James R. Strickland's Blog

Back from SOPA/PIPA protest mode

2012-01-18T23:44:00.001-08:00

Those of you who went to the website yesterday may have noticed it was down in protest of SOPA/PIPA. It's back now. The news about those two idiotic bills seems promising.-JRS

On Technology

2012-01-10T18:17:00.001-08:00

It's tempting to believe that, while technology has changed drastically, if the Victorians (for example) had had material x and technological skill y, they could have built aircraft, spacecraft, and so forth and so on. The more I dig into it, and the more I watch the present world change, the more I think that however fun this is to play with in steampunk, it's not really quite true.

Consider this: Between 1988, when I was engaged in learning computer science, and today when I am completely out of the field, one particular problem went from taking 82 years to solve to less than a minute, an improvement by a factor of 43 million. Now processors got 1000 times faster in that time, but the algorithm got 43,000 times faster as well. See this link.. Likewise, while the initial insights of chaos mathematics date to the late 19th century, as a science it was not given serious study until the middle of the 20th century. (I don't pretend to understand chaos mathematics, but they seem to be proving useful in a great many areas, such as climate change.)

We don't tend to think of mathematics and algorithms as technology, but they very much are, as much as the technology we can put our hands on. And they march on the same way.

So stealth fighters, for example, depend on high tech materials, but those materials were designed based on computer modeling, in turn based on Pyotr Ufimtsev's 1962 book "Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction" In fact, the reason the F117 stealth fighter is made up of flat planes is that the software used for the modeling couldn't model complex curves. The stealth Bomber (B2), and the F22 Raptor were built with more modern software that could. It's interesting to speculate what might have happened if you'd sent an F117 back in time to, say, the Nazis. While having the artifact in hand and knowing it works would have given them a huge jump on knowing what the goal was, one must ask, did they have the math to understand it, and would they need it to recreate it?

This matters in Steampunk fiction because Steampunk is all about asserting things existing before their time. As an example, I'm handwaving fusion for power, because fusion can power steam, and thus fits very comfortably into the Victorian technosphere. I further assert (though rest assured, only in my notes thus far) that the fusion system they use, they don't really understand how it works or what neutron radiation really is, or any of those things. They developed it Edison-light-bulb style - throw ideas at it and see which ones stick. It worked for Edison in the lightbulb, and I assert that it worked for him - and others - with fusion once they knew it could be done. It helped them that they also captured the factories to make these fusion plants. (It also makes me giggle to power the whole story with what amounts to Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion.)

At its heart, Steampunk is a fantasy genre. It's things that never actually happened, mixed with some things that could have happened but did not (Babbage engines) combined with anachronisms and some flat out magic.

At least, that's my take this week. :)

-JRS

Trivia

2012-01-06T19:22:00.001-08:00

A million 1895 dollars worth of silver weighs about 9 (US) tons, and would amount to about 260 1000(troy) ounce bars. As a solid volume it would take up about 27.5 cubic feet, a cubic block a little more than 3 feet on each side *edit* Someone missed a free book. The numbers I had in here originally sounded fishy so I re-ran them (also with better figures for the price of silver in 1895 and the relative value of the dollar). No book was given, though, so the offer stands. If anyone finds problems with /these/ numbers, the first one to send me corrected ones gets a free copy of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings or whichever other of my books you don't already have, signed by me (and Jeff if it's DC/OGW.) -JRS

Byebye GoDaddy

2011-12-29T18:29:00.001-08:00

In light of GoDaddy's support of SOPA (of which I am apparently the last person on the planet to hear) and in light of their continued failure to get it even when they dropped their support for SOPA, I am transferring the domain name control of JamesRStrickland.com to a more reputable domain host. There shouldn't be any problems that you, the reader, notice, but if there are, this website and I will be back as soon as they are resolved.-JRS

On Middle Age (Part 1)

2011-12-27T16:56:00.001-08:00

Middle age moment today. See #9. I'm 44 years old. Statistically speaking, I have a lot of middle age to go, but I've already learned a few things I wish I'd known last year, the year before, and so on. So here, in no particular order:

1. Do what you love. By now you know that life's too short to work a job you hate to buy shit you don't need. (To paraphrase Fight Club). Find work that you enjoy that will also pay the bills. Don't let them promote you to a job you don't like from a job you liked. Don't take career advice from work-at-home authors. Yanno, like me.

2. Love someone. This is probably harder than you think, but worth it like life itself. Also, it makes the sex better. Those hot young things you secretly envy have no idea what they're missing when they haven't slept with someone with twenty years of practice with them.

3. Make more friends, especially younger friends. Statistically speaking, not all of your old crew is going to make it to old age. Hopefully your crew will be different, but the fact remains that while you can't replace them, and it's a mistake to try, keeping the ranks of your friends up helps. Real friends. People you spend time with in person. Internet friends, however dear, are pale imitations.

4. Go to joyous formal occasions in real life - weddings, baby showers, that kind of thing. It helps offset the increased number of funerals.

5. Drink the good stuff. Try the blends. When we were younger we were purists - only grapes from a certain vintage, only singlemalt Scotch and all that. But you know what? Wine and whiskey blenders have centuries of craft experience making blends that taste good. Try 'em.

6. Evolve. When you're in your 40s, it's time to admit that your upcoming adventures will probably not center around your junk. Physically? sure. But your mind moves on and changes. Those pretty naked people you look at on the net? They're young enough to be your children. You've probably noticed this already, and it probably makes you a tiny bit uncomfortable. This takes some getting used to. Fortunately, you have a lot of other senses you've probably been neglecting while chasing girls/guys/farm animals/etc.

7. Evolve. Challenge a habit. Confront a fear. Do something not because it is easy or comfortable or familiar, but because it is hard. (Thank you JFK.) Change happens. It's going to continue to happen. But you can control some change. Cause some of it. Become stronger for it.

8. Make peace with your parents. No matter how screwed up your upbringing was (mine was fairly idyllic, all things considered) you've now had 20 years since your parents ran your life. Whoever you are now is as much your doing as theirs. Forgive. If you can, enjoy the time you have left with them.

9. Get your eyes checked. Presbyopia comes on fast, folks, and there's nothing more disheartening than feeling like you're going blind. Your eye doctor can do a test where they give you a reading distance with very small print, and throw a reading prescription on. If your reaction is "oh wow, that's so much better" it's time. Don't, however, let them give you a reading prescription too soon. (Why yes, I'm reading the screen from behind my first pair of progressive trifocals. OMFGWTFLOLCATS I can see better. It makes a huge difference.) By the way, optical technology has marched on. You don't have to wear windshields with lines in them.

10. See your doctor. Get one you trust. Scary things happen to your body, and most of them don't mean a damn thing other than "Hey, you're over 40 now." Skin tabs are not skin cancer. That soft fatty lump that showed up on your ribcage? Lipoma. A change in texture of your body fat. Doesn't mean anything. But yanno, we're not doctors, so you need a doctor you can talk to. Someone you'll believe when they say "No, that's completely normal for your age," or "Actually that is something to be concerned about, let's do some more tests." Either way, at least you can sleep instead of lying awake in medical-industry-induced panic. (Remember, the doctors on tv are selling something.)

It goes without saying that weird new moles, chest pains, erectile dysfunction, and things like that are definitely see your doctor moments. No, not doctor internet, a real doctor. ED, for example, has been described as a great dipstick for the condition of your circulatory system in general. Yanno, like your coronary arteries? Yeah. See your doctor.

11. If you are female and/or are in love with a middle aged female, you need to know about perimenopause. The mood swings, stress, lack of libido, sudden gusts of strong libido, dry skin, body shape changes and forty five other things that freak her and/or you the hell out? News flash. They may be normal, as a woman's reproductive career heads toward the finish line, even if she's still technically fertile. See also #10.

We're not taught anything about this next stage of life. That's why we don't know what the hell we're doing. Medical science doesn't know much about middle age. They study college students as the "norm" primarily, so how would they know? Also, when we're children and up through our twenties, physically we're much more alike than after 20 years of genetic expression, environmental related changes, and eating our own cooking.

There's mounting evidence, according to this article, that middle age is not the noticeable beginning of degeneration, but a developmental stage. Like puberty. It may well be that you're supposed to get grey hair, presbyopia, a paunch and back hair, and menopause for females so that, evolutionarily speaking, you can stop having more children and focus on raising the ones you already had who survived.

Be thankful for middle age. For most mammals, when your breeding life comes to a close, you die, leaving your last batch of young to die with you. Humans are different. We, along with elephants and some species of whales have a middle age. We have a time after childbearing, and before degeneration, from our forties into our sixties or so, maybe as much as seventy if you're lucky. I mean really, what else is there to do? The alternative - dying young - is worse.

-JRS

In Memoriam

2011-12-27T12:30:00.001-08:00

In Memorium Alice E. "Badger" Washburn, 1967-2011. I'd wish you to rest in peace, but you'd be bored. Have a blast where you are now. -JRS

Relay Computing FTW?

2011-11-26T21:50:00.001-08:00

So we finally got around to getting a new humidifier to replace one that had died. Three times. (Hint: If you get the chance to put in a Honeywell humidifier? Don't. They suck.) The new one is an Aprilaire 700. Very nice, digital controls, outside temperature sensor, and the works.

We put it in ourselves.

Now, this doesn't seem like a big deal on the face of it. We had to cut the duct work a bit, and putting up the outdoor temp sensor was a joy, but by and large these are straightforward processes.

Wiring the thing into the furnace? That's where it got interesting. Our furnace is probably a decade and a half old. Unlike modern furnaces, where you open them and find yourself face to face with a printed circuit board (which, in fairness, I'd have been a lot more leery of working with), our contains relays and interrupt switches, and that's pretty much it. Working through the schematic has been interesting. Heaven forbid the HVAC industry should use electronics industry schematic symbols or anything. Once I figured out that those two vertical lines are contactor (relay) contacts and not a capacitor, the thing made more sense.

Once I sorted out which circuit did what, it dawned on me that I was looking on a string of and gates, effectively. If the white wire is at 24v, turn on the ventilator motor. If the flue pressure is correct (ventilator motor is running, flue is not blocked), turn on the ignitor and the gas. If the flame sensor indicates there's flame, turn the ignitor off. If the rollout sensor is off (that is, flame and/or gas are NOT coming out the back of the burners into the body of the furnace - yikes) keep the gas on. If the manifold temperature is above temperature x and the manifold temperature is below temperature y, turn on the blower. OR if the green wire is on, turn on the blower by itself, and bypass all the furnace start sequence logic. OR if the yellow wire is on, throw the relay to turn on the AC compressor. (note that these two ORs are not exclusive, and in fact the thermostat turns on both lines for AC.) It's all pretty straightforward. Theoretically.

Practically, I got the motor relay line plugged in the wrong place (on the yellow wire's terminal instead of the green) and it has been giving me bizarre results since yesterday for anything except heat. Now that that's straightened out, I just have to find out from Aprilaire how exactly I keep the humidifier from coming on when the call for heat comes down, humidifying the return plenum, switching itself off, then switching itself back on when the humidity in the plenum drops down, then switching off three or four times while the furnace goes through its startup sequence for heating. I don't even know if it's bad that it does this.

