Tag Archives: fuzzylife

School, Writing

Still Alive!

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

Wow, four months went by just like that. I’ll admit I hit a serious period of burnout thanks to last semester. Taking three creative writing workshops at the same time was not the best idea. Still, it frees me up for much easier semesters now, and next fall so it was worth it.

A whole lot has happened since then for me personally, but very little has been done writing-wise. Avatars & Identity still needs to be published, and I almost have everything I need for that. My original goal was to have all formats out and available at about the same time, but that is turning out to be fairly unrealistic. Each platform requires different formatting, which includes the cover. Right now I have two of three done. I could go ahead and push it out the door, but that means the audio book version won’t be ready for some time. Probably best not to wait any longer though. I think I’ll make submitting everything for publishing my goal this weekend. On top of homework of course.

As for this semester, I’m taking my senior creative writing thesis class (undergraduate level). This is the senior project or capstone basically, and as creative writing majors we get to pick what we want to do for this project. Naturally, I picked writing the third and final installment to Stephen’s trilogy, Revelation. I know I’ve been putting off doing this pretty heavily for some time. Part of that was not know where to start exactly. Another was just being tired of dealing with the same characters for yet another novel. A third, and something I hadn’t realized right away, was that I have a pretty good idea of what some of the major events are going to be, and they’re going to be hard to write. As tired as I may be of some of these people, it will still be hard to say goodbye. The good news is I’m already on Chapter 4, and I’ve just finished my second full week of classes. The goal is to hit about 1k words a day, which gives me more than enough time to finish the book before the semester is over. My professor for my senior project class has never received a finished, published novel before. So that’s the goal. I may not be able to get the full print version here in time, but I can definitely have a pre-pub copy ready to turn in.

Now if I just knew where this next chapter was going…

Publishing, Writing

Kindle Scout: Three Days Left

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This entry is part [part not set] of 5 in the series Live Writing

There are just three days left for my Kindle Scout campaign for my novel Avatars & Identity. As of midnight this morning my campaign page has a total of 105 hits over 28 days. That’s a little less than four hits per day. While I have no idea how good or bad that is since Amazon doesn’t reveal anything about their selection criteria, my gut instinct tells me this isn’t good enough by far. I find this to be pretty disappointing, but also not the end of the world. The book is ready to publish so even if Amazon doesn’t pick it up, I’m prepared to put it up on all of the usual self-publishing sites. There’s still the small hope that I’ll get picked up regardless, but I’m definitely preparing for the opposite. Hopefully I’ll know by Friday/Saturday, though the decision may not happen until Monday.

Uncategorized

My Kindle Scout Campaign is Live!

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

I was super excited to get the email telling me that I’d been accepted and that my campaign would go live today. So now I have 30 days to get as many nominations as possible. They don’t reveal the number of nominations unfortunately so I won’t have any idea of just how many are coming in on a daily basis. No idea what their threshold is for acceptance. Basically the most any author can do it submit the best, finished book they can. Avatars & Identity was the first book I managed to find a copy editor for so I can at least be confident that it’s my best work so far. Getting published by Amazon would be a big step forward, of course. Having someone actively pushing your book can only help with getting the word out.

The whole system is pretty cool. Anyone with an Amazon account can nominate up to three books a month. I’ll probably spend some time in the next couple of weeks checking out other books up for nomination. I’ve got two free slots to fill after all! For anyone interested, this is the link to my campaign:

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/2IWW36YM9USU5

Here’s hoping I make the final cut!

Business & Moore, Publishing, School, Writing

Frantic

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

I’m really hoping the frantic pace I’ve had to maintain this past week and weekend won’t be the one needed to get through this semester. It was my first full week of classes. Today is Sunday, and I’m exhausted. I had a paper due today, I’ve got another due (much longer) Tuesday, with two more due soon after. I suppose the hardest part for me is keeping track of each little task required for each class and making sure I get them done on time.

I managed today’s deadline for the paper (an obituary for my non-fiction class), but it really was a struggle. I think it was mostly because the obit wasn’t about someone I knew personally. That made research and fact-checking more time consuming than actually writing the damn thing. Thankfully the next assignment is based on personal experience.

The bit that’s due Tuesday is for my fiction workshop and is a short story based on a dream I had last Thursday. The dream was so vivid and provided such a strong basis for a story that I went to school early to start working on it. By the end of the day I had ten pages done. Clearly fiction is my strong suit.

