Free Software For Writers: Inkscape

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

If you write large-scale fantasy novels, you are probably interested in drawing a map of your imaginary realm. There are several reasons you may want to do this, including:

  • Tolkien did it
  • It helps you understand the geopolitical dynamics of your little kingdoms and theocracies
  • Tolkien did it
  • You know where your characters are when they’re fleeing into the wilderness to escape hordes of orcs or whatever
  • Tolkien did it
  • Your characters can talk intelligently about landmarks, geographical features, countries that don’t figure directly into the action, etc.
  • Tolkien did it

Back when I ran Dominant Operating System(TM), I used ProFantasy’s Campaign Cartographer, which is software intended for use in drawing maps for role-playing game. This is really nice software, but unfortunately, it’s only available for Dominant Operating System(TM) and I never had any luck getting it to run under WINE (“Wine Is Not an Emulator”). So I had to look for alternatives. Enter Inkscape.

Inkscape is a scalable vector graphics (SVG) editor along the lines of Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. It is not specifically designed for drawing maps, but can easily be used for that purpose. Unless you’re a graphic artist, you probably won’t be using it to generate something that looks like these, but you can certainly draw something that you can use as a reference for your own purposes. Then, once you hit the big time, you can hire an illustrator to turn your maps into actual artwork. Of course, you could always hand-draw your maps on graph paper, but what fun would that be? <ROLLS 20-SIDED DIE> Mmm, six. Not so good.

Inkscape can be used to draw anything, of course, so if you’re feeling ambitious, you could use it to design your cover art, interior illustrations, character sketches, etc. (See also The GIMP, which I’ll talk about at some point, but not today.)

Inkscape is available for Linux, OS X, and, of course, Dominant Operating System(TM). Inkscape is only one of many free drawing programs, so if you find that it does not suit your needs, another one might.

“Dragon Stones” Cover

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

I mentioned that for my book Long Before Dawn, I took the cover photo myself. For the Dragon Stones cover, though, I had a bit of a quandary … I could hardly find a dragon and take a picture of it (they’re notoriously camera-shy and tend to eat paparazzi), and I’m not so good at the drawing thing, so I couldn’t make my own picture unless I wanted a stick figure dragon; so I delved into a couple of artwork sites (iStockPhoto and deviantART) looking for dragon illustrations. I ended up working with a group of Italian artists called Red Frog to get a modified version of their vector dragon illustration.

I just finished working on Long Before Dawn (except for getting an ISBN for distribution purposes), so it will still be several weeks before Dragon Stones comes out, but here’s a preliminary version of the Dragon Stones cover:

2053464_cover.pdf

Feedback is welcome!

“Long Before Dawn” Available From Lulu.com!

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

Long Before Dawn is now available from Lulu.com in both print and electronic versions. Huzzah! It will eventually be available from Amazon.com and other booksellers, but that is still a week or two away as I have yet to receive my ISBN. I will post a follow-up when this is ready. In the meantime, if you’re interested in purchasing a copy of Long Before Dawn directly from my Lulu storefront, you can do so here (check the link in the sidebar) or here.

In the past, I’ve made a habit of giving free, signed copies of my books to anybody who asks for one. This is partly because I’m more interested in having readers than in making money (although I wouldn’t turn down big bucks for the movie rights), partly because hardly anybody asks for one, and partly because I’m not really comfortable exhorting people to buy my stuff. (This is why I need an agent.) However, it’s been pointed out that giving away books online could get prohibitively expensive, so I’m going to have to forgo the “free” part, and exhort people to buy my stuff*. I will still be more than happy to sign copies, though. If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Thanks, and happy reading!

*Please buy my stuff. (Maybe if I keep saying it, I’ll get used to it.)

Review: “The Chronicles of Riddick”

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

It’s probably no surprise that “Pitch Black” is one of my favorite movies of all times. Believe it or not, it’s also one of my wife’s favorite movies. (I still can’t quite get my head around that one.) We had never gotten around to seeing the sequel, “The Chronicles of Riddick”, until last week. It was … okay. I kind of figure the studio’s conversation with David Twohy, went something like this:

Studio: Hey, David Twohy, that movie “Pitch Black” was popular and cool! Here is ten times more money to make the sequel!
David Twohy: Hey thanks studio! Now I can buy all kinds of special effects and CGI! Woo-hoo!
<MUCH LATER>
David Twohy: Uh-oh, I spent all my money on special effects and CGI and now I don’t have anything left for a script! Now what?!?!?!
Vin Diesel: Let’s raid Shakespeare.

