Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron

I have to talk about the color specifically though. Color is everything in this world. People are divided into social ranks according to what colors they can see. Who they marry is largely determined by what their combined color ratings will do for their offspring. For instance, Eddie Russet, the protagonist, is a Red trying to marry into the Oxbloods, an old Red family that wants to increase their red percentage. It’s crazy-sounding, but with a little thought it’s not that different from marrying for money or some other kind of prestige.

Despite the fixation on color, Eddie’s world is very black and white. He lives in a rigid society that is completely dedicated to the Rules. He knows his duty and he does it, both as a member of society and as a young man looking for the best marriage. But he soon finds out that there’s a lot more underneath his orderly world than he ever guessed.  And he finds that he’s willing to risk more than he realized to find out the truth.

Shades of Grey is a meticulously constructed book that was a fascinating exploration of a very different kind of post-apocalyptic world and the decisions we face when we confronted with a shift in worldview.  I’m looking forward to the sequels, and I think I need to check out some of Fforde’s other work as well.

Update: Also, if you like the book, definitely check out the Shades of Grey website.  Barcoded animals! Lincoln green! You’ll just have to read the book to truly get it.

In order, the Gallagher Girls books are:

-I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You

-Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

-Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover

It’s hard to talk about all three books without spoiling any of them, especially since each book is full of twists and turns that teach these spies-in-training that the world is not always what it seems. It’s fascinating to watch Cammie, the narrator, approach her world with the skills she’s learned in her years at Gallagher Academy: martial arts, hacking, multiple languages, and other invaluable spy skills. And yet like any teenage girl, she’s often blindsided by her emotions.

Despite being the daughter of the school’s headmistress, Cammie’s specialty is being invisible. She’s known as the Chameleon because she can blend into her surroundings so completely that even her friends can’t find her. She’s also learned how to disappear at school by exploring the old building’s many hidden passageways.

Cammie’s voice is smart and confident, but also funny and very personal with conversational asides sharing her thoughts about boys or the current mission. Her training as a spy pervades her life, with parts of the text even being told in the form of a covert ops report, as well as lists that show Cammie’s ordered mind. Cammie has known for most of her life that she wanted to be a spy like her mom and dad, and it shows in the way she thinks.

Like Cammie, her friends at the Gallagher Academy think like spies, though each has her own background and unique personality. I love how real Cammie and her friends are, and yet how diverse. Each girl feels completely authentic, with her own very believable strengths and weaknesses. They may be taught to hide their emotions and think in terms of neutralizing threats, but even as their skills develop, the Gallagher girls remain very human, very accessible.

In fact, this is one of the themes that runs through the Gallagher Girls books: what does a spy give up in order to be the best she can be? The ability to be herself instead of one of her numerous “covers”? Honest relationships with people who don’t have a high enough clearance? Any semblance of a normal life? Cammie and her friends wrestle with these ideas and the hard decision of whether to pursue the life of a spy with all its dangers.

It’s no surprise that a girl surounded by spies-in-training and taught by ex-spies is also surrounded by secrets. Some of these are relatively harmless, though they might be classified. Others could cost her and her friends their lives. Cammie stumbles across both kinds in her quest to be at least somewhat normal, especially when it involves boys.

And yet Cammie and her friends address the mystery of boys like spies rather than like your average high school girl. In the first book, Cammie creates a cover story to tell her normal boyfriend. She and her friends hack into various government databases looking for dirt on him. And her friend Liz is working on a boy-to-English decoder. These twists on the usual teen-girl-obsessed-with-boy trope were a welcome change.

Things grow a little darker in the second book, with the danger more real than just a class exercise, and darker still in the third book, which leaves us and Cammie with more questions than answers. In fact, the question at the end of Don’t Judge a Girl By Her Cover gives me that anxious sort of itch that makes me wish I didn’t have to wait so long for the next book in the series. But I’m sure it will be worth waiting for.

The fourth Gallagher Girls book, Only the Good Spy Young, is scheduled for release in June 2010.

(The first book of Ally Carter’s new series, Heist Society, also looks pretty interesting. Out February 9, 2010.)

Evy Stone, a hunter of Dregs (nonhuman species like goblins, vampires, and weres), has been resurrected into a new body and has three days to figure out who killed her and why. She has no hope of living past the time limit, but she’s still intent on saving her city from the potentially horrific results of a planned alliance between the goblins and vampires. Not only that, she wants to figure out who killed the other two members of her Triad and framed her for their murders. With the help of the only person she can trust, her Triad’s former handler, Wyatt, she follows a trail of lies and deception to the truth, which is worse than anyone thought.

