He rises from the dead

Six weeks ago I reached a mental state best described as I'm-Gonna-Die-If-I-Don't-Finish-This-Book.

Yes, it was almost done, but it wasn't finished.

So I cut myself off from the world. No blogging, no tweeting, very little email. If I wasn't doing family stuff or sleeping, then I was in the office writing or, more often, staring at writing already there. (Why must I stare at my own words for so long?)

I finished it in two and a half weeks.

I sent the ms off to my beta readers, who very kindly read what passes for prose from my fingertips, and who tell me which bits suck and, just as importantly, which bits don't suck. (It can be surprising the answers you get back...sometimes I get praise for sections I feared were weak.)

It was going to take weeks before anyone got back to me, so I could catch up on blogging, tweeting, etc, for a gap of about 3 weeks. Right?

Wrong. The first feedback from one reader came in next day, on the first 80 pages. Three days later he'd finished the book and I had complete, detailed, and brilliant information. So the blog and the tweets went back in the cupboard and I started on revisions. As I was revising I got a response from another of my generous readers, who had very perceptive things to say. I'm very lucky to have these people give me their time and talents.

It turned out I had a sagging middle. Well, I'm a guy in my 40s, these things happen.

I revised for two weeks. Everything got fixed (I hope), 6,000 words disappeared, 1,000 words came into being, and then the ms was off to my agent, Janet, so she could have her turn tearing it to shreds. Which I actually like, btw. The mission objective is to publish the best book I can write that you will enjoy reading. That's not going to happen unless people tell me where it can be better. I don't understand writers who can't handle criticism; if it were a bridge and someone pointed out a flaw in your design, would you whinge? Of course not.

As soon as I'd emailed the ms off to Janet I hopped back on the net -- the addiction never went away -- to immediately see a tweet from Deb Vlock that she'd just that moment sent her ms off to Janet. Then Susan Adrian said she was about to send in her revisions. Bill Cameron mentioned his was going in next week. Somehow Janet's clients had contrived to simultaneously hit her with manuscripts.

Terrific. That meant I had time to get some other stuff done, such as write my first blog post for six weeks. So here it is and it's nice to be back.

I might not have much time though. I thought I had weeks (again) but Janet's started reading.

Word count in OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word is wildly different!

I've been writing book 2 using the OpenOffice Writer application instead of Microsoft Word. It was a successful experiment for the most part.

But industry standard for manuscripts is Microsoft Word .doc format, and I'm getting very close to sending the ms out to beta readers, so last night I saved the ms as a doc and opened it in Word.

The word count in my manuscript went from about 92,000 in Writer, to 88,000 in Word.

WTF!?

Convinced I'd just lost a couple of scenes worth of wordage due to some hideous bug, I began a comparison. But the page count was identical, and I couldn't find anything missing.

A bit of scrabbling with Google found the answer. Word and Writer have radically different definitions of what constitutes a word. OpenOffice Writer accepts almost any sequence of white space or punctuation delimited characters as a word. Microsoft Word is much more discriminating. On top of that, OpenOffice Writer counts text in headers and footers, and anything in text boxes.

Do I really have 4,000 extraneous character sequences in this ms? I haven't put headers or footers in yet, so the only thing I can think of is em-dashes and en-dashes -- I do tend to use them a bit, just like this -- but even so 4,000 is a bit hard to come at. There are a small number of hyphenated words, which OpenOffice will count as 2, and I use *** to mark scene boundaries.

Which of them is "right"? Fortunately for a novel it doesn't matter, because the publisher only cares about pages. As long as you stick to Times New Roman 12 point with 2.5cm (1 inch) margins, you're going to get 250 words per page. But I have to say Microsoft Word has the correct definition intuitively.

If you're using OpenOffice Writer for an article or essay or school assignment where word count matters, you better be wary.

OpenOffice guys, please fix this!

Songs for Mystery Writers

Romance writers get a zillion love songs but how many people write songs for mysteries? Even SF gets more.

The only mystery songs I can think of are:

Watching The Detectives by Elvis Costello

Who Are You by The Who, had nothing to do with mysteries when it was written. CSI fixed that.

