Top Ten Things That Are Out To Get My Word Count

In no particular order:

• Work: A lazy day at the office can be a fine time for an author to sneak a few words in on the side (but only if you're on lunch break and/or have finished your immediate tasks and are waiting for vital input you can't proceed without, naturally). A day at the office where you've got deadlines breathing down your neck and coworkers screaming for some vital piece of data you've forgotten about, not so much.


• Pets: Nothing stops a good burst of creativity like having a Corgi jump in your lap and throw her head down on the keyboard.


• Writing Groups: My group of choice, www.internetwritingworkshop.org, requires at least two critiques per month for each list you join if you want to stay active (for me that's four crits per month). This sounds trivial, and it is, right up until the end of the month rolls around and you haven't critiqued anything. And your email account has been blacklisted by the list's spam filter.


• Chores: Do the dishes. Do the laundry. Mow the lawn. Take out the trash. Drag the dog outside for a walk. Repeat ad nauseum.


• Commuting: I drive an hour each way to get to work, five days a week. That's ten hours per week of prime writing time I'm losing to the stinking Beltway! I've tried dictating material while I'm driving, but transcription is just as much of a time sink, and a pain in the butt besides. (If anyone knows of some affordable transcription software, pipe up.)


• Exercise: You cannot write while you are on a treadmill, unless you are a much steadier hand than I am. This one gets a pass, since you also can't write while you're in a hospital bed recovering from a quadruple bypass.


• The Internet: A fountain of information, blind rage, and massive time-wasters. There's no shame in admitting that you need to unplug your Ethernet cable for awhile.


• Video Games: I'm pretty sure I was a gamer long before I was a writer, although to be fair, I was a reader long before I was a gamer. Regardless, I have an XBox 360 that literally sucks my free time into its plastic black casing.


• Television: As much of a time sink as video games, but it's possible to ignore this one and get on with the work. (Not recommended, but possible.) Unless of course, you're expected to be paying attention because you're watching with...


• Family and Friends: Who also get a well-deserved pass, because they're the ones keeping me out of the lunatic asylum most of the time. They also provide love and encouragement and a sympathetic ear and patient tolerance. That last one's especially important when I get snippy over the time I've lost to the other nine things on this list.

Runners up included reading, sleeping and eating - one of which I'm going to go do right now. Good night all.

--David

Starcraft II Beta Boogaloo

I blame Facebook for everything.

The kind folks at Blizzard decided some weeks back that they'd be handing out beta keys for Starcraft II on their Facebook page. This meant that at predetermined times, they'd post an image with about 20 keys on it, and everyone following would scramble to type one in correctly before anyone else did. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were jamming keys into a little text bar with every image posted. And for about two weeks I was one of them.

Then I came to my freaking senses and preordered the game at Gamestop, which is the sane way to get in on the beta. (Was? Still is, I think.)

So I run home and I register my beta key, and I start downloading the beta with Blizzard's patented P2P downloading service. What, you thought peer-to-peer was only used by disgusting criminals trying to steal money from Justin Bieber? Well, so does Comcast, which meant it took me about twenty hours to actually download the damn game (including patches).

You are now familiar with the first day of my beta experience.

Now, we have two computers in my household. My personal computer is used for writing, web browsing, email, and playing... older games. It's a fairly ancient... oh wow, I just realized my computer is over ten years old. Granted, I think I've replaced every component in the thing excepting the motherboard, but still. Damn. Anyway, on a lark I try installing Starcraft II on this machine, which can theoretically play the game. And this, as it turns out, is factually accurate. But it plays the game - I'm sorry, it plays the title screen at about one frame per second, and I wanted something more. Something playable.

The second computer is my wife's computer, which is considerably newer and understands terms like "dual-core processing". I install the game on her computer (by copying the install files from my computer - no thank you P2P), and up comes the title screen, giving me a beautiful view of a starship orbiting a planet. "Sweet!" says I, and I make a profile and log in.

