A Writer's journey into game development

John Scalzi (author of some great science fiction books, and Hugo winner) has an interesting article about long books and productivity , that I strongly recommend. Pay attention to the comparison in the end, between Scalzi and Moore, and between Scalzi and Martin, in terms of word count. I use to write a few hundred words daily (almost every day, really), reaching 1000 some days. So far, my books range between 45 thousand and 62 thousand words, enough to be considered novels, but too much for most literary competitions, which set the limits around 40k words or 120 pages. I tend to go straight to the action and avoid excessive introspection or ramblings, which usually are up to a 40% of long books text. My friend Yoss says I have a good synthesis capability. To write 100.000 words, a small percent of Jerusalem , and much more than my current average, supposing I had the plot to justify that, I would have to work for about seven months. Which, I think, is not that bad, considering t...

Savior , the first cuban indie game, got featured in an article published in one of the major official news site, Cubadebate.cu. There are no precedents, as far as I remember, because games without any educative components are a sort of taboo for the official media, except for highlighting how bad are they for children. Even when the cuban public can't contribute to the upcoming crowdfunding  campaign, this opens the possibility of more indie projects getting big exposure to the public. The authors agree that cuban players will probably get a pirated copy, and they are totally ok with that. The crowdfunding campaing, on IndieGoGo, will start in October, so, stay tuned, because I will let you know.

September has proven to be an improductive month. Game project is going slow, and the current novel is not going as fast as in August. I still keep my discipline, so I produce three times what I did before, but compared to July-August, I'm under my goal. Coming back to office and an unexpected visitor have introduced some little disruptions in my routine. But eventually I will get used to it and recover. Also, Im trying to get into Android development. Yes, with Java. another language to learn, but this time I hope I can get some benefit from it. I hate the first stages when learning a new technology. I feel like dumb, and everything is hard to underestand. Specially, when the schedule is tight, and many things are against me. Specially, Android requires lot of stuff that are unreachable from Cuba. Even when Google guys have been visiting the country, and they even sponsored a DOTA tournament in Havana, getting the Android SDK is almost impossible. Contradictory. Eventually,...

After some (maybe too many, and still counting) depressing days, Im back to work. By work I mean the office I hate so much. As I said, lot of depressing days, but I managed to finish the fourth book in record time. I have been hitting the wall with all I have, which in this case is only my head. There are four, maybe five years ahead before the readers in my country can enjoy (or suffer) it and I can get paid, so, I have decided to seriously search for some foreign agent. Programming have been relegated a bit, because things are getting complicated. But there are advances too.