I never was much for group projects at school. Assign me a project and I would dive into it, working on every aspect until everything was perfect. Stick me on a group project however and watch me curl up into a shell. The problem with most group projects is that everybody in the group feels like they are smarter and do better work than everybody else in the group. The best group projects were the ones where I ended up with one or two people who didn’t care about the project at all. I was not one of those kids… (read more)

A couple of years ago, I got assigned to a couple of projects at work where I ended up writing a lot of code and scripts. I didn’t know a lot of the commands I needed off the top of my head, so often I wrote what we called pseudo-code before writing real code. Pseudo-code isn’t real code that a computer can understand, but rather a summary of what you want the code to do. For example, if I were quickly sketching out what I needed a script to do, I might write something like “do SQL database query here,”… (read more)

A couple of days ago, my primary desktop computer died. I had some concerns, like long was it going to take me to replace it and how much money was it going to cost me, but one thing I was not concerned about at all was, “is my novel backed up?”

Many years ago (back in the mid-90s), a friend of mine and I started a monthly electronic magazine. The magazine consisted of original short stories and poems. Along with copy editing everybody else’s submissions and assembling all the electronic code, I was also on the hook for contributing a few original short stories of poems each issue. After only a few months, “the well was dry,” so-to-speak. I had already printed all of my previously written stuff, and began to experience writer’s block. And so, late at night, I would go for a walk.

In the original outline draft of my novel, I didn’t tell the protagonist’s back story until chapter three or four. The back story was revealed to the reader through dialogue that takes place between the protagonist and a secondary character. The back story, save for the climax, is one of the most action packed scenes in the book. My professor suggested that I move this scene into the prologue. After completely agreeing with her, I went home and searched Google for information on how to write a prologue. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.