Got the SASE I was so anxiously waiting for in the mail today. It was, to say the least, probably the worse rejection letter I’ve ever had in my life. Bar none. A 3″ by 8.5″ strip of paper in a form letter. Basically, “I hate form letters but your query was so boring, that you get it.” Okay, it was politer than that, but I’ve never had a rejection letter than wasn’t signed before, or a full piece of paper. I’ll move on to the next one, but frankly, this was rather depressing and frustrating, yet not entirely unpredicted. I know its a matter of time, time to find the proper agent or publisher who will give me a chance, but with hundreds of thousands of people out there, how can I get noticed? Besides keep trying; which is what I’m going to do anyways.
2007-04-30
Lojban Obscurity
I like Lojban. It is a neat little language with a nice ascetic, to me of course, and a great promise. However, at this xkcd points out, no one speaks Lojban really. One of the major draws of the language is preciseness, something I find a fascinating concept, but also the attitudinal aspect of the language. The wide ranges of emotions let you do simple emotions to fairly complex ones. For example, “.ui” is happy. “.uinai” is unhappy. “-cai” is strong so very happy is “.uicai”. You can do things like scope, I’m mentally happy “.uiro’e”. One of the phrases I use in chat is my pleasure or “.oinairo’e” or “my mental pleasure.” There are more obscure ones, such as “it phyiscally feels good but it makes me unhappy” or “.oinairo’o.uinai”.
2007-04-29
Bedknobs and Mountain Ranges
Feel a bit better after the last post. Fluffy reminded me that the person who hated my novel wasn’t exactly the best person in the world to get feedback. Still hurt, but its amazing how negative comments like that, even when you consider the source, still hurt. Other than that, I have chores to do today, some writing, and being annoyed with not figuring out relief rendering.
2007-04-27
Mud and critical feedback
This ended up being longer than I planned. It was suppose to be about the troubles of finding a good critique on a novel and pulling posts out of the ground using naught but my strength (and physics). But, the first bit got a tad long so I’m throwing this behind a lj-cut.
2007-04-26
Back at work
After a couple of days of hot flashes and fever freezes, I’m back at work. I remarkably felt pretty well this morning, though I can already tell I’m heading down a slow slide over the day, I think I can make it the entire day, but I’m just happy to be out of the house.
I had to cancel gaming, which I despise, but it had to happen. And since my eight year (twelve years together) anniversary is in two weeks, I won’t be gaming for a month. Hopefully, I can get a few more writing things. I saw a nice list of magazines that have submissions from alanajoli posting on eyezofwolf (the other Dylan) in one of his entries. Reading over it inspired me to maybe write a bit more and have fun actually doing stuff, I need to get more stuff out there if I want to be serious about writing. I suspect one of the reasons I didn’t get accepted with the last agent request is because I basically had no footprint in the market. Though, my egosurf score has apparently shot up a couple hundred points since the last time I looked at it. Yeah, its a silly thing but it also marks the point where my real name actually has a higher score than my penname (which I really should stop talking about).
Maybe I should use this time to get a few more things done, so I don’t feel overwhelmed. I’ve been getting that feeling lately, mainly because my list of things I want to do is growing faster than my apparently lack of writing has done to fix it. Besides a commission I’ve been working on for the last week, I haven’t done any writing since my Machine of Death entry and The New Girl for Steam Punk Magazine (which told me almost two weeks ago they would be in contact “soon” with the ones accepted). I keep checking their website in hopes, but nothing has changed. I’m also hoping to get a response from the last agent, but at the moment, I don’t really have that high of hopes.
Oh well, I always said that patience was my best virtue, better practice it.
2007-04-24
Sick, sick, sick
Yeah, still sick. Went home two hours early yesterday, working from home today. Talking is a chore and my voice is giving out after 15-20 minutes. This morning I almost couldn’t breath when I woke up though drinking a pot of tea and creamer seemed to has helped with that. I even missed the rifftrax for Willy Wonka, which saddened me, but it was a good thing because my father came over with a chainsaw to handle the tree that tore out of the ground a few weeks back. We were only back there for an hour, but it is amazing to see how much cutting you can do with a chainsaw. The tree is now neatly sectioned into no length over 1.5 meters. I just have to drag it back into the woods over the next week and finish getting rid of a fence the city is bitching about.
At least I’m almost at the point I want to be with the world creator program. I got it to handle scaling of images so I can start with a single 256 pixel image for a world, say drawn on a napkin or photographed from a particularly interesting stain on the oven *cough*, or scaled down from a higher detailed once such as the vector map I created for Exalted. At this point, the main things I have left are the editing infrastructure which is going to let me make changes and automatically rebuild the rest of the zoom levels and details involved, and the relief generation from two other layers (I already got heightmap and terrain skinning done).
