Recently, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce held a contest to award $35K for an office makeover (Sorry, and “extreme” office makeover!) and my friends at Wing-It Productions were one of the finalists.
And the won! Check out the hot linked image!
Recognize that guy on the left? Huh? Huh?
Anyway, they put together a great video which you can watch at the Chamber web site. I’ve known Mike and Andrew for many years and I couldn’t be happier for them.
Congratulations, guys!
… please, someone, anyone, kick me in the nuts and shut me up.
My eyes, they can’t stop rolling.
Seen via bookslut
Yesterday was a bad day, despite a bunch of good things happening.
It started with me at work on … Blue Dog (still). I had hopes of wrapping it up, but I was working very carefully over a sequence of pages that haven’t been as strong as it could be. Okay. I guess I’ve become a little obsessive about it, but I really want to do this right so I can be done with it. Probably I’m giving it too much time, but if it makes the book better…?
But that wasn’t what messed up my day.
Late in the morning, I had a conversation with the assoc. copy chief at Del Rey about last minute questions about the galleys for Child of Fire (Amazon.com or Indiebound.org).
No problem! I thought. I’d scanned all the galley pages I’d marked up before I sent them back, just in case. How clever I felt! Nevermind that my corrections must have been unclear somehow. I was ready.
Except, not. The questions weren’t about the notations I’d made on the galley. They were additional mistakes caught by the proofreader.
God, this stuff is mortifying. How many times have I read this damn book? Shouldn’t I have noticed the phrase “in the front” appearing in back-to-back sentences? Shouldn’t I have noticed that a character does not need to walk up to a door twice? Shouldn’t I remember that a very important item is not in the character’s pocket because not fifteen pages before he was grinding his teeth in frustration that another character was keeping it from him?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for every note. Improvement is improvement, and I want the book to be as good as possible. But I feel honestly ashamed that I never noticed these problems myself.
Luckily (for you guys), immediately after the call my wife and I ran out the door for a very nice lunch with an old friend I don’t see as often as I should. When my son got home from school later, we had a great time together. All of that gave me time and perspective to truly absorb the copy chief’s wrap up to our conversation: “This is a perfectly normal list of corrections we’re talking about. I’ve worked on books with many worse than this.”
So, yeah. I was too busy to post this yesterday, which means you get this lesser degree of whining. And I have it in perspective now, and I’m ready to finally finally kill off this second book.
Still humiliating, though.
Ah, well. I only got an hour of free time for my writing today. No big. I’ll make up for it tomorrow.
But for you, dear Reader, I have a link: Morningstar.
What is that, you wonder? It’s a free online game of the point-and-click narrative variety. It’s also remarkably well done–the visuals are excellent, the voice acting (there’s a lot of voice acting) very strong (although you can mute the sound) and you can even save the game part way through.
The story is simple: You’re second-in-command on the space ship Morningstar, and the opening of the game is a fantastic little cut scene of you and your ship crash landing on the surface of an alien world. The captain is injured and unable to move (but full of advice) and your engineer is dead. Can you salvage enough of your ship to make lift off? Why did you crash in the first place, and what happened to the other ship lying wrecked across the sand. Finally, how can you prevent it happening again when you try to leave?
It’s a surprisingly long game, with a lot of detail, and the story takes you much further down the rabbit hole than you expect. And of course, it’s all about the puzzles. How do you get this control panel to work? Where are all the pieces of the hull-repairing glue dispenser? What are you going to do about the ruined CO2 filter?
You click on items to pick them up, combine them, and use them with objects in the environment. Best of all, the objects are used in ways that are thoroughly sensible–not always a given in this sort of game. The captain gives you hints about the next step in the mission, but there’s a walkthrough, too, just in case. And the visuals are excellent. Hell, even if you just watch the pre-title animation sequence, you’ll be impressed.
It’s great fun. One of the best c&p games I’ve played in a long, long time. Enjoy.
