Well, the organizers of the short story contest FINALLY put the voting engine online!

It's based on an e-mail gateway thing, but you don't have to send an actual message (or you can, if you trust your Spanish skills :) )

The voting page is HERE

My story is "CUENTA LA LEYENDA" (which I translated here :) )

The fields mean: Nombre (Name), mail (...duh... :) ), Relato (Story... this is where you pick meeeeee :) ), and Mensaje (Message).

Tell your friends! Tell the world! :D

I finished and delivered my submission for the second round of the short story contest. Unlike the first round, where voting was closed and only participants could vote, this time the 21 stories will be up for general public voting starting on June 22nd. I want to marshal the online forces of DEWM that comprise my friends and contacts lists from different media, but since most of my online activity is on English-speaking forums, I used up some time today at work to translate the story, so if you are so inclined to vote, you know what you're voting for! ;) So, here it is, under the cut.

( Story! )

Since a long time ago, I decided I would live without fear. Not that I would seek adrenaline rushes, mind you, simply that I would refuse to be taken by hysterics or paranoia about everyday things. I didn't freak out during the influenza crisis a couple of weeks back (I did take the sanitary precautions, I just didn't point and squeal like a pod person whenever someone sneezed). I walk the streets despite the crime rate reports, and try to lead a worry-free life.

However, last Friday and Saturday I received a couple of phone calls that freaked me out. First one it was my sister who actually answered, and later told me that one of our cousins had called saying he'd be arriving to town soon, but she was a bit suspicious. Saturday morning it was me who answered, and I was a bit surprised or else I'd have asked trickier questions, but I still intentionally dropped a couple of info bits that posed questions to the caller's statements, like how we had called our parents to confirm said cousin's visit and how we knew said cousin was actually due to return to his home in the U.S. before his entry visa expired. As my sister and I had discussed and predicted, the caller never called again.

Comparing notes, I realized the caller had fished my name and phone prolly from the phonebook, because he asked for me when my sis replied, and then started probing for info.

The freaky part of it all is that phone extortion is a popular crime here in Mexico City: you'll receive a random call that would claim a relative of yours is kidnapped and you need to pay ransom within the day. The hurry is to keep people unbalanced and from thinking straight, checking facts and getting in touch with the supposed kidnappee by whatever means. This already happened to my parents who received a call claiming my sister was taken, except my mom had the presence of mind to call my sis to her office and confirm she was safe and fine.

So, I've been musing scenarios and trying to deduce stuff from what info we had, to the point that I did start having a nagging fear on the back on my mind. That is, until this noon.

I was walking towards a small restaurant where I sometimes have lunch, when suddenly, an older woman who was walking in front of me turned around and threatened to hit me if I kept following her. Totally confuzzled, I calmly explained I was just heading towards the restaurant half a block ahead, but she insisted, and started calling me names. So I just walked, realizing reasoning was futile. The woman kept swearing at me, telling bystanders and passers-by that I was accosting her, and I could hear her voice half-breaking at times. Fortunately, the average Mexico City citizen has a crazies radar and she was ignored, and so I was reprieved of her annoying stream of insults when I entered the restaurant to have a delicious t-bone.

As I pondered the event, I pitied the woman, how horrible it must be to live in such state of fear than even kindly-faced strangers are considered a threat to be lashed out at. And thus it hit me... that nagging half-fear was the seed towards that state, and I was resolved not to let it get to me to the point of ruining my sense of peace.

Still, I'm not an idiot. I'm going to be vigilant for a couple of weeks, but I'm not going to be afraid.

Well, I'm not as excited as the title would indicate, but still :) I just passed into the second phase of the short story contest I mentioned previously. While I would have preferred for my steampunk fantasy to make the cut, my cyberpunk caper was the one who got the votes (or maybe the judges eliminated the steampunk one because they didn't want to repeat authors :) ).

Now, it's on to write the second phase story, slightly more than twice as long as the first. I'll keep with the same setting of a Mexico City megalopolis with a superimposed virtual reality that is unwittingly infringing upon the old spirit world, and more space will allow me to explain why.

