Author: James Viscosi

Game-In-Progress Review: Siren

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

So I just started playing “Siren” again. This is a survival horror game for the PS2, but with a twist: Instead of mowing down armies of zombies or whatever, you mostly have to sneak around and avoid getting noticed, because if you do, you get killed really fast. (This probably makes it much more like what would really happen if in fact one found oneself in a landscape dominated by ghouls and monsters. See also “The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead“.) Don’t get me wrong — I love the “Silent Hill” series, for instance. But after the first play-through of Silent Hill 3, once I got my hands on what amounted to a light saber, I was hacking even the most fearsome creatures into Jack Link’s beef jerky. That doesn’t happen in “Siren”. EVER.

What does happen is something called “sightjacking”, where you have the ability to tune into the vision of the monsters that are stalking you, allowing you to  see what they see. I can assure you, it’s quite unnerving to sightjack some axe-wielding zombie thing (called “Shibito” in Siren) and realize that it’s looking at the back of your head. The game is quite difficult, even on the early levels, as there are very few clues to help you out, the map doesn’t show you where the hell you are on it (which is sadly typical of real-world maps, but almost unheard of in video game maps), and there always seems to be at least one Shibito sitting in a tower with a rifle just waiting to go all Charles Whitman on you as soon as you pop your head up from behind that fern you’re cowering under. Still, I’m having fun with it so far.

One interesting thing about this game is that all the characters look like they wandered in from a Godzilla movie (no, the real ones, not the one with Matthew Broderick), but they talk like they just got off the boat from Liverpool. I’m not sure who decided to dub Japanese characters with British accents, but the effect is, um, interesting, and more than a little jarring. I’d rather have seen subtitles, but maybe that’s just me.

“Siren” is not a new game. I got it for Christmas in 2005 and am just getting around to playing it now. So it’s not state-of-the-art, but if you like a game to freak you out, you could do worse than to dig this one out of the cutout bin. My preliminary rating is that this game would not put my wife to sleep at all, because she would be afraid that some Shibito might come up behind her and whack her with a shovel.

Free Software For Writers: Scribus

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So you’ve written your book and have either self-published it or gotten it published by a small press (because if your book is being put out by Random House or Tor or HaperCollins, you certainly aren’t reading this), and now you want to publicize it. This is of course going to be your own job, because the publisher isn’t going to do it for you. Some simple ways to make a nice display include making little handouts, colorful bookmarks, or other promotional material that can be easily handed out to or taken away by people who may be interested in your work.

It’s possible, of course, to do brochures, bookmarks, signs, etc., in a word processing program or a publishing application like Microsoft Publisher; it’s even possible to misuse presentation software, such as PowerPoint, for this purpose. However, this is a blurb about open source software, and I’m going to point you in the direction of Scribus. Scribus is page layout software that lets you design a document to your exact standards, positioning each item precisely on the screen. You have exact control over every element of your document in a way that is difficult or impossible to achieve with regular word processors. I’ve used it to create bookmarks with excerpts from various of my books and stories, as well as a small display card for Night Watchman. (Crows was still out of print at the time so I didn’t make a card for it.) This can be a simple way for you to enhance a small store display or signing. Scribus can also be used to create PDF files, including forms that can be filled out.

I wouldn’t really recommend taking advice from me about self-promotion, because I’m not at all good at it, but even I can hand bookmarks to people. Nobody wants to accidentally start reading five pages ahead of where they left off.

Scribus is available for Windows, Macintosh, and (of course) Linux.

A Note About Reviews

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So I’ve decided not to use the boring old A-B-C-D-F scale for rating movies.  Instead, I’ll rate them by how fast they would put my wife to sleep.  For instance, Dragons of Autumn Twilight would put her to sleep in about five minutes.  (This doesn’t count time that she spends awake making fun of the movies before getting bored and falling asleep.)  The “This Puts My Wife To Sleep” scale will go from “Immediately” (J-Men Forever)  to “An Hour” (The Namesake), while the very best (Pan’s Labyrinth) will get a “Didn’t Put My Wife To Sleep At All” rating.

Books don’t put her to sleep, and she doesn’t play video games, but I’ll use the same scale for them.  We’ll just pretend.

A Review: Dragons of Autumn Twilight DVD

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

My wife thought I should write some reviews … I’m probably not a good choice for a reviewer because I like almost every movie I see. I’m a little harder on books and video games, but not by much. Still, it might be fun to play Leonard Maltin (Chef: “That thing just beat the crap out of Leonard Maltin and Sidney Poitier!”) now and then.

So, having just declared that I like almost every movie I see, let me start with one that I didn’t like all that much.

