Search Results for: dragon age

Withdrawing from the Dragon Awards

/ Awards, Controversies / By

So, amid the furor of preparing for a book launch, I’ve had to divert time to another matter. I found out belatedly that The Obelisk Gate had been nominated for the Dragon Awards, basically when I started to hear murmurs that the awards were especially problematic this year. I went to go see what the problem was… and lo and behold, there was my book. No one had notified me I was on the ballot. Apparently not many people affiliated with DragonCon even know the awards exist, or that voting is currently open. So basically I found out by complete […]

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From the Mailbag: The Unbearable Baggage of Orcing

/ 54 Comments / From the Mailbag, On Writing, Thinkythoughts / By

Awhile back I got an email from a reader which asked, “When are you going to write some real fantasy, y’know, with orcs?” This is a paraphrase, because I didn’t get the reader’s permission to quote (I asked, no reply). But I’d say it’s pretty accurate as to its tone and implications, since the email went on to explain that the reader really really liked me and thought I was a good writer, but hated the fact that the stuff I write is labeled “epic fantasy” when it doesn’t resemble Tolkien much. In fact, the reader felt that this was

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Copyediting and Agents and Gardens, oh my!

/ 3 Comments / 100K, Progress, The Industry / By

Been awhile since I posted here, so now I’ve got “diarrhea of the mouth”, as my grandmother used to say. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately: Received the copyedited version of Book 1 last week and have been steadily working my way through it, checking to make sure all my i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. I’ve never seen something professionally copyedited before, so it’s fascinating to see how someone who really knows their English has interpreted my sometimes loosey-goosey language. I’ve learned two things from this: a) that I overuse commas and hyphenated compounds like no tomorrow, and

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A world in which race matters

/ 39 Comments / On Writing / By

I’ve been thinking about this article for the last day or so. I posted a link to it on my Twitter feed yesterday, and saw a few reactions to it that seemed… confused. Part of the problem is that the article gets a little muddled at points, I think because it’s talking about a complicated concept: race as identity, versus race as socioeconomic marker within in the modern (racist) political structure. But part of the problem, IMO, is the misconceptions that readers were bringing to the article themselves. A couple even asked (paraphrase, since I didn’t ask them about posting

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Your groundbreaking is not my groundbreaking

/ 18 Comments / On Writing, Review / By

Note: I will be mentioning a few spoilers in this post. Look away now if you’re not ready for that yet! So, a few nights ago I started Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third game in a franchise I’ve liked a lot over the years. Just for shits and giggles I livetweeted my game for a few hours. Most of the feed is pretty dull — like, me eating dinner while waiting half an hour for the game to finish installing on my XBox’s hard drive. But once I finally got the game going and dug into the character creator, I

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A survey of my recent gaming

/ 45 Comments / Uncategorized / By

And by “recent” I mean “I played it recently”, not that these are recent games. ‘Cause I’m busy, and sometimes it takes me awhile to get around to things. Spoiler warning on all of these, so I’ll put them behind a cut, but these are all old games anyway, so my guess is that nobody really cares about spoilers anymore.

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Gamefail bluescreen

/ 54 Comments / Rantage, WTF World? / By

Apologies, ya’ll. I know you haven’t heard much from me lately. Partly it’s that I’ve been busy; this is the time of year when my day job ratchets up, and since I’m still plowing full speed ahead on the UMSP, I don’t have a ton of spare brain. What little I’ve got has mostly been channeled into stress relief — hanging out with local folks, long meditative walks on snowy evenings, and among other things, gaming. But lately the gaming has been… shall we say, less than fun?

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Predators, the GOP, and you

/ 25 Comments / Controversies, The Mysterious Glowing Box, WTF World? / By

People sick of American politics and American media, you might want to look away from this one. Or not. Also, I reserve the right to use copious profanity throughout this post… because it involves American politics and media. For various reasons on Sunday night — mostly having to do with the fact that I can’t beat that one hidden boss in the Dragon Age 2: Legacy DLC wtf why doesn’t Anders heal faster he’s so damn useless and seriously why is Sebastian even in this game — I found myself watching Predators (2010) on TV. I’d been vaguely interested in

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Identity should always be part of the gameplay

/ 84 Comments / On Writing, Thinkythoughts / By

This is sort of a tangential response to John Scalzi’s “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting. Good article; you should read it… and the comments. Yeah, I know, I usually say don’t read the comments. But I think they’re illuminating, if frustrating, in this case. If you’re not a straight white male, it’s a good idea to understand how even the most liberal of them think. If you are a straight white male, Scalzi’s talking to you; listen. I’ve been playing the hell out of Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 on the Xbox 360 lately. This is partly

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