The vaults had once been the place of nightmares for Sarah. When she was younger, her mother used to terrify her into obedience with the threat of leaving her down there forever and ever. This lasted until Sylar had dared her to go and see if she could bring back a monster pelt all by herself; an episode that had landed her in her father’s office, dusty and triumphant, having dragged a dirty old rug [...]

Court was a very boring affair, mostly consisting of her father walking around and talking to various important members of the freehold’s supporting town and outlying areas. It was supposed to be a smaller version of the High Court at Faeholme – another event that Sarah couldn’t wait to avoid at every turn. Dressing up was fun, and her mother had excellent taste in fashion, but the stuffiness of it all made her want to [...]

I still think I’m crazy and I have no idea where I’m going with this. OH WELL. Here are the rules: once it’s posted, I can’t edit anything until the whole book is done except for fixing typos. I’m doing a minimal amount of editing, so there will be mistakes and plot holes and who knows what else. Good, bad or indifferent, it is what it is. I’ll be putting most of it under a [...]

It’s happened. Google has axed the Reader that has been a part of my life for years. It was clean, slick, and had just enough sharing functionality that I felt connected but not overwhelmed. I thought Google+ was a good idea, true. It’s a social network that looks a lot better and is more user friendly than Facebook. I was pretty sure it was going to outdo Facebook at some point as Google added more [...]

Yes, I’m still humming and hawing over this. Self-publishing versus mainstream, which should I choose? Could I get a book deal? Is it worth my while? Do I have the time and energy to handle all the levels of insanity of self-publishing? I don’t know, honestly. At one point, I’d have given anything to see my work in print. Nowadays, I take a more pragmatic view of it – I’d rather make a ton of [...]

It’s that time of year again… National Novel Writing Month starts in November. Am I participating, I hear you ask? Am I ever. I always participate in some way. I work best when put under the most ridiculous deadlines on earth, and they don’t get much more extreme than 50,000 words in a month. My previous two books were NaNoWriMo books, and they were terrible, of course, but what I learned from them went into [...]

Breaking into mainstream publishing is a difficult process, but I think not for the reasons that many people assume. I think there’s a fundamental disconnect between aspiring authors and publishers that needs to be addressed: that publishing is a business, and books are the product. At a basic level, the author is producing a product. It could be a very good, well-written product, one that they’ve spent years perfecting, but it is still a product, [...]

I’m faced with something of a conundrum. At this point, I’m pretty confident that my writing is good enough to publish. The Novel is still sitting in editing hell – and at this point, I’m eyeing up NanoWrimo to rewrite the whole damn thing, chapter by chapter – but I got the chops to knock out some pretty stellar prose on my good days. I’m moving into copywriting on the business side of things as [...]

So, as you can see, the site is back. Mostly. I’ve changed the theme and sliced out about a third of the posts. I’ll write about writing, I guess, and some other creative stuff. I’m doing more drawing lately so that will probably go up here too. Still, the new site is up now – link over in the sidebar if you’re curious – so most of my time will go there rather than here. [...]

I’ve talked about the games that get it right, when it comes to female characters. Today, I’d like to talk about the ones that get it wrong, with some reference to PAX 2011. I was lucky enough to get to PAX Prime this year, and it was pretty awesome. (Yes, it was two weeks ago; I know I’m late with this post. Forgive me, please.) I played a lot of games, and I enjoyed most [...]