Joel Spriggs's Blog

I lied. This post is not about books about writing. The books I would like to talk about will not tell you how to conjugate a verb, where a noun goes, or what onomatopoeia is all about. They assume you know how to muck around with the English language in the most basic sense. What they will teach you is about story telling. It's something your high school English teacher maybe didn't touch on. I'm sure you got the basics, that a story has a beginning, middle, and end. That a story has one or more plots and arcs, etc. But what really makes the story compelling and will keep the reader's attention through twenty pages or a thousand. The first one I'd like to touch on is Damn Fine Story, by Chuck Wendig. If manuals and text books often bore you, this will be the book for you to read. It will tell you the concepts of writing a good story and how to work on becoming a better story teller. Wendig has quite a history with this, and is a very talented and accomplished writer to learn from. He does this brilliantly with giving you entertaining and complex examples. Warning time though, if you haven't watched any of the Star Wars movies or Die Hard, you may want to put that time in prior to reading this book. Along with Wendig's own stories about himself and his stubborn tough-as-nails father, he uses examples from these and other pop culture based movies. I loved having the use cases being drawn from these movies though, because it did give me a solid reference to call on when he's talking about dialog, rising actions, beats, etc. The toolkit he helps to introduce you to is simple, but malleable to your own process. Chuck introduces you to ways to work through creation, writing and editing, while understanding that there will be some things to keep and some things to cut to make a Damn Fine Story. It's definitely worth the money, and it's a relatively short read with a quick pace. Just remember what it is trying to do for you, teach you how to hone your skill to be a story teller. The Fantasy Fiction Formula is by another great SFF writer, Deborah Chester. The edition I bought had a forward from Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files series. The gist of his introduction is that he had Chester when in college and while seeking to prove her wrong about how to write a fantasy novel, he ended up proving her right and Harry Dresden was the result. I will level with you that this book is longer and not as entertaining as Chuck's Damn Fine Story. It is more like a textbook, and readers that can grok with textbooks will be happy to have this resource. Chester goes through how to develop your characters and what to do with your story lines. It is helpful in directing you on what works in fantasy. The tools she helps you to add to your kit are very helpful. She provides a very robust list of over 75 questions that you can use to form your characters. She also notes that while she would encourage you to answer all of those questions for main characters, tertiary characters beyond your repeating and frequent supporting characters can bypass a large amount of those questions. This process does help answer a lot of unknowns about your mains before starting your story and helps to provide some fodder for asides and stories to provide as you're writing your primary story to help add depth to those characters. She offers great exercises for helping you deal with outlining, slugging through the middle of the stories, and creating a memorable ending. I really took a lot of this book to heart while writing and editing my first novel, Over a God's Dead Body. I do have one criticism for Chester's book. At multiple points she supports the idea that you should write fantasy from a single point of view. Such as in the Dresden novels, everything is told from Harry's perspective. I understand where she's coming from, it is hard as a reader to follow floating perspectives. I find it a bit limiting in some storytelling aspects though. I intend to follow this advice with my next novel and try to consolidate that viewpoint, but I didn't in my first. Reason being, my first book followed the storytelling method I like to call "the clusterfuck". Think of stories like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or any Guy Richie film. There were multiple story threads that wound together to become a knot of intersections at the climax. That's the case where changing viewpoints works, but you have to be careful to help the reader make that shift. In my case, it was usually only having one or two view changes per chapter, with a heading letting the reader know who was being followed for that section (Loki, Esmy, Seth, Kyle, etc.). As far as wanting to have a formula to help you tell your stories well and be able to actually get them out quickly though, I can easily see how following her advice will get you to being able to crank out a novel every month or two writing full time. As it was, writing Over a God's Dead Body took me the better part of 16 months between research, writing and editing. Though that was writing part time, averaging about 10-15 hours a week

Recently, I pulled up The Firebird's Trail by Louisa Dwyer on my Kindle Unlimited account and gave it a read. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and when I did finish it, I finished it in a quick sprint where I had meant to only read one chapter. I read three and went to sleep much later than I expected. The ending really made the whole story for me. I had a problem with beginning the book though. It's not the fault of the novel, the author, or the subject matter. It was a problem of my recent few years approaches to fantasy. Like a lot of people, my recent reads in fantasy can be characterized with Game of Thrones. The idea that fantasy is an extreme amount of action and adventure, packed with meaty amounts of gratuitous violence. This is not that book, but that's part of what made it a good read for me. This novel reads more like Shakespeare, in fact the language reads very closely like Shakespeare. It's not the life and death, murder and ominous witches of Macbeth. The Firebird's Trail reads more like Much Ado About Nothing or Othello. There is romance, there is refinement to the language and the speech of the characters. The interactions are nuanced and elegant. As far as the specifics of the book, the fantasy world Dwyer generates as you read is intriguing. In her fantasy world, the people of the different lands can live a very long time, it seemed multiple centuries were the average with full adulthood not being realized until about the fifth or sixth decade of life. With such a long lifespan, less people have children, they specialize and put priority on extreme mastery of skills. It seems, most importantly, to the story, they have a very intricately detailed and complex social tradition around courtship and marriage. This detailed ritual is made more complicated by the fact that close family members and extremely close friends can share a soul bond. What that means is that individuals sharing a soul bond can communicate complex feelings and emotions via a minor touch of each other. This can be between a brother and sister, as is demonstrated via the King of the Forest People and his sister the princess. It can also be between just two very close friends, as shown between the two primary characters, Ravar and Amalin. This soul link brings them together as what is called soul friends, and the soul friend is entrusted to be the first gatekeeper to being able to court a person. I won't go further into the social contracts erected in this elaborate tail, but it does make for a compelling environment and setting for this story. If you are looking for a high fantasy novel that is expounding without characters being killed every third page, I'd highly recommend The Firebird's Trail. If you are looking for a fantasy novel with killing every third page, I'd still say give this a run and expand your horizons some, it can be a great palate cleanser while waiting on that next Game of Thrones or Dresden Files book.

