Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Welp, the comic is up. My work here is done. Until next week.

Hey. Hey YOU. Want to waste way too much time? Try this interactive text game called Violet. Don't tell me how you solved it, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the Ethernet cable.

Also, if you have a few bucks to burn, go check out Historyonics, a comic anthology by some Vancouver-area artists. It's got a pretty good short story by Jonathon Dalton and something by the fabulous Steve LeCouilliard, who does Much the Miller's Son but doesn't seem to have a proper website. You can read Much the Miller's Son on his blog, assuming you can find the first comic.

In other news, my NaNoWriMo novel is terrible but almost done, and my house is no longer listing to the side although I sort-of miss the pitfalls in my front yard. I was hoping to turn them into a moat filled with piranhas. Special cold-weather piranhas that can survive the Edmonton winters.

Anyway. Off to do something gloriously unproductive!

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Up to 31,000 words and got a comic out this week (and on time, yet! Go me!) I'm having some plotting problems with the book. Anyone know of an easy way to cure fish-zombie poison that can be obtained in the middle of nowhere? Or should I just let everyone die?

And because everyone needs to take the occasional break and make fun of some terrible things, here's Photoshop Disasters and Cake Wrecks, dedicated to exposing terrible professional photoshopping and caking (respectively). Read through the archives, some of this stuff is hilarious.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Currently re-reading The Malazan Book of the Fallen while I'm waiting for the new Dresden Files book to come out in paperback. Last time my interest petered out somewhere around Midnight Tides (Book 5), but going back through Deadhouse Gates (Book 2), I have to say that I had completely forgotten how great a writer Erikson is. Also, Iskral Pust rules.

I think I lose steam through all these huge series because as great as a truly epic story is, there are often just too many characters to keep track of. You just manage to get interested in one group when BAM! you're in another scene with a completely different group of people. Once there are enough such groups, you start forgetting what these people were doing last and why you were interested in that in the first place.

Otherwise, this has been stuck in my head since the weekend. It's two years old so I'm sure everyone's seen it, but if I have to live with it, then I might as well inflict it on anyone else who hasn't been infected yet.

Monday, November 17, 2008

NaNo is clipping along, I'm a little over halfway done. In the past few thousand words, I burned down an inn and poisoned a couple caravan guards. Lest you think that I'm using up precious comicking time, I actually do most of my writing at work, where typing doesn't cause any comment but whipping out a tablet probably would.

For the interested, here's another good writing resource for those of us of the Spec Fiction persuasion, The SFWA Resources List.

And here's a few things for the artists:

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Some cool stuff for writers I've come across in the past few days:

And just because I think this is great, here's the article on Otto the Octopus for those who didn't see this on Twitter or Facebook (via Pharyngula).

Friday, November 7, 2008

I've never been much for random socializing, but I thought I'd try putting up a Skulking Ninja blog. It'll include both the apologies for late comics that you know and love, as well as other things that I think should go in a blog, like rants about Kids Today and blurry pictures of the neighbours' cat.

But before I get on with that, and since this week's comic isn't late, I'll start with NaNoWriMo. Anyone else doing NaNo this year? I did it in 2005 and managed to squeeze out a terrible urban fantasy novel about loser vampires. This year I'm doing a sword 'n' sorcery fantasy. I started 5 days late and I'm keeping up with the comic as well so it's a ton of work, but it's a lot of fun. Masochistic, "oh gods, where's the plot going next?", "I suck at writing!" fun. If I survive this, next year I'm going to write a terrible bodice-ripper. With actual bodices getting ripped. I'm not sure anything risque will happen in it otherwise, but there will be pieces of bodice all over the place, let me tell you.

Also, I can't believe that it's taken me this long, but I finally read Code Name: Hunter, and the story's really quite good. If you enjoy urban fantasy, don't dislike furries (and if you don't and do, what are you doing here? Shoo! Shoo!) and haven't come here from there, you should check it out.

Last of all, I really enjoyed drawing those goofy faces in panel 5 this week. Oh, Castus. You have issues.