Alexander Freed

Does it meander? Yes. Does it embrace a few predictable patterns and twists? Yes. But it also depicts not only a lushly imaginative SF setting but a set of characters convincingly wrought by that world.

It is beautiful and horrifying and tragic. And if nothing else, you will remember the Lazy Gun.

Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks - Books on Google Play Against a Dark Background - Ebook written by Iain M. Banks. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes...

Iain M. Banks's Against a Dark Background is discounted to $2.99 at the Kindle and Google Play stores.

Banks, of course, is widely beloved and needs little promotion. But AaDB is widely considered one of his lesser works.

I love it. It's one of my favorites.

play.google.com/store/books/...

(My favorite Locomalito project is--and may always be--Hydorah, but I sank plenty of hours into l'Abbaye des Morts, Curse of Issyos, and Toxic Tomb as well!)

The brilliant Locomalito has been making beautifully crafted, totally free, retro indie arcade games for years. He is video gaming's equivalent of the unknown guy in small-town Texas making some of the world's best barbecue.

I really enjoyed original Gaurodan. Definitely interested in the revamp.

Pitch for a young adult romance novel: "My BF Skinner". A young woman dates a student of behavioral psychology at Harvard, but his well-meaning yet manipulative approach to their relationship causes her to eventually split.

...but I'd been envisioning small and cramped (probably ruling out the CR-20), maybe modified from a shuttle of some sort.

Thanks so much! It's a fair question but I'm afraid I don't have a good answer... I don't like to speak to what's not in the text (and I don't remember the specifics).

I certainly wasn't thinking about U-Wings at the time, as the book was written a while before those first appeared...

So lovely to hear! Thank you for reading.

If memory serves, I named the orobird way, way back in the day! What's not to love about them?

I spent way too much time trying to smudge the text!

I'm sure some clever enough person could make an algorithm to reconstruct it based on likely word lengths, but that seems like a lot of work for what I suspect would be a disappointing result.

Saw the Columbo episode "An Exercise in Fatality" for the first time. Maybe not among my absolute favorites but very solid and the Internet consensus is right: Milo Janus is absolutely one of the most loathsome murderers in the series.

Oh, and look what the Google Play bookstore algorithm just threw at me. On sale for $2.99! There are worse ways to spend your money.

Robert Irwin's brilliant novel The Arabian Nightmare is on sale as a Kindle ebook, for those of you who use Amazon.

www.amazon.com/dp/B07RW6VNB4

The book has many merits, not the least of which is one of the greatest set of chapter titles I have ever encountered:

But also because every writer works differently. My guess is that you could run draft comparisons for a dozen different authors and see different patterns in the redlining, revealing a bit of their style.

Everyone finds a process that works for them. Very often ONLY for them.

I do most structural work early, in my outlines, and largely stick to that plan. There are always exceptions, but you won't see whole scenes added / cut every chapter. Or many whole chapters added or cut. Usually, anyway.

Why am I sharing all this? Mostly because I think it's neat.

...but it's not unrepresentative of my process, either.

There are pages lightly touched. There are pages with multiple paragraphs torn out and new ones inserted. No whole scenes added or cut in this section, though--those are rare for me.

Excerpt of a work in progress. I used Word's "Compare" tool to redline everything that changed between first and second drafts.

The changes are slightly more pervasive than usual for me (there are some recurring minor changes that show up a lot, making it look more red than it "should" be)...

But all of that is speculation on my part, and I don't normally keep notes on minor points like that, so I can't confirm or deny anything.

Wish I had a good answer for you but it's been a very long time since I wrote those lines. Your assumptions about Umbara and Salient seem reasonable, and my guess is that the Corporate Sector campaign wasn't referencing any specific continuity (other than the existence of the Corporate Sector!)

Genuinely tempted to (but probably won't) start a book-by-book critique, analysis, and ranking of the non-Beginner Book works of Dr. Seuss.

Reread "I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew" the other day... still great!

So glad it worked for you, and thanks so much for the kind words!

(Seriously, I do not want to overstate my contributions in any way. But it's a neat project and I love a good turn-based tactics game--and they've got a top-tier team of designers, writers, artists, cinematics folk, and so forth. I'm looking forward to playing it.)

Wrong time period!

Thank you so much for reading!

YouTube video by EA Star Wars Star Wars Zero Company | Official Announce Trailer

Pleased that Star Wars: Zero Company has been announced at last! I had the privilege of working a bit with Bit Reactor early in the project and am excited to see where it's all going.

Wonderful team, full of talented and caring people... wishing them the best.

youtu.be/rcxnRaZ6slU?...

You're not recovering more slowly. You're just becoming more thorough!

Nah, nothing too bad. Had to rearrange a few things and cancel a short work trip, but that was inconvenience, not tragedy.

As I age, I am appreciating more and more both how sturdy the human body can be, and how much we take for granted the ways we can strain it.

Doing MUCH better now, thank you! Wasn't anything major but laid me low for a bit.

Been off social media awhile thanks to some travel and health issues. (Not like I'm normally a social media fiend, but usually my disappearances are gradual instead of sudden!) All is well, though.

I wrote probably 80 or 90 percent of the content (plus more that was never released). I'm glad people really seemed to enjoy it while it lasted, and it was a lot of fun to write... a sort of broad, occasionally even funny style of drama that I don't often get to try. I'm genuinely proud of it.