The Blutonian Death Egg

The Mystery of the Baby Teeth!

2012-03-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

I made an offhanded comment yesterday about still having baby teeth. I did not expect to find that so many people would find that curious. But, in a post about death, privilege, and the plight of human suffering, folks only wanted to comment about my teeth. So, what the people want, people get.

I have baby teeth, they are in my mouth, and they are what I use to chew my food with. I am a mutant.

How many do I have? I have eight of them. four on top, four on bottom. Turns out, all those mushy foods in the modern American diet don't require those big kid teeth to eat. That's pretty much the whole story. I've had 4 or 5 dentists since I was a late teenager and they've all noticed it. None of them seem to think it was that unusual. I asked once how rare that was and my dentist shrugged and said, "I see it sometimes."

So, not too weird, it's not contagious, I won't infect your friends or loved ones with baby-toothitus, I don't need to have my rights taken away, my belongings confiscated, or spend the remainder of my days in a small government prison waiting for death.

No, I'm just like you. A person. Yes, I'm a mutant too, but think of me like a wizened old professor Xavier, I'll only use my powers for the betterment of ALL mankind.

And now you know.

Where Willingness To Die Proves I'm Shallow...

2012-02-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

Being sick, generally speaking, sucks. In my case, I was sick last week. Funny, every time I get ill I might hate life for the duration, but generally come away from the experience with some life lesson about human nature, or the nature of nature.

I realized, for the first time in my life, that when that moment comes, that time when I’m destined to lie down for the very last time. Close my eyes for eternity… well, it might not be so bad.

I was lying in my bed. A comfortable, king sized bed with plenty of room to kick my legs and get all tied up with the blankets. I was punching, feebly, mind you, at my tempurpedic pillow, one of those crafted with the finest in Swedish space age technology (because, they go to space all the time I guess) and costs hundreds of dollars to own – and I was lamenting at how horrible my life was.

I did appreciate the irony of course. On the rare day that I don’t eat out, I still enjoy a diet that the King of England would have envied a few short centuries ago. I can eat ripened grapes any time I want. I can have watermelon, tomatoes, pineapples, whatever. Hell, pepper was practically a wonder of the world at the time.

So, like I said. I was sick, feeling sorry for myself despite that fact that I have a higher standard of living than 99.9% of all the people that have ever lived. And as I inch ever closer to forty, I’ve already managed to beat the life expectancy of the typical adult up until around 150 years ago. And I’m in better shape than most of them. I mean, hell, I still have my teeth. Actually, I still have my baby teeth (that's true).

So, while I’m staring at the ceiling, doped up on Nyquil and Vapo-rub, and I have my moment, the shining moment that we all experience at some point in our lives eventually.

I’m going to die.

I don’t want to. I want to be here as humans slowly and painstakingly uncover the mysteries of the universe. But then again, as I laid in my misery I thought, what if I just closed my eyes and it was all over? All I could think was that it might not be so bad.

So, while I don’t want to die, that pain and suffering a common cold put me through made me actually long for the sweet release of death.

I have to say, that seems incredibly shallow of me. I mean, some people fight famine, disease, war, and natural disasters for years, only to be rewarded with more famine, disease, war, and natural disasters. Life for most people really kinda sucks.

But, I was reading Briane Pagel’s epic tale of the afterlife, The After, this era’s answer to The Divine Comedy – for those of us less familiar with the classics, think of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey – and I think that had something to do with my state of being.

The real review of the book will come later. As I’ve not written it yet. But it really had me thinking about how content I would be to have a world, noticeably similar to my own, but better. Would I question it, as the characters did in his book, or would I just go with it and enjoy forever? Do we need suffering so much that we’re willing to create it in order to feel human?

I know this, if I closed my eyes sick and opened them healthy, I’d be so damned happy to feel better that I think I might have confused this world with The After. If it wasn’t for all that dirty laundry and the need to show up at work I might think I was in the afterlife now. Weird that.

Anyway, learn more about Briane and participate in his 100 days of Star Wars Trivia blogathon going on at his blog. This week's random prize for folks that comment is a copy of my novelette, A Dead God's Wrath. That's right, you can possibly get the prize of the century there. Although personally, I'd ask him for a copy of The After if I won.

CassaFire Launch Is Here!

2012-02-28T07:00:00.000-05:00

Today’s the big day. In case you’ve not been around the internet in a while, Alex J Cavanaugh’s sequel to the mega popular CassaStar, entitled CassaFire, comes out today.

Make sure you journal your activities today, as I’m sure you’ll be telling your grandchildren, or great grandchildren, one day about what you were doing the day this came out. His publisher has made a huge swag haul that you can win just by commenting on his blog during his mad blog tour. Just go to his blog and comment during anytime between today and March 9 and you're entered! It's too easy. Click----> Here<----

When we last left Byron, he was heading out into the vastness of space to just see what was out there. Well, 20 years into his new job, he’s kinda bored. Turns out space is mostly empty, and exploring the cosmos generally means there is a lot of empty to look at. But whispers of something truly alien on a remote planet on the frontiers of explored space send Byron's ship off to investigate. What they find there could destroy the galaxy.

I got to read a pretty early draft of this novel sometime last year, to say I was impressed is an understatement. It was publishable way back then when he was still hammering out the details. That Alex kept going back to the manuscript that he had to look for ways to improve, to tweak, to make stronger only speaks to his dedication to make this the best product he could.

I tip my hat to him. He's worked very hard. I haven’t read the finished product yet, but I’ll be purchasing my copy today and will start reading soon thereafter. What I read of his earlier drafts takes all the best elements of the first novel, and expands on them in the second.

See the real blurb below:

CassaFire

by Alex J. Cavanaugh

CassaStar was just the beginning…

The Vindicarn War is a distant memory and Byron’s days of piloting Cosbolt fighters are over. He has kept the promise he made to his fallen mentor and friend - to probe space on an exploration vessel. Shuttle work is dull, but it’s a free and solitary existence. The senior officer is content with his life aboard the Rennather.

The detection of alien ruins sends the exploration ship to the distant planet of Tgren. If their scientists can decipher the language, they can unlock the secrets of this device. Is it a key to the Tgren’s civilization or a weapon of unimaginable power? Tensions mount as their new allies are suspicious of the Cassan’s technology and strange mental abilities.

To complicate matters, the Tgrens are showing signs of mental powers themselves; the strongest of which belongs to a pilot named Athee, a woman whose skills rival Byron’s unique abilities. Forced to train her mind and further develop her flying aptitude, he finds his patience strained. Add a reluctant friendship with a young scientist, and he feels invaded on every level. All Byron wanted was his privacy…

Available today!

Science fiction - space opera/adventure

Print ISBN 978-0-9827139-4-5, $15.95, 6x9 Trade paperback, 240 pages

EBook ISBN 978-0-9827139-6-9, $4.99, available in all formats

CassaFire is the sequel to Cavanaugh’s first book, CassaStar, an Amazon Top Ten Best Seller:

“…calls to mind the youthful focus of Robert Heinlein’s early military sf, as well as the excitement of space opera epitomized by the many Star Wars novels. Fast-paced military action and a youthful protagonist make this a good choice for both young adult and adult fans of space wars.” - Library Journal

You can visit the author’s site at http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/

Book trailer available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa6VINRGtyE.

Oh, Say it isn't So...

2012-02-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

A few things I want to touch on today.

Alex J Cavanaugh's super-giant book release extravaganza is tomorrow. It's going to be huge. If you follow very many writerly blogs then you'll probably see quite a bit about that tomorrow. Just keep in mind that you'll be able to own your very own copy in less than a day. I plan on posting more about that tomorrow though.

Comment of the week last week was pretty tough for me, last Monday's post brought in a huge number of very interesting points. It looks like many of us are used to rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. All good. I briefly considered one of them.

But, I decided to go with this one:

For some context, I'd made the point in the post that I generally consider driving dangerous enough that I say my final goodbye's and set my affairs in order before doing something as mundane as going to the grocery store. I like being compared to Shakespeare. Well, a character from one of his plays at least.

It would be easy to turn this into a buddy network celebration, so I'll try to make sure the next one I do isn't to someone I'm necessarily super regular about interacting with, if at all possible.

Finally, it's Monday again. Ugh.I feel like today's post is somewhat poor. I'll do better tomorrow.

My Favorite Topic. Me!

2012-02-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I made an offhanded comment on this blog that I’m an amazing conversationalist, and did so again on Wednesday’s post. I figured that if I were to keep making that claim then I better see how it goes. I started to ask my wife, but decided that would be a huge mistake, she seems to think that I’m a great conversationalist as long as the other person doesn’t talk back. A point I happen to agree with most of the time, depending on the company. However, when she says it somehow sounds like I’m the one with an issue.

My favorite character on Cheers was always Cliff Clavin, the guy was just soo interesting. When my wife explained to me that I’m pretty much a real life version of Cliff, I was thrilled at first, and wanted to offer that up as evidence of my amazing verbal skills, but she’s informed me that the rest of the world might not find that as endearing as I do. So I’ve amended my self-image a bit. I may not be as great a conversationalist as I thought, but if you liked Cliff from Cheers, then you might like me.

Anyway, all that was just a segue into this: I got tagged.

I can think Trisha at WORD + STUFF for that gift. I always am amazed when I stop by her place to visit, she’s always somewhat disappointed in her productivity, yet she manages to be orders of magnitude more productive than I do. Looks like, if I read her post correctly, all I have to do is talk about myself some. Um, I can do that. Hell, that’s kind of all I do. But, to follow the format she sat out in her post.

6 things about me.

· I’m an amazing conversationalist. Wait, have I mentioned that? Maybe if I keep insisting that it’s true people will start to believe me. Hey, I can’t be the only guy in the room that wants to talk about how the angle of the tip on Spock’s ears changed from episode to episode on the old Star Trek, I mean, who doesn’t want to talk about that?

· I think about death more than I should. Actually, I probably think about everything more than I should. Weird. But each time I am about to leave the house to drive anywhere, before I get in my car I tell my wife and kids. “As you know, I might be dying later, as I have to drive to the grocery store. If I don’t return, please do the following…”

· I believe that the most vocal people usually have the least interesting thing to say. Also, I’m an amazing conversationalist and sometimes have to get pretty vocal about it before other people finally realize it.

· When I was a kid, I had no idea that Superman wore an ‘S’ on his chest. I thought the image was formed by the bright yellow portions of his insignia. I had no idea what it was supposed to be, I thought it was kryptonian letters or something. When I began attempting to draw him, I created the S by drawing the negative space around it.

· I’m pretty sure that upper management types at large corporations and people that hold high ranking political positions (Senators, Congressmen, etc) are sociopaths. All of them. I also think that people with a moral compass generally don’t do well in their attempts to gain power because in order to obtain it, they have to compromise their moral code. It’s complicated. I probably shouldn’t have even bothered to bring it up. Just take my word for it.

· Finally, every year that I bothered to dress up for Halloween, I went as the incredible Hulk. Why? Because we shared the same physique. All I needed was little green body paint and people thought the comic book was brought to life. Also, I think the biggest fit I ever threw as a child was when my mother bought me a Frankenstein costume for Halloween. Hello? That isn’t the Hulk. If memory serves, the hulk costume was the Frankenstein costume, minus the neck bolts and forehead scar. However, at the time it went from being something I was proud of to something I was too embarrassed to be seen it. If my mom would have just let me take my shirt off and paint myself green everything would be fine. But she was afraid I’d get cold. Whatever, I was the friggin Hulk, I could handle a little cold weather.

And there you have it, a glimpse into the soul of silent stranger. If only Clint Eastwood would have answered such questions about himself when he traveled as the man with no name back in the day it probably would have saved a lot of bloodshed.

I’m supposed to select six people to pass this too. The passing it along generally is the most stressful part of this sort of thing for me. As some people think it’s an insult to be selected, while others might feel left out. So, if you’re reading this, and you want to answer some questions about yourself, then you’ve been tagged.

A Brief History of Typing

2012-02-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

I’m a bit of a history buff. No, that isn’t true, using the term ‘buff’ implies a bit more working knowledge about history than I have. A fan can still be as ignorant as a tree branch and still be a fan. I can tell people I’m a fan of the Denver Nuggets and not get people too upset if I admit that I don’t have any idea what their record is, or who their coach is, or what sport they play. But I saw their logo once on some kid’s backpack and I’ve been a fan ever since.

See? So that makes me a history fan. As a fan, I can’t be expected to know what the latest news in history is, I heard Elvis is still alive. Besides that not much has changed in a while.

Wow, I usually at least can be counted on to start off on topic before getting off onto a tangent. I’m sure I’ve lost half my audience already, so let me try to cut to the chase: I’m a fan of history. I most enjoy the history of technology, of how sometimes an arbitrary (or practical) decision led to all sorts of ingrained items that we can no longer remove fromproducts and devices we take for granted now, even long after we’ve discovered that the system today is inefficient due to those early decisions.

Case in point. Anyone ever take a peek at their keyboard? Ever scratch your head and give a big ol’ “What the…?” when you look at it? Those letters look like they’re laid out more or less randomly. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. In fact, there has been alternate keyboard layouts over the years that allows users to type far quicker than using the old one we are all used to, the QWERTY.

Early typewriters also served as toaster ovens

Of course, the layout we have now is already ingrained, established, it isn’t going anywhere. When I was learning how to type, way back in the day, I was frustrated with how stupidly the keyboard was laid out. Of course, I had a suspicion, even way back then, of why.

When I was a kid we had an old typewriter from the 30’s (or 40’s, 50’s or 60’s I actually can’t tell, but the more I thought about how it looked I suspect that it was a later model) that we kept around the house. It wasn’t considered collectable, or classic, it was just an old piece of junk that was really hard to use. I typed on it all the time, not in any sort of formal way, I would just stick a piece of paper in there an start pounding the keys. If paper wasn’t available then I would stillpound the keys. I liked the way it felt. There was long, metallic, thunk as they struck home. Like a mini sized hammer striking a proportionately mini sized anvil.

If you haven’t used a real typewriter from around that era or earlier then I suggest you do. I think it would impress most people who’ve never used one how sturdily they were built. I’m not referring to the electric typewriter, which was cool in its own right, and I suspect were the source for 60’s and 70’s Kung Fu movie sound fx. I’m referring to the old, manual, typewriters. In those old things, when you struck a key, you might have to depress the thing a couple of inches to getthe hammer to strike the paper, because a metal arm with a letter printed on it would have to travel six inches or so to actually make it to the paper. There was a hinge at the bottom of the arms that would open when you struck the key… If you hit it hard enough. When I was a kid it took a lot of work. I had a hard time getting a whole sentence out within a couple of minutes. I would hit a key and have to depress it so far than my hand would hit the surrounding keys and several arms would leave their home positions and travel halfway to the roller before I could lift my finger from the key I struck. It was really hard.

My mother could type around 60 words a minute using that machine, I would think that is the equivalent to around 200 words per minute today, her fingers must have been built like rock hard sausages to pound out letters on that thing. There was no such thing as finesse when it came to using those.

Oh, but that’s the rub, 60 words a minute was a blazing fast typist at the time. Today, half the people over the age of nine can do that. The technology in those old typewriters by the 30’s (40’s, 50’s, 60’s, whatever), when ours was made, was pretty mature. I would think that using a working model today would make a modern user think of the thing being very steampunk, all sorts of teeny little bears and levers. Those were marvelously engineered devices.

But, as someone who used one of those typewriters can attest, if you hit keys that were right beside each other at close to the same time, the arms would often collide with one another on their long, six inch journey to the paper they were meant to strike. If they hit just right they would get stuck, and if you kept typing, you’d get a bit of mess as keys started banging into one another. Trust me, that happened a lot. I was just a kid playing with a toy. People who were banging out stuff found that sort of thing annoying. It was a real problem, almost from the invention of the typewriter.

The solution: Make sure people can’t type too fast. Design a keyboard that forces the user to strike keys on different portions of the keyboard, separated as far apart as they can reasonably be expected to be.

Years after the typewriter became popular, with its odd keyboard, there was a format war of sorts. A Beta/VHS, HD-DVD/Blue Ray sort of battle amongst the typewriter makers of the day.

See? Clearly superior.

See, the problems with the keys could be circumvented, I can’t recall the solutions,* but people are clever, and much faster, more efficient types designed and built. But the whole QWERTY layout was already pretty popular. Legend tells us that the reason you can type the word – typewriter – on a single row of keys is because it was done that way on purpose. Salesmen might not have even been entirely proficient navigating around that mess of keyboard, hunting and pecking doesn’t look so good when you’re trying to tell people how awesome it is, but they could be taught a pitch that ended with them inserting a single sheet of paper into a fancy device and typing in the word – typewriter – to an aghast audience. Sounds stupid, but it was a big deal at the time.

The story of how the competing keyboard lost its format war is sad, and has to do mostly with their arrogance in their superior product, they didn’t count on those 60 words per minute people that had spent endless hours practicing to become adept at a flawed way of doing things. A national ‘type off’ was conducted (no kidding) and the winner was the person(s) that could type the fastest.

It’s sad really. It would be like I’d challenged LeBron James to a slam dunk competition and somehow convinced the world that the winner would determine who was using the better shoe. There is a flaw in the logic there somewhere.

After that crushing public defeat (I believe there was media coverage at that event – national media coverage that was widely reported) that the organizers should never have allowed, no one ever seriously challenged the QWERTY keyboard layout ever again.

And now you know.

*You know how I’ve bragged in the past about being an amazing conversationalist, well, you’ll just have to take my word for it. But here is a perfect example. This is all from memory people. All my research for this post stems back to an essay I read back in the 90’s about the QWERTY keyboard. And I believe the essay itself was written back in the 80’s, back when the history of the QWERTY keyboard was shrouded in mystery even amongst people who really should have known. Sure, 10 seconds and a decent search engine and anyone can be an expert now. But I go old school. All from a half-remembered reading nearly two decades ago. You can’t Google stuff after the apocalypse. But I’ll still be able to bore my loved ones around the campfire about the most inane subjects imaginable.

Look! Information!

2012-02-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

I have a hard time understanding how I got this far behind on things, but I have. I got sick this weekend, well, not sick sick, but sorta sick. Enough where I feel like doing nothing but sleeping, which I didn't do because of my dumb dogs, who think 6 a.m. is party time. That includes lots of face licking and cover removal.

I worked on Saturday. Yuck.

I also managed to do something I'm proud of, which is submit a short story, in this case to the WOTF that I mentioned of Friday.

BUT, with all that said. I wanted to start off today with my comment of the week. It came from Friday's post where I mentioned that the story I was about to submit involved more than a few references to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

That's right. Jay Noel knew a member of the Funky Bunch. That made my day. No, that made my week. Jay not only knew a member of the Funky Bunch, but after careful consideration, Jay called into question said person's true Funkiness.

Anyone else have a brush with pop culture fame that would wow us all?

Also - the careful observer may note that I have begun a blog roll. Yes, I'm no longer going to depend solely on memory to visit others. I have left it relatively small to start off with, but I will expand it as my confidence grows in my ability to manage it. I'm pretty excited about it right now, we'll see how it goes.

