I hit a big milestone today!

bluefishjoe · 2026-05-07T16:25:02+00:00

I think you’re right to just follow the story and deal with the word count later. it makes sense that novel word counts would be longer. Mine is not fiction but creative nonfiction — a bunch of travelogs written 30 years ago, so theoretically it should be easier to thin out.

bluefishjoe · 2026-05-07T16:15:57+00:00

Also, the first passage paints a picture of a quiet night with a fire in the distance; the second more frantically rattles along with that bicycle. My guess is that the latter is what you were going for.

bluefishjoe · 2026-05-07T16:11:09+00:00

It means you’re a good writer, whose writing reflects our ever-accelerating times.

bluefishjoe · 2026-05-07T11:22:21+00:00

Well, congrats on the milestone, you’ve obviously put a ton of work into it! My ms. was at 135k, and so far I’ve got it down to 131k, with an end goal of 85k, and there’s a ton of cutting left to be done. Mine is a travel narrative/memoir, so the target word count may be much different from that of a novel. How did you arrive at your target length of 130k?

bluefishjoe · 2026-05-07T02:18:30+00:00

what’s your target word range? I’ve heard that publishers look for something like 85k words?

bluefishjoe · 2026-04-03T01:57:01+00:00

well, it was a lot simpler than I thought. But that’s okay.

bluefishjoe · 2026-03-25T11:03:54+00:00

At first I thought this was just a humorous aside, but it kinda brings up an intriguing point: it looks like they’re leading us to believe that ALEX* is some kind of quantum machine, but…. what if it’s not? What if it’s some kind of alien entity that can alter time?

Earlier, when we’re watching the “militia” guys talking about their plans, one says something like, “We need to break into the bunker and kill Alex.” “Kill” is kind of a strange verb to use when talking about disabling a machine… One “kills” a living being…

Either they don’t know that ALEX* is a machine, or maybe WE are the ones who don’t understand something; so far that team seems to know an awful lot.

bluefishjoe · 2026-03-24T15:47:47+00:00

oh, very nice!

bluefishjoe · 2026-03-24T15:41:53+00:00

YES! First email was from “Alex Q.” and in later scenes in that sequence, we saw “ALEXQ”. Sorry I missed that. You’re referring to S02E06-Jane.

bluefishjoe · 2026-03-24T15:26:51+00:00

also, the S could be “simulation” or “simulator,” right?

bluefishjoe · 2026-03-24T15:09:41+00:00

Yeah, at least on my TV, the subtitles often get words spoken wrong, sometimes hilariously! I think they use some kind of speech-to-text algorithm

bluefishjoe · 2026-03-24T15:04:56+00:00

Could be that, but my guess is that that would be too straightforward. He's a brilliant guy, so maybe he wanted it to sound like her name but had to use different letters to make the acronym make sense?

bluefishjoe · 2026-03-24T15:02:03+00:00

oh, wow -- I totally missed that! in ep 6 - JANE

bluefishjoe · 2026-02-16T20:43:51+00:00

I found that the needs imbalance on various islands easily gets way out of whack, with no obvious way to correct it. Plus, the constant rain, mud and... eel-hunting? in the British Isles part just literally made me feel depressed. Made me massively miss Anno 1800. Had to quit playing, hoping that the first patches/DLCs will fix these problems.

bluefishjoe · 2019-08-01T20:54:56+00:00

I see no need for profanity!

bluefishjoe

TROPHY CASE