There are quite a few ways that video games are better than real life. For one, there are very few consequences for your actions. Want to eat mushrooms? Snack away, Mr. Plumber. Want to try to defeat the world’s most evil wizard with a bunch of Deku nuts? Have at it, Hero of Time! Pretty much anything goes.
But one of the things I really love about video games happens to come from role-playing games in particular — the idea of leveling up. Continue reading →
These days, I’m often too busy to do all of the things that I love. Between hanging with the wife, writing, watching awesome TV shows, reading and playing video games, one of these items will unfortunately be forgotten. Since ignoring one of those could end in divorce, right now that particular neglected past time is reading. However, every now and then I do get to read something so I try to make it count. In recent months, I’ve read the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, and I’m currently working through Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, which is book one of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
While those books have made their own impressions and are great reads in their own right, one title that I got to read around the end of last year really stuck with me: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I suppose I’ve been thinking about this one a lot since I recently heard that Grossman is working on a sequel. Continue reading →
When this site got up and running finally, I promised a small glimpse at the opening section of my novel, Seven Sons. So, I figured I’d make good on that. Here is a (very) rough version of what I have in mind for the prologue. If you need a primer on Sons, I’d suggest you go read up on that first.
Something I feel that I should point out: once again, this is a rough draft, so nothing here is final. That includes characters, titles, etc. Anything is fair game to change. At the moment, I’m writing for quantity over quality. This hasn’t been edited much, because the idea is that the heavy revising will happen in the next draft. The main goal right now is simply to get to the end. That’s the hard part. Going back and making it sound pretty is the simple stuff. So, I would appreciate it if you could keep it easy on grammatical critiques, as it’s not the thing I’m concerned with at the moment. I’m sure there are a great many. Also, it should be noted that this opening POV is from Jonas, a thieving, conning, all around rotten dude.
So, now that those caveats are out of the way, feel free to read and tell me what you think. Continue reading →
Every time someone asks me what my dream job is, I always say a sci-fi/fantasy author. If I could make money writing cheesy books for the rest of my life, I’d be a terribly happy man. The only thing better would be getting paid to play video games, but even that would lose some of its enjoyment after a time. And this is coming from a video game nut.
At the end of last year, I decided to finally try my hand at writing a novel. I’ve had ideas of doing it for the longest time, big ideas that I’ve been keeping in my backpocket until they were developed enough. I decided to finally go for it because I accidentally caught that my word count of blog posts on GamerSushi and SmoothFewFilms combined came out to a total of 250,000. This was with just 2 years of posting. If you’re unaware of just how many words that is, imagine one of the later Harry Potter books, or anything in the Wheel of Time series. That roughly translates to around 800 pages or more of sheer nerdy prose, and I had done it by accident, accumulating volumes of words by posting a few hundred each night. I figured, well, if I can do that, I can do the same thing towards an original story for an entire year and see what happens.
Enter my novel, whose working title at the moment is Seven Sons. Continue reading →