Friday, July 25, 2008

A Word from our Sponsors

Brief update: I received an email from Lulu saying they are endeavouring to fix the printing problem as quickly as they can, so that seems like good news.

Tonight I decided to create an advertisement for What Lies Beneath. If you look directly above, you will see a picture of the northern coastline of Morae with the words Play and Stop loitering about. In this space I have assembled some of the pictures I have created for the Caliban's End wiki (out of beta soon) and put them to music. I put it all together in SwishMax which is a distant cousin of Flash. Most of the pictures were found in Morguefile which permits artists and writers to use the images without fear of infringing upon copyright. Other images were either sent to me by friends or I took them myself. I modified the images in Corel Photopaint which I actually prefer to Photoshop ('Heresy!' somebody cried).

The music came from the Creative Common site ccmixter. The song is called Strange Love and it is by Manolo Camp.

This little video is actually the short version. I amazed how many pictures I have done over the past couple of years; the longer version of this video will include twice as many images as this one!

I hope you like what you see. Just click the Play button to start and Stop when you've had enough. Enjoy!

BTW: If you're wondering how I managed to embed Flash into a Blogger page, check here for the secret sauce.

Cheers, Paul

Friday, July 18, 2008

Going Dark

In software development, there's a phrase to describe periods when no-one hears anything from the code monkeys writing the software and the silence usually suggests a problem- it's called going dark.

Now whilst I haven't gone dark with my writing, things have slowed down a little due to a number of factors (i.e. other things that take up my time):
  1. Work - unfortunately I have to pay the bills somehow and lately work's been the sort of slog that leaves you knackered by the end of the day.
  2. The Caliban's End wiki - this is my wikipedia of the world of Caliban's End and it involves just as much writing. It's coming along nicely but it's far from finished
  3. Printing problems - at the moment, I wouldn't be recommending Lulu.com with the confidence I once had. Hopefully they can resolve the issue before I use another self-publishing company.
Anyhoo, it's all part of the experience. The book won't be available to buy any time soon but I'm determined to make it available before the seasons change again.

On a completely unrelated matter, I thought I'd throw the text of What Lies Beneath into Wordle to see which words I'm using a lot. Here's the result (click on it for a better view):