Oh, last thing. Please check out Briane Pagel's plight with his health (Pt 1 & Pt II). The guy has a huge heart, wait, that was a pun I didn't intend to make. Anyway, he has some health issues and a newish book out. I heard it was great, so I picked up my copy and can't wait to read.

I won't lie, Monday's are terrible, terrible things. I'm doing my best to start this week off well. Wish me luck.

Six Week Update

2012-02-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

It's all about accountability I suppose. So here is my attempt to let you know where I stand so far this year in my goals.

I have half-heartedly agreed to participate towards the write 1 sub 1 for this year. I say half-heartedly because there is no way in hell I am writing 52 short stories in a year. I figure I can whip out 12 though. Which means I’m doing one a month instead of one a week. Close enough for me. Oh, and I've not actually signed up for anything, it's more of a personal goal.

Also, I’ve only now about to submit my January story. I figure I’ll submit all 12 this year sometime. Again, close enough. My short stories to tend to run long. I’m going to try to do a few 2000-3000 word ones this year. It’s hard for me, because I really like digressions, a lot. I’ll have to try to rein those in a bit going forward.

But by Monday submission number one should be out the door. Probably to Writers of the Future again. A grand prize winner gets something like $5k. It’s hard to not make that a priority up until such a time as I become ineligible – which happens with professional sales.

The story? Glad you asked. About an astronaut trapped on the moon and contemplating suicide as the earth endures the apocalypse. Early drafts focused on Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch and shoddy Chinese screening processes for choosing their taikonauts. Also, a main character whose Russian sounding name turns out to be Latino, go figure.

I’ve been in the self-editing stage in my February story – this one about a disgruntled teenager who finds something he shouldn’t when piddling around somewhere he shouldn’t be. I’m already freaking out about his one – is there a market for YA novelette thrillers? If there is, I’ve not heard of it.

But whatever, write it first, worry about the market later I suppose.

As it stands, I'm way behind my larger goals, as these short stories were supposed to be nothing more than weekend projects, with the rest of the time spent working on revising novels. The short stories have been bigger, longer, and more time consuming than I would have hoped.

Still, the year is young. I can catch up.

The Traveler

2012-02-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned before, and relentlessly on Twitter, I was out of town last week. Doing my best version of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Except, less funny, and more warm weather.

I was sent to sunny Orlando to do corporate type of stuff, attend a small conference, discuss business things, talk about projections, clientele portfolios, corporate bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions, ugh. What did I learn?

I love warm weather.

This is what February is like! It sucks.

On the night of my arrival, I showed up checked in, and ended up deciding to eat at an outdoor restaurant that night along with some fellow travelers. There I was, in February, wearing a T-Shirt and eating outdoors. It really doesn’t get any better than that.

I discovered that my TSA screeners leaving my home town were pretty darn nice. They smiled, laughed, and chit-chatted with the line of people being herded into the millimeter scanning device. I kept thinking that I’d been warned online recently that one of the see-through-my-clothes technologies that are currently being used has recently been discovered to emit a very high dose of radiation, much more than would normally be considered safe… I read it very recently, I recall that since it isn’t a medical device, it doesn’t fall under any oversight from a party that has standards for that sort of thing, so the manufacturers are pummeling us with X-Rays in much higher doses than we’d get from something in a doctor’s office to see if we’ve broken bones.

Scary stuff. All I needed was to remember if it was the millimeter scanning device or something else. Dammit. I couldn’t even recall where I’d read the article. I do remember thinking it was relatively well cited, and at least felt like it was researched appropriately.

So, I worried a bit about developing some horrid tumor as a result. But I let it go.

Also, Orlando has Disney World and Universal Studios theme parks already – but really, the whole city is like an amusement park. I live in the foothills of the Smokey Mountains. I know what those places are like. Locally, we’ve got Pigeon Forge, nothing but putt-putt courses and go cart tracks for 10 miles. Right next to that is Gatlinburg, a ski resort with 3 slopes, 4 malls, 155 restaurants and a few live shows.

This is what Orlando was like. Except without all the water... or sand.

Orlando is the same way, just a thousand times more of it. It’s weird to go to city that big that has no real industry aside from tourism. Great for a few days, but no character that I could discern from my hotel window – or from the short time I spent wondering the streets there.

I did however, manage to go to a Brazilian Steakhouse while there. A nice place in the Universal Studios bar/restaurant district. There was live music on a giant stage, some guy playing some sort of Latin American flamingo, actually, I was a bit confused by the mashup of cultures represented there, so despite it being a Brazilian steakhouse – it seemed to have a much more in common with the Mexican restaurants I’ve seen.

Not in the menu, but in the décor and music. I mean, ethnically, Brazil is Portuguese, there was no love lost with them and the Spaniards that settled over most of the continent. I suppose in the centuries since then things have been muddled somewhat. And of course I probably shouldn’t be looking for nuances in cultures to be represented at an amusement park restaurant.

But here’s the thing that actually bugged me: they come out and immediately begin talking up their signature dish - Skirt Steak.

I’m not a real foodie, but when I go to a place that is planning on charging me – er, the company I work for – upwards of a $100 for my meal, I’m not that thrilled with Skirt Steak being the main entrée.

The story I was told, and I have no idea of its validity, but I’d heard it since I was a kid spending my summers in Texas, was that skirt steak grew in popularity because it was so tough that butchers had a hard time selling it to customers and it was commonly thrown out.

So the hungry and poor residents of many towns would take this otherwise unwanted cut of meat for almost nothing, and work it relentlessly to soften it up so it could be used. It became used in fajitas and other meals where it could be cut into bit sized chunks and eaten thusly.

I’ve cooked with skirt steak, I found nothing in my dealings with that meat to dissuade me from believing that story. It’s like trying to soften up wood.

So, I watched as every single person in my group orders the skirt steak. I, having a very hard time thinking it would be good as a main course, ordered the chicken. Everyone ate in silence. Eventually, once our plates were taken, I asked how it was.

“Not the best steak in the world,” seemed to be the consensus.

I raised my eyebrows, and folks began to clarify: “It was a bit tough. Tasty, but tough.”

Sometimes, you just have to take things on faith. I took it on faith that skirt steak should never be used as a main course in a meal. I really liked my chicken. I know this is stupid, but I like to think that if a big brained cow is going to have to die for me to have a meal, then I better damned well enjoy it. Otherwise, it died in vain. My level of guilt is somewhat less for a chicken.

That said, I’d love some fajitas.

Origins Blogfest!

2012-02-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

The Origins blogfest (click for details) is today. It's an opportunity to talk about why I write, no, not exactly, it's about my origins, what led me down this path.

My origin story, like that of Peter Parker, is a mixture of the exotic and banal. I'm just a normal person, living a normal life, when one day - bam! - I've been bitten by a radioactive muse.

The truth be told. I didn't come to writing until I was well into my twenties. I did, however, always consider myself a storyteller. As I mentioned in my About Me page, I first dreamt of being a comic book artist when I was young. I would spend hours and hours in a small desk I kept in my closet, yes, closet, and toil away drawing all these comics. I recall doing this He-Man rip-off about a guy who was imprisoned by a skeleton headed guy in a cowl that said he kidnapped barbaric humans... AND SOLD THEM!

That's right, I was a pre-teen, writing stories with relevance, touching on big social issues, like enslaved barbarians (I came down on the side of it being wrong, FYI). At the risk of spoiling the tale for those who haven't read my early story, this young barbarian solved the problem by beating up everyone he came across until he made his way to Skeletor...er, I mean, the Skullhead, and punched him right in the face.

Story over.

Anyway, I did lots of those type comics. However, as I got older, my dream of drawing comics slowly passed by me as I got away from what I thought was childish stuff, and got into other things, like playing guitar, then later, doing television.

Not real television, but public access stuff. Friends and I discovered it by accident. Our local public access had to air our stuff if we asked them to. It was the law. So we ran around and did all sorts of stupid stories, badly acted, horribly conceived, and no matter how bad they were, they went on the air.

My favorite show at the time was Star Trek: TNG. Now, I've talked about that show so much that I'm getting tired of bringing it up, but I have to, it's important for me. Because, as we went along with our public access show, we were starting to do more Star Trek themed episodes. Generally, they would start with a far future band of human explorers getting sent back in time to do something... I think saving the Panda population was high on the list of tasks. So we were sent back to the early 90s to bring back specimens to the future.

Well, as I got further into the our own convoluted story, which made no sense, but carried on in spite of this, I was constantly trying to ret-con things said or done into some sort of something that made sense. Of course, I was actively watching Star Trek, reading the books, and otherwise living the dream.

The show, as we each kept wishing to do it better, began taking more time to produce, we were starting to buy props, film on locations, trying to come up with coherent stories, and were attracting a growing number of people that wanted to be a part.

It was beginning to take too much time, like, we were having to film several days a week, meet to discuss what we were going to film, and in our spare time, figure out how we could improve our technical skills for the show.

It quickly got too big for us. God forbid anyone in the group have a girl friend, play in a band, or worst of all, have a job. After an awesome summer things fell apart. We just couldn't do it. One of my friends decided that he wanted to be a real actor and got an agent and did bit parts in local productions and TV commercials. I got drawn in deeper and deeper into the behind the scenes aspects. And eventually discovered that TNG was open to story submissions.

Um, what?

That's right, during their run, I heard that they would solicit ideas for stories. Honestly, I don't know if that was even true, but I believed it, and was determined to get a story idea on the show.

As much as I loved the show, I was often frustrated that they had these amazing science fiction elements buried as back story that were never explored. They had that ancient super civilization that had artifacts littered across the galaxy, the Iconians, they ran across a Dyson's Sphere once, the first spacefaring race in the galaxy explored and found the universe a lonely and empty place, so they seeded it with life - bringing forth Humans, Vulcans, Klingons, and all the other humanoid races that were eventually became so familiar with.

But that wasn't what the show was about, instead it was always about the crew getting space drunk, or Riker having to teach the women of some new planet what good loving could do. Again, it was frustrating at times.

So, I started trying to come up with the greatest episode of TNG ever. The absolute best. I began working on a story that I thought would be just that.

I went epic with it, making it as big a story as I could envision. So big in fact, that naive as I was, I realized it was unfilmable. I had been reading the novels and thought it might serve better as a novelization. And once I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) I couldn't seem to turn it off.

I wanted to be a writer.

And there you have it, my origin story. Star Trek again. I'd consider creating a fictional origin story that involves me running away from home as a child and travelling across country with a hobo on a train, but I haven't got the details worked out yet. As it stands, that's all I've got for now.

Sigh, thanks for the opportunity to share.

Chronicle

2012-02-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not around today... weird, I know. But I'm out of town and my internet access is not entirely reliable. Well, that and the last time I went out of town for work I ended up consuming way too much alcohol to try to write. So, I'm just tossing this out here.

I saw Chronicle last weekend, and I must say, I was stunned by how much I enjoyed the movie. Stunned. I went home after and checked it out on Boxofficemojo and saw that it's production budget was... are you ready for this?

$12 million.

Huh? That should have gone on Steven Tremp's list of low budget movies he did for Alex J Cavanaugh's blog on Monday. Because that was money very well spent.

That's a lot of money, but when $200 million is more or less the new standard for a blockbuster, and some films getting way higher then I'm doubly impressed. Hell, I watched some movie a year or so ago and was wowed by it's use of fx for cheap and I found out later it was something like $40 million. That surprised me.

So, making a movie like this on that kind of budget was incredibly impressive to me. However, passable fx isn't what made me enjoy the movie. I liked it because it was well done all round. I loved the found footage concept. I'm not a horror fan, so I've missed out on that huge slate of that type movie, Cloverfield was my only real frame of reference, and that flick made me feel like I'd just spent the day on a roller coaster.

This one kept the shaky cam to a minimum and instead made the brilliant decision to have the story's main character more or less be a videographer. Carefully documenting his life as things go crazy. Later, when things get real crazy, we see lots of security cam footage and bystanders phone vids. Again loved how it was all put together.

And the story was a pretty good one. It's not really a superhero movie, it's just people who can do crazy things. Giving folks, especially troubled folks, godlike powers is probably not a good idea. This movie shows how a good kid can snap. I kept thinking how awesome it would have been if Anakin Skywalker's fall from grace had been son wonderfully done in the Star Wars prequels.

I'm impressed. I generally don't do movie reviews, but I liked this one a lot. Good, fun, and felt much more real that the subject matter would have suggested.

Fish Tacos!

2012-02-08T07:00:00.001-05:00

Fish Taco’s. I had some the other day at a restaurant here downtown. Now, I’m not a big fan of the Fish Taco, as I’m pretty sure that only beef, or maybe chicken, should be the only representatives of the animal kingdom to appear in the dish.

Well, I met my wife for a bit to eat and they were advertising the fish tacos on their outdoor chalkboard. Our waiter, a cheery fella that seemed really excited to tell us what we were ordering was awesome, was all over those fish tacos. She ordered them, I got a brisket grilled cheese.

Again, fish don't go in tacos, they just don't.

My wife ordered them and they brought out something I did not expect. Something awesome. I asked for taste. Yum. I asked if she wanted to trade. She shrugged. My grilled cheese brisket thing wasn't real good, not bad, but not worth the money they were charging. She didn't really eat any of that.

You know, I’m not sure what my wife ate. I hate her food, I ate my food. I hope she didn't leave hungry. I know I didn't.

I've dutifully used my artistic skills to try to represent what was in my head when the waiter mentioned they served fish tacos.

See? Irresistible.

I was so surprised by the wonderful reality that I tried to compare it to other times in my life when I received surprising news that made me happy.

1) The time I found a 20 dollar bill in the parking lot at Taco Bell.

2) The time I went to watch a concert and after the show a fan of the group came up to me and said I played an awesome gig. I even signed an autograph. I hope he’s telling his kids about the time he met that one guy from that famous band.

3) The time I got a FedEx from the Smithsonian telling me that my photo was going to be displayed in the museum and printed in their magazine.

4) When I found out I was having a boy.

5) I could never dunk a basketball, but that brief summer of my 20^th year when I could jump high enough to touch the rim of a basketball goal.

Anyway, I'm out of town today doing work things. I'm not sure what my schedule will look like for the next few days. I may not be as around as I want to be.

Ah, those were good times, add the fish taco thing to it and I’m feeling pretty good about life.

The Big Questions

2012-02-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

Right now, actually, for the past several years, my absolute favorite author, no exceptions, has been Alastair Reynolds. He's a British (well, Welsh) science fiction author of notable popularity. In case all have forgotten, he signed a $1,000,000 deal a year or so ago (actually, I think that should be in British pounds, which is significantly more than USD right now) and generally writes great tales with very deep science fictional themes. The guy, in a word, is awesome.

He also was a speaker at TEDx, I don't know what the 'x' stands for, but whatever. Ted talks are one of the things that makes the internet awesome.The reason I find him so compelling is because all his fiction, or most of it anyway, deals with a lot of the same questions most of have asked when we're sitting around and pondering the universe in all of its vastness. Of course, he was a working scientist with the ESA for a number of years and was writing his first several novels while working on some pretty cool science at the same time.

If I were a master of my craft in my own mind, I would probably be churning out books quite similar to what he does. If you have 20 minutes or so to kill, please sit back, relax, and have your mind blown by my writing hero, discussing my philosophical hero, as he discusses my favorite conundrum of all: The Fermi Paradox.

Now, if that just got a bit 'too real' for you, then please enjoy a new feature I'm going to include from time to time, which I will call my comment of the week, or month, or year, whatever. Because let's all be honest. Most of us just blow into a blog, skim the post, make a short, sweet, comment and move on. I get it, I really do. I wish I could spend more time interacting with everyone, but there just isn't enough hours in the day. It usually makes me sad. But I do what I can, as we all do.

But every once in a while, something happens and that comment is beautiful in a way no one could have expected.

Unfortunately, my first comment of the week comes from an anonymous user. Too bad, as I'd like to meet this person and hear more of their thoughts. Check it out:

"Pretty section of content. I just stumbled upon your web site and in accession capital to assert that I acquire in fact enjoyed account your blog posts. Anyway I will be subscribing to your feeds and even I achievement you access consistently rapidly. <link deleted>"

Wow. That's all I've got, wow. Thank you good sir, I'll be clicking those links you provided right away, just after I forward them to all my friends.

This Stupid Pineapple is...

2012-02-03T07:00:00.000-05:00

... Finally beginning to understand where pineapple juice comes from.

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!"

As mentioned Wednesday, today is Briane Pagel's Stupid Pineapple blogfest. Not only does he host the thing, he is giving out prizes - choosing to do so in a manner so hopelessly complicated that he might as well just give it to whomever he feels like. Anyhow, if you want to know who's entered and all that I'd recommend you check out his twitter feed, because I'm not sure if there is an official list anywhere. It's kind of like a secret blogfest I suppose.

Anyhow, without any further delay, my completely fictional account of a the stupid pineapple which again, is not based on a true story. This did not happen to me at work yesterday, as I am a human, not a pineapple.

The Stupid Pineapple lost my his headphones yesterday at work. Now, he hates having nice things because he hates worrying about and being stressed over his nice things. But one area he decided not to skimp on was his earphones. He plunked down a cool hundred bucks for some nice earbuds that block out most noise when they're in, and produce quality sound. He listens to them a lot. He loves them. They complete him.

Yesterday, just as The Stupid Pineapple was getting ready to go for a walk somewhere on my his lunch hour, he realized his headphones were missing. He checked under some loose papers at his desk. Nothing. He checked in his junk drawer at work. Nothing. He checked his coat pockets. Nothing.

He tried to recap his morning: He came in, he had been wearing them when he got to work, he took them off once he got there and had an impromptu cleaning session. after which he threw away his cleaning materials.

Wait, had he seen my his headphones since then? No, no he had not. He looked in his wastebasket only to find it entirely empty. The custodian had already been by and taken the trash. The bastard.

He ran around the floor looking for him for a few minutes until he found him. He asked to see the trash the custodian had just picked up. "Sorry dude, I just took it to the basement to be put in the dumpster."

Well, shit. He made his way all the way down to the basement with the custodian and found that the items had been put in the 'pre-dumpster.' That is a word he just made up to describe what it is, they dump all the collected trash in these giant bins to wait for someone later in the day to haul them out to the compacter on the loading dock. The trash wasn't in a real dumpster, but whatever. It's a giant thing full of trash.

He had the custodian show him the bag. How he could tell which one was his out of all those bags was beyond the Stupid Pineapple, as they all looked identical to him. But he was stupid, so he figured the custodian knew. He tore open the bag he was told contained his trash it, was one of those giant lawn bags and he couldn't get it untied, so he just ripped it apart. He dug in with gusto. He found not one, but TWO pair of headphones in the bag - neither of them were his though - and found lots of food, pasta, tomato sauce, mustard, tons of used kleenex, lots and lots of paperwork.

The paperwork gave it away, It was all from a different department than the stupid Pineapple worked in. "Hey," the Stupid Pineapple said, "Do you pick up trash from any other departments?"

"Nope, just yours."

