• Writing Resources

    Geeking out

    So I use Google Reader to keep up on people’s blogs. I have a couple folders I use to organize things. One of them is called WRITERS. The other is called WRITERS I KNOW. Right now I’m moving a boatload of entries from one folder to the other. (Yeah I’m still feeling that post-Writers of the Future high, deal with it)

  • Writing Resources

    Writers of the Future

    I’m back! Exhausted. Inspired. Overwhelmed. Tired. Tomorrow I plan to go through my notes and photos and start documenting what has really been a once in a lifetime experience. I’ve just lived through six emotion charged months… in seven days. Congratulations to all the other winners. Thanks to the instructors, judges and guest speakers who stayed up late into the night helping to prepare us for what lies ahead in this wacky and wonderful world of writing. And I lost 5 pounds! Best. Diet. Ever.

  • My Life,  Writing Resources

    Offline for a bit

    I am going to be mostly offline for the next week as I am participating in the Writers of the Future event. I will probably check online in various places sporadically but won’t be checking my email. If something urgent comes up please find me at Empire Avenue or on Twitter. For those of you who are visiting my blog for the first time, you can find my bibliography page here and my biography page over here.

  • Empire Avenue

    How to have fun on Empire Avenue

    Noticed some people on the #EAV channel on twitter discussing Empire Avenue. As often happens there are some people upset with share price dropping. I previously discussed ways that influencers could stop me from selling them; see post#1 and post #2). This time around I thought I would explain how I’m playing the game now that I’ve passed the million-dollar mark in wealth. The Avenue has multiple levels of user engagement. An influencer’s share price is a biggie — everyone loves to be on the leaderboard, right? Increasing your share price involves buying shares in people and hopefully being ‘interesting’ or aggressive enough that other users buy you. But there…

  • My Life

    Writers of the Future Volume 26

    Thanks to Scott, a fellow winner in the Writers of the Future Contest, I saw that Amazon has the next volume of Writers of the Future for pre-order! This is exciting (to me) because it has my story ‘Digital Rights’ in it (not by itself of course, the other winners all have their excellent stories in it too!)

  • Writing Resources

    Updates

    Bibliography has been updated with the latest story sale, as well I’ve cleaned up some broken links and whatnot. Check it out… you can click on the story names to see more details about the stories, including where to read them.

  • Writing Resources

    Lucky #13

    Seems I sold my thirteenth story (a horror story called ‘Stealing Death’). It will be published in the 13th issue of a gruesome little horror magazine… I’ll post more details once I know its okay. Thrilled… it has been a bit of a dry spell for story sales so it is nice to get one more in before the Writers of the Future event, coming up shortly.

  • My Life,  The Lazy Designer

    BioWare-Brent Year 10 (Fall 2008 – Summer 2009)

    This is the last of ten posts, one for each year that I worked for BioWare. Talk to me Spent the early fall participating in several interviews for Dragon Age. Not as much as when I was on Neverwinter Nights though this time around more of these Dragon Age interviews were in person or on the phone (the Neverwinter ones were often e-mail interviews). Doing interviews was certainly not my favorite thing but I believe that they generally went well even given that a couple times the interviewer attempted to ambush me. No hard feelings, that’s their job :) The most disturbing event that happened during these interviews was when…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Secret Keeping

    Overview This is an addendum to my previous post on being a manager. I touched a bit on the issue of being open in that discussion, though I want to expand that here. Currently I am reading the biography ‘Riding Rockets’ by Mike Mullane and while I am fascinated by his descriptions of his journeys to space and the path he took to become an astronaut (the reason I bought the book) I’m finding a lot of valid criticism of poor leadership techniques in it, something I was not expecting. As Mullane explains it NASA had a rather weak management structure, one that served to diminish astronaut morale. Astronauts were…

  • Writing Resources

    Novel. Is. Sent.

    So I submitted my novel proposal yesterday. Quite excited, first time I’ve subbed a novel in over ten years (while busy at BioWare I really didn’t feel I had the time to write novels, focused instead on short stories). For the novel I choose a publisher that accepted electronic submissions (print will come next, if needed but wanted to avoid the expense if I could), was considered a SFWA accepted market and has published books that are similar to what I’ve written. Will submit to other markets once I return from the Writers of the Future event, just wanted to get one submission out the door before that. I will…