But it did amuse me once I realized that the furnace /does/ have a computer of sorts in it, and one of the more ancient types imaginable, at that. Flagging this post steampunk, since telegraphic relays most certainly did exist in the era, and you could do some interesting computing with them if you were so inclined.

-JRS

Some thoughts about Steampunk

2011-11-15T17:43:00.001-08:00

As I dig more and more into Brass and Steel: Inferno (or whatever it finally winds up being called,) I'm forced to try to really understand the Steampunk esthetic in a way I can articulate it. While by no means does the esthetic define the movement, it does give an insight into what steampunk is and how steampunkers (steampunks?) think.

75 years ago, the hot trend was to streamline everything. Hide all the fussy mechanical bits under a smooth, sleek exterior. Sure, it made those machines (e.g. steam locomotives) a monstrous pain in the rear to service, but they certainly looked cool, at least to the esthetic of the day.

Radio underwent this transformation as well, from the Atwater Kent breadboards of the 20s, where they went out of their way not only to leave the guts of the radio out where you could see them, but also made those guts /pretty/. An Atwater Kent breadboard is a radio for the steampunk esthetic. these were finished radios, as you'd take home and use. By 1926, however, the tubes all went inside a wooden box or a metal can,like this and by 1929, they needed to, since your radio was now plugged into the wall and had voltage and current enough to kill you.

Fast forward to the computer revolution. If you were around at the beginning of the personal computer revolution, as friend Jeff was, your first computer might have been a Cosmac Elf, IMSAI or Altair, or perhaps an Apple I. These machines came as kits. You knew how they worked, because you put them together yourself, and you put them in a case for one specific reason: to keep dust, RF interference, and the cat out of them. Nowadays, they look like this or this.

Steampunk inverts this trend. More than that. Steampunk says this trend is a lie, and that it's used to cheat you by hiding an inferior machine inside, or worse, that the machine is up to something and you don't know what that is.. Steampunk embraces mechanical complexity that isn't afraid to show off its construction. Steampunk is about the construction. It's about the complexity. It's about being honest and showing you how things work, even if they don't do anything especially useful. To whit, this art 'bot, archived at Make Magazine. Watch the video. It's worth it. Steampunk, at its best, is about that kind of mechanical grace, where your eye can take the object apart at the same time as watching the whole thing move.

At least, that's my take on it.

It could just be about cool hats. :)

-JRS

MileHiCon 2011

2011-10-12T17:13:00.001-07:00

As always, I will be at MileHiCon this year, and this year, I'll be joined by fellow author,co-author, and friend Jeff Duntemann, which should be fun.

My appearances in panels and such are as follows:

Friday, Mesa Verde B, 10:00pm: Can't Stop the Prose: Late Night Readings/Discussion. My guess is that this will be exactly what it sounds like - readings and discussion about them. Jeff's scheduled to be in this one, so expect readings from our double novel, /Drumlin Circus/ and /On Gossamer Wings/.

Saturday, Mesa Verde A, 4:00pm: Fan fiction. Does fan fiction still carry the stigma it used to for both fans and publishers, or has that changed? This ought to be interesting. My nano group in Colorado Springs had quite a few fan fiction writers, so it's a topic I've heard about, but not really dug into. Rest assured, I'll be digging between now and then.

Sunday, Wind River A, 10:00am: To FTL or not to FTL? A discussion of
relativity, fantasy vs. known science and other factors involved in that
venerable SF standby, faster than light travel. I've given this topic quite a lot of thought, especially lately since neutrinos may have been caught violating the speed limit. It's one of those tropes that's been around forever, and it's time we go after it with the dissecting tray, pins, and scalpel.

Sunday, Mesa Verde B, 1:00pm: Programming the Future. Where are computers headed and what will it mean for our future? A look at AI and other, more imminent, possibilities. Okay, I'm on a panel about computers and the future. No worries, right? Let me rephrase. I'm on a panel about computers and the future with Vernor Vinge. One of cyberpunk's founding fathers. Still, it's a subject I've given a lot of thought to in the process of writing my first two novels, and if memory serves, the only work I've done since I went pro that /doesn't/ have a machine intelligence in it someplace is /On Gossamer Wings/. And even that one's debatable. Should be fun.

See y'all there.

-JRS

RIP Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T22:36:00.001-07:00

In 2001, I bought my first Mac, a blue and white G3, to run OS X 10.1. At the time, I thought it wasted an awful lot of cycles on eye candy, but was a pretty nice machine, and anyway it was Unix underneath. It took a long time for me to come around, grudgingly, and admit that how my computer's desktop /looks/, how it behaves when I click on things, does actually matter, and in all those things with OS X, IOS, AppleTV, iPod, Airport; in the look and feel of the hardware as my systems became more and more apple-centric, the esthetic sense of Steve Jobs and his team could and can be felt. At times, it's been maddening, because some simple thing that I should be able to do ran afoul of what Steve's esthetic said I needed to do. Other times it's as though he read my mind beforehand, and the solution to a given problem was literally at my fingertips when the need occurred.

So on this sad occasion of his death, let me send my condolences to everyone who actually knew him in person, but also to all of us who knew him only through his work. May the wind be at your back, Steve Jobs. You made technology exciting, even after the excitement had mostly died down and the suits had taken over.

-JRS

Google+ and security

2011-08-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

As someone rather graphically demonstrated on this blog, using your secret mobile email posting address to forward messages from Google+ to your blogger blog leaves the aforementioned secret posting address exposed to the world. I've deleted the post and turned that posting mechanism off.

What's really mind boggling is that the post in question was one I put on Google+ almost a week ago, and it only went through recently. Why it takes days to send email from one part of the Google empire to another I have no idea, but in any case, the point is taken. Until Google provides a proper, secure way to auto-crosspost from Google+ to here, or a proper RSS mechanism on Google+, things will remain as they were.

I /am/ on Google+. Look for Jim Strickland there. But there isn't much to see publicly.

-JRS

The Right Dynamic, Followup

2011-08-12T13:32:00.001-07:00

In workshopping Brass and Steel, it became obvious that my clever dynamic of having Dante be an outsider for 8 years in Perdition didn't work well. So I've changed the dynamic (again) to have Dante /be/ the outsider who just arrived in town. It wants to make him a little too cosy with the powers that Be in Washington, but I can apply the inside-outsider treatment to that part of the story (it's inevitable, really). So now he is the Deputy Federal Marshal, fresh off the airship in this very strange town in the mountains of Nevada.

New opening paragraphs (subject to revision or cutting, as always):

The sheriff of Perdition and his boys are waiting for me as the Jupiter comes in for her landing. In the time it takes the big airship to settle into her berth, they saunter over to the gangway as it reaches up toward the enormous belly of the ship, and they try hard to look inconspicuous. The locals — longshoremen, ground crewmen, cigarette girls and so forth give them a wide birth.

The hatch opens like the doors to a blast furnace, and the high-altitude chill of the cabin boils away like steam in heated air that reeks of burning coal and brimstone. My skin tries to sweat. I’m going to have to drink a lot more water here. I can tell. Put on my hat. Step out onto the gangway. It creaks under me, but it holds as I walk down it.

The sheriff and his boys don’t wait until my boots hit solid ground before they buttonhole me.

-JRS

On Taos Toolbox

2011-08-08T13:41:00.001-07:00

On Taos Toolbox

I've been home for two weeks. The various house disasters that occurred while I was gone have been largely controlled, the various online fires that needed fighting have been doused, I'm back (unfortunately) to my usual sleeping schedule, and in general, life has returned to something like normal. If you ever want to feel like the center of a universe (not necessarily the universe, but the universe you live in, at least) take two weeks away from it.

I'm not going to write an in-depth day by day account of the whole workshop. Christie already did it. I'm going to summarize quite a bit instead. (I know, I know. Summary vs Dramatization, telling vs showing. :) Ok, fine. I'll try and set the scene first.

It's 10:00am. I'm sitting in a char hulled--apparently--by rabid beavers from raw logs before being upholstered. The room is the largest at the ski resort, the main suite. A log wall is across from me, set with windows and a wooden walkway on the other side. A TV and coffee table are off to my left, the latter stacked with printed copies of manuscripts for critiquing. Overhead are a collection of track mounted spotlights assigned at fairly random angles in what is probably the only light fixture in the entire resort not made from horns or other dead animal parts.

I'm cheek by jowl at this folding table with Stephen Blount on my left, and Carole Ann Moleti on my right. Across this end of the table are Jeff Duntemann and Ed Rosick. The rest of the class is seated at the same table, with Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress at the head and left hand of the head respectively. Walter's just arrived, being a late sleeper, and is wearing an eye-bleeding hawaiian shirt. Since we're all here, he does not see fit to sound the Air-Horn of summoning, thus sparing all of our hearing. Especially his own.

Nancy Kress gets up and lecture begins. She's talking about description. Description, she says (according to my notes), is best when it is specific. Generalities aren't your friends. (I'm paraphrasing here). If you're driving a car, it makes a vast difference to the tone of the story if it's a 2011 Lexus coupe or a 1974 Nova with holes rusted in the floor. It makes a big difference whether you're listening to Bach or Bachman Turner Overdrive, and whether the sound is coming from an iphone connected to the car's Alpine sound system, or from an old Sparkomatic FM radio with only two push-buttons set. You can characterize a scene and the people in it just from the stuff around them. Description, on a related note, is tonal. Gibson's opening line in Neuromancer: "The sky was the color of a tv set tuned to a dead channel." sets the tone of the entire novel, both in the grey sky and the technology that wraps around it.

There I sit, scribbling notes in longhand, printing in hopes (unlike with my college notes) of being able to read them later. Even on the fly, I know these notes are important. I know that they hold the keys to breaking the great dissatisfaction I've felt about my writing over the last two or three years. The lecture goes on. Description is interactive and dramatic. Instead of just telling a description, give nouns, eyeball kicks, emotion from people, connection to others, and intimacy. Make it vivid. I stretch my hand a moment to keep my wrist from cramping. I write for a living, but normally it's with a keyboard. Many of my classmates take notes on the profusion of mostly-macintosh laptops, with legato clicks as the membrane keys dip under their fingers. Taste of coffee. Keep up.

After Nancy's lecture is a ten minute break, and we line up for the bathroom, and to head to the kitchen for more coffee, soda, and the odd bagel. After that, critiques begin. And because we were asked not to make the critiques public, that's where I'm going to stop. Walter's second lecture on plot came afterwards.

