Saturday, June 26, 2010

Chapter 1?


after millions of re-edits I finally have the guts to say this "probably" is the final edit of my first chapter of my story... and I'd like to proudly present the NON-BORING edition!


(c) 2010 Andrew T. All Rights Reserved. Via Legal Zoom!



If one's voice is not heard, has a word ever been spoken?



Chapter 1
- Beginning to an End

The sun filtered through the window. His left hand thumbed at his lip while his right played with the warm, sun bleached carpet. As he outside, glistening waters and beautiful scenery appeared. The sand was hot and bright in the mid-day sun and the palm tree cast an inviting shadow that cooled the sand to ice. There were people playing and laughing. The boy smiled brightly as he stood up and looked at the shady tree...
He forced open his eyes and the trees faded away, the warmth settled down, and he was now staring at a lonely patio and a filthy, crumbling brick wall... He held tightly to one of the fibers he pulled from the carpet. He slowly loosened his grip and let it slip from his fingers. It splashed into an ocean of carpet and sunk deep between the fibers. An image of a bright, glistening ocean appeared before the carpet but the boy tried to hold back. He looked up and clenched his fists till his fingernails dug in. He spoke quietly him self, "I can't do this any more! It's time to grow up, it's time to start living in the real world!" and this young boy's name was Long...


6 years later....
"why does it always seem like the memories of old... were the best we've ever had?"



"Look at this place, it's covered in trash!"
"Tell me something I don't know..."
Long was sitting at the table with Matthew who was eating chips and Andrew who ate chocolates. He looked around campus, all he saw was trash and students.
"You hear about what happened last night?" Long asked as Mark sat down. "At the slum town a man spent the day stacking boxes until he made a tower. During the moon festival he climbed to the top and jumped off. He died and the festival continued without him..."
Mark put his hand against his face, "Do you have any good news?" He sighed.
"Well yesterday my little brother Luke finally got hired!" Luke had just sat down at the table.
"I heard no one cleaned the body yet." Luke said.
Mark sighed, "How many suicides happened in the past week, three?"
"I think three maybe four." Matthew said.
"Let's just talk about something else.."
Luke took a deep breath, "Even I was surprised when I first found out the store could actually afford to hire me."
"It's because that store has beer!" Mark started laughing, "The rich and poor people will always have one thing in common, a love for beer!"
"We've been saving up our money! When we get enough, then we can finally leave this trash ridden toilet, worthless giant piece of annoying shi--"
"Okay we get it!" Mark started laughing, "I feel the same way about this horrible town..."
Matt added, "We apply for work every week but we never get hired, Luke was lucky enough!"
"There's nothing much we can do..." Mark said. He gazed out upon a crowd of people talking and laughing. "What do you suppose their talking so happily about?"
"I heard in the other towns they have shiny buildings where the glass isn't broken and where the streets are clean. I want to go there."
Long said.
"Hey you guys hear about the new kid?" Luke asked.
"The new kid?"
"Yeah, they say he wears ripped up clothes and torn up shoes but his secret is that he lives in the Land Lord Mansions! And best of all he goes here! This school!"
"I heard about him too!" Matt said, "They say he has more money than everyone in this town combined!"
"I'd sure like to meet this kid." Mark said rubbing his head. "Maybe then we could actually afford dinner every night!"
"I'm sure we'd all like to meet him!"
The lunch bell rang, the commotion of the crowd grew, and the passing hustle and bustle filled the air. Long turned around, "I..." He stopped as he noticed the only friend left at the table was Mark... "I had an idea...." Long said looking down.
Mark smiled as he got up, "I want to meet this kid!" And they both left for their classes.
The bombastic eyes of Andrew stared, he was still sitting at the table and for the first time he spoke, "What just happened? Was I day dreaming again?" He finally realized no one was sitting at the table. The surrounding crowd slowly started to shrink until all that remained were mountains and mountains of trash....

22 comments:

  1. That was certainly an interesting first chapter. I doubt this should be the final draft though of the first chapter. I know you were uncertain whether it would or not anyway. I found a bit of a problem in the first paragraph of the chapter. Read it again, because it sure did not make sense to me. It is this sentence, "As he outside, glistening waters and beautiful scenery appeared." Should it be "As [if] he [were] outside, glistening waters and beautiful scenery appeared." There could be other ways to fix it too.

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  2. haha I hate those types of errors!

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  3. Actually it should have been, "as he stared outside, Glistening waters and beautiful scenery appeared."

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  4. It happens all the time to everyone. That's why I have not published anything but either the third or fourth drafts. My proofreader is an avid reader and most, certainly not all, which would take a lifetime or more, of the problems in my work is fixed by that time.

