All posts by vica

Starting a New Online Fiction Project – Continuing the Series “A Life Upside Down”

November 8, 2016Books I write, Experiencing the writing process, Writingvica

Recently, I have finished writing and sharing with you, here on my blog, the “Cheerleading for Writers” project.

So now the blogging-a-creative-book space is free and I decided to offer it to fiction.

There are several books projects I started some time ago and left to pick up later.

I realized that the most challenging for me at this point of time would be to write “A President’s Sister”, the second book in the series “A Life Upside Down”.

There might many reasons, why it is most challenging. I guess the most prominent of those reasons is that I discuss this project quite a lot in my head, especially whether it is worth to write it now, when I have so many other projects to do. “But you are going to continue blogging on writing, so you might as well do it there,” my creative brain drops in.

Yes, I might as well do this and I will do.

I actually think now that it might be the best solution for this series. I remember how, when I was writing the first book “A Spy’s Daughter” and the prequel “Seven Broken Pieces”, there was a certain urgency to get the story out there, and at the same time realization that I needed to take time to elaborate each scene, so that the reader is captivated instead of being rushed through.

So blogging a book (or in other words writing and posting it bit by bit) in this series, might be a solution and I think it is worth to try.

In the next posts I will start posting chapters and/or scenes of this book. But I will also share the writing process with you and my experience during research and re-reading the books I have already written in this series.

I am actually gathering the experiences on the latter right now. I’ve read the prequel recently and read the book 1 these days, a chapter or so a day, and I must say the experience is very interesting. It is as though I am getting to know the person I was when I wrote those books. She is definitely a different person than the person I feel right now to be. Not better, not worse, just quite different. My brain does try to compare. But it is quite impossible, because the life moved and moved me with it. And now it is time to write a new book. 🙂

As soon as this second book in the series will be published, I will remove this first draft from my site, because it is only meant to share its creation process with you. Maybe I will keep the articles on the writing experience. But the story itself will be deleted as soon as its polished and improved version will be out there on Amazon and other retailers.

I had a great experience of undertaking a similar endeavour with “Nothing Is As It Seems” and enjoyed it very much. So I am doing this again and welcome you into this adventure with me! 🙂

Click on the title of this new project at the end of this sentence to read the short description of “A President’s Sister”. I will update this regularly to add all the links in relation to this project.

Picture: me and my sister Svetlana when were children. If you have read “A Spy’s Daughter” and happen to know both of us, then you might have recognized some of our traits (not all 😉 ) in both characters. My beautiful sister is on the right. A small anecdote about my love of being photographed as a child: I’ve been told to have thrown the toy you see in my hands into the photographer. 😉

A Startup’s Glossary: Startup

November 3, 2016Businessvica

(Photograph © librestock.com under keyword “startup”)

Today, I begin a new category in my business blog. I called it “A startup’s Glossary”. The reason for it is simple. As a startup or a new business — and after one year in business, I still consider Optimist Writer being very new — there are many things to discover and to understand.

The entrepreneurship has its own language and there are many dictionaries and books explaining various bits of it.

I guess I won’t be wrong saying that, as with anything else, the perception of what entrepreneurship means is very subjective and depends on a very personal prism through which a certain person is looking at it. Most of those perspectives are worth looking at and as I gather experience with my business, I realized that it is worth for me to observe and discover my own perspective on various topics of being an entrepreneur and owing a business.

I would like to start with the word in the title of this category. Startup.

The Online Business Dictionary (http://www.businessdictionary.com/), to which I will be referring regularly in this Glossary, defines a startup in the following way:

“Early stage in the life cycle of an enterprise where the entrepreneur moves from the idea stage to securing financing, laying down the basis structure of the business, and initiating operations or trading.”
(Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/startup.html)

This came as a pleasant surprise, since some time ago a number of sources related to a startup as a completely new idea, never done before by others, like designing and producing a water-pump powered by a specific kind of solar batteries, or similar great novelties, and not realization of any new idea, which made have been pursued by others as well.

There was a certain fear of not belonging when I, as a writer and consultant, went to events organized for startups. I did feel the topics they discussed there addressed me and my endeavour very much, but I thought I didn’t classify because there were thousands and thousands of writers and consultants before me. Optimist Writer is a unique name and my approach is unique, but doesn’t it apply to any venture? Each department store is unique, even if only in respect to its location and people working there, and though the articles they offer there are the same as in the other stores of the corresponding chain.

The definition above did bring relief and strengthened something I realized as a writer.

Ernest Hemingway once said about being a writer:

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
(Ernest Hemingway, The Wild Years)

I feel the same about startups. You can never become a master of starting and owing a business. Each endeavour is unique and the world around (and inside) us changes faster than we notice. I think entrepreneurs will never be able and should never stop being an eager startup apprentice, that is someone who is always invested in learning how to bring ideas to life and someone who immediately tries the learned knowledge out.

