My husband’s latest Kickstarter just went live, and I wanted to share it with you. He had great success with his first project, Wild Gears, and now he’s delving into the world of poker.
He plays in a regular game with some friends, and as the game goes on, they cut low value chips out of the pool, and are left with only the large chips.
But he found that sliding huge stacks to bet was cumbersome and inelegant. He searched around and found that the thing he was looking for already existed; you have seen them too, in Casino Royale. Like, how cool are these?!
But the only ones he could find were not nearly so cool as that. They were light and made of cheap plastic. So, my husband being my husband, the only logical thing to do was to design and make his own.
He spent a long time designing graphics to put on them, using the four card suits as inspiration, and came up with some pretty slick designs.
The plaques will be stamped metal, like a coin, with the designs in enamel on them.
Each one will weigh about 50 grams; that is a heavy plaque.
He got a render done that shows what he’s going for, though I imaging that the real product will be far cooler, due to the weight and the feel of them being made of frickin’ metal.
And naturally, if he was bumping up against this problem, other dedicated poker players must also have had these ideas too. So he has made a Kickstarter, and if anyone else is tired of lame piddly chips, and want to instead make serious bets like a pro, they can get in on it too.
World War ZZZ is a book about what would happen if the world stopped sleeping. It’s gripping, compelling, and heartbreaking. It showcases the depths that humanity can sink to, and also the heights to which it can soar, when put to the ultimate test.
It’s written. It’s edited. (Side note- this is the fewest edits I’ve ever received from my beta readers; I’m getting pretty darn good at editing! Or maybe the story was so good that their attention was elsewhere? Either way I’m pretty stoked.)
And now comes a part I’ve previously dreaded: approaching agents with the work to see if they would represent it and take it to publishers.
But I’m not dreading it. I’m actually feeling pretty pumped about it. Why? Because I know this book will pull people in. I know it will sell. I am so confident in this manuscript that I am in danger of feeling overly confident. A little arrogant maybe even.
After all, this was the most difficult thing I’ve ever written, and it turned out damn good. Damn good I say old chap.
Or maybe this feeling is covering for the terror of agent-hunting yet again? *nervous laughter*
In any case, I’ve queried a few agents who I’d love to work with. Watching interviews and looking at their existing clientele is a great way to see if an agent is for you, and so far I’ve found several who I think would rep this novel well.
So I’ll keep you updated with how it’s going. Every full request bolsters my spirit, every rejection is expected. I’ll grab one of them enough to go to bat for World War ZZZ, and then we’ll get this party really started.
In the mean time, here’s a great way to find and share music I’ve been participating in:
plug.dj.com is pretty neat! You basically are in a room with people sharing music, and you can share too! You have three options when a song is playing: woot! (you like it), grab (you like it enough to save it for later listening), and meh (you don’t care for it).
I’ve been listening to tunes with the folks on the Miner Apocalypse minecraft server, and you can come see if anyone is DJing, here. If not, set up a playlist! 🙂 Once I begin my next project, I’ll be playing music to write to here. (I’ll let you know when the tunes star flowing in case you want some writing background sound too!) I love making playlists to add to the ambiance of whatever genre I’m writing. Western Inspiration, Noir, Epic Film Soundtracks, Rock.
If you hear something you like, grab it for later, and then find it in iTunes! I’ve bought more new music from hearing it on plug.dj than anything else recently.
Hope to see/hear you there!
I played Banished for a little too much there… I had three builders building their town’s first Tavern, and I’ve never seen them work so fast.
Heh.
What else. Oh man, at the end of writing, I was binge-watching TV shows like it was my job. It was such a good escape from the horrors I was crafting in the novel, even though some of the shows I watched took horror to a whole new level.
Like, holy smokes.
It’s terrible, but such a guiltly pleasure.
And then it was Attack on Titan.
I could write a whole post on this one, but I think the less I say, the better. I went into it knowing very little, and it was a better experience for it.
I’ll tell you it’s an anime, it’s brutal, and scary and disturbing. There are giant monsters that eat people. The monsters look like people. We made walls to keep them out, and we live in a safe zone inside the outer wall. The show begins on the day that this outer wall is breached.