Well, m#^%^#&$ker. He ripped open the wrong effen bag. All that dried snot and half eaten food he'd been diving through was the wrong bag. "Why don't you just go? I think I'll rummage through the trash alone now," the Stupid Pineapple said.

He left, and the Stupid Pineapple dug into another bag. This one was paydirt. It had oatmeal all over it, yummy. He was so glad it was lunch time. There were all sorts of other things, he found a pair of shoes, a really nice lunchbox, and some more snotty kleenex, it was flu season. No headphones though.

Eventually, he gave up. he went to the bathroom and scrubbed up like a doctor going to surgery. He washed and washed and washed. He leaned over the bathroom sink and stared at ~~myself~~ himself as he washed away the filth. He was trying to think of how he could tell his wife that those ridiculously expensive headphones that he just had to have were now lost forever when he noticed a small bulge in his front shirt pocket.

Oh, there they are.

Dumbass. He was a truly, deeply, stupid pineapple.

The end.

Anyhow, if anyone is curious as to what I had for dinner on Tuesday evening. You can find that by clicking...HERE.

Insecure Writers - February Edition

2012-02-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

There are several things going on today that I’d like to mention.

First! I mentioned on Monday that if anyone managed to sit through all those videos I posted I’d make a big deal about it today. Well, congrats to Gail who patronized me by watching them all. She was too pooped to really have thoughts about it. But hey, she was like a marathoner that wouldn’t quit.Alex emailed me later and mentioned that he watched them all (and that doesn’t mean he watched his own five times either, I asked). But beyond that I’m not sure anyone else was able to hang in there for all of them.

If I missed anyone please let me know, I didn’t leave anyone out on purpose. Some of the comments were a little dodgy on the topic.

Second, the legal whiz, Briane Pagel, came up with an idea for what is perhaps the greatest blogfest ever devised. Where he got the idea is beyond me, because it’s amazing. On Friday you need to write something about a pineapple, you can read about it here, I’m not actually sure about the details, as the rules read much like a calculus final, but I figure that if I post something about pineapples the rest will take care of itself.

And I signed up for the A-Z blogging challenge in April, it’s pretty much the greatest blogfest ever devised… wait, why does that sound familiar to me? Regardless, I’m pretty sure it’s the biggest. The day after it went live it already had several hundred folks signed up. Look, April is going to be a lonely month if you don’t plan on being a part of it. So hop in and go with it. You can sign up here.

What else? Oh, today is Insecure Writers group – February edition. Thanks again to Alex J Cavanaugh for creating the group.

And I've got so many insecurities I’m afraid some of them even contradict one another. You know, like suffering from agoraphobia and claustrophobia at the same time. I’m the kind of person that wants to do everything, and I mean everything, myself. Which is why I always feel vaguely ashamed if I have to ask for someone’s help on anything I produce.

How far does that go? Well, let’s just say that I do my digital painting in photoshop – I feel like I’m cheating because I didn’t write the code myself. When I draw on a piece of paper I’m always wondering if I should have made the paper myself, from a tree that I grew from a seedling.

Sigh. I know, it’s a problem. Ironically, I love collaborative efforts, I only get that way about things that will only have my name on them and no one else’s. Am I the only one who struggles with this? Have I invented a disorder? This rears its ugly head in me when I get editing or critiquing help from others as well. Like, if I put a period at the end of that sentence then all of a sudden it's not really my work anymore. I recognize that it's ridiculous, but that doesn't change how it feels to me.

Oh well, thanks everyone.

Book Trailers - What's the Deal?

2012-01-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that the whole concept of book trailers has taken the world by storm in the past couple of years. I wonder where the concept even came from. I do recall seeing TV commercials for L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, when I was a kid. But I either never noticed others, or that was pretty much it. Well, unless you count the thing the Latter Day Saints used to do. But I'm having a real hard time figuring out the origin of non religious books as trailers.

Regardless, I've heard a few marketing professionals chime in on the subject and say that they aren't so sure that even the very best ones are that effective in pulling in prospective readers.

Me, I think it's much more likely to make the book being marketed come off as corny. And me being one of those creative types, I would absolutely love to put one together. If I had the time, I would spend a good couple of months putting it together - and as one of those people that really wants to do everything myself, I'd also probably try to do everything from creating the background music, to shooting the footage, to adding the special effects. I would probably end up pouring my heart and soul into a 60 second thing that a few dozen people would actually watch, and even fewer would appreciate.

Which is why I hope I never get it in my mind to make one.

But, thankfully, other people do that sort of stuff. Like I mentioned before, I think the vast majority of book trailers are embarrassingly bad. A small percentage are fine, but do little to peak my interest beyond what I might have already felt about the book being marketed, and just a very, very few, are pretty damn good.

Now, last week, Alex J Cavanaugh was politely asking for folks to hop on over and vote for his book trailer in a competition at You Gotta Read Videos.

The voting ended, and our intrepid hero, Alex, finished in third place. There appeared to be a late rush in voting that allowed him to rise in rankings and place third in order to receive his award for excellence. My humble opinion is that he should have won the darn thing, as his trailer is just amazing - not to take away anything from the others that entered, I did spend time this week trying to watch them all, and some of the others were also pretty good. But it is rather subjective, I just think Alex's is pitch perfect. Why? Well, let me give you an example of one that is by all accounts, amazing, yet still somehow manages to be corny:

That was about as big of a production as I've ever seen for a book trailer. Complete with pretty cool fx, slow motion filming, choreographed fight scenes, excellent costuming, and even live animals. That was not cheap to make - there was an investment of real money in this. My first impression was that it was a stunning achievement. But a repeat viewing made me think of those straight to SyFy movies that are a bit awkwardly acted and somehow always find a way to miss the mark. And when I think of it in those terms, I realize that is what I'm looking at here. I'm disappointed. Yes, it is unbelievably awesome, but it's still cheesy.

Because once you start involving actors things get real complicated - and most book trailers rely on volunteers or very cheap people to get the production done, I don't think you'll find many award winning performances as a result . Here is, in my opinion, the best book trailer I've ever seen that involved a real person:

And I thought it was stunning, not the same level of production as the previous one. But in a lot of ways it was more effective on me (of course, Alastair Reynolds is my favorite author, so I am biased because I geek out about anything that has his name attached).

Scott Sigler managed to create a pretty good trailer for his sci fi/horror novel Ancestor using (I think) a lot of volunteers. I'm sure his publisher chipped in something, but I do recall during the lead up to filming his open requests for fans that had video production experience to be a part of this trailer.

So even though I think the level of money involved in each production went way down with each successive one I've listed so far, I don't think there was any real drop off in quality, and in some cases, the effectiveness was better.

This brings me to Alex's trailer for CassaFire, which has been out for a little while. The direction chosen for his trailer (as the previous one for his novel, CassaStar) is to go all CG. Doubly impressive considering that unlike the other book trailers, this one isn't from one of the Big Six publishers, or from NY Times bestselling authors. This is from a small press and considering the level of difficulty involved - and the resources available (I assume), this is one amazing achievement:

If I were to nitpick, the voiceover was perhaps a bit too mechanical sounding, but that's a pretty small thing over all. This is something that is up there with the very best book trailers I've ever seen. Well done to everyone involved.

Funny though, what I think is the single greatest book trailer ever, bar none, isn't a book trailer. However, if what I've read is to be believed, it is actually a short film, again, a labor of love for everyone involved, with a budget of $0. Well, if you consider it's done by Hollywood professionals in their spare time, using Hollywood equipment and talent for every facet of the film, then you can say that it really isn't a $0 dollar production. But still, if this is the sort of thing folks can turn out in their spare time then I think writers ought to be courting film students and Hollywood folks looking to add something to their resume for future book trailers. Watch the short film below and tell me that wouldn't easily be tweaked into the best book trailer in the history of the world:

And by my count, that's five videos I've asked you to watch. If anyone actually takes the time to watch them all let me know in the comments below. I'll be sure to make a big deal about it in my next post.

Are there others out there that are also amazing that I've missed? What are they?

Oh Crap, You Just Destroyed the Earth

2012-01-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

Work is wearing me out. I mean, really wearing me out. Not only am I spending more time there than I want to, but I'm also working much harder while I'm there. What that means for me of course, is that I'm having a tough time right now even remembering to post, let alone all the other stuff I need to do to maintain a semblance of an online presence. Heck, I haven't even been reading very much lately, very odd for me.

So, I dusted off a post I wrote a long time ago (you know, last year sometime) that I'd written but never put up because I felt like it was too pessimistic/controversial/depressing. But since I'm all but out of energy to produce something I decided to paste it below. Be warned, it's kind of long. And it rambles. And I guess it's kind of a rant. Sorry.

The Destruction of Human Life of Earth... In Two Parts

Pt I -

I was talking about the inevitable downfall of human society with a coworker the other day, a point we both agree upon, and about the things that are contributing to it in larger or lesser degrees. And I had an epiphany of sorts, it’s really a battle of for the hearts and minds of people everywhere, it’s Fantasy vs. Science fiction, and to be specific, it’s Tolkien vs. Vinge.

Fair warning, I made this a multi-part post, but I really wanted to fit it all into one, I just can’t. In fact, this one is way longer than I wanted it to be, but, I can only do what I can do. So, today I discuss the coming downfall of human civilization, and perhaps the biosphere. Much like Stephen Colbert, I’m about the truthiness portrayed here, so a few facts might be, er, misstated. Not on purpose, I just am a lazy ranter.

The scenario:

1) The earth has approx. 7 billion people.

2) That is too many to maintain without heavy industry and highly sophisticated farming/logistics/governance, etc.

3) Said scientific principles are falling into disfavor as more westerners are looking for less technology in their lives, not more.

4) It only takes one generation or two to really screw things up.

Okay, let’s look at point 1 above, 7 billion is a lot, if you think about the food you eat, the travel you make, the energy you use in your home, all of that leaves a bit of an ecological footprint behind. Best guesses have Americans at the very top of the list of who has the biggest footprint, each person uses up some portion of the earth’s available resources in order to maintain their lifestyle, that burger you had for lunch came from a cow that had to have pasture, the vehicle that shipped the beef to your store or restaurant required fossil fuels, those extra pickles you wanted – those were brought in from Mexico by plane, the heat that ran to keep you warm as you ate required a lot of coal to be burnt at a steam plant miles away. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture.

I’m not going on an environmental rant here, I’m just saying that 7 billion people takes a huge toll, and you can’t feed and house that many people without some seriously intense farming techniques, you can’t keep that many people healthy without some serious medical work.

I, like a lot of people, am sad when I see heavily processed foods lining the shelves of my supermarket, but the truth is that food is cheap because it is a concoction of alchemy that boggles my mind. Some really smart people were able to take some grain, an old chemistry set, and a bit of corn syrup and make almost every item from isle 3 through isle 8 at my grocery store. It’s impressive.

And it lets millions of people live that otherwise might not. Because if the whole world went for fresh foods every time they got hungry, we’d all starve in a matter of months. There isn’t enough to go around. It all comes down to math. It’s a numbers thing.

It isn’t just processed foods, it’s the genetic engineering that goes into the crops themselves, the resistance to disease, or pests, or the larger yields, or larger edible portions. Those things are created in labs, and again, they keep us alive.

Okay, I’m done with that. I have a larger point to make, try to stay with me if you can.

I’m read The Children of the Sky, by Vernor Vinge, back in the late fall. In that book the central conflict arises from this: A small community of far future humans are trapped on a planet with the equivalent to Medieval technology, and have a super advanced race of baddies baring down on them as fast as physics will allow them to. Right now they are still decades away.

The leader of the humans knows the world will be destroyed unless they can raise the local population to the highest levels of technology possible in the shortest amount of time possible… and that’s when I had my epiphany. She, the story’s hero, is essentially Sauraman from LoTR.

Yep, in a fantasy book, she is bad, bad, bad. A lot of folks in the novel see her that way. I’m not the first person to point out that LoTR does have this vague sense that science, industrialization, etc., is generally a bad thing. In fact, I’ve heard it said that fantasy, or at least that Tolkeinesqe part, is really a tale about maintaining the status quo, to fight change, to keep things just the way they are (or back to what they were). The bad guys in those stories are people trying to change the world.

Science Fiction, on the other hand, is often about people changing society, or about something that will change the world. In fact, in Vinge’s book, many people suspect that the baddies that are coming are actually good guys, and the story’s protagonist is really a bad guy… again, if the story were told from the ‘rebels’ perspective, then we would have a classic fantasy tale. When I started seeing the novel this way I really started to enjoy it a great deal more.

Anyway, I feel like this type of tale is playing out in the real world now too. There is a large amount of pushback from people that want to return to a preindustrial society, and I can understand it too. Big, faceless companies are doing scary things behind closed doors, irradiating our vegetables and throwing cockroaches into our hot dogs. We hear that cell phones cause cancer, as do McDonald’s hamburgers, diet soda, too much vitamin E, and water heaters. I mean, I can’t think of a way to test all those ideas out, and I can’t avoid everything.

But it’s not just the food industry at risk, folks don’t want to vaccinate their children (fearing a wide range of things, the biggest being that it causes autism), folks trade going to the doctor for home remedies. I had a strange moment at work where I mentioned that the thing where you stick an open flame into your ear to remove wax is insanely dangerous and has been outlawed in many places due to the number of injuries the practice has induced, and I was met with derision from a group of about 15 people… they thought I was the crazy one.

See what happens if you don't get your flu shot?

Again, this stuff isn’t a value judgment, it is a dangerous procedure. You know, doctors and everything agree. Oh, but they don’t really trust doctors, or modern medicine. Sigh. It’s a lost cause. A podcast I listen to mentioned in a recent episode that a distrust for big, applied science probably comes from the 50’s and 60’s when things like DDT and <the thing where pregnant women were given things that caused horrible birth defects> ended up being worse than the problems being addressed. It was because no one bothered to do any rigorous testing to see if there were possible side effects. The occasional nuclear disaster, like Three Mile Island or Fukijima, only deepens that distrust. It’s understandable, but turning against the scientific process in its entirety is a bad idea.

So, to try to wrap this up here, I was reading about all these science projects that are being cancelled, or cut, and how international projects, ones too big to generally be done without multiple nations being involved, are leery of US involvement at all because all of a sudden we’ve become so ‘frugal’ (I put that in scare quotes because the govt is only cutting less popular programs, not less needed ones – I mean, being frugal is supposed to be smart).

Dammit… I want to talk about the mathematician that predicted the end of humanity in the next century or two based on some scary math, but I think I’ve already gone too long. My point? The world would descend into chaos, and a new dark age will begin (along with billions of deaths) if we (as a society) fail to embrace science, become literate in it, and share a goal of making the world better for our kids and grandkids. We’ve come too far to go back now. We reached that turning point a century ago. We’re committed to the course we’re on. We have to see where this takes us. If we don’t, millions will die. Global warming, all political aspects aside, means that most of the coastal cities will be gone,

But that won’t happen. We’re all going to die. Why? We have a generation of youngsters that don’t do science, it’s been that way for a while, but we were filling that brain drain with the top minds from other countries to fill key, and not so key, roles. Meanwhile, our kids are either smoking dope, or using their talents to invent the next Farmville game. Not a lot of help there.

And since 9/11 we don’t let foreigners in our country any more, they might be terrorists. It won’t be long before no one is able to even maintain the technology we are already dependent on to live. I once heard a story about a generation after the fall on the Roman empire, Rome’s buildings were, more or less, vacant despite large number of people still living in the cities. Why? Because as the structures fell into disrepair, masonry began to fall, injuring and killing residents living in the buildings. Instead, people were building hovels in the streets, decrepit things, but they had to, because no one knew how to repair the masonry. No one.

If you are a religious person, pray for divine intervention. If you’re not, hope for that Kurzweillian singularity. Because otherwise I’m just Cassandra, knowing the future, but powerless to stop it.

Next time I feel like posting about this: Why rebuilding from a new civilization out of the ruins of the old is impossible!

A Star Trek Love Song

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

Part I

*if you don’t like Star Trek this post will bore you out of your head – Don’t feel obligated to read. Seriously. I won’t get mad*

I mentioned a few weeks ago about my long dormant love affair with Star Trek. Something that I fully expected to continue fading into the night as more and more years went by. I mean, other, grittier, more emotionally driven shows have really upped the ante since ST was on the air. Well, entirely out of the fondness of my memories for the series, I added them to my Netflix queue as soon as they came available. I cherry picked episodes on TOS and TNG to watch for a while, I didn’t bother with DS9 however, as I made the complete run of DS9 a few years ago when they came out on DVD, and that show is a bit more serialized than the other incarnations so seeing an episode out of context can leave me scratching my head and wondering what it was I was forgetting.

Anyway, earlier in the month, I found myself with 45 minutes or so to kill, and I had recently seen the Abrams reboot and Star Trek was on my mind. I was thinking about it some, and I realized that my viewing habits with Voyager were somewhat spotty. It wasn’t entirely my fault. If I recall correctly, Star Trek Voyager was the show that the mega-geniuses over at Paramount decided to use as their flagship for their fledgling network, UPN.

I'm not entirely sure they put in the effort
they could have into their logo.

What that meant to people like me was that Voyager wasn’t viewable. UPN was trying to strong-arm cable companies into carrying the rest of their programming – mostly urban sitcoms - and no longer allowing Voyager to be shown in first run syndication.* I believe this all came to a head around the end of season 3. And up until that time I had not missed an episode. After that time, I had nothing, no access at all, I couldn’t watch the show.**

And just like that, I moved on. Yes, things eventually got worked out, but I missed most of the fourth season before someone locally stepped up and decided to carry the UPN network. By then, I wasn’t that interested, I’d learned to live without it. That isn’t to say I never saw another episode, I did, I saw lots of them. But the spell was broken and I just wasn’t as interested anymore. That huge gap in my Star Trek knowledge was damning.

You see, I spent most of my online time back then – the late nineties I guess – on the Trek BBS. I was there every day. Had been for years. I loved it, talking about the episodes, the technobabble, real science, and my favorite, the neutral zone, a board where folks argued about politics, religion, all sorts of stuff like that. In fact, After Voyager disappeared from my local programming, I switched to that portion of the Trek BBS and almost never discussed Star Trek at all after that. Well, until a year or so later when the BBS switched servers and lost all my account data and I had to be reset. Since newbies weren’t even granted access to the controversial portion of the forums and my post count went back down to zero, I had no reason to even go back there anymore… the last of my Trek fandom died then. I just let it go.

So, back to Netflix, I was recalling all this and decided to pick up where I left off with Voyager. I watched the last episode of Season 3 (A cliffhanger involving the Borg) and finally jumped right into the black hole of my viewing, season 4.

And through the first 9 episodes of that season, I felt like the show was very well done. I think I’d caught most of them later, but not all. Still, I thought it was an impressive run of quality. The 10^th episode though, one entitled, Random Thoughts, was a bit of a mess. The crew visits a peaceful planet full of telepaths where Voyager’s engineer gets arrested for thinking a violent thought.

