MBR's Art

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Welcome to MBR's Art

Leaves

Friday, 03 September 2010 04:01 Michael
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Today I helped my brother catalogue (yes, I spelled it the British way) ten different species of trees by their leaves for his first fourth-grade art project:

  • Valley Oak
  • Olive
  • Manzanita
  • Gala Apple (identified by its fruit. Yum)
  • Mulberry
  • American Sweetgum
  • Fremont Cottonwood
  • Pitch Pine
  • Canyon Live Oak
  • Eucalyptus

It's interesting because I had to go traipsing around the property with my brother to find out what the Canyon Live Oak was. And the only way I knew was by finding acorns on that tree. We also found two young Valley Oaks rife with galls, including a couple of fairly fresh ones--green, shiny, and nasty looking.

 

Inspiration

Thursday, 02 September 2010 04:32 Michael
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I recently read a piece on Ted Dekker's Facebook page which talked about the criticism his new book Immanuel's Veins has received. It's inspired me to take my writing to a new level, to finish Revolution on Hra, and try to get it published. Hopefully by introducing my readers to the most thought-out society I've ever come up with, I'll follow it up with the rest of the Future Earth canon. But just in case, I may wait until I have Screech finished so that I can try to get the first contact novel published. Either way, if I can make a cent off my writing, I'll be better off than I am now.

 

New Site

Tuesday, 13 October 2009 03:58 Michael
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New site, bebeh! Currently, user registration is disabled until I work through a few little technical kinks. But until then, friends of my writing blog on LJ will be able to access the site once I create users for them.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 04:00
 

WriPortCard

Saturday, 26 December 2009 23:53 Michael
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I'm currently working on a project for WriYe which I plan to use to replace the current report card system, which is an excel spreadsheet. The project is called WriPortCard, and I'm hunting for features. The current plans:

 

  • GUI, cross platform
  • Creation of individual writing projects, chapters within those projects, and an individual word count for each chapter
  • Management of participation in challenges such as Full Moon Madness, with the addition of creating new challenges
  • The pièce de résistance is worry-free daily word count tracking. It works with challenges as well. Basically, whatever word count the user puts in gets counted toward the daily word count. When the computer's date changes, a new daily word count is started. No more manually locking Excel fields by replacing the formula with a static value. For multi-day challenges, it tallies the daily word counts from challenge beginning to challenge end.

 

I'll be using PyQt4, the Python Bindings for Qt4, and Qt's GUI toolkit.

 

Last Updated on Sunday, 27 December 2009 00:36
 

Bon Voyage

Monday, 12 October 2009 22:59 Michael
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My NaNoWriMo novel this year is entitled Bon Voyage, and it's my first attempt at pure science fiction in a good long time. Here's the "Back of the Book" paragraph:

It's 2042 and the Earth is overpopulated. A select few board the Halcyon, an Earth colony ship on an two-week to Terra Alter, the fourth planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. But one bad decision on the captain's part puts the ship, her crew, and her passengers deep in hostile space. Low on fuel and morale, they must band together to make it to Terra Alter...or die trying.

This is one that I plan on publishing. I'll keep y'all updated as that works out. In the meantime, subscribers get to see a new 1,000 word excerpt every Sunday during November!