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Man, is that something I never expected to type.
So I was in a recording studio with Flying Lab Sound Designer/Director/Engineer Jaclyn Schumate today. Jaclyn booked Seattle's Pure Audio, which was run by a stellar group of people and were incredibly understand and generous, going so far as to include delivered lunch and regular coffee runs as part of the overall service; I got to watch really talented actors (including a few friends) perform lines Chris Pramas and I had written; I got to sing one of my favorite shanties for the game. A good, if lengthy, day. The actors were amazing, their improvisations were better than anything I'd written, everyone seemed to have a great time.
Early that morning, I thought I had a brilliant idea, truly I did: To use my little snapshotty digital camera to record short little web interviews with the voice actors along with some video of them performing in the studio. I had a tripod, after all. And since I was bringing my MacBook, I'd be able to empty the little camera when it was filled up with .avi files. No problem!
And then with the problems. Not with the actors, or the recording of audio, but with my precious side project, the thing justifying my presence as more than just the guy saying "Couldn't she punch that second 'GYARRGHH!' a little more?" Unfortunately for my heart, which belongs to Apple--as opposed to my head, which tends to line up more with Microsoft--that problem seemed to lie in the MacBook.
My 2-year-old MacBook automatically tries to download the images from the camera. It used to try and use the proprietary Fuji software, but I set it to use iPhoto and that seemed to work fine in Hawai'i. And sure enough, after a couple of hours in the studio the camera was full. The camera and MacBook instantly made friends, and soon the laptop contained all the photos I'd taken that morning, as well as leftover action movies of our cat Remo chasing a laser pointer and my first voice actor interview of the day with former Pirates of the Burning Sea producer John Scott Tynes. So far so good.
Three more interviews, time to empty (I only have a 1GB card in the Fuji). I hook up the camera, the Mac loads up iPhoto, I click "Import," and...nothin'. For like, five minutes. Then the program shuts down, though it still indicates there are videos on the camera.
I have several minutes left on the camera, and reckon I can fit at least one more interview. Maybe something screwy is going on that will be fixed by recording more, I inexplicably reason.
This time, some success. The camera spits up a single photo and one more voice actor interview, strangely the third one I'd done and not the second. From there on out, for the rest of the day, no dice. "Import." "Preparing to import..." "Three items to import." "Import." "Preparing to import..." "Three items to import." "Import." "Preparing to import..." "Three items to import."
I ended up managing to cram the last interviews into less than four minutes, which fit on the camera. And I thought, for the first time in many months, "I'll be Windows can fix this." Yes, Windows XP, the once-maligned-but-now-we-realize-how-good-we-had-it version. I got home from the studio, walked up to my 4-year-old desktop PC, and said "Surprise me." Well, I figuratively said that by hooking up the USB cable. Then, in what was in fact no surprise at all, I saw the Fuji camera as just another drive I could open in the My Computer explorer window.
I opened it. The files were inside it. I dragged them to a folder on my desktop. They copied in about three minutes. I unhooked the camera, put the video files on a flash drive, and will now use a similar procedure to move the files onto the Mac where I can (hopefully) edit everything into something that will appear on the PotBS website.
Why couldn't I do the same thing on the Mac I did on my PC? I have no idea. I thought Macs invented that deal where whatever you've got hooked up or plugged into your computer appears on the desktop. I thought that was why it was a freakin' desktop. Instead, the Mac keeps forcing me to open a program that clearly doesn't want to move video from my camera to my laptop. I close the program down, but the camera doesn't appear as a peripheral or anything.
My point? Macs are like older, overprotective siblings who do everything for you so you won't put your eye out, kid, while you're playing with all that fancy whizbangery (and I do appreciate that whizbangery). PCs are like younger siblings who borrow your car, destroy it, and force you to rebuild the thing yourself, learning how it works in the process. Either way, you have to live with 'em both.
