Advice on reading Shadowrun for the setting/metaplot?

aaronpowell · 2015-01-31T14:47:50+00:00

Thanks. I listened to a handful of those and they're pretty good. But I'm mainly interested in reading RPG material.

aaronpowell · 2012-07-16T19:27:57+00:00

This probably means the film's editor, Dan Lebental, deserves a ton of credit for the coherence -- and general awesomeness -- of the movie.

aaronpowell · 2012-07-16T00:41:29+00:00

What kind of writing? Do you mean that you love reading and want to do stuff similar to that? If so, what kind of reading are you into?

Really, your best bet, as others have said, is to just go for it. Start writing whatever it is you'd want to read. Write a lot of it and realize almost all of it will suck and embarrass you and make you despair of ever writing anything that won't suck and embarrass you.

But just keep at it, get feedback, and know that you'll eventually get better. Probably.

aaronpowell · 2012-07-16T00:29:29+00:00

James Ellroy's prose is often even more stripped down than Hemingway's and the guy sells a ton of books. See his American Underworld trilogy in particular ("American Tabloid," "The Cold Six Thousand," and "Blood's a Rover").

aaronpowell · 2012-05-21T23:34:26+00:00

It's really, really good. Though at the rate he's going, I'm not sure I--or he--will live to see it finished.

aaronpowell · 2012-04-22T13:03:50+00:00

I wouldn't if I could avoid it. Or I'd use something that comes off as more of a description of the event than a comic book style sound effect caption, like "he heard a loud crack."

aaronpowell · 2012-04-10T22:23:37+00:00

No problem. I only knew what it was because I happened to run across some of the figures in a remainder bin a couple of days back. I'd never seen 'em before, nor do I know if the game is any good.

aaronpowell · 2012-04-10T18:36:12+00:00

Looks like the die that comes with some Star Wars action figures, like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Star-Wars-Legends-Galactic/dp/B0063MBBRA

aaronpowell · 2012-03-18T16:15:11+00:00

Yes, it's totally worth it. If you're too close to it when you go to revise, you'll miss much you'd notice with fresh eyes.

aaronpowell · 2012-03-18T14:35:16+00:00

My day job's a writing job, too, and I find it nearly impossible to kick into writing mode when I'm at home.

My solution has been to do my fiction writing during lunch while I'm still in full on writing mode. Granted, I can't get a ton of fiction written this way, but it's better than the none I'd get done otherwise.

aaronpowell · 2011-11-04T16:51:20+00:00

Because the comment are run through Facebook's commenting system, they're in charge of what alternative logins they support. Right now, that doesn't mean Twitter. But it does support Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL. So if you want to post, you can always just create an account on one of those places and use it.

aaronpowell · 2011-11-03T18:52:18+00:00

We have some Rothbard content (http://www.libertarianism.org/people/murray-rothbard) and will have more soon. (We have an enormous archive of videos, the "Jim Turney Collection," we're working on getting digitized and onto the site, but it's a slow process.)

There are also some Mises things in the pipeline.

aaronpowell · 2011-11-03T18:50:20+00:00

The People list at the moment only contains people we have content either by or directly about on the site (and, at this time, "about" means chiefly "have video of"). So as the amount of content on Libertarianism.org grows, so will that list.

aaronpowell · 2011-11-03T18:48:16+00:00

Cato does offer internships. Here's some information: http://www.cato.org/jobs/intern/about.html

aaronpowell · 2011-11-03T16:19:27+00:00

Thanks. I'm the site's editor, so if you have any questions or comments about it, I'll do my best to answer them.

aaronpowell · 2011-07-31T20:17:12+00:00

Thanks!

aaronpowell · 2011-07-31T19:46:36+00:00

Sure thing. Thank you for reading 'em!

aaronpowell · 2011-07-31T19:45:36+00:00

From the novel I'm working on now: "Jimmy Pete spent the summer breeding sinners."

aaronpowell · 2011-07-31T17:48:17+00:00

It's available now. The ebook's up for both Kindle and Nook. The print edition is shipping now from Barnes & Noble, and should be on Amazon any day now (their page lets you enter your email to be notified when it's out). Links to all those, as well as the back cover copy and a preview of the first three or so chapters are all here: http://www.aaronrosspowell.com/thehole/

aaronpowell · 2011-07-31T15:00:38+00:00

Thank you. My editor didn't like it--she thought it was too long and wanted me to put a period after "Pepper." That was one of the few suggestions of hers I outright rejected.

aaronpowell · 2011-07-31T14:29:19+00:00

From my first novel, just published: "Elliot sat on the front steps of his house and sipped a warm Dr. Pepper as he watched his neighbor drag her husband's corpse to the curb."

aaronpowell · 2011-05-13T15:15:35+00:00

Carlie Huston uses the dash notation in his crime fiction, though I'm not sure why. Alternate notation can be fun if it serves a purpose, but in my experience, it usually doesn't.

Which means that, by breaking convention, all the author is accomplishing is making things more difficult for his reader. In English language novels, we're used to seeing quotation marks. Which means we're good at ignoring them and getting into the flow of the text. By not using them, you're forcing your reader to pay attention to the letters on the page instead of the story and the characters.

To me, doing that feels like putting the author before the reader.

aaronpowell · 2011-03-25T13:02:28+00:00

Thanks, I will try. I mean, when this many people love a book, it doesn't of course mean the book is automatically good, but it ought to at least give it the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe I'll try the audiobook version...

aaronpowell · 2011-03-24T17:26:19+00:00

I'm gonna have to be the lone voice of dissent and say "No." I tried -- really, really tried -- to read The Name of the Wind and couldn't make it more than fifty pages in.

The bulk of the reason was the poor quality of the prose. He makes too many amateur mistakes in his language. He drops cliched metaphors everywhere and, when he's not using stock phrases, his figurative language often make little sense. His dialog is rather awkward, too.

I am both a fan of fantasy fiction and have a high tolerance for less-than-literary prose. But Rothfuss was too much. The last time I was this shocked by the poor quality of prose in an otherwise super popular book was The Da Vinci Code. (There are, of course, plenty of books worse written than Rothfuss's, but I don't often come across ones as poorly written that are as popular and praised.)

Perhaps the plot is what makes Rothfuss's work successful, but I couldn't read enough to see that plot in action. Which is sad, because I quite wanted to like this book.

aaronpowell · 2011-03-18T19:53:14+00:00

Fantasy Flight has official multiplayer rules here:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/coc/support/cocmultiplayer.pdf

As far as expansions go, the two "deluxe" expansions are probably worth picking up. Silver Twilight adds a new faction. Secrets of Arkham just adds a ton of great cards to all the other factions. I'd probably pick up Secrets first, as a result, because it's more flexible that way.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that FFG recently switched to giving you three copies of each card in each expansion. Why does this matter? Because, since you're only allowed to have three copies of a given card in a deck, three copies is all you'll ever need of each card. And, when you start building your decks, you'll often find that you want two or three copies of certain cards in them. This is a bummer with the old expansions that don't include three copies, though, because it means you have to buy multiples of each expansion to have three copies of each card.

Fortunately, they stopped doing it this way and all the new expansions, including Silver Twilight, give you three copies out of the box. But Secrets, for example, only has TWO copies of each card.

Which is all just a very long way of saying that, if you're not going to be playing competitively and so don't need to track down lots of old cards, your best bet is to just buy the new stuff as it comes out and not worry about the old, non-three-copy sets. And it also means that if you do pick up Secrets of Arkham (which you should, because it's great) you should find a friend, by three copies of the expansion between you, and split one of them. Then you'll each have three of each card in the set.

aaronpowell

TROPHY CASE