• Review,  Writing Resources

    Read This Week

    This week I finished reading Volume XXI of the Writer’s of the Future series of anthologies. Stories that particularly interested me were: “Betrayer of Trees” by Eric James Stone. A stone worker with a troubled past is called to work on a new palace back near where he grew up. We learn early that he betrayed his people, but the exact details are revealed slowly. A strong central character and interesting world really elevated this story for me, and I enjoyed it. “Deadglass” by Lon Prater. A religious father who’s duty is to capture sinner’s souls so that the ‘devil’ cannot use them faces a dilemma that makes him question…

  • Writing Resources

    War of the Worlds:Frontlines Update

    Reviewed the edits for “John’s List” which will be appearing in the War of the Worlds anthology set to appear sometime in April and sent them back to the editor a couple days ago. The full table of contents is: After Welles by Michael Scott Bricker Weird Fruits by Camille Alexa Killers by Vincent L. Scarsella The Dodo Dragon by Sheila Crosby The Virus of Memory by Gerard Daniel Houarner What Makes You Tick by David Steffen The Broken Hand Mirror of Venus by Mark Onspaugh Common Time by Bruce Golden Steve’s Really Cool Movie Blog by RJ Sevin Moth Tamuth Robotica by Kristen Lee Knapp Empire of the Moon…

  • Writing Resources

    Done!

    With 4700 words, the first draft of my novel is finished. It ended up at 108000 words, a little long as I’ve noted before but I’ll have it below 100k for the final draft. Most of the writing happened after January, so not bad output for three months. I had planned to be finished in February though. The draft is rougher than I had intended setting out but I learned a lot. I’m taking a break from it to work on several short stories and start planning the second novel (a rewrite of an urban fantasy novel I started writing back in college). In May I’ll start work on the…

  • Writing Resources

    One more chapter to go!

    Wrote a bit over 4000 words today. I have only one chapter left to go and my first draft of my first novel is finished. In slightly less good news the novel is now over a hundred thousand words in length. I’m going to be trying to remove a lot during the second draft as I’d really love to keep this thing under a hundred thousand.

  • The Lazy Designer

    Getting into the Gaming Industry

    I’ve been offering some advice to a few people who are interested in working for a gaming company and I figured I’d might as well summarize what I’ve told them. Are You Sure? First, I think someone wanting to enter the industry must be sure that this is something they want. Thinking that the job is going to be as fun as playing the end product is not entirely accurate. Working in the industry can be fun and rewarding but it can also be very demanding. Do some homework into the company you are applying at, especially if you have a family and/or will have to relocate. Some companies have…

  • My Life

    Office Hours

    In an attempt to get back into my regular writing routine after the Great Plague struck my family, I am back to ‘office hours’ in regards to e-mail correspondence. That means I’ll generally be answering e-mail only on Mondays and Fridays. Just in case you’re thinking I’m ignoring you, I’m not.

  • Writing Resources

    Best Mouse Ever

    So a couple posts ago I talked about going back to being ‘wired’ and loving it and I just discovered a secondary benefit of my ‘great technological push backwards’… my new (cheap) mouse doesn’t have a back button. I am delighted. I can’t count the number of times I accidentally pressed the back button on my mouse and had it navigate to a previous webpage I didn’t want to go, or worse, lose work. I’ve always hated the little suckers and on a couple mice I actually removed or taped over the button. When you’re working with content generation in a web-based environment an accidental ‘back’ can cost you at…

  • Review,  Writing Resources

    Read this week – various stories

    Finished reading Writers of the Future XXII. Many good stories in this one, a few that stood out for me: Broken Stones by Judith Tabron. The main character’s faith is challenged when she disagrees with how the aliens are being treated on a world that her people have colonized for generations. I thought the world well invented and the dilemma of the main character authentic. Games on the Children’s Ward by Michail Velichansky. Creepy story about children dying in a hospital and the games they play to survive in the dismal, lonely place where too often one of them is wheeled away, dead. This story will be stuck in my…

  • My Life

    Wired up again

    I always thought wireless stuff was pretty damn cool and years ago I dreamed of the day when everything I owned would be wireless, without a tangled nest of cables breeding beneath my desk. Ah, so silly now are those dreams of youth. Wireless stuff (mostly) sucks I am now slowly making the transition back to everything being wired. I ditched a wireless home network a year or so back in favor of wired (I was spending too much time fixing routers and there’s the whole security thing, you know). Now I’m even back to a wired keyboard and mouse. Why? Well I’ve went through several that have had varying…

  • Brent's Toys

    Brent Buys a Hydrogen Toy Car

    Now that I’m self employed I’ve found that I have had to create my own ‘progression system’ to help keep myself motivated. So I pick out ‘toys’ and after reaching certain writing goals, I buy them. Now the point of this is to buy things I don’t really need, but will maybe amuse me or the kids for a bit. Now I’ve always been interested in the hydrogen fuel cell and I was curious to see one in action. So my latest gift-to-myself is the H-Racer 2.0 from Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies. It only took a couple days to arrive and is what it looked like after I opened it…