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Thursday, April 18, 2013

Blogging about worldbuilding

I'm talking worldbuilding at Ivy Book Bindings today. While I do get flashes of character and plot in the early stages of storywriting, it's the worldbuilding that I love designing the most, along with the impact it has on human relationships.

This is part of a Book Crush series so I've also listed three of my favourite books - a classic, a recent fantasy (yes, I occasionally read one), and this year's standout (ahem) from my other half.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Computers as movie directors?

Here's a nice reference to Song of Scarabaeus on the Mac Observer. Think about it: what if computers were powerful enough to make a digital movie from a book with no human input necessary?

The computing power of the biocyph in SoS is fast enough to terraform entire ecosystems. I think biocyph could probably handle animating a novel. Whether an Apple Mac could ever do it is up for debate. I'd love to see how a computer handled the musical analogy I used for Edie jacking into the datastream. It's not visual concept, and movies need to be pretty to look at.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Talk about Song

If you're on Goodreads, Song of Scarabaeus has been picked as one of the two reads this month at the Vaginal Fantasy Hangout, which is a segment on the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel from Felicia Day (et al). The YouTube discussion comes in a few weeks but meanwhile you can talk about the book on Goodreads here.

In last month's YouTube episode, Felicia introduced the two books at the end (the other is Ghost Planet by Sharon Lynn Fisher) and not only said both my names correctly but succeeded with her second attempt in pronouncing Scarabaeus (check out 1:07:44 so that you, too, can achieve this rare feat). In my experience that's about three attempts fewer than most people, and I don't blame them. It's a silly word. (Don't even ask what it means.)

I don't actually know how it's pronounced, by the way. It's just how I say it.

As for spelling it... good luck with that. Even my own publisher misspelled it in a promotional flyer (fortunately I caught it in the draft).