Here's a new story. A short little 1500 word piece I wrote from a random prompt from one of Chuck Wendig's Flash Friday posts. Of the ten he offered at random, I got Absent Elves for my random title. Be warned, the story below can get graphic with language and content. ******** An old electric chime dinged out beep boop and the automatic door for the 7-11 slid open in front of me. The air shifted from the heavy humid blanket outside to a crisp flat rush of air conditioning when I stepped through. I do another quick scan of the store, walking a few aisles. There weren’t any cars in the lot, but I’ve got to do a sweep of the store to make sure there weren’t any late night walkers coming in like me at two in the morning. There’s just no accounting for the late night vampire and hooker crowd sometimes. Don’t lose my nerve, they’ll come. Don’t lose the nerve, they will come. They will come. The guy behind the counter is a husky looking white guy, greasy long brown hair, and a bushy beard. This is going to be disgusting, the guy doesn’t even shave his neck. He barely even noticed me coming in and he’s barely giving me any attention as I walk up to the counter. Don’t lose my nerve, they’ll come. Don’t lose the nerve, they will come. They will come. “Pack of smokes, whatever the cheapest menthols you have,” I say to him. He doesn’t say a word, just swivels his chair and walks over a few racks. He turns back to put the cigarettes on the counter. His eyes grow wide and he stumbles back as he sees the small revolver in my hand on the counter. “Hey, no trouble man, just take what you want.” “I will, and then maybe the fuckers will finally come back again. Come out here fat man, hands behind your back.” I keep the small .38 trained on him as he walks shaking around the counter. I take my first tool out from my hoodie’s front pocket, the pair of handcuffs. I cuff him and walk around him, I yank off his nametag and throw it over my shoulder. “Like I said, man,” he’s trembling and the words are shaky, “just take anything, there’s a couple hundred in the register, grab anything you want.” “I don’t want the money porky. I want them to come back.” “Who? Who do you want to come back?” “If you’re lucky, you’ll find out.” I pace around him a few times, come on. Don’t lose my nerve, they’ll come. Don’t lose the nerve, they will come. They will come. Time for tool number two. I step in front of him, he looks at me with fear in his eyes. They never expect tool number two. His eyes grow wide when I pull it out, an eighteen-inch black rubber dildo. Scruffy stumbles back trying to get away from me, I start beating him with the cock. He stops running, but I keep hitting. I stand over him as he curls up trying to hide his face, as I rain down blow after blow. I stop, he’s starting to look like a bloody mess. I must have broken his nose at some point and he’s got a couple of gashes above his right eye, those will need stitches. Still no one else in the store. Fuck. “Why are you doing this,” he sobs. “Just take the money or whatever, please!” “Nah, they’re still not here. I can’t leave until they’re here.” I walk the aisles and grab a few packets of kool-aid from a shelf. “Look at me!” He does and for a moment he stops sobbing. “You may get through this, but it will go a lot better for you if you can stop this goddamned sobbing.” It’s at that moment when I’ve given him a glimmer of hope that I tear open the kool-aid packets and pour it into the bleeding wounds, rubbing it in with a finger. He shrieks in pain. “Yeah, that happens, fun note for you, if you don’t have salt and lemons to rub on a wound, kool-aid is just as painful between the citric acid and salt content, you get the same effect.” I look at the green stain from the kool-aid mixing with the blood on my fingers where I worked it into his skull. “It leaves you with some nasty kaleidoscope staining though.” I look around again, still nothing, they aren’t here. “Please please please, you don’t have to do this.” He’s