Justwritecat

Now, the weird thing I that I can’t find the origin of this thing.  Naturally, google is polluted from all the people passing this thing back and forth, making it really difficult.  I tried tracking the linking back, but got bored at the 7th or 8th link.  My suspicion is just that it’s a benign chain-letter type thing – and it does have a positive effect I think – making you aware of blogs you might not otherwise be aware of, spreading blog-love and all that.

The award part is that someone chooses you to receive it.  The meme part is that it doesn’t appear to be an actual award, and you are supposed to say 7 things about yourself.  The chain letter part is that you are supposed to pass it on by tagging fifteen (!) other blogs.  That’s the part that makes me wary.  15 is silly overboard.  I probably barely read 15 blogs, in total.  And they are supposed to just be ones that you have recently discovered, or something.  I guess people have waaaay more time than me.

Alright, so… things about myself.  Since I’m not going to link to 15 people, I’ll just do some extra facts.

1. I have IBS.  Awesome, I know.
2. My favorite music act/group/whatnot was Starflyer 59 for most of my musical life, but these days I don’t have one.  Not as much time to get into music, and not really liking the stuff SF59 is putting out these days.
3. I’m fucking clumsy.  Especially when it comes to my poor little toes… it’s a miracle there’s any nail left on them.  Sometimes there isn’t.
4. Driving puts me to sleep.  It’s incredibly annoying.  Usually I chew gum to stay awake, but for a long drive I don’t have much choice but to dip into the energy drinks.
5. I’m more than a little OCD, mostly the D.  Wait, no, I mean the C.  I frequently have to go back and make sure the door is locked, even when I just locked it seconds ago.  Which causes my poor wife no end of annoyance, I’m sure.  To get around it, I try and “lock” the sound of the door clicking locked in the front of my memory until I get out of range.
6. I have a BA & MA in Linguistics, but I do IT work in the construction industry.  Go figure.
7. I’ve seen Top Gun more than 30 times.  Ish.  When I was in junior high-ish – my aunt used to live with us, and she was in love with Tom Cruise.  That and we didn’t own very many movies.  I lost count in the 30s.  Amazingly, I do not know all the dialogue by heart.  I can probably sing the “baby baby I’d get down on my knees for you….” part.  Poorly.
8. As implied above, I’m a horrible singer and dancer.  You would be hard pressed to fake appreciation convincingly.
9. I opened every single can of coke (and by “coke” I mean “soda” or “pop”.  Bonus factoid!) that I drank between 7th grade and my 30th birthday with my teeth.
10. I’m for the death penalty, which tends to upset/confuse people that I would otherwise line up with politically.
11. I spent the middle 10 years or so of my life as a pretty serious Christian.
12. I have had a doctor (and the young doctor-in-training with him) laugh at me when I described a issue to them.   If you want to know what the issue was, you’re gonna have to ask me in person/email.
    O.O
    Yes, I immediately switched to another doctor.
13. I don’t think I’ve read any of the Lord of the Rings books.
14. DS9 was my favorite Star Trek, although I loved the finale to TNG.
15. Uncanny X-Men 234 was the first comic I ever bought.

And now for the passing of the torch portion of the post.  Since it looks like the practice is not to award it to folks who’ve already gotten it, I can’t like to Jen or Bethany.   Most of the bloggers that I read are “names” in that they are published writers or agents or something, and I’m assuming the point of this thing is not to get people reading blogs they are already reading, so I’ll shoot for the “common man” type stuff.

1. Fearless Gamer : A great League of Legends oriented blog.
2. A Girl and Her Books: “M” is aspiring writer (like myself), although she posts about non-writing things as well.
3. I’m From Driftwood: Coming out stories from around the world.
4. Clients From Hell: “A collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from designers.”  Funny stuff.
5. I AM FUEL, YOU ARE FRIENDS: I think this may be a bigger name type blog, but I just recently found it.  Music focused, and lots of new music info.
6. The Portland Housing Blog: Updates on the local housing market.  What can I say – the older I get the more I follow the economy.
7. Color Me Katie: She does some cool things with color/artsy stuff.

Note that if you’re actually curious as to what I read regularly… check the links on the right.  Those are like awards of awesomeness that I give out every day.

Of course, the counterpart – the other ancestor – D&D & pnp roleplaying in general, is extremely social (jokes about the players social skills aside).  So, maybe RPGs & MMOs are really siblings, or cousins, not a strict lineal relation as time would have you believe… maybe the parents (D&D and uh.. computers I guess…) had one child early in life (RPGs) and the other in their 50s (MMOs).  Makes me wonder if the parents will be around to see their youngest grow up – or has it already?  WoW would like us to think so, but I’m not convinced.  I think that whatever “virtual reality” becomes will be the adulthood of the MMO.  WoW is like… early puberty maybe?  We’ll see.

Also, Guild Wars 2 is looking good.  They’ll have a good size audience carry over from GW1, and are doing some pretty different things in MMO land (big budget with no monthly fee for one thing) so the potential for something special is there… I’m looking forward to it.

/end rambling

OH, and the unofficial month of blogging more than usual is over (April), so I’m back to my sporadic updates.  Enjoy?