I'm taking cues from Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex in the way that its cases stem from the use of the technology; they are crimes that cannot be committed by any means other than with the new science in the setting.

If anyone's curious, I translated the winning story, below the cut :)


( Read the story! )

I'm not talking about furry, toothy, clawy things from a large rainforest.... just that ever since I started buying from Amazon again to get up-to-date with my fiction reading and stocking up with D&D 4E stuff, the amount of notices they send me has multiplied, with stuff I may actually be interested in reading.

Thing is, since I once included a blu-ray for a friend, and a bunch of Bollywood DVDs for my sister, I'm also getting the odd movie notices for things I can't play (as I have no blu-ray player myself) or have no real interest in...

WARNING: What follows is some random thoughts I've been toying with regarding D&D 4th edition game design; it's niche professional geekness; you've been warned.

With the release of the playtest article for the Monk class in D&D Insider, the WotC design team seems to have discarded "ki" as a power source, making the monk a psionic class instead.

True, in the most basic definition, "ki" and "psionic" were the same: harnessing internal power to do Cool Stuff. However, the flavor of psionics was always Weird Quasi-Magical Mutant Power (with Crystals!), whereas ki was a more mysterious, exacting and invisible mystical force. True, no D&D product ever went to the lengths of explaining that ki means "breath" and represents not only internal energy, but the ability to take in the energy of the world itself, as the world also "breathes". Also true is that of the core classes, only the monk used ki.

Then again, in order to fill up roles for the power sources in the PHB2, we got the warden (primal defender) to tread on the fighter and paladin's tank job, the invoker (divine controller) and reinterpreted druid (primal controller) to step on the wizard's toes, and the avenger (divine striker) to taunt the rogue with mad holy assassination skills. I bet that with some thought the team could have come up with classes that would use ki for each role. Off the top of my head and without too much analysis:

* Steelsoul (ki defender): a warrior who channels ki to harden his body and grant penetration to his unarmed and weapon strikes.
* Channeler (ki controller): a master at manipulating the flows of ki in the world and in enemies' bodies, thus able to alter their properties.
* Healer (ki leader): one who restores the balance of ki to get rid of undesired conditions and grant temporary abilities to allies.

Note that I purposefully avoided the obvious "samurai", "wuxia", and other Asian concepts as, per the designers' own words, they thought it'd be some sort of "-ism" that all ki classes were Asian-flavored... curiously putting aside the fact that "monk" is a reference to Shaolin monks, completely ignoring other types of monks in Asia that had nothing to do with martial arts. Also ignoring that "primal" classes all have a primitive flavor, despite establishing that the primal spirits were on equal footing with the forces that are the foundation of the divine power source of the more sophisticated-looking invokers, clerics and paladins.

In any case, the ki power source seems to be fertile grounds for development, and I plan to exploit this in the project I'm working on right now. I'm certainly going to take a cue from the multiclass structure used for weapon mastery, and in the preview of style feats that appeared in Dragon magazine for Martial Power 2. Ki would be a keyword that characters can attach to their existing powers in order to gain new ones or do more things with them via feats that target powers with the "ki" keyword.

Details to be mulled over in the following weeks.

I love stories, whatever the medium, and over the years of consuming stories I have developed an IMHO good critical eye, and hopefully my own narrative skills.

Case in point: I entered genre fiction contest organized by a local publisher, who usually publishes comics in booklet format by local artsy talent... that is, these are not Mexican superhero comics, but more like Heavy Metal Region 4, and now they are venturing into prose, opening this open contest to ultimately publish an anthology book.

The contest consists in three phases: a mini-story phase where every participant submits a 2-page story, to be voted in publicly into the second phase, where a longer story is required, and that one will be judged to proceed into the last phase, where all winners expand on their entries for inclusion in the anthology. They didn't expect the amount of entries, so the rules changed: all participants could only submit one mini-story per genre, and only the contest participants can vote. Somebody must have foreseen the avalanche of trash votes summoned by MySpace and Facebook members asking their network to vote for them...