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Free Software For Writers – OpenOffice.Org

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A comment on my last post got me thinking about the software that writers can use to do their work. Microsoft Word is of course the dominant word processing program on Windows and perhaps on the Macintosh, but for those who can’t afford it or (like me) don’t run Windows or Mac, that’s not an option. So I thought I’d do a post or two about other choices that are available.

I do my writing in OpenOffice.org, a free and open-source office suite that includes a word processor (where I spend most of my time), a spreadsheet (which I use to keep track of submissions), a presentation package, a diagramming/drawing program, and a database application. I find the database a bit primitive, but the rest of suite is quite polished, with functionality comparable to Microsoft Office circa 2000-XP. (This is fine with me; I use Microsoft Office 2003 at work and to be honest I think Microsoft Office 2000 was better.)  OpenOffice.org will open files from other office suites, up to and allegedly including Microsoft Office 2007 (if you have the correct plug-in for Office 2007).  I haven’t tried opening an Office 2007 file so I can’t verify this ability.

One of the most useful features of OpenOffice.org Writer is the ability to export directly to PDF, creating a file that (a) will look the same for everyone who views it, and (b) cannot be easily modified by anyone who gets it. This comes in extremely handy for things like electronic manuscript submission and self-publishing (I’m using PDFs in my Lulu self-publishing project).

For the average user, OpenOffice.org is a more than adequate substitute for the Microsoft Office suite.  Power Office users may find that some critical feature that they use is missing, but as OpenOffice.org is free to download and use, there’s no risk or cost to trying it out.  OpenOffice.org s available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, although I would recommend that Macintosh users try NeoOffice instead.  NeoOffice is an OS X port of OpenOffice.org, so it fits in better with the OS X environment.

Laying Out A Book Isn’t As Easy As You’d Think

~ James Viscosi ~ 8 Comments

So I got the printed version of my first stab at a Lulu book and, as a book, it looks surprisingly good — quality binding, nice solid feel to the cover, good weight to the pages, dark and legible text inside. The problem is, the interior looks like one of the manuscripts that I print out when I’m editing. It quite frankly didn’t occur to me that I would need to:

  1. Change the font from courier to something reader-friendly
  2. Add the page numbering and book title in the header and footer
  3. Replace underlining with italics
  4. Insert the sort of pages you typically find at the beginning and end of a book — you know, a little blurb, a title page, a copyright page.
  5. Turn off double spacing, for crying out loud … jeez, what am I, a moron?

Also, the margins are too close to the inner binding, but that’s not on the list of things that didn’t occur to me, because it did. I just didn’t make them big enough. I’m correcting all these things and getting ready to try Lulu Book Revision 2. I expect this one to look nicer, but there will probably be a couple more iterations before it’s ready to go.

For anyone who’s waiting with bated breath for this to be ready (i.e., no one), I’ll drop you a teensy tidbit … it’s a vampire novel set in the mid or late 90s. It was actually written in the early 90s, but later updated to account for the newfound popularity of cell phones. (I am not, however, going to be updating it to account for wireless Internet, camera phones, etc. I have to draw the line somewhere.)

my diry of destrukshun

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

hello nice reederz its dennis the vizsla dog hay gess whut my dada is giving me my own blog isnt that neet its at http://dennisthevizsla.wordpress.com so yoo can follow all my ad … advench … all the trouble i get in ther now i mite even let tucker and trixie and even dada rite sumthing ther becuz thats the kind of dog i am ennyway see yoo over at the new site ill be ther licking myself ok bye

That First Step Is A Lulu

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

So seeing as the mainstream publishing world has never quite known what to do with me — I have a portfolio of rejection letters eight inches thick full of comments like “highly enjoyable but we have no idea how to market it” and “skillfully written, but not everyone wants to read The Books of Blood by Clive Barker” (I used to get compared to Mr. Barker fairly regularly) — I’ve decided to bypass them and start publishing books myself, with the first one being that old standby, the vampire novel, coming soon via Lulu. Watch for Long Before Dawn to be available in the next few weeks.

I’ve set up a small homepage at Lulu which for now will serve as my main writing, media, and publishing-related site, although I’ll likely continue to cross-post material here … assuming Dennis lets me sit at the keyboard every now and then.

The Crows Caught Up With Me

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

I’m not sure if they’re looking for royalties from A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder (hey, guys, I made hardly any money off it), or if they want to have a chat with me about how the crows were portrayed (call my agent … oh, wait, I don’t have one anymore), or if there’s just a lot of yummy garbage in the neighborhood.  Let’s hope it’s that last one.

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“Me and the boys would like to talk with you about that book you named after us …”

Nuts A-Poppin

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So last night I cooked chestnuts in the toaster oven. Evidently you’re supposed to cut an “X” in them before you roast them, and if you don’t, they eventually start exploding, spraying shrapnel (bits of shell and meat) over a wide area. Who knew? (Besides the instruction label on the container, I mean. But who reads those things?)
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