COMICS, CREATIVE, FIRST STORM MANGA, FURRY, RANDOMIZER9.COM, WHATS GOING ON, WORDS, Writing

A Name On Paper

I do put BBQ sauce on my burgers…it’s like HE KNEW

I am old enough to remember when seeing your name in the newspaper was kind of a big deal. I think it has something to do with the idea that lots of people are seeing your name, even if it is alongside a bunch of other kids’ names on the honor roll or the perfect attendance list of your small-town newspaper. Or it could just be a small-town thing, who knows?

I still get a kick out of seeing my name in the newspaper and it has happened a few times since then. I submitted an idea to the “Pluggers” newspaper comic that was used (at right), and made a ‘guest appearance’ in the “My Cage” newspaper comic strip after winning a writing contest on MySpace (remember them?) and was mentioned in an article about First Storm Manga that appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.

We’re the ‘cool’ office

Every time it happened, I would buy a copy of the newspaper and cut out the article or comic in which my name appeared. I even have the My Cage strip hanging in my living room. I admit that it is a bit odd and probably the kind of thing that future generations won’t care much about as newspapers become less relevant in our increasingly connected world, but doggone it, its special to me.

I wrote a story named “San Japanic!” that became First Storm Manga’s first self-printed comic book. I remember smiling when I opened up a copy for the first time and saw “Lead Writer/Editor: Eduardo Soliz” at the bottom of the inside cover. While they weren’t my pictures, and not even many of my words, it was my story.

Art by Mary Mouse of micecomics.com

These days, as I try to get exposure as a writer, I have decided to send stories out to furry conventions in order to get my name out there. I think its a good deal: they want the content for their conbooks, I like writing short stories, and unlike my usual lackadaisical writing schedule of finishing stuff whenever I feel like it, I have a set topic or theme and a deadline to work around.

The first one I wrote was “Bedtime” for SonicCon 2010, but I never heard back from them, so to this day I have no idea if it ever made it into the book…or if there even was a book for that matter. The first one that I know was published was “All’s Well That Ends Well,” a short I wrote for Furry Fiesta that featured their mascot jackalopes.

I remember being at Furry Fiesta and eagerly opening my copy of the conbook after receiving it. I got that warm fuzzy feeling again as I saw my name near the top of page 28 in glorious black and white ink. More recently, “The Hunter” made its way into the AnthroCon conbook, and I once again smiled as I saw my story in print.

It is impossible for me to know exactly how many of the folks that received those books actually opened them up and read my story, but knowing that thousands of folks have it in their possession feels much more real to me than anything I’ve ever put on a computer screen.

There’s just something about seeing your name on paper.

ANTHROCON, Books, CONS, CREATIVE, FURRY, RANDOMIZER9.COM, WHATS GOING ON, WORDS, Writing

Magic Can’t Do EVERYTHING

Magic is pretty cool stuff if you’re a writer because you can pretty much do anything with it. Its almost a requirement in some respects, I can’t imagine writing a story in a fantasy setting without having a magician, wizard, or some kind of creature that uses magic.

Of course, just because you can do everything with magic doesn’t mean you should.

I am currently writing a series of furry short stories that take place in “The Enchanted Forest.” The first one, titled “The Hunter,” may or may not have been printed in the Anthrocon 2012 conbook but that’s neither here nor there. The Enchanted Forest is a magical place where, among other things, one can find a village called Aetherwood, where faeries live and grant wishes to those that can find it. I am admittedly borrowing the idea from “Fantasy Island” TV show, but with more fantasy and more fur! :3

So this is a place where magic exists and the faeries throw lots of magic around to bring the wishes of their guests to life. While the temptation is there to have everything happen with just the wave of a wand, I find that it is much more interesting to put limits on what can be done with magic in these stories.

I’m hoping that it helps prevent me from pulling the old ‘deus ex machina,’ too. If magic has infinite capabilities, then it can be the solution to just about any problem that comes up. This would make for some boring stories if at the end of each story, a character waved their hand and everything went back to normal, like in a TV show where everything seemingly ‘resets’ at the start of each episode. It also means actions can ultimately have no consequences, and as The Enchanted Forest stories are essentially morality tales, there need to be consequences or else the protagonists won’t learn their lesson.