In any case, all mini-stories were released yesterday, and I've been reading a few in preparation to cast my vote. I had already sampled a couple as the upload files section for the contest was left open. I immediately spotted entries to be disqualified: out-of-spec formats, multiple genres-per-entry-per-author, etc. Of the few stories I've read in the sci-fi section, only one has garnered my preference; some have deplorable grammar, others are boring and bland, others are not even science fiction but soap opera with unexplainable (and unexplained) elements, plot holes galore... And I wonder if I've lost something along the way that keeps me from enjoying the stories,. but nah... I picked up Perdido Street Station again and I was reminded how good storytelling reads like, and those entries don't be having it.

If you're interested and can read Spanish, the stories are here. My own entries are "Contra-ancho-bando", the sci-fi one, a play of words that could be transalted as "Contra-broad-band", and yes, it's cyberpunk :), and "Alma Fértil", the fantasy one, which is actually the narration for this piece of art :); it's translated as "Fertile Soul".

I may translate them into English and post them here later.

So, this weekend there was the swine flu scare that wasn't a scare, but people around me ARE taking it out of proportion.

Just a few minutes ago, a mild earthquake.

Tomorrow, what? Zombies?!

I REALLY have to get a cellphone with a camera and start documenting the Weird that is Mexico City.

Today, the city was overrun with ninja.

Well, not TRUE ninja (or maybe they were there, just hiding), but a lot of people with a great variety and latest fashion in facemasks. Turns out there's a flu epidemic and the local media did what it does best: exaggerate. The wonder-starved population took the news with gusto and a great panic is going on, and half the people are wearing various pieces of cloth over their mouths.

I didn't see a single one of them sneeze or sniffle.

As for me... I think I caught it already last month, in the form of a cold that lasted two weeks plus one peak-oh-please-god-shoot-me day of feverish agony. Normally, I process colds in three days at the most.

The dull annoying feeling I'd been feeling on one of my backteeth became howling stabs of pain this weekend. So I scheduled a dentist appointment and turns out the problematic tooth is fractured. The dentist told me a few accounts of other patients with fractured teeth (I like the guy, he's chatty in addition to being very dexterous and ingenious :) ), including a young couple who broke each a tooth in each other's mouth in a particularly passionate kiss, or the guy with the perfect teeth that bit on a nut and broke the tooth just like that... I think the purpose was to make me feel more at ease, this being a dentist's way of saying "shit happens".

Right now, I'm wearing some plaster he applied to keep the fragments together and in place (the wiggling was the cause of the howling stabs of pain), which is working wonderfully as it doesn't hurt anymore, there's just some annoyance and my mouth tastes like shit. I'll return to the office in a couple of days for the final verdict on my tooth: crown, bridge, surgery or just plain extraction, depending on how much it keeps hurting and how deep the fracture goes.

One of the interesting things of my job is the rollercoasty nature of the workload. Last week we were scrambling to deliver the three projects we had deadlines for, a rush compounded by the loss of the newbie recruit who didn't pass the evaluation period due to his poor ninja skills (he got caught sleeping on his workstation more than once). Today, I just spent a good two hours browsing the news and rueing the fact I forgot my USB drive at home with a couple of freelance documents I could be working on.

Oh, and I just got the word that new material just arrived with another frantic deadline...

Nikki Tesla, Thief-color1 by ~Coyotzin on deviantART

Work in progress! (slow progress, even). I'm taking it easy with this one, working on it between other stuff. I want to play with all elements of my usual coloring practice: brushes, gradients, shading style, even linework will be undergoing experimentation, as I'm inking directly on the computer rather than on my drawing board with pen nibs and india ink. Eventually I want to mess with the lines; filter them, texture them, color them...

On account of my first kung fu class last night, I sustained a rather silly injury.

In addition of my thighs threatening to go on strike and my forearms muttering in support, my index toe is an unhealthy deep purple. Yes, my "index" toe, the one next to the big toe.

The socks I was wearing were old and a bit loose, so as my body refused to lift my limbs more than an inch from the ground near the end of class, a foot slide dragged on the floor rather than gracefully just brushing it, violently pulling the sock inwards and half-crushing the unsuspecting toes, who I bet were feeling safe and smug and making fun of my other limbs for the sudden abuse they were being subjected too. Little buggers may have gotten what they deserved.

