Monthly Archives: January 2012

January 29, 2012 · 8:47 pm

A tour of the Known Worlds: Venus, Part II

The streets of Puerto Verde are vacant in the heat of the Venusian afternoon, but will come to life after the siesta.

I’m going through the setting of Spacebuckler planet by planet, and this week we’ll linger on Venus for a bit, because it’s more than just a hot and humid jungle. Indeed, if the late 18th century London broadsheets are any indicator, the entire planet is a hive of scheming Spaniards, savage Venusians and pirates of all stripes.

And yet despite the papers’ tendency to stretch the truth…they’re pretty close to the truth when it comes to the Green Planet. After the Pinzon expedition discovered the aurora pathways into the Void and first landed on the Moon in 1492, the Spaniards quickly set their sights on Venus. There, they laid claim to the entire planet — an impossible task given its size, nearly as large as Earth itself, and its trackless jungles.

Then there were the Venusians.

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A tour of the Known Worlds: Venus

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and Tweets and whatnot about writing lately. I had a few things I could say about all that, but I realized I had contributed more than enough to the stew of often contradictory and occasionally maddening advice that would-be writers seem to covet and trade like dog-eared baseball cards.

Enough, I say! Let’s have some fun. Starting today, and until I run out of worlds, I’m going to take this blog on a tour of the solar system — or the Known Worlds, as I call them in Spacebuckler. These aren’t the eight (formerly nine) planets you’re used to. These are the kind of worlds an 18th century Royal Navy frigate would visit…if said frigate could escape the surly bonds of Earth, of course.

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January 16, 2012 · 7:35 pm

Back to writing! (How do you manage it?)

The past few months have been my first experience with trying to write fiction during a full-blown holiday season and while juggling a couple of really big projects at work. The result? The only thing fictional was my progress writing fiction. Not that I have cause to complain. I had a great holiday and I love spending time with my wife and daughter. I like my day job a lot, to the point that only Dan Brown-esque success would prompt me to think of leaving. I have friends and hobbies and home ownership stuff and, well, I’m good with all of it.

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Filed under Books, Writing

January 8, 2012 · 10:17 am

The elevator pitch

I first heard this term back in the early days of dot-com, when I was out in Seattle for the AP covering Microsoft, Amazon and a plethora of startups burning through their cash and primed to flame out. These latter companies, always desperate for capital, never stopped asking for money from investors, honing their pitches down to a mere sentence or two. It’s what the marketing pros call the “elevator pitch” — the compelling pitch for your company, product or offering that can hook someone in the time it takes to ride in an elevator with your target.