The question then becomes: what limits should be placed on magic? I’ve got the following so far:

Magic can be used to manipulate the land, create plants and even animals, but not people.
While the faeries of Aetherwood can use potions and spells to change their appearance, the color of their eyes does not change.

Granted, that’s a pretty short list, but hopefully more ‘rules’ come to me as time goes on so I don’t pull too many things out of my posterior.

Or I could get off my rear and write a proper ‘bible’ for this world. That’s a topic for another time, though.

Books, CREATIVE, FlipSide Stories, JUST SAYING, One Sheet Stories, RANDOMIZER9.COM, WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT, WORDS, Writing

What the ****

Most of my stories are written for a general audience, and so I try to avoid the use of swear words in my short stories. I also believe that cursing is for the uncreative and unoriginal. Think about it: haven’t we all cussed at one time or another because we “couldn’t think of anything better?” The problem is that there are instances where cursing just works really well and is even expected at times.

Case in point: I am currently writing a story that involves pirates…IN SPAAAACE! Just like any other self-respecting pirates, these scurvy dogs (really, they’re pirate DOGS) spit, belch, don’t bathe, threaten harmless people (or cats as the case may be) and should probably swear like sailors. Thus, I have a few options:

1) Say ‘f*** it’ and use real swear words in my story, which I don’t really want to do.

2) Borrow not-quite-swear-words from other works of fiction, like ‘frak’ from BattleStar Galactica, but I don’t want to do this either because its well, unoriginal, and I know I’m setting myself to get stuck in some “THERE’S NO FURRIES IN BATTLESTAR GALACTICA” debate down the road.

3) Use common words. This method was used often by one of my favorite writers, Isaac Asimov. When a swear was needed, his characters would say things like “Space!” or “Stars and galaxies!”

4) Just make stuff up. This is obviously the hardest one, because I’m essentially inventing new words, and I’d like for them to make sense and not look like a random jumble of letters.

I am going with #3 with a varying degree of success, and who knows, I may invent some new pseudo-cuss words, especially at work, but for now I’ll just have to punt and pepper my story with <SWEAR WORD> placeholders until I think of something better.

Crap.

Books, BUSINESS, CREATIVE, FIRST STORM MANGA, One Sheet Stories, RANDOMIZER9.COM, TECH SUPPORT, The Rules of Tech Support, WHATS GOING ON, Writing

Second Storm

I believe that every creative person has, in their head somewhere, their masterpiece. The Big One, the Magnum Opus, that one work that they believe will knock everyone’s socks off and change the world, or at the least, make them rich and/or famous. One concept that we always preached in First Storm Manga was the idea that your Big One should never, ever, be your first project.

Why not? As eager as you may be to unleash your book, song or artwork onto an unsuspecting world, the fact of the matter is that when you undertake your first major project, you are more than likely going to make mistakes. Thus, you should undertake a similar smaller project that you aren’t quite as emotionally invested in, so when things go wrong, you won’t be discouraged from having borked up your masterpiece.

Thus, “The Rules of Tech Support” is actually my second ebook. My first one was “One Sheet Stories” which was a collection of five of my one-page stories. Nobody bought it, and I also encountered a few slip-ups along the way. I tried using a service called Smashwords which ended up not working as well as I had hoped. Their touted ‘Meatgrinder’ conversion program didn’t quite spit out my e-book the way that I wanted it to look, which was frustrating. I did some research and found a spiffy program called eCub that I could use to convert my text properly to e-book format then upload it directly to Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

That was just one of the lessons I learned while working on “One Sheet Stories” that I was able to apply to the production of “The Rules of Tech Support.” The process went much smoother because I was doing it the second time around and I didn’t make as many mistakes. Time will tell whether it “The Rules of Tech Support” will be successful or not, but on a technical level, I am happy with the result.

Its not that you can’t strike gold on your first try, but the unfortunate reality is that most folks will not, and who knows, that small project just could be the one that makes it big!

CREATIVE, ORIGINAL-GAMER.COM, RANDOM REVIEW, TECH, Videogames, Writing

Reviewing Musings

Reviewing videogames‭ ‬sounds‭ ‬like a‭ ‬really cool thing to do:‭ ‬you get to play games before they are released,‭ ‬you get to keep them if they are downloadable games,‭ ‬and well,‭ getting to play ‬games‭ ‬without having to pay for them is nice, too.‭ ‬I’m not lucky enough to actually get‭ ‬paid to review games‭ (yet‭!) ‬but‭ writing and editing ‬for original-gamer.com gave‭ ‬me the opportunity to attend E3‭ ‬back in July. Totally worth it.

