I am soliciting feedback on when and if a follow up session to last month's technical session on setting up a blog would work from AAAWG members.  At this point I am suggesting either Saturday the 20th or 27th of February.  Please drop me an eLine if you are interested and which of the dates would work for you.

The wiki article, which has additional information about location, time, etc., is here: Q-and-A follow up session on How to Set Up and Run a Web Site

Based on the email I’ve received from those interested in attending the “How to Set Up and Run a Web Site for Less Than $125 per Year” tutorial, I think January 16th, from 10 AM to 2 PM (or we have exhausted ourselves) will work.  We will be meeting at Patrick’s apartment complex’s clubhouse (instruction on how to find forthcoming).  Either email me or reply to this post to RSVP.  I will post additional information about what you might want to bring and what I plan to cover.

Update:  I’ve added a wiki article here.

Pelly and Winters bring you the AAAWG notes

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If you are a writer you may have heard of the admonition “kill your darlings“. Read the rest of this entry »

There were eleven people in attendance at last nights AAAWG meeting. Read the rest of this entry »

Prompted by a post by my friend Jenn on Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »

OpenOffice, the open source alternative to MS Office and my writing tool of choice, has released version 3.0.  You can get it here.  A little review of this release can be found here.

I’ve been fooling around with some JavaScript to generate word clouds that I found on the web.  I decided to try it out on “Death’s Harp has One String”.  WordPress doesn’t handle it inline, so follow this link to my wiki to see the the word cloud from DHhOS draft. Its based logarithmic frequency rather than linear, as this produces a more interesting visual distribution of words.

Update:  I’ve posted a new version of the DHhOS word cloud that is case insensitive.  For those care.  Or not.

After hiatus, the Friday link dump is back.  The primary reason for the big gap was a broken export from my del.icio.us account, probably due to the the change from del.icio.us to delicious.com (i.e. the Yahoo takeover).  I’ve created link dumps for the gaps and put them on my wiki.   The other reason was my summer vacation and a trip to Colorado for WorldCon 2008.  After the cut is the link dump for last week.
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Sadly, Gary Gygax, who along with Dave Arneson created the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, has died at the age 69. (Updated: 2008/03/11 2:22 PM) Read the rest of this entry »

I ran across a blog today that vehemently denies that science is faith-based. While this is a tempting position to stake out, particularly in light of the cultural wars raging across the blogosphere, it shows a disturbing misunderstanding of the underpinnings of science and logic.

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Came across an interesting post on MetaFilter on Dashiell Hammett and Red Harvest that led me into this thicket hard boiled links: Read the rest of this entry »

Recently there has been some discussion in the AAAWG about “show rather than tell”. This, in addition to some suggestions about letting the reader get to know the character a bit more before plunging them into the action led me to transform an early paragraph of exposition in “The Shaper’s Daughter” into a dialog scene.
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Trying out the theme Cleaker. I think I’ll have to adjust the font, but otherwise I like it.

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