Cris Game

If I remember correctly, yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my career as a novelist.  (Or, more specifically, when I put my first novel on sale.) It's hard to believe how fast time flies and how quickly things have changed - all for the better, in my opinion. Bearing that in mind, I thought it was worth a quick look back to see what a difference a year makes. Books Published The natural assumption is that I started off with one book published. In truth, I published two books -  Warden (Book 1)  and  Sensation  - in such close proximity that it's almost like I started off with a double bang.  (This was more by accident than design: I used the service Amazon offers on CreateSpace to format my first book for Kindle, but it took about 6 weeks. By the time the first book was ready for Kindle, I had finished the second and had it ready as well.) Anyway, fast-forward a year and I've got 7 books under my belt: four in my Kid Sensation series (plus a boxed se...

Update (Aug. 24, 2014): Squidoo is shutting down! Roughly a week ago Squidoo's founder released a statement that the site is going the way of the dodo and will be selling it's content to rival HubPages. It's not a huge surprise if you were familiar with some of the things that were going on there (such as what's noted in my previous blog post ), but I feel sorry for all the people who devoted hundreds or thousands of man-hours to the site - especially in the past year or so. Update (Aug. 30, 2016): It appears that WebAnswers has gone the way of the dodo as well.  Don't know when exactly it happened (I haven't been on the site in ages), but it's gone.  That's sad, because it really was pretty easy to start earning there. Oh well... c'est la vie . One of the great things about being an author, from a  pecuniary standpoint, is the fact that your writing has the potential to produce passive income. In essence, you do all of the work - the writing - on th...

TL:DR  Unreal Engine 4 is awesome. Just scroll down for screenshots...we know that's what you want. It has been just about 3 weeks since we got back from GDC...and this whole time we have been nose deep in learning the ins and outs of Unreal Engine 4. In those 3 weeks, we have accomplished a crazy amount of work, transferring and recreating the XING Rainforest Level. Why did we do it? There are several reasons why we decided to make the switch: Being on the Cutting Edge Now we can count on Oculus support for certain when the game is released We can keep up with the times and continue to push for incredible graphics Constant support from Epic for their new engine UE4 is a more User-Friendly Engine to Use  Blueprints makes coding far more enjoyable  Workflow and speed have been amped up! More streamlined import process Better material editing Art integration with Blueprints We can implement things now we had only dreamed of before We are trying out new ways of displaying te...

Up until now, probably the first indication that I was anywhere near finishing a work-in-progress would be the message to my email list that I had just published something new.  And with each publication, I would generally declare that I would make a better effort next time in terms of things like a cover reveal. Well, I have finally made good on that promise. I'm including in this post the cover for the third book in my Warden series.  In keeping with the spirit of the previous books, I have tried to shy away from the "normal" monsters and write about creatures that typically don't get a lot of air play.  In this instance, the primary focus is on the aswang, which is a legendary monster from the Philippines.   As usual, the cover art was done by Isikol. Needless to say, I'm very attached to his work at this point, and I think he did an excellent job here. The big question, of course, probably revolves around publication. Frankly speaking, I don't have a hard...

Per Wikipedia, there were over  1800 automobile manufacturers in the U.S. from 1896-1930. Over  a 34-year period, that averages out to almost 53 new car manufacturers a year - over one a week! Needless to say, that's far too many, especially for a fledgling industry. Thus, it's not a surprise that few of them were able to endure the test of time.   In fact, a large number of them practically withered on the vine, lasting no more than a few years. (The Acme Motor Car Company, whose ad is shown here, actually lasted 8 years, from 1903-1911, which is surprisingly lengthy compared to many of its competitors.) In a similar vein, there are some who say that the world of publishing is undergoing a comparable expansion. Basically, with anyone being able to publish whatever they like at the push of a button, we now have millions of books being produced outside of traditional channels. However, just like the auto industry couldn't support almost 2000 manufacturers, there are some ...