The Fantasy Fiction Formula (Book and Podcast)

When I tell my friends that my writing professor (Deborah Chester) wrote the book on writing genre fiction, I’m being quite literal. Okay, so maybe she didn’t write the book on writing genre fiction, but she wrote a book on the subject, and a darned good one too. It’s called The Fantasy Fiction Formula, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. In 264 pages, Chester walks you step-by-step through the process of writing a fiction novel. If you have stared at a blank computer screen wondering where to start, or started writing a novel only to hit a dead end… (read more)

RobOHara

Wrapping Up Another Semester

Back in January at the beginning of last semester, I created a side blog (write.robohara.com) to track the creation of my novel. The semester’s over and my work on the novel is done, so yesterday afternoon I exported all the posts, deleted the blog, and imported them over here into the Writing category if you want to read them. If you subscribe to email updates for this blog, it’s possible you received a flurry of emails from my website when I imported them. Sorry about that. I got the grade for my novel’s rough draft back last week. I got… (read more)

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Did someone just play a perfect game of Donkey Kong?

Earlier this week, (geeky) news outlets reported that Wes Copeland has achieved a “perfect” game of Donkey Kong with a score of 1,218,000. While the truth of the matter is a bit more complicated than that, it is true that we are not likely to see a higher score on Donkey Kong any time soon. If you’re into classic arcade games, you probably know that Donkey Kong has what is known as a “kill screen” — a point where the game simply crashes. Several other classic 8-bit arcade games (including Pac-Man and Dig Dug) also have kill screens, typically the… (read more)

RobOHara

Random Memory: Duane

The year my best friend moved away, I was forced to make some new ones to fill the void. Riding the bus home from school one day, I found one. Duane and I didn’t have a whole lot in common, but when you’re in third grade, you don’t need to. We both had bicycles and liked playing in the creek. When you’re eight years old, sometimes that’s enough to base a friendship on. It’s been so long that I don’t remember much about Duane. He grew up in Mississippi, and had the accent to prove it. His toys were low-tech… (read more)

RobOHara

Feels Good, Man

Earlier this week I turned in my novel. Not just an electronic copy, but a printed one as well. 261 pages. It felt weird to print something that large and think, “I wrote all of those words.” I don’t think I ever printed out either of my first two books. Even though 52,500 words puts this book closer to a novella in size than a true novel, I’m still pretty happy with the length. It took me two years to write Commodork, which has 59,000 words, and another two years to write Invading Spaces, which has just over 63,000 words.… (read more)

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Theme Upgrade

I spent a couple of hours upgrading my WordPress theme today. I’ve been running the Mandingo theme for several years and I really like the way it looks, but it’s limited to 1024 pixels wide. I plan on adding some new things to my website soon, and to prepare for that I wanted to change from a two-column to a three-column design. Mandingo’s fixed width squeezed the center column so much that things started breaking and I knew it wasn’t going to work. I did some searching this morning and discovered another theme that met my needs: Atahualpa. I am… (read more)

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Almost There!

It’s been quiet around the blog for the past couple of weeks — my apologies for that. I hate writing blog entries that don’t say anything more than “sorry for not writing blog entries,” so I’ll add a bit more. Graduate school has turned out to be more time intensive than I estimated. I’ve spent the past four months writing 50,000 words for my Writing the Novel class. Over the first two months I wrote and turned in the first 25,000 words, and I’ve spent the past two months not only writing the next 25,000 words but also fixing all… (read more)

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Star Wednesday: The Star Wars Storybook

Happy Star Wars Day, everyone — May the Fourth Be With You! I’m pretty sure I stated that my 1977 Bradley Watch was the first Star Wars thing I ever owned. If it was, this was a close second. The Star Wars Storybook was a Scholastic Book that I purchased through my school’s book club when I was in kindergarten. The school didn’t traditionally bring the Scholastic handouts to kindergartners because most of them couldn’t read, but I could, and someone must have provided me with one. On the first page, readers are treated to a “who’s who” of the… (read more)

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Star Wednesday: Dianoga

During the late 70s, there was no such thing as “rarity” when it came to Kenner action figures on the shelves. By 1978, Kenner was manufacturing 3 3/4″ action figures just as quickly as they could. If Walmart didn’t have the figure you were looking for, chances were Service Merchandise, TG&Y, or some other local retailer did. Despite that, there were rarities, or at least figures that not everybody had. Most of these were figures that came bundled with playsets. The Blue Snaggletooth (included in the early Cantina playset) is the most well-known early rarity, but another one that few… (read more)

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The Finish Line!

On Sunday, thousands of people gathered in the streets of Oklahoma City to run in the annual Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, marking the twenty-first anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The marathon has multiple categories including a 5k, half-marathon, and full marathon. The marathon is televised locally, and on Sunday I sat at my writing desk in my living room eating some scrambled eggs and a cinnamon roll as thousands of people pushed their bodies to the limit. Some might say I am pushing my body to the limit in the wrong direction, but that’s… (read more)

RobOHara