Twitchy

It's been a while but it's time to blow the dust off the old blog and post to it. I would apologize for my absence, but hey, let's not pretend either one of us are regulars around here, okay?

I've been writing on Twitch for a while now. Early-on, I think I was being naughty, so I tried to hide nonchalantly in the Music channel, and I played music to CMA.  At that time, Twitch's TOS said that all streams should be gaming-related, and sure, while games get written all the time, I'm streaming a fantasy novel. The best argument for which I could hope was that the novel had the potential to be turned into a game, and maybe in 10 or 20 years Twitch streamers would stream games set in a world created on Twitch. Meta-poetically, it works, but it's a pretty shaky argument against a TOS should Twitch want to be by-their-book. However, nobody ever told me to go away, so I kept hiding in the Music channel, poking away at my book.

Twitch's response to me (well, people like me, I'm not deluded enough to think it was really me) was to give me a Creative channel. It's quite a fascinating place.

You can watch people engage in their creative side and broadcast your own. You can join a fanbase or build one! You can't always call it art, but it's assuredly always entertaining.

Best of all, a community of writers has been building there, both who stream and do not stream, and with the addition of the NaNoWriMo streamers this month, there is quite a lot of writing happening right now on Twitch.

Getting you into the business end of streaming is beyond the scope of this, but overall, streaming is pretty easy and well-documented on Twitch. You'll need some software (like OBS or Xsplit). A microphone and web cam are handy but not required. Getting some of the "bells and whistles" like follower announcements or social bots can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, but after a few pokes of trial and error, I was able to get them up and running without too much hassle.

Specifically, check out JudyDawn and SilentWillow, both of whom have writing talent exploding from their word processors. If you follow them, you can set Twitch to notify you by email when they go live.

Come join us.

Release: Ignite

I've just released Ignite, a free short story that mixes the genre of political thriller with a dash of romance. It's about a tragic love affair that was never meant to be, set against a violent vortex of social unrest. 10,000 words. Here's the blurb:

An unlikely couple finds love in the vortex of violent social upheaval. Can their relationship survive their differing political stances? A terse political thriller, infused with an uncompromising romance.

Point Blank Idiocy

Every time a writer uses the phrase "point blank range" to mean "extremely close range", God clubs a baby seal to death with a physics book. Just because most of the English-speaking media uses the phrase incorrectly does not imply that you must, too.

In ballistics, it is the distance at which a projectile will hit the ground if you perfectly level a gun and fire it, which can be over 300 yards for high powered rifles. That's three football fields, which is obviously the opposite of "extremely close range". And if it's a handgun and its PBR is only three feet, then your gun sucks, because the PBR on even the most piece-of-crap squirt guns is about 2 yards.


If you must use the phrase and the victim is indeed at very close range, use the qualifier "within". Within point blank range is perfectly acceptable, because the victim's range falls inside the range of PBR, but by saying "at point blank range" implies the victim was shot at the gun's maximum PBR.


Think of the goddamned baby seals next time, won't you?

Procedural Language Generator

As of late, I've been spending far more time tinkering with linguistics for my tastes. For instance, I took a three day diversion from a paragraph to figure out the linguistic rules set just to establish a two word phrase. The language is from a far-off country called Eshet, whose citizens wear a particular style of ankle-length toga. The fashionable people of Anchorest love the style, but in order to continue to sound fashionable they kept the name straight from the Eshan language, which is lor nobre in Eshan, and never mind that in their own language it just means 'the long cut'.

Granted, that far-off land is pretty important and the language will end up being used a lot more than those two words that it initially spawned, so the time isn't necessarily wasted. It could just be better-spent doing some actual writing.

Decimate the Lightning Bugs

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Mark Twain

Let's talk about the word decimate. It's a lightning word when used correctly, but more often than not it's used as a lightning bug.

Goodreads and the "Community"

Here is an interesting perspective on Goodreads and the "community" that it has created.

First, I have to say that I really like Goodreads for all of the reasons stated in the article. It gives a place where authors can engage readers and vice versa. It gives a good "landing place" for your novel. It also connects to your blog, so that what I'm typing here will show up there eventually. Goodreads is a great site for authors and readers.

Dealing with negative reviews is tough, however. As authors, we spend so much time with our work that it is easy to be sensitive about it. The books we write are like our children, and nobody wants to have their little snowflakes criticized. That being said, though, once we bring our work to the table and release it, it's up to the public to judge it, even if we might think that judgment is unfair, incorrect, or even spiteful in origin.

Risan Bracelet Design

This is a preliminary design of the "entwined, opposed serpents" that appears in my upcoming novel, Fallen Rise. The symbol is used in several places, such as the design of a pledge bracelet, the cross-guard of a sword, and a banner. It figured heavily enough that I wanted to see it visually, so I built it using a CAD program called Campaign Cartographer 2, followed by a pass in Photoshop. The snake heads are stylized and do not represent a specific serpent,though they are closer in design to the heads of venomous vipers. I'm also considering making a more iconographic version for a chapter header flourish.