I've disappeared again. And more importantly I took Captain Arcolier with me. I've missed two weeks of serial posts now, and generally been non-posty, even through the depths of E3 (which I didn't go to, but I have a veteran's eye view of all the coverage and some talks with friends who did go).
Here's the scoop. Many of you know that I picked up some part-time contracting work (yes it's in games, but it's mainly work from home) recently. If you don't and it's meaningful to you I'm working on tools for Ms. Chickenhead. If that's not meaningful . . . well it's not really a bloggable topic but send me an email and I'll fill you in appropriately to your friend level. :-) So the idea is that I'm going to do some coding work part-time and write part-time. There's a bunch of reasons for this, money obviously being one. We can survive and pay the mortgage with Karin's income but my income will pay for vacations and techie toys. :-) More importantly I've discovered being a full-time writer isn't very good for me. The thing is that while I enjoy writing I can't do an entire day of it productively. On a good day I get in a few solid hours and then things trail off. Also, although I enjoyed being at home over most of the last year round about January or February I realized that I was only leaving my house once a week (to go grocery shopping) and well over three-quarters of my conversations were with cats (the vast bulk of the rest being with Karin). So I decided getting some external work was a Good Thing(tm) and this gig seems to make sense both to me and to my employers.
What does this have to do with our illustrious Captain and her fight against the Cantrellans? Well two things. First off, you've caught up with the material I wrote while goofing off from the Magic novel. I need to plot and write new segments. Second, the "part-time" work sort of exploded into full-time (I'll probably even be doing some work over the holiday weekend). This is a mix of things including a problematic deadline that I can help on, but needs more effort than I'd like. Another part is the normal ramping up to speed on a new codebase which is aggravated by the remote link. I've run Perforce flat out in the background over a couple of weekends just getting assets on my home machine. Lastly it turns out that after a year of non-coding I'm surprisingly rusty and it's taken a few days to blow the rust off and get my coding muscles back into tone.
So those combo into a situation where I need to take some some serious time on my "goof-off" web serial work and I don't actually have that time right now. Well of course I do if I went into "crunch mode", but that's ridiculous. The good news is that all of those "part-time ballooning into full-time" factors have an expiration date that's less than a week away. So my current plan is to miss both next week (May 30th) and the week after that (June 6th) on the serial posting. That first week in June will get some serious writing time down and I'll get several parts of the serial done. So expect to see a super-spectacular episode on June 13th and regular updates thereafter. Apologies for the delay but I don't want to put up work that I don't have the time for my best effort and that's what posts right now would entail.
I'll try to get some erratic non-fiction posts in over the next few days. Whiskey asked for an update on my 360 feelings and I have a bunch of links backlogged - probably mostly due to E3. I should probably write up a coherent "thoughts on E3" post now that the dust has settled. Reviews of New Super Mario Brothers and Field Commander could also be in order if anybody cares about those.
Here's the scoop. Many of you know that I picked up some part-time contracting work (yes it's in games, but it's mainly work from home) recently. If you don't and it's meaningful to you I'm working on tools for Ms. Chickenhead. If that's not meaningful . . . well it's not really a bloggable topic but send me an email and I'll fill you in appropriately to your friend level. :-) So the idea is that I'm going to do some coding work part-time and write part-time. There's a bunch of reasons for this, money obviously being one. We can survive and pay the mortgage with Karin's income but my income will pay for vacations and techie toys. :-) More importantly I've discovered being a full-time writer isn't very good for me. The thing is that while I enjoy writing I can't do an entire day of it productively. On a good day I get in a few solid hours and then things trail off. Also, although I enjoyed being at home over most of the last year round about January or February I realized that I was only leaving my house once a week (to go grocery shopping) and well over three-quarters of my conversations were with cats (the vast bulk of the rest being with Karin). So I decided getting some external work was a Good Thing(tm) and this gig seems to make sense both to me and to my employers.
What does this have to do with our illustrious Captain and her fight against the Cantrellans? Well two things. First off, you've caught up with the material I wrote while goofing off from the Magic novel. I need to plot and write new segments. Second, the "part-time" work sort of exploded into full-time (I'll probably even be doing some work over the holiday weekend). This is a mix of things including a problematic deadline that I can help on, but needs more effort than I'd like. Another part is the normal ramping up to speed on a new codebase which is aggravated by the remote link. I've run Perforce flat out in the background over a couple of weekends just getting assets on my home machine. Lastly it turns out that after a year of non-coding I'm surprisingly rusty and it's taken a few days to blow the rust off and get my coding muscles back into tone.
So those combo into a situation where I need to take some some serious time on my "goof-off" web serial work and I don't actually have that time right now. Well of course I do if I went into "crunch mode", but that's ridiculous. The good news is that all of those "part-time ballooning into full-time" factors have an expiration date that's less than a week away. So my current plan is to miss both next week (May 30th) and the week after that (June 6th) on the serial posting. That first week in June will get some serious writing time down and I'll get several parts of the serial done. So expect to see a super-spectacular episode on June 13th and regular updates thereafter. Apologies for the delay but I don't want to put up work that I don't have the time for my best effort and that's what posts right now would entail.
I'll try to get some erratic non-fiction posts in over the next few days. Whiskey asked for an update on my 360 feelings and I have a bunch of links backlogged - probably mostly due to E3. I should probably write up a coherent "thoughts on E3" post now that the dust has settled. Reviews of New Super Mario Brothers and Field Commander could also be in order if anybody cares about those.