It’s that time again, my monthly recap of my writing progress, interesting articles, videos, and podcasts I read/watched/listened to, and books I finished. Check out the past installments here.
Writing update
September saw the release of my new short story Relic Hunter as part of Guild of Tokens: Origins. With the last Beatrice prequel finished, I turned in earnest to drafting book two of the Guild of Tokens series, Guild of Magic. My ambitious goal is to get the first draft done by the end of 2019 and the success of this goal will depend on how successful I am in next month’s NaNoWriMo.
Links and things
- Starbucks, monetary superpower
- Continuing the coffee theme, and in honor of National Coffee Day, an in-depth guide on how you can start your own coffee roasting business
Stuff for writers
Books I read
- Hero Forged, by Josh Erikson
- I read two of the stories in Amazon’s Forward short story collection: Randomize, by Andy Weir, and Summer Frost, by Blake Crouch.
- Randomize is billed as a fun heist story mixed with quantum computing. Except that it mostly boils down to a monologue about how you could use quantum computing to rig a keno machine, followed by the protagonist immediately getting caught and then talking her way out of being arrested. It didn’t really have a point.
- In Summer Frost, a video game programmer notices one of her in-game non-player characters exhibiting signs of intelligence, so she brings the character out of the game to study it further. An interesting take on the emergence of AI.