But, not today. Today, I’m going to work as long as I can then pass out again.
2007-04-23
Sick as a human
I never liked the phrase, “sick as a dog.” I mean, my dogs were rarely sick and when they were, it was a couple of days not weeks. So, I was almost as sick as fluffy and very sick. Spent almost the entire weekend with fevers, the inability to speak, getting dizzy when I moved, and having to take care of Fluffy who was even worse. Apparently, someone forgot the household rule of “one sick person at a time.” Fluffy has bronchitis, so she’s going to be off center for a few weeks. I’m really hoping I’m better for this weekend, I’ll decide if I can run on Wednesday which is also the day I decide if I’m going to a doctor.
One of the bright points was zenbodhi calling to chat, sadly I was passed out trying to get over the fact I was alternating between freezing and sweating for close to five hours after he called. Sorry.
2007-04-20
DefectiveByDesign.org
Got a t-shirt in the mail yesterday. Wasn’t expecting a t-shirt, didn’t even know why until I pulled it out. It was a donation gift from DefectiveByDesign.org, one of the efforts to protest DRM all over the world. I’m not fond of DRM, the number of times I’ve had to reinstall or fix Fluffy’s machine because of DRM has put it pretty far on my shitlist. Plus, I don’t like that DRM basically treats all customers as criminals, since it won’t stop a dedicated criminal. Even Sony’s latest DRM apparently doesn’t even run on Sony DVD’s players, go figure. Well, it has this list of names on the front and a cute picture on the back. I didn’t think of anything until fightertype was talking to me, then she suddenly gasped. “Your name is on that!” Shocked, I looked down myself and lo and behold, on line nine, is my name. I got this shirt because I donated money. That makes me curious of a few things, the first is: how much much did I give these people? And two, why are there only 50 names on the list? I guess people don’t care about DRM as much as I do.
Still, a nice surprise.
2007-04-18
Meme – About Me?
Do you know where memes are about? Wonderful concept, since it includes everything from architecture and colors to minor little things like viral Q&A across the blogs. Well, I’m doing one just because I find them fun on occasion:
Comment and I’ll–
- Tell you why I friended you.
- Associate you with something. A fandom, a song, a color, a piece of fruit. SOMETHING.
- Tell you something I like about you.
- Tell you a memory I have of you.
- Associate you with a character/pairing.
- Ask something I’ve always wanted to know about you. (Or else I’ll just ask a random question. I reserve that right.)
- Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
In all honesty, I don’t care if you continue this. It’s just an interesting idea on social networking and self-propagating social units. Though, in this case, you can thank zenbodhi for initiating it.
2007-04-17
A Frustrating Weekend
This weekend, Fluffy had a belt testing and went out town for the entire weekend. She made her belt and is now a Senior Red in Hapkido. That means only three more belts until Black Belt (Junior Deputy, Senior Deputy, and Black). If everything continues as planned, she should hit her black belt right about the time we are planning on moving to Iowa.
As for me, my weekend alternated between frustrating and good.
First the good: gaming was a stitch. I was depressed for the first two hours or so, but I got into the groove and had some fun. People laughed and enjoyed themselves, which was the point. Bunch of magic items got dropped into the player’s hands, including some Heartstone Bracers and female-shape plate which uteck is planning on having shaped to fit him. Interesting characters, interesting locations, and a really cool plot we all came up with that I just have to go with. I actually “killed off” about half the party, but no one really died. There was a nasty botch on one roll so instead of killing them for real, I just gave them a little Wyld mutation that I feel adds to the character. And scienceprincess‘s character got a third eye which I thought was just a cool visual for basically the party’s mage.
The rest of the weekend, not so fun: I had an idea of how to produce a better-quality map with a bit of programming. So, what I thought would be a two day effort to get a prototype (just to see if it works) ended up being two days to get just the windows up and running and a big black screen where I should have a beautifully rendered map of Creation or some other fantasy world. In fact, it is quite depressing in the completely lack of “stuff” I wanted to see. I know that it will eventually work, or I hope it will. I’m going to give it a few days to get out of my head and see if the idea is even viable. Basically, I’m trying to write a Google map based system that lets me generate height maps of a fantasy world, then use that to create the height and depth regions of my vector map. In addition, a good quality terrain map would let me create a bas relief map of a fantasy world. Bas relief happens to be my second favorite type of map.
I also finally got feedback on my Scroll of the Lands:
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