Brent Knowles's Blog, page 8

Read: “Her Robot Babies”

My short story “Her Robot Babies” is now available over at Perihelion Magazine.

You can read it for free here: http://www.perihelionsf.com/1408/fiction_3.htm

This is my second story that I’ve sold to Perihelion and I’m delighted to be appearing there again!

Definitely encourage you to check out some of the other stories available.

For those of you who need a bit of a teaser, here’s the opening:

“At night we stuff our babies inside microwave ovens.”

Drumheller

After living in Edmonton for over a decade, we finally decided to check out Drumheller. This town sits about three hours drive from us and it is home to loads of dinosaur related stuff, so my kids were pumped to check it out too.

Overall we enjoyed the trip. The drive was uneventful. We particularly appreciated it when the flat prairies became badlands, a welcome change of scenery!



We spent a couple days in and around Drumheller. What was nice about the location is that you can undertake multiple excursions in a day, pretty much everything is close by. We checked out the Royal Tyrrell Museum and several other smaller museums. The Tyrrell was definitely the best of the bunch, and affordable. I could spend days there, I think.



We also explored the badlands a bit, walked across a creepy suspension bridge, climbed inside a dinosaur, visited the Hoodoos (which sadly are almost vanished), and checked out a ghost town.



Drumheller itself was interesting to walk around, but it certainly shows signs of its age. Many of the building are rather run-down and the restaurants struggled to keep up with the large number of patrons. Definitely worth the trip though for the dinosaurs and the history.

San Diego Zoo

Our final big excursion while in San Diego was a day trip to the zoo. I wasn’t overly looking forward to this… I’ve seen some cool zoos before and I’m not very fond of the whole “watching animals in cages” thing.

The Zoo

Overall this was a fun day. Though the day was sunny there’s a lot of shade, especially in more heavily treed areas like the rain forest. There’s so much to see and some neat opportunities like the underwater viewing of the hippos and polar bear exhibits. The park got busy (we went on a Monday) but it was only super congested in a couple chokepoints. For the most part you felt free to move about at your own pace, without being shoved around by crowds.

There were no real negatives. Eating was a bit pricey. Other than that, just keep in mind the zoo is huge, plus there’s other stuff to do in the nearby park. Probably most folk would like to spend two days in this area. We never ended up seeing about half the park — we took the skytrain up to the top of the park and then walked through a large number of exhibits in the morning and then did a bus tour afterwards, to catch anything we missed. I kind of wanted to walk parts of the park we had glimpsed during the tour but we were out of time.

Recommended

This was a good experience.

The kid’s overall verdict was: cool and cool.

Other Stuff

While in downtown San Diego we had two very good restaurant experiences. The first was Brian’s 24, an all day diner style place. We arrived there close to lunch and had a bit of a wait, but it was worth it. The menu has everything on it and the servings were huge and the staff were attentive. Plus Brian’s gives out Wikki Stixs for kids to play with while they await their food. I’ve never seen these before and when I did, I did not think my kids would even look at them. I was wrong. They didn’t want to eat their tasty food, they just wanted to keep playing with the stix!

(If you don’t know what a Wikki Stix is, more info is available on the webpage.)

Another good dining experience we had was at the Burger Lounge. We ended up having a supper there and then lunch on our last day. Again, good food and interesting decor and attentive staff.

Robots for the Win

I’m pleased to announce that Perihelion magazine has purchased my story “Her Robot Babies” to appear in an upcoming issue of their science fiction magazine.

I have written a few stories with robots as protagonists, but in “Her Robot Babies” I delve a lot more into how a robot-only society might function. I am thrilled that the story will be available to read sometime in August.

And if you can’t wait, head over to Perihelion and check out their latest offerings — all free to read.

(I have also sold another story with a robot protagonist living in an equally odd — but quite different — robot society, but I’m waiting for the contract to be resolved before I’ll announce what and where.)

So it has been a good run for the robot stories :)

San Diego SeaWorld

This is part 2 of 3 detailing our recent family vacation. The first entry discussed the great time we had at Legoland.

Downtown San Diego

The first night after leaving Legoland and arriving in downtown San Diego, we took it easy. Our hotel was located near all the public transportation, so I was a bit nervous about how well we would sleep. Periodically a very loud train (the Coaster, I think) would rumble down and shake the hotel. Luckily enough that first night we were all so exhausted from the Legoland experience, that we slept fairly soundly.

