The Kindle Unlimited Service. For $10 a month = $120 a year, you get access to hundreds of thousands of titles for free. Sounds like a good deal, but I hate taking on what I call “lifestyle overhead”, the little services that nickel & dime your monthly paycheck until you have nothing left. The cell…
A Post on Creativity
Inspired by the HobbyGameDev article on creativity and reminded of John Cleese’s video, I posted about how to get into a more creative mindset over on the Blue Tengu site. It’s worth a read for writers as well, and John Cleese’s lecture is worth watching a few times a year. Getting to the Good Stuff
Captcha Plugin
I just added a captcha plugin to try and cut down on the number of spam bots registering and logging in to the blog, so now if you want to login, you’ll have to complete a quick math puzzle. My apologies for the inconvenience, but that’s the way it works on the wild wild web.
Fifth Book Stats
This will come as a surprise to those of you who know my writing style, but I’ve finished a fifth novel-length story, and it’s not even National Novel Writing Month. My first non-NaNoWrimo book was an experiment to see if I could write the story I chickened out of writing last year in favor of…
Kicking it Off!
I finally broke down and got the domain name to move my site from http://tengu2001.wordpress.com over here. All of the articles, pictures, and comments look like they survived the trip. This will continue to be my personal site, but I’ve also got an entertainment site set up at http://www.bluetengu.com, which I’ll be working on over…
Pixel Art and Animation
Lately I’ve been working on learning pixel art & animation, hoping to get my meager skills serviceable enough to make the art for some old school video games. This one’s my first attempt at a person, from a picture of me after biking up Mt. Rokko many years ago: I’ve received a lot of great…
Fourth Book Stats
It has been some time since my last post, but that has mainly been to keep my pace up in finishing the fourth novel started last November. I managed to beat out my previous novel’s fourth edit by three months, so I’m moving considerably faster than I used to! I think the primary contributing factor…
Writing Tools
Although the main tool I was planning to discuss was something for ferreting out cliches and overused expressions, the timing was right for kicking off with this article on the preferred writing tools of some famous authors. I’m sure that not many modern publishers would appreciate an envelope stuffed with hundreds of pages of loose-leaf…
Short or Long Story?
Once in a while I come across a novel that should have been a short story or a short story that should have been a novel. What seems to be the problem is: A short story that should have been a long story = a character-focused story that doesn’t pan out because, like an awkward…
Writing with Style
This jumps back to the earlier post about JK Rowling being recently outed by her style, but there is a site that will analyze a few paragraphs of work and tell what famous author’s writing style the writing resembles. I Write Like Of course I have no idea what sort of algorithm is behind the…