Not a bad premise I suppose, not really original, it made me think of that early episode of TNG where Wesley committed some minor snafu on a peaceful planet and was sentenced to death, but the execution of the Voyager episode was ludicrously stupid. At one point, the constable of the alien city is aghast at the barbarity humans displayed by even have a brig to hold people against their will. She moralized a bit and stressed that they rehabilitate their criminals, they don’t imprison them. Then, only moments later, she arrests Voyager’s engineer and starts a procedure to lobotomize her. Not one shred of irony was expressed by anyone. In fact, when the real criminal is caught later, the Vulcan seems to take some pleasure in relaying that they were keeping him in the brig. I mean, really? The entire episode was poorly conceived and poorly executed. That brought back a flood of memories in of itself, not everything Trek did was gold.

Let's see. The evil thinking engineer is the bumpy headed girl with a perm

I think I was like a guy that was romanticizing a long lost relationship, conveniently editing out the unpleasant parts. Star Trek wasn’t all awesome. There were some dark times in there.

So, here’s to a second romance. I’m still loving my run through Voyager, and look forward to watching the final four seasons straight through. Then I’ll jump onto Enterprise. Good times are ahead.

*If memory serves, the first few years of Voyager were shown on UPN, but not exclusively, as UPN did not have an affiliate in my area at the time, local channels were allowed to carry the program.

**At the time, Nielsen ratings for Star Trek were falling like dollars at a Vegas strip club. At its height, I believe TNG was pulling in something close to 10 TIMES the viewers than Voyager was getting by the end of its 3^rd year. Seems like a bad time to trying to bully people by threatening to take away your product, but whatever.

When You Just Can't Do Any More

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

Had a busy week last week, and a busier weekend. I've not written a word of fiction this new year. I'm kind of freaking out about that. I spent some time doing more book cover stuff this weekend though, worked at my day job (on a Saturday!), cleaned the house (looks good) and tried to get a copy of my unpublished novel printed (via Lulu) and sent to me to do another read through to see if I want to do some more revisions to it.

That last thing, about my novel, it looks like Lulu crashed while I was just finishing up. I had all the interior formatting looking good, the cover looking sweet (a vanity thing, that's all) and just as I was about to hit submit the stupid thing crapped out on me. I tried to log back in and it sent me all the way back to an earlier part of the process. I was very disappointed. So I quit and went back to working of more covers.

So, as it stands, you know what bothered me more than anything else I did this weekend? I attended my son's football banquet on Friday night. While there I had to stand in line for an hour for my food. Then I got to the front after all that only to find that they were out of salad, out of potatoes, out of bread, and out of Chicken. Yes, I paid a lot of money to stand in line and eventually eat a macaroni and cheese dinner.

Then, after all the eating was over and the whole night was getting close to being over, I had to run to the restroom. What did I see as I passed the kitchen? Pans full of chicken, all cooked, on the warming burners, and right beside the pans of fully cooked potatoes and bread. WTF?

Turns out, they had a bunch of stuff cooking that wasn't ready until dinner was over and we had to start the festivities. I suppose the cooks all got to take the food home with them... food I paid for.

Sigh. Whatever. I'm being a poor sport I know. I suppose I just had to vent a tad. A mood appropriate for Monday.

The Great Internet Blackout

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the 'blackout' of the internet that many participated in to protest the draconian SOPA/PIPA bills that, if enacted, would make the internet a whole lot ickier than it should be. Click ---> Here <--- to learn more.

Also, I was just lazy this week and didn't feel like doing anything. So it really worked out for me, I can be lazy and get points for being an activist.

For me, when people post videos on their site I rarely watch. As I am often reading posts on the go and can't really stop to watch a 5 or 6 minute video that I'm not sure I'll enjoy. But I'm asking everyone who enjoys that awkward humor that Ricky Gervais is famous for, please, please watch.

In the sketch, Liam Neeson has decided he wants to do comedy. Once they get started in on their improv session I laughed as hard as I have in a long time. Great stuff.

Ah hell, while I'm at it, I might as well post the other funniest thing I've seen - also staring Ricky Gervais. Here he is listening to a movie idea from Patrick Stewart. This clip was from his hilarious TV show called Extras.

Please watch. This is the funniest stuff ever.

Happy days folks.

News, Notes and Updates

2012-01-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

Not really, but I always find those types of posts irresistible. Not enough happens to me that warrants real updates though. So, I don't actually have any of news. Nor notes. And definitely no updates.

Wait, I do have one. A few people emailed or otherwise sent me a message to let me know they couldn't comment on Friday's post. I couldn't help but notice that it coincided with Blogger's update to allow threaded commenting. That sounds about right. I like using Blogger I suppose, but it seems like it's buggy to me. Always things going wrong. So I disabled the embedded commenting - effectively ending the threaded commenting - and instead have pop up comments enabled. Hope that works better.

Anyway, on to the rest. I have watched a few episodes of Star Trek this week. I realized when trying to cut things from my Netflix queue that I quit watching Star Trek: Voyager, around the time 7 of 9 jumped on board. Not real sure why, but I started watching and realized that it didn't suck near as much as I thought it did. Weird, because as I went back and watched several episodes of TNG and I found I did not like them near as much as I remembered.

In fact, I had built up Best of Both Worlds from TNG so much to my kid that he recently sat down with me to watch it. He was so jazzed about seeing it. So we watched.

The Rubik's cube became a bad guy. They were running low on ideas.

And it wasn't that amazing. In fact, I was stunned at how impossibly weird several scenes were. Like when the away team beamed aboard the Borg cube and Riker walked around describing what he saw. Let me repeat that: He walked around and described what he saw. Like, "We're walking into a room now. The room has walls, there is a button on the wall. I pressed the button. It appears to control the lights... Yes, the button controls the lights."

I mean, I've seen similar things done in movies and such, but usually I'm at least seeing reaction shots from other people. I might have been cool with it if the Captain had to sit on the bridge and there was creepy music playing as he listened to the folks aboard the Borg cube describe things, you know, the Captain could look pensive or something. All in all, it wasn't the most effective storytelling I've ever seen. During all that Riker was just walking around looking at stuff.

My kid was less than enthused. He's been raised on the MTV style of frenetic edits and nonstop action, and I guess I have been too, because, damn. It was really slow. I suppose I can't recapture the awe I felt when I saw the episode the first time. Or the second.

I don't know. It was just, well, sad.

How The Cola Wars Proved You Can't Trust Anything From Anyone... Ever!

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

I’m a big fan of Coke Zero. It tastes like Coke, but 0 calories. Yum. Funny that, as Coke already had Diet Coke on the market for a very long time. Same product with all new marketing? Not exactly. I actually think it's an important thing though, so I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Firstly, I’m in “art mode” right now and am struggling to communicate via the written word. I’m still working on another cover that will probably take me through the weekend to get close to being good enough turn over to the respective persons that need to okay it. Then writer Rusty can wake up from hibernation and get back to work. Editor Rusty has no place in my life right now. So he can die a thousand deaths for all I care.

Like a lot of men, I tend to compartmentalize things, and even though writing and designing/painting are creative endeavors, they seem to come from different areas in my head.

Because right now, in my head, I’m thinking that I should be drawing a picture of this, not writing about it. Weird.

I’ll make mention that as of right now, I’m closing polling on my great cover question from Monday, where I solicited everyone’s opinion on whether or not I should replace my existing cover for A Dead God’s Wrath, which is suffering a bit from lackluster sales. I’m not fretting over it, because the amount of effort I’ve put into marketing that story is about as close to zero as a number can be without actually being zero. However, it did give me an excuse to whip out the old tablet and paint some. But I went all over that in Monday’s post.

The results:

I had 22 people respond to my question: Which cover should I use?

People who thought they were both so awesome that they would rather choose between their children than those two book covers (i.e., worried they’d offend me by choosing): 5

People who preferred the original cover: 16

People who preferred the new cover: 1

You know, back in the early eighties Coca-Cola had been tinkering with a new formula for their flagship drink. But it had been around - more or less unchanged - for decades and they were nervous about making changes to a much beloved product willy-nilly. These folks were no dummies, so they decided to do some research first.

Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement, they carried out the most extensive marketing research program in the history of the world to determine how the larger public would react to their new flavor for their drink. After it was all said and done they had an overwhelming response from the public. The new formula rocked, the old one was history.

It must be better. It's new!

So, they unveiled what is universally considered one of the largest disasters in the history of product rollouts. They labeled their product as ‘New Coke’ and quit selling the old stuff altogether. Pepsi celebrated by lighting Michael Jackson on fire, symbolic of the king of soda going up in flames (Don’t bother looking that up, that’s what happened, trust me). Coke had a huge, and I mean huge, PR mess of their own making on their hands*. Well, actually, it was the fault of the people of America, who LOVED this New Coke more than anything ever made, until it actually hit the market, when they universally decided that they hated it.

The point? They lied. Not Coca-Cola, but the people who said they liked New Coke in the first place.

Not on purpose I’m sure, but the end result was the same. When you want to know what people want, ask them, then do the opposite of what they say. It works for product rollouts, it works for presidential candidates, and it works for book covers.

By my math, it’s 16-1 in favor of changing the book cover. Thanks everyone.**

*Not entirely true, all those years of research that went into the formula for New Coke actually came from their introduction of Diet Coke. Which of course is why New Coke tasted like crap. It was just Diet Coke with sugar instead of aspartame as a sweetener. Coke Zero actually uses the formula for Coke (with artificial sweeteners instead of sugar, Diet coke still plugs away with the ‘New Coke’ formula)

** I’m kidding. I still might make the change, but it won’t be because I think everyone is lying. I’m not creating soft drinks here.

Book Cover Week Continues!

2012-01-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

I'm sure no one is entirely thrilled with this post, but since Grumpy Bulldog, Secret Agent, has publicly been soliciting advice about his book covers for his upcoming novel releases. I thought I would answer my own question that I asked during one of my comments at his site a few days ago... found here

I mentioned that he might want to consider doing minimalist covers instead of the characters in environments covers he has mocked up. This way, the bottom half of each book stays the same with each installment, except for the title changing. And the upper portion has a variation of the helmet each time. Brilliant!

Just a mock-up, I don't have rights to the helmet I lifted from the internet. And I'm sure Grumpy would point out that purple isn't the same as scarlet... I'm just throwing my idea out there.

The Juggler

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

Yep, that's me. I managed to get a lot done this weekend around the house, and I do mean a lot. Still, not as much as I wanted to otherwise. I decided I'm not writing another damn word of fiction until I get some art related projects done for some other folks. Weeknights tend to go poorly for me in that regard, but I'm going to give it a shot this week.

I did sit down this weekend and play some more with that 3D software I got a few months ago. That has a ridiculous learning curve, I clearly have no idea what I'm doing. However, I did do something book cover wise - er, for myself.

This is the version I've had around since August

My novelette, A Dead God's Wrath, was released last August and I've never been too thrilled with the cover I did for it. I had in mind do do several installments in the same universe, and wanted the covers to all be riffs on a theme. I haven't come up with a theme, per se, but I did think the cover didn't do me any favors. I mean, it isn't bad, it just doesn't make me shout from the rooftops.

So, I have decided that I need a new cover for myself. I do realize that a lot of other folks are waiting on me to do stuff for them, and I am on a short timeline, but this is sort of an exercise, getting out of writing mode and into artsy mode.

So, I came up with the image below and am thinking of putting it up as a replacement for the existing cover on the novelette.

I wouldn't get mad if I got some advice.

A super special edition collector's cover maybe?

The man on the cover is the 3D model I made. I think he's passable enough as real except for the way his arm bends as he holds the gun, that gives away the illusion some. If I work on it enough I'll get better. I actually blended the model with regular digital painting stuff. Doing that is a cheat, because rendering hats and clothes take time and skill that I don't have. So yes, I rendered a naked man, and painted clothes on him.

But, I think I can see the potential in doing stuff with the 3D software. Once rendered, they can look pretty cool.

Anyway, should I make the change? Or keep working on it? I am a bit worried that no one would have a clue about the Science fiction elements of the story based on this cover. It might give the wrong impression.

Cerulean Isle

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

I did a book cover recently for the fine folks over at Wido publishing. They were very kind and forgiving of my consistent unprofessionalism. The cover they let me do was for Cerulean Isle, by G.M. Browning.

I asked for ideas they wanted me to try out and they just told me to have fun with it. I submitted a version of the above picture and they liked the concept and we went from there.

Funny thing about the concept though, as it required a great deal more work than I anticipated to bring it to fruition as a final product. During the process I kept wanting to tell the great people over at Wido that it was good enough. But I am an author too, and I would be really disappointed if my cover artist half-assed a cover for a novel that I may have spent years perfecting. So I kept go back over it until all of us were happy.

Funnily enough, I spent most of my time reworking the back cover of the book. My first version had the owner of that fin pictured coming out of the water. I had been trying to portray a scene from the novel, but had gotten enough details wrong that the idea had to be scrapped altogether. Still, check out an early version of the wrap around cover:

Notice how dolphin-like the tail was at first... because I used a dolphin as a model

Yes, my son was serving as my merlord model, I've been using him as a model for all sorts of my art projects for his entire life, so it was no big deal to him. But in the end, he was scrapped for the open ocean.

By the end, I felt pretty good about how things went. The final version, had several other changes to it before it was sent to the printer, although I had nothing to do with the back cover text or spine design:

Anyhow, the process took a bit longer than I wanted it too, but I love how it turned out. I also have a host of other covers I'm working on this month.

Happy days everyone.

Insecure Writers - January 2012 Edition

2012-01-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

The internet has Alex J Cavanaugh to thank for Insecure Writer’s Support Group. It’s a monthly opportunity to vent your fears, insecurities, and whatever else writers get weird about, and get to know others that feel the same way.

For the first couple of weeks of the year I’m going to have to try real hard to not start every post with some sort of ‘this is the first time this year that blah blah blah…’ or ‘this is the best (or worst) thing that happened this year.’ It can be a hackneyed way of doing things, but at least for me, it’s heartfelt. One of the few holidays that really impact me on an emotional level is New Year’s.

Every year I find some time to reflect, see what I’ve done, what I’ve not done, dream of what may come, and predict what seems likely given my past performance. It’s this weird time of despair and optimism. Where I wonder if this is the year I quit dreaming and grow up, or if this is the year I actually begin to live the dream.

2011 felt like a pretty productive year for me, until I stopped to see what I actually accomplished. Which was close to nothing. I managed to submit a novel for publication, see it rejected, submit it again to someone else, and not hear back. I wrote a novelette, and novella, and a short story… I have half a draft for a novel, and another short story that I can’t really call done because it’s too horridly awful.

That doesn’t seem like very much. All that combined puts my word count for the year at close to 100k. That feels about typical for me. But that is nowhere near the productivity I would like to have. By my math, that averages out to around 250 words a day. Not so much, that’s about a single page’s worth of text.

That sort of failure to produce is exactly why I at least try to make resolutions around writing, around goals. I mentioned yesterday some of the writing things I want to get done this year, and I need them, because without setting goals, I will achieve nothing. I’ll end up here in 2013 lamenting that I didn’t do what I hoped to.

And that’s my worry now. I did spend close to a decade of my life talking about writing, and researching for a novel I never wrote. My big moment of realization came when I, per chance, had a professional, published author, a guy nominated for a Pulitzer, offer to read over some of my stuff and give me some helpful tips.

I jumped at the chance to let him read some of my stuff. I had nothing. Nothing! I recall running home and writing a three page story about a college professor fretting about the world ending, then rushing back to his office the next day and handing him my crappy story. The poor guy very politely went over some storytelling basics with me, and gave me a book on the craft of writing that I still savor to this day.

And if I’m not diligent, I’ll spend the next 20 years of my life turning out stuff at a snail’s pace. Not because I can’t do more, in which case it wouldn’t bother me as much, but because I didn’t make good use of my time. And that, well, that bothers me.

It's a Brand New Year

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-05:00

I took an impromptu vacation last week. I intended on a post, or even two, but decided not to. I had already written an end of the year recap, books I liked, movies, stuff like that. But I decided against it. I saw so many of those type posts go up that I figured the world could live without it from me... of course, if the world really does end in 2012 then I'll know I was wrong.

So, I do have some goals in mind to accomplish this year. I want to write more short stories. At least 12 of them. I want to revise and edit one complete novel until I think it's done enough to submit, and write at least one completely original novel.

That's pretty much it. Oh, and just in case anyone is looking for a pearl of wisdom from me today: Hangovers seem so much worse when you're older.

I also hope to establish and follow a set blogging schedule, and be better about visiting others.

And I hope to lose at least 30 pounds. I had salad twice today. I hope I've lost most of that 30 pounds by tomorrow.

Happy New Year!

Year in Review - Before Christmas!

2011-12-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

Yes, most people save their best of lists for the week after Christmas, well, I'll try to have a real one (or two) next week, but for now. Just a few thoughts about the year in review.

Just a thought about the year, for me, it's been a year of trivia. One of the things that makes me born to be a writer, and an amazing conversationalist, is my encyclopedic knowledge of trivia. Not for the sake of anything except for the fact that I love knowing stuff. Not real knowledge of course, you know, like how to fix a car or fix a leaky faucet, but knowledge like knowing rhubarb really means 'barbarian food from near that river in Russia'.

What else did learn in 2011? Lots of stuff. According to my research (meaning, it appeared on my ‘what your poo is telling you’ desk calendar), the world’s oldest known joke, appearing in some sort of archeological find, goes like this:

“A young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap”

Huh. I hope that isn’t the best the ancient world has to offer. I’m sure if the person writing that down knew it would have been discovered again four thousand years in the future they would have at least tried to make it funnier. I mean, I was pulling off better jokes than that when I was like, five years old. Lame.

But reading about that made me think of another piece of trivia I’d heard, this one was from some scientist guy who said the oldest recipe we've ever recovered was a recipe for Beer!

Oh, and of course, that figures. The oldest written records we have of humans daring to write down their abstract thoughts are recipes for homemade beer and fart jokes.

I was sorta aghast at the thought, then I realized that if some far future archeologist turned up some computer hard drive of a typical person from today, they would probably find it full of porn and cat videos. Then I was more aghast at what a future person would learn about us, I mean, we haven’t just been recycling fart jokes and alcohol recipes for the past 4000 years have we?

Well, when a coworker took a look at the cream cheese cupcakes with chocolate pudding on top that we had yesterday and made a poop joke, I thought the answer has to be yes, because that’s just what we do.

Anyway, I wanted to do a year in review, but found out that I have nothing to review, as I don’t pay that much attention to things as they happen. So here are a few items that I remembered that I think happened this year.

1) There was some sort of natural disaster made worse by people doing something they probably shouldn’t - People shouldn’t be messing around with the fires of creation. Or, rather, they need to give it its proper respect. A tidal wave striking Japan in the way that it did might be a once a century sort of event, but so what - engineer your NUCLEAR facilities to handle those once a century cataclysms… especially if you expect to use the facility for several decades.

2) The TV show, The Six-Million Dollar man, yes, it was about a cyborg that battled bionic bigfoots and insane Venusian probes, but in 2011 I looked for it on Netflix and could not find it… I’m not sure who to be angry with, I want to see Steve Austin use his awesome car phone to talk to his boss.