“The Chronicles of Riddick” put my wife to sleep in about 30 minutes, which is actually pretty good for a SF film. It’s too bad she didn’t stay awake longer because “CoR” actually improves as it goes along (the friends we watched it with may disagree with me) and would likely benefit from a repeat viewing (the friends we watched it with may REALLY disagree with me). As noted above, it’s got some Shakespearean elements (think “Macbeth” in space) and some Biblical elements (which are spoiler-ish, so I won’t reveal what they are). Unfortunately, the bad guys suffer from a Borg-ish “assimilate or die” look and mentality. If your villains are going to channel the Borg, they’d better be scarier than the Borg, and these folks aren’t. Plus they have bad haircuts.

Anyway, the bottom line is: Don’t go in expecting another “Pitch Black” and you won’t be (too) disappointed.

The “Good Old Days”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

Remember when we didn’t have things like

  • Vaccines
  • Visible minorities
  • The Internet
  • Cable television
  • Air Travel
  • Antibiotics
  • Civil Rights
  • Feminism
  • Labor laws
  • Environmental protection

Well now you can relive those glorious days with Reminisce Magazine!

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Yes, this magazine actually does have a web site, although it would seem more appropriate for it to communicate via telegram.

“Reminisce” accepts submissions of true stories from the 30s through the 60s.  If I’m reading their submission guidelines correctly, they don’t pay anything, but if you send them something really good they might send you back a ’57 Chevy model bank that you can use to store coins that you find in your plastic-covered naugahyde-upholstered couch.  (Of course, many times I’ve gotten “paid” in copies rather than currency, so I’m not one to talk.)

Here’s my true story from the 60s:

First, I was born.  Then I lay around and slept a lot.  Then it was 1970.  The end.

Mmm, probably not worth a ’57 Chevy model bank …

Underground with the Mouthless Girl

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

Back when I wrote mostly horror, I accumulated quite a collection of reference books of ghosts, spirits, and various and sundry monsters. (This was before we could just hop on the Internets and pull information out of the worldwide series of tubes.) One of my favorite reference books was The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, which listed literally hundreds of ghouls and beasties from around the world. “Underground with the Mouthless Girl” is about a rather nasty ghost from India called a churel, which is the restless spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. “Underground with the Mouthless Girl” appeared in “The Earwig Flesh Factory” from Eraserhead Press in the summer of 2000.

This story is not particularly gory, but I’ve always considered it one of the most creepy and unsettling things I ever wrote. You have been warned.

The girl catches Michael Osborne’s eye as he comes out of the men’s room. She’s sitting on a tall stool at the end of the bar, with one long, impossibly shapely leg extended toward the floor, like a dancer doing a pirouette. Silky black hair flows over her shapely neck and shoulders with the grace of a waterfall, concealing what her scanty red summer dress would otherwise reveal.

Osborne slides onto the stool next to her; it is inexplicably unoccupied on this noisy, crowded night. She looks at him and smiles. Her skin has a lustrous walnut sheen that goes perfectly with her jet hair. Her eyes are wide and dark and shaped like some exotic nut. For a moment Osborne finds himself speechless.

“Hello,” she says.

Osborne finds his voice before he begins to stutter or babble. “Hi. I’m Michael. You can call me Mike.”

“I’m Madhur.” She has a slight Indian accent. Aren’t they the ones who do all that kinky Kama Sutra stuff? “You can call me …” She looks him up and down. “… anytime.”

Just who is picking up who, anyway?

Continue reading “Underground with the Mouthless Girl” →

Free Software for Writers: Celtx

~ James Viscosi ~ 3 Comments

By now you’ve probably gathered that I write short stories and novels.  Although publishers tend to put formatting restrictions on the submission of these types of manuscripts, the restrictions are usually easy to meet:  Double-spaced, flush left, courier font, wide margins.  Other types of manuscripts–screenplays, for instance–have much more specific requirements.  Although you can try to implement the required format in a word processor, it’s much easier to use software specifically designed for that purpose.  Enter Celtx.

