I do love time travel stories, but writing them can be mentally exhausting. I have a set of outline notes on this story that’s getting entirely too complex, so I’m writing this today and will be spending a chunk of tomorrow straightening things out. Stay tuned!
I learned of an admirable Kickstarter project the other day thanks to Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont of the Sword and Laser podcast, and I thought those who follow my blog might be interested in knowing about it. It’s the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi project.
What they aim to do is save as many old, out of print sci-fi books as possible. Each month they pick a great classic or obscure or otherwise awesome sci-fi book that’s not in print and not online. They track down the author or whoever holds the copyright. They acquire the copyright or get permission from the rightsholder, and turn the book into an ebook for online publication. The resulting ebooks are either free or very cheap.
The Kickstarter for the project helps to fund these efforts to track down and acquire copyrights for the books they save, as well as fund development of the website and open source book scanner they make use of.
There are far too many books out there that are at serious risk of being lost if the paper degrades and nothing is done to preserve them, so this is a fantastic project well worth backing, or at the very least learning about.
There’s several bits of good news about it. The first is that they’re fully funded up to their goal of $15,000. The second is that as of this writing, they have 11 days to go, so you can still contribute and drive them even further past their goal—they sit right now at $24,059. With 11 days left, it doesn’t seem impossible that they’ll double what they were looking for.
Check them out at the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi Kickstarter! And be sure to let me know in the comments if you decided to back them.
I think the reason I’ve had so much with Corwin’s latest story is that while I have a good idea of what exactly it is that he wants, that he’s invested in, I’m not nearly as sure about how it comes into play within the story itself. I might need to break from this one for a bit and work it out.
I’m not going to go on another big break from fiction though. I have another story in mind that I think is pretty strong right from the outset.
The cost of living these days sucks, and it’s only getting worse. Imagine how expensive it’s going to be by 2030. Wouldn’t it be great if you could go back in time when rent and food were crazily cheap, but not sacrifice your connection to the present in the process? Sure sounds great. But would it really be great?
Displaced, starting soon…
Warning: I’m a bit of a butter-fingers today. I’m about to drop a name. Oops! There it goes. Damn, sorry Brian Brushwood! Let me just pick your name up off the floor here and dust it off a bit.
Brian is a friend of mine, so take this review with however many grains of salt you need, but he has just published his third book, Scam School Book 1 (affiliate link), as of this writing. And by just, I mean it released on Amazon.com, iTunes and other booksellers earlier today. As the name suggests, this is the book version of Brian’s popular Scam School web series produced by Revision 3.
I preordered my copy from Amazon for my Kindle. I’ve looked at it on my Kindle 3, on the Kindle Cloud Reader on both the PC and on the iPad, and on the Android Kindle app. Unfortunately Kindle is—for the time being—a little disadvantaged in displaying Scam School Book 1. Brian and his assistant Jon Tilton went to great pains to create something special in formatting the book, including in-line videos and audio commentaries, and Amazon’s Kindle format doesn’t handle all of that extra polish yet.
That’s changing though. Amazon announced some time back that a new version of the Kindle format will be forthcoming, and it will handle all of the new media content just beautifully.
In the meantime, the painstaking effort that went into formatting the book pays off in backwards compatibility; the text displays just fine, and while the audio and video won’t be seamlessly placed where it was intended, external links to the content make it easy to access until Amazon updates us all to the new goodness.
So what about the content?
Brian goes over 70 scams, from the Human Chimney to Tic Tac Toe Prediction. He revisits each of the Scam School show episodes, covering how the trick is done, and providing written reference on how each illusion or trick is accomplished. The audio commentaries give a personal touch to each one. Exactly what each commentary provides is unique to each trick. It may be a remembrance of the first time Brian did the trick, or learned it, or of shooting the episode of the show that covered it, or additional information and notes on it. It’s all well worth listening to.
These are brain teasers that he has demonstrated time and again in real bars with real people, getting real drinks out of the bargain.
Scam School Book 1 is clearly a labor of love. Brian and Jon spent countless hours writing, finding photos, creating videos and recording audio commentaries in order to give the reader a completely mobile reference for scamming free drinks at bars or just generally becoming the life of the party.
Highly recommended for anyone who loves magic, science, or just knowing how stuff is done … to say nothing of those who want to score free drinks at a bar.
Brian Brushwood, Scam School, bar, beer, book, illusion, magic, shwood, tricks | in Reviews 
This new story is really being uncooperative these last few days. Yeesh. Back to games and another blog post I guess. This time I’ll tackle Mass Effect.
I’ve played Mass Effect before, and I got part way through Mass Effect 2. For those who aren’t aware, Mass Effect is a series of science fiction role playing games for the PC and consoles put out by Bioware, the creators of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Mass Effect 3 came out, and so it’s time for me to finish the other two. Or to replay them as the case may be. I lost my original game data for them.
While playing through the original Mass Effect I was reminded of just how good these games are. Of course for me “good” means strong story, and that has caused me to sink large amounts of the last 3 days into playing.
The stories are rich and peppered with minor stories for variety. The characters are fleshed out and convincing, and the amount of thought that’s gone into the themes and background information on the world of Mass Effect is nothing short of remarkable.
There are flaws, of course, but those mostly have to do with the game mechanics and level design. Since I’m writing about story, I’ll ignore those. They’re minor quibbles anyway.
A part of me had hoped that immersing myself in this great story would give me some insight into getting past this part of the story I’m writing. So far that hasn’t happened, but there’s always tomorrow; who knows. I am coming up on a part of the game that I remember only vaguely from my first play through, and it does contain a situation similar to the corner I’ve written myself into. I won’t be able to copy anything from the game—the scenarios are far too different—but maybe it’ll give me an idea.
It is also striking all kinds of chords for stories I could consider later in the series, though I didn’t really need to play Mass Effect for more ideas like that. I’m planning another post some time on how the act of writing will, itself, generate more ideas than you could possibly need.
The takeaway I intended for this piece is one I’ve expressed before; don’t be afraid to look outside of the traditional world of books for examples of fantastic storytelling. Film, theatre, even television and video games can all provide fantastic examples. Mass Effect certainly does.
Bioware, ME3, MMORPG, Mass Effect, RPG, Star Wars The Old Republic, Writing, swtor | in Writing Observations 
