SFWW General

It's sooo quite around here. Thought I'd post this, despite the possible jinxing (touchwood), to do my bit to liven up the place. Oh and I didn't want to put it in the Trophy forum cause that definitely would be tempting the fates to spit on me.

Anyway...I've been writing a TV series with a friend back home (Australia) on and off for a while now. We've recently got it to the stage where it was fit to be seen and so he showed it to some ppl. Now it seems it [i]may[/i] have been picked up by a new cable channel.

It's all mights and maybe's and of course it's cable but hey, it's pretty damn exciting all the same!!!

:smt040

I have read the advice from several books on writing: get to know the market. They recommend subscribing to Publisher's Weekly.

Great idea, but... it's $225 US per year!

https://www.publishersweekly.com/subscribe.asp?screen=pi2

Anyone have a subscription? Is it worth it?

This is pretty darned funny. And not at all surprising.

http://critters.critique.org/sting/

I just finished the game. It's more than a game, it's also an engrossing story with atmosphere to spare. It's set up like The Matrix, where you are plunged into action with the promise of a lot of explanation coming later.

Plus the graphics are absolutely incredible. Total immersion into a movie. You need a high end PC to run it though. I did an upgrade on a budget -- I bought an ATI 9600 graphics card with a $100 rebate, then a new motherboard with a Sempron 3100+ processor and 512 MB of RAM. Then I transplanted my old drives into the new PC, and used my old monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Total cost was around $600. The game runs very well on this.

It's a game where you not only are looking forward to the thrill of playing, but also looking forward to finding out what happens next in the story.

They also used some (relatively) big name actors for the character voices -- Robert Guillame, Lous Gosset Jr., Robert Culp.

A lot of games nowadays have budgets as big as movies, and they have hundreds of people working on them, and professionals writing the stories.

This is encouraging.... As our attention span gets shorter and the market for books gets tighter, the market for other avenues for story-writing gets better. I imagine there is more money for authors in bestselling novels, but maybe you could make a living writing for the gaming industry.

What brew method do you use? Drip, French press, vacuum?

Do you roast and/or grind your own?

Doing a little research.....

If you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser, you may have animated gifs (the little pictures that move, like some smilies and avatars) set to only play once. I think this is done to reduce CPU load on your PC or maybe to stop annoying ads from repeating. However, most ads are flash or similar so that won't help anyway.

If you want the animations to repeat, so you can see them again in case you missed them or you simply like watching them (like me):

(1) open a new tab;

(2) enter "about:config" in the address bar, this opens up a screen with all your configurable parameters;

(3) go down to the entry for "image.animation.mode";

(4) double click on this entry and change to "normal".

The other options here are "once" and "off" (meanings are self-explanatory).

Anyone register a domain name? Obviously Elizabeth has. :)

How did you go about it? Did you use a service or let your ISP take care of it (I think some do that)?

The big services seem to be www.register.com and www.domain.com. I wonder if they are all the same. A domain is a domain, right, no matter how you get it?

Things were simpler in the InterNIC days methinks. One place for everything.

Well I'm new...just joined and I thought I'd post a quick hi to you all. Thanks to those who emailed me also....really nice to feel welcome.

Hmm...a quick word about myself? Aussie chick living in England currently wasting away the last 20mins of work. I write mostly fantasy stuff. Although my short stories tend to be mainstream fiction for the most part. Am working on a fantasy trilogy at the mo. Book 1 in first draft, 2 & 3 outlined and almost ready to start writing in Jan '05.
Also working with a writing partner on a TV series that's SF.

I promise you it's less impressive than it sounds (at least I hope it sounds impressive :D ) Anyway I'm unpublished so far...I live in hope!
Have spent a fair bit of time on sites like this but none where you can get stuff critiqued so I'm looking forward to that.

I haven't seen any other introductory posts so I hope I put this one in the right place but even if I haven't I think I've rambled on enough!

Look forward to chatting with you all.
moo

For all my mag submissions so far, I have stuck my SASE's into a big manila envelope. No problem.

But what if you want to send an SASE in an envelope of the same size? How do you fit that sucker in there?

I saw a description somewhere that says you fold the SASE into thirds and then put it in the envelope.

Anyone know if agents / publishers find this acceptable?

I just thought I'd post a thread for us NaNoWriMo's to come and chat and procrastinate.

Are the few of us that signed up still hot to trot, or are the nerves creeping in?

What are folks doing, if anything, for preparation?