The next day though we were up and at them and heading over to SeaWorld. We decided to purchase public transportation passes and we took the train to Oldtown, where, after a few mixups, got on a bus to take us to SeaWorld.

SeaWorld

I did not enjoy SeaWorld at all. My dislike started with the bag search. Yes, before you enter the long line to get a ticket you have to stand in line to have your bags searched. Luckily I had decided not to bring my harpoon gun (this time).

After the search we wandered around a bit trying to decide which of the two long lines we needed to stand in. One was for buying tickets. One was for entering the park after said tickets had been purchased. Eventually we figured it out. We headed to the longer of the two lines.

This was where SeaWorld really tricks you. You think you are about to enter a really lengthy line (and you are) but the truth is that the line is even longer than you know. They do a sneaky redirect around behind the ticket booth and you don’t really notice the redirect until you have stood in line for ten minutes or so. Then when you see it you think, “Well, that’s lame, but it doesn’t look too long.”

Wrong. The redirect is long. Probably as long as the original line. It is just cleverly camouflaged. Had we known how long the ticket line was going to be I think we might have given up and headed back to the hotel to try a different activity (so I suppose there’s a bit of design cleverness at work here).

(In SeaWorld’s defense we went there on a Saturday during probably the peak time of year for the park… it was destined to be busy.)

What was most frustrating about the line was that it was in direct sunlight the entire time… no shade (unlike Legoland which has shade areas built into most of their lineups). Luckily it was a fairly cloudy day. We waited nearly an hour.

The next long line was the ticket check line. This line was not as long as the purchase line but the woman running our line walked away to handle an issue for another customer and we ended up waiting until she came back. People who came after us but had entered other lines got in the park before us. I’d say we waited about ten minutes here.

Once inside the park there were some interesting things to do — like the “petting zoo” where the kids could touch sharks and crabs. But for the most part I was dissapointed. It was crowded and there were not very many areas to just sit and observe things. Almost everything required standing in line. Legoland posted wait times in a variety of places, which allowed you to plan where you went next, but within SeaWorld it was just kind of confusing. We basically wandered about, paid over $20 for a few hotdogs and sat on the ground to eat them.

We did watch the whale show but I spent most of the time feeling sorry for the poor things. Plus the show was kind of boring. I guess I expected them to be leaping through rings of fire or something, to make up for the wait and the crowd. Probably the most fun we had was when we wandered to the back of the dolphin exhibit and got to watch them hanging out with the trainers (pre-show). For some reason they kept on throwing balls at the trainer’s heads while the trainers were busy setting up. That amused me.

There was also poor pedestrian traffic management. When the whale show exited, for example, a band was setup right in the middle of the path, making what was already a congested walk, even worse. Somebody wasn’t paying attention to Design 101.

(Plus a few of the exhibits were closed without any notice. That kind of sucked. Especially when you walked across the park to go to them.)

Not Recommended

I don’t understand why anybody would go to this place (especially after having visited a better designed destination like Legoland).

The kid’s overall verdict was: “lame” and “dumb”.

Vacation – Legoland

We recently returned from a vacation to San Diego and I figured I’d give a quick overview of our vacation — broken across a couple posts as I’m super busy, catching up on what I’ve missed while I was away. We spent about half our time at Legoland and the rest in downtown San Diego, visiting SeaWorld and the zoo, as well as walking the downtown area. This post will primarily focus on Legoland itself.

First Flights

This was our youngest kid’s first flight, so that was part of the incentive of going… to give him the chance to be on a plane a few times. Since we had to take connecting flights (from Edmonton to San Francisco and then onto San Diego), he got plenty of “air time”. Probably enough to last him for a while.

Overall, I don’t think he was impressed by flying; he seemed rather nonchalant about the entire thing. Mostly he just wanted to play on his mother’s iPad. Sigh.

Legoland

The highlight of the entire trip (and the primary reason we went) was Legoland and it mostly lived up to our expectations. There was a lot to explore at the park and it is fairly well designed — plenty of shade areas and though the lineups for individual events were long, they were never overly unbearable. (Plus my youngest let a little girl butt in line ahead of him and was rewarded with a pass that allowed him to go to the front of the line for his next ride, which was cool).