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  5. yeah, I guess the longer the book the more of a pain it is! But I'm sure I can get things fixed, it sure would be embarrassing to find an error in the final publication!

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  6. There's always an error in writing a book. Good thing I caught that one though. Also, when you are ready to publish, buy a proof copy and read the story again. It helps with formatting errors and makes sure that things are ready for final publication.

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  7. yeah, to make sure the pages are formatted correctly and the cover and back and all that good stuff!

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  8. Just follow Lulu's guidelines and the front and back should look fine. The main concern is the interior.

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  9. of course! the internal is always more important than the cover! I hate a book that has an amazing cover, but the story is complete garbage!

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  10. That's not the only problem. The spine could cut off words, so the interior formatting is the most important to check. The story itself is dealt with during the proofreading and editing stage of writing. I think my cover for my first book came out pretty well, considering I did not have a dedicate Desktop Publishing program at the time, but I do now.

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  11. that's good! I think I will worry about formatting after the actual content of the story is dealt with first. You know the cover was the first thing I did when I made my book! I used Paint.net and hand drawings to make it...

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  12. I usually do cover designs while my manuscript is being proofread, so my artwork can match what the book contains better. I don't format my books until editing is completed anyway. I used Illustrator and Photoshop for my first book, both programs legally obtain, of course. My second book's cover design was done in Illustrator and InDesign, which I got for Christmas.

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  13. I had my idea for my book for a long time, so the cover design also came into my head. I started making the cover design thinking it would just be a drawing, but then I actually started writing it and next thing I know I started writing a book!

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  14. I see. My first book was just a compilation of two stories I had already written, but I did not even think I would publish them, so my second and third books are relatively recent stories. I really recommend you use Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator for your work too, since images tend to look much better by tracing them in vector-based graphic programs then exported to an image file. Also, it may be a good idea to give out the full ebook version for free. I hear that it works really great for promotion. In fact, I recently coded my site to have downloads of my ebooks for free between July 4th and August 15th every year. Right now, only my first book is available in the queue, but the second book might make it in time. Of course, they won't be free on Lulu, just DRM-free, whereas my author website will have free DRM-free ebooks between the dates I told you.

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  15. yeah I was planning on putting the ebook version for free in a YouTube video... I use Paint.net for all my pictures, I don't want to spend money on fancy editors and I think Paint.net does a really good job anyways for a free program... really? I'll be sure to download your book!

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  16. Inkscape is free and pretty decent, but I like Illustrator better. Yeah, I created a test program in C, in order to check if my logic was right, so it should definitely do what I told it. It's in the ePub format, so you'll need a program that can read it, but I have a few suggestions on that page. If you want, I can help with the basics of creating an ePub file. My epubs pretty much always validate against IDPF standards, but that's because I know HTML really well, which is what usually cause problems. There aren't a whole lot of free tools to make epubs and to do it manually, you need to know what you are doing, since the files need to be in the right locations and compressed properly.

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  17. thanks, maybe when I'm finished we can figure something out

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  18. You're welcome. It would not be too hard. I might not be inclined to do the HTML or CSS, which formats the epubs contents, for you, but I can get the important stuff and do the compression. However, the HTML must validate against W3C's XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard at the minimum, otherwise you won't have a valid ePub according to IDPF standards. If you want them DRMed, you are on your own, but Lulu can apply it, if you want.

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  19. wow! I don't even know what half those things mean, W3C? well I'm not too concerned about the publishing part yet, when it comes around and I"m finally finished writing then I can stop thinking creatively and start thinking rationally so I can understand these complicated things.. it's funny when I use the creative part of my brain I always feel stupid, but then when I'm done being creative and I look back on it, it feels so genius!

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  20. HTML = HyperText Markup language (creates webpages)
    CSS = Cascading Stylesheets (styles content, such as indentation, bold, italic, center, text color, background color, font, font-size, and text justification)
    IDPF = Internation Digital Publishing forum (people who made the epub standard)
    W3C = World Wide Web Consortium (creates/maintains web standard as (X)HTML, XML, Atom, CSS, SVG, and others)
    XHTML = same as HTML, and even servers the same purpose, but stricter and can use elements of XML, hense its name Extensible HypterText Markup Language.

    I could have added those in, when I mentioned them, but I'm not too sure what tags I can insert in these blog comments.

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  21. Thanks alot, makes more sense now!

    I heard bad things about IDPF...

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  22. I made a misspelling, it is supposed to be International, not internation. There are bad things about any company, organization, or person.

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