A Writer's journey into game development

It is official. Today is the The Bad Luck Day. Started the morning with a trip to the airport, which is no less than an adventure in a city with very few public transportation, specially for places out of the urban perimeter. Useless effort, my friend wasn't allowed to leave the plane, even when it was scheduled to wait 2 hours in the airport. Shit happens. Then got more bad news. I was awaiting for a publisher proposal to publish in USA, which now seems to be vaporware. I contacted another publisher, in Spain, and they kindly accepted to review my books. Now Im in the same place, waiting for an answer. Then I got even more bad news: seems that I have been visiting a couple of  web sites considered as forbidden. Using a VPN to access sites blocked to Cuba (because you can use it to hide where are you going) and reading alternative news are not allowed in my office. This could represent a severe punishment, like loosing my job, or maybe nothing. Im wondering if, to complete the ...

I want to play an RPG. The problem is that there are not many choices. I want something like The Witcher, Dragon Age, or Mass Effect (the first one, before they reduced RPG elements to bare minimum). Lately, large studios are avoiding the genre, and we are forced to rely on indies to get titles that really go back to the roots. The old school RPG is a risk for the big companies, too much work, for a not big enough market. They insist on saturating the market with disposable FPS, and they think that implementing silly features like fights in zero gravity or more Quick Time Events they are being innovative. It is time to face the truth: an FPS is just about following a linear story and shooting at everything, no matter how much you try to disguise it. We only have a couple of studios who dare to face the challenge: Bioware and CD Projekt RED, and their titles are like Halley comet: one each 75 years. Please don't mention Bethesda, with Fallout 4 they proved that they are taking a ...

Saviour, our first indie game, has started its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo . Official site haven't been updated, so I didn't knew about it. They have reached $6861 and the goal is $10,000, so, I guess they will succeed. Anyway, if you can, support them! They are facing hughe challenges, as game development is still a sort of mine field in Cuba.

My friend Victor Hugo (who is a writer, but not the old french writer), brought to my attention this phrase during the interview I made him. Attributed to Pliny the Elder, it means "no day without a line", and it is now my slogan. As I have mentioned before, creating a discipline is essential to become a writer. It can be a mere 300 words, a couple of lines, or simply fixing something.  Doesn't matters the amount, whatever you do brings you closer to your final goal. If you find yourself some day without ideas, perhaps you should try planning ahead the structure of your novel. And of course, taking 2-3 days for resting and letting your ideas to settle  is not totally forbidden.

Orbita Juracán , an anthology of cuban science fiction writers is available on Amazon, and Im happy to say that Im among the authors included. The book features a dream team of writers, from great clasics like Daina Chaviano, Yoss and Bruno Enríquez, to more recent and young authors (Im recent, but not young). In case you can read spanish, I strongly advice you get this book. Haven't got my copy yet, but Im sure that the selected stories are of exceptional quality.

Due to hurricane, I will be awat for a ocuple of dyas. Lets see how much of my old house survives, although forecast models set the probability cone mostly over Guantanamo province. Anyway, hurricanes can change direction at any time depending on athmospheric conditions. We won't know for sure until tomorrow afternoon.

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...