Well today I spent a few hours trawling around the internet for information on Australian Publishers that publish fantasy novels and what they had in the way of submission guidelines. It was an interesting trawl. I’m sure I didn’t find them all but the majority of them had a strict policy of not receiving any unsolicited manuscripts. They do however accept submissions via literary agents which I found a little disconcerting until I investigated the website of the Australian Agent Association. Reading it I found they were very open about unpublished authors asking any of the listed members(ie. agents) via phone if they want a first snippet of a manuscript. That and they charge nothing upfront for anything even when they agree to represent you, instead taking a commission fee of roughly 15% of author royalties.

There was however one Publisher that had a method for unpublished un-agented(I don’t think thats a word but eh…) writers to get a foot in the door. A friday arena pitch as they call it. Where you could email in a chapter of your story and a editor would read it as long as it was sent in on the friday. Then if they wanted more they contact you for more. I thought that was a very nice gesture of them, never mind I think its also brilliant business. They get to pick from a VAST swathe of people desperate to have a nibble from an editor about their story. All it costs them is a single editor spending their friday reading single chapters of stories.

In other news I’ve picked up the new Creed Album ‘Full Circle’ from the iTunes music store and found myself loving it. It’s that bit grungier than their older stuff, Mark Tremonoti’s guitar solo’s and riffs are as awesome as ever and Scott Stapp once again gives full use of his impressive vocal range. I’ve said it before and I will say it again I love me some 90’s rock and Creed are vintage 90’s rock even a decade after the 90’s has ended.

Moving on I’ve decided this weekend I am going to devote some time to trying to create myself a workspace in the house in either the garage or if I have to the back shed. I need a place outside of my room to devote to pure work. So I can enjoy playing games and other things in my room or elsewhere in the house again and also to help focus myself when I intend to work. If the only thing I do in the workspace is work then it is much more likley I will actually work in the workspace. As opposed to getting distracted with movies, books, msn and other things as I do now in my room when I try to make myself work. Be it drawing, 3-D modeling, writing, coming up with plot or system for a RP game or something else that is work.

Finally, Happy New Years and New Decade to all of you out there. Have a good one and may it be a time of happiness and growing competency

Well hello to all of you out there.

It’s nearly christmas and it should be a super fun one as always with my family. I went and did my christmas shopping yesterday and got all sorts of things for my family. My mother has been cooking up a storm the last week or so and so christmas goodies are piling up in the fridge in preparation for the frenzied feast that will see them consumed in the next week or so. My siblings are all going to be there so its good, my brother and sister-in-law also bring with them their two kidlets, my niece and nephew. I can’t wait to see them on christmas day when they open their presents, always so cute.

The only sad thing really is that another part of the extended family can’t make it again for christmas with the rest of the family. It’s been years since my favourite cousin Stephen and I have been able to hang out for christmas and his crazy wife is also fun to hang with so its sad they can’t make it but I’m sure they will have a good christmas with their parents this year. I’ll have to go visit them sometime so I can see their new house they moved to after I left Newcastle earlier in the year.

Moving on from christmas I’ve also just finished this week gone on a job I bagged for a month. Its not much work but it was good because it let me afford christmas presents this year, once again. God looks out for me, he knows how much I love giving people christmas presents, so I haven’t yet had a point where I have nothing but a dollar for presents. I’ve always been able to buy my immediate family presents

Speaking of work, I also just recently tried my hand at another job advertised at Axxis here in Dubbo. We’ll see if anything comes of it. There is also a advertisment for a job in Newcastle at the RTA call centre there. It’s a traineeship for 12 months or so that gives a cert III at the end of it, I don;t know in what yet but the pay is ok. 26kPA roughly I think, its enough to live on. Anyway, this is a nice sized post so I think i’ll leave it there. Merry Christmas and a Happy new Year to everyone out there in the wide land of internet.

Well hello all of you out there.

It has been a whole since I last did a blog post and I guess I should update the internet about my life. Ive been looking for jobs the last few months and slowly making progress I think. I’m starting to get interviews so I hope I have a job within the next month. Other than that Aion has come out and I have a level 24 templar in it and I am having a blast with it. I just wish more of my friends played it so I could get a group going for fun and hilarity. That was the main reason I loved World of Warcraft. The group play. I had a lot of fun playing with with freinds on the game and doing dungeon runs with them. The Massivly Multiplayer part of a MMORPG is the thing I think I like best of them. Being able to play with 5 freinds or 40 freinds to try and take down some huge epic boss. Aion also has more in depth crafting that WoW and the crafted gear is generally BETTER than any drops of the same level I’ve been getting.