pleading now, shit it might be time to up my game. “There's cops, they stop by around now every night on patrol.” “Don’t lie porky, cops don’t give two shits about this neighborhood. I can’t leave, they aren’t here yet,” I scream at him. “Who? Who’s not here yet?” Time for tool number three. I pick my gun back up and hold it to his head. “This next part isn’t fun, but you be a good boy and you won’t lose your life.” I whisper close to him, “just keep it all in perspective.” His eyes get wide with fear again when he sees the pliers I pull out from the hoodie pocket, a special pair, needle node with a wide circle at the end. “The fuck man?” “Yeah, they’re meant for pulling spark plugs, but they’re great for this too. Open wide.” I grab his face, but he keeps his mouth shut and shakes his head no. I sigh, typical resistance. Don’t lose my nerve, they’ll come. Don’t lose the nerve, they will come. They will come. “Open wide or you lose your life instead of a tooth or two. Now I’m not going to lie, this will hurt. But you do what I say, I’ll leave the tooth with you when I’m done and a dentist can pop it right back into that socket. As a bonus, you won’t be dead.” He finally stops resisting. I go for a back molar, get a really good grip with the pliers and start rocking them back and forth. He’s screaming, the tooth is resisting. “Damn, must have grabbed one with a twisted root.” I give a sharp yank and it pops out of the socket with a gurgling slurp. He falls over in a slump and I stumble back, looking at the bloody tooth in my pliers. “Who the fuck do you want man?” He’s screaming as the blood pours from his mouth. “We can call them, there’s a fucking phone at the counter!” I look around again, still no one. “Nope, these guys don’t use phones.” “Who?” “The elves,” I scream at him. “They’re gone again and they won’t come back unless I show them that I need them still. So shut up for a minute.” He’s looking at that doorway, and I can tell he’s thinking he can make a run for it, so I stand between him and his freedom. “One time they left me, I went to a porn shop and you wouldn’t believe how many things had to get shoved into so many places on that poor clerk before they showed. That’s where I got my ‘nightstick’ over there.” He looks at me with those great wide eyes, blood crusting up in his beard. “Then there’s the auto shop I stopped at, somebody was cleaning up late. One kneecap and almost a whole damned row of teeth before the little fuckers showed up again. That’s where I got this handy guy.” I waived the pair of grimy old pliers. “And sometimes it’s more than other people’s blood, it’s mine too.” Don’t lose my nerve, they’ll come. Don’t lose the nerve, they will come. They will come. I open my mouth, feel around with my tongue a bit. I reach in with the pliers and get a firm grip on the molar, it comes free with barely any effort. I spit the tooth and blood at the sobbing man. “The fuck is wrong with you man? I just want to go home,” he cries. I knelt down beside him. “Well, these little fuckers started coming around when I was doing meth at a real low point. I can’t describe them to you, but they brought real joy, I mean fucking sincere joy that I have never felt before. It was better than any drug I’d ever tried. Then, poof, they were gone. No matter how much meth I did, they wouldn’t come back. I got angry and beat a homeless guy half to death and they showed up again, and I got it, they only come when I’m desperate. I have to prove that I need them, and when my own suffering stopped working, I had to make others suffer.” I stood up and sighed. One more look around, nothing new, they aren’t coming. Fuck. “Alright man, sorry it came to this, but it looks like it’s no either of our lucky nights.” He doesn’t say anything laying there, just sobbing curled up in a ball. Don’t lose my nerve, they’ll come. Don’t lose the nerve, they will come. They will come. I pull back the hammer of the .38, right as an old electric chime dings out beep boop.

