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The Call Back
I set goals (tasks I want to accomplish during a year) and I list milestones (things I hope to achieve but do not have direct control over). So far I’ve met, or am close to meeting, all my goals for the year, which is fairly standard for me. If I have work to do, I do it. I haven’t had nearly enough success reaching certain milestones, unfortunately. A couple days ago, that changed. I’ll need to back up to explain. Generally, for the genres I write in, to sell a novel to a publisher requires sending a synopsis (summary of the main action and development in the novel) and a…
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No Nano this year
Last year I participated in Nanowrimo, but I won’t be doing it this year. I’ve just finished a novel and need to revise it and don’t want to dive into something new. I will be adding words to the Lazy Designer Book #3, but I don’t think it will be more than 30K and its of secondary priority to finishing the novel. Still keeping busy thought. Today, for example, I’ve wrote 1700 words on Lazy Designer #3, edited 2 chapters of Novel#5, and sent out a couple short stories. I’ve also started an editing pass on my four previously written novels, as I’ve noticed some bad writing in my earlier…
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Brent’s Stories Available (So Far) This Year…
So this has been an interesting year for me. I haven’t really kept a tally in previous years but I’m sure 2012 has seen more stories of mine published than in any other year. So far I’ve had six stories appear, with another slotted to be out before the end of the year (and two wildcards that should have been published earlier in the year but haven’t been yet). The stories are: Nikki 2.3 (still available to read, for free, at The Journal Of Unlikely Entomology) Onion Farmer (Aoife’s Kiss) Proof in the Pudding (Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader – Flush Fiction) Stone Eater (Abyss and Apex, you’ll need to subscribe…
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Stickers!
While cleaning out some old files I came across these old stickers. I believe I got them for the writing organizer software I used to distribute over a decade ago. When I first started seriously writing I really wanted some kind of digital notebook to organize all my ideas, stories, and submissions. So I wrote my own, using the Delphi programming language. I received the stickers because the software reviewed favorably. And I am still using this software, though it was rewritten in C# a few years ago. I stopped distributing it because supporting software is a bit of a headache and I wasn’t making enough money from it to…
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Trains, Trains, Trains
Yep, this is what I’ve been up to lately. The kids love the new Lego train set and I’ve been buying too many accessories for it. Well, okay, I’m doing a bit more than just playing with trains. Mostly I’ve been writing, editing, writing. I wrote rough drafts for several stories last summer and I’m rewriting them and sending them off to editors. I’m also editing novel#4 so I can send it out later in the year. I’m also preparing some notes for the third book in the Lazy Designer series based on feedback on the first two volumes, available here and here.
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Things You Might Not Know
For those of you who are interested in such things I thought it might be worthwhile to list a variety of facts about me. Some true, some not so much. TRUE FACTS I write short stories and novels I won first place in the third quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest (2009) for my short story ‘Digital Rights‘ I have story reprints available on Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and the Nook I am a game design consultant with Empire Avenue, the Social Stock Market The most recent game I played was Emissary of War My first writing sale was an article on role-playing with different languages in Dragon Magazine.…
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What do you want to know?
Okay I have a cold and my two sick kids are home with me and I’m in the middle of major novel revisions and Empire Avenue is near to rolling out our super killer robot army to take over the world some exciting new updates. So I’m busy. I have a lot I want to talk about here, some new Lazy Designer articles in rough draft and whatnot, but I need to get Other Things done first. Instead of posting anything today I’m just going to ask if any of you would like to know something I haven’t touched on before. A game design question? A BioWare question? A question…
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How do you write?
After working many years with BioWare, much of those being spent helping to design tools that writers use, I’ve gained a fair bit of experience with understanding how creative types, create. As a writer myself, I’ve often used my own experience to help guide tool development and even created my own writing platform YourOtherMind . I have tried many things (different software, work methodology, et cetera) but over the last year I’ve stuck with a couple approaches that seem to be working well. Short Stories – Format Conversion Of course the biggest change in my writing process occurred about a year ago when I started doing all my writing within…
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Word Progress so Far
Since the beginning of the year I’ve set myself some firm word count goals and to my delight I’ve been able to meet and often exceed them. I took a quick look at my tracking and I’ve now written over 75 000 words since January. The bulk of this has been on the novel but I’ve (almost) finished a 12 000 word sci-fi story and the rough draft of a flash story. If I can keep this pace I should be able to finish the rough draft of the first novel by the end of March and start on the second novel in April. Of course today I’m derailed from…
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Fullscreen Writing Mode
Allows writing in an uncluttered, fullscreen environment with all the power of YourOtherMind available but kept out of sight. Fullscreen Writing Mode What does it do? Allows the writer to focus on the current text. Several advanced formatting tools are also available only in fullscreen mode such as access to cosmetic color changes (i.e., white text on blue background). It also has re-formatting options to convert a text between various styles (some markets like italics to be represented by underlines for example). How To Use It Right-click any note and select Full Screen Editor and then start writing. Changes will be saved automatically (ctrl+s still saves too). To view advanced…