In other news, formatting and all of the necessary bits for Avatars & Identity was finally done this evening. Which means I was able to submit it all to the Kindle Scout program. According to their info, I’ll hear back from them in a day or two if it gets accepted. Then it’s a month and a half wait to find out if enough readers like it for them to take it on and publish it. Of course I’m hoping to get published as having Amazon push my book for me is a very appealing thought. More importantly though I think it will go a long way toward establishing my presence as an author. That’s the idea anyway. Time will tell.

Writing, Method, Business & Moore, Publishing, School

First Impressions

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Now that I’m in my third week of classes (but only my first full week thanks to our ridiculous starting schedule) and I’ve had at least one session with every class I have mostly put my fears to rest. I like all of my classes, though some more than others. Unexpectedly, I am seriously enjoying my ENG242 English Literature class. It’s one of two required for all English majors and covers English Literature from the late 18th century onward. We’ll be reading “Pride and Prejudice,” “Wuthering Heights,” and other classics. So far though we’ve only gone through selections from Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man. I’ve been far more interested in this very thick and heavy reading than anything from my previous literature class. My least favorite class so far is my creative non-fiction workshop. Mostly because I’ve always been a fiction writer, and reader, at heart. I’ll read most any story if it’s done well but somehow fiction has always resonated more with me. Still, it’s very early days.

What I didn’t underestimate, and fully expected, was the workload accompanying taking four English classes: one literature and three workshops. I’m already a very busy bee doing classwork. Pile on top the copy edited version of Avatars & Identity that I still need to finish plus the audio book version of Transformation that I need to get through ASAP and I’m swamped. I really wish both of my book items would have been ready for me before school started but thems the breaks, as they say. For now I’m up to date with homework and slowly chipping away at the rest.

Life

Fun with Hardware

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

While I’ve been waiting for the graphics for my Fuzzy Adventures series to be completed I’ve been doing my personal edit of Avatars & Identity, making corrections to my first two novels in preparation of some business stuff, as well as dealing with a bunch of personal issues. This has kept me pretty busy but now I’ve got a serious wrench thrown into my plans: my main computer is having issues.

Now I’ve been building my own PC’s for the past 17 years or so which means I’m no stranger to problems. I’ve had some that were seriously difficult to figure out and fix. This one takes the cake though. My PC is randomly crashing to a black screen. No BSOD so there’s no error messaging from Windows. I can’t even replicate the crash as the conditions vary so wildly I don’t know what’s causing them. Part of the issue is pieces of my PC are over 4 years old now. This includes my PSU, motherboard, CPU, and RAM. I’ve run just about every software test I can think of and they all pass with flying colors.

This leaves me in quite a quandary. Based on my research this is most likely an intermittent hardware issue indicating one of my core components are failing. The most likely culprits are the PSU, motherboard, and graphics card. I’d like to think it’s not the graphics card since that is barely a year old. If it’s the PSU, then it is not the 12V rail that is failing. I can read that through GPU-Z and that sucker is super steady at 11.5v with no real fluctuations. So now I’m going through the process of re-checking all of the physical connections. Again. Dusting and cleaning. Again. Ultimately culminating in a re-installation of Windows. Fun times. I’d rather be working on my book/gaming series but without my main PC I’m pretty much dead in the water. Here’s hoping I don’t have to shell out money I don’t have for new PC parts.

FuzzyAdventures, Gaming

Let the Fuzzy Adventures Begin!

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With my summer now in full swing (even if the weather disagrees), I’ve started work on my new Fuzzy Adventure series. This was item 6 in my post about what I planned to do this summer and I’m super excited to get to work! I’ve done a test session already with a short run through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to see how my setup works:

A screenshot of an initial Fuzzy Adventure test run.
A screenshot of an initial Fuzzy Adventure test run.

 

I’m using a StarTech USB3HDCAP to hook up my consoles to my PC and XSplit to handle both the Twitch streaming and video recording. The cool thing about the capture box is it can handle any console so I can play and record on anything from my old NES up to PS3. Since I just picked up Ni No Kuni I may end up doing a regular Let’s Play as I work my way through that.

