Dino-Art (by sarah)

I'm 'live-blogging' the process of produce my next piece of Palaeo-Art on Salaric Craft.

Haikus in git (by alaric)

I decided I'd write a haiku a day through February, for WoPoWriMo.

But I had to make it interesting, so I'm doing then in git, and letting GitHub publish them for me at http://alaricsp.github.com/wopowrimo/ using their pages system.

git is a system for looking after a bunch of files, keeping track of the 'history' - previous revisions. Since it knows the history, it can show you the changes made in each version; it can also do advanced stuff like letting you make several copies of your work, making changes to each copy, then comparing the results, merging the changes into one version, etc.

This has a number of uses. Perhaps you can have copies of your work on your laptop and your desktop, so you can work on either computer, and merge your changes when you get a chance. Perhaps you can try several different changes to your work, and decide which ones you want to keep. Perhaps a team can each take a copy of something, work on different parts of it, and merge them together again. Perhaps you can just put a copy on another computer, and merge your changes onto it from time to time, just in case you lose your laptop, so you have a backup.

Keeping the history means you can try making experimental changes, safe in the knowledge that you can undo them by going back to an earlier version.

It's normally used for things like computer software, but it's increasingly being used for things like writing projects as well. There's a git tutorial for designers, and writers such as Cory Doctorow and Tycho Garen are starting to adopt it.

GitHub is a site that hosts copies of your git repositories for you. You can push changes from your local copy to the github copy whenever you want to publish them to the world, and it has a nice Web interface to let people take copies of them, view the history, and so on; its pages system also exposes simple Web sites stored in git repositories onto the Web.

So you can view my efforts at http://alaricsp.github.com/wopowrimo/; or from that page you can find instructions on how to take your own local copy with git (that you can pull my changes into from time to time, and then look at the history), or you can follow the links through to http://github.com/alaricsp/wopowrimo/commits/gh-pages and view the history.

The Frog and The Fiddle (by sarah)

Tuesday I went along to what is essentially a University of Gloucester (I think) event that has been opened up to the public. It is held at the Frog and Fiddle in Cheltenham in their 'barn'.

I really liked the evening though I had to leave early - but I did get up and read 🙂 I also put flyers out for WoPoWriMo 🙂

I was incredibly nervous about this night as it was full of people who like study poetry and things - again the only thing I could speak authoritively on was Interzone and their submitting process :/

100 Stories For Haiti (by sarah)

I found about four hours before the deadline that there was a 100 stories for Haiti book project asking for submissions to help raise money for the earthquake victims.

So I hurriedly altered one of my stories and sent it too them last night - I was first stuck with a feeling that I wouldn't have anything to give them as they didn't want anything with Death, violence etc... it was the death one that stumped me - all the stories I have with the nice happy endings are ghost stories which were obviously out.

Anyway I found something and sent it off!

I had actually already mentioned something like this project as a possible money raiser after an argument about writing stories about the crisis itself.

Now I would encourage writing about suck heavy subjects as I feel they all to often get swept aside but I also feel you have to be careful and think before you fictionalise such a thing. Why? Becuase it would be easy to trivualise it.

How can you fictionalise a crisis why it is still going on? Unless you have actually been being there helping and are fictionalising your own experience - you need to research it or you will just get it all wrong. And I feel uneasy about writing about it whilst it is still a crisis - Apparently people felt helpless and wanted to show they cared - my reaction to this was simply - make an ebook of other stories and sell it to raise money then.

I'm not sure why I had such a strong reaction to this but Alaric thinks the same way too - he thinks you can't really fictionalise something like this until a yr or so afterwards.

Anyway they have now extended the deadline so if you have a story under 1000 words you might want to donate it 🙂

WoPoWriMo – World Poetry Writing Month (by sarah)

I am organising and taking part in WoPoWriMo which means that I have been setting up the web-site and facebook group and newsletter sign up and what have you.

Why am I doing this? Because I was asked too! And it sounds like a fun project:)

What will I be doing and expecting others to do?

Write a poem a day for the whole of February!

There is a Pledge to sign too 🙂

So you going to join in? I've even go Alaric pledged and excited - yes you heard me Alaric writing poetry!