The park itself is built into several zones (pirates, medieval, et cetera) and within each zone the restaurants and activities are themed accordingly. The day the kids went to the waterpark I hung out in one of the restaurants and was able to write most of a short story while enjoying the ambiance.

We stayed at the onsite Legoland hotel and that was a huge part of the fun too. There are activities and entertainment ongoing and building centers and two restaurants. There’s also a pool and at night Lego shows are shown on a large screen. Probably my most enjoyable night was just hanging out in the outdoor restaurant, watching the movie and enjoying a snack while my eldest built a Lego set (while the other swam around).

Each day a special “kid’s safe” was replenished with a new, small Lego toy. The kids loved that.

The hotel also offered early admission to some areas of the park, which meant we could beat the crowds, at least in the mornig.

Recommended

Our kids are (almost) 9 and 6, respectively. I think for our oldest, and even for the younger dude, the rides were a bit tame. Much older than 9 and I’m not sure if a kid would really enjoy them. The ambiance and things to do and see were awesome though. It was fun just walking around the park and checking things out. And there are activities for older kids — our eldest attended a Mindstorms group activity and programmed a robot and thought it was a blast.

Staying at the hotel made the entire experience more enjoyable too. If we needed to we could head back to our room and recharge. I’m not sure if I would have had as much fun if we had to drive back and forth from a hotel.

(Do be prepared to walk… a lot. My poor feet are still recovering.)

Compared to SeaWorld (which I’ll talk about in another post), Legoland was a pleasant experience. There’s actual logic behind how the park is put together and an emphasis on making the experience as fun as possible.

The kid’s overall verdict: “Awesome” and “Wicked”.

Addendum — Leaving Legoland

We foolishly left Legoland on a Friday afternoon, which meant our cab had to fight traffic. It took well over an hour to get into San Diego. It didn’t help that we had a puking child in the backseat. Luckily the cab had puke bags and the driver was awesome. He pulled over at a gas station and we took 15-20 minutes so our kid could recover, before proceeding.

Anyways, in the next couple posts I’ll talk a bit about the rest of our trip to the San Diego area.

Rewards and Incentives…

When I left BioWare, several years ago, I thought my time best spent pursuing a writing career and so most of my “deliverables” were writing related. Each year end I planned what projects I wanted to work on over the course of the next year.

For the most part I exceeded my productivity goals. I wrote dozens of stories and several novels.

But I did not hit my milestones however.

Time and again I failed to sell the number of stories I needed to. After winning a place in the Writers of the Future Contest I became even more aggressive with the milestones I wanted to achieve but after the contest I failed to sell any other stories to “professional” level magazines (professional refers to pay-rate and, generally, visibility, of the publication).

So, what’s my point? Well, first, a digression into game design.

Incentives

Very few (any?) games survive without an incentive-reward structure. The player needs to be accumulating something (whether it be points or a collection of fantastic story moments or cool guns). The player needs a reaction to the actions they undertake — even if that reaction is a horrific death (for their controlled character, not the player). They need interaction and reward and incentives to continue playing.

Games that lack such (or provide poor incentives) tend not to thrive. The player might as well be randomly pounding keys on their keyboard or clicking mouse buttons aimlessly. There has to be some feedback.

So… 2014

During my time working for BioWare I had constant feedback (albeit occasionally of the unpleasant sort) and I always had interesting tasks to tackle and problems to solve. Since leaving I’ve been working for a long time without feedback/incentives/rewards. (I do sell the occasional story but in general the reward aspect has been sparse.)

Last year the lack of any major success started to really gnaw at me (I mean, seriously, I left BioWare in 2009! According to the “plan” I should have sold a novel or three.) For 2014 I needed a course adjustment. I looked at what I had worked on and realized that my Lazy Designer game design books were selling “ok” (and I’m being generous here) and sales of those books were about the only consistent encouragement I was receiving.

I thought the wisest course of action was to finish the final two Lazy Designer books and, when complete, put money into advertising the entire series and try my hand at direct selling, offering some “bonus” material to encourage readers to buy directly from me. I hoped this would work towards building a stronger community, as opposed to resting all my hopes on selling through Amazon.

I also decided to only plan half a year. In June of 2014, I would reevaluate, not only the remainder of 2014, but my future.

June 2014

Yeah, it’s June. Here’s a snapshot of where I’m at with things.