It’s a strange thing to play detective in your own life, but Evy’s reactions to her discoveries were well-balanced emotionally. Part of her is intent on solving the mystery, reacting to challenges as decisively as any kick-ass urban fantasy heroine, while another part is sometimes overcome by the betrayals and painful memories she discovers. These occasional reminders of Evy’s human vulnerabilities only increased my admiration for her courage and made me want to find out who had killed her and why. Helping the reader connect to Evy’s previous life are the vivid portrayals of human and Dreg minor characters, both allies and enemies. While the sheer variety of Dreg species were sometimes hard to keep track of, I appreciated the blending of traditional and fresh depictions of these fantasy staples.

With only three days to live, the story moves fast from the moment Evy wakes, the short time she has left emphasized by the countdown at the beginning of each chapter. So at first the romance subplot threw me off, as it seemed like too much of a distraction considering everything else Evy had to do in those three days. But the characters and their interactions were so real that I believed in their relationship with the help of some flashbacks that gave me a good sense of their prior friendship.

One of my favorite parts of this book was watching how Evy adapts to her new body. At first she flounders a bit with physical skills she’d been proficient with in her old life, and later she discovers her new body has some different feelings and abilities, which also take some getting used to. I liked this touch of realism and the accompanying entanglements of the life of the woman who had previously owned Evy’s body.

Three Days to Dead is very tightly plotted, with all the clues, whether they prove true or false, clicking together in a puzzle picture that grows clearer as the story progresses. Reading with my skeptical writer brain, I expected to find a few threads left unresolved, but everything wrapped up in a tight, satisfying way. It’s quite a feat to cram that much story into 72 hours, but I believed it was true to the way smart, determined Evy Stone would have lived, both before and after her death.

I haven’t read much urban fantasy beyond Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, butThree Days to Dead makes me think I need to read more widely in the genre. It’s a definite keeper, and I’m certainly looking forward to Meding’s next book, As Lie the Dead, out in summer 2010.

My previous favorite writing program was Liquid Story Binder (LSBXE), which is a fantastic program.  Unfortunately, I run Ubuntu Linux and LSBXE just doesn’t run as well in Linux as it used to.  This is not the developer’s fault, as the program is only intended to run in Windows.  So if you use Windows, I definitely recommend trying LSBXE’s free 30-day trial.

But I decided I needed something more reliable for NaNoWriMo 2009, so I started testing new programs in October.  The one that best met my needs was SuperNotecard by Mindola Software.

It’s a Java program that runs on Windows and Mac and adapts easily to Linux.  (Instructions for running in Linux.)  It’s inexpensive at $29, with a trial version that reminds you to purchase after a deck has more than 20 cards.  It could easily be run forever without purchasing, but I found it well worth the money.

Complete review with a screenshot after the cut.

Click for larger image

SuperNotecard is just what it sounds like: a writing program organized like a deck of note cards.  Each card can be sorted into a separate deck, color-coded, categorized, flagged with notes, and linked to character and setting profiles.

I’ll give you an idea of how I use SuperNotecard.  I began with five main decks:

• Meta, which contains information like a summary, notes from beta readers, and a quote that struck me as useful to remember;
• Timeline, which has a card for each day in my novel, color-coded according to location;
• Chapters, where each chapter has its own card;
• Notes, where I freewrite on plot and characters with separate cards for each day; and
• Research, where I collect notes that relate to my worldbuilding

Other important tools include Factors, which is a somewhat odd term for keeping track of the characters, places, things, events, and other important objects in a story.  I can designate characters as major or minor, color-code, make notes, and associate them with the chapters in which they appear.  The same goes for places, things, events, and other objects.  I would be absolutely lost without this feature, as I can see at a glance (and add directly into a card) what exactly was the name of that minor character from Chapter 2 when I need him again in Chapter 57.

Another way to organize cards are Categories.  Because I have multiple viewpoints and some chapters with flashbacks, I use the Categories to color-code the viewpoint character for each chapter, as well as whether or not it contains a flashback.

Flags are another tremendously useful feature, allowing notes to be attached directly to a card.  I’m using this feature often as I revise; I list the changes I want to make to a chapter in the flag pane where I can easily refer to it as I write.

The interface is flexible, allowing cards to be displayed in different sizes and orientations.  The file listing is optional, as are all the toolbars, if you just want to write without distractions.