* * *

What Taos Toolbox is most like, as I described it to friend Jeff, who wrote his own lengthy blog posts here on his Taos experience, is a 500 level mixed workshop and lecture course on the craft of the Science Fiction and Fantasy novel, taught by two experts in the field, Walter Jon Williams, and in our case Nancy Kress. Walter has, according to Wikipedia, two Nebulas and a Sideways, and Nancy has four Nebulas, two Hugos, a Campbell and a Sturgeon. You don't often find this kind of expertise in universities. You don't often find masters of science fiction short stories like guest lecturer Jack Skillingstead in universities. These are working pros in the field right now, and they are some of the best. Their lectures alone, their critiques alone, would make the workshop worth every cent and every second invested. Personal conference with the faculty? Yup. In the Jacuzzi? Optional.

Consider, from my notes from Nancy's first lecture: a scene is a unit. It contains orientation in terms of location, cast, and time. It has a purpose in the story - to advance plot, or deepen characterization. It has dramatization. Things happen in the scene. It has tension, and it ends on rising tension, emotion, and/or action. Dramatization, in turn, consists of Dialog, action, description, character's thoughts, but not much exposition.

Consider, from my notes on Walter's first lecture, about plot: Narrative is what happens in the story. Plot is how the story is presented to the reader. "The king died and then the queen died." is narrative. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief." is plot. He went into a whole taxonomy of plot types which I won't type here, and then said that plots can be compared to a multistage rocket. 3 to four stages that accelerate the story, often in different directions than they originally appeared, and then there's an explosive final payoff, reveal, etc.

None of these are hard and fast rules, but they are useful to know.

When I processed these lectures, and remember, they're from the first day, it occurred to me that I did these things, without knowing why, in the two novels and the novella I've written that worked, and that most of the stuff I've written that doesn't work fails because it was missing either dramatic scenes, or because the plot was missing fundamental anatomy. I knew they didn't work. Now I know why. It makes it a lot easier to fix something when you know why it doesn't work. That, friends and neighbors, is worthwhile learning.

But wait, there was more.

Workshop classes are a participation based method of instruction, so the better the classmates, the better the class. My classmates in the 2011 were all professional writers. Every one of them has sold fiction in professional markets. By heaven, every one of them wrote well when they got there, and the critiques they gave were professional and insightful. Walter bills the course as a master's class, and the 2011 gang certainly reflected that. They were also, without exception, a wonderful bunch of people. Interesting, funny, delightfully strange around the edges, and all serious and professional about writing.

And then there was the work itself. Over two weeks, we read and critiqued on the order of 198,000 words. This, in addition to writing our second week submissions, which probably averaged about 4000-6000 words each (I'm guessing here), and the odd assignment, along with movie nights, of which only Casablanca night was required. (Walter breaks the plot of Casablanca down on the fly during the movie. He also has a wealth of background information from the movie. Neither are to be missed, and it's a hell of a good movie besides.) We were busy. Most days, after critiquing and lectures were done around 2:00 in the afternoon, (starting at 10:00am sharp) people disappeared to their suites, or to balconies, or wherever to work. And the critiques and the writing showed it. There were some pieces where it was hard to find anything to talk about with them, particularly for the second week of critiquing, where we all had the chance to apply the lectures and the previous week's critiques to the next piece. More than a couple critiques I wrote began with "Wow." And you know, I could see that the new chapters of Brass and Steel: Inferno that I wrote/revised for week 2 were markedly better and tighter than the first week's.

But wait, there was more. Sean wrote on this subject, Jeff wrote on this subject and being that I'm kind of in a hurry and I'm lazy, I'll just link to that and say yes, a thousand times yes. From my suite-mate Jeff Duntemann to the instructors, to the incredible gang of writers, thank you all. I'm proud to have known you, proud to have spent two weeks with you, proud to have had the honor of critiquing your work and having you critique mine. I look forward to seeing what you and I become.

For more information on Taos Toolbox (especially for those interested in attending the 2012 edition, click here.

Reading at Who Else! Books on Aug. 13 @3:00pm!

2011-08-08T12:45:00.001-07:00

Reading! Jeff Duntemann and I will be joining mystery writer Mark Stevens for readings at Who Else! Books. Jeff and I will be reading from our respective short novels in Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings, and Mark will be reading from his novel Buried By the Roan. For Jeff and me, this will be the first reading we've done since the premier at AnomalyCon (it's been a busy summer for both of us) and it will be great to get back in the saddle. Who Else! books has a number of copies of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings on hand, for those who wish to buy a hardcopy.

If you've never been to Who Else! books, it's a wonderful place, part of the Broadway Book Mall, and Ron and Nina Else have been staunch supporters of my previous work, and they are deeply and passionately involved in science fiction in the Denver area. Also really, really nice folks. Who Else! Books is in the Broadway Book Mall, at 200 S. Broadway, Denver, Colorado, 80209.

The Right Dynamic

2011-06-21T15:56:00.001-07:00

It's a standard trope of the Old West that change comes from outsiders. The stranger comes to town, and by the time he's done, the town has been upended, its culture changed or destroyed, and he rides off into the sunset, being too volatile to keep around. And the truth is, this really happened quite a bit. Reading the stories of the Earp brothers, it's clear they wore out their welcomes in towns they cleaned up fairly regularly.

It hasn't always been the case that Old West stories start with an outsider. In earlier Westerns, like High Noon, the strangers were the bad guys and the hero was the townie sheriff who faced them down, but I grew up on Eastwood Westerns, particularly High Plains Drifter, and by the time they came along, that dynamic had been inverted. The outsider was the good guy - though frequently he's at best a mixed blessing. The dynamic of insider vs outsider is a powerful one.

Why this matters: Brass and Steel: Inferno is a story about Dante Blackmore, who is investigating some decidedly strange goings on in the town he's lived in for eight years. The problem I kept running into was asking how, if he's been there for eight years, has he been unaware of those goings on right along? He can't be (or I don't have a story to tell), and yet I have no desire to have the story depend on his incompetence or stupidity. Worse, the more I thought about it, the story I've been stealing the technique from; Dead and Buried - the novelization by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; gets out of this exact problem only because the main character's memory may or may not be reliable. (Read the book. It's very good. The movie is only so-so.) I'd reached the point where I was facing upending the plot (again) by making Dante either an outsider coming in, or a war hero coming back after years of work away from his home town. Both interesting dynamics, but not quite what I wanted.

This afternoon, though, a third way emerged in the fleshing out of chapter 1 that hadn't been there before, and it gave me the feel I want. Blackmore's been in town for eight years, yes, but he's not /part/ of the town. People don't talk to him. It makes him as much an outsider as if he'd just gotten there. He knows quite a bit of the history, but he's not immersed in the town culture. Best of both worlds. All of a sudden chapter 1 starts to ring properly, and the town culture starts to work. Plus, the dynamics of gyrations of the town's culture as we all proceed through the plotline together start to make a /lot/ more sense.

For those playing the home game, chapter 1 is not the first chapter I've written. I have /lots/ of other chapters, quite a few of which will probably be in the final novel, but chapter 1 sets the town and lays down the culture, and it's got to set the right feel for me to play the rest of the novel off of.

Back to work.

-JRS

Lights are on/Someone is home

2011-06-15T11:30:00.001-07:00

When I reload my cyberpunk world - and I am planning to return to cyberpunk - you can expect the technology to look a little different. There are things I didn't imagine in 2004 (or 1991, depending on which parts of the Looking Glass world you're looking at), such as cloud computing, and the revolutions in the Middle East. There were things I did imagine too, for other purposes, and one of those things is this: a technique for making light activated neurons in mice.

Not inherently useful in cyberpunk you say? Consider this. Given a supply of stem cells, dropping those same genes into the stem cells and triggering those stem cells to become neurons gives you a supply of light activated neurons which you can implant in someone's brain. Add some encoding/decoding logic, a power supply, and an optical port, along with a good understanding of how the brain really works, and you've got direct neural interfaces. It's tempting to say "it gets rid of all the nanomachine handwaving of neurofibers" buuuut... I did say those neurofibers were practically living neurons themselves. In any case, I saw it, it amused me, and so here it is. :)

-JRS

Downloads Page is Back

2011-05-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

As part of my update in support of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings, I was quietly sunsetting the free downloads section of my site. Then I looked at the Google Analytics, and let's just say removing the second most popular page in the site seemed like a bad idea. So the Downloads page is back. :)

-JRS

Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings On Sale Now

2011-05-08T13:11:00.001-07:00

TLDR version: Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings double novel is available for purchase! More info on my website at http://www.jamesrstrickland.com!
--
I'm pleased to announce that Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings (also known as Copperwood Double #1) is on sale now.

I've discussed Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world before, but for those just tuning in, a quick recap.

Toward the middle of the 22nd century AD, the new Starship Origen departed Earth on her maiden voyage, bound for the colony on Numenor with a cargo of livestock, various frozen DNA samples of livestock, plants, and people, and a large number of scientists and university professors bound for SUNY Numenor. She never made it. Instead, when her Hilbert drive malfunctioned destructively, she emerged from her FTL jump all the way across the galaxy, in unexplored space, with no way of returning.

The castaways were fortunate enough to discover a planet strongly resembling Pleistocine Earth, and there they were forced to start a colony nobody had planned on, with only the tools and materials they'd brought with them. It wasn't easy. In the hard scrabble that ensued, a lot of the knowledge they'd brought with them was lost, and their civilization began to regress.

And there was something else. Scattered over the surface of the planet were tens of thousands of alien artifacts called thingmakers, each with a pair of pillars that make a drumlike sound when tapped, and a two and a half meter diameter bowl filled with silver dust. When 256 taps total are made, something will appear out of the dust in the bowl. Sometimes they're useful things, like axes and pilsner glasses and rulers. Often times they're unrecognizable metallic shapes.

Two and a half centuries later, the world those castaways named Valinor is slowly clawing its way back up the technological ladder. Steam locomotives have begun moving passengers and freight over iron rails, to and from the rural communities where the food is grown. The first hydrogen filled airships are being developed in secret. The uneasy truce between those who would re-develop human technology and those who would rely on drumlins has held. Humanity is prospering. An industrial revolution has begun.

As the title of the book suggests, there are two short novels printed in this book. The hardcopy is a double novel, like the old Ace Doubles of years gone by. Read one story, flip the book over, and read the other.

The first story is Drumlin Circus, by Jeff Duntemann. Drumlin Circus tells the story of Simon Kassel, a director of the Bitspace Institute, sent to suppress a drumlin used by the circus to train its animals. When his mission is wrecked by other Institute operatives who kidnap the animal trainer and her assistant, wounding Kassel in the process, Kassel joins the circus and becomes a very scary clown, bent on revenge against the Institute. He returns to Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa only to discover that the function controller does a lot more than train animals. Played by an expert, human beings and even other drumlins will obey its tunes. And young Rosa is one very annoyed master.

The second story is On Gossamer Wings. I wrote it. Far out in the dusty farmlands of the Great Bowl, a strange, mute girl named Natalie Bishop discovered the rhythm for the Big Ball of Iron. This has not gone unnoticed by the Institute. Now, Institute director Hiram König has been sent to suppress it. What he finds is that in the meantime, Natalie has become a young woman, and the big ball of iron is only the beginning of what she's drumming up. Despite the fact that everyone considers her a mentally defective child who will never grow up, Natalie is determined to prove her worth, her intelligence, and her adulthood by drumming up the parts for a flying machine she's designed. It's up to König to spirit her and her unique gifts with the thingmakers out of the town of Joiners before the whole situation blows up and crushes her and her dreams of flying underfoot.

Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings is for sale in ebook and dead-tree formats from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. We'll hopefully be making it available from more ebook sites and brick and mortar bookstores soon.

-JRS

Belated Anomalycon Wrapup

2011-04-07T13:50:00.001-07:00

I was surprisingly stressed out on the approach to AnomalyCon 2011. I've been into Steampunk since it first had a name (around the time Gibson and Sterling's Difference Engine hit the scene.) It's a genre I've enjoyed for quite a while, and the very first novel I completed for NaNoWriMo is in that genre. (It will probably never see the light of day.) Still, I had no real handle on what the crowd would be like, and Jeff and I, by vacuuming up any panel space that came free when the inevitable cancellations cropped up, had both a reading and a topic panel to give.

As it turned out, it was a lot of fun. The Tivoli Student Union building is a defunct 19th century brewery, still replete with much of the equipment - a large steam engine, keg management equipment, and so on - so it was a perfect setting for the con. It is also enormous, so when the con ran to three times the number of people the staffers reasonably expected to see, it still didn't feel crowded or harried, and we weren't getting the hairy eyeball from some hotel staff. The LLC running the con did a remarkable job for the first time around. Kudos to them.

Our presentation on Saturday was on Steampunk in post-future worlds. What this translates to is that Jeff's Drumlin world, while strictly by date, is set in the distant future. However, because the people of the colony have undergone a technological regression (they were never expecting to colonize a world from scratch, so the information they brought with them was on consumer grade electronics - which only lasted 10 years or so.) What our talk centered around was what forces made the original Victorian era occur, and if, given the same or similar values in the culture, it would recur in this future world. We concluded that not only would it, but between cultural DNA (they had lots of pictures and some pattern books) and manufacturing technology, it would likely /look/ very much like the Victorian era.

On Sunday, we did readings from our double novel: Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings. It was reasonably well received, though we were across (and literally right below the balcony of) a somewhat more popular panel. Fortunately Jeff and I are both experienced readers who can fill a decent sized room with sheer lung power.

The downside of the Tivoli building is that the light is absolutely terrible in it. Getting good pictures inside the con was very much hit or miss, even with my mighty F1.2 Pentax-A lens, which is the fastest camera/lens package I own. So I don't really have any compelling pictures to share.

A fun con, and I'll most likely be going again next year, with intent to read and/or panelize.

-JRS

Site Update

2011-03-25T19:53:00.001-07:00

Switched on the new stuff to support the premiere of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings on Sunday at AnomalyCon.

Please note that (obviously) the final art for the Drumlin Circus side of the double isn't in place - that's an artist's sketch that I labeled with the Dymo label fonts. :)

Oh, I also fixed the book reviews section - replaced it, really, with a javascript one from Goodreads. They somehow changed the feed and broke the magpie scripting that fed my bookshelf to my desktop. Hopefully they'll refrain from doing the same to their own API.

See you at the con.

-JRS

Anomaly Con

2011-03-23T18:38:00.001-07:00

Anomaly Con is this weekend! Yay! The premiere is on!

For those playing the home game, For the last couple months, I've been working with Jeff Duntemann on a double novel. We're premiering it at Anomaly Con here in Denver on Sunday, March 27th, at 1:00pm in Panel Room 1.

Well, this week, the organizers of the con emailed me to ask if we could do a panel on Saturday as well, to fill in for someone who got sick at the last minute and had to cancel.

We said "Sure." :) So now we also have a panel on Saturday at noon in Panel room 1 called "The Evolution of Steampunk in Post Modern Worlds". As we've worked on the double novel, and indeed as Jeff worked on the previous stories in the Drumlin world, it became obvious that we were writing steampunk, whether we set out to or not. So Jeff suggested we take a step back for this panel and look at what forces produced the original Victorian era, and how many of them were replicated in the Drumlin world, and how those elements came together again to form the second Victorian era on that far-away, distant future planet. And once we started talking about it, we realized that's a good topic for a panel.

This is also a good time to give a quick shout-out to Wild West Mercantile for not only getting my order to me extremely quickly, but for going above and beyond by /measuring/ the vest in the store while I was on the phone with them, so we could make sure it would fit.

-JRS

Some Perspective

2011-03-20T14:13:00.001-07:00

Some perspective on Japan's nuclear plant problems, courtesy of XKCD's Randall Monroe

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Finally, a decent epub reader for Mac

2011-03-19T21:44:00.001-07:00

Epub is an open standard for ebooks. It's very popular, used in iBooks and by the Barnes and Noble Nook, and it's fast emerging as the lingua franca of ebook systems - even some versions of Sony's e-reader are said to read them. Why, then, are there so few epub reader options for Mac users? I've talked about this before, in this very blog, and I'll not rehash that whole discussion here. The point I'm making here is that I think I've finally found a decent epub reader for mac. It's called Lucifox and it's a plugin for Firefox. All the details you'd want are here. There appears to be a standalone version as well (dependent on the Mozilla XUI runner) which I've not played with yet.

-JRS

My new favorite font

2011-03-09T16:53:00.001-08:00

Gputeks has two major things going for it. First, it's an attractive font at almost any scale, and just what I was looking for for the title page of On Gossamer Wings. Second, it's OFL licensed. That's Open Font License. As in Open Source. Free as in Freedom, and all that. You can get both here: http://www.fontspace.com/gluk/gputeks What gputeks means, I have no earthly clue. Nor do I particularly care. :)

-JRS

AnomalyCon

2011-03-09T16:47:00.001-08:00

For those in the Denver metro area, I will be appearing at Anomaly Con on the 26th and 27th of this month, in support of Cooperwood Press's Copperwood Double #1. This book contains two stories set in Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world, which I've talked about before. On Side one is Jeff's novella Drumlin Circus and side two of the double-book is my novella On Gossamer Wings.

If you've never seen one of the old Ace doubles, double novels work like this:
On side one of the book, you have cover art, and a short-ish novel. Flip the book so the spine printing is now upside down, and instead of the back cover, you have different cover art, and a different novel. The two novels meet in the middle, one upside down from the other so you know where one ends and the other begins. Page numbers go from the side you started on toward the center. In the center was a catalog of other titles from the same publisher. Double novels often contained abridged versions of the novels within, so they'd both fit in the relatively small number of pages allowed. (Neither Drumlin Circus nor On Gossamer Wings has been abridged in any fashion, as they were written with this format in mind.)

Novellas run, according to Wikipedia, somewhere in the huge span between 10,000 words and 70,000 words. Novellas are fun to write. They're middle-length stories where you can experiment with writing style, with story lines, with characters, without the screamingly tight word constraints of short fiction, and yet without committing the time and intricate story telling of a novel. They're fun to read too, since you can read them at one sitting and still have time to do other things the same day.

Unfortunately, novella length fiction is typically impossible to sell. Publishers usually want either short fiction of less than 7000 words for print in magazines, or they want 90,000 to 110,000 word novels - or longer if you're Stephen King. Double Novels give you /two/ novella length pieces in one cover. If you've never read a novella before, you're in for a treat.

As for working with Jeff on this one, it's been a pleasure. Jeff's an old hand at Science Fiction, and a damn good one. He's been on the final ballot for a Hugo (twice) and he's been selling short science fiction since 1974. His first novel, The Cunning Blood came out in 2006. He's also a good friend. You've seen his name in my blog before.

We're still hammering out the final details of the book, and the deadline is tight, but we should have copies in hand to sell at the con. Look for the guys in the top hats. Our panel reading is Sunday, the 27th, at 1:00pm. I'll put up another posting here when I know where in the con the reading will be.

-JRS

Off Topic: The Politics of Suck

2011-02-04T15:48:00.001-08:00

I got a letter from the Democratic National Committee a couple days ago. In it, I was advised that the time to prepare for the 2012 election is now, and that above all we must work to keep Republicans out of the White House. It went on for some length about the matter, in fact, how any Republican President would pull a "George Bush" and "run this country right into the ditch."

Now, as folks might have guessed from my post entitled "That was the decade that was," I was not and am not George W. Bush's biggest fan. If one is paying attention, one might guess that this has something to do with why the DNC is asking me for money, in fact. But as I read this letter, one thing got on my nerves.

It said nothing about what the President and Democrats in Congress are doing. The entire letter was about Republicans, in the most harsh tones, though remarkably without many facts to look at. The letter basically distilled down to this: Republicans suck. Give us money so we can keep them out of power.

So um. I take it the whole Civility in Politics thing didn't reach Governor whatsisnuts who wrote the letter?

See, here's the problem. Starting with the Reagan era, politics has become less and less about ideas and more and more about how the other guys suck. The results of this have been devastating. The parties have grown more and more polarized, lest anyone in party A admit that they suck by admitting that party B might have a good idea there. When party A is in power, they feel they have a "mandate from the people" to do things that suck. And verily, they do. And finally, and most importantly, they drive the civility out of the business of democracy where it is most needed - in the people who vote.

The tragic shooting in Tucson is the final result of this last problem. You can argue, as I was prepared to, that Sarah Palin knew exactly what she was doing when she set up the target reticles on her website to intimidate the candidates she was targeting. She certainly should have. The Operation Rescue web campaign against Dr. George Tiller of Wichita certainly netted similar success for that organization. Certainly, Palin should have known that her website put people's lives in danger. But the bottom line is that both those websites were inappropriate for mainstream politics, bordering on terrorism, and should have been roundly denounced by the sensible people of America. They were not so denounced. The level of normal violence was raised. Bloodshed and lives lost were the result.

Until our civilization refuses to sanction the violent undertone in our politics, blood will continue to be spilled. I, for one, will no longer sanction it. So no, Governor DNC. Not one fucking dime for you and your party. Not until you admit that the other party can be simply wrong instead of evil. I have had enough of the politics of suck, sir. And until you learn some manners, I don't want to see you or yours in the White House either.

-JRS

Off Topic: A Thank-You Note to Apple Computer

2011-01-28T14:44:00.001-08:00

Dear Apple Computer:

I am a computer geek, and I have been for 30 years. My mother, by contrast, is not. She called me yesterday to tell me that her late 2005 G5 iMac/iSight was showing blue horizontal bands instead of booting. I have to say I cringed when she said it. It's never good to have severe video distortion on a computer, but particularly on an all-in-one machine like an iMac.

Worse, she was trying to power the machine up to write a paper for a class she's taking. The paper is due monday. This is the lady who gave me such grief for leaving things to the last minute. I suppose she could have waited until Sunday afternoon. I suggested, without much hope, that she call the Apple store nearest her for a genius bar appointment and take the iMac in to see what could be done.

I suggested she take her time machine disk to the store with her, just in case.