Celtx bills itself as “the world’s first fully integrated solution for media pre-production and collaboration”.  In addition to its screenplay formatting ability, it contains facilities for defining characters, storyboarding, index-carding, and production scheduling, as well tracking props, wardrobes, sets, and cast members.  It even permits collaboration with other users.  I only used Celtx briefly, when I thought I might dabble in screenwriting (an experiment that didn’t last long), but I found it easy and intuitive to use.  Even non-screenplay writers might like it for its organizational power.  I don’t do index-carding or outlining (tried it once and the end result bore no resemblance to the outline), but many authors do.

Celtx is available for Linux, OS X, and that other operating system whose name I can’t remember at the moment.

As a side note, writers who are interested in learning more about Celtx (and about Linux in general) might want to check out episodes 93 and 94 of the Linux Reality podcast.  Episode #93 is an interview with a writer (not me) who uses Linux, and episode #94 is a rundown by another writer who uses Linux (also not me) of various Linux applications that are of value to authors, including OpenOffice and Celtx.

Thanks and happy writing!

“Night Watchman” Review

~ James Viscosi ~ 2 Comments

I stumbled across an Epinions review of Night Watchman today. I was surprised to see this, given that Night Watchman came out over five years ago, but it’s nice to know people are still reading if after all these years. (Yes, it’s a recent review … 1/26/08.) Although the review is not unalloyed praise (3 out of 5 stars), it is positive overall, and raises some valid points that I would probably address if I were rewriting the book now. Still, I think Night Watchman does hold up pretty well for a novel that I wrote when I was about 23 years old. (Never you mind how old I am now.) You can visit the reviewer’s Epinions page here and his home page here.

Long Before Dawn is an even older* book than Night Watchman; I started working on that shortly after getting married, and finished it at the ripe old age of 22. But since Dawn was never published, I’ve had the opportunity to go back and “improve” it a couple of times since completing it. I think that this most recent set of revisions, done to get it ready for Lulu publication, has tightened up the plot and characterizations significantly. We’ll see if the readers (all ten of them) agree!

*In fact, Long Before Dawn is so old**, I originally wrote it using the MS-DOS program PC-Write. PC-Write couldn’t handle a document that long, so I had to split it into three or four files for editing. Ahhh, good times …

**And Long Before Dawn isn’t even my oldest book; there’s one more, older still, called Three Detectives, that I actually had an agent working on for a while. He was never able to sell it, unfortunately. This is a (you guessed it) detective novel, set in Utica, NY, that I wrote after a marathon Nero Wolfe reading session. Perhaps it will see the light of Lulu some day, but I doubt it.

After The Vampires, The Dragon

~ James Viscosi ~ Leave a comment

Although I’m still putting the finishing touches on Long Before Dawn, I’ve already started formatting my next book, Dragon Stones, a fantasy novel about (yes) a vengeance-obsessed dragon. This book was originally slated to be released by the publisher who had put out one of my earlier books, but after waiting seven months for the contract, I’ve decided to withdraw Dragon Stones and release it myself. The quality of the Lulu.com product was a strong factor in this decision.

Side note: I have nothing but good things to say about my editor, who tried hard to get the contracts together for me. Sorry, Karen — maybe we can work together on a project in the future.

To everyone who’s been wanting to read one of my books but was afraid to crack open Crows or Night Watchman, let me just advise that Long Before Dawn is not the book you’ve been waiting for. Dragon Stones is.

It’s Getting There

~ James Viscosi ~ 3 Comments

I’m currently finishing up the Lulu edition of Long Before Dawn. The formatting is just about finished; I think the finished result is looking pretty good. More to the point, so does my wife, and she’s picky. (She won’t actually read the book, because it’s full of nasty gory stuff, but she will comment on fonts, margins, graphics, etc.) I have the latest print edition coming to me; my plan is to read through it as if I were an actual reader, and if I don’t find anything wrong, I will release it for sale. I’m planning to take advantage of Lulu’s ISBN service and make the book available through Amazon.com and other book sellers, so we’ll see how that goes.

Although the book is not yet available, you can get a sneak peek at the cover. In the PDF file, it’s laid out Back Cover/Spine/Front Cover, as if you had put the book face-down on a table in front of you. The photo on the back was taken in a small cave at Cabrillo National Monument in Point Loma, San Diego; the photo on the front is a shot of the moon from our backyard. I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with the blurb on the back of the book, so I do invite comments on how to make it catchier. (As I said previously, self-promotion: Not my strong point.) I realize you might have to actually read the book to know how to plug it on the back, but this way is more of a challenge. 😉