Map Update #3
April 25th, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair | 3 Comments »
Ok, so not my usual Monday post, but I promise that when I’m done with this map, I’ll resume normal schedule.
In my previous posts (here and here) about this particular map, I showed you the sort of groundwork I had laid for the town. Over the weekend I got the chance to flesh out the map a bit more and add some new features to it. I’m actually really happy with it, so it’s likely that all I’ll do now is label everything and place some icons for various points of interest. Here’s what I have so far: Read more…
Posted in: Worldbuilding
Sunday Smash Up #1
April 24th, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair | 2 Comments »
Welcome to the first edition of the Sunday Smash Up where I shut my mouth and link you to other, awesome blog posts my friends have written this past week. I have a wide variety of interests, so expect to see a lot of different kinds of posts here. Well, that’s all I’m going to say, shall we check some of these posts? Read more…
Posted in: Sunday Smash Up
More on the Map
April 23rd, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair | 2 Comments »
So, I finally finished the basic outline of the map in Adobe Illistrator, but there’s still a ton of work to do. What I did, essentially, is trace every single road at a magnification of 1600% so that I could capture the subtle nuainces in them. Did I need to do that? Probably not, but it looks better, I think. Illistrator has a neat feature that allows you to apply a sort of brush stroke to a line or a gorup of lines after they are already drawn, so when I make my own brushes, I may find out that I need to tweak the roads around a bit to make them fit together better. I tried to trace the roads right down the middle so that when I make them more than just a skinny line with my custom brush, they shouldn’t need much more work. I hope not. Anyways, here’s the outline of the town thus far: Read more…
Posted in: Worldbuilding
Arcadia Meadows
April 22nd, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair | 4 Comments »
So, I’ve sort of decided to create my own city for the mystery novel I’m working on and tentatively, it’s called Arcadia Meadows. What I wanted was a small, rural town of about 10, 000 people, and I chose a town called Guymon, OK as the sort of analogue.
The town itself occupies about 7.3 square miles and has roughly 11,000 citizens. I wanted a smaller town so that there would be no police force and so that the sheriff’s department would be small. As far as crime is concerned, here are some basic numbers for the city compared to Oklahoma and the nation: Read more…
Posted in: Worldbuilding
How To Determine Time of Death – Part 3
April 22nd, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair | No Comments »
I didn’t plan on adding a third post to the Time of Death series (Part 1 and Part 2), but I have received several questions on the matter via email that I’d like to clarify now, with some more added info. I’m also going to present this in a sort of list form so that it will be an easier, quicker read. Read more…
Posted in: Forensics
The Columbine Tragedy
April 20th, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair | 8 Comments »
I can’t believe I missed this, but the 12 year anniversary of the Columbine shooting is today. It marks the deadliest high school shooting in the United States and the fourth deadliest shooting in all of the USA.
So, what happened is that two kids, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, arrived at school on 20 April 1999 like it was any other day, except that they were armed to the teeth with guns and homemade pipe and propane bombs. They first set out a bomb a short distance from the school and set it on a timer in the hopes that it would Read more…
Posted in: Children Who Kill
Writing Tools – Celtx
April 20th, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair | 2 Comments »
It’s not often that I post anything about a writing tool, but finally, one of my favorite apps finally has support for novel writing-Celtx. Since Celtx was mainly for scriptwriters, I only used it to help me write that ill fated Friday the 13th Machinima that never saw the light of day, but I also used it to outline all those novels I never started. Doing an outline in a script format worked pretty well for me.
Oh, and for those of you not in the “know”, machinima is the act of making movies with existing 3D modeling engines, normally video games, rather than making them from scratch like Pixar does. Anyways, I digress. I’m writing this to talk about Celtx Read more…
Posted in: Writing Tools
The name's Chris writing under the nom de plume 