She went to the Apple store in Albuquerque, NM, and there her old iMac was indeed pronounced dead of a logic board failure. Pretty much what I expected from her description, and from the age of the machine. The G5 macs just didn't last as well as previous generations, and her imac outlasted all the other powerMacs in the family.

This was, however, the Apple store. The folks there are not inclined to throw up their hands and say "Sorry." No. The genius bar employee handed her off to a salesman. I suggested that she think about laptops, mac minis, and iMacs if she had to get a new machine. With the salesman's help, she did. Together they reached the conclusion that for her needs, a new iMac was the best deal in terms of performance per dollar and that it best suited her computing habits.

The machine she selected was the 21.5 inch iMac 3.0ghz core i3 with 4gb of RAM. In terms of raw clock speed, it's the fastest mac in the family. I'm trying hard to keep the lyrics from "Little Old Lady from Pasadena" out of my head. My mother would /not/ appreciate the comparison.

Looking at the specs, it's a hell of a computer. It probably doesn't really have enough video RAM for a hardcore gamer, but then my mother really isn't into EverQuest, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online anyway. Don't laugh too hard. I know some people's moms who are.

What she did not do was have the folks at the store restore her system from time machine. There was an extra charge for this, and more classes she didn't really want to attend anyway. She took the new machine home, set it up on her desk, marveled at the wireless keyboard and mouse, and then called me again.

She was at the part of the automatic setup process where Setup Assistant asked her if she'd like to recover data from another mac or a time machine backup. Yes, I assured her, that's what we wanted to do. Did she want to select everything? Again, yes, I assured her that's what she wanted to do.

18 minutes later, she went through the registration pages, and after that, her desktop was back, and everything was where she expected it to be. I suggested we probably should make sure time machine was set up on the new computer, so she opened time machine, threw the switch, and it asked if she wanted to use the existing time machine drive for the new computer. We heartily agreed.

And that was it. When we hung up the phone, the computer was busily creating its new time machine backup, she was busily reading email and checking her bank account. Oh, and thinking about starting her paper, since it is due Monday and all.

Now, I have nerd friends who have other brands of computers, and when they have a total hardware failure, or a total reload situation, they're down for a day, at least, and there's some tinkering involved to set the new machine up with all their accounts and all that. For my mother, buying the computer took longer than getting it up and running with all her data and applications. The longest part of that process was copying the data off of the time machine drive. It took maybe a dozen mouse clicks to make it all happen, and frankly if I'd been out of the house, she probably could have done it herself.

Thank you, Apple Computer, for putting the thought and the care into your hardware and software to make the recovery from such a catastrophic failure such a non-event, and for making her shopping experience at the Apple Store such a positive one.

There's only one thing missing. Someplace to email this to. So I'm posting this as an open letter to my blog.

-James R. Strickland

Google Ebooks Ripoff - Refunded

2011-01-18T13:09:00.001-08:00

Two days after I made my post about what a ripoff Google Ebooks was, I was contacted by Anna, on the Google Books team, who apologized and offered me a refund, which I accepted.

While my complaints about the quality of the ebooks they're offering stand, I have to say it's almost unsettling how proactive their customer service is. Kudos to Anna and the team for settling the matter.

-JRS

Google Ebooks: A complete and utter rip-off

2011-01-12T17:31:00.001-08:00

I've been following the ebook thing for a long time, but seldom have I seen such a disgusting rip-off as google e-books. Doing research for the novel I'm currently working on, it became necessary to have a copy of the Sears, Roebuck catalog from the late 1890s. Great, I figured. Here's a job for an ebook. I looked on Google's ebook site and they had one. I read through the information on it, and nowhere did it say the book was not available in PDF or epub format, so I purchased it.

First problem: the price. Google ebooks are either free or expensive, in this case I paid $9.95 (plus tax) for a book I could have bought on paper for $12 from Amazon.

Second, I'm stuck reading the book on the cloud. This sounds nicer than it is. It really means that on my desktop I'm limited to using their browser-reader, and on any other device it has to have an active, battery sucking internet connection. Oh, and by the way, there is no way at all to read it on Kindle. Let me repeat that, because it's one of the main reasons I'm calling this a rip-off: there is NO downloading this book. You read it from Google's servers or not at all. Basically, you're paying to access a web site.

Third, this book is a plain scan of the reproduction of the catalog. This is as primitive as ebooks get. It is in no way searchable. It has no internal organization other than was present when the catalog was published 114 years ago. While this simplicity (the only addition is a foreword from the republisher) would be charming in a paper edition, in an ebook edition it severely limits the book's usefulness.

Fourth, of course, is the web-page reader itself. Consisting of a web page listing the books you were fool enough to buy on this service, and a link that takes you to the ebook in question. Once there, you get a bar at the top of your browser to take you back to your "I wasted my money on THIS?" page, and a button at either edge of your browser to scroll, one page at a time, through the ebook, along with an uncalibrated slider at the bottom of the page so you can scroll to about the middle of the book, or somewhere near one end or the other. That's as accurate as it gets. Using the forward and back buttons is no special joy. Each time you hit one of the buttons, the web site has to send you another page (remembering this is a scan, so it's a big image file of some kind, so even on my 16mb/s link it takes a certain amount of time). If you hit it more than a couple times close together (I need to get to page 500) it will stop responding altogether. As if these defects weren't sufficient, there is one that is above all, unforgivable. If you shrink the window it buckles the text and hides the forward and back buttons altogether. Read that again. If you scale your browser window the PRINT BECOMES UNREADABLE and THE FORWARD AND BACK BUTTONS ARE HIDDEN. THE READER BECOMES UNUSABLE IF YOU TRY TO SCALE IT.

If you're entertaining the idea of buying a google book for any reason, I encourage you to think twice, maybe three times. Google has not done any work at all to make a quality product here.

-JRS

That was the Decade that Was

2011-01-03T16:04:00.001-08:00

The aughties - 2001 to 2010 - span my entire writing career. Wow. So much stuff has happened in those ten years. Consider: in 2001, I still worked in high tech. The country had a budget surplus, after years of competent management by the Clinton administration, and the worst scandal everyone knew about was the President's dalliance with a lady on his staff.

Compare that to now, when, when after 8 years of the Stupid, America has a trillion dollar deficit, its own secret police, secret prisons, the TSA, and a genuine concentration camp in Cuba (as opposed to a death camp, with which the term has become conflated)

So given the slow poisoning of American culture that I was seeing, the decay of the value of common decency, and in the face, four days in, of seeing that idiot re-elected in 2004, I wrote Looking Glass, my second NaNoWriMo novel, and if sales are any indication, the most likely reason you're reading this. I finished it in the summer of 2005.

Met friend Jeff (Jeff Duntemann) over regenerative radios in January of 2005. If for no other reason, I'll never regret getting into vacuum tube technology. Jeff is salt of the Earth.

NaNo 2005 gave me a second novel in the Looking Glass world, though it's not the one you're thinking. It had a lot of good ideas, but I was so desperate not to make another Catherine Farro novel that the characterizations in Last American Virgin are pretty weak. Not many people have seen that novel, and it's unlikely many will, at least in any recognizable form. However, in January of 2006, I had the idea for what is the second novel in the Looking Glass world, now known as Irreconcilable Differences. Long, boring drives through Kansas and Wyoming, combined with the buddy movie concept I tinkered with in Virgin to give me the idea. The first draft of the manuscript was finished at the end of September, 2006.

Looking Glass sold at the end of 2006, and I became a published author.
NaNo 2006 was when I wrote the first draft of the book that's kept me in knots since, Einstein's Blues. So many cool ideas in that book, including a new universe of planets that I still have ideas for, but so many fundamental problems with the plot. I still hope to finish this one, as I think it's worth it. It's also the last novel I was able to bounce ideas off of friend Mike with.

May 25, 2007, Looking Glass is released with another book in Flying Pen Press's release party at the Tattered Cover

July, 2007, we finally left Colorado Springs for a Denver suburb. Just in time, by the look of things, as while it took us six months to sell our house there, the economy there has pretty much dried up and blown away. The Denver paper covered how the Springs can't afford to run all their streetlights anymore, and how they were selling some of their police helicopters on Ebay. Yeesh. This process started in July and ended in early 2008.

October, 2007. My father passed away after a series of strokes.

January, 2008 found me feverishly completing work on the manuscript for Irreconcilable Differences, which I ultimately finished the first week of February. The book was released during WorldCon Denver (Denvention 3), on August 7, 2008, and the release party was at the Tattered Cover again. I did NaNo in 2008 as well, but the novel that resulted, Truth be Told, is another one that may never see the light of day. It was, notably, my first attempt to have a male narrator. Also, in 2008, Americans finally elected a President we could be proud of. After 8 years of George W. Bush, frankly Mickey Mouse would have been an improvement. President Obama is far from perfect, but he seems to grasp that decency is still an American value. Whether Congress agrees is another question.

2009 seemed like a not-very-productive year, and from an output standpoint that's true. But the truth is I spent much of 2009 converting most of Flying Pen Press's catalog into ebooks for sale on Kindle. 2009 also saw the death of friend Mike, who was killed by a drunk driver in a traffic accident. Between the two, I just didn't create much new material. This malaise lasted me well into 2010.

2010 after the end of June saw a comparative explosion of new work - a novella and a short story. The short story, Brass and Steel is in print now in Science Fiction Trails magazine, and the novella, On Gossamer Wings will be part of a double-novel with friend Jeff, due out sometime this summer. NaNo 2010 saw me extending Brass and Steel into the first novel of what may turn out to be a series of books. (Eek.) I'm working on that one these days.

2010 also saw the return of Republicans to power in the House, and it remains to be seen if this is a return to the Stupid of the early Aughties, or whether they're more sane these days.

And now it's 2011. A new decade. While my first instinct is to club the old one over the head with a shovel, bury it, and spit on the grave; looking back it wasn't all bad. I'm 43 now, I have a new career that I'm slowly kicking forward, still married to the most wonderful woman in the world, and I live in a place now where there's some hope. And of course, there's the new work, so hopefully my long-patient readers (that's you folks) will have new output from me soon.

Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year and Happy New Decade.
-JRS

Disarming a Civilization

2010-12-26T16:29:00.001-08:00

Working on a side project hopefully destined to become a novel some day. I've been envisioning the world of another novel in the Einstein's Blues universe, this time on the moon called Glory. Lots of stuff goes on in it, but one thing that sprang fully formed to my mind the other day, and it's a nice fresh paranoia to keep folks through the new year.

Imagine that millimeter wave radar (one type of invasive scanner at airports) becomes inexpensive. Imagine a slightly fascist government. Now imagine that every light post you walk past may be scanning you, and the scan is being analyzed by a pattern matching computer or an AI for weapons. Your civilization has just been disarmed.

Of course, being my creation, even the somewhat fascist government in question is pragmatic and only insists people not carry guns. Edged weapons, since they produce few collateral casualties and do not significantly improve one's ability to resist the police state, are perfectly fine, at least in some areas.

Glory's shaping up to be a fun place. Rather more cyberpunkish than the story I've been working on in this universe.