Lazy Designer Game Design Books. I don’t really like writing this, but at this point, this appears to have been a failure. My sales are less now — with all books complete — than last year. In May I had the lowest sales I’ve had in a very long time (though it picked up some for June).

It almost feels like the series is too large… I’m wondering if that has started to deter potential purchasers who cringe at thinking they need to buy all five volumes and do not realize they work well as standalone volumes.
Direct sell has been even more of a failure, especially when the few months I spent writing the bonus content are considered.

Fiction Writing. My reduction in fiction output the past year has created a fairly obvious result. I don’t have much of an inventory of “sold” stories — only two remain to be published. I do have a couple of stories still out for consideration at various markets, but at this point last year I had over thirty.

This year I stopped writing 1000 words a day, for the first time since leaving BioWare. The effect of this is rather noticeable… it takes me longer to get up and running with new work.
On the positive, I did make it through the initial rounds in a couple open calls for novel submissions, but in all cases, the novels were ultimately rejected.


The Danger of False Incentives

I’m fairly dedicated to the working-for-myself thing and so I’ve been clutching at straws, looking for every possible “incentive” I can find. I’ve certainly fallen into a trap at times, pursuing likes/retweets and other social media goodness instead of actually writing; effectively scrambling for any interaction/incentive in the hopes that it might grow my audience. I’m not sure if all that time has been well spent.

I also spend too much time (especially with my novels) following what’s going on with the various publishers and querying and dealing with all the missing manuscripts/e-mails and other stuff that plague traditional publishing.

So… what next?

I don’t know. June is not over yet :)

What I do know is that I’ve spent the budget I set aside to fund my work-from-home. Now, don’t panic, I’m not about to launch a Kickstarter asking for money or anything; my time at BioWare was well rewarded and I could continue self-funding my writing for a while. I’m just not sure if, given the lack of rewards, my sanity will handle it.

Anyways, here are my thoughts on the matter. Be warned, these are rambles. Obviously I am in the midst of some major decision making! And these are (obviously) not mutually exclusive.

A Day Job

For a person like me, who thrives on completing projects and having others interact with, said projects, the lack of success has been… un-fun. At this point I’m seriously considering heading back into the (non-gaming related) workforce. There’s a lot to be said for a constant paycheck (re: incentive) and interaction with other humans.

Improving My Writing

If I am to continue with writing I need to make huge strides towards improving the quality of what I write to sell work more consistently. The biggest failure, on my part, has been that I haven’t branched out enough and built a network of readers/writers to review my work before I submit it. I haven’t been a member of any writing group for over a decade (my last involvement being fairly negative, but that’s another story). I have certainly read many how-to books and review a multitude of writing blogs regularly, but I think I’ve hampered myself by not being more involved with a strong writing group.

Traditional Publishing

I have had some amazing experiences working with certain publications and editors and I value those experiences tremendously. I have also had many negative experiences. Mostly I’m going to chalk this up to my work not resonating with editors, but the number of lost manuscripts and replies over the past few years is staggering. Keeping track of the time spent here, is also sobering. It might not seem like much, but many times I’ve had work sit for months, years, at times and when I query I’m asked to resubmit and the work is “lost” again and again. Frankly, I don’t have the patience for it.

The number of markets I submit to has shrunk drastically — basically those that I’ve previously sold to and a handful of others that have always been timely and competent. Sadly, many of my worst experiences have involved publishers of novels. Given that I would like to actually sell a novel, trimming this list, would be foolish.

Self Publishing

Other than my non-fiction books and story reprints (i.e., stories that had previously appeared in a magazine) I have not self published my work. I have toyed with the idea of publishing my existing long form fiction but have always hesitated here. I’m not entirely sure why, partly, I guess, I have been working towards more traditional publishing for such a long time that I do feel the lack of interest in my work points towards a problem with my writing that self publishing won’t magically fix.

Other Thoughts

I am torn about walking away from writing completely. Last year I plotted a novel that (at the time) I was super excited about. But other commitments (i.e., the Lazy Designer books) kept me from tackling it at the time. Now, I’m not entirely sure if I will pick it up again. I have also recently begun plotting a series for middle-grade readers (i.e., my kids).

Game Development

Regular readers will know that I have dipped my toes into creating my own games using Unity. To this point I have only released simplistic prototypes intended for my kids and these have been beyond amateurish.