I sent out 21 queries for my first book yesterday.  It took quite a while to prep them as, in addition to any customizations I altered for the text of the actual queries, almost every agent had a different set of requirements… here are some requirement combinations (my spell checker is telling me the plural of ‘combination’ is not a word.  Really spellcheck?!):

1. email query only
2. email query with synopsis in body of email
3. email query with synopsis and 1st 5 in body of email
4. email query with 1st 5 in body
5. email query with 1st 10 in body
6. email query with synopsis and 1st 10 in body
7. email query with 1st 50 in body
8. email query with 1st 10 as attachment
9. email query with 1st 10 and synopsis as separate attachments
10. email query with 1st 3 chapters as attachment
11. email query with 1st 3 chapters pasted into body
12. email query with 1st 3 chapters & synopsis pasted into body
13. web form, query only
14. web form, query, 1st 10 & synopsis all in single .doc file

Basically, any combination of the various options & email, plus a few webforms for kicks.  It was tricky keeping track of who wanted what, but I think I got it all punched out – ywriter turns out to be really handy for query organization too.  I may do a separate post on this, just so people googling around for ‘query organization’ or something like that have it as an option.  Need the time to set up a dummy file, take & organize screenshots…

Once I get all my rejections (and hopefully some non-rejections) back, I’ll post the stats, for those that are curious.

Also, I hate synopses.  They are evil.  If you want to see the life sucked right out of your book, synopsize it!  But seriously, I suppose it may be the sign of a skilled writer – writing a beautiful synopsis that is.  Then again, it may be an entirely separate skill.  All I know is, I don’t have it.  Yet.  I’ve seen it mentioned that one may want to start with a synopsis, then flesh it out as you write the book.  I think this might work a little better for me.   Going to try that for the next one.

Double also, I’m messing with my stylesheet – does the bold on the hyperlinks inside posts make them more noticeable?  I could barely see them with just the color shift included in the template.

I’ve been following his blog for a couple years.  He was not that old.   To just die, out of nowhere?  So tragic.  I don’t have anything eloquent to say.  My heart goes out to his friends and family.

Here are two links with more info about him and his life.

I do, occasionally.  Spammers are getting strange.  I feel like they’ve started copying random comments from other blogs?  Check this one out:

That rss feature on your blog here is magnificent, you should tell more folks about it in your upcoming post. I haven’t noted it for the first couple of times, now I’m using it each morning to check on any updates. I’m on a rattling slow dial-up connection in Alabama and it’s quite daunting to sit there and wait for such a long time ’til the page loads… but hey, I just found your rss page and added it to the Google Reader and voil? – I’m always up-to-date! Well buddy, keep up the good work and make that rss button a little bigger so that other people can enjoy that as well :-P

What the fuck?  I don’t even know what he is selling there.  I’m not up on how all the search engine spiders work these days BUT I suspect that, in addition to trying to get random people to click on their linked names, they are trying to get their name with the hyperlink to their bullshit site (it was a review aggregator site in the case of this comment, hardly the worst type of bullshit site) so that the spiders will register more links to it?

Stardock makes quality games these days.  If I had more money & time I might even buy some of them.  Sins of a Solar Empire certainly looks like an awesome time sink.

The game in question though, Demigod, doesn’t look like my cup of tea.  Too much focus on multiplayer, not enough unit types, etc.  That being said, it still looks like a really compelling game for people into online strategy titles – although it seems more hero focused than unit focused, but who knows.  It seems like it’s based heavily on the Warcraft 3 hero model, amplified.  Which just isn’t enough for me – I need the rest of the game too.  Story, upgradeable units, etc.

That and time & two hands to play it. ;).  Maybe in a year or two.

I don’t get it.  Where did he go?  Why did the guy vulcan his ass?  And then why was the dirtamancer acting completely different after they left…and where did they leave??? Soooo head burning.

Was it the place in between disbandings?

Probably my favorite strip on the net…and I was cool with all the various references and in-things…right up until 153. I must be missing some meta/game/gaming  joke there.

Yooo..

I kno it has nothing to do with what you wrote, but have you ever heard of [some bullshit link]. They seems to promise free ringtones

PS. Dont be an ass, this is NOT spam ;)

Cheeky isn’t it?

I wish I had the one I accidentally deleted this morning it was SO SO bizarre.  The site it linked to was a fake/program generated blog, where each post had 25 comments, all posted at the exact same time…looked like they were lifted from some gaming forum or something – anyway they had nothing to do with whatever the post was, which was always something to do with chocolate (also programmatically generated I think).

The weird thing was that there were no spam links that I could see on the site, and it was hosted at blogger so I don’t *think* there were any xss/scripting/etc. hacky attacky exploit things.

It was just so damn odd.

Ann Coulter clowns herself.

AKA Starjammers v4.3 or so.

The thing with Havok and the star guy…CLASSIC.

Some major shake-ups, a direct lead in the no-I-won’t-link-it probably return of Jean Grey, good action scenes and another original Starjammer potentially dead (although I suspect he’ll return as some warped hybrid before too long).

Ch’od loses an arm in War of Kings #1 too – so the originals are pretty fucked these days.  Wouldn’t want to be Ch’od or Lilandra right now…of course they should get Hepzibah back now that she’s been in limbo for a year or two now…