Don't expect to see any of this soon. Brass and Steel: Inferno will be chewing up my writing time for quite a while.

Have a happy new year. :)

-JRS

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T18:39:00.001-08:00

Whoops. I knew it had been a while since I updated here, but I didn't realize it was two weeks or so. Sorry about that. My bad.

Not a lot to say here. I've been accepted to a writer's workshop for this summer (as a student, mind you) which I'm looking forward to, and I've been busy doing the Christmas thing, so writing had to take a back seat to that for a bit. This is normal this time of year.

So being that Christmas is upon us, let me wish you all a merry Christmas. Don't celebrate it? No problem. Hopefully it will be a merry Saturday for you anyway. We're going out for Chinese buffet, weather permitting.

Just in case I'm as tardy with my next entry as I was with this one, let me also wish y'all a happy new year (2011). May it bring you health and comfort, and of course, joy.

-JRS

Why Tech Companies Die

2010-12-11T21:32:00.001-08:00

This article should be required reading for any executive team at any high tech company. Wow. How many times have we seen companies go through this process?

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-wrong-with-blackberry-and.html

-JRS

Brass and Steel: In Print

2010-12-07T17:35:00.001-08:00

It's my pleasure to announce that my short story, Brass and Steel is in print in Science Fiction Trails magazine.

The folks at Science Fiction Trails have been great to work with. I can't say enough good things about David B. Riley and Laura Givens.

For more information on Brass and Steel and on Science Fiction Trails, please click the link above, or in the new section of the front page of the website, marked "Short Fiction". Hint. If you're reading this on my website, it's to the right of where you're looking now, below the novels.

-JRS

Site Update

2010-12-06T15:25:00.001-08:00

I just finished overhauling the website. It doesn't look that much different, although there are subtle changes to the theme and nearly all the pages. The underlying guts are substantially changed.

There are some changes you may notice.
1. Support for antique, non-css compliant versions of internet explorer is gone.
It hadn't worked right for a while anyway.

2. Books is renamed to "In Print".
3. Buy Books is renamed to "Buy".
4. The Bookshelf and Press Info pages are gone
Nobody was hitting them.
5. Downloads is renamed to "Download"

[edit]

Known issues:

If your browser window is bigger than about 1300px wide, the nav block becomes detached from the rest of the content, which is pinned to a maximum width of 1280. I know I can fix this by putting everything inside a container div the width of the browser, but I'm trying to find out if there's a nicer (easier) way to do it from the CSS side of things. Remarkably, setting the body max-width doesn't work at all.

If you find any bugs, links trailing off to nowhere, etc, do please let me know.

-JRS

Planes, trains, and... well just planes and trains.

2010-12-05T13:27:00.001-08:00

from Looking Glass: I look through the perspex at the train, watch it spread apart, the microwave links providing power and communications between cars little inconvenienced by the doubling of their transmission range. I can see the T1 itself, the big fission reactor on wheels, as it goes into a turn to arc around the switchyard. A light jolt and a flicker of the lights in the car tell me the fork is complete. I watch the train streak away, only a few cars diverging from it to join up with the car I’m in as we turn away from the main line and hit the brakes, decelerating toward the station, the g-forces pulling me against my seat belt a bit at first, easing down as we slow. Not so different from a jet landing in the old days, and much more gentle than a suborbital reentry, or so I’m told. Safer than both. There are almost always survivors in a train wreck.

Two items talking about my fictional trains.
First, this about the Chinese train that now holds the world speed record for a passenger train. According to China's Xinhua news agency, the CRH380 train hit 416.6kph, about 299mph. That's slightly more than half the speed of my fictional trains, which clocked in at 800kph - 497mph or so - the cruising speed of a jet liner. But those numbers were just for my convenience, to make Looking Glass' aggressive story timeline work. But realistically? I think 416kph is plenty fast. That would be Denver to Emeryville (San Francisco Bay Area) in just shy of 6 hours. Now the airline flight is 2 hours and 37 minutes flight time. Add two hours ahead of time for security theater in the airport, and that 6 hour train ride starts seeming pretty darn reasonable.

Second, is this photo of the Pennsylvania Railroad's first T1 locomotive, from whence I took the name and inspiration. I don't think it's too difficult to morph the Chinese train's locomotive and this old streamlined steam engine together into a coherent locomotive, personally. My T1s would lack the enormous side-rods and drivers, of course, since they are essentially a nuclear-electric power plant on wheels and most of the motive force for the train comes from motors in the cars. But still, the problems of accelerating a large volume of hot water persist, and I think my T1s wouldn't be too different from this.

Must resist temptation to try and 3d-model it. :)

-JRS

Nano - Done

2010-11-30T15:36:00.000-08:00

As of about 4:37 today, I crossed 50,000 words for Nano. The final scene is just starting to unfold, but the rules require that I end the story, so I do, rather abruptly. Not the final ending, of course, probably nothing about this novel is final though there are a few interesting scenes along the way and I have a good sense of who Dante Blackmore, Josephine Tyler, and Anita Graves - among others - are. It's more the bones of a novel than a full novel. But hey. This is where it all started. And it feels good to finish. :)

-JRS

Downloads working again

2010-11-27T21:25:00.001-08:00

Just a quick fix: Downloads of Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences should be working again. Apparently I erased the downloads on my development machine and propagated their non-existence to the server at some point. Sorry about that.

-JRS

Thoughts on Nano

2010-11-23T18:15:00.001-08:00

Once again, late to getting something on my blog, strung out in the last stages of Nano. (I cracked 40,000 words today). And naturally, I find myself without recyclable content to post. So I'm going to post this little bit of silliness that started going through my head about a thousand words into today's output.

(To the tune of I'm Gonna Be by The Proclaimers)

When I wake up, well I know I'm gonna write, I'm gonna write another couple thousand words.

At Panera I got a frequent eater card, and I've eaten every salad on the board.

If I get drunk, well I know I'm gonna fall, I'm gonna fall behind a couple thousand words.

And I can't give up. Yeah I know I can't give up, I can't give up though I'm behind ten thousand words.

(refrain)
And I will write 500 words and I will write 500 more just to write my fifty-thousand words 'bout steampunk old West zombie whores...

Ok, I'll stop now. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.

-JRS

Readings from MileHiCon Pt 3

2010-11-16T22:52:00.000-08:00

Still doing Nano. The novel I'm working on is taking some directions I didn't expect, which is always rewarding. I like it when characters decide to be their own people. The novel is based (somewhat loosely) on my Brass and Steel short story, mentioned previously, but friends and neighbors, there's a lot more going on. I'm two days behind, which is actually pretty good. And in case you were hoping, this post does not contain any samples from the novel. I'm trying not to get all twisted up about this one the way I have about Einstein's Blues, and so I'm keeping this one close to the vest until I'm ready to show it.

However, since I'm already a day late with this post, and since I somehow didn't already post it in this blog, below is the teaser reading from Einstein's Blues that I gave at 2009's MileHiCon. No guarantees that any of this will appear in the final novel, and yes I do intend to go back and finish the thing, probably when I'm done with the novel I'm working on now.

-JRS

---

• The year is 2967. It's a long way into the future, but the story really starts only a hundred or so years from now.

• Years get away from you in time dilation stories.

• Narrator is Haidee Lee Jones, lead vocalist and lead guitarist of The Prodigal Daughters. They're the house band for Amazitron, a traveling show in the vein of Circque de Soliel. They also do gigs on the side.

• The scene is on the conning tower of the S.S. Tallahatchie, originally a colonial ship that transported colonists and their stuff from Earth to one of the few dozen colony worlds up to forty lightyears away.

• Tallahatchie is approaching Duntemann's world, an Earth-like planet orbiting HR483 A and B, a binary star system in the constellation Andromeda, about 41 lightyears from Earth.

• Tallahatchie travels at relativistic speeds, resulting in time dilation for those aboard, but that time really passes for the place they left and the place they're going to. Einstein's Blues refers to that fact. "You can get there from here, but nothing will be the same."

• I'm still working on this novel, so take this scene as a teaser of the general flavor of the final novel, even though the scene itself may be very, very different in the finished version.
Chapter 1
In the beginning, as the saying goes, there was nothing. Darkness on the face of the water. And then... wait for it... there. Starburst.

Space explodes into a silent shower of blue sparks as we slow down, as the light from those far-away stars is blueshifted less and less, until the coolest stars' light just scootches past the UV filter in the conning tower windows. It's quite sudden. One moment, darkness, the next, stars like fireflies, lighting up the vast gulf of dusty, empty space ahead.

Look up. Let my eyes adjust to the faint light of HR 483 B. Her twin, A, is far brighter, but that means her light is higher frequency. Which means it's still into the ultraviolet. Which would sunburn my pasty white-girl hide worse than catching a round-the-backside wave on Glory, if it got through the conning tower windows. Which it doesn't. So for these few minutes, the light of the hidden twin, normally outshown by her much-brighter sister and visible only at sunrise and sunset on the surface of the one rocky planet that orbits them both; that feeble glow the red dwarf is capable of, is the major light on the face of the dark water of space that the Starship Tallahatchie sails into.

Final stop for the season. Last gasp for this show before we head back to Glory, and take a couple months off, surf, rest, lick our wounds, and spacedock the ship. Assuming Leo wants us all back and hires us again, after that we start building the next show.

And there was light. And there was still nothing, but at least now you could see it.

Look back to my soldering. Wait for the call on the radio that is, that should be coming, as the light slowly warms more and more into the visible spectrum, and shines into the dusty corners of the conning tower, over the metal grate floor, washing out the feebly blinking lights in the conning tower almost nobody uses anymore. Prop my amp on the science console. It hasn't worked since I've been with the ship.

The call comes.

"S.S. Tallahatchie, sierra sierra seven-zero-one, This is Turnbull Control, Hotel Romeo four-eight-three. Received your transmission at eighteen hours, forty-one minutes, August two-seven, two-niner-six-seven, Universal. Permission to approach is granted. We have you on the schedule and in the pattern. Your approach vector is attached to this message. Orbital control will pick you up when you clear the outer planets, and the signal will get there the same day. Look out for our extra star, and welcome to Duntemann's World. Turnbull Control, Hotel Romeo four-eight-three, end of message. Message will repeat on s-band, two two niner five megahertz in six-zero seconds." So it does, and so it will, hunting up and down the usable frequencies in interplanetary space, along with any other system to ship chatter, each with a sixty second reply window, until our reply gets there. I've heard stories about messages that stayed on the queue for a century until wreckage of the ship that never replied was found.

My voice slips into the usual 'com voice' patter by itself. I don't have to think about it. Just do it. "Turnbull Control, Hotel Romeo four-eight-three from S.S. Tallahatchie, Sierra Sierra seven-zero-one. Received your transmission at thirteen-forty-seven, August two-eight, two-niner sixty-seven. Vector downloaded. Will pick up Orbital control at or around noon, September one. Universal. Thank you, and I'm looking at your extra star as we speak. S.S. Tallahatchie, Sierra Sierra seven-zero-one, end of message. Message will repeat every hour, this frequency." Log the message into the communications console so that it will.
"Com to CIC."