I have been working on some other stuff that I have not talked about.

I am tempted to take a concept I have been prototyping and just move it to completion and release it as a free game. However, even a tiny game will take considerable time to complete without any reasonable expectation of a reward. But I am thinking about it. I also have a much larger game that I worked on over the winter that I’m more excited about, but its fairly niche and has several years of development in it before it would be finished (i.e., several more years without any chance of feedback/interaction).

In Conclusion

At this point I think I’ll be reducing my online presence for the foreseeable future. I have been very inconsistent with this blog anyways and I expect my posting rate will decrease further.

If there’s enough interest (i.e., subscribers) I will continue to work on the newsletter (I’m preparing the first issue of that now).

Anyways, enjoy your summer!

Want to Read the Lazy Designer for Free?

I’ve started a newsletter. Well, actually I’ve had a newsletter for a long time but have not really done much to promote it.

My intention going forward is to begin releasing sections from the Lazy Designer, starting with the first book. But before I proceed I’d like to acquire a few more subscribers. So if somebody you know has been wanting to read the Lazy Designer but hasn’t bought it yet, maybe direct them to the sign up form for the newsletter:

http://blog.brentknowles.com/brents-mailing-list/

Let me know if you have any questions. In regards to newsletter frequency, I’m thinking 1-2 newsletters a month to start.

(And I still intend to post content to the blog! More than likely the way this will work is newer stuff will show up on the blog, but revised content — i.e., sections from the books or an edit to a blog post taking into account the comments I received on it — will show up in the newsletter).

Console vs PC?

I don’t think I’ve spoken much about how I play games on this blog beyond mentioning that I strongly disliked the previous xbox and that mostly we play PS3 games (with a bit of Wii mixed in). At one point I was not playing any games on the PC anymore.

Over the past couple years things have slowly started to shift. I started using Steam again and purchasing more games. Then our xbox finally died. When I carted off all the games I had owned for it and its predecessor, I became rather pissed. We owned some fun games and with the console’s demise I knew I would never be able to play them again (unless I bought another flawed xbox). Even buying the xbox one is pointless because it lacks backwards compatibility.

I realized that most of the games the family plays are available through Steam and often at a much lower price. Theoretically Steam will be around for a long time, and we’ll have access to all our games for a long time (unlike consoles which seem to avoid backwards compatibility nowadays). But I kind of likely playing games on the home theater.

Years ago I had tried playing games via PC on the television with poor results but lately I’ve started messing around with it again. I already have a controller kit to use game controllers on the PC. With Steam’s Big Picture mode, full controller interaction is provided.

I think I have found our new console. Almost. The only hitch so far is that my laptop is the only machine we have in the house powerful enough to play games. Obviously I need the laptop for work (and I dislike carting it between rooms) so now I’m looking for a suitable dedicated PC. But I think once I have that, I’ll not be bothering with consoles again. (And to help justify the purchase of yet another computer, I think I’ll setup a proper Minecraft server on it.)

Thoughts? I realize console gaming is very big with many folk out there but there just doesn’t seem to be enough amazing, exclusive, games on console to warrant them, for me.

The Basement Disaster

No, this is not the title for my next novel.

A few weeks ago our sump pump failed and we had a bit of a basement flood. We caught it early and no furniture or possessions were damged, but the insurance guys still decided to tear the carpet out. This is what our basement looks like right now.

It is kind of creepy. And noisy. A person forgets how much noise carpet and furniture absorb.

We also have the pleasure of working with various contractors again, to rebuild. I’m being sarcastic. I have nothing against builders, of course, it just seems to me that most of the ones we end up working with are dreadfully unhappy with their jobs. Take for example the drywall contractor who was replacing the one wall torn out… he spent the entire time complaining that his bosses always underestimate how much drywall he needs. He then listed all the other jobs where they had screwed up and he had been forced to make two trips to get more drywall.

This made me think back to my game design days (doesn’t everything?) and I was hard pressed not to ask him why he did not drive around with a couple extra sheets of drywall, “just in case.” Especially considering how incompetent he said his bosses were. But I didn’t (this is another story but we once angered drywallers working on a previous home and they threatened to smash all the walls to pieces, so I’m a bit more cautious around them nowadays).

Anyways, this is what is going on with me :) Anything new and exciting happening to any of you?