"Are you Adam," a man with a French accent asked, Adam spun around mid-pace to face him. He was dressed in a suit with a vest and wore a thick scarf around his neck. "Yes, but I thought our appointment was at three?" "My apologies, I misplaced my scarf. I'd probably forget my head if it weren't attached." He leaned his head to one side and pulled the scarf down with a gray finger, revealing thick twine stitched across a long cut that went through his entire neck. "I am Henri, I'll be your agent today." "Henri this is my wife Barbara," Adam held out his hand to a woman sitting patiently reading a decades-old People Magazine. She stood up, pale and young; the long white gown she wore stained dark red at the sleeves. She took Adam’s hand and shook Henri’s when offered. “You two really are quite the couple. Are you both new to this side of the coil?” “Yes, we were engaged. I got shot during a convenience store robbery.” Adam opened his jacket, revealing a black hole over his heart and a large dried blood stain down his yellow plaid shirt. “And you, madam, were so distressed over losing your betrothed that you couldn’t bear to go on?” Barbara frowned and held up her arm, showing the long cuts, “guilty as sin. I took a couple of Xanax when I got the news, next thing I knew I had drawn a bath and made a very permanent decision.” “What can Henri do for the beautiful young couple today? Problems in paradise?” “Yes, Barbara and I were renting a loft in a cheaper area off Harvard Square when we,” Adam trailed off. “Died,” finished Barbara. “Yes, died. Anyway, we stayed there after death and were happy haunting around it for a while. But lately, it’s been umm,” “Gentrified. Hipsters everywhere and they keep thinking our haunting is just ironic. When a diner opened downstairs I was thrilled to try some new ideas for scaring the living, but these people are just the worst.” “What did you try?” “She loved messing up their orders, but these people were strange; they wouldn’t complain. They’d start raving about how great the unlikely combinations were. First was the avocado toast.” “Turned out the guy was a Boston Globe Restaurant critic. He loved it, raved about it. The breaking point though was someone ordering a club sandwich and I swapped it out for this unholy combination of peanut butter, mayonnaise, SPAM and pickles on sourdough.” Henri gagged. “That’s the result we expected, but they loved it. They made it a permanent menu item, people started raving about it.” “Barbara and I, we’re just not into this whole new scene and how these people act. I think we need something more traditional.” “Well, you read the manual right? You know you’re dealing with a very limited market,” Henri asked Adam. “Yes, only homes where a death occurred. The building was vacated by others in our situation, the resident spirit has either served it’s time and moved on or been exorcised.” “Even with those limitations, I do have a few properties I can show you today. I hope you’re both ready for a little traveling,” Henri said excitedly stepping up to the large stone fireplace. A fire blazed high in the hearth, he held out an inviting hand and Barbara and Adam stepped through the inferno. They came out of another fireplace, this one made of marble with ornate gold filigree. Henri stepped out behind them. “This,” his voice echoed across cathedral ceilings, “was the home of one of the world’s first billionaires. An oil and railroad magnate; a miserable wretch to his family, killed half of them one December, then sat naked in his gardens where he died of exposure waiting on the authorities.” “Adam lifted a sheet from a table, the cobwebs clung and dust puffed up. “Why is this one on the market? Shouldn’t there be a large family haunting?” Henri consulted a folder of notes. “Ah, family squandered the wealth. They had the mansion exorcised and are awaiting auction of this and other properties.” Barbara shook her head, “no, I think it’s too big for us, too flashy. What else is available?” Once again the trio stepped into the inferno and came out the other side to a fireplace drawn on a grey wall. Barbara sniffed deeply, “Bleach and antiseptic? Where are we?” “Bellevue Memorial Hospital, room 1313. The previous occupant was insane, driven further into madness by the hospital, he knocked out a nurse and chewed his throat out, killing him before being beaten to death by guards as he continued to gnaw on the nurse.” “What happened to him,” Adam asked while trying to understand a scrawl of psychobabble on the walls. It had been written in blood decades previously and still showed through in the layers of ectoplasm residue. Henri once again checked his folder, “let’s see. No exorcism didn’t serve his time nor move to another haunt. Oh. Yes. The spirit of the one he killed, she haunted him in turn. The file says they ‘ate’ each other.” “Oh, I’ve heard about that happening,” Barbara sneered, “nasty business. This seems a bit cramped though, bit too institutional.” Henri ushered them through the drawn fireplace inferno, they needed to duck to exit the blaze this time, stepping onto soft plush carpets. Barbara walked around the room looking at embroidery hanging on the wall; Adam tried out a floral wingback chair. Henri finally popped out of the fireplace. “Sorry for the delay, this old Victorian home was haunted by a librarian who hanged herself around forty years ago.” “It’s perfect for us,” said Adam nodding to Barbara. “Where is the librarian though?” Henri checked his file again, “she … chose eternal damnation over haunting or reincarnation. I can never remember what code 8829 stands for. It’s one or the other.” “How soon could we move in?” “Let’s head back to my office and we’ll start the paperwork.” He ushered them back to the fire. “Mind your head; this shouldn’t be much longer than a decade.”