Contributing to Mekon’s Bitesize on Business Rules – 2: Why You Need to Be in Control of Your Business Rules

October 28, 2016S1000Dvica

(A note beforehand: This post is attributed to both Business Rules and S1000D blogs on this site, since the post and especially the article referenced in it, relate strongly to both topics in equal strength. This means that subscribers to both blogs will receive the notification on this post twice, once for each blog. I apologize in advance for this inconvenience.)

Discover of how and why business rules are vital to your success in this second article I have contributed to Mekon‘s Bitesize series on S1000D Business Rules.

This article is about what can go wrong if you are not in control of your business rules. It also underlines the importance to have a good understanding and overview of your business rules’ current status and its relation to the current state of your product or service.

Click here to go to the article.

Picture: like in music also in business rules you need to control all the “tones”.

(Photograph © librestock.com under key-phrase “to be in control”)

A new S1000D blog category with a strange name – A Fiction Writer’s Musings on S1000D

October 25, 2016S1000Dvica

Recently, I self-published a book and I made a presentation. These two events, or rather the whole creative thinking connected to them brought me to this idea. To start a new category on my S1000D blog called “A Fiction Writer’s Musings on S1000D”.

It might appear strange, but if you have seen my presentation at this year’s S1000D User Forum in Seville you might be able to guess why.

A year or even a month ago, I might not have been sure myself what this is all about, but now I am convinced that this is a good idea.

The epiphany came when I exclaimed in a discussion in a break between the forum’s sessions in Seville, “Data modules are so much like scenes in a novel!” And after that I couldn’t stop the flow of realizations. “Just as scenes, data modules have a start (for a procedural data module it is preliminary requirements), an end (close-up requirements) and one setting (a unit or assembly). And in a way just like the scenes in a novel they tell a very short and self-contained story, or a future short story, that is how the given procedure is to take place.”

The previous statement during the presentation I made at the S1000D User Forum in Seville this year, claiming that technical manuals are books, whatever format they are in or however interactive they are, only strengthened this flow of parallels between books in general and S1000D conformant technical publications in particular.

After the User Forum I jotted down a list of topics I could think of when relating S1000D and its constructs to story-telling, and I came up with seven of them immediately.

Already at the User Forum and also after, during the training courses on S1000D, I started bringing up these parallels and the result was inspiring. Aha reactions and wide smiles of finally understanding a complicated topic. And I felt that after bringing such parallels forward, about the matter I love so much to those who start dealing with it and dread it (like I did twelve years ago), I felt that they began to like S1000D and the ideas behind it or at least started to look at it with curiosity.

So yes, this is the main reason and motivation behind this category: to take fear from such a substantial and multidimensional standard, and also to show its brilliance and again multidimensionality as well as also connect it to what we all already know and love, story-telling.

I wish both, you and me, an interesting, curious, fun and valuable journey on this yet unpaved ground.

When Two “A”‘s Exchange Places within “Manipulate” – Which Comes First: Acquisition or Attracting Users/Customers to the Product?

October 19, 2016Businessvica

I am on the way to finish the second self-edit and revision of my book introducing Business Rules and explaining its importance for any kind of business. You can see the very first and raw draft of it here.

During this second revision I realized that something didn’t work. I discovered that I had put acquisition (of both tangible and non-tangible means) for a given product or service before the planning the user interface and before marketing the product.

This sequence does have its justification when we talk about concrete actions. You need first to acquire the necessary manpower, knowledge, tools, supplies, etc., before you can develop your product or service, create a corresponding user interface, and finally when it is ready, you put it on the market.

But this is not true when it comes to planning. When you plan something, then you first need to have a good idea how your product is going to look and feel like when used. And even before that you would need to identify your customer base, which is the first and foremost part of marketing.

On the other hand you will have to perform a number of acquisition actions before your product or service can go into design phase. You would need certain hardware and software, and your team or yourself would need to acquire the necessary skills.

While the product or service is being designed, and even when created, produced and maintained, the user interface will change its appearance and functionalities, which will call for the appropriate action while marketing and further acquisition.

So I guess all the above may have contributed to my confusion on what to put first when defining a product’s or service’s business rules: business rules on user interface and marketing or what is necessary to acquire for this product or service to exist.

I think the main and also quite exciting challenge can be concluded as follows. When you define your product’s or service’s business rules, you are in a way already implementing your product or service. You might find yourself acquiring not only the necessary knowledge about your customer base but also practically at the same time getting the needed team together, the necessary hardware and software to develop your app. You might not wait with all that until you declare your business rules released and official in their first version. Or you might. It is up to you.

P.S. An interesting observation. There is only one letter, which repeats in the word Manipulate. This is “A”. Curiously, I have confused the position of the types starting only with this letter and not with the other ones.