3) I tried to watch Stargate the TV show, I watched season 1, and a few episodes of season 2. It was hard for me to watch, real hard. I’ll in 2012 to make it through season 2.

4) I did watch the first 5 seasons of Psych, best show in the universe.

5) I saw movies at the theater, but I don’t remember any that were so good I might need to force my grandkids to watch them when I’m an old man. Am I forgetting any? I liked the Marvel movies, I liked Cowboys vs Aliens one, all in all, I was a bit underwhelmed.

6) I've realized that outside of writing, reading, and pop science, I have no idea what happened in the world in the past year.

Maybe next year we'll all be jazzed about The Hobbit coming out.

DRAGON SLAYER LIVES!!!!

2011-12-19T12:00:00.000-05:00

Writing is a way of life, really. I don’t like writing, it’s painful, frustrating, it takes me away from family, it makes me angry when it isn’t going well, it’s awful really. But once I’m done with something I feel like I have to jump in and do it again. I like the pain I suppose. As it stands, I’ve got a half drafted fantasy novel that I’m considering abandoning – this year’s nano – if I can’t re-outline it into something I like better. Right now it’s a bunch of people wondering around and saying, “Hey, this whole world is really weird,” and “Man, we can totally do magic! That doesn’t make any sense.”

Yep, that’s hard core storytelling right there. Especially since these people aren’t visiting this fantasy world, but actually supposed to be living on that world. Ugh.

Easy mistake to make, happens all the time. But that isn't the Invincible Sword of Leboria - that's Glagnar's toothpick.

Part of it must have something to do with world building, or a lack thereof, I started thinking about my teeny little village that was cut off from the larger world and everyone carrying weapons. Well, that means they had to have a forge, and ore, and something to keep the fires burning hot (lots of trees, maybe coal). Ooh, then I thought of a guy with poor eyesight, then that led to optics, and glass blowing, oh, and don’t get me started about clothing, do they have wool? No, I decided, only cows and pigs… so they wear lots of leather. But then I started thinking of home construction, if they are iron poor (which they are), then they don’t have lots of nails, and if they don’t have nails, do they also have iron hinges (yes, I decided, they will). Is that significant? I have no idea. But I spent too much time figuring that stuff out as I wrote. What do I mean, figuring it out as I wrote? Let me explain by using some (made up) example.

“But Ragon can’t be the town’s only Smith, what if he were injured? Or he died?”

“I know,” Platt said, “but it’s true. We can’t support another Smith, the apprenticeship takes too long, and we need all the able bodied men to help with the harvest.”

Julie frowned. “But the harvest isn’t all year round, surely someone could apprentice for much of the year, and then help in harvest time. It doesn’t make any sense to go without.”

It was Platt’s turn to frown now. He hadn’t seen the poor logic before then. “You’re right. There is no reason for Ragon to be toiling away without an apprentice. He must be hiding something, making up lies in order to continue working in secret.”

Oh, I can’t write anymore. It’s awful. Now imagine approximately 200 pages of what I’m now calling “plotting through dialog,” which is what happens when I chuck my outline, or even follow it, but miss a major plot hole, which gets discovered during my extended character interactions. I’ll just write it out and move on, and come back later to fix. But when more and more of the time spent writing is really just me plotting, or figuring out the world building, then I know I have a problem, I’ve not thought my story out well enough.

So, that’s where I’m at with that. I do think I’m going to give the novella I wrote late in the summer another editing pass. It’s that one I’ve complained about intermittently that starts as an epistolary tale before sliding into a traditional first person narrative. The problem I’ve been having is I like both methods of storytelling in general, and in particular, I think both serve to help me tell the story I want to… but something about putting the two together, unintentionally, bothers me. I don’t know, maybe it’s like the discovery of penicillin, or a peanut butter and chocolate thing… serendipity that leads to greatness.

Sky High

2011-12-17T12:19:00.001-05:00

I've seen some pretty skies of late. Thought I would share

Bah Humbug Blahgfest

2011-12-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

Grumpy Bulldog, formerly a Doctor, now a secret agent, is hosting the Bah Humbug Blahgfest and asked for 12 things about the holiday season that I hate…Be sure to check his blog for a list of all the other participants, as he has a list of all of them there. Okay then, here we go.

12) Irregular television programming: It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, but as recently as the 90’s, if you turned on the tv to watch Seinfeld at Christmas time you might end up having to see something like A Dianna Ross Christmas special. Or you want to catch the Misfits of Science and what is on instead? Rudolph and Prancer: A Love Story. Argh. Even if it’s shows I already watch, they’ll do this Christmas episode that gets needlessly sappy and weak. I’m waiting for a Christmas episode of Stephen Hawking’s Universe where he discusses Santa and the physics of worldwide present delivery. Ugh, I dread it already.

11) Crowds: My son’s headphones died and I need to get them replaced because they are under warranty at Best Buy. Well, try doing that at Christmastime. It’s like waiting in line to get Superbowl tickets. Lines go back for as far as the eye can see at every counter, the wait time is hours. I just want the damn headphones. I’m not purchasing a new stove for delivery on Christmas eve to grandma’s house… with a bow on top. Just give me my fµƆʁing headphones!!!... Sorry, I had a moment of anger there. My point, I don’t like the crowds.

10) Traffic: Of course, getting to Best Buy in the first place took an hour longer than it should have. But so does everything else. For 11 months out of the year I think I live in the perfect spot. A quiet neighborhood with a nice yard, but will all the luxuries of city life, movie theaters, shopping, restaurants, within minutes of my front door…. Except I can’t get milk at the gas station in December without fighting gridlock on the roads first, it reminds me of people evacuating a natural disaster, except there is no disaster, just cars everywhere.

9) The Weather: I hate the cold. Usually, March through November is tolerable, but December is when it gets bad. I get depressed and beg for relief. Please let global warming just give me this one thing: A toasty Christmas.

8) Presents: Not real, meaningful ones, but the crap people give out of obligation. $3 jewelry and $5 gift cards to Frank’s Tire Emporium. Billions are wasted every year on this future landfill.

7) Ungrateful Recipients: You know, I had to fight traffic for 4 hours, and stand in line for 90 minutes to get your stupid gift card for Frank’s Tire Emporium, be grateful. It was the only place open. Deal with it.

6) The Music: I don’t really like Christmas music. When I hear it piped through the speakers at the dentist’s office, the grocery store, the lobby of my office building, every other blog I follow, I just don’t care. My ears glaze over and I shut it out. If the music were that good, people would listen to it all year round.

My son say's he's a genius

5) Rap Music: Originally, this spot was for people who were a little too much into the Christmas spirit, but I was having a hard time making my point. Then I thought, what do I really hate most about this time of year? And it hit me, Rap music. Now, Rap music is something I hate worse than Christmas music, that I can’t funnel it into a mere month long period of time makes it worse. But no, my son thinks Rap is great, and his mission in life is to present me with a rap song I will like. I have honestly broken down and started shouting at him over it. He just won’t give up, and they all keep on sucking. Why do I hate it, well, at first it was just a general, “it’s not my thing” but as I’ve been exposed to it more and more I’ve grown to hate it like I hate very few things in my life. I hate a whole genre of music now, that’s a lot of hate. Thanks son.

4) The Religious Aspect: Okay, back to Christmas stuff. I know, the whole point of Christmas is that it’s about the birth of Jesus – but here’s the thing - it isn’t. It’s more like someone took every wintertime celebration they could find during the middle ages, threw them into a blender, drank it, and pooped out Christmas. I would think most Christians would want Christ taken out of the holiday, it seems… I don’t know, disrespectful. I like the story that Odin would fly through the sky on his 8 legged horse on a great hunt, and children would leave treats for him by their hearth as he passed by their house at night. In gratitude, he would leave them presents in return, well, that’s familiar. There are tons of Christian traditions that are more ancient still, but the point I’m making is that the Christmas traditions most of us know now has nothing to do the Jesus. Doesn’t it cheapen the experience to throw him in there? Either way, when people start getting up in arms about it being this super holy Christian holiday I have to disagree.

3) The Secular Complaining: Taking the nativity off of government funded facilities. Ridiculous. If my courthouse erected a 17 foot tall totem every year in honor of a Native American holiday I wouldn’t care about that either. Granted, I might not be happy if they are spending money on it – I’d rather see them spend money on better public transportation, or fixing pot holes - but the thing about taxation is that you don’t really get to dictate what they spend your money on, because it isn’t your money after the government gets it, it’s theirs, they can do what they want. There are limits for sure, but those little nativity scenes have not crossed any lines.

2) People Who Don’t Celebrate: Party poopers. Every one.*

1) Me: Yes, much like that guy from the movie with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, I have reserved the final judgment for myself. For complaining so much.

And that’s pretty much it. Just so we all know, there is a lot I love about the holiday too. But that wouldn’t be in keeping with the spirit of the blahgfest, but rest assured. I find enjoyment at this time of year.

*not everyone. I can make exceptions for those with deep seated emotional scars that stem from some holiday tragedy.

Scientists: What A Bunch of Weirdos

2011-12-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a big day in the world of Science, and by big, I mean huge. It was the day for the Higgs Boson announcement.

So, okay, um, pretend my finger is gravity, and, um, my other finger is, er, a battleship... wait

If you’re not sure why that might be a big deal then let me explain. Some scientists in the physics community have hated Einstein for years, decades even. They have worked as hard as possible to help disprove his theories of special and general relativity and in the past few months, have taken it to a new level.

Yes, those feeble minds have been taking it on faith that he is wrong, and have been thinking that way since the thirties. Why? Well for the obvious reason is that if his theories are correct, then quantum theory has to be wrong… of course the great paradox of modern physics is that both theories have been shown to be correct to the extent of our abilities to test them. However, they contradict one another.

First, the anti-Einsteinians fabricated that giant hubbub about FTL neutrinos. Now a race is underway to duplicate the results of the experiments that turned out those bizarre results. All I have to say about that is, if correct, that would also invalidate quantum theory as well. So don’t expect those new results to confirm the old

So, what did those bastards do next? They had to have this big press conference yesterday where they went on and on about finding the Higgs boson. What is that? Well, it’s quantum theory’s lame attempt to explain the existence of gravity. It isn’t a curvature of spacetime like what Einstein described, oh no, it’s these little force carriers (hence the term, boson) that gives all matter in the universe its mass.

Einstein also debated physics with Richard Nixon... and maybe smoked a lot of pot

I know, stupid, right?

Anyway, this big conference is held, most of the world’s scientific media is there for the announcement that they found it. The Higgs is real! The Higgs is real! They start discussing all their results and finally the lower the bombshell… they have found the Higgs Boson.

Maybe. Well, actually, no, they haven’t found a thing, but you know, it might be there.

Because really, they aren’t sure, they need another year to see. So that’s it, that is the big announcement. A big whomping maybe. I think those relativity deniers need to go back to the drawing board and come up with something good and quit trying to make up whatever comes to mind and announcing it as a big fact. I mean, the press conference ended with a standing ovation for crying out loud… They didn’t find out anything new!*

Here is my attempt at reproducing a similarly absurd press conference in another setting.

“Thank you for coming, I’m sure you’re all eagerly awaiting the results of a great discovery in our Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. As you know, we’ve been looking for signs of radio signals from the stars that show signs of non-human intelligence in the wider universe. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve had a surprising and thrilling result in our search.”

“Today, we stand before you, my team and I, and proudly announce that we can finally say with a high degree of certainty, that if there are intelligent beings living on plant Gliese 22b, then we can’t find them. Thank you, have a nice day.”

Big whoop.

Sigh. I hope everyone understands that the above is all tongue in cheek. Finding the Higgs boson would actually be a pretty big deal. It isn’t called the ‘God particle’ for nothing**. If there is ever a hope for artificial gravity, real artificial gravity, not the kind that is contingent on centripetal force, then it would come from manipulating the Higgs field, er, that’s the ~~magical~~ theoretical field that allows the bosons to work.

So, I love my science, but I’ve never been a huge fan of quantum theory where it overlaps with relativity, it’s very inelegant and doesn’t offer a lot of insight. So I’m honestly not sure what to make of this should it turn out to be true.

Sorry Einstein, the world is against you.

* Yes they did

**Yes it is.

The Problem With Moving South

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

I'm a little behind, as always, but just in case everyone missed these pictures that hit the internet in the last few weeks, please take a look at this:

I'm eating a finger for dessert

In case you don't know what that is, it's a big assed bug. It's eating a carrot. It could easily be a man's arm though. This is proof that monster's do exist.

Seriously,

Also, I hear all these wonderful things about New Zealand and then something like this pops up and you realize that if their bugs are this big, then their alligators must be Godzilla sized.

Actually, if you've watched the extended editions of the LoTR movies then you've probably seen these in the extras. But the one I've pictured above set a record for its size. It's ridiculous.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2068547/Weta-insect-Heaviest-world-weighs-3-times-mouse.html

Don't forget Grumpy Bulldog is having his grumpfest on Thursday. If you're the sort that likes to complain, then please sign up so you can vent about the holidays.

It's Not Possible

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

I had this 3k word long post prepared about the coming destruction of society, and maybe humanity, but after reading it again I decided it needs another pass or two before I can let that one see the light of day. I go to some dark places there.

So, instead, I want to point out that I worked (wasted) my weekend trying to expand my horizons by entering the 3D art workplace.

Well, I don't want to chalk that up as a loss yet, but I did not have a good time. I got Poser 9 recently, thinking I could design and build 3D figures. I chose this program because it was relatively cheap and supposedly, great for beginners.

Sigh. I have no idea what I was doing, but I was not creating art, it was not user friendly, and in a lot of ways, extremely frustrating, not to mention, buggy, as it crashed many times, deleting my progress each time.

So I have nothing to show for all my work, nothing. If I knew it would have been like this I would have just gotten Blender or something, at least that one is free. But, I'll be trying it some more, which is why I'm not ready to call it a loss yet. A lot of my frustration is that they seem to be pushing me to use the prebuilt models, which doesn't feel very artistic to me.

Oh well.

I'm Right Here!

2011-12-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note to everyone out there. I am on Goodreads. I like the site, and I've been there for a while now. But man, do I suck at making friends. So please, find me and friend me there. Unless you already have, in which case, thank you.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5124150.Rusty_Webb

Also, if you are a writer, or hope to be, I really do think the episode of the Simpsons that aired a few weeks ago is an absolute must see. Grumpy (who used to be a doctor - now a secret agent), made mention of it recently and I watched it. It really was great. Lisa is determined to write a novel and... oh, just watch it. I've went through the trouble to embed the thing so you don't even have to go looking for it. So take 25 minutes or so, relax and enjoy.

But don't wait too long to watch, I'm sure they'll disable it at some point in the future.

Insecure Writers, Christmas Edition

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

I hope we all know the routine by now. Alex J Cavanaugh started the Insecure Writers Support group a few months ago as a chance for all of us to vent our fears/frustrations about writing and to encourage one another. So, please go sign up, or, if you’re one of those writers that doesn’t struggle with confidence, then go and encourage all your fledgling brethren.

Last month, Nancy, who is a mental health expert in the real world, mentioned that the imposter syndrome plagues many people. But then I was thinking, does it still count when you have imposter syndrome but you've not had any success either?

A lot of this goes back to knowing your station in life. I spent many of my formative years living with relatives, grandparents, aunts and uncles, before my mother scrounged up the funds to put us in a sweet little trailer on a farm.

I’m not sure of the relationship we had with the farm owners, but we eventually wore out our welcome and had to move. We took that trailer and found a place that was nestled between lots of country, a few nice homes, and yet another farm. We plopped that trailer down on a very small plot of land that had been slivered off from the many acres of grasses and pasture and we lived there through all my middle school years.

Except for that nagging feeling like I didn’t belong. I always felt like I was that one kid, the one who was living in the wrong zip code. Others belonged and I did not. Never could shake that feeling - my whole life, just thinking that I didn’t belong, no matter where I was. I had to know my place.

I was well into adulthood before I realized that the problem might have just been with me. I’ve always enjoyed diagnosing myself as suffering from an assortment of behavioral disorders, and despite not knowing anything at all about disorders, and usually resorting to making up conditions to classify myself to fit in, I feel like I’m pretty dead on.

Example: did you know that I suffer from Conflictarian Rousal and Avoidance disorder? It’s where I find the situation with the highest drama, completely involving other people, and firmly insert myself into the middle of it, then do everything I can to not be involved.

It’s a disorder, I have no control.

Anyway, you get the idea. Well, I have also diagnosed myself with the disorder I’ve named, “Social Aversion and Discordance Disorder," the acronym is S.A.D.D., which is cool, but also I’m sure had been taken by some drunk driving campaign, and I don’t want to confuse people, so I changed it to:

“Social and Hierarchal Aversion Temperament?” There, the name is less cool, but I like the acronym better.

Yes, I have S.H.A.T.

This will totally keep people from knowing I'm crazy!

What does that mean? Well, as I started to mention earlier, before I got sidetracked, is that I always feel like I have no business even trying to do the things I do. I feel guilty, yes, guilty for wanting to be a writer. Look, people around me in real life are generally supportive, if a bit confused about why I would choose to do something like this with my free time. But they don’t discourage me, the opposite really. So why do I feel this way, why do I feel bad about writing, about hoping to write even more?

I have no idea. Does it have something to do with my childhood? The more I think about it the more I think I would have felt this way no matter my upbringing. I mean, it sounds so lame that a farmer forcing my mother to move when I was a kid was that big a deal, I moved a couple of times a year up until I got to middle school. That wasn't that big a deal, and it sounds like a pretty lame excuse. No, I was just born this way. I’m insecure, yes, I have S.H.A.T., but I haven’t let that stop me for moving on anyway.

So, here’s to feeling like I can belong. Cheers.

My Last Sales Update

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

From time to time, I like to post my sales figures, just to let people know where I stand in regards to the relative success of my short story I’ve posted on various online ebook outlets. I think information should be free and freely available, shared and all that.

That’s kind of a guiding principal in my life, I tend to share stuff to people if they ask, and I like knowing stuff. Not necessarily anyone’s personal business, but things that are kept arbitrarily secret for no real reason bugs me some.

However, it was brought to my attention recently that publishing my sales figures could very well be a breach of the terms of service for those aforementioned ebook retailers, and they would be perfectly within their rights to pull my measly little short story and shut down my seller account.

Along with my desire to see information be free, I am somewhat pragmatic, and don’t have a burning desire to rail against the world for my terms of service agreement, which I did, after all, agree to. Not real sure I could expect to sway too many people to my way of thinking on this one, so I’m nipping this in the bud and caving to the draconian demands of my ebook selling overlords: No future sales numbers from me.

Also, on an unrelated note, I got an email from Amazon letting me know that my ebook will be available in Italy. I’m not saying that they opened up the whole country just for my little short story that has sold XX number of copies. But there is a bit of a spaghetti western vibe going on there, and I’d like to think they saw some potential and so decided to give it a go.

Harry Potter

2011-12-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

I had an internet free weekend. It was weird. I didn't write anything, again, weird. The teenager waltzed in and asked if I wanted to watch the Harry Potter movies this weekend. So we sat around and watched them. It took most of Saturday and Sunday to get through them all, so I did pretty much nothing at all. It was quite nice, and I can see why so many people like doing it. It was pretty awesome.

