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The Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine
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Publisher: Randy Ingermanson ("the Snowflake guy")
Motto: "A Vision for Excellence"
Date: January 4, 2006
Issue: Volume 1, Number 10
Home Pages: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com
http://www.RSIngermanson.com
Circulation: 3769 writers, each of them creating a
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
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What's in This Issue
1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine!
2) Email safety
3) Managing Your Time
4) Plotting Structure: the Big Picture
5) Plot Structure of Pirates of the Caribbean
6) Plot Structure of Pride and Prejudice
7) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com
8) Steal This E-zine!
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1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine!
Those of you who have joined in the past month (nearly
300 of you are new since my last issue), welcome to my
e-zine! You can find all the previous issues on my web
site at:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/html/afwezine.html
Drat, drat, and drat! I had intended to get this issue
out yesterday--the first Tuesday of the month. Alas, I
was busy yesterday working furiously on a Tiger
Marketing Project, which I was hoping to show off in
this issue. Well, it won't happen. My project is not
quite ready for prime time. I expect that it will be
ready soon, and then I'll drop you a short Special
Edition to show off my handiwork.
Because of that, there will be no Tiger Marketing
column in this issue. (As you all recall, Tiger
Marketing is a method of marketing that lets your
customers find YOU, rather than you having to shotgun
the world with irritating ads for products it doesn't
care about.) I'll do a Show-And-Tell of my little
project as soon as it is safe to show.
In this issue, I'll tell you something important you
should know about keeping your email address from being
harvested by people who want to sell you obnoxious
products.
I'll also give a (rare) product endorsement for a
time-management tool I've started using.
Finally, I'd like to talk about the Big Picture in
story structure. Last summer, we talked extensively
about the Little Picture. Now it's time to zoom out a
bit. I'll talk first about the theory and then show how
it works in practice for two movies: Pirates of the
Caribbean; and Pride and Prejudice.
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2) Email safety
A friend asked me recently how to deal with all those
annoying unwanted ads that come to your email in-box by
the hundreds. There's a four-letter word for this that
rhymes with "ham". Unfortunately, if I use that term
here, this email will be labelled as being, um, "ham"
by your "ham-filter" and you won't get this email. But
I think you know what I mean by "ham".
Anyway, my answer to my friend was that you should do
all in your power NOT to get on the "ham" email lists
to begin with. There are wicked orc-like beings who
write programs that crawl around the web looking for
links that look like this:
"mailto:joeschmoe@somecompany.com".
In a web browser, this shows up as a link. If you click
on it, your email program pops up with the email
address "joeschmoe@somecompany.com" already filled in.
This is a very convenient way for webmasters to let
visitors on your web site send you an email.
It's also a very stupid way.
The reason it's stupid is because of those pesky web
crawlers. When they see that "mailto" prefix, they grab
the email address "joeschmoe@somecompany.com" and send
it back to the bad guys, who collect tons of these
email addresses. They stick them in databases and sell
them to those obnoxious "ham" people. And then poor Joe
Schmoe starts getting unwanted email to help him
refinance his hovel, or to watch Paris Hilton doing
naughty tricks, or to increase the size of various body
parts.
There is an easy way to avoid all this mess which I
will tell you here. I didn't invent this idea.
Competent webmasters should know this trick. If they
don't, then they should be spanked. Severely.
The solution is just a wee bit techie, so if you're not
techie, give this to your webmaster. The idea is to
replace the "mailto" link with a slightly different
link that does the same thing, but in a way that the
web crawlers aren't designed to look for. So they pass you
by, and your name doesn't end up on the "ham" lists.
First, let's look at the WRONG WAY to do it. A typical
"mailto" link would look like this:
Email me
What appears in a web browser is "Email me" underlined
as a link.
The right way to do this is to follow a two-step process.
1) Modify the above line to call a JavaScript function
that calls the email program in an obscure way. So
replace the above line with this:
Email me
2) Add a couple of lines of JavaScript in the header of
the web page HTML file. They should look like this:
Each of the lines above that starts out "