Snowmageddon (?)

The weather people are predicting frozen precipitation for these parts on Friday night.  That's right... the "S" word... the great white horror... the crystalline demons of an icy hell.

SNOW.

One to three inches of it, if you can believe such a thing.  Three inches!

*gulp*

I'll be right here with you guys all the way.  We'll get through these difficult times together.  And when the meteorological nightmare is over, we'll be better men for it.  Stronger men.  We'll be freakin' heroes of legend, like Hercules and Achilles and Duke Nukem.

See you on the other side.

Names of companies

I hate trying to come up with names for businesses.  I'll think I've come up with a good one, and then I'll google it and it turns out to be an actual name for an actual company.  So I can't use it, because I don't want to cause any trouble for them or open myself up to legal challenges and whatnot. 

The result is that I'll end up googling a couple dozen names before finding one that both doesn't suck and isn't currently in use.

What the internet needs is a business name generator.  There are plenty of character name generators out there.  Let's get one for corporations.  The generator needs to only produce names that aren't currently in use by some business somewhere in the world.

Tech guys, get on it!  :D

Mechwarrior is real!

Check it out:

Finally added a new start for Mercury

A beta reader told me the story started out too slow.  He suggested I cut a good bit of the beginning out.  I didn't want to do that, yet I agreed that something had to be done.  So, instead, I'm doing an Ice Monster Prologue type of thing.  I'm adding a new first chapter that will hopefully serve as a hook to keep the reader reading until the action cranks back up again.

Started designing a magic system

I've started thinking about the epic fantasy series I plan to do at some point.  It's just preliminary brainstorming for now--I won't start on the first book for at least a couple of years.  But it takes time for ideas to percolate in my head, so I'm doing some rough sketching.  I want to have a decent magic system, so I'm putting thought into it now instead of trying to rush it later.

In the meantime, I'm trying to write some short stuff, too.  And I'm working my way through the Mercury book, trying to fix its flaws.  Nothing is finished, though, and that's frustrating.  It's one of my weaknesses--I start out strong but fade at the finish.

On the plus side, my Christmas shopping is done.  So there's that.

Winter blues

I tend to get a little melancholy this time of year.  I think I've got Seasonal Affective Disorder.  I try to sit in direct sunlight when possible for as long as possible, but that's not always feasible.  And it's been cloudy and rainy for the past several days anyway.  So I've had the blahs for a while.

So that's why I haven't been very productive.  It's totally not because I'm lazy.  Yeah... it's Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Not laziness at all.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Another crappy update

Firefox updated recently, and now the browser is having problems.  I don't know if it's a memory issue or what, but it's slow and things don't always load.  My Flash Control add-on is now unreliable, too, and I've turned it off.

I'm getting sick of this company constantly screwing things up.  It's like they're trying to drive me into the warm embrace of another browser.  And it may happen.  I may try one of the Firefox forks again.  I tried Pale Moon once, but didn't stick with it.  Maybe I'll try Brave or something.

/rant over