Behind The Scenes

One of the themes I see in vampire fiction is the stalwart hero who has to come to grips with the blood lust once they get infected. I.e., they fight against the cannabalistic prejudice in our society. Did I just imply cannibalism is a good thing? ;>

After all, if the hero enjoys killing and feasting on his fellow humans, well, he isn’t very much of a hero, is he?

Or consider the vampire who struggles to regain his humanity - Nick Night and to a lesser extent Blade. While Blade accepts his state, he still, like Nick, sucks on a blood bag. Consuming donated blood from a bank is so much more elegant.

With The Nanovampire and also Batter Up, I wanted to explore humans who didn’t have the same moralistic views as most of society. Logan, and Vaughn Ryan, have different reasons for not caring about killing, but when they get turned into their versions of vampires, well, they don’t hunger at all.

Logan doesn’t want to change his lifestyle and Vaughn can’t go back to being normal. With Logan, the decision is firm, but with Vaughn, his future is much less certain.

Technorati Tags: Science Fiction vampire

I learned enough about style sheets to update the stories.

I also remembered that my visual layout skills leave a bit to be desired. If I stay with simple schemes, I’m okay. I.e., check out Cached copy of USC. I’m pretty happy with how that came out. It didn’t have a style sheet, which would have really made things easy, but I had some nice perl scripts to keep it simple and readily viewable on most browsers.

Oh yeah, and I learned that what is easy for me to maintain, i.e., flat files and scripts, is a major pain for anyone else. ;>

So I went with a simple terminal look and feel. I’m sure I’ll change it by tonight - I might be better going for the look of paper. I wanted the green on black to invoke the image of reading the stories on usenet and a vt100 terminal.

But I still want to snaze up the page titles, possibly in a separate box. I’d like the page controls to be a little bit more modern and include links to the main story page and this blog. (That last part I can easily tweak with my script and html.)

And I want to add left and right boxes. I want to be able to drop advertising links into these. I don’t know that I ever expect to get advertising, but that is a design goal I’ve had in mind from the start.

PS: A very simple resource for understanding style sheets is at Dave Raggett’s Introduction to CSS.

I wrote a perl script to take a raw text file and convert it to a story with pages which are 66 lines each.

I’d link the script in here, but if it is a .pl, browsers barf. Okay, here it is story.pl. Very scary and needs to be made safe.

You can check out my first effort, which produces a very plain styled web page, at Batter Up. It took a couple of hours to tweak this the way I wanted it, it still needs some factoring and style, but once I got it up and running, I was able to suck in a second story in about 5 minutes. And we have Abduction, abduction, whaat’s your function?

Time for bed, but the cat just jumped up on my lap…

I like to write. I just don’t keep at it.

I tried collecting some of my stuff over at Serialized Science Fiction, which is my work blog. I just didn’t follow up on it.

So, I’m going to try again here.

The intent is to keep a story, the set of changes that go on with it, the behind the scenes narration of the changes, and so on.

I’m going to follow the model that Howard Tayler has over at Schlock Mercenary. I.e., the stories will be static content and the commentary will be dynamic.