I had a few thoughts. First, the movies are better than I thought. I know, everyone loved them. I never did. I always felt that with having already read the books, a newcomer would be lost trying to follow the rather involved plot that runs through the series. Especially later, when the books got thick and there was lots of information the viewer needed to understand what was happening.

Having read the books, not such a big deal for me, but still, I just like the books so much more, The movies are mere shadows compared to the novels.

But, I've pretty much seen them in theaters and never again. So watching them together was nice, as the teen doesn't want to hang around with me as much as he used to. That it's been several years since I read the books means that I don't have that chronology running around inside my head at the moment either. I figured, why not?

So, for the first time, I watching them as movies, and nothing else. And I liked them, well, I liked them except for the first two, which seemed a bit too, um, I don't know, kiddie, to me. They smiled too much, there were too many wacky hijinks. I found I didn't really like Dumbledore much then either.

But by the time we got to number three things turned awesome in a hurry. The series got darker, the threat of Whatshisname got serious. I did the wikipedia thing to see what was written about the direction and learned that Chris Columbus directed the first two, and intended to do all of them. He got burnt out and said he'll just produce. That saved this series, if they'd all been in the same style as the first two I don't think I could have stuck it out.

But anyway, it's all history now. So, I've provided for you, my favorites, in order:

The Prisoner of Azkaban
Deathly Hallows Pt I
The Order of the Phoenix
The Half-Blood Prince
Deathly Hallows Pt II*
The Goblet of Fire
The Chamber of Secrets
The Sorcerer's/Philosophers's Stone

Happy Monday, for those of you that think Monday can be good.

*Confession, I didn't watch PtII this weekend. I was going to, but I didn't. I'll watch it thing week. I'm basing my enjoyment of that one on my movie going experience, and since I've already explained that I liked them much more this weekend, my opinion might change about that one.

News, Notes, and Nubbins

2011-12-02T07:00:00.000-05:00

I had a great time with Ciara Night's blog hop yesterday. Many of the authors found their books. Please stop by her blog and find out how others did.

First Item: That's right. I won the crap out of Nano this year. I think that makes it lucky number 7 for me. I'd have to go back and look to be sure, but I think that's right.

It was the most difficult year to date for me. I chucked my outline a few paragraphs in and that made it tough. I managed to squeak into that glorious winner's circle by churning out many thousands of words in the final days. Take a look at the nifty nano word count stats below to glean what wisdom you can from my ordeal. As you can see I was behind the pace almost from the very beginning. Well, really I guess I fell off the wagon at around day 5. I nearly quit around day 20, but I decided that even if I didn't make it, I wasn't going to go out a quitter. So I plugged away and during the last week I think I hit a stride of sorts. I'm not quite halfway through the story and am definitely taking a few days to do other things before I start writing again.

Item 2: Dr Grumpy himself has decided to get into the whole blogfest thing. Not by merely participating of course, but by hosting one, he's giving out prizes and everything. Please stop by, say hello, and sign up. Let's see, I don't think he has an official linky thing up.So comment HERE and I'm sure you'll be counted as in the running.

That's real money that will be changing hands there folks, real money.

In case you're curious, and can't be bothered to check the link above, the blogfest is dedicated to Christmas. Wait, scratch that, Dr. Grumpy has a vendetta against that word. It's a blogfest dedicated to the holidays, specifically, the twelve things you most hate about the season.

I know, how can I possibly narrow it down to only twelve. Just kidding. It gives us all permission to vent a little about some of the more annoying aspects of the holiday season.

The Nubbins: Yes, just one last thing. I've put off a lot of stuff over the past month, and will be feverishly working on some of the things I've put off doing over the next few weeks. So everyone, if you're waiting on me to do something that I've promised I was going to do. I'll be getting my butt in gear in December.

Did I Notice Your Book?

2011-12-01T03:00:00.000-05:00

The lovely Ciara Night graciously asked me if I'd like to be a part of her 'Did I Notice Your Book' blogfest today, and I couldn't say yes fast enough.

To put it plainly. I'm tasked with putting a book I've noticed recently up on my blog, and seeing if the author notices my post. Sounds like tons of fun. It's also a grand experiment in how memes can spread. Ciara has been doing this for a while now, and a surprisingly high percentage of authors eventually find their books, even without knowing anything about the blog post before the day begins.

The blogfest is highlighting authors from several genres, please visit Ciara's blog today to see how well this experiment plays out.

My genre? Science Fiction.

My choice, well, it was tough. I had something in mind right from the beginning, then thought better of it and chose another book from another author, then changed my mind again and again. In the end I went through about 5 or 6 books before I settled on one.

So, without further adieu:

Neanderthal Swan Song, by Rick Novy

From the blurb:
The world of anthropology would have been excited when a perfectly preserved Neanderthal body is discovered in the Greenlandic permafrost, if authorities would allow the details out. When an American anthropologist involved in the excavation is denied access to the body, she uses an illicit tissue sample as source material to carry the Neanderthal’s clone to term herself.

Meet Ike Mudge, twenty-first-century Neanderthal man. Self-educated and raised in a laboratory thirty-thousand years out of his time, he is alone in a world of billions. Will it drive him insane, or will he make a final contribution for his kind–a Neanderthal Swan Song?

For what it's worth, this book sounds amazing to me. So, Rick, if you're out there, please drop me a line in the comments below and let me know that you found your book profiled here today, and how you discovered it.

I'm Trying Real Hard...

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

... But stuff keeps happening in real life that tries to derail me from writing. I'm at around 42k words and am running out of time to get the word count I wanted to for the month, which I'm sure you've already guessed is 50k.

All the other novels I've ever written have been in the 60-70k range when done. Very short. This one is shaping up to be a much longer project. Hard to tell though, I may end up cutting a lot. But I'm thinking it will still be around 120k when done. Long by my standards. And I think at the upper limits of what any publisher would even look at for a paper book from a unknown author.

So, here's hoping I have a couple of days free of too many other distractions, because... damn... you just wouldn't believe the stuff that's been happening.

If You Are a Turkey, Let Me Start By Telling You How Sorry I Am

2011-11-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

For those of us here in the States, it's Thanksgiving. A day that was ordained long ago that we must eat Turkey and watch football. Funny, I really don't like Turkey. Don't know why we eat it so much this time of year, they're difficult to prepare and are often dry, breeding grounds for bacteria, and of course, make me sleepy.

What I find interesting is that they have been bred to have such large breasts that it encumbers their ability to live a normal life. Yes, those butterball turkeys are so malformed that they can no longer breed in nature.

Every turkey in an American supermarket was artificially inseminated. Every. Single. One*. Because they literally, cannot do so on their own - they're too big to have sex. In fact, forget sex, many of the Turkeys sold in supermarkets are so large that they can't even walk.

With a name like that, it's hard to say no.

I mean, they don't even taste that good. That's what gets me. Granted, I have had one or two amazing birds over the years, but I don't want to appear to be waffling on the issue. I'm making a stand. I'm going to buy what is called a 'legacy turkey.' That's a bird that has been allowed to be breed naturally, one that is several times smaller than the typical thanksgiving bird. Because I'm a good person, it's important to me.

Well, hang on. Some of them can cost up to $9 a pound. WTF? Forget it then. I'm not going to pay $100 for a skinny bird. I don't care that much.

Enjoy the holiday folks. I'm thankful for much. Be happy.

*That's totally untrue. I'm just trying to make it more black an white here. You know, for drama. But most of them are.

2011-11-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

Check it out... I'm Batman:

I actually laughed at this. Honestly laughed. That doesn't happen too often.

Look! Stuff!

2011-11-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

I like history. Probably because it's like time travel, except without the actual travel part. So it's like time, except past time. You know, history.

Damn. I'm sure everyone sees why I dream of being a writer. That's some good stuff right there.

Anyway, I like history, it's full of stuff that's usually way weirder than fiction. I know it's a cliche, but it's true, real stuff is way more bizarre. I think the reason fiction works so well is that it allows us a sense of justice, or closure, or whatever, that we rarely see in real life. No, in real life, nice people get struck by lightning on their honeymoon and die. Or the biggest ass in town wins $43 million in the lottery and makes all the people he's bullied and spat on his whole life suffer even more. Because that's real life (Ironically, I made up the one about the lottery, I couldn't think of anything else off the top of my head).

Whoa, I didn't mean to take this to such a dark place. All that is just to say I found the National Archives Flickr stream yesterday and spent some time being mesmerized. Please, go waste your time there just as I have mine.

Global Warming: Totally Natural

Too many jokes... I can't choose between them!

Retirement home my ass. They put granny in a sweatshop

My Nano Disaster

2011-11-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

A metaphor for my novel

That's a strong word - disaster. I'll just call it a bit of an oversight. You see, a large portion of what I thought was the plot for my current story is actually not a plot. Yeah, I know, a rookie mistake. I thought I had a this great meta-story and then this really good personal story to tell. You know, love and betrayal, all that.

Well, that meta-story is really more like a backdrop. You know, like WWII isn't a plot for most novels, it's something that's going in the background while the actual plot unfolds.

Oops.

I'm not writing a literary novel, and I don't think I can carry the story using just the love pentagon I've developed. Sigh. Problems problems.

Even when I take the day off work, Monday's still find a way to suck.

Saturday Quickie

2011-11-19T16:51:00.000-05:00

Folks, just imagine what could have been...

Me, The 90's, and Potential

2011-11-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

I have a funny story to tell, funny because while it’s true, and not funny, it’s illustrative of how other people perceive me. Or did at one time.

Pretty much at the apex of my life

At a time of my life when I was still pretty young, early 20’s I guess, I was a bit of a wonderer. I was drifting along through life (I still am, if I’m being honest with myself here) without any real direction. At the time I worked in a gas station. The gas station was filled with people who had lots of other interests and tons of things that filled their out of work hours.

Let’s see, two guys were in a band that had just gotten signed to a record label and were on the verge of breaking it big.

Two guys had just graduated from college and were football players. One in particular was a QB who had dreams of playing in the NFL – he had an agent, offers on the table to play in the arena league and wrapped up his collegiate career as a pretty successful player.

One of my best friends, who had gotten me the job there, was in a band as well, they were just signed to a record label too. In fact, they were signed to, what was at the time, the largest record label in the world (well, a small label that was owned by the largest label in the world). They knew they weren’t budgeted to be superstars, but they had their foot in the door. Again, it was a big deal.

One day, my good friend and I were chatting about things, the future, what we’re going to be doing in life, you know, when you don’t have any real responsibilities and don’t know that the odds aren’t in your favor. He says to me, “Have you ever thought about how much talent we have here at the store?”

“No.”

“Well,” he said, “think about it, we’ve got Andre, Chris, Scottie, (all discussed above), I feel pretty good about my chances… and yours too.”

“Me?” I asked. “I’m not even playing much anymore.” A reference to my guitar playing.

“Yeah,” he said. “But you’ll do something great.”

And that was that. I never forgot that conversation. He was sincere, and I was touched. I lost touch with most of the guys, except for being Facebook buddies. But none of us, except for him possibly, really achieved anything close to what we’d envisioned. Later on, at his wedding, he introduced me at the rehearsal dinner to the rest of his rather large party as, “the smartest guy I’ve ever known. Go ahead, ask him anything you want to about Star Trek.”

Yeah, that's sounds like something he would say. Good times. In some ways, it was probably close to the high point of my life, in regards to having friends, having no worries, and feeling that the world was my oyster.

Sigh. I love my life now. But something 'great' hasn't just fallen in my lap. Here's hoping that I'm just a late bloomer.

Add A Caption!

2011-11-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

I know, it's stupid. I'm a sucker for this type of stuff though. So please someone add a caption for the picture below (which I whipped up a few months ago for another blog post.).

I have wasted entire days, days, looking at those damn 'add a caption' contests. I don't know why, but for some reason I just have this need, it comes from deep within, and I need to add captions to all pictures.

It's a curse.

It Started Poorly Then Got Worse...

2011-11-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

After yesterday's rant, I had the brief inkling to continue to air my grievances today, but thought better of it at the last moment. I've got a list of things that infuriate me about the world that's a mile long. I could post every day about it, but it makes me miserable. So instead, I figure I'd throw something out there about the state of my writing.

After the full manuscript of my novel was summarily rejected by one big time publisher, I queried a big six publisher and cringe at the crappy query I sent. Really should have proofread that one one more time Still waiting for that next rejection.

A Dead God's Wrath is still hanging around there in the ebook world. Sales to date look like this:

Kindle Barnes & Noble Smashwords
25 6 2

For a grand total of 33 copies. I'm still pretty pleased with it. I think most of the sales have been to people who stop by the blog on occasion. I do realize I'm a crappy marketer, and would probably do better if I forgot the whole blogging/twitter thing and just wrote more. But I kind of like where I'm at right now with that. I enjoy reading the blogs I follow and I think I write about as much as the family will allow.

I do think I'm going to try to put something else up for sale in an e-format soon. Probably. I'll give it a few weeks for certain, I was listening to a podcast tonight and I started really thinking about why I'm sitting on so much stuff, I have short stories (a few anyway), novels, all sorts of stuff that I've been sitting on for a long time. Most of those need some editing work, which I think is at the heart of why I've not already done that part, as I am not a huge fan of editing. For me it's the difference between designing race cars and being a mechanic. One is a dream come true and the other is what you have to do for the damn thing to work.

So I need to do a lot more of the mechanic type stuff for a while. When nano is over this year I'll dive right into that.

There has been some push back from a number of authors in regards to pricing, as that race to the bottom seems to have, well, bottomed out. First, I saw a very minor author (meaning, they have a small following of fans that will buy anything they produce) selling novellas for $2.99 and it surprised me. Then I heard an interview with another author, one that has no professional sales to their credit, that is selling short stories for $2.99 and doing so with no fanfare, several pen names (for different genres) and no marketing at all on their part, and selling in the hundreds of copies per month. The latter mentioned in the interview that they saw a bump in sales of one of their novels when they raised their novel price to around $5. The logic being that the perceived quality of the cheaper priced book was poor, but when the pricing got closer to what a reader would expect for a professional product then they were more likely to buy. Weird.

So, two instances don't equal a trend, but I'm thinking of playing with my pricing some. I don't think I could ever justify selling something like A Dead God's Wrath for $2.99, I don't think it holds that kind of value. But I also don't think I can really run an experiment with only one data point either. That brings me back to my need to have something else out there.

Anyway, I'm just thinking with my fingers at the moment, typing away, and avoiding working on my nano novel. My town constable has been attacked and carried off by an unnamed assailant. I suppose I should go back and write his death... or not. It's a plot twist I'm anxious to reveal. One of many. So much fun to be had there.

It Started So Innocently But Then...

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

Genius!

What a rant! I don't know where this came from. Sorry team, we'll try to do better tomorrow.

I think I’ve talked about Neal Stephenson before, actually, I know I have, I just can’t remember when (or which posts), and I don’t really want to talk about him again today except for what it means for my larger topic. He did, however, write of the most brilliantly odd books I’ve ever read in Cryptonomicon, which is a genre defying novel about a code breaker in WWII and his grandson in the present day, both kinda sorta on the hunt for the same thing. Flat out awesome. Drop what you’re doing and go read it quick, before others find out and mock you.

Of course, at a solid 1000 pages long, I’m not sure you can read it real quick, but do what you can.

Anyway, I have plans to read all his books at some point, and have one still sitting on my shelf that I picked up in the great Borders’s fire sale of 2011, but I’ve also got around 50 other books on my shelf I got then as well, it might be a while before I get to it.

Now, what was my point? Oh yes, I heard an interview with him the other day and he mentioned offhandedly about how America has shied away from mega-engineering projects for quite some time.

Also, it's a Star Destroyer!

And boy, did lights start going off in my head. It’s true, oh so true. My first thought was the James-Webb space telescope. To put it bluntly, it’s the most awesome thing in the history of mankind, and it’s up for debate right now on whether or not it will ever fly. This was designed to be the replacement to Hubble and would be another giant leap forward in our understanding of the cosmos. It’s entering its home stretch in the assembly process, it’s over budget, it’s behind schedule, and it’s almost done. I blame those who budgeted the thing, but only partially. The thing is cutting edge, and we’re pushing the limits of technology, and in some cases, were counting on technologies that didn’t exist when the plans were being drawn up for the thing. It’s an impressive piece of engineering. The reason it might not fly however, is not an engineering one, it's a political one. The funding might get pulled now, in the 11th hour.

The shuttle program… gone. There is a replacement program in the works, but some insiders are doubtful that it will come to fruition. I personally feel like the shuttle program was a mistake anyway, but that’s a different topic. I don’t think ending a program with nothing concrete in the works is a good idea.

It would have been that big!

Anyone remember the superconducting supercollider? The U.S. spent tons of money on this project back in the 80’s and was far enough along in construction in the early 90's that shutting the program down was nearly as expensive as just finishing the damn thing (not really, but it was very expensive). It would have dwarfed the large hadron collider that had so many folks believing the world would end when it opened for business last year.

Even stuff as small scale (relatively speaking) as skyscrapers, the replacement towers for the world trade center got me thinking of when the last truly grandiose skyscraper was built in the U.S. When I was a kid most of the tallest, most awe inspiring structures in the world were the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower in Chicago. I know a lot of the reasons that we don’t continue to build bigger buildings are political – like a beautiful San Francisco building proposal was nixed because it violated height restrictions within the city – and there are federal regulations that would prevent anything similar to the giant tower in Dubai from being duplicated anywhere in the U.S.

Well, now that I look at it, it does look a bit... gaudy

I think the whole thing is depressing. I want to see a base on the moon, a trip to mars, a Manhattan type project to build a space elevator, or a maglev from Florida to Australia. I want to see miles wide solar cells high in orbit beaming down energy to the earth, or a plan to wipe out smallpox... wait, they may have done that one.

I wonder if those big dreams were part of the WWII mindset that carried over into the cold war. It was a time when using atomic weapons as a propellant for space craft wasn’t just a crazy idea, it was tested and ready to implement. Then it all came to a halt.

I want it back. I want us to do something big, so challenging that it might not work. The funny thing is, the main reason given is that it costs too much, that these projects are too much a financial burden, it would be foolish to waste our money on them.

To those who say that, I say you’re wrong. We spend more money on air conditioning in Iraq then we spend on NASA in a year*. I’m not making a political statement (as any discussion about congressional money quickly becomes), I’m just saying we spend money, lots of it, on things that don’t matter that much in the big picture.

The reason for me is two fold, 1) corporations are only interested in their quarterly earnings. Long term projects are those that take 2 or 3 years. We won't see any decades long research coming out of a publicly traded company, there is no money in it.

2) Governments. That's the only way to get really large scale projects done. They actually hire publicly traded corporations to do the big projects, it's inefficient, costs are hugely inflated, and corruption abounds, but it gets done (years late and way over budget). Except politicians are under more and more scrutiny, and they think of long term as their next election cycle, which means a 20 year project to get my ass to mars won't happen there either. They're more likely to make a big deal out of spending money that could be used to feed orphaned tuna is being wasted sending squirrels into space. Space science gets cut, the orphan tuna still starves, but people think that they're being frugal.