SuperNotecard has a flexible backup feature that automatically saves multiple versions of your work.  It also has basic tools like spellcheck and word count.  Another helpful feature is the ability to split the screen so that I can write in the top half of the screen and refer to my timeline in the bottom half.

Most importantly to me, SuperNotecard allows for easy exporting with a variety of options.  And if for some reason the program isn’t supported in the future, SuperNotecard saves all its data in an XML file, which allows for easy extraction.  No worries about losing data to a proprietary format that can’t be opened outside its originating program.

One of the drawbacks, at least on my relatively less powerful netbook, is that cards with more than 2,000 words begin to lag.  I don’t notice this problem on my more powerful desktop computer though.  Also, although it is theoretically possible to attach images to cards, I haven’t been able to make it work in a way that lets me click on an image and open it from within the program.

SuperNotecard also has several features that I haven’t worked with, including a nonfiction format that turns Factors into References that connect citation information to your notes.

For only $29, this has been one of the most useful writing programs I’ve ever tried.  It rivals Liquid Story Binder for its organizational abilities and surpasses it in some ways, such as its multi-platform approach and open file format.  I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to keep all their notes organized alongside their writing.

Because Simon wrote yWriter for his own use as an author, the program is continually improving and expanding as Simon considers feedback from other users and his own needs for the software. I’ll be discussing the most up-to-date version, yWriter Version 4.

So what can yWriter do for you?

yWriter allows writers to organize their work in an clearly laid-out system that can be easily exported into a final document. yWriter produces various summaries and reports, such as:

• a work schedule from outlining to completion
• a long or short synopsis based on chapter and scene descriptions
• an outline
• a storyboard that allows scenes to be rearranged graphically
• a scene list and scene cards
• lists of characters, locations, and items
• number of scenes and word count for each viewpoint character
• scene ratings to measure tension, humor, and any other qualities you would like to track throughout the story. The scene ratings can then be viewed as a chart.

Chapters and scenes can easily be rearranged, either in the main interface, pictured above, or in the storyboard. Also, characters, locations, and items can all be associated with scenes, and the author can make notes about the projected goals, conflicts, and outcomes. yWriter also has a places for general notes and descriptions for each scene. Notes can also be created as separate scenes and chapters, then marked “unused.” For example, if you have an idea for a scene that you’ve not yet written, you can create a placeholder scene with your notes that can be ignored when a draft is printed.

How I’m using yWriter

I really only started using the software after I finished most of my rough draft for my NaNo novel. yWriter has a rich text editor that allows users to adjust the font style and size, and apply boldface, italics, and underlining, but I didn’t write directly in the software. Instead, I used the minimalist word processor JDarkRoom to do the first draft. When I finished the rough draft, I copied and pasted my work into yWriter, allowing me to see the structure of my novel more clearly. yWriter creator Simon Haynes says this is how he uses the software as well.

yWriter allows me to see the structure of my story much more clearly than scrolling down one seemingly endless document and looking for missing pieces. Now that my rough ideas are organized into chapters, I can see more easily where I need to add scenes.

Some tips on using yWriter

One of the best features of yWriter is the program’s extensive backup system. Unless you delete the entire project folder, it’s difficult to lose all your work. Each scene is stored in a separate RTF document that can be edited outside the program without disrupting any of the settings. One caution though: If you export the entire project, work on that file, then attempt to import the document back into yWriter, you will erase your project settings, such as the viewpoint characters and notes for each scene. I wouldn’t recommend trying to import a file unless it’s with a brand new project.

But if you’re looking for a way to use yWriter when you’re away from your home computer, install the program on a flash drive. Simply run the installation program as usual, specifying your flash drive as the installation location. Then do the same thing with the Pendrive Runtimes program from the Spacejock downloads page. Put the Pendrive files in the same directory as the yWriter files and you’ll be able to use yWriter on any Windows computer with your flash drive.

Note to Linux users: Follow these directions to install yWriter in Wine.

For a thorough overview of all of the functions of yWriter Version 3, see House of Strauss. Also, you might find this discussion on the NaNoWriMo forums to be useful.

In Conclusion

I look forward to using yWriter to organize many other projects. One of the sticking points I’ve often had with previous projects is confronting the mess I was left with after the initial writing. yWriter provides a free, easy-to-use, and helpful way to organize my writing. One of the best aspects, in my opinion, is that the software is designed by an author who also uses it for his own work. All in all, yWriter is an excellent tool to organize a novel, whether as a creation tool or an organization tool.

Have you used yWriter or any other novel-writing software? What has your experience been?