I’m working late, again, trying to wrap up a puff piece so I could get back to a better story in the morning. I manage to corral an intern, Carl, to help me review some recordings of the interviews. The second set of eyes really pays off with this one so I can get my write up done before two in the morning. “Why are we still working on this at eleven, Jack?” “Carl, this may not be due until tomorrow, but if I don’t have to do it tomorrow, I can get back on a beat and find a story worth actually writing.” Lazy ass kid, he’s trying to slack off when he should be looking to build a career. “This isn’t a valuable story,” he persists. I look into his round face and give him the stare of a man that could give negative shits about something if it were possible. “Kid, this is a softball, an easy run for a struggling paper. People love to hear this nostalgic bullshit about has-been heroes and where are they now rock stars.” Carl cued up the next tape, “but if it sells papers, isn’t it worthwhile?” “Sure, to investors, advertisers, board members, all of those whiney assholes that sign our, excuse me, my paychecks. Doesn’t matter for shit or shinola to me though. I’d rather get back out there and weed out the corruption, bring down bribed judges and politicians, expose social injustice. Isn’t that the reason we got into journalism in the first place? What are you doing here, if not looking for that?” Carl grimaced, “my uncle’s the editor of the style section and I wanted to become a restaurant critic.” I sighed and realized I should have guessed Carl’s doughy features were suited to reviewing food he shoveled down his thick gullet. I turned a new sheet on my notepad, “what’s this tape got?” “Footage of the Flash at work,” replied Carl. “Seems like it’s a split of the two GoPro cameras you hooked up at the sandwich shop. Why do we have all of this footage again?” “I couldn’t interview the Flash himself, he’s washed up as far as heroes go. I interviewed some of his handlers, the government brass that signs off on his activities, etc. But to actually give a good image of who he lives, how he lives and paint the picture that the readers of The Metro Standard should get, I needed to actually observe him.” “Why record him though,” Carl asked as we watched the video of the beginning of the lunch rush. “You’ll see right now.” We watched the video run, we saw a steady stream of customers lining up. They would yell an order at the masked man behind the counter and the sandwich would be ready and bagged in less than ten seconds. After five minutes of tape, we could see the Flash had made stacks of sandwiches and people were now waiting on the automated cashier computer to pay for their order. “That’s crazy; they must be serving hundreds of people in that shop on a daily basis.” “Thousands actually,” I replied. “The government in conjunction with a heroes support network popped this sandwich shop in the middle of Central City a year or two after his breakdown. It’s been operating in the black since day one and other shops like Subway and Jimmy John’s want it shut down because it hurts their business. What can they say though? "We need to stop the Flash!" You think Subway wants to look like a corporate supervillain?” “Especially not after the Jared fiasco,” Carl shot back. I nodded and chuckled at the jab. “What happened to him?” “Cumulative effects, you remember how he got to be the Flash, right?” Carl shakes his head and I sigh. “I can’t remember the specifics of everything, but he got into some accident involving experimental chemicals and being struck by lightning at the same time. Somehow the lightning caused some reaction with the chemicals, bonded at a cellular level or what have you and boom, he’s got superhuman speed.” “No kidding,” Carl says slack-jawed. “Anyway, he started acting all funny a few years back. It started with him not remembering some publicity appearances, but as long as he kept saving people they let some mall openings slide. Then one night, he’s helping clear an apartment building, three-alarm call. He thought he got the whole building cleared and started signing autographs in the crowd. Someone heard some shouting, they realized he missed a unit and it was around back that the ladders couldn’t reach. He was about to go back in when the building collapsed. Eighteen floors, right in the middle was a family trapped on ten. They found the charred bodies a few days later in the middle of all the rubble. Mom and dad were holding tight to their three-year-old boy and nine-month-old daughter.” “Jesus fucking Christ,” Carl whispers staring off. “Yep, he had a mental break after that. The docs and scientists poked around at him. Turns out any electricity was causing more reaction with the chemical bonding at a cellular level. So any friction he created running around was actually causing miniature electrical discharges. Those little discharges were bit by bit changing him. They hypothesize it was destroying his mind, like a form of accelerated autism, combine that with the PTSD of that fire and being a hero in general, then you get the Flash we have today: a shell of a man that makes a sandwich fast and that’s about it.” “Is he still causing himself damage making sandwiches?” I shook my head stiffly, trying not to lose focus on the screen. “Nah, the shoes and floor keep it discharged now.” Carl hit the remote suddenly. “Did you see that? Slow it down and watch him again.” I did, we replayed a club sandwich being made, I didn’t catch it, and so we looked again. Thank God these cameras record at over 200 frames per second. We slow it down to a snail pace, and that finally shows Flash making a sandwich at normal speed. Plain as day, right there in the mayo on top of the cheese, a big old pecker. We went through every sandwich order that had mayo, mustard or other sauce on the tape. It’s the same on every sandwich: dick, dick, dick and more dicks. They all got dicks. We even catch him look at the camera while drawing one dick and he winked at us. “Son of a bitch, Carl.”

