Doc Coleman's Blog, page 18

#NaNoWriMo, Day 3

Yesterday was a slow day on theNaNoWriMofront, but I made up for it today. I slept in late today, despite the best efforts of telemarketers and campaigning officials. I’m sure that any moment I’m going to hit the limit of how many phone numbers I can block on my home phone system. I am so sick of the constant interruptions of automated phone calls from strangers for whom I am a demographic rather than a person. After this election is over, I’m going to start campaigning my state and federal r...

#NaNoWriMo, Day 2

Not a lot of excitement in today’sNaNoWriMowriting. It was my turn to drive the car pool to work today, although that came as a surprise when I got to the commuter lock. I didn’t mind having to drive, I just wish I had been given more notice. Needless to say, that meant that I didn’t get a chance to write on the way into or coming back from work.

After work, I decided to go to the county early voting center and see about casting my vote early. The irony here is that the whole purpose of going...

#NaNoWriMo, Day 1 recap

D’oh! I completely forgot to work on my NaNoWriMo diary entry last night. I’ve been planning to do the diary again this year, but last night after I got finished with my writing, I was so focused on what I need to write next, I completely forgot about doing the diary entry. So… I’m starting this year’s diary off a little late… but I had a good day of NaNo yesterday!

This year’s story started off as an attempt to do a twist on a modern fantasy story. The typical trope for modern fantasy has a y...

Northern Mist revealed as The Cross of Columba!

If you’ve been reading along here, you’ve seen me refer to a story that I’ve been writing for Philippa Ballantine and Tee Morris’ Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. I’ve been referring to that story up until now, by the code name “Northern Mists”. Well, no more. Today I can finally reveal the true title, because today the Ministry released Tales from the Archives, Volume 2, Episode 7, “The Cross of Columba”, written and recorded by yours truly, audio editing and sound effects by my lovely wife...

Shifting Gears

I feel as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders! The audio forNorthern Mist is complete and has been turned over to Tee and Pip for Tales From the Archives. At least our part is done. We don’t have good access to music sources, so Tee is going to be doing the scoring for the story. And, of course, they’re going to put their own stamp on the beginning and end of the story. For now,Northern Mist will stay under the code name. Once I get word from Tee and Pip to reveal the name, or that...

The Way of the Gun Kickstarter

Do you long for those lazy Sunday afternoons where every channel on the TV was either a Western or a Samurai movie? When the ultimate showdown of the story was two men standing in the middle of the street, their weapons at hand, staring each other down and knowing that the first one to reach for his weapon was most likely the one who was going to die? Did you ever wish you could combine those two together and see gunfighters facing off under the honorable code of Bushido? We do. And now, you...

NaNoWriMo Approacheth!

The time has come, dear friends, when NaNoWriMo lurks on the horizon. This means you can look forward to posts about my new NaNoWriMo project, and the flurry of posts tracking my progress through the month of November. But I need your help, first. National Novel Writing Month is a great program that is made free to its participants each year, but there are costs associated with the program, and the money has to come from somewhere. I know the economy is hard right now. My wife lost her job 3...

News from the Sound Mines

Great merciful Elisabeth! It’s been three weeks since I’ve had a chance to drop a post over here. That’s way too long in my opinion. Then again, I’m not sure how much I really have to say about what is going on. Our main push is still getting the audio version of “Northern Mist” finished so that we can turn the audio over to Tee and Pip and they can finish it up and release it on Tales from the Archives, and we can stop using the code word “Northern Mist” and start using the real title. But progress has been slow due to health problems, insane schedules, and the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Perhaps I need to adjust my priorities…

If you’ve been following along with the progress bars at the top of the right hand column of the site, you may have noticed that we have been making progress finishing up the audio on “Northern Mist”. The story is broken up into seven distinct scenes, and we’ve now finalized the audio for five of those scenes. Of the last two, one is a short scene that is mostly done and may be finished later today. The other scene is the big climactic scene of the story, the largest of the sections, and the one that needs the most audio depth. We’ve hardly begun on this one. I *think* we should have the sounds we need to go forward, but Kee is the genius when it comes to wrangling audio. The goal is to get it all done and off to the Ministry before the end of the month. We shall see if we can get it done.

A big problem in all this has been our health. Kee has been having lots of issues with her knees. Some days the pain has made it impossible for her to work. Other days she’s been seeing doctors and therapists to see about relieving the pain. We’ve just joined a gym so that Kee can have access to a therapy pool, and that has led to more time at the gym for both of us to try to get into better shape. This is an investment in time that will pay off in the long run, but in the short term it has really tangled up our schedules.

And since we’ve put “Northern Mist” on the front burner, everything else has stopped. That was probably a mistake, but I’ve been trying to focus on one thing at a time in order to get things completed. Instead I’ve essentially run into one roadblock and had everything slam to a halt while I try to work around it, instead of putting time into something else until I can clear the roadblock. There are a ton more Balticon special podcasts I need to put out, and I’ve hardly gotten started working with the audio. But I’ve only got Kee and myself to do the audio editing, so that limits how much work we can get done.

There has been some activity on the writing front. I’ve begun collecting notes for this year’s NaNoWriMo project. There is still a lot of work left to do on it, but I’m hoping to get some help. It also looks like I’m going to be part of an anthology coming up, but that may end up meaning that I’m going to have to write a story for the anthology at the same time I’m trying to do NaNoWriMo. Argh! It does mean that I’m probably going to have to turn down the invitation I got back in June to be part of a Steampunk Anthology. I’ve been thinking about this opportunity for a few months, but I just haven’t been able to come up with a story to tell in that world. This is really cool that I’ve had these opportunities come up for me, but juggling all these projects has really left me strapped for time.

