Raven Oak's Blog, page 74

Interview about Amaskan’s Blood

The folks over at ReadFree.ly interviewed me about Amaskan’s Blood, what’s next, what I do when not writing, and a few other topics.

Feel free to check out the Interview aboutAmaskan’s Blood here: http://bit.ly/1r2SftW

(Monday Night Gaming post coming later today.)

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Class-M Exile Excerpt

The Class-M Exile Excerpt is now up in PDF, ePub, and MOBI formats. You can download it here.

If you like what you read, there are two ways to get the full 80 page novella:

1) You can Join the Conspiracy. Members of the mailing list will receive the full story for free.

2) You can purchase it in late February. Details on that coming in 2015.

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Top 10 Text-to-Speech Fails

When I’m editing writing, what helps the most is to have Scrivener read out loud my novel. Having a computer read it, finds all those annoying typos or mistakes that my brain auto-corrects no matter how many times I read my work.

(If you aren’t sure how to get Scrivener to read out loud, click here.)

While text-to-speech has grown by leaps and bounds since its development, it still struggles with some words.

In the past year, I’ve found quite a few hilarious bugs. I’ll give you the word and then...

Flashforward Friday: Galaxies

This week’s FlashForward Friday: Galaxies.

Photo Credit: Wildlife Learning Center.

The Western screech-owl above is named Zeus. He’s blind.

And he has galaxies in his eyes.

Scientists say that the galaxy look is due to strands of gel that have clumped together to make lines or strands. He doesn’t have an iris either.

Zeus can’t ever be released into the wild, which only makes me feel happier at my freedom. Looking at his eyes, the vastness of the universe stretches before us–all of time and space...

Book Cover Throwback: Howl’s Moving Castle

This week’s Book Cover Throwback: Howl’s Moving Castle.

Before it was an amazing film from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, it was an excellent novel by Diana Wynne Jones. This cover is from the reprint, but I love it so much more than the original, which you can see below the reprint.

Here is the original.

The original makes it feel too much like a horror novel for kids. While there are scary elements to the story, the themes of believing in one’s self and finding beauty in unique things makes...

Giveaway Winners!

Congrats to our giveaway winners, Melissa in Michigan and Matthew in Illinois. They won autographed copies of Amaskan’s Blood and autographed posters of the cover art in the Goodreads Giveaway.

Would you like your chance to win a print copy of the book & a poster? Stay turned as we’re going to have another contest very soon! This one won’t be limited to Goodreads (it’ll be via this site) and it’ll be open to all countries.

Goodies heading to the post office!

The post Giveaway Winners! appeared f...

What I’m… Updates

It’s that time of the month where I’ve updated the What I’m Reading, What I’m Writing, and What I’m Watching for those curiously inclined to check.

Lots of unique reading, zombies, and murder going on!

I also added a new page called What I’m Playing. Rather than focusing on tabletop, which I cover in the Monday Night Gaming series, this will chat a bit about what video games I’m playing.

Happy Reading/Writing/Watching/Gaming!

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Riley the Party Cat

Completely off topic post on Riley the Party Cat.

The Doubleclicks, being the wonderful geeks that they are, called for people to send in cat pictures with particular words for their new video, Cats at Parties.

If you watch the awesome video, you’ll see our wonderful cat, Riley, at 1:03 in (he’s the orange cat with the word EVERY). You’ll also see our friend Elise with her three kittens at 0:14 and Patrick Rothfuss at 1:17.

Watch the vid and then have a party with cats!

The post Riley the Party C...

Monday Night Gaming: Penny Arcade

This week’s Monday Night Gaming: Penny Arcade The Game–Gamers vs. Evil.

Erik gets a bad hand!

If you’ve followed my weekly tabletop reviews, you know I’m a fan of deck-builders. For those who aren’t familiar with the term,Deck Building is a mechanism where players begin the game with a pre-determined set of cards and add & change those cards over the course of the game. Most deck-builders give some form of currency used to “buy” other cards for your deck. The new cards tend to expand the player...

Scrivener Saturday #4

This week’s Scrivener Saturday is on Backups.

If I had a dollar for every time an author lost their project/novel, I’d be rich. We’ve all lost something due to hard drive crashes or corrupt USB drives. One of the things I love most about Scrivener, is the ability to use it with Dropbox to ensure you never lose your writing again.

Scrivener can be set up to do automatic backups:

Choose Scrivener –> Preferences (Tools—>Options in Windows)
When the Preferences window appears, click on the Backup tab...