And I wait.

The main menu screen comes up. I click on the button to find a game to play.

And I wait.

The game selection screen comes up. I pick out what kind of game I want to play, and the game lets me know that it needs to download some maps. And it downloads about 6% of the first map, has a grand mal seizure and crashes.

You are now familiar with the first two weeks of my beta experience.

I'm still not 100% sure on why I couldn't download any of the maps for this game, nor do I intend to detail the dark and bloody pacts I made to overcome this difficulty. Suffice it to say that after a lot of crash reports, disappointment and shady downloads, I finally got a working set of maps and signed into my first game.

Which played at one frame per second. Before crashing.

My consolation for all of this mess is that my wife seems quite pleased with the 2GB RAM upgrade she got out of it.

The Actual Game

The Starcraft II beta is multiplayer-only, which is understandable, but still a shame, since I was always been more enamored with the single-player storyline in the original game. Still, no sense spoiling the plot before the real game's up for sale, I suppose.

There are still three races that are playable: Terran (humans), Zerg (bug aliens), and Protoss (psychic lizard aliens). The armies have changed enough from the first game that you have to relearn the units, but their basic play styles remain about the same.

I've played ten multiplayer games so far, and have been stomped in every game where my opponent didn't have network problems. The beta testers are a hardened, dangerous lot who've perfected rush tactics to an insane degree. Zerg rushes, Marine rushes, spider-robot-thing rushes, they're all here and perfectly deadly. I'm looking forward to getting killed by some of the larger units eventually, but that will probably have to wait for the full game.

On the positive side, the graphics are gorgeous, the maps are fun to play, and there's a nice social networking setup to help you find regular opponents and friends from real life. The single-player campaign looks to be long and involved, and there should be two more campaigns coming out later as add-ons, which means lots of tasty sci-fi story in between bouts of machine gunning the hell out of vile alien lifeforms.

And in the end, it's Starcraft II. You'll buy it or you won't, and your mind was probably made up years ago. But if you do buy it, make sure you know where to find RAM in a hurry.

--David

Still Alive

So, over two months since my last post. Let's see what I've accomplished in that time:

• I turned 27. Science has decreed that it's all downhill from here.


• My novel pitch was ultimately rejected by the publisher. As rejections go, this one was pretty nice - I got a brief explanation of the reasons (weak opening, not enough details in the battle scenes, the whole series I was pitching for is being reconsidered), and encouragement to submit again, which I fully intend to do.


• My query letter to Maxim magazine has gone unanswered. I may attempt a list submission for phase two.


• I took the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) exam. (Yes, I have a day job.) If I passed, then the CISSP is the premiere certification in information security and I wholeheartedly recommend getting it. If I failed, then I'm not bound by CISSP Code of Ethics and I'll have plenty more to say on the subject.


• I continued to have a life, visit with friends and family, keep the wife and dog happy, and maintain gainful employment.


• I did not get enough sleep.


• I decided to abandon my old blog posting format.

--David

How to Write For Maxim Magazine

Good evening readers,

I thought I'd try something different for this blog post, and walk you through my experiences in trying to write for Maxim magazine. Why Maxim? Because it's a popular magazine with a wide circulation; because their submissions policy is not something a Google search will sort out for you; and because it's damn near Playboy and I thought the T&A appeal might draw a few readers.

Many things seem like good ideas late at night.

Research

The first step in submitting to any magazine is to read the magazine. Editors hate writers who don't actually read the magazine beforehand. It conjures a terrible rage in the editor's heart to read a letter selling them a 20-point guide to knitting doilies, especially when said editor is editing Fangoria.

So to start, I picked up the latest copy of Maxim at my local pharmacy. A brief scan of the cover yielded the following article leads:

-Big Bang Theory's Kaley Cuoco Splits Our Atoms

-Guzzling To Glory: The World Series of Beer Pong

-Sex: Cheat and Don't Get Caught. Women Tell You How

-Global Warming: The Hottest Girls From Australia, Turkey & New Jersey

The magazine has now gotten my attention.

