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Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books.

See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.

This chapter is by Jane Yolen, a prolific writer who has authored and/or edited over 300 books. It is also a break from the preceding chapters focused on science fiction. She dives head-first into what it takes to create a believable fantasy world. Just as the other chapters have used science fiction to deliver lessons on plot, dialog, and characters, this one uses fantasy to teach world building.

Note: there is now a GitHub repository for this project. Get the latest code there, including a downloadable Automator app 

After sleeping on this I decided there were a few things I could do better. Having to put raw source in the document was annoying. I looked into several ways to do this, but found Ulysses had the answer.

Ulysses does a lot of things right as a writing tool. But it’s not designed to be a HTML or Markdown editor. It’s also not able to post directly to a blog.

But its export friendly nature makes it easy to build helper apps. So I wrote a Ruby script that will post to a WordPress blog. It’s also fast. It usually takes less than 5 seconds. That’s faster than the WordPress post editor loading time.

On May 27, 2015, The Poisoned Pen, a local bookshop here in the Phoenix area is having a book signing with 17 authors attending. There will also be snacks and giveaway prizes.

Authors attending: Stephen Blackmoore, Beth Cato, Wes Chu, Myke Cole, Delilah S. Dawson, Kevin Hearne, Jason Hough, Richard Kadrey, Michael Martinez, Brian McClellan, Naomi Novik, Andrea Phillips, Cherie Priest, Brian Staveley, Sam Sykes, Chuck Wendig, & Django Wexler

Sometimes I run across an older book that’s usually out-of-print, but has exceptional wisdom locked up in its pages. I found this one at my local Half Priced Books.

See all of my WSF&F chapter reviews.

This chapter is by Stanley Schmidt, an American author best known for his long-running tenure as editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. He uses his editorial experience to explain the maxim “show, don’t tell” with practical examples.

This is something really cool: A writing workshop hosted by an actual working quantum physics lab. I applied back in March, and the acceptance emails were scheduled to go out around the beginning of April. I had started to wonder if it was still going to happen. The website hasn’t been updated and I hadn’t received word of either acceptance or rejection.

This is my weekly fitness updates. I’ll be posting one every Monday for the foreseeable future.

I update a shared iCloud spreadsheet every day. Follow along!

The numbers say this week was a step backwards. I’m disagreeing because of the way I feel. I have more energy and have been sleeping better.

Today’s weight: 192.6 lbs. with a BMI of 28.4.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

I was actually surprised at how much I got done this week. I took a whole day to sort out my taxes, but they’re done and filed. Every time look at the calendar now, I sigh with relief.

After using GitHub to contribute to a project the other day, I got to thinking about other uses for Git. One was to keep a backup of my ~/bin folder. I write a lot of one-off scripts to make my life easier. Most of the time they’re under 20 lines and previous versions aren’t really needed. But sometimes1 I break things. Other times I’ll go back and wonder what the hell was I thinking.

I have a few projects up on GitHub, but it’s more of a “code storage” place than a “get work done” place. But the other night I ran across a project that I could make a quick contribution to. Besides helping out the project, I also learned a few things about how pull requests work. Including how to clone a pull request and work with the pull request author directly.