Crossed the finish line with a few minutes to spare. Mr. McGough finished a few hours ahead and actually got a good night's sleep, but that's just how I roll. If I'm not wrapping it up and mailing it off at 7 AM on a workday, during which I will then zombie my way through until I can return home and slip into sleep's warm embracing warming embrace, then I ain't writin'.
But I don't have to tell you that. And I certainly don't need to tell Bill. Since we ventured into the ancient past for our last Shatneriffic video, it only seems appropriate to venture into the slightly less ancient past for the big finish. Note the shiny new "computer graphics" in the opening titles and especially note that Hooker has moved from a pair of car hoods and an airplane wing to jumping from a helicopter and onto a speeding speedboat!
EDIT: This was originally entitled "And the Winner is...Me!" because, in the exhilaration of hitting the deadline, I felt as if I had "won" a "race" of some "kind." But then I actually looked at what I wrote and realized by any estimation, McGough "won" in terms of both word count--which I'll endeavor to make up for in the second draft, by gum--and in terms of crossing this so-called Finnish Line, which I assume is somewhere in the vicinity of Espoo. Not that it's a contest, except it is.
This is it. Last possible weekend to work on this deadline. Got enough cigarettes to get through tomorrow, at least. Got a shiny new French press and a little bit of the birthday bourbon left for when the coffee doesn't keep them words a-flowin'. Got the D. Got a good chair, and a solid re-re-re-revised outline.
Just need a little something to kick things off right. Bill? Got anything for me?
Amazon has a cover image up for book 1 in the Lorwyn cyle, the first entry in the new set Scott McGough and I are writing (currently we're hard at work on the book 2). Note that the image on Amazon is an early version. I expect it's not the final version, especially the byline.
Here's a home-made corrected version I made for kicks. My apologies to the cover artist, I could not find a name to credit.
Facing a Lorwyn deadline, so it must be time for a delicious and (for me) ego-boosting video post lest the sheer awesome of S.P. Miskowski's Daughters of Catastrophe completely overwhelm the blog, if not the world.
I wrote the narration and scene descriptions for this trailer Wizards used to help introduce the Ravnica cycle a year or so back. It's narrated by Michael Dorn, meaning I've pretty much peaked and am coasting from here on out.
No idea how it got onto YouTube.
Would that it were the Grindhouse, but nope. I'm talking about words what need the smithing.
Scott McGough and I have a deadline rapidly approaching that's coinciding with one at the day job, so my furious spate of blogging is likely to slow for a bit. We're deep into Book 2 of the Lorwyn block and things are cooking right along -- things I can't talk about, naturally, but Things all the same.
I can talk a little more about Pirates of the Burning Sea, however. 
We're hitting that -- and pardon the starry-eyed nature of the following -- magical point at which the game is becoming a Game. I get to play it every day, and the changes that have been wrought on things that I fortunately have nothing to do with are nothing short of beautiful. Little things that didn't quite work right when I came on a year ago are not smooth and functional, big things that could have been improved a bit were instead overhauled, redesigned, and made spectacular. I've never worked with a harder-working group of people. And yet we still can spend lunch arguing the strategies for zombie warfare, concocting gastronomic military euphemisms involving General Tso/Tsao/Gau and his infamous Safeway chicken recipe, pasting a convention photo of the community guy's head onto any unlucky meme that hits the office email (and FLS has no shortage of meme-mail, most of it both funny and disturbing), and the usual debates concerning the Sopranos, Star Wars, Deadwood, Rome, Trek, BSG or Street Fighter.
Seriously, only lunch. We're busy there in ConCo.
Back to Lorwyn Book 2. This is both the most exhilerating and terrifying stage of co-writing, I'm finding. The ideas are coming fast and furious, but when you have two people writing simultaneously, the seams really show in that first draft. Fortunately, it's just the first draft. At the same time, we finished our final edits on book 1 and sent it off to the editors at Wizards. If all goes according to plan, you will see Lorwyn Book 1 at the end of August 2007. It helped a bit to go over book 1 one more time, especially to see how smooth the transitions from my writing to Scott's writing turned out. And really, but the end all of the text is the result of combined efforts since we edit and revise each other's stuff quite a bit. I had trouble remembering who had written exactly what, and I figure that must be a good thing.
