Weekly Update

PDF Splitter – I managed to pretty much finish the PDF splitting project I started last week. Now I’m down to commenting, code cleanup, bug fixing, and testing while I wait for feedback. Hopefully, I’ll be able to work on other things now, but these projects have a tendency to consume all my time and brain power. DX

The Twelfth Hour – I’m still hoping to finish it by the end of this week, but Chapter 4 is being a bigger pain to revise than expected. Have I ever mentioned that writing in third-person present tense is ridiculously difficult? Maybe it’s just my self-imposed rule that exposition in present tense sections of the book can never explain anything that happened in the past unless it’s of the form “_____ remembers…” I think it makes sense. When you’re writing in the much more common past tense, writing random sentences in the present tense is frowned upon. Writing in the present tense should be held to the same standards. Movie scripts certainly can’t mix past tense events into their third person present tense exposition. Other novelists, however, don’t seem to care. I’ve been reading a book Red Rising by Pierce Brown and several pieces on Critters that are written in third-person present tense. The authors switch to past tense to describe past events all the time, which seems strange to me. Why write in the present tense at all in that case? Anyway, I think it’s hard to write in under this rule mostly because I have to determine how much I can get away with not revealing about the character’s thoughts (which like to wander into the past) in the exposition to the reader. If I had my way, I’d share nothing (like a movie script) or very little, but people tend to like knowing that stuff, and I can see the benefit at times.

Pointless Ranting – Besides that, I voiced disagreements about Fable, Final Fantasy XV, Charlottesville, James Damore, Trump, and the eclipse at various places and, most of the time, with various people around the Internet. Someone take my social media accounts away from me when I decide my unpopular opinions about stupid crap are important enough to start arguments over. >_<