This week's topic bridges the two worlds I work in so they may be introduced to each other, lovingly caress each other and curl up into a fetal position to talk about criticism. For anyone that doesn't know me, I have a very steady career in software development and I write in my spare time. Why would I do this? Why does anyone do anything? Fun and profit. I develop software because it is fun and profitable, and I write fiction because it is also fun and I hope to make it profitable one day. Let's talk about melting these two worlds together and discuss something everyone really hates: criticism. Let's face it, you've written a 690 page single spaced manuscript that you believe has flourishes that would make Oscar Wilde beam with pride and you don't want to be told otherwise. You need to be told otherwise. Unless you plan to never get that epic published, you need criticism. There isn't any need to fear it, but you DO need it. I learned this about my own manuscript recently. It has stuff wrong with it, parts I'm sure I will discover drag. I took over a year to write it, and I'm very defensive of it because of that work, but it needs more work. This process seems like something that the writing world isn't new to and you guys have it down pretty good. You have folks that are fantastic editors, subsets for content and creativity editing, folks that can help you with flow and contradictions. All of this available at a price, and it should be as time is a valuable commodity. It also seems like you guys have it down to a nice scene for remote criticism or are generally pretty nice to each other in face to face critique and reviews. Well done, points for humanity there. Let me welcome authors and writers to the software development world and introduce you to what can persist as a pure nightmare. There is a lot of information to follow, you may get bored, but there are questions for you at the end. To start with, I should be clear about one thing and some people will fight me on this. Writing code is an art form (collective gasps from readers). It really is, ask any programmer you know and they will tell you they've seen code that is ok, code that is the purest emblem of beauty and science wed together in a compiler, and they've seen code that is complete and utter shit. Walk through any museum and you'll see the same thing. Walk through any library and you'll pick out books that you describe in that exact manner. Developers just have a different view of code as art. Along with that world of code as an art form, you have critics, and we are ALL critics. Some of us are harsher than others. Silicon Valley fans that don't work in development may be surprised to hear this, but that argument regarding tabs vs spaces is real and can bring out some extreme opinions from two very similar developers. How variables are cased is another one that sounds petty, but can derail an entire week of work (var thisIsAGoat vs var ThisIsAGoat vs var this_is_a_goat). Syntactically, those were all the same goat, but they will fight you. Now that some opening salvos have been fired, let's talk about criticism. There's good and there's bad. The bad is actually a wretched process of agony that will give you severe anxieties and increase your alcohol tolerance. The Process So here's the process. As a developer, you get the requirements, you think through how a feature will work, how data comes from point A and goes to B. You write some tests and write some code. Eventually, it's done and working, the specifications are met and you are ready to deliver this thing you've built. This process varies, but if you are in a good environment then they’ll want to do code reviews. A code review can be a simple or complicated process, depending on the people and organization. It’s just a process for at least one other person to look through what you’ve built and answer some basic questions. Does this meet the specifications? Does this match our coding style guide? Can anything be written better? Are there some glaring mistakes? I’ve worked at a few different shops over the years, here are some examples of how it worked well for me personally. The Good What’s worked well to me, and this is becoming more common, are review systems. It sounds like overhead and process and all that crap nobody wants to deal with, but trust me, when you read the bad you’ll understand why it’s worth the overhead. If you come to my blog and have had any experience with Git/Github, you may already be familiar with their pull request process for bringing in new code and performing reviews at that point. For my non-programmer readers, when you want to deliver new features/code, you don’t just save it and it goes straight into the program. If that’s what you’re doing, then I hope to any higher power you hold as a creator that you are the sole developer on that product and project. Back to how it works, you are requesting that this thing you’ve made/changed get merged into the original code base. In Git, it’s a pull request. There are other tools if you have other code repositories. Some of the best that work with code repos automatically that I’ve seen are Jet Brains UpSource, Atlassian Crucible and there’s an open source one that comes with Phabricator called Audit. They have slightly different user interfaces, but they boil down to the same set of features. I can show the differences between my code and the existing code Parts that I’ve deleted are shown and it’s clear they are being removed Parts that I’ve added are shown and it’s clear where they are being added I can give some information about the change happening Others can view my review Myself and others can make comments on the same lines of code and the UI will put them on the screen in such a way that it is clear where the person is talking about something with a code The commenting helps me facilitate a discussion about the code and can help me resolve issues or make tasks to fix any issues. Having these software