• Writing Resources

    Writer profile added to Writertopia

    The kind folks at Writertopia have added a profile for me on their site. I’ll be keeping that up to date, along with this site going forward. Check it out here: Brent’s Writer Profile This came about from me finding out that I was possibly eligible for the John W. Campbell award. I confirmed with Writertopia that I was and they added a profile for me. I am in my first year of eligibility.

  • Writing Resources

    Murky Depths

    Murky Depths is a relatively new magazine of dark, speculative fiction. I have subscribed to it for a while now. The magazine features an interesting blend of comic versus traditionally formatted stories. The one common thread that ties the stories together is the previously mentioned “dark”. There are no happy endings here. The latest issue was #7 and while I don’t think it was as good as issue #6 (which was the best so far, in my opinion) it had some solid stories. And all of them were interesting. My favorites this time around are “The Longest Road in the Universe” by CS MacCath, which features the correspondence between a man…

  • Writing Resources

    Kindle 2, audiobooks, and the elusive Writing Career

    Reading recent posts by Stephen Kotowych and Robert Sawyer about the Kindle’s ability to read books aloud and how that might impact the future revenue of writers, has got me thinking about whether a writing career is even really possible. And if so, how to achieve that… because few, even succesful writers, make their money on just the first-time print of their stories/novels. I suspect writers will have to accept (be flattered?) that their work will be distributed beyond the original contractual agreements, especially if they are publishing their work digitally. At that point it is easily distributed all over the place, even with DRM (which I hope will go…

  • Uncategorized

    StickIt – Background Color… what happened!?

    Before version 8.1 of YourOtherMind, the writer’s organizer, the background color for a StickIt page was determined by the user’s choice of desktop colors. We wanted to give the user more control over this and so with version 8.1 the user can set the color manually (by going to the Details tab on the main screen). Unfortunately this means soem Stickit pages might default to a weird color (usually a nice vomit green). Easily fixed though by going to the Details page and choosing a new color.

  • Writing Resources

    Fast Ships, Black Sails

    Still scanning Richard Horton’syear-end updates and noticed that he mentioned that he really liked Naomi Novik’s story “Araminta; or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake” in the anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails. Congrats go out to her, according to Naomi’s blog, this is her first short story published (though she, of course, has been very succesful with her Temeraire series of novels). Naomi and I worked together on Shadows of Undrentide (an expansion pack for the RPG Neverwinter Nights). I’ve met few designers who were more passionate and excited about their work than Naomi and it is great that she has found such success with her writing. Sadly I have not…

  • Game Reviews

    Little Big Planet – A bit more…

    Still playing Little Big Planet, or more aptly, now I’m building levels. I’m experimenting with building some child-friendly levels — simpler things that require less coordination, hopefully something my three year old might be able to play a bit more easily. I’m impressed with the building tools. I am a lot more familiar with structured toolsets, such as Neverwinter Nights, and I thought I would hate the visual/embedded building tools of Little Big Planet, but I found I got used to them quite quickly. Flying around the level as sackboy, manipulating objects, copying/pasting.. all of it is quite simple, even with a console controller. It is easy to build geometry…