_______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ The Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 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. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 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! _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 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. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 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 "