Newsletter September 2007
Hello everyone,
The days get shorter, the weather changes, and my local coffee shop gets overrun by high school kids. Ahh, fall.
I did a lot in August, but no big news to report on the writing front. The agent search goes on. No luck so far. Not much more to say.
I did figure out what Viral Coat needs to make it awesome: a touch of the weird. Last month I mentioned Tim Powers as a reading choice. I love his books because they take a ordinary people and throw them into the supernatural world that lies just below the surface of the real world. But he doesn't use the same old monsters (vampires, werewolves, etc.). No, Tim Powers comes up with ideas that you would never predict in a million years. For example, the story that dealt with the underground society of people who trap ghosts and then snort them like cocaine. Yeah, I never saw that coming.
I want to do something similar with Viral Coat. And just last week, I found a perfect way to do it that involves ancient Chinese demons and genetically modified food. Ah! I love it!
In game making news, I have been play testing a card game I'm working on. It is a game where you compete with other players to be the most successful biotech company. Or you play mean and try to hold everyone else back so no one is successful. The bigger news is that I joined an indie game development team, and I've been working on a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). In case you don't know, that is the same genre as World of Warcraft. I'm in the world building team, so I basically get to help create the world geography and history. Then I'll help populate the world with interesting quests and dungeons. The process is very similar to world building for a novel.
Plans for my nanowrimo novel continue. It will be a science fiction thriller that takes place on Earth (and its colonies on other planets) and the wilds of Venus. Genetic engineering, crystalline robots, and extremeophiles will play big roles.
In other news, I've been suffering through home construction all month. My day job has me working from home, so I get to listen to the hammering and sawing going on down the hall all day. I'm surviving, and on the upside, we now have a big HD TV and HD cable. The Xbox 360 also looks amazing on the big screen. I don't have any good books to recommend this month, but I can recommend Bioshock. It is an Xbox game that has a wonderful story. If you've read Atlas Shrugged, you get a kick out of the setting.
Take care, enjoy the coming of fall, and start thinking of plots so you can do nanowrimo with me in November.
--Todd