tools to do this may sound like abstracting a face to face interaction that could be more beneficial. I get that, I really do. In smaller organizations, that may be better, just sitting down with another dev and explaining it, hashing out issues and get the whole process over easily. The abstraction to a tool is better in my opinion though for a number of reasons. People don’t always have the time to sit down right now to review your code The commenting is kept and I have a log of what to do, not a random sticky note or a bit of chicken scratch that I can’t remember what it means the next day The review is now an archivable piece of documentation that we can revisit if new bugs occur or we want to replicate something People are people and they get anxious, not everyone likes to just sit down and hash things out in close quarters The other team members may not be in the room, or same city or even the same continent Using a tool for doing the code review as an online process, I’ve had other devs ask leading questions like, “why did you do it this way?” And that’s fine, I can take a few minutes, look over the code again, search for best practices and see if maybe there was a better way to write something. I get the opportunity to admit I’m wrong gracefully and commit to fixing the issue. Or I respond and it’s teaching my reviewer something maybe he or she doesn’t know or hasn’t encountered before. In other situations, devs may not go with leading questions. They may start the conversation as, “this is a bad way to do this because of x, please rewrite this to do y instead before we merge.” That’s fine too, it still facilitates the same discussion and I can always defend what I’m doing and push it back if I feel I am right. The point is that we still had the discussion and more than one person knows what is being brought into the larger project. This process isn’t perfect, and I’m sure many a Github project has had to deal with trolls in the reviews. I can see where the way the commenting can roll, it would be easy for a troll dev to come into reviews and start flaming devs with just adding unhelpful comments like “lol, noob”. That’s not likely to last long though as that dev will just get blocked from projects and people will move on. The Bad and ugly I’ve only really dealt with this at one place I’ve worked. The process sticks with me still after having left them nearly a decade ago. I would follow most of the same steps as before. Requirements, development, ready to merge. Instead of a tool though, I had to schedule a code review. I needed to: Book a room Invite at least one other developer Invite my supervisor Invite the department head Prepare for hell At the code review, I would have to explain what it was I was trying to do, go through the bug ticket or requirements documents. Once we all knew the requirements, I would literally have my code on a projector walking through everything I changed. At any point, people could stop me and ask questions. This may not sound too bad at first, but our department head seemed to believe in two philosophies: the Socratic method and give a person just enough rope. If he saw something, regardless how minor, he would stop and ask something like, “on line 54, why did you do that?” “Why did you choose to use a string instead of an integer?” “Why is that an array?” “How will that facilitate concurrency?” He would lead you on with these questions and eventually you would get to the answer he was trying to pry out of you like a molar with a twisted root. That whole process can take a while and I grant you that you will learn something. I learned a lot through this process. I do believe it did make me a better developer overall. The process did help take me from code monkey to developer/engineer. At the end of it all, I would still have drinks every Friday with every one of these people as well, though that may have been part commiserating and part reinforcement into Stockholm syndrome. So, if it worked to make me a better developer, why is it bad? Are you kidding me? Of course it’s bad. That company had a higher turnover rate of developers than anywhere I’d been. Yes, it made me have a thicker skin and made me a better developer, but almost at the cost of turning me into the Socratic dictator as well. It doesn’t work with everyone, hell it barely worked well with anyone. Survivors of that company still agree that it was a miserable process. It took a lot of time (some review sessions required multiple meetings), scheduling was hell and you couldn’t even be sure that everything was always answered or fixed as it wasn’t actively recorded. It was also very traumatic. Some developers would leave in tears. Literally, it would break them down. You’re rambling, what’s the point? Yes I’m rambling a bit, but I’m doing some crossing over in my career for writing as a side project and wanted to see if I could bring some of that back. I have been working in software development for nearly 15 years now. I did some creative writing classes a decade ago and wanted to get back into writing. I’ve been working on my side project of a novel for a bit over a year now. I’m finally at a point where I’m doing revisions, editing and rewrites. I have no idea what to expect in the writing community from that process aside from what appear to be happy interactions by people in some critique forums and examples posted by some professional editors. So, writers that may be visiting, here are your questions Are there any tools you use for this process or is it mostly review/notes in MS word? How many editors/review sessions do you generally work through? How often do you end up scrapping the whole thing and do a complete rewrite? What are your horror stories of the process? Honestly, at this point in my career, I feel like my skin is probably thick as dragonhide, but what should I expect? I’m fine with people telling me something is complete crap if they can give some solid backing, but will they?