This has also meant that I’ve been unable to start on the second draft of The Perils of Prague. I know I’ve got a ton of editing to do, and some new elements to add into the next draft, but right now it looks like I won’t be able to get started on the draft until next year.

The worst casualties in all this have been the audio productions. The re-boot of Treasure Island and the production of Taming of the Shrew haven’t gotten anywhere. They’re at a dead stop and probably won’t be going anywhere until spring or later. I’m fairly invested in Treasure Island, as I’ve already done a chunk of the narration, and I really want to see that project completed. Taming of the Shrew may be in more danger of getting dropped depending on how things progress with my writing and other projects.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. Hopefully I’ll be back next week with good news. Thanks for staying with me and following my progress.

Great is the enemy of Good.

Things have been progressing slowly of late. If you’ve been listening to me on Galley Table of late, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been talking about the story that I’m doing for the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences for quite a long time. In fact, if I’d done the recording right after I’d finished the story, I could have gotten it out in time to qualify for this year’s Parsec Awards. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

While a lot has been going on, the real culprit here is the drive for perfection. Some really good stuff has been a part of this year’s Tales from the Archives. Just look at the Parsec Awards finalists. I really want to hit that target. I’ve never tried to take a production to this level before. It is a LOT of work, and the going is sometimes slow. The biggest issue has been trying to find the right sound effects to set the scene. We’ve had to get creative with some of the sounds available to us. And even do a little foley work.

While the going has been painfully slow at time, we have made progress. And Kee has crafted some wonderfully subtle scenes in audio. If we’d been willing to settle for just good audio, we’d have been done a while ago. We’re shooting for great. I hope when you finally hear the episode you’ll believe that we’ve really stepped up to the plate. This has been a team effort. I’ve done the writing, voices, and provided direction. Kee has put the sound together and crafted a rich audioscape. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to try and score the work, so we’re turning it over to Tee and Pip to do the score.

So, it’s going to take a little longer, but I think you’ll find that it has been worth the wait.

Along came a logo…

At long last, we finally have a logo for Swimming Cat Studios. For those of you who have been looking at the “Logo coming soon” message up on DocColeman.com and on the Swimming Cat Studios Facebook page, this will surely come as good news. I’ve been working off and on with artist and author Helen Madden, aka Cynical Woman, for over a year now, ever since Balticon 45. In fact, her insights have done a lot to help me shape the current design of the site.

For those who haven’t caught on, Swimming Cat Studios is named in the homage of an old Heinlein quote relating to learning a skill by doing it. i.e. Learning it “the way the cat learned to swim”. While this is a picturesque phrase, and somewhat evocative, I wasn’t really going to throw a cat into a pool to get a signature image. I discussed this with Helen, and she was the one who pointed out that tigers swim. I love tigers. They’re pretty much my favorite of the big cats. So I quickly had a theme for the site, and Helen had some ideas to begin working on the logo.

Over the months, Helen and I traded ideas back and forth, with some delays while Helen worked on other paying gigs, and hustling Girl Scout cookies. And then there was the search for a font. I never realized how much people, read *I*, take fonts for granted until I had to choose a font for a logo and make sure that the rights to use that font were secured. We see so many different fonts every day, that we tend to forget that someone had to work at designing those type faces, and that work is copyrightable. Some fonts are public domain. Anyone can use those, and most of what you see on the web is text rendered in these public domain fonts. Some fonts are available for personal use, but require a licensing fee for commercial use. And then there are premium fonts that you pay for the right to use. Some of these are very expensive, and some are quite reasonable. It can be a real project to find a font that looks good and represents the look you want for your site. That is something that is really important in a logo.

If you have an artistic bent and have a good idea of what you want, it may just be easier to draw the letters for the logo, rather than getting a complete font. This works if you only want those letters for the logo and aren’t going to use them anywhere else. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clear image of what I wanted my lettering to look like, and I wanted more flexibility for future graphics. So, it was a font search for me. Then, when it came to acquiring rights to the font, we ran into another snag. The company that owns the rights to the font appears to have dissolved. We made repeated efforts to contact them and pay the licensing fee, but all of our attempts bounced. We made a good faith effort. We weren’t really sure if we needed to license use of the font, seeing as Swimming Cat Studios really skirts the line between personal and commercial use. Right now, it is pretty much a personal site, but eventually I do hope to be able to use it to sell my writing and to pick up paying voice acting contracts. Someday we may even do paid audio work. Fingers crossed. But so far, all the support for the site is pretty much coming out of my pocket.

Having done our due diligence in selecting the font, we pressed on, and Helen came up with this really wonderful line art for the logo.

I’m not a tattoo person, but this design is cool enough to tempt me to get a tattoo. It has a very cool tribal feel to it. Still thinking about it.

And then we started to talk about color. Good line art is important for any logo, but color will really catch the eye. When we started talking about color, the question came up as to what breed of tiger was in the logo, a Bengal tiger, which is orange, or a Siberian, or white tiger. In the end, the answer became, “Why not do both?” This is the result. First the Bengal…

And then the Siberian…

I hope you’ll agree with me that Helen did a fantastic job on these logos. There will be some changes to the site in the next few weeks as I integrate the logos into the existing layout. Please let us know what you think!