So yeah, on paper, reviewing‭ ‬games‭ ‬sounds like loads of fun,‭ ‬but in practice,‭ ‬it loses a little bit of its luster.‭ ‬When I’m not playing awesome games like‭ ‬Rock Band‭ ‬3‭ ‬or Kirby’s Epic Yarn‭ ‬I’m struggling through crapfests like Power Gig or enduring kiddie games like EyePet.

Yeah. EyePet. That’s hardcore.

The most direct effect of reviewing games is that it has turned playing games into work (albeit volunteer work). Its a mental thing: instead of playing games because I want to, I now play them because I have to. It gets a little annoying at times when I have a stack of games I need to plow through or when I get asked to play games in genres I don’t particularly enjoy such as fighting or driving. The most aggravating bit about the whole thing that it takes time away from games that I want to play, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The first thing I do when I get assigned a new game to review is I write the review’s introduction. I like to have it done before I even start playing, and in my opinion it should give the reader some context in regards to my relation to the game. Is it something I have been looking forward to, or something I’ve never heard of?

When I play a game for review, I keep my laptop handy so that I can take notes while I’m playing it. That way after I’m done playing the game I just have to flesh out the bullet points I have marked down. I’m not sure if I should be admitting this, but I don’t always finish games I review. Usually its because I don’t expect to see anything new after having played a game for so many hours. Let’s be honest, after a certain point, few games really offer anything surprising in terms of gameplay.

One game that bit that strategy in the pants was Gladiator Begins. I played through about 30 days of the campaign, probably about seventy or eighty nearly-identical fights, figured there was nothing else in the game, and wrote my review. I went back to the game and soon discovered that the levels did start to occasionally change up, and upon seeing the box in a store, I learned that there were even fights against animals. D’oh. It was either my fault for giving up on the game too early or the devs fault for taking too long to open up the game’s interesting parts. Probably a little bit of both, oh well.

Writing reviews is a balancing act. On the one hand, I don’t want to look like a fanboy by gushing praise all over a good game, nor do I want to simply verbally vomit all over a bad one for the sake of being entertaining. Great games have minor flaws that have to be explored, and bad games sometimes have good ideas that were not executed well.

Picking out a numerical score can also be a bit of a headache, because I want my score to reflect what I have written. I still read reviews myself, and I get annoyed just like everyone else when the two don’t jive. I go by what the site says on the “About” page, supposedly we work on the ‘bell curve’ model where the middle point is average. Despite the occasional “10” handed out, nobody’s really perfect.

At the end of the day, though, the site editor is the guy that says what goes up on the site, and while I haven’t always agreed with Oscar, I think he’s doing a good job for the most part. Working with him and the rest of the original-gamer.com crew has been lots of fun.

And now, back to EyePet…whee

JUST SAYING, TECH, WORK

Had To Be Aggies…

From the TTI-TDS Department of Texas A&M University:

“Thank you for your interest in the Senior Web Applications Developer position within the TTI – TDS Department. The response to the posting included many qualified individuals with documented relevant education and experience. After an extensive review, it was determined that another candidate would more closely satisfy our immediate need.”

Sheesh, and I thought I was wordy.

CREATIVE, ORIGINAL-GAMER.COM, TECH, Videogames, WORDS

Why So Serious? WHY NOT?

I’ve been writing opinion pieces, game reviews and doing voice-overs for Original-Gamer.com (and occasionally here) for a few months now, and for what its worth, I always try to play it straight. Well, except the voice-over stuff, unless its something I wrote myself, I don’t have much of a choice there. -shrug-

I play it straight because I don’t believe in pandering to the least common denominator. If gaming is an artform that is just now ‘growing up,’ as some claim, then the people that report on it are probably just a few steps behind. As I said at the end of my second article, The Numbers Game: “if we want others to take games seriously, we must take them seriously ourselves.”