Luck met Fate in Chicago’s Grant Park near the center fountain. Their bet was simple, work their influence on the same person and see who would ultimately win out. Fate had disguised himself in a local news anchor, his teeth radiating through a wide lipped smile. Luck, having anticipated Fate, disguised herself as a Telemundo meteorologist, her skin tight dress as immovable as Fate’s coiffed hair in the stiff breeze coming off Lake Michigan. They both started by claiming the weather. “Lucky we had such beautiful weather today,” purred Luck. “I’d say it was more fated, considering the complex relations of jet streams and currents,” chuckled Fate. Luck rolled her eyes and gave Fate a curled lip sneer. “Who’s the lucky target of our little bet?” They scanned the people around the park. Luck nodded at a man in a windbreaker walking a small dog. “That one?” Fate pursed his lips, “hmm, no, I'll feel sorry for the dog if something happens.” Fate looked around, he pointed to a woman reading a paperback romance in the shade of a tree. Luck twisted her lips to a grimace, “I don't see any action heading her way.” Fate and Luck continued pointing and nodding at random passersby in this fashion for the better part of an hour. Finally, they spotted a hipster looking gentleman. He had walked right past them and sat down on the edge of the large fountain. He wore a red flannel shirt buttoned up under a black vest. They both found this absurd on the heat of the August afternoon. He opened a small rusted ThunderCats lunch box. The hipster withdrew a small tube of mustache wax, a paper bag, an avocado and a knife. When he removed a piece of toast from the paper bag and started putting slices of avocado on the toast, Fate and Luck smiled at each other. Fate waved a hand broadly at their target, “ladies first.” Luck smiled slyly behind her sharp penciled mascara. She winked as the hipster was waxing and curling his mustache. A gull swooped low and delivered a long runny white poop across the shoulder of the hipster’s vest, it ran down the front and back. He stood up scanning the sky for the bird and trying not to touch the fresh deposit. Luck chuckled lightly, but saw Fate’s disgusted countenance. “Really, Luck? Bird poop? That’s what you’ve got?” Luck sneered at Fate. She looked at the scene again and wiggled her nose. A squirrel rustled out of a tree nearby. In a flash of brown fur the little critter ran across the plaza, jumped onto the fountain ledge and made off with the fresh slice of avocado toast. The hipster turned in time to see the bushy tailed thief and attempted to chase. Luck had different plans though, as she followed him with her gaze and the hipster fell over his own two feet. He fell awkwardly, scraping his hands badly and giving himself a nasty gash above his brow. Fate laughed at the man’s bad luck. “I think you may have concussed the poor bastard, Luck.” Luck smiled again at Fate, “perhaps you’d like to take over now? Give me a little taste of what you’d do to this fellow?” Fate crossed his arms and looked over at him, “oh, I dealt with this man a long time ago. Feel free to keep going though, maybe you can still cheat his fate.” Luck’s expression sunk to anger at Fate. She turned back to the hipster, he was still laying on the ground. Slowly he pushed himself up, checking his bleeding temple lightly with the fingertips of his bleeding hands. He started to walk back to the fountain when a cyclist came across the plaza. Not seeing each other, the cyclist ran straight into the hipster, the hipster was kicked back as the cyclist flew into nearby shrubbery. Luck turned to Fate, who was frowning and just tsking in disapproval. Turning her attention back to the hipster, he had finally made it back to the fountain. He began to wash the blood from his hands and his face in the water flowing in the fountain. Luck nodded. While the man was bent over, a dog walker trying to control a pack of seven lost them all when the carabiner joining the leashes snapped. They ran in different directions. The largest, a big fluffy Old English Sheepdog, ran straight to the fountain, jumping on the hipsters back to launch itself through the spewing waters. The hipster fell face first and found himself wading. Luck felt quite proud of herself. She looked to her side though to see Fate was yawning in boredom and checking for dirt under his fingernails. Without turning to look back at the hipster, Luck snapped her thin manicured fingers. A cloud filled the sunny Chicago coastline suddenly and with a magnificent clap a great bolt of lightning struck down directly at the fountain. The hipster was thrown by the sudden impact, launching him towards the nearby tree. The young woman reading under the tree tossed aside her paperback romance and ran to the hipster. He had lost his vest in the fountain and the water had unfurled his moustache, he almost looked normal as he lay twitching when she came to him. Luck rolled her eyes at Fate, “now you’ve done it, you’ve pushed me to go and kill the poor bastard.” Fate sharpened the gaze under his plucked eyebrows, “did I now?” Luck stared at the scene unfurling. The reader had started CPR on the hipster. Suddenly he coughed and sputtered back to life. The hipster stared up into the eyes of his savior, he leaned up and kissed her gently. They fell over together embracing tightly in love at first sight. Luck saw Fate smiling smugly at her. She started to walk away and clapped her hands. At that moment, another bolt of lightning struck down at the tree the new lovers were passionately kissing under. The tree’s trunk split and fell heavily upon the couple, killing them instantly. Fate frowned, “oh you win this round you cruel bitch.”