Saturday morning (yesterday) I took a long walk over the hill to Starbucks so I could work on Everyone Loves Blue Dog. I really wanted to finish, but I couldn’t. In fact, there was so much polishing needed, I made notes to myself to go back and polish even more scenes.
We ran some errands on Saturday afternoon, including picking up a book we’d ordered through Indiebound.org. Annoyingly, the automated email told me my order was waiting at the store, but when I got there, half my order (Blood of Ambrose) hadn’t arrived. Annoying. Now I have to go back when it does.
We had our Mother’s Day dinner after that, at the Hi-Life. Salad Eater had the Pork Porterhouse, which she really enjoyed but thought they skimped on the marmalade. Her marscapone polenta was terrific. I had the empanada, and it was so incredible that I have to find a recipe for it. The boy at kid food, and was happy.
After we got home, my wife put my son to bed and we sat down to watch OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. It’s a French spoof of 60’s spy movies, and it came very highly recommended, but there was a little too much social embarrassment humor for me to bear. The scene where the incredibly self-centered, utterly insensitive protagonist loses his cool at the muezzin for waking him at dawn (the French-speaking hero has no idea that it’s a Arabic call to prayer) was pretty funny… in fact, many scenes were very funny. I just have a low threshold for embarrassment.
Still, the chicken-chucking fight was hilarious.
Then there’s this morning. Today, Mother’s Day, is traditionally a day where I do no writing. I woke early, roused my son, and together we made a nice breakfast for his mom: oatmeal pancakes and sausage patties (both heart-shaped) along with some other treats. It was a happy morning.
After she left, my son’s buddy came over, and we had a super-soaker battle. They soaked me through and through, and I returned the favor.
Finally, they both decided to play at his house. They’re gone now, and I won’t be picking up my son for another two hours. Maybe I’ll get some writing done after all.
“For all his veniality and selfishness, Cat was a cool, smart dresser, unlike most _Red Dwarf_ fans,who smelt of piss.”
— Patrick West
This meme is stolen from Brett. Open your current WIP and type out the first ten verbs that appear in the manuscript.
I went to Man Bites World, because it’s newest.
Boy, that doesn’t sound promising, does it? It’ll work when it’s finished, though. I promise!
Also, thank you to everyone who has been voting in my polls. Today’s is about recurring characters in a series and last weeks poll (which I should close this weekend about what I should do with my ARE copies of Child of Fire.
On my last post, ethelmay dropped a link in the comments of my LiveJournal for this video by debut author Lara Zielin. You’re going to be seeing this link all over the web, so you might as well watch it now.
Besides, she’s funny and she has verve. Like.
What am I doing posting again so soon after I said in my previous post that was going to a thing at my son’s school. Well, I felt worn down and flushed, and I told my wife I was feeling sick. Out I went to catch the bus home early.
While I was standing at the bus stop, I remembered that, as a kid, I was sick on the first day of school every year. My nervousness about going back to the hall of bullies always manifested as illness.
It’s denial. I’m good at denial. It helps me behave like a sane person, but it also sneaks up on me and makes me miserable.
It’s good to be aware.
My son’s school is having a benefit pizza party tonight. Mom and boy are already there, hanging out at Volunteer Park or the library nearby, and I’ll be catching a bus over there later to join them. It sucks that they have to kill three hours between the end of school and the start of the party, but it didn’t make much sense to have him ride home on the school bus for an hour, demand food at home, then take a Metro bus in the other direction.
As for me, I’m making progress on Everyone Loves Blue Dog, but I can’t shake the feeling that I should have finished by now. I really really want this thing to be in my rear view mirror. Man Bites World is sitting fallow while I tinker and trim, and I am itching to get back to it. … Blue Dog is solved. It’s done. At this point, I’m just managing the reader’s experience, which is important (very important, I know) but it isn’t interesting.
Also, I’m tired. Tired enough to feel kinda sick. If we owned cell phones, I’d call my wife and beg off.