My Writing Tools

For anyone interested here are some notes on what I use:

Great podcast website called Writing Excuses is by the intelligent and engaging Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler. Each podcast is a short but informative 15 minutes long; full of excellent advice, tips, information, and always lots of laughs for your fantasy and sci-fi inner (or outer) geek.

Absolute Write forums is a very involved community of aspiring and realized writers in all sorts of genres and mediums, you can also post your story for critique if you dare. I have not yet dared, but I claim that it is merely out of paranoia and not fear of critique - ok there may be a little fear.

Duotrope is an excellent site with the ability to search - in a variety of ways - their large database of information on publishers, magazines, etc to find out where to send your work and other useful information on each entity. There are other sites out there, but Duotrope from my limited experience is the most comprehensive...and searchable.

For actual writing I use WordPerfect 12 from Corel, though one day I may look into other tools that are more streamlined for novel creation, this works for now and I think it is a good way to start since I don't want to constrain my style because I'm using something that "automates" it. This could be a gross misunderstanding of what more specified software out there offers, but I won't find that out or a while.

My Blackberry, is my on the go notepad when I can't pull out the laptop. It is much more handy than pulling out a pad of paper to scribble on. I even typed up my 11k word short story that I just submitted to F & SF on it; though I brought it into WordPerfect to make revisions, it was primarily created while I stood on the BART or during breaks at work while I took a walk.

Do you have any great writing tools to share or comments to make? Please comment below.

Sending manuscript...

Cross your fingers, I decided to send my manuscript off to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and it is in the mail! This is after I deliberated on where to send it and making triply, or maybe even quadruply sure that I was following all of the guidelines noted for submission. Then to top it off I had my good friend Scott double-check I didn't miss anything - as a writer for the Orange County Register I think I can trust he would catch anything I might have missed. Wouldn't you?

Duotrope notes them as only accepting 0.24% of what they get, so it is a definite long shot, but I've got to start somewhere with it and might as well start big.

Novelette done - Looking to Publish

So I've finished my novelette - which for those that don't know is just a longer than normal short story (in my case at about 11,000 words). I'm fairly excited to have it done and am looking forward to searching for a magazine willing to publish it. I'm thinking I'll start big expecting rejection and work my way down until I find success. So at the moment my sights are set on Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. We'll see how that goes.

Thanks go out to my wonderfully helpful alpha and beta readers: Astrid, Anneli, Josh, Natasha and Scott (if you would like your full name in lights, just let me know). Your assistance with finding peculiarities, ambiguities and fixing my punctuation was vastly helpful. I hope none of my friends and family feels slighted at not being included. Please know that my choice of readers was based on an attempt to gather a varied and quick review of my story. If you feel the need to wade through a sea of misplaced commas and semicolons and wrinkle your brow in consternation over the meaning of a vague passage, please let me know and I'll see about including you for my next story; but be forewarned that it will probably be of novel length.

Wild Pockets Internship

I was introduced to Wild Pockets and their browser-based 3D game creation tools earlier this year during their 2009 Bay Area Game Jam. It was educational, interesting and at times exhausting as we trudged through the creation of a game over the weekend. I got to work with some great guys on our Space Brains vs. Zombies turret shooter here.

I got the opportunity shortly after that to join with Wild Pockets as an art intern to work on an as yet unfinished helicopter shooting game. So far I have produced most of the models, setup about half of the uv's, and created about half of the texture maps in game. A few other artists at the Wild Pockets Pittsburgh office have been lending a hand where necessary as well. It has been a whirlwind of a production schedule and I certainly wish I had more time to devote to them beyond my limited part-time status. The game has great promise and it has been a pleasure to work with the game engineer intern Nicholas McClay - who certainly has good things in store for him. Unfortunately my involvement will be ending with the internship next week, though the game will get some more time before it is due to be finished. I wish Nick and the others involved the best, and hope the game is well received.

Thanks also to Shanna Tellerman for the opportunity; Eddie, Dan, and Brando for their art contributions, and everyone else at Wild Pockets for a great learning experience. If you haven't checked them out already I would advise it. Their free to develop for platform, micro-transaction payment system, and potential for growth seems like they may be one of those "next great things".

*I'll post some images of my work when I get the chance after the game goes live.