Besides Aion I’m getting along with Anime as well. New season has just started and I’m following a few of the series. Maybe I’ll actually blog about them and do episodic reviews, would do me good probably to have a weekly schedule to write something besides fiction. Also working out how to do pictures and screen capping episodes would be fun to learn as I blog on them. Speaking of fiction writing I’ve decided to basically just treat it like leveling or crafting in a RPG. Time to grind to epic level! As odd as it sounds its a much better philosophy I think I should be taking besides lets do a work of art instantly, focusing more on the hard brain breaking work involved in it than weird airy fairy romanticised versions of bright sunny artwork that I lightly and delicatly create. As Thomas Eddison said about invention 1% inspiration 99% perspiration.

Well I guess that is gonna be all from me for now. I hope to have the second chapter of Tales of Illusia done in the next week so I can post it up o my creative blog. Must, be regular with updates…..Later all!

At the end of the day you’re another day older. Points for musical.

Well today has been yet another day really. The last week has been another week. I know its not very exciting but really I am trying my darndest to not fall into the trap of doing nothing every day. I think I’ve managed to most days do something more than consume. Whether it be do a sketch, look something interesting up, or work on my resume. Lets hope this marverlous trend can continue and that I can also continue to update this blog and my other blog. Really  I think I need to update things like this just to get into the writing swing and flow. My fingers have not typed enough for several years now and I can tell because they start to get tired and a little fumbling after a bit. How I long for the times when I would sit and write 500-1000 words without pause and then look back at it and grin and not have my fingers or wrists/arms hurt. Its just roight dodgey it is. For those that care updates for my boring life. I’m watching and nearly caught up on a show my brother Tesseract introduced me to called Qi(Quite Interesting). A kind of quiz, comedy show, its very very hilarious and also surprisingly informative often. On another note I’ve been trying to get through a map on Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn 5-6 times now and I keep having someone die from just stupid mistakes on my part or sheer freakish luck on the computers part. The last one was a random critical on Boyd by a swordsman who had less than 8% chance to crit and it killed Boyd! How the heck am I supposed to account for freaky luck for the computer when strategising…..*grumble grumble* Bah. Hopefully I will be getting Path Of Radiance tomorrow in the mail and I can go back and beat that game as well. I’m also hoping to entice Stryder into trying the games as I think it would appeal to him as a strategy/tactical game not to mention the story is kinda cool as well and worth following. I always have maintained after finishing Radiant Dawn for the first time that Path of Radiance is a better strategic/tactical game while Radiant Dawn was a much more cinematic and epic on the edge of your seat story telling game with some decent strategy. Finally I’m working back through my Collection of Tamora Pierce books and I might even end up reading Scarlet and Tuck to finish off the Robin Hood in wales trilogy(as I like to call it) by Stephen Lawhead. I wait with bated breath for the next Wheel of Time novel and Wars Between Light and Shadow novel. Two grand epic stories I can barely wait to see the endings of.

But I am fast approaching 500 words for this post so goodo to me for doing a decent post instead of a silly little “I was sad today and had a biscuit” kind of post but I am darn hungry and I’m cooking tonight so, tally-ho!

-Seppy

Well I’m back in my parents house now in Dubbo after moving from Newcastle over the weekend, helping my mother also move my Brother’s various things from Sydney. Lets just say it was a LONG weekend and leave it at that.

I’ve now unpacked most things and restacked my bookshelf to its point of overflowing and have various stacks of books around the room as well. I need another bookshelf but more than that I need a place to put it. I had become very used to having a fair sized room in the house at Newcastle with a seperate little office for my desk and computer as well. I will miss it but hopefully I can not get myself into a bad habbit of doing nothing when at my computer now that I’ve moved back. Hopefully I can keep this blog updated as a hobby along with a million other things I want to do which include writing, drawing, learning the guitar, learning 3-d modeling tools and animation and more. Hopefully I can keep myself busy and get a decent part-time job to pay for more books, anime, games and food/bills.

I just hope I can continue as I’ve begun, having breaks but actually doing things. Peace out lurkers of the net.

-Seppy

Well today has been interesting watching fellow tLegion members working on the new tLegion website. They have managed to do a fair bit of work on it and its looking sexy. Bug has started the pretties up and Meatball is making the pretties have function with the rest of the site. They’ve done a lot of hard work today and as far as I know have been working on it since late morning until now, which is 3am. So props to them.