As for the Fuzzy Adventures, I anticipate doing at least one episode per week. Each episode will probably include about an hour or more of game time (no doubt subject to the game being played) along with the written portion.  Since this is all new to me I’ll have to see how much writing is involved for each hour of game play.  I’ve also engaged the services of a professional graphic artist to handle the graphics for the videos. I really want something that looks well-made. All of this should be ready within the next week or two. Can’t wait to get started!

Business & Moore

Buyer Beware

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

Caveat emptor indeed. When I upgraded this blog to be hosted by WordPress directly I did so with the assumption (doh!) that I would be able to customize the site more than with the freebie version. Really should have done the research. I’d been trying to figure out how to install custom plugins off and on for a month or two but I didn’t have a lot of time/energy to devote to figuring it out. Until now. Le sigh. So now I know that WordPress restricts plugins to what they deem is essential. Then if you upgrade to their Enterprise package you can pick from a select list of business oriented plugins they will deign to provide for the tidy sum of $500 per month. Ouch. Way out of my budget. Though even if it weren’t I’d want a whole lot more in the way of features and services for $500 a month. Now I’m looking into the various web hosts that offer managed WordPress hosting. Turns out that, or web hosting where you install WordPress yourself, is the only way to really have control of your own blog. Lesson learned.

Here’s hoping I can transfer the site as it is to whatever host I settle on.

Insomnia, Life, School

A Wednesmonday

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

Three to five days a week I take the bus to school. All of my classes start just before 10 AM but due to the bus schedule I usually take the 8:10 or 8:39 bus that stops across the street from my apartment. This bus only runs during the morning and evening rush hours so if I miss it, I’m pretty SOL as far as getting to school by public transit. Needless to say I’m pretty good about getting up and being at the bus stop a couple of minutes before the bus is scheduled to arrive. Usually they’re right on time +/- one minute. Today I was almost to the street at 8:07 when the bus was already pulling away from the stop. Lovely. Thankfully the 8:39 did not pull this same BS and was on time. So I got to my classroom early, but not as early as I usually do. I know, I know. First world problems. It’s just some days, coming on top of physical exhaustion I haven’t been able to shake for a couple of days, that kind of thing feels like a bigger deal than it really is. It’s not like I haven’t missed that first bus before because I certainly have. Those other times were very much my fault yet I didn’t get upset about it really. Just went back inside and waited 20 minutes to head back down.

I guess in the end all I’m really talking about is how strange our perception is at times and how heavily it influences how we perceive the events around us. The same event, missing the bus, could be taken any number of ways. Usually my mood is decent enough that it’s not really a problem, just something that happens from time to time. Yet today it was really annoying. It’s funny how some stress, anxiety, and a little poor sleep can really color your world in negative colors.

Life, School, Writing, Inspiration

Writing and Shyness

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This entry is part [part not set] of 73 in the series The Writing Life Blog

Although I’m not quite certain, I don’t believe I have ever submitted my writing to a contest. I know they existed when I was in high school but I was far too shy to even consider it then. Now though I’ll be submitting the poem from my last post along with two more, and a short story, to a couple of contests for undergraduates at UW. No idea what my chances of winning one of them might be of course. Just from the quality of work in my creative writing class there are undoubtedly much better writers at the school. Plus these things are all so subjective that anyone’s work is fair game. I’m just excited to be participating for once.

I’m nervous too but not as much as I thought I would be. I know when I started writing my first book it was really hard to let anyone read what I’d written. I wanted to protect my writing like it was some kind of secret treasure. Silly but true. I was also envious of the other writers whose blogs I followed. They wrote so easily and were very open about discussing it, sharing it. They were unconcerned with reviews, positive or negative. Then my first book was published, just electronically, and it wasn’t an overnight success. No magic book lottery picked my story out and made it super popular. I was disappointed of course, but it was a good thing really. It made me face the reality that switching to a writing career was going to take a lot of time and effort. So I had to ask myself what I really wanted.

In the end I took the plunge. I gave up a very lucrative career that made me miserable and now I’m back at school full-time as a poor student. And loving it. I have before me possibilities that I couldn’t have dreamed of back when I was working my butt off for a job I hated. I’m still enjoying writing, enjoying school despite the sometimes annoying work that comes with it, and most of all enjoying the exploration of my life in a way I never anticipated. I never expected to get a chance to start my life over in this manner. Especially not so far into my life. But that just means I’m going to push myself to make the most of this chance. Not everyone gets a first one, let alone a second.