The end result. I think we're screwed.

*What is more profound to me, the total amount of dollars spent on NASA since it's inception in the late 50's totals around $500 billion. A lot, but we've spent about two and a half that amount on the U.S. war on terror.

Well, Crap.

2011-11-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

I had a brilliant post all planned out in my head for today, but it was going to take a bit of work and I forgot. As this nano thing is going in fits and starts and I've been getting behind during the week and trying to catch up on the weekends. Of course, this weekend didn't work out that way due to unavoidable surprises. But, like a sick patient, barely hanging in there on life support, my story had a blip of life as I was mired in the depths of my craptacular disaster of a novel. Yes, I had a moment, just a moment, where I felt like it might be salvageable. Big moment.As I mentioned before, my outline went out the window almost from the first paragraph. Probably because I didn't have faith in what I was supposed to write. But it looks like I'm essentially writing three interwoven stories.

1) Abused wife finds out she has more power than she ever dreamed.

2) Kid with an identity crises finds out he's a god, wait, maybe a demon. Whatever, either way, it doesn't help his self-confidence.

3) Town constable finds out every person in the whole damn town is a liar.

The part I do have worked out, more or less, is how these pieces intersect in the end. Thank goodness. I hope to actually write something entertaining at some point for this blog, but not today. It's Monday after all. I don't understand why we didn't name Monday after Satan. That feels right.

They Should Have Sent a Poet

2011-11-13T12:18:00.001-05:00

Because I don't have words for this:

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Memory Lane Continues!

2011-11-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

Another doodle from work. I was too lazy to take out the rule lines on the notebook. Damn, does smoking ever not look cool? Yes, this is another recycled piece of something I'd already posted, but again. I'm pretty sure no one ever saw it the first time it went up.

I'm doing a fantasy novel for Nano this year, I'm thinking this is my obligatory wizard. The story so far, having a few issues. I'll try to get them all fixed over the weekend.

A Blast From The Past

2011-11-10T07:30:00.000-05:00

Every time I go to post a pic, Blogger asks if I want to choose a picture already on the blog. It makes me remember when I used to post drawings and sketches all the time. I figured I would repost this one then, to relive my glory days, and of course, recycle old content.

This one was a doodle done at work.

Happy Day

Well... That Sucked

2011-11-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

As of this writing (Sunday), I'm way behind my writing goals. Namely my Nano plans. I had hoped to get a huge amount ahead early on during the month and coast through the rest of the month, but instead I got behind almost right off the bat. I've got a great idea for a novel that has been percolating for a while. I'd outlined it and once I started writing I got derailed right off the bat. Figures. Now I'm back to trying to figure out what I want to write as I write... I don't encourage that behavior. The big hope is that I'll write myself right back into my outline.

Still, it's fun, and I'm writing. I may be posting about my story for the next few weeks. Maybe make it a public brainstorming session. Maybe not. Just be prepared.

I Want A New Body

2011-11-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

I went to the doctor the other day, I have to go every six months in order to get my medicine that continues to keep me alive (relax - I have high cholesterol), and while I was there I tipped the scales at a good 204 pounds. Five years ago I was freaking out because I was one 165. Two years ago, not too long after I started this blog, I was tipping the scales at around 175. I've been creeping ever closer to enormous for a few years now. Looks like it's time to get radical.

That gastric bypass thing has been around for a few years, nice, but not for me. The problem is that it doesn't really give you immediate results. You still have to actually lose the weight. Way too inefficient.

See? I trade body "A" for body "B"

No, I am looking into a body transplant.

Yes, I had heard about the experiments done, mostly during the 50's and 60's, where assorted animal heads were detached from their bodies and either A) they were kept alive without any body attached, or B) they just attached it to something else and kept it alive that way.

It wasn't until this weekend when I was researching* for my Nano novel that I saw photographic/video evidence that this happened. It's as surreal a moment as I've ever seen. Then I was hit with the epiphany that they already have the technology, it's decades old, why not use it as a weight loss program?

You know, get fat, trade in your flabby body with some young, fit person who will take it (and money) and they hit the gym. Everyone wins.

Anyway, all kidding aside, do yourself a favor and check out the video. It's a 15 minute documentary about that whole head transplant rage that swept cold war era scientists for a time. Looks like the U.S. preferred using monkeys/apes for research while the Russians preferred dogs - just like the space race. I'm a huge fan of science and I hate to criticize folks in the pursuit of knowledge, but seriously, did anyone at all consider the ethics of this sort of thing?

*meaning, I was avoiding writing.

Meme Spreader!

2011-11-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

Rogue Mutt tagged me in a meme thing the other day. I debated on whether or not to respond. I decided in the end that I probably should. This blogging thing is all about being social, after all. So, let's just dive right in here.

If you could go back in time and relive one moment, what would it be? There is no way in hell I'm sharing that one. No way.
If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be? Uh, did you ever see a time travel movie, ever? I mean, any time travel movie? Going back in time and changing things leads to disaster. Let's see, Back to the Future, The Butterfly Effect, The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror # 7 (or 8, whatever, the one where Homer's toaster turned into a time machine), crap, what was the Ray Bradbury one, the movie I mean, not the book? I think The Butterfly Effect has already been taken. Anyway, that one. There was Primer, the small indie movie about that guy that invented the time machine... all of them shared one thing. If you screw around with the past, it will be a disaster. That said, I'd definitely go back and muck around. Picking lottery numbers seems like a popular choice, but I'd just like to go back and talk to myself at around the age of 14 or 15. That's it.
What movie/TV character do you most resemble in personality? Geez. Stupid as it is, I think it's Paul Rudd as he was in, I Love You, Man.
If you could push one person off a cliff and get away with it, who would you choose? That really isn't my personality to do that sort of thing, you know, murder people. But, I really didn't like my 3rd grade math teacher. Did she really have to be that mean? It was every day with her. She stole my damn eraser because she said it was a toy. WTF? It was an eraser! I used it to erase things, nothing else. Damn that woman. So petty.
Name one habit you want to change in yourself. I wish I could quit obsessing over my third grade math teacher. Damn her, that woman was mean.
Why do you blog? Narcissism.
Name at least three people to send this to: Rogue Mutt, Rogue Mutt, and Rogue Mutt. I just want to see if he'll do it again.

That's me on the left

Nano update

2011-11-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

Not going real well, I'm finding lots of things very distracting right now. Like, for example, the fact that I think I'm being featured at The Best of Everything blog today.

I need to stress that I only think I'm going to have something there today, as I tend to write these things in advance and you never know what might come up and make things go awry. Still, you should check out the site, I managed to reveal more of myself in that short interview than I ever have here, with nearly 200 blog posts under my belt.

Of course, if I'm not featured, check it out anyway.

November Edition Insecure Writer's

2011-11-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

The months keep whizzing right on by. Can't believe another month has gone by since the last post I've made as my part of The Insecure Writer's Support Group, as hosted by Alex J Cavanaugh (who by the way, saw his novel, CassaStar, hit the top 10 in space opera on Amazon last weekend. Good job, dude!).

This is always difficult for me, not because I don't feel insecure, but because I'm not sure I can articulate all that mess that is going on in my head and it come out in a way that the reader can understand. Well, there's that, and I can kind of be like that guy, the one that just broke up with his girlfriend and won't stop talking about it. I mean, at first you try to be supportive, you listen as he tells you about how much he cared for her, how she crapped all over him, how she was so awful when they were together. How much better it will be now that she's gone.

Then, the next day, he says the same thing. The second time through you kind of figure he just needs to get it out of his system, and you try your best to come up with a reason to leave. Then before you know it, it's been two weeks and every time you've seen or talked to the guy he's trying to corner you so he can complain about his crazy ex-girlfriend.

Well, I've been on both sides of that. I've been that guy who can't shut up,and I've been that guy who takes the long way to the bathroom at work because I'm avoiding that other guy.

So, now I'm here, given the freedom to talk about what I'm feeling insecure about. Well, in the immortal words of Dave Coverdale, "Here I go again."

No, wait. I don't want to go there again this month. What am I insecure about? Well, among other things. I'm afraid that I'm going to give up one day. I have a history of it. My rock star dreams, my artist dreams, even my photography dreams. I don't trust future me to want the same things that present day me wants.

I don't trust me to pursue my dreams. Again, I've gone to school to be a bible scholar, a biologist, an accountant, and have pursued none of those things. I dreamed of being an actor, but never auditioned for anything. I'm tired of obsessing over something new every 5 or 6 years. Dammit, I'm done with my wanderlust.

I'm a writer. I hope.

A History of Me and Nanowrimo

2011-11-01T07:00:00.000-04:00

It begins today. I didn't have my outline as fleshed out as I wanted to, but I got enough to at least start writing. I've been saying all along it's fantasy... really it's science fiction. But without me telling you that it's Sci Fi, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't know. As it's clearly fantasy. Well, that doesn't make a ton of sense, but I think my conceit is pretty clever. I won't give it away yet. As I want to pretend for a while that it's completely unique.

But I also realized that I've participated in several Nanos to date. I figured I'd recap previous years entries to see what I've done.

Year 1: James and Galfar: The Blutonian Death Egg. Yes, this book is my first ever Nano attempt. I had written several short stories before, but nothing serious. This was my first try at a novel. It was really, really bad. I had rants that went on for days. I had a kernel of a story I liked though. But I shelved this one, chalking it up for experience.

One sentence synopsis: An average guy ends up being humanity's ambassador to an alien race.

Year 2: The Alarming Alterity of James Coastsman. This was a sequel to the previous Nano. Even though I knew the previous year was chalked up as practice, I liked where I was going and so I wrote more. It was a much better attempt at a novel and I still really like it. I plan on revisiting this later this year.

One sentence synopsis: A new kid in school claims to have moved here straight from outer space.

Year 3: The Bleeted Undulations of an Aphasic Universe. This one was a framed novel. A present day story with a long novella length tale set about a hundred years ago within the larger story. I love the novella part, but not the modern day part. That's kind of a mess. I think I was trying a murder mystery, those things need more planning ahead of time. It might be salvageable, but I have no plans to try. Well, the novella will probably get recycled for something else.

One sentence synopsis: When a gas station attendant that runs a website dedicated to welcoming aliens to earth receives an artifact unlike anything he's ever seen, people start dying and he has to run for his life, all while trying to uncover the artifact's origins.

Year 4: The Blutonian Death Egg. I went back to year one's Nano and started over from scratch. This novel has been shopped around some without anyone showing any real interest. Although I continue to query.

One sentence synopsis: Twentysomething slacker and gifted codebreaker is drafted to take a top secret mission to discover the secret of an alien artifact that's been found near Earth's moon.

My personal life got a little crazy not too long after this and I didn't write for a couple of years. Well, I did write, but only short stories. So when I came back I decided I was going to really try to get something done and see if I can make this writing thing work. I'm still in the middle of that - I'll let you know how that goes.

Year 5: Crazy Shit with Space Aliens and Stuff: Yes, that is only a working title, I realize that it might need a bit of work. I wrote A Dead God's Wrath and another novella length piece set in the same universe. I even have a spreadsheet that details the history of the universe that I use as a guide. This one is set in the modern day and is probably the most fun I've had writing since I was much younger. Full of insane aliens and zombie attacks... as well as the possible end of all life on earth. I tried to raise the stakes here. Well, the end of all life on earth is something I've tried before. But this at least was more of an immediate threat. I really like the concept here, but this novel is pretty rough. It needs tons of work before I can start showing it to anyone.

Once sentence synopsis: When his grandfather dies, a man finds his grandfather was part of an ancient secret society that has vowed to protect the earth from an unnamed threat - that threat has now arrived.

Year 6: The Wizard's Secret. That brings us back to the present. This year is again, an attempt at fantasy. That medieval society with monsters and magic and all that. I've tried to spend some time doing some worldbuilding. I haven't got as much as the story plotted out as I meant to. Enough to get started I suppose, but not what I wanted.

One sentence synopsis: When Jeb flees his village and into the forbidden lands beyond he stumbles upon a dead wizard, and is now the only hope to save the world from an ancient evil.

And now you know. Wish me luck with this year.

Poo City!

2011-10-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

It's Halloween! I hope this post scares you like no other. This, as well as I have been able to determine, is true. Which of course makes it even more scary. Of course, I wrote this last week, and intended to put it out there as a stream of consciousness experiment - not intending it as a Halloween post, but whatever.

I hate being out of the loop. Well, I hate being out of the loop when I want to be in the loop. Sometimes it’s just the slight I feel by not being included, like when everyone you work with gets invited to a party and when you find out they say, “Oh, I’m sorry. We just thought you wouldn’t be interested.”

Duh. Of course I’m not interested, that’s not the point. I want to be invited so I can reject YOU.

Wait, this is going off the rails here right at the start. Let me back up. I learned recently that the city of Oslo, Norway, has been running their city busses on human poo for the past 2 years.

I had no idea.

I’ve missed two whole years’ worth of jokes and puns. The mental images alone will be priceless. Jokes tend to work better in person, it’s tough to get the nuance right when it’s being written down. This is real world knowledge I missed out on, not internet knowledge. I’m so disappointed.

So, anyone want to venture a guess what the plan is should they run out of fuel? Pass out burritos and prune juice and ask everyone to make their way to the potty recently installed in the back?

Get it?

We won’t have to worry about that nasty diesel smell if you are near a running bus anymore. So it solves all sorts of problems. See, if the real world people will laugh, on the internet, some might laugh, others will be upset because I am making light of power of poo to save our world. Of course, I know that both sides are right. I throw a fit anytime anyone mis-pronounces Uranus. All those jokes are wasted because they aren’t saying the word right - I mean, no one makes a joke out of the vacation island of Phuket, do they?

Wait, I may not have made my point. Still, if poo can save us all then maybe I should start a grass roots movement to get all our city busses to run on it. Heck, maybe the city can use all that money they saved not buying fuel to lower my water bill.

Actually, why can’t we convert our cars to run on poo too? I don’t think it has to be human to work, it’s really just the methane released from little critters as they frolic in it. So where does that leave us. We could be switching over from an oil based economy to a poo based one. Those who control the poo control the world.

Makes me think of all those space race books I’ve read - the ones about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts that just confounded me with all the stuff that they didn’t know about space flight. One of the common themes they all have is how poo was a big problem. Turns out that those old fellas had to poo in something like a sandwich bag, squirt some spermicide in there, then knead it through real well. If they didn’t those bags would quickly fill with methane and explode, I’m told more than one capsule that landed in the ocean was pretty nasty inside.

No big deal, we almost lost a shuttle due to a urine accident once. Going to the bathroom in space is possibly lethal. So we should just train the astronauts to just hold it until they get back…. Oh, might not be a problem now. Since, you know, we don’t actually have a manned program.

Sigh… and there you have it folks, a good reason I shouldn’t be encouraged to do a stream of consciousness sort of thing. The don’t generally go over real well.

Oh What Plans I Had

2011-10-28T07:00:00.000-04:00

I had big plans for today's post, they fell through. My kid's football team ended their season last night. They did well, undefeated and all that, but I'm thrilled that I won't have to be going to practice every night for a while. Getting home between 8 and 9, trying to eat, spend time with the family, blogging, writing, doing artsy things... it just can't be done easily. I have high hopes for more free time.

I hope everyone enjoys their weekend. I plan on A) finishing a book cover for someone B) trying to start and finish another book cover for someone C) hammer out the details of my plot for this year's Nano... recall that I'm trying my hand at fantasy. It could be a real disaster. Also, D) write Monday and Wednesday's blog posts, E) Finish A Fire Upon the Deep, and finally, F) do whatever my wife says we need to do.

Oh wait, G) to make changes to a novella per one beta reader and ship it off to another.

Any one of those could wipe out my weekend, I'm being WAY too ambitious, but whatever. If I don't have goals, I doubt I would achieve anything.

So, everyone one enjoy your weekend.

Those Crazy Days of Elementary School

2011-10-26T07:00:00.000-04:00

I had a short post over at Alex’s blog today where I firmly established I’m not crazy. Whew. Glad that matter is settled. Please go read if you haven’t already. I’m sure you’ll find my logic irrefutable.

I had intended to continue my thought over here, but after careful consideration, I’ve realized I have nothing else to say on the subject. Instead, I’ll entertain you with a story from my childhood.

I moved a lot as a kid, I didn’t attend the same school for two years in a row until I was in 7^th grade. During one memorable stint – 5^th grade – I lived on a farm. That isn’t to say that I ever spent any time farming, just that I lived there. To be specific, we rented a plot of land, plopped a trailer down on it, and lived.

My mother happened to be the proud owner of one ’67 Chevy Impala. It was big, made out of solid steel and had a steering wheel that belonged on a battleship. Estimated weight, 3000 pounds.

My sister, a high school student, borrowed the car from her. A lot. During the afternoons when school was over my Mom would be at work and the car would be there, just waiting for someone to go take it. So, I decided to go for a spin. We were, after all, country people now, I’d better learn to fit in.

Who could resist? No one. It's impossible

I grabbed the keys, a telephone book, and decided to go for a ride.

Oh, the telephone book? I had to sit on it in order to see over the steering wheel.

It seemed so easy at first, just pull out onto the road and stay on my side of the yellow line (if the road had one) and don’t drive off of the road. Everything else would work itself out. It didn’t take me long to determine that being the only kid in the 5^th grade that could drive pretty much made me the coolest kid in school, so I had to show off.

I went to visit friends, waved at the suckers that still had to use their bicycles to get around, and generally got lost of oohs and ahhhs from pretty much everyone. Kids at school were coming up to me and shaking their heads in awe. That’s the kid that drives.

The thing is though, it was scary as crap. I started going for joyrides when I had a chance for a while afterwards – but in the back of my mind, I knew I was riding a bull. It's one of those things that you experience when you're young. You know it's oh so wrong, yet, it's impossible to resist.

It wasn't like I starting doing this all the time, but I didn't just do it the one time, I did it and survived. The cool factor made me do it again, and again. So, after enough trips to start feeling pretty confident in my skills, I was driving in a neighborhood and a car pulls out opposite me, a group of my friends jump out from behind the car, all on their bicycles, and into my path. I was about to run them over.

Like anyone in a tense situation, my perception of time slowed down. I calmly decided that I couldn’t possibly avoid them by hitting the brake of the car. So instead I cut the wheel in the opposite direction and mashed the accelerator to the floor.

What was in the opposite direction? Oh, nothing much, a house for sure. Oh yes, one more thing. A tree. Approximate weight of tree… much less than 3000 pounds.

I jumped the curb and slung mud all over the place. I kept my foot planted to the floorboard though. That tree, I still remember that tree. I recall hitting it - and running the damn thing down.

It was still young, just small and soft enough that it would give when hit by all that kinetic energy. It gave. I killed a tree.

I, and the others that were in the car with me, looked around. I’ll tell you, it was almost worth it to see the look on those kids faces, the ones that were on their bicycles. They were stuck in open mouthed awe at the wanton destruction. At my destruction.