So, I'm walking with a limp, because stepping down too strongly squeezes the blood towards the toes, eliciting a sharp stab of pain.

The class itself was better than the last time I tried kung fu; the sifu is more understanding about us older students and our degraded physical conditions, so the whole running and jumping like monkeys was kept to a minimum, and the rest was practicing individual steps, followed by separate groups to study forms, depending on level (one group was learning a sword from :D ). One of the sifu later explained to my sister and me that the first couple of classes they left new students to their own devices, for us to try and mimic stuff on our own to build self-confidence, so we shouldn't feel discouraged and confused. I didn't reply then, but later my sister and I agreed that it's not that we were confused or discouraged... we were simply out of breath ^^;

One particularly happy discovery was that the school's claim to be Mexico's branch of the Shaolin Temple is actually true. The two sifu studied under Shi Yan Ming in New York, and the funny Chinese monk comes to Mexico once a year to give seminaries and conferences. Also, as I saw in the Discovery Channel's show about Shi Yan Ming, classes do end with a "Merry Christmas/Happy New Year" greeting ^^.

...because, I mean, there's just too much win in the concept of a team of war correspondents in ancient times...

Painted Warfare Division (found through this fanart).

Just stumbled upon this.


I have very mixed feelings; while I love steampunk, pulp and new takes on old stuff, the fact that it's a Heavy Metal production makes me wonder... will it be the utter garbage that FAKK2 was? Will it be as mediocre as the magazine has been ever since the European authors stopped contributing? Or will it be surprisingly good?

I finally got around to watch Real Drive, a 26-episode anime series that I.G. produced as they milk every Masamune Shirow project after their wildly successful Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

Real Drive is about Haru Masamichi, an octogenarian diver... but the guy doesn't dive in the ocean (although he used to in his youth); he dives in the "Metal", a virtual reality construct modeled after the sea to represent the network of computer systems, AIs and cyberbrains that permeates the environment of Artificial Island. Haru suffered a diving accident just as Artifiical Island was beginning construction, and he lapsed into a coma for 50 years.

The series feels and probably is the intellectual precursor of Ghost in the Shell. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Artificial Island is, in the Shirowverse, the foundation of Newport City, the fictional location for both the Dominion Tank Police and GitS manga. The virtual universe that Major Motoko Kusanagi and the Puppetmaster navigate with eerie expertise is just being built, and the culture shock is being felt between the early adopters of cyberbrain and cyborg bodies and those who haven't or can't get them. It's a clash between a world built by humans and the natural world and its ecology.

This conflict is more or less represented by Aoi Minamo, an energetic high school girl who was volunteering at Haru's nursing home and ends up as his assistant when, during an experimental dive, it's her voice calling out to him that keeps his conscience from melting into the Metal. It is then hinted many times that this girl has some special connection with nature, as she's able to hear the sea and wind and she makes great intuitive leaps to solve situations that baffle her elders, who are tackling it just intellectually.

The "conflict" is not hostile, though, it's just two worlds and lifestyles clashing, and people trying to reconcyle them. As its typical of Shirow, there is a lot of questioning of what makes humans human, and how human endeavors can and should be in harmony with Nature. And how it's not wrong to pursue technology, if done responsibly.

One failing of the series, though, is that it seems built from Shirow's notes rather than a fully developed story. It's completely episodic although some events tie in progressively. Character and world development feel weak and almost token in favor of making a point. It's not as insufferable in this respect as Genesis of Aquarion, but as the actual conflict starts until episode 21, the series could have benefitted from a tighter script or a much shorter prologue.

GitS is still superior about both character and world development and making a point, but the issues in Real Drive are nonetheless interesting and worth thinking about, prolly shamelessly reusing :)

Times promise busyness in the coming weeks and months. For one, I've been chatting with Skirmisher Publishing and they just recently green-lighted a project I don't want to specify yet, but will be my first professional D&D 4th Edition project, which might split into three books instead of just one. In addition, I'll be doing art for them; as an "introductory offer", I did three illustrations for a monster manual they'll be releasing in a couple of weeks, and I guess they liked my work, because they asked me if I wanted to do cardstock miniatures for them from time to time :D

And, after the Mystery Project, the option is open to publish Nahast's much crowed (by me, of course) RPG setting book.