I’ve just kinda been buzzing around today looking over their shoulders, its hardly a thing I know a lot about, all that code, it just makes my head hurt thinking about it. I’m fairly sure I’m not a coder by nature at all. I don’t tend to have a very numbers approach to creative endevours. I’m more a soft approach. Same way I work in the kitchen for the most part. I will use a recipe as a very rough guideline and take it from there and add in new things that I want, a dash of this a dash of that. I don’t really tend to think in discrete parts for my writing either. Its all very much “this kind of thing should happen, this mood needs to be conveyed” in my head and then I just go from there weaving what I want to happen. Anyway, to make sure I don’t waffle too much I’ll cut this ost short now since its getting close to 3:30am. Not that that means I’ll be going to bed soon but I will cut short a waffle I can feel coming on. Later

-Seppy

Well, I think I have decided to reboot the Fireborn game I am running for my freinds in Newcastle. Since I’m moving back to Dubbo in a few weeks we thought we should move the game to IRC where we can still keep gaming even with the distance between us. I think thats as excellent idea but the disparity between my abilities of writing and speaking to a group are fairly wide. Especially when it involves creativity. The words just flow my from my fingers onto the keyboard and screen whereas there is some sort of mental disconnect between my creative side in my brain and my tongue which speaks the words and plots and descriptions. It’s really weird and really frustrating to know the game is interesting and exciting in my head but being unable to articulate it through speech.

Anyway that is why I want to reboot the current game. It will let me restate what I wanted to do in the first place and I know for a fact I can create a much better mood and let themes come through better with the written word. I also plan on working more closely with players in making their characters this time around and making sure they give me something to tie them into the main plot with, some sort of hook for them, be it a long lost brother, missing mother, murdered girlfreind, work mate that is crazy, anything.

Noblesse Oblige, Please Continue to be a Messiah.

Wow. Just wow. I just felt the need to write something about this episode of rideback. I love where it is going and how it is doing it. The ways may be old fashioned but hot dang are they well done.

Anyway in this episode of rideback we get to see what I would term “A Declaration of War’ in a story like this. Poor Suzuri-chan but I knew it had to be. What got me the most about this episode and why I think I continue to watch anime is they can often pull out a pure gem of 10-20 minutes. This was one of them. When I saw the blood spray I got that sinking feeling in the pitt of my stomach and it evoked just such a raw reaction to the injustice. But that wasn’t all, I could see clearly the story and I gotta say I love where its gonna go. The view of the crowd standing shocked was all I needed. In my own words for a prediction of the next few episodes. “This unjustice shall not go unpunished. The judgement of the righteous will burst like an all consuming flame and consume the wicked…”

Hot Dang you screwed up GGP. The only way to keep control by supressing is never let the people get a public focal point for their blind rage at you. k thx bai thnks for playing GGP.

And I’m very tired…dunno if this is any good or just crap. Just felt the need to write something as I said before.

For anyone who hasn’t watched Rideback…go watch it. Go to www.tokyotosho.com and search for rideback. Download and watch. Fantastic anime series.

Hey guys Im sure you’ve all been wondering what this secret heat I’ve been talking about the last few days is. Well here it is. I have a second blog that will contain nothing but my creative endevours and to usher it in I will be doing a super update challenge today. On the hour, every hour today starting at 7am I will update this new blog with something creative of mine. Including a new story I’ve started writing that has been in my brain for a while. THis will be stuff I have written from yars ago, drawn etc. Some of it will be new, some old but all of it my own work. HEAT D GO.

here is the link.

http://epicillusions.wordpress.com

Hey guys just thought I’d give a post snce I haven’t done anything for a while. The last few days have been fairly good for me. Aside from having my sleep pattern utterly thrown out of whack. In a way it has been good to have alot of time to my self and think about various things. More and more I’m coming to the conclusin that I need to just shut up, stop talking and thinking and just do it. As Nike says. yesterday I finally just actually tried out blender(a 3-d program) for real. And I had alot of fun and learnt alot about it as a made myself a cool little gingerbread man with the help of a tutorial. I don’t know why I never did it before it was SO easy compared to what I thought it would be. I still don’t know much about what I’m doing but I’d never used a 3-d program before and in an hour or two I was able to make from scratch the following.

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v470/Septin/?action=view&current=Gingerbreadman.jpg

Wow now how about I actually do this for like an hour or two a week and I can actually start creating again. I really love creating things but I keep getting hld back by a stupid fear of it sucking. Possibly I need to toot my own horn a bit more, I dunno. But I’m sick of it. So on a very related note. I am working on something I want to start doing very soon. I’ve code named it Secret Heat. My brother Josh will no doubt get that reference. But anyway those who read this, keep an eye on it for the next few days. I’m hoping to have something to show you all.

In other news I need to do work for getting my aus-swim certification this weekend! My parents are coming down sicne my mother is doing the course with me and it is also my birthday this coming sunday, yay me. I get to be old and 22. Well I guess only my mother feels old when she sees her baby is 22. Love you mum.

Anyway thats all from m for now. Remember, keep an eye on this blog. Secret Heat D go!