Skip to main content

Scalzi, on long books

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 that until  past may I was happy the month I could write 4000 words.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Isometric camera with Godot

Took some effort and some of my sleep hours, but at last, I made it. Here is my first videotutorial: implementing an isometric camera in 3D, with Godot. Useful if you want to emulate the look of old classics like Fallout 2, but with some extra features. Considering that my voice is not so nice, and my english pronounciation is even worse, I also added texts to help you underestand what Im saying. You will also notice some background noise, but cant do anything to solve that. Any suggestion is welcome. Expect another tutorial soon.... or sor tof. This time, will be about my AI system.

Unity3d isometric camera tutorial

I had pending this since a month ago, so Im forcing myself to post it today. The goal is to provide a fully functional isometric like system that you can use with few or none modifications in your own game. So, lets get started. Start Unity3d and in your scene, add an empty GameObject, we will call it target . Create a camera object and drag it to target to make it child. The result looks like this: Now select Camera and set the values to this: For a true isometric like feeling, ortho projection is essential. You could use perspective, but it is not the same. Play with Size to suit your needs (we will be using this later, when implementing zoom). Now, lets create an script named CameraController, or whatever, and drag it to target GameObject. Lets implement scrolling, the easier part: go to Update() and add the following code: if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.W)) {             dir = UP;         } e...

Tutorial: building a modular character

Building character models with body parts have been an obsession for me in the last weeks. I have googled, asked, googled, and asked again, played with Unity3d editor, tested code, and so on. You can see the result of my work in the previous post . First of all, I have to say that what I achieved is mostly derived from this thread and the sample posted there. My code is a copy&paste of that sample. Also, you can find a more extense solution in this Gamedev.net forum thread . First, lets start with the model, which obviously, is divided in the required sections. Lets say we have head, torso and legs. Each part must be exported to a separate fbx file, but it must include the skeleton. Then, export the skeleton without geometry to another fbx. Im going to assume that you want to instantiate all components, and even player, at runtime, from a  C# script (no Unity editor involved, except for creating prefab an position marker), so, we will place the sections, the skeleton and ...