Just an amazing show. Many feelings. Such tears. Wow.
Yesterday, after I spent the morning querying, I watched Rick and Morty, and I loved it. Oh, Dan Harmon is involved (you know, from Community?).
It’s pretty dope. And then around episode 6 it goes from funny to like, way more serious than I was expecting. Like, things got real. And I loved it even more.
The last of the TV worth mentioning is this stunning HBO miniseries, True Detective. Talk about sublime characterization; my god man, this show pulled me in and wouldn’t let go until the final second. I gotta recommend it.
Oh yeah, I haven’t just been studying storytelling/rotting my brain with TV… I have been play testing a board game in development, and reading. I read The Handmaid’s Tale (how on earth did I go this long without having read Margaret Atwood! I skipped grade 11 English so maybe it wasn’t entirely the school’s fault…).
I’m also giving Neil Gaiman a rare 4th shot. Usually it’s 3 strikes and you’re out. But when I tell people I’m not into Neil Gaiman I get looks like I’ve just drowned a sac of puppies or something… *sigh* So I’ll try again. I really want to like his writing.
Anyway this post is bordering on the rambling, so I’ll end it here. I’ll keep you updated with good news as it comes in.
Thank you all for your support. It’s really lovely of you to continue to stop by and see how things are going on this long road to being a published author! ❤
Been a while. It’s been a little slow going on the writing front; sometimes it’s a slog, and you just have to muscle through it. ._.
I just got back from PAX! Penny Arcade Expo is a huge gaming convention in Seattle, and this year it went from Friday August 30th to Monday September 2nd. Four days of wicked awesome gaming fun with my best friends, and 80,000 other people.
We had an 8 bed room at a hostel. I made a nest up on the top bunk by the window, and it was excellent.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
This is perhaps the most clutch example of bureaucracy I will ever recount. I still cannot believe it happened. Truly, I am in the luckiest timeline.
9PM the night before leaving for PAX: someone in my group posts on our coordination thread that they just realized that their passport was expired. The rest of us gave our condolences and continued packing.
So at about 9:05PM, the night before we leave, I also discover that my passport is expired.
There was much freaking out, but I kept it together. Discovered that it was possible, though not likely, that I could get a new passport in time to make my 11:30 bus the next morning.
10:05PM: get passport photo taken. Thank goodness for late night convenience stores that take passport photos.
That night I packed and figured out the timeline for the next day. If I got up at 6, I could get in line for the passport office at 6:30. When it opened at 7:30 I was the first in line, of about 40 people. I explained my situation to the teller with a good a mix of urgency, optimism, and cheerfulness, but with an underlying panic that was impossible to conceal.
Longer story shorter, my new passport was handed to me at 11:17AM. I was in a cab at 11:20, and on the bus with all my friends at 11:25.
I cannot believe that worked. The people at the passport office in downtown Vancouver are wizards, literally wizards.
Bonus: my friend who was in the same predicament got his passport as well and made it to PAX in time for An Afternoon With Patrick Rothfuss.
Onto PAX! Here I shall share my top 10 games to check out.
Against the Wall is a first-person platforming-adventure game set on the side of an infinite wall. You have a weapon/tool equipped to manipulate sections of the wall, pulling them outwards so you can climb on them. This game looked challenging and fun and I look forward to trying it out. (by Michael Consoli)
There was a contingent of Australians up on the 5th floor of the main convention hall, near the PAX10, and I had a brief peruse to see what would catch my eye. Orbiter jumped out at me because of how insanely beautiful it is. It’s a space game where you orbit stars and moons and blow them up for energy. The effects are eye catching and the soundtrack is great. Just a beautiful game that I look forward to playing more of. (by Tim Stasse)
This game was eyecatching- everything in it started hand drawn on paper. The concept was neat and challenging- little beasty-dude can teleport to where your mouse cursor is. I had a tough time picking it up, but that was mostly because I was exhausted by the time I got to it. This is one game I will be playing again, when I have skills like basic hand-eye coordination, and brain function once again. A neat game.