Until Lorwyn Book 1 hits the shelves, may I recommend Scott McGough's Time Spiral cycle? They're some great reads. And the more of his books you buy, the less Scott has to sleep on my doorstep. I know the nights are getting warmer, but he lost three toes over the winter. Have a heart. It's Easter.
So Scott McG and I just finished, more or less, the second draft of the first book in our first co-written set of Magic novels. This is the same unnamed book I was working on before, but now it's got a name. I can't say much else about it (wait, did I say anything?) except that it's named after the card set upon which it was based.
The first book is always the hardest to get through. It changes you, you learn from the experience. I guess you could say I feel somewhat . . . transformed.
A Transformed Man, if you will. And I will.
We're holding a reading of S.P. Miskowski's new play, Daughters of Catastrophe, tomorrow here at home. It's "An intelligent and twisted comedy that reflects the social, political and personal implications of living in our often amoral times."
I'm going to help fill out the reading cast. I don't think as one of the titular daughters, but you never know.
And very nearly on the deadline, too. I'm beat, but this oft-seen and -imitated number exemplifies how good it feels to be done within fudge range (i.e., it was due on the 20th, but our editor, the gracious and saintly Susan J. Morris, granted us the Thanksgiving weekend, and it all worked out).
Take it away, Bill.
They make me cry and drink and cry in my drink.
But then again, better than not having them at all, better by far. The first major iron in the fire is a first draft of my first attempt at outright collaborative writing with Mr. Scott McGough. We're both used to charging for the finish line with a first draft, but now we're charging out of sequence and its requiring staggering feats of frequent electronic communication.
Second big iron is Pirates of the Burning Sea. Jess Lebow and I and the rest of the Pirates content department were joined by Chris Pramas. Chris rules. The department, hereafter known as ConCo, is furiously generating the words and storylines that will make up the life of a seafaring captain. Been spending a lot of time peering at maps of Bermuda and concocting (hopefully) nifty naval encounters.
I don't know if anyone's reading this blog but my mom (hi, Mom), but just in case, that explains the dearth of posts lately.
So I volunteered to help with voices and audio on Pirates of the Burning Sea, and yesterday we hit the studio to record incidental dialogue and what the sound engineer calls "exerts"--sound effects that play during avatar combat (duels, swordplay, and the like). And as is often the case, I didn't *just* get to skip a day of work to hang out in the recording studio and eat a free cheeseburger--I also learned a few things, too.
1) I only have the one pirate voice, and he's a combination of Steve the Pirate from the movie "Dodgeball" and the sea captain from the Simpsons.
2) My "proper English" voice bounces back and forth between Patrick Stewart and Jeeves.
3) Improvising in a Spanish or French accent is really hard.
4) The sound you make when you toss sand in someone's eyes is very similar to the sound you make when you get slashed across the cheek.
5) Everyone's favorite sound effect was the "I've just been stabbed in the eye" sound.
Hey, all y'all (my friend from Alabama says that's the appropriate way to refer to more than one person, y'all being singular) Dom has got the interview up on the newly revamped MTGCast site. It's an hour and a half of pure Cory goodness. Enjoy, won't you?
And if you dig the Magic cards, check out the rest of the MTGCast podcasts, which feature charming people who are much better at playing Magic than I am.
Dom over at MTGCast interviewed me this morning about the Ravnica books, writing, deadlines, and keeping cinemas open on Christmas, among other things. He said it should be up on or around Tuesday, September 12.
Hit the MTGCast link over on the right to see what Dom and his gang of scrappy, troubled loners get up to.
