable, which means you should know some typography, or use one of the templates, or have an applied artist friend... all of which are things which may be worth the while if you're a professional writer. Which I am not. I am an amateur - in the literal sense of the word (qv in any dictionary).I like to write, despite the low frequency of posting here - I'm usually writing somewhere else, on forums, on my regular website, in emails, even documentation for my work (if the programmers' guild ever hears of this, I'll probably owe a dinner for the whole board).
So I had an idea on how to both hold it tight and fart (aka "eat the cake and have it too" - which is a senseless brainkiller of a phrase, because then what does "have a cake" mean? That you can't eat it?), which is to self-publish, in a form of a website containing the book. No advertising needed, I don't care if anyone ever reads it, because I will have published. The word would get out, this way or other, dropping a link when the context calls for it is allowable on any forum, or having a link in your signature. I may be getting more visits than here, who knows.
BUT, but... there's trouble ahead. I'm not writing SF because I can't be bothered to invent a proper plot (actually I have an outline of one, somewhere in my head, and I'm still writing that one for the last decade). The only thing left to write, in my favorite short form, is... an autobiography. Which is perfect for me - I know the subject matter intimately, I don't have to invent the plot. I don't need any deus ex machina to contrive a happy end - the very fact that it's an autobiography means that the author survived long enough, and was not disgusted enough, to write it. I don't even have to invent personae - they exist already.
And that's where the trouble lies. They exist, and so do I. As with every book concerning real people, someone would be offended, the guys who got depicted as bad guys most probably, but then also some who may have thought that I'm giving out their secrets, or at least spoiling their chances at 15 minutes of fame. So I'm hiding the names, of people, and some smaller places, and companies, and software apps on which I worked... but anyone who knows me intimately enough will recognize the most by description, and I'm fried. I mean, do I need the trouble with dozens of people whose feathers I may ruffle? Every autobiography is full of lies, but if I make them all look good, what will be left of the real life in the text? And lies are a nightmare anyway, they can't be automated and you have to watch out for bugs and inconsistencies in every new word you write. In a text written slowly over the years, it's impossible to keep track.
OTOH, it's a pity that I don't publish. I already have some 400K of text, in english. The story may be interesting altogether, for I have lived in four cities, three countries, three languages... actually, six countries, if we count the various incarnations of my country so far. There'd be a lot of material to include about the way of life in previous decades, specially for the current audience with memory capacity of a demented chicken, who don't know what happened just a dozen years ago.
Okay, this last paragraph was a hidden reference to Byo, which was, then, still eleven years before I published it. Slow does it.
28-VII-2021 - 8-IV-2026