November 2, 2008

Now I am become Ziggy, the Teller of Stories.

7k words in and I realize I’m not writing this book, Ziggy is telling it. The words roll and flow in my head, pouring out like warm olive oil into a pan. This better be good.

November 1, 2008

writing now.

first day, 4300 words in. did a lot of work on the house today so not as many as I wanted. tired. sleep now. 4 hours sleep last night. need more.

October 26, 2008

Generating a city

So I’m really lazy when it comes to creating cities for DnD, and this book is no exception. a few years back I wrote a samll utility to generate a city from a given xml file full of choices. After attempting to use it to generate some towns, I found it really wasn’t finished and the code was unreadable (it was perl after all, and city generation is complex). So, I’ve rewritten it in Ruby, and while it’s not done yet, here’s a good example of what it’ll produce- see if you can figure out what the madlib words are…

October 20, 2008

Geeked for NaNo

So I’ve been furiously preparing for this year’s nano, and thought I’d share this map. This is from the first part of ziggy’s journey.

October 11, 2008

Ziggy’s exploits

So it’s been several years now since I first created Ziggy, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be writing this year’s NaNoWriMo about him. The storyline will mainly take place before any of the games he was in took place, however some of the events will be retconned into place. I’m looking for bits of storyline and events from the DnD sessions, from IRC, and from the neverwinter nights module. (note at some point I need to decompile the module and strip out some of the backstory.

October 9, 2008

Shameless Virtual Panhandling

So I made the mistake of going to guitar center and trying out a epiphone G-400 on a fluke- I was just looking for a book and stumbled across the lefty. I’d never played one before and messed with it for a few minutes before leaving empty-handed. It got stuck in my head- it felt way different than my pathmaker or strat. A few weeks went by and kept thinking about it.

October 5, 2008

Fretboard Memory

So I’d like to create a simple memory game in Flex, however my brain is stuck in music/writing mode rather than code mode, so I’m going to ask some people I know who are learning flex if they’d like to help. It will start off with 2 modes and a couple options- relatively simple, but in the future might move on to more modes (once I read their code, I may be able to tweak and append on myself).

September 30, 2008

Now that that’s out of the way…

Now that the Guitar books are done (enough to sell at least), I can concentrate on gearing up for NaNoWriMo. I’ve added the little image on the right that links to my wordcount. NaNo doesn’t start until November, so I have a month to get all my ideas down. This year I’ll be writing The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift, a first person narrative of the life story of Ziggy, as told by Ziggy.

September 27, 2008

Guitarist’s Tab Notebook – On Sale Now!

So I’ve sorta been quiet about it on here, but I’m finally done- I’ve written a book! …well, design might be a better word. It was created for guitarists to uses as a journal for keeping tab for songs. I’ve included a link to my storefront on the top so it’ll be easy to find You can also buy a copy here: The storefront will also be used for other books I produce, such as my NaNoWriMo creations.

September 22, 2008

Reading Guitar Tab

So some of you may know that I’ve been working on a second book- this one is music-based. Anyways, I have a few friends who are new to guitar and my book is more or less aimed at them, however some of them don’t know how to read tab- hence this post. So here’s the rundown: e|------------------------------------------- B|--------x---------------------------------- G|--------x-------5---5-7b9r7-5-------------- D|--------x--5h7---7--------------7~~~~------ A|---5/7--x---------------------------------- E|------------------------------------------- The above is a sample of some tablature. Each of the 6 lines represents a string on the guitar, each number represents a fret on that string.