Beth answers. Her watch is always the same as mine. "CIC. Whatcha got, Haidee?"
"I got approach permission and a vector download. We pick up orbital control in four days Universal."

"About time. Let me get to the nav console hon." She says. "Okay. We're set. Did they say anything else?"

"Yeah, watch out for their extra star."

"It's hardly ever missed. But noted. Thanks. CIC out."

"Com out."

Four days. I have work to do. Handmade twentieth century technology always needs work. The guitar's strings are steel. They stretch and wear out. Lose their tonal quality. Replace them. Find the loose solder joint in the amp head. It's been breaking into oscillation sometimes during rehearsal. I built this amp. I know where to look. And for that, at least, I only have my own shoddy workmanship to blame. Resolder it.

I could play blues and rock ’n roll on my optical guitar. But no. Analog, thermionic electronics are the same for my art as the wood choices, instrument shapes, and varnishes used in a Stradivarius. If you want the Stradivarius sound, get a Stradivarius. If you can't afford a Stradivarius... and who can, especially now? ...figure out how the master made his violins, and make your own the same way. If you want that sound bad enough, it's worth it.

And it is worth it. When I play, you hear what you'd have heard, feel what you'd have felt if you'd been alive in the 1950s through the 2050s, and had gone to your favorite club to hear the band. So yeah, my optical guitar has better bandwidth, easier fingering by virtue of not having physical strings, it's always in tune. It always sounds the same. And because of all those improvements, because it is so very modern and clean, playing Hendrix on it is like playing one of Bach’s sonatas on accordion and kazoo. You miss the point.

Readings from MHC pt 2:

2010-11-08T23:33:00.000-08:00

-Intro-

In 2006, my friend and fellow science fiction author Jeff Duntemann invited a few of his friends to write stories in what he called the Drumland world. This is a big deal. He was inviting these people to jump into his world and write stories that would become part of his canon, for future work in that world. I was one of those friends.

But his world was so different from the worlds I'd been building. The colony of Valinor had reverted to 1850s technology, and indeed one of the published stories in this world is about building steam locomotives. More than that, scattered all over Valinor are thingmakers. These machines can make any Earth artifact that will fit in a 2.2 meter bowl if you know the right rhythm to tap out on the two pillars of the machine. It had, it seemed to me, the makings of a utopia. And my first two novels are cyberpunk. Let's just say coming up with an idea for a story took a long time.

June, 2010. I had the idea. I also had some goals. I wanted to write something in third person. I wanted to write a main character who didn't have long internal dialogues. And I wanted to write a tragedy.
. Jeff is busy writing the companion novella in the same world, and we're hoping to see a release date through Copperwood Press sometime next year.
-----
(Jeff's short stories in this world thus far are:
Drumlin Boiler: A competition to build and race steam locomotives is quickly polarized into a drumlin tech vs Earth tech race with strong repercussions down the road.

Drumlin Wheel: An ordinary guy discovers a most extraordinary drumlin – a wheel that turns itself. He quickly runs afoul of the simmering conflict between the pro-drumlin tech folks and the Bitstream Institute, that insists Valinor develop its technology for itself (so they can keep the thingmakers to themselves).
Roddie: A short short story about one man's encounters with an enigmatic drummer who is trying to drum up some deeper understanding of everything. And there's a disturbing sense that he has it.

These stories can be found in Jeff's anthology: Cold Hands and Other Stories, at Copperwood Press's site on lulu.)
On Gossamer Wings
Chapter 1
The waters of the Steinbeck river come down a long way, from the snowmelt creeks high in the White Plume mountains, through the Veneris canyon, all the way across the western half of the continent named Arcadia by the spacewrecked settlers of Valinor. The river wends its way south and west to christen the arid land of the Great Bowl, and leaves a broad stretch of fertile green land in its wake.

Toward the southwestern edge of the Bowl, irrigation ditches have drained the Steinbeck to little more than a creek. The land is dry underfoot and trees are mighty few and far between. Clusters of windblown farms cling to the banks of the Steinbeck; wood and concrete buildings covered in the reddish brown dust blown up off the soil of the ancient lakebed of the Bowl. They live and die at the ebb and rare flood of the waters. Where the farms survive, the farmers carry on the war against the dust and the turf with the waters of the Steinbeck, prodigious quantities of manure, and backbreaking, spirit-crushing, endless labor for man and beast. They coax and cajole the green shoots of rye up out of the ground into the alien sunlight until the Earthborn grass is strong enough to keep them and the town of Joiners out of the dust for another winter.

It's hot. The sun has barely started its decline toward the horizon, and the heat and humidity press down on the small line of people waiting to use the thingmaker at the edge of Joiners. Such wind as there is brings more heat, and the taste of dust and cowshit to the people standing in line. A horse and buggy pass, and the driver watches the line at the thingmaker keenly for a moment, before heading on into the town of Joiners just up the road. A man works in the field with a small group of other men.

Natalie Bishop flies over it all. Arms outstretched, she turns and banks, a faint Mona-Lisa smile on her lips as the ground curves down and away in her mind, and she feels and hears the air rushing past her ears, and her hair dances behind her. Natalie flies. The people she's standing with sweat.

She doesn't fly alone. Two small girls in the line fly with her, following in their own dream of leaving the ground behind. For Natalie, though, there's more. In her mind's eye, she can see her flier, delicate wings shining in the sun, long, slender, graceful body trailing behind her, shiny thingmaker-diamond windows in front of her. She takes it apart again, and notes well the shape of each part. She lines up all the parts just so, and each one whispers mathematics to her – the lift it must generate, the drag it will create, the thrust and direction each part will force the air. The numbers swirl in her mind, and sort themselves back into the single, complex formula that is flight, and their sweetness makes her smile yet again.

The flyer reassembles in her mind, and banks lazily in the sky, low enough that she can see the astonished faces below. She smiles back, lost in her vision while she waits. The little girls run around the line, flapping their arms like wings and giggling.

Ms. Carmichael teaches. Has always taught. It shows. Straight posture, proud, with her hair tied into a neat, efficient bun at the back of her head. Of everyone in the line, she seems the least affected by the heat, and other than Natalie, she is the only woman wearing pants rather than a skirt, and a modestly cut blouse dyed in bright, primary colors. She watches Nat fly, squinting into the sun slightly, then leans to whisper to the woman standing next to her. Bea McHelvy, a younger, heavyset woman, listens to Ms. Carmichael, and then calls her children in.

"Nat's building a flying machine, mama." the older girl says. "I seen it."
"You have seen it." Mrs. McHelvy says.
"Yes mama. I have seen it."
"She's too old to be pretending that anymore. She's nearly full grown."
"Nat can do it, mama. She can drum up anything."

Ms Carmichael shakes her head at the child. "It takes science to build flying machines, Elizabeth. Science we had once, and we lost. Make-believe, drumlins, and funny noises won't get us there."

Natalie turns toward the little girl when she hears that group of sounds. The nasal one that sounds so funny when someone's nose is plugged up. 'NNNN.' The open one whose flat tone shapes the whole progression of sounds, 'AAAA,' and the sharp tongue-against-roof-of-the-mouth cutoff that most people truncate the sequence of sounds with. 'T'. The sounds, in and of themselves, take no shape in her mind, carry no meaning. But she knows from long experience that when she hears those sounds, all jammed together in a quick flutter of lips, tongue, and mouth like that, they refer to her. She turns toward the little girl who said it, and smiles at all that enthusiasm in the little girl's body language.

Ms. Carmichael whispers to Mrs. McHelvy again. The latter looks Nat in the eye only a moment. Natalie can see the tiny flicker of expression cross the other woman's face. Fear. Mrs. McHelvy glances toward her daughters, then back at Natalie, expressions only bare moments, like the flicker of hummingbird wings, but Natalie can see them. She looks away. Mouth sounds can make people happy or unhappy, and much worse. She knows that. They can also bring great joy, happiness, all these things Natalie can see when people make sounds at each other. She can see that they get some meaning out of them, the way she can out of hand signs and body language. She knows that it's practically effortless, that even little babies learn it. But for all her efforts, it's just barnyard noise to her. Like the clucking of so many chickens. She looks away, and reaches down for the shaft of the wheelbarrow. Clenches her fist around it hard.

Natalie's turn at the thingmaker. She closes her eyes again. Lets her mind clear to focus on this one thing. A low humming and whistling comes from her, not quite disconnected from her thoughts as she pictures what she needs, imagining every single detail of the part she wants to make, until she can imagine the individual grains of it, vibrating and humming with their own motion, with the sound and the energy and the feel of thought. She hums to herself, then changes to a whistle. A cylinder about ten tocks in diameter – nearly up to her waist – and roughly the same length. It's hollow. With two parts that turns inside, counterrotating. Angled blades on them to catch the air and force it out the back. This, she imagines as she takes two sets of what look like round shutters off the top of her wheelbarrow and lays them on the ground, then empties her wheelbarrow of all the other thingies and cricket legs and bits of drumlins back into the silver dust of the thingmaker's bowl. She waits while her offering is absorbed, imagining each thing, and how the pattern of it leads inexorably to the pattern of the thing in her mind now.

Tommy McQueen and his brother walk by. The ground seems to snatch at his boots sometimes. He wobbles a bit, trying to make his feet do what he wants, paying too much attention to their rhythm and getting lost in it before he stops, closes his eyes and just wills himself to walk. A knee twinges. Tommy ignores it. 'Growin' too fast.' his father told him. 'Ain' nothin' wrong with you. Get back t'work.'
He glances over to Billy, his brother. Shorter now, sure. But he's strong, and compact, and he has that man-smell of sweat and alcohol that reminds Tommy of their father. Tommy watches Natalie a moment, and he takes a breath to call out her name, the automatic habit ingrained for more than half his life. But he stops, closes his eyes, and doesn't let the sound out.

His older brother doesn't miss the expression."Oh hey Tommy, look. It's your girlfriend. The amazing good-for-nothin' moron."

Tommy rolls his eyes."She is not my girlfriend, Billy. We were friends when I was a kid, that's all. I keep tellin' you that." He looks her way again, though, glancing at the wild hair blowing in the wind, and at the curve of her profile.Then he looks away. "She's not useless, an' she's not a moron either. She c'n drum anything. Anything at all."

"You still are a kid," he says. "An' so what if she can drum anything. Can't talk. Can't read. Can't write. Damn near burned the house down last time she tried to cook, I hear." He gives Nat a quick glance of his own, watching her body move. His lips curl into a slight baring of teeth that doesn't quite become a smile. "'Now … there is one thing she might be good for."

"Don't you look at her like that, Billy."

Billy laughs and elbows his brother. "I'll look where I damn well please. You get married, an' from then on you're just lookin'. Maybe wishin'. Maybe not, but you're lookin'. "

Tommy glares at his brother. "Cut it out. You got Becka. You don' need to be lookin'."