Paperback Writer by Paul McCartney is relevant. I love the way it reads as a query letter. The story goes McCartney wrote the song after his aunt complained he only wrote love songs. You know you're overdoing it when even your aunt starts complaining your lyrics are too soppy.

This list is too short. Can anyone help me here?

Athenian Coins: The Owls

This is an Athenian coin. Every coin minted in Athens was stamped with this design.
The bird is a Minerva owl, the sacred bird of Athena, patron Goddess of Athens. Athenian coins were universally known as owls. If you bought something at the agora, the stallholder might say, "That'll be three owls." The birds were always printed looking at you sideways with those huge eyes.

There are three letters down the right hand side. The funny O with the dot in the middle is a capital theta, which carries a th sound. Alpha Theta Epsilon spells out as A(TH)E, the first three letters of the word Athenai (Athens) in Greek.

The pattern in the top left is olive leaves and an olive, the olive plant being Athena's special gift to Athens.

Between the owl and the olives is what looks like a banana but is actually a crescent moon. The moon doesn't appear on any coins before the Battle of Salamis, but does on all coins shortly thereafter. The assumption is Salamis was fought under a crescent moon, but no one really knows.

The obverse side btw had a picture of Athena. I haven't bothered showing the obverse because it's not all that interesting. It's worth noting though this is the first commonly accepted coin to have heads (Athena) and tails (the owl).

Athens didn't have a logo like the famous SPQR of Rome. But to anyone in the ancient world, this coin face instantly screamed Athens.

Athenian coins were the first in history to be accepted across national borders. In those days every city minted its own coins, except for the Spartans, who were convinced this newfangled money stuff would never catch on and stuck with small iron bars as a unit of currency.

In general people in one city would not accept the coins of another. Your average vendor in, say, Mytilene, was unlikely to know the relative value of coins from, say, Thebes, and even if he did, he certainly wouldn't know the relative values of the 20+ other major Greek cities. If that doesn't sound sensible, try this quick quiz: off the top of your head, list the current exchange rate for every major currency in the world relative to the US dollar.

Right. People in the ancient world had exactly the same problem. If you turned up at one city with another city's coins, your first stop was the moneychanger at the local agora.

The moneychangers actually had a tough job. They were effectively setting the exchange rate between city economies. They had to judge largely by the amount of precious metal, usually silver, in the coins, but also had to be wary of cheats. There are plenty of surviving coins that have been chopped so a moneychanger could check what's inside.

But everyone accepted owls (except the Spartans). This coin was the ancient world's equivalent of today's US dollar, until the Roman currency took over, and even then owls were still good as a trading system.

There are people who could glance at this coin and tell you in what year it was minted, because the design of the owl changed subtly over time. I am not one of those people.

This coin is a tetradrachm. 4 drachmas. There were smaller and larger denominations, but the tetra seems to have been the common unit for commercial trading. Its value though is far too high for normal everyday use. For that you wanted a smaller coin called an obol.

1 drachma = 6 obols

An average workman earned about a drachma a day. So most things you bought in the agora would have cost a couple of obols at most. There was even a half-obol coin for small purchases. When you died, the obol was the coin placed under your tongue to pay Charon the Ferryman to get you to the afterlife. The obol had exactly the same owl design as the drachma, but smaller and thinner with less precious metal. Obols were tiny. Here are some pictures I took in the British Museum:


These are all made of silver. The important difference is the size.

#2 & #3 are each side of a tetradrachm
#4 is a didrachma (2 drachma piece)
#5 & #6 are each side of a drachma
#7 is a half drachma (3 obols)
#8 is a quarter drachma (yes, I know that's not an even number of obols)
#9 & #10 are obols
#11 is a half obol
#12 is a quarter obol





There were units higher than the drachma:

1 mina = 100 drachmas
1 talent = 60 minas = 6,000 drachmas

Only the very wealthy and governments dealt in talents.

Why were owls so successful? For much the same reason the USD is ubiquitous today. Because they were so very successful a large number of owls survived. Many have been placed on chains. Theodore Roosevelt is said to have kept one in his pocket.

A writer's life

A writer's life...I had to go to the shops today. It was my first time out of the house for over a week.

I saw people! They were walking from place to place, blissfully unaware of my ms and its remaining problems.

I spoke to someone outside of my immediate family, and it wasn't via twitter!