But why aren’t videogames taken seriously? Is it because of their relative youth compared to other artforms such as television and film, or is it because of the immaturity of those that cover it? Granted, this is the internet, but there are very few places where videogames are covered without a wink and a snarky attitude. What the gaming press needs is the equivalent of The Wall Street Journal or Variety, but what we’re getting is Mad Magazine.

Now, I openly admit, I don’t practice what I preach: I crack jokes in my reviews and perhaps I shouldn’t ‘write myself’ into them. The latter, I do because think it is important for the reader to get a sense of where I am coming from. For better or worse, my score will be influenced by whether the game was something I was REALLY REALLY REALLY looking forward to or was just something that got tossed into my lap. I think it also helps the reader if they are made aware of my biases for or against the game coming in.

Am I impartial? Admittedly not, but let’s be honest, nobody truly is.

In any event, while I am pointing out the problem, I don’t really have a solution. The best that I can hope for is that the ‘serious guys’ get popular enough to, well, be taken seriously. Now, does everybody have to take gaming seriously? Not really, there will always be a place for the snarks and clowns, and if worse comes to worse I can always go back to joking about how much I suck at fighting games.

CREATIVE, FIRST STORM MANGA

Artists Are Jer…um, I Mean, Interesting People!

I’ve never been in any “leadership positions” in any of my jobs thus far, save for the occasional minion or two that got tossed my way. Thus, being “in charge” (big finger quotes there, I’m just the writer) of our first project at First Storm Manga is a new experience for me.

One thing I learned quickly is that artists are a lot like programmers. We are touchy-feel-y people, prone to being easily distracted, and believe that we are special because what we can do something that not anybody can.

Oh yeah, we can also be jerks…especially that jerky-jerk AUSTIN!

In the workplace, programmer ire is generally directed at management (for example, Dilbert). I am rapidly learning that artist ire tends to be directed at writers such as myself. It also doesn’t help that I am out-numbered.

I am the only person at First Storm Manga (so far!) that does not draw, I could call myself a “pure writer” with an exaggerated air of self-importance if I wanted to sound like an arrogant jerk. I was puzzled for awhile as to why I was getting all the writer-hate from the other guys. Actually, “writer-hate” is a bit strong, it was actually more like “treat the writer like a red-headed stepchild.”

After awhile, though, I figured it out: when doing a manga (or comic), the art is done first, and then the words are slapped on top of it. Thus, the more words I come up with, the more the art is covered up! So, yeah, I guess they have a point. I suppose the occasional barb or two is a small price to pay for seeing a “pure writer’s” story come to life in pictures, though. *smug*

They’re still jerks, though.

BUSINESS, CREATIVE, FIRST STORM MANGA, Manga

San Japanic!

Page 1

Our first First Storm Manga project is a commission: we have been ‘hired’ to create a short manga (a Japanese-style comic book) to promote the San Japan 2.x Japanese Culture and Anime convention. The manga is supposed to feature the convention’s four mascot characters: a bat named Dios (like most folks, I was all, wait, that means “God” in Spanish! I presume its something different in Japanese) a longhorn named Suzaku, an armadillo named Hinode, and a girl named Sana.

The story will consist of all four characters encountering some kind of (hopefully) funny situation as they voyage to the convention. I am the storywriter/editor (because I can’t draw) and we have three different artists working on the project. Its lots of fun working with them, and I think it will come together quite nicely when its all said and done. Click the picture above for the full image, and stay tuned!

CREATIVE, Manga

Super Happy First Storm Manga Group Hey!!

Okay, so I got a little silly with the title…

First Storm Manga is a group of artists and writers that I joined recently. We get together on Saturday nights at the La Taza coffee shop to go over various projects that we are working on for self-publication. Our stuff is going to be done in the manga style of Japanese comics.

Well, the artists, stuff, anyway…since I can’t draw, I suppose that makes me a writer-slash-idea man.

I am working on a project right now, though I can’t say much beyond that. Its neat to have a creative outlet and to meet and work with other Creative Types. Its also like herding cats in terms of trying to keep things organized, and I admittedly don’t make things much easier, but we solider on, and if all goes well, we’ll have something to show for all our work.

I’m pretty excited about it, though, the thought of seeing something I created in words come to life in pictures is an exciting one!

Eduardo Soliz

IT Guy, short story author, podcaster, and furry!

Tag Archives: Writing