Cannon Brawl is out right now. My husband plays it a lot. He was very excited to meet the creators of it; he made a shirt and they were pretty thrilled to see how into their game he is. They signed it for him, and played the game with him. The creators are super cool, and their game is absolutely fantastic. Think Worms Armageddon meets tower defence, with real time zeppelin warfare and destructible terrain. It’s super fun! Check it out, and get your Cannon Brawl on.
The next three on the list are all about sound. Visuals and gameplay are great, but mostly it was the soundtrack that drew me in.
It’s like asteroids, but you can bend time. Oh and also the soundtrack sometimes kicks into reverse, and so does everything else but you. It’s hella cool, and free to play.
Sidescrolling 2D platformer that has a kickin soundtrack to accompany you on your perilous journey. The look and feel is really great. Bought it when I got home.
This is a fantastic concept that’s so well implemented I could have played this game all day. You move to the beat of the music to keep your combo multiplier going, and it rocks my socks. This had such a crowd around it, mainly because they had a DDR pad hooked up to it, so people had to get their feet moving to the beat to dodge skeletons and fight dragons in this roguelike rhythm dungeon crawler. No picture could do it justice; you have to hear it to believe it, and everyone watching was bobbing their heads along to this awesome game.
This game was round 2 of the Omegathon, and boy oh boy was it fun to watch. It’s like Smash Bros, but with more game types, and with the cute factor pumped to 500%. Customizing your little battle dudes before the fight is super fun; there’s a jillion different heads to get. I bought it when I got home, and have a stoic lion head as my mug of choice. Want a party game? This is the one. Epic fun times ahead with Battleblock Theatre.
Holy moly this was fun. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime at the top of my list for sure: it’s beautiful, sounds amazing, and is so inventive I fell in love with it immediately.
It’s two player co-op. You and your partner are manning a ship, and there are four guns, a shield, a giant space lazer, and thrusters, and you have to operate the ship in real time while being assaulted by space aliens, and simultaneously trying to save whole planets that are being attacked. It’s super fun, and I cannot wait to play more of it.
But wait there’s one more: it was the most hilarious thing to watch and then to play. Octodad: Dadliest Catch is a game where you play an octopus in disguise as a normal human dad, trying to fake his way through normal human stuff without letting on that he’s an octopus in a suit. Controlling the jelly-noodly-flip-floppy-cephalopod resulted in constant laughter. Having to do such mundane things as “Get your daughter the milk” and “Make coffee” resulted in near catastrophe as my flailing tentacles sent things flying around due to my inept control. It was so, so funny, and I will make everyone that comes into my house play it, so that I can laugh at them.
So that’s *my* PAX10. PAX11 I suppose. There were so many games, and even more that I list here that I’m looking forward to. The final round of the Omegathon was “Spy Party” and I think I’ll get it and play the heck out of it, and I will learn a new meaning of the word “subtlety”.
(My lanyard by the end of the con!)
That’s all for now folks! Thanks for checking it out. I hope I’ve inspired you to take a look at a few of these games and see if you like them.
For those not in the know, PAX is Penny Arcade Expo, a gaming convention. It spanned the three days over the Labour Day long weekend, and had many things that interested me.
I went to a ton of panels with interesting people talking about interesting things. I mostly tried to come at it from my perspective as an author. It was nice; a lot of the talks really applied to writing, and not just in video games.
I wanted to share a bit about some of the writing related panels I went to, and the points I took away from them. The speakers were engaging and humourous, informative and well thought out.
First up: Loving The Alien: Non-Humans in Fiction and Games.
This is extremely relevant to writers of science fiction and fantasy in particular.
These good folks talked about non-human characters and the challenges faced by writers trying to flesh them out. It was interesting, though I felt rather pretentious when I had the thought “I know all this.” I DON’T know all this, but I guess it feels like that sometimes when you’ve spent time thinking about a topic. …But then, I’ve been doing A LOT of thinking about this; I am in the throws of writing a novel where the main character is non-human.
The one point I hadn’t really thought about was, when you have non-human species, show them interacting in places where they’re forced together with other species. You get to see all kinds of tensions, their differences, but also their similarities when you show where their borders clash. Showing a non human character in their element is fine and dandy, but show them at odds with other species to really make them shine.