In the wake of all this, talks go more slowly with Polymancer, but I just got word back that my contract has been received and, once they clear some Canuck law stuff, I'll be receiving the reference documents for their RPG system, and once we hammer out specifics, I'll start work on a setting/adventure book for them, a fantasy steampunk world I once ran for local friends as a BESM d20 game (which sputtered out, but helped me figure out some things for my later OGL Steampunk book). Of course I want to illustrate it too :)

So, busy, busy, busy. In addition to all that, I might hook up with a girl I met recently, who not only seems interesting, funny and smart... she's also a local, which is a vast improvement on my previous arrangement ^^; And no, it's not rebound blues :)

So, Nicci finally gathered the courage to get in touch with me, prompted by her brother, certainly but, to her credit, she also offered to talk through voice chat.

So I had the chance to get off my chest the things I've been wanting to tell her, and to hear her thoughts with her own words. I still have not forgiven her for the way she handled things, basically throwing me to the winds, but I've left the window open for her to earn my forgivance, if she's willing to work for it. I'm moving on, and she's welcome to catch up if she can and if she wants.

Sad moment, yes, but I was thus able to close the chapter; what the next one will be about remains to be seen, but at least I can turn the page with a clear head.

The last 2.5 weeks were spent on general vegging and doing things I particularly enjoy, and catching up on old hobbies left on the side as my time was mostly taken by my ex-GF (the only news on that particular front is that there's no news). I advanced on books I read halfways, I leveled my elemental troll shaman to 80, finished watching an anime series, I planned some new things for Nahast and made little advances here and there.

But now, it's back to the dayjob and the true start of the New Year. I want to keep doing the aforementioned things and work on some other projects I had outlined. The next stage of my life has now begun, and it has begun with little fanfare, actually, just a lot of promise for the future.

I've also rediscovered that, unbound by my sense of faithfulness, I'm still quite a flirt <.<

Anyhow, one of my more definite plans for this year is to attend a convention in the U.S. for professional self-promotion in addition to just enjoying myself. Now, what I haven't decided is to whether attend a comics/anime convention in my webcomic author capacity, or a gaming convention with my freelance writer/budding illustrator hat. Both options present their own opportunities, challenges and preparations and as I still work for peanuts, I can only afford one convention. Right now I'm leaning more towards GenCon since my writing credentials are WAY more solid (which won't keep me from taking a portfolio for art directors), but Otakon and AnimeExpo might be contenders if I manage to get an artist table, prolly with another webcomicker to share costs and responsibilites. San Diego Comic Con intimidates me, for some reason...

The sooner I decide, the sooner I can start producing material and making arrangements, although the common prerequisite for anything will be renewing my visa.

So, 2009, here I come.

My trip to Germany was plagued with last-minute obstacles and triumphs. In addition to the account of getting the ticket I was later faced with complications as my invoices expiring, the Mexican IRS having locked my account for a minor clerical error I had to clear out, and payments owed going out at the last possible second. Every one of these issues I tackled and solved one by one, looking forward to the goal, which would make every hassle worth it.

Would HAVE made.

At the LAST possible instant, as I was packing, I called Nicci's home because I was worried for her not showing up yet. She didn't know my flight information and I needed to be picked up at the airport.

SHe's not home yet, and her family is worried.

Also, she left a letter for me with her brother, stating simply that she'd been lying to me and to herself about her ability to cope with her personal issues that once did and apparently still do prevent us from being together, and she was pulling the plug as she had lost hope to ever be able to.

So... the insurmountable last minute stuff hit me now: no trip, no girlfriend.

Merry Christmas, sucker.

P.S. Despite the bitterness of the last lines, I'm now moving into the resignation stage, pending a real talk with her to get some closure and glimpse at the future.