It was only a moment, then it was gone. We got out of there as fast as we could, got home, acted like nothing happened and hoped that the police wouldn’t show up later. Never could figure out why no one ever did. There were tons of witnesses. One tore up yard, one dead tree, and a whole lot of people that knew who I was.

I learned my lesson though, learned it well. Kids should never, ever, be allowed, under any circumstances, to play in the street. Another kid might run them down with his car.

Happy Wednesday people.

When Things Go Wrong

2011-10-24T07:00:00.000-04:00

Like most people, I have beliefs, er, to put that a bit less obliquely, I believe stuff without having a real good reason for it. If you don’t think you are one of those people, then you clearly aren’t being honest with yourself. You can try to be as comprehensive as you are at eliminating crazy things you believe, but you can’t do it all. Too much stuff happens in life that we just don’t question.

Examples? Sure. From my own life, I believe that things will more or less, work out okay. I know intellectually that might not be the case, but when s#!t starts going down, I always think that it’s all about to turn around for me. I’ve seen enough tragedy in my life to know that isn’t the case. I’ve seen cancer, accidents, even murder, disrupt and destroy the lives of people I know and care for. Doesn’t matter, nothing that bad will happen to me. It’s a matter of faith really. I’m sure there are some deep, psychological nuances at play that make that way. But still, I’m okay with that.

Anyhow, that’s just an example. But some folks have those sorts of beliefs about things that are demonstrably false. Wait, I might have used the wrong adverb there, demonstrate-ably false.

Example number two: I love my grandmother, she is more awesome than most. She grew up during the great depression and has seen some real s#!tty things in her life. She can go through a tin of snuff in a day, and string a bushel of beans even faster. She has broken more bones in the past decade than I have during my entire life. She still plugs away, outliving all of her 13 brothers and sisters and refusing to let much of anything stop her. She doesn’t suffer fools lightly though, bring your A-game if you visit, because she’ll eat you up if you don’t.

So, you know that little light in the fridge? Don’t bring it up around my Grandma. And for the love of all that is good in your life, don’t flick the little switch to show her how the light goes on and off in her fridge when you shut the door. She will beat you with whatever she has handy. Pray that it isn’t an iron skillet. She wins that argument, don’t even try.

Did I have a point? Yes, when I started writing I did have one. Whatever it was is lost on me now. It probably had something to do with seeing someone give a misguided rant on the internet. I mean, rant all you want about how unfair something is, or how bad something smells, about how fat Americans are, whatever. Just don’t go on a rant about something I can disprove as easily as my grandma’s eternal fridge-light theory.

Where Have I Been?

2011-10-23T07:00:00.000-04:00

Not online. Or even on my computer much. I did have to enter a pumpkin in a contest at work. I did Buddy Holly. I don't know why. Probably because I had the glasses.

Can't tell them apart, can you?

Getting home late every night. Had to get that damned pumpkin done, as it was my boss's boss that gave it to me. So much stress. I'm just glad it's over.

I hope to get back to normal, more or less, next week.

I Liked It So Much I Never Want To See It Again

2011-10-17T07:00:00.000-04:00

Please be good, please.

Woo boy. Last week, the sequel to what is probably one of my favorite books of all time was released. And I’ve not read it yet. It hurts, and I’m scared. I’m scared I won’t like it.

Best. Book. Ever.

The book? Oh yeah, it’s Children of the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. The sequel to the book that I fell in love with, oh so many years ago, A Fire Upon the Deep. And it was one of a trinity of books that made me fall head over heels in love with Science Fiction.

Now, I’ve often recommended some of my seminal books to others and have been met with blank stares, or outright confusion after folks have tried to read them. I have had to do some deep soul searching before I can tell you why I love those books so.

Here’s my best guess. From the earliest times of my life as a rational being, like, 4, maybe 5, I dreamed of being a scientist. To be specific, an Astronomer. Well, I did have a brief foray where I investigated becoming the incredible Hulk, but found the science was… a little untenable. Anyway, the minutia of actual scientific work was a bit too dry to keep my interest. It required a lot of math, which I was pretty good at, but it required that I really put forth effort to do it well. Being lazy won out and I decided I would pursue one of the other great passions of my life.

The arts.

Sigh. As I got older, I still loved the sciences, and read as much pop-science type of stuff I could - books about physics, cosmology (about the cosmos, not hair), paleontology, whatever it was, I ate it up. I might not ever contribute to any of those fields, but I could at least enjoy the work that others had done.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s, after quitting college and finding that I had tons of time on my hands that I started to read books again. You see, that was a time of my life where I was spending as much of my free time as I had attempting to play music. I’ve told the story of how much I loved Star Trek before, and won’t rehash it again here, but I would watch TV, or movies, and be playing my guitar quietly the whole time. If I was on the phone, I was playing. If I had some free time, I was playing.

It was really hard to read and play guitar. I did have the good fortune to work the nightshift at a gas station then, and I probably could have brought my guitar in to play, but it was in a pretty rough neighborhood, and I wasn’t about to put my guitar in harm’s way. So, I brought something to read with me.

Like I said, I read a lot of pop-science books anyway, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t read anything before, and during my late middle school/early high school years I read several genre books, I enjoyed them, but none of them were life changing.

It wasn’t until I was sitting in that gas station at 2 o’clock in the morning, bored out of my mind, that I thought I could pass the time reading. Of course, my much admitted adoration of Star Trek meant I read Star Trek novels. There were already a lot of them then (yes, even way back then), but I did have some taste, and I passed on a few I thought would be stinkers.

I found I could read a lot of books that way, I worked 10 hour shifts, and generally, I had about 4 or 5 hours of every night where I did absolutely nothing but sit and read. After a few months I had no more Star Trek.

By that time, I had gotten into a habit of running by the bookstore on my way to work, browsing the isles and looking for the most Star Trek like book I could find, which meant I was looking for a cover with a spaceship on it.

Not Just Epic. Super Epic!

I've talked about Stephen Baxter’s Ring before. It was epic in a way few books ever written were epic. I mean, what happens when you get a window into the future where every single star in the observable universe has been snuffed out? What do you do then? How do you fix that? Epic.

That was my very first non Star Trek book and it was so much bigger, better and more powerful than anything I’d ever experienced in fiction before. It was so full of… ideas.

Oh, idea based fiction. Now that’s awesome. So, as it were, I fell in love with not just science fiction, but a sub-genre labeled as hard science fiction. There are tons of definitions readily available, but the one that best fits for me is this: The emphasis is on the science. Characters and plotting are of lesser import than the science, or the scientific speculation that takes place in the story.

It makes sense that I would be drawn to that. I was, after all, a frustrated adult, already wishing I had at least made an effort to follow my childhood dreams of becoming a scientist one day. I would lay in bed and think about what I read in that book. It got in me like a drug, I was hooked.

That was also getting pretty close to the time that I chucked any thought I had of being a musician. I was no longer reading when I was just at work. At the time I had a schedule that meant I worked 8 days on, 6 days off. That was a long time between books. I was reading a minimum of 3 books a week when I was at work, and none when I was not. I was finding that I couldn’t wait all the way until my next work week before I started reading again. All that time I formerly spent playing guitar was now taken up with reading.

It’s okay though, I think grunge was still the popular rock music at the time and I didn’t begin to appreciate it until a good 10 years later, after it had long since gone out of style.

Well, I think the book I picked up not too long after Ring, was A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. This one, it might have had too many ideas, because I had to read it twice. Literally, I read it. Freaked out, waited a day or so, and read it again. In a lot of ways, it was superior to Baxter’s novel, actually, in almost every way. He introduced me to the Tines, the zones of thought, to the technological singularity*, to a great story. This one had it all.

What made me love Stephen Baxter is that he kept putting out books, Vernor Vinge though, he had a lot of other interests, writing novels was just something he did on the side. Now, almost 20 years after he published A Fire Upon the Deep, he’s writing the sequel. Set 10 years after the events of the first book and involving most of the characters.

And again, I still haven’t read it.

I read Rainbow’s End just after it was released, again, Vernor’s book, and I found it to be a big whomping clusterf**k of crap. I can’t think of much I found that disappointing. I hated, hated, hated it. The guy who produced the greatest work of genius of my generation also produced the biggest turd.

So I'm scared. I purchased it from Amazon and it's being delivered later in the week, and I will read. I’m just stalling. I’m going back to my birth as a heavy reader of science fiction, and also, the birth of my dream to become a writer. It’s holy ground. It’s a place to tread carefully. Wish me luck.

* The Zones of Thought have absolutely no scientific rationale at all. This book isn't really hard science fiction. But it is a work of pure genius.

Paying it Forward!

2011-10-14T07:00:00.000-04:00

Ever get on of those feelings like the internet is just out to get you? I've had no luck getting this stupid thing posted. Erased links, missing text. Stupid computer.

Anyway.

Matthew (and Alex) are sponsoring a blogfest. This one is pretty cool, I'm forced to admit, as it's called Pay It Forward, and it's around to give me an opportunity to spread the word about some bloggers that everyone might not already be aware of. The great thing is that I can do it without having to hand out another one of those awards that so many people seem to only accept begrudgingly. Cool

Nancy – if you’ve not stopped by to visit her at Kicks in the Pants, well, all I can say is that you should. She is really open about some of the pain and loss she’s experienced in life and reading her blog can sometimes feel voyeuristic. I think I've gone so far as apologizing for commenting before, because I felt like I was writing in someone's diary. Of course, she laughs it off and waves her hand like I'm being silly. Then she'll turn around and make me laugh at some of the absurdity in life. She’s a promising writer and always reads my stuff, no matter how crappy, usually before I show anyone else. And she kindly makes recommendations about things I can do to make it suck just a little less, then doesn’t get the least bit offended when I want to argue about why my pages long description of a foot fungus can’t be cut from my manuscript because it’s so integral to the story. Her help is always greatly appreciated. She is probably the most under the radar person I can think of out here, and deserves some recognition, and a larger readership.

Julie – Her Gypsy in My Soul blog is always a great read. She probably puts more research into her posts than anyone I can think of, and I for one, appreciate it. Whether she dives into the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle, crop circles, or the wedding band, rest assured that it will be well documented. Plus, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the video she posted about the Leopard Slug ear penis that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that karma is real, and some evil soul is suffering from past sins by having an ear penis. The only other thing I can recall making a mark on me like that was that time I talked my sister into renting Faces of Death when I was a kid so I could watch it. I think that pretty much cured me from ever wanting to see people getting killed on film again.

Briane P – Thinking the Lions Look, I'll be honest. One in every four blogs on the internet are either his, or Rogue Mutt's. I picked this one more or less by throwing at dart at a list of his blogs (I totally should have printed that list out first), but he’s said some of the dammed funniest things I’ve read - usually when commenting of other people’s blogs, I don’t visit as often as I should – but if you don't like what you see after clicking on my link, then check out his profile and pick from one of his multitude of others. And he isn't shy about telling people to buy his books, which for some reason, when he does it, is funny instead of annoying. I really don't know how he does it.

So everyone, go check out these folks if you don’t already, I’m sure you’ll be pleased.

Oh yes, I'm not sure, but I think my novelette, A Dead God's Wrath, will be reviewed over at the Good Book Alert today. I'm not sure, as I haven't seen the review as of this writing. But please hop over there and check it out.

A One Track Mind

2011-10-12T07:00:00.000-04:00

How many times have I heard that phrase in my life? “You have a one track mind.”

Well, I do. I think might self-diagnose as borderline OCD. I have a tendency, once I start something, whether it be writing, drawing, playing music, whatever it is, to do it at the exclusion of everything else. And I mean everything.

Of course, much like Ben Franklin before me, I am a big believer in self-improvement. He famously had a list of things he wished to improve about himself. I can’t recall the chart he used, but I do remember the story he told about it. He was bragging about how he hoped to, one day, be the perfect human, and was proudly marking all his character flaws and personal shortcomings off his list as he finally defeated them. when a contemporary of his pointed out that he really needed to work on his humility, well, that was just one more challenge to conquer.

If I recall his diary correctly, after some time he remarked that he had finally mastered humility, or at least the appearance of it, which in his mind, was close enough. He proudly wrote that he no longer shouted down men who approached him at gatherings as being morons, despite the fact that they clearly were. Nor would he talk over his compatriots when he realized they were blathering on about something stupid. Yes, he’d finally mastered it.

I’m not entirely sure if that applies to what I was going to make here, but that is a story that bears repeating, even if it doesn’t fit in with my larger point. Which is: I’m really obsessive.

Part of the inspiration for me coming out with that is because it’s NaNoWriMo time again. Twitter is full of it, I’ve seen several blogs mentioning its approach, and it’s been on my mind. Turns out, I need Nano to keep me sane.

You see, when I wrote my first novel, I wrote the first draft in a little more than a week. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, I didn’t eat, sleep, or even go to work. That didn’t really bother me, as I’ve always been that way. When I used to dream of being an artist, I would draw for entire weekends, huddled in my bedroom closet, producing page after page of adolescent scribbles, mostly barbarians cutting the heads off of dinosaurs. The perfectionist in me would invariably throw every single drawing in the trash upon completion. I have very little artwork from my childhood remaining.

The point is that I find it unimaginably annoying when I’m working on something, and I mean something that is important to me, and I have to stop. That’s why I don’t like writing over a long period of time. I have become better at it, writing the novella I finished recently over a period of about a month. But I want to come home on a Friday evening, lock myself away, and write until Monday morning when I have to go to work, assuming of course that I'm finished by then.

Being a grownup has meant that sort of behavior is frowned upon. My wife sure doesn’t appreciate it. My kid probably doesn’t dig it too much either. So I find I put off doing a lot of stuff I want to do, because until I can really commit to it, I don’t want to start.

NaNoWriMo is like Ben Franklin’s self-improvement list for me. It tells me I can write until I get 1667 words done, then I can stop. I may do more, should the mood strike, but I don’t have to write until I collapse. It’s a means of self-improvement. It’s funny, and like Andrew said in his last post, it’s really a game you play with yourself to get things done, and in my case, an excuse to stop. I can get lost in my head sometimes, this year, I have plans to dabble in the realm of fantasy for my nano novel. I’ve never written a fantasy book before, but after I reviewed what I’d read so far this year, I realized I must have read more than a dozen fantasy novels. It wasn’t that long ago that I ranted on this blog about how much I hated the genre, looks like I’ve kinda come around.

What do you want to bet that means the whole genre is about to crash?

So, everyone get geared up, I may be doing a few nano related posts – maybe not, but I’m just laying down the groundwork so there is no surprises later.

When Change is Needed

2011-10-11T07:00:00.000-04:00

Without much fanfare, Rogue Mutt started a new blog yesterday. I hope everyone stops by his new place and begins to follow him there. His posts are often the highlight of my day.

Find him here.

And as long as I'm throwing links around. If you happen to have an extra $4k lying around. You can get a perfect replica of your face produced as a mask. I'm already thinking of hiring a temp to go to work wearing a "Rusty" mask so I can spend more time doing other things.

Awesome. Happy Tuesday.

*Edit* I fixed the link.

Where Did Monday Come From?

2011-10-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

I don't mean the origin of the word, which I find fascinating, and for a while at least, dominated my twitter stream. What I want to know is: how did it get to be Monday already?

Einstein once famously explained relativity by saying a hand on a hot stove for a moment can seem like an hour, and an hour with a beautiful woman can seem like an moment. In the same way, weekends, although two days long, generally go much faster than I'd like. Relativity again. It's science, and it sucks.

Anyhow, I've been debating (again) why I'm blogging, as I've become crappier and crappier at responding to comments, and of course, have found my writing time slashed to nearly nothing, as well as my time visiting others.

Sigh. Stupid time again. So, sorry everyone. I do read everyone's comments and appreciate them. I respond to some via email, but not everyone has that feature enabled. But I'm inconsistent and often miss things.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, Mondays. They suck. I have anecdotal evidence (i.e., me) that a person is only really good for about 30 hours or so of real, quality work in a given week. At least for the kind of work I do. So, I propose that the powers that be, without changing my salary, allow me to not work Mondays.

And I hope, for all that is good in this world, that they never read my blog.

Oh, I tweaked my logo, anyone notice?

Insecure Writers Support Group - Oct Edition

2011-10-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

It's that time again. Alex J Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers Support Group. It's that time of month when those of us that have all sorts of insecurities about our craft, future, whatever, all get together and vent about how freaked out we are. The goal is to visit everyone who is part of the group and offer your best wishes or encouragement.

Man, I can write one of these posts about once a day. Last month I talked about. Damn. I have no idea what I talked about. But whatever it was, it was one of my insecurities. This month, I’ll talk about, well, another one. Or, maybe it’s the same one, since I can’t recall what I wrote last time, it’s hard to say.

Writing for me, the dream part anyway. Is that I’ll do it well enough so the people of this world will pay me to do it. It would be all I would need to do. Never have to work another job, just write my little stories and have folks eagerly hand over cash for the privilege of reading. I think it’s odd that I used to think writing, being a writer that is, was the equivalent of me becoming a theoretical physicist. It was something reserved for only the select, elite, and noblest members of society.

So, early in my twenties I started thinking that I wanted to be a writer. To write novels. I know most people have long since figured out whether or not they will write way before then. But not me. The funny thing though, once I made that decision, I figured I had to get permission before I could try. So I spent years, and I mean years, planning on writing as soon as I knew how – or got permission to. I recall during one of my many stints in college, this one somewhere around the time I was 30, talking to one of my professors, an author of several books, including novels, about wanting to be a writer. He said, “bring some of your work in and let me take a look.”

I didn’t understand, I said I wanted to be a writer - I didn’t say I was one.

Believe it or not, I was dumb enough to rush home, whip something up, and bring it back. Yep, I really did. I’m so embarrassed about it now. What makes it worse is that it was a scene about a college professor worrying about the sun exploding. Geez. I’m going to have to write him a letter and apologize for subjecting him to that. He was great though, he gave me a book on writing as a gift and encouraged me to continue.

And I did.

So, what did that have to do with anything? Well, it brings me back to that dream I was talking about. I’m afraid that the world of writing is going to leave me behind. Self-publishing seemed so cool to me a while back, but after a month where sales were really close to zero, I started to wonder if that was what I should expect to see if I'm not going to be constantly beating the bushes and screaming at folks to buy my stuff. Because, I don’t like doing that. I’m not a sales guy. I’ve been reading a lot from folks that are successful, and they all seem to spend quite a bit of time promoting themselves, they don’t talk as much about the story, the craft, it’s isn’t a creative endeavor for a lot of them. It’s a job. They talk about sales quotas and hitting targets.

Buy my book! Buy my book! Buy my book!

I don’t think I’m one of those people. Some facets of it might be okay, but I don’t want everything I do online to be a business decision. I joined Goodreads to keep tabs on books I was reading, (and later, to see what people I know are reading) not to ‘network’ with potential readers, I am on twitter because it’s awesome, I don’t want to follow 1000 people because I hope they’ll follow me back so I can spam them with crap about buying my books.

If that’s the future, then I’m going to be left behind. It makes me sad, it makes me want to… well, I don’t know what. But it makes me doubt that dream I mentioned earlier will ever come true.