The next day, a panel that caught my eye was called Making Magic Work: Designing Magic Systems for Games and Books. I was, unfortunately, behind the last person admitted. The Tabletop Theatre was consistently too small for the number of people that wanted to see the panels there. I saw tons of people turned away from every talk there! I hope next time they have a bigger venue for such interesting panels. I found an interesting read if you’re into magic systems.
One good thing happened there, even without me actually getting into the panel: a girl in the line got a game going. It was a simple game to learn, and a lot of fun. It drew strangers together. I purchased it post haste! I ended up proliferating her idea, and started a game of it while waiting in another line up. It was just a fun social interaction that left everyone feeling great.
The game is “Spot-it” if you’re interested. Colours and shapes; you’d think it was easy.
Anyway!
Later that evening, I attended “Setting the Mood”, on what makes a good RPG.
I was pleased to see Keith Baker again; he had a lot of interesting things to share about his experience with RPGs. Also on the panel were Will Hindmarch and Logan Bonner.
These guys had a lot of RPG experience between them. They went over many great ideas, from using music as an aid, to party cohesion, to dealing with problem players. It was all about steering the story in the direction it should go, helping players play their characters, and just having a good time.
Ok, not explicitly about writing, but it was about storytelling. It was a lot of anecdotes, some good Q&A, and just a lot of fun.
On the third day, I went to a panel called “Sympathy for the Devil: Creating Killer Villains for Games and Books.”
What this panel made me want to do was just talk with them about vilains. Interesting panels have this effect. It sometimes causes the Q&A to get a little dumb (we’re here to hear the panelists, not you, random audience member). But my friends, who were also listening with me, and I had some great discussions afterwards about villains and villainy.
It was interesting hear the panelists talk about their favourite villains; my friends and I made observations about them based on which villains they identify most with. I completely agreed with Erin Evans, who said the her favourite, Ozymandeous, was not actually a villain.
One of the most interesting points they made was to have someone trusted turn out to be the villain. Guy keeps supplying you with weapons? Arms dealer bent on destabilizing the region for his master plan. Sometimes it’s easy to have a stereotypical view of villains. But the best villains have good ideas, make you want to join their cause, help them carry out their grand plans. It just so happens that they’re going to kill millions of people in the process.
The more human you make your villains, the more compelling they are.
So, that was PAX from a writer’s perspective. There were a lot of other interesting things going on, and I think in my next post, I’ll write about it from the perspective as a gamer. Good times.
…Especially when the creative team from Ubisoft joined our gaming session in our hotel on the last night. Wow.
I awoke this morning wondering if there were giraffes that were unusually taller than other giraffes.
Sure brain, this is an important thing to try and figure out as you’re waking up.
I kept a dream journal for a year solid. It took dedication; sometimes I wanted to relish waking up slowly, but I knew that doing so would cause the dreams of the night to waft into the ethers. I wrote down every dream. I have a book full of strangeness, which I bagan copying into a nice good copy, categorizing them (“Being Chased” and “Shopping” are the two most prevalent themes).
I think last night was my first dream about giraffes. That’s all.
Tonight, I embark upon my vacation; Aaron and I are going camping on wonderful Keats Island. Some friends are joining us. We muster in downtown Vancouver today, then head to Gibsons to get our gear in order. We’ll be catching a water taxi tomorrow morning to Plumpers Cove, a wonderful spot.
Games I’m hauling over there: our newly opened Harry Potter CCG, a deck of cards, Once Upon a Time (great storytelling game), possibly Race for the Galaxy, and Citadels. We’re all about games when we camp.
Also on the menu: a book about cracking the Northwest Passage, Sno Crash, my sketch book, and writing journal (going to return with a piece or two ready to type out and submit).
Yesterday I submitted two pieces to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Flush Fiction: “Starship Engineers Make the Best of Friends” and “Zargnafs to Xebits”. Both were fun to write, and I think people would enjoy them whilst using the washroom. :}
So, I shall post again on Tuesday with news of Keats Island and Plumper Cove.
But for now, I shall go put all of my friend Ian’s belongings into a truck. Seems everyone is moving these days…
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The Tabletop Theatre was consistently too small for the number of people that wanted to see the panels there. I saw tons of people turned away from every talk there! I hope next time they have a bigger venue for such interesting panels. 
H.G. Bells 