Updates and News! · 8:50pm Jul 10th, 2020
Hey folks! How’ve you been?
I know, I know, I’ve been quiet this week. There’s a good reason for that, actually. and it has to do with out first bit of news here. Basically, I’ve been away from my keyboard and desktop a lot this week. At least, during my working hours.
Sounds odd, right? After all, shouldn’t I be at the keyboard? Normally, yes (and don’t worry, the lack of writing bugs me too). But there’s a good reason: Starforge is coming. And so I’ve been reading through Colony and Jungle all week, getting myself caught up on every little detail and nuance before I start work on the big finale. I’ve finished Colony already, and I’m blistering my way through Jungle at the moment.
By the way, I’ve been doing this with a new ereader (the absolutely awfully named, but otherwise fine, “Boox Poke2) which means I’ve been using the Kindle App rather than my old Kindle (both are still e-ink, however). Anyway, this newer reader has a feature for Kindle that’s quite nice: Estimated reading time. When you start a book, it shows you the average reader time to completion, and then adjusts it to match whatever pace you set.
Jungle? The average was something like 29-35 hours. The thing is a titan of words.
Actually, that’s only one of the amusing things I learned reading through Colony and Jungle this week. The other was … Well, for those of you who don’t read ebooks often, Kindle has a neat feature where readers can highlight passages from books, and if enough people highlight the same passage, a small dotted, light-grey line will show up in everyone else’s copy (if the feature is turned on) to show that people have marked the passage. Originally this was created with the intent of helping folks perusing non-fiction texts find relevant sections (like students searching for a date) but has since become a staple for a lot of fiction readers for favorite quotes, insightful lines, etc.
Anyway, I was both surprised and elated to find Colony now bearing such markers! A milestone I didn’t even realize was there until it arrived, but it did make me feel a nice inner glow to see a number of people marking moments in my work as insightful and worth referencing. Time to see how many I find (if any yet) in Jungle!
That's really cool about finding thos underlined quotes. I usually only see those in Dresden Files (and occasionally Discworld) novels.
Yowch about the open letter backlash. I wish being outraged wasn't so fun and rewarding. I could do with a bit less blinding moral certainty myself. David Brin's book, Existence, touched on this issue.
Great to hear about the progress on ABF. That art looks familiar, and getting cover art from them would be fantastic.
Best of luck exploring Planet George!
It's always nice when you find those signs people like your work.
I was just had that letter pop up on my radar last night and it really did look like a category 8 storm. Glad to hear how things worked out with those mods, always good to hear those parts of these stories.
Subnautica is a great game, glad you're enjoying it. Just never set out on any 3 hour tours in the Minnow there. I think I named my cyclops the Nobody in one playthrough...
Been truly loving Axtara so far. Just about to the point I hate to finish it because that will mean I'll have well finished it...