In all seriousness, skimming the magazine yielded the following information:

-Fully one-third of the magazine was devoted to full-page advertisements. If I want to have something I wrote appear in Maxim magazine, I could do worse than to write ad copy.

-A full list of editors is included on page eight, including six I am likely to get in touch with.

-Pages 10 and 12 are a letters page and a jokes page, respectively. While it's not paid work, a good joke or letter could be a potential icebreaker down the line.

-Pages 18 and 20 contain four lists and a how-to guide for bracketing March Madness. Believe it or not, somebody actually writes the lists that appear in many magazines, and are paid to do so. Even better, these writers are not necessarily staff.

-Interviews with actors, comedians and beautiful women feature prominently in the magazine. These are not gigs an unknown freelancer is going to get. At a minimum, a large body of prior work is going to be required.

-Kaley Cuoco nearly killed one of her costars with a Vespa.

-There are feature articles on how to get away with cheating, beer pong championships, and a boxer's mysterious death. Subject matter aside, these all appear to be straight journalism.

I could go on, but I've got enough to figure out my strategy. If I've got a feature-length article floating around that Maxim might be interested in, or a salable pitch, I can try to submit that. If not, Maxim seems to have a high demand for lists that can be used to fill empty page space. Either way, I've got editors I can contact by name. Now all I need are...

Submissions Guidelines

Even though I've read the magazine, I still don't know how to submit anything other than letters or jokes. So, like any good author, it's time to look up the submission guidelines.

My first port of call is Writer's Market, the 2009 edition. This is singularly unhelpful: according to this book Maxim magazine does not actually exist. So it's a quick hop over to WritersMarket.com, which does have an entry for Maxim. Unfortunately it's not much better than, well, nothing: the entry includes an address, phone number, and email address; a brief description of the magazine; and a discouraging Freelance Facts section, which tells me that the magazine has a circulation of 2.5 million and does not respond to multiple submissions.

Now it's on to Google. Out of the results for "maxim writing guilelines", this site seems to be the best, letting me know that Maxim's editors expect a query letter with clips attached. Possibly - the site also wants me to pay $2.99 to acquire the email address I can send said query + clips to, and while that's admittedly have the cost of buying the magazine, it's still more expensive than going to a library or thumbing through a copy at the newsstand while no one is looking.

So at this point I have addresses to submit to, both postal and email; I have a bunch of editor's names to work with; and I have the recommendation "query + clips", which may be accurate or may be a general guideline WordHustler is using in place of actual information. At this point I cannot be sure, so it's time to ask the editor directly.

Since I can't expect a next-day response from any editor on something this low-priority, much less an editor of a major magazine, this post is going to turn into a series, the length of which will depend entirely on what sort of response I receive, whether I can actually write anything that Maxim might want to publish, and whether I can be bothered to keep at it. Stay tuned...

--David

Author's Log

In other submission news, I found out today that I was not accepted for ING Direct's "We the Savers" blog program. This would have entailed $200 a month over the course of a year in exchange for regular blog posts about how I save money using ING's banking services. The length of time I had to put together a submission was about a day, so I'm not entirely surprised; but it's still about 500 quality words that have now disappeared into the ether, because I didn't back up properly. Let that be a lesson learned.

Current Reading

Now working on Brothers of the Snake, by Dan Abnett. It's an odd book, format-wise: it focuses on a core cast of characters (Iron Snakes Space Marines, in this case), but progresses in a series of what amount to loosely linked short stories. I'm looking forward to seeing what the finale is, and how high the body count is going to get beforehand.

Image courtesy of egotastic.com, by way of fanpop.com.

N.

As it turns out, the N. comic book adaptation started out as a series of web videos, available for your amusement. And here they are.



--David