Billy goes uncharacteristically quiet. It only lasts a moment. "Becka's a good woman. You need to find one like her, when you're done foolin' around with your moron."

"Damn it, Billy, I told you, she's not my girlfriend."

"Oh yeah?" Billy's lips curl into a smirk. "You two were foolin' around by VanHutchen's Pond back in May. Dad told me. I heard you were both naked. She look good naked, Tommy? She got nice tits?"

"We were not foolin' around!" Tommy says, hitting his brother harder. "Knock it off. She's gonna hear you."

"So what?" Billy says. "She don't understand. She's a moron, Tommy. Her parents should send her away before she drums up somethin' bad, like that death drumlin that fried that guy in that display over in Wakeen. That's what Dad says. She's useless trouble, that's all."

Tommy punches his brother as hard as he can in the stomach.

Billy's stomach tightens and he grunts at the blow. He bends over, choking. Tommy steps back, not expecting that. "Billy, are you…" and Billy flicks out a hard jab deep into Tommy's own stomach. Tommy folds up, the wind knocked out of him.

Billy grabs Tommy by the wrists and shoves him down, straddles him, leans close until his nose is an inch from Tommy's. "Sucker. That always works on you. Bein' around her makes you soft. You thought you really hurt me? Aww. Did the liddle brudder hurt his old, old big brudder?" Billy laughs. "Is that what you think? You think maybe you're too big for me to whoop you any more? Or maybe that I ain't your big brother no more?" Billy's smirk wars with a snarl, as though the wildness within him has seen an opening in the cage it's spending more and more time in.

Tommy struggles to breathe, writhes against his brother's iron grip like a pig being dragged to the slaughterhouse. Tommy's eyes tear up. When the air finally does come, it arrives in a ragged gasp. He squeezes his eyes shut and grits his teeth. "No."

Billy sighs, takes a long, slow breath. The smirk fades. He takes another breath and lets it out slowly, and nods. "Good." he says, as he lets go of his brother's wrists, and rocks back onto his heels. He stands slowly. Steps back. His hands stay up, as though they're not quite sure what to do. "Good." he says again, and lowers his hands when his brother doesn't swing on him. "'Cause I'm always gonna be your big brother. Don't matter if you're taller than me. Don't matter that I'm married now. Maybe I settled down. But I ain't completely tame. Don' forget it."
Tommy clutches his stomach and breathes. "You'll always be my asshole brother. Can't wait until you move out. Might be a day I don' get beat on then."

Billy spits on the ground, still breathing a little heavily, as though there was more to the fight than there was. He reaches out one hand to his brother. "I never beat on you that much. You're my brother. I'd never beat on you that much. You know it was all in fun."

Tommy's jaw squeezes shut, and flinches as he takes the hand that's offered and slowly pulls himself off the ground. "Yeah." he says. "Sure."

Natalie scarcely notices the trouble behind her, glancing over her shoulder only a moment while Tommy's not looking. She looks away quickly, and faces the thingmaker. The people behind her in line watch curiously. They've always watched since she drummed up the Big Ball of Iron, since her father started making things with the iron and things got good for a while. They always watch, and she used to see the hope in them that she'll drum up something else miraculous, something they can see the point of, like the iron.

Nat whistles and hums, setting up the beat frequency between her voice and her whistle, and then, as the wind begins to blow her hair and her skirts back, her hands begin to tap the pillars, quickly, an alien rhythm, seemingly random, but she drums it out fast as the hoofbeats of a galloping horse, as though this pattern is an old friend, as though the rhythm of it has been part of her all along, as though the drumlin is something she's drummed up a thousand times, weaving the pattern around her sounds, around her thoughts, around the thing she has imagined.

The dust in the thingmaker fountains upward, blowing into her face like warm rain as the wind backs through the bowl. Her soft mouth curves into a dazzling smile as she waits, listening, still humming tunelessly, and very high, to the thingmaker, as though she understands its secret language, its enigmatic truth, and as though it, like herself, has a mind of its own but doesn't know the words.

When the dust settles again, Nat jumps into the thingmaker's bowl to catch her new prize, like it's a living thing that will try to escape. Which is not far from the truth. It seems to dust itself as the parts inside begin to turn. Thingmaker dust blows out the lower end as the rotating parts inside pick up speed, and a faint whoosh comes from it as the air begins to move. But she's wise to it. She gets close right away, and the whole process stops as abruptly as it started. In her mind's eye, it's all to easy to picture what would happen if this drumlin built up to its full thrust. It's easy to picture it launching itself into the sky, uncontrolled, in some random direction, like an arrow shot without fletchings. But drumlins are funny. They try not to hurt people, at least the complex ones like this. As close as she is, it would have to hurt her to get away. And it won't. She clamps down on the upper end quickly with one set of the shutters, and ties them in place with silver drumlin three-tick rope, then steps back, the way her father does after roping a calf to brand and castrate him.

The drumlin's blades spin up again, but they quickly exhaust the air behind the closed shutters, and the thrust dies away again before it really gets started.

Nat watches and smiles. She moves close again, and tips her prize over. Rolls it to the wheelbarrow. Picks it up, loads it in, and ties it down. Then she gets picks up the other set of shutters, places it on top of the wheelbarrow, and moves to the back of the line to drum up another. A few people chuckle. Most just look down and away. Natalie doesn't watch them as she leaves. The disappointment in them hurts too much.

Readings from MileHiCon

2010-11-01T20:00:00.001-07:00

Since I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year, I'm likely to be a little quiet on the blog front. (Which, I know, is not that unusual.) However, it seemed like a good time to put up a taste of the work I have that is in the pipeline. So I'm cutting and pasting a reading I didn't actually deliver at the con so y'all can see what I've been up to. The whole short story will come out in Science Fiction Trails' next edition, in December or January.

When the good folks at Science Fiction Trails asked me to do a story for them, they put relatively few stipulations on it, other than it not be Wild Wild West fanfic. I loved Wild Wild West when it was on reruns, so I figured I understood the genre well enough. I gave it some thought.

I already had an idea I'd been turning over in my head for a webcomic script that didn't pan out, and it took about a minute to re-imagine the idea set in the Old West, albeit with a steampunky flare. It transmuted even more after that.

The result is a short story with a big scoop of steampunk, a dab of High Plains Drifter, a beautiful woman – or two – of questionable morals, cultists, and of course, zombies.

----------

They say the #6 mineshaft punched a hole in the lid over hell, and the Devil has his due for all the gold mined out of the other five shafts. I say the gas explosion started one of those coal seam and gas fires like they have in Pennsylvania, and the flames and coal ash light the town at night, and fill the morning sky with sulfurous smoke from the pit. As may be. The war's over. I'm a law-man now. I deal in facts. The romance of it all is lost on me.

Dawn in Perdition. The start of a new day. My clothes are fresh, my hat is crisp, and I'm well rested, shaved, and sober. My joints feel like a freshly greased machine as I walk down to Cannibal Way, just south of Main Street, past Lucifer's Bar and Restaurant, toward my office in the fine new brick courthouse, finished only this spring. I watch the steam trolley rumble down main street, carrying the morning shift of miners toward the Pit. The miners have been back at work coming on two years now. The gold is flowing, and the town is flush with money. Because there's money, there're gadgets big and small, mostly manufactured back east from technology looted from the Hive. It's been a busy few years, I reflect, as I scratch the lump on the back of my skull. 'Nothing to worry about.' Doc Kimble tells me. 'It's called an occipital bun. Some people have them'. Not him, apparently. But some people.

"Mornin' Marshal." Ed Parker. Editor of the Brimstone Daily. Little guy with an apron and ink stains on his hands. His hair's a little wild, too. He gives me my paper without my asking him to. Pay the man. Skim the headlines. Glance up at the elegant redhead that walks by. "Mrs. Graves." I say, and tip my hat. Frown at the bruising I can see on her hands and the back of her neck as she walks by, giving me only the slightest of nods that her manners require. I'd say something. Question her about the bruising. Any other woman, I would. Not her. They say Elias Graves sold his soul to the devil to get her. Someone bought and paid for someone, that much 's certain. But who owns who in the end? That's another question. The bruising makes me curious. Maybe old Graves is trying to renegotiate.

Ed rolls his eyes and shakes his head. "Don't, Marshal. You know better."

"Course I do. Anyone from that family can come to me if they want some law."
"Wise man." he says. "Speaking of your work, Is it true you brought down the Dope that killed Ned Pervis?"

"Yes sir. Last night."

"Congratulations. What was it like?"

"Like all of them. Looks like an ordinary man on the outside, but strong as an ox and nimble as a cat. Took two twelve gauge slugs in the head to stop him."
Doc Kimble wanders past. I always picture Moses looking like Doc Kimble. Big man. Old, craggy, bald as an egg. Beard. It's easy to imagine him raising his cane and parting the Red Sea. "You two talkin' about that Doppelgänger?"
Nod to Doc. "Yeah. You get a chance to work on him yet?"

"Same old story." he says. "Preserved human corpse, full of brass and steel cables and metal bones, and what we now call a Pons-Fleischmann boiler in its belly. The usual micro-clockwork in its head, for what what little was left of it."
"Was there a stamp on the boiler? It'd be in the back."

Doc Kimble nods. "There was. It was a type 81."

"An eighty-one." I say. Figures. Old model. The model number's the same as the year they were introduced. An eighty-one could be as much as 14 years old now. It doesn't always hold. Could be a 14 year old Node that got isolated from the rest of the Hive when they lost the war, and kept on making the same Doppelgängers it was designed to back then. We still run into those now and then. "Figures he didn' have much to say. Those early wartime models ain't real bright."

"You talked to it?" Doc and Ed ask the same question at the same time.

"A little. He gave me the usual horsefeathers about the God abandoning man and raising up Man's machines as the true keepers of His word. I took it under advisement. Then blew his clockworks out."

"Pity you didn't talk to it further." Doc says. "Mighta known some things 'bout the Hive after all that time. Even if it's just for the history books now."

Ed pipes up, "So you think this is just another straggler? A leftover from the war? Or is this maybe the start of another wave?"

I look at Doc. Then Ed, who asked the question. "Another wave, Ed? Don' you trust your government 'n they say the Hive is dead?"

Ed's smile falters a little. "Well, we keep finding them. You'd think two years after war's end they'd be all gone. Maybe they pulled back at the end of the war. That's my theory."

I think on that a few moments while I light my cigar. "There's a nasty thought." I say, finally. "'You think they mighta pulled a strategic retreat. Go back somewhere secret and regroup. Nasty. You know somethin' the rest of us don't, Ed?"

Ed pales. "I'm just talking, Marshal."

I nod to him. Take a long pull on my cigar and let the smoke out my nose. "You go on talkin'. They fought us hard for twelve years, but at the end they just … petered out. Now, a strategic retreat could just explain it." Pretty sloppy retreat, though, leaving all that technology behind for humanity to pick up and learn. I don't say it aloud though.

Doc Kimble looks at me. "You shared that opinion with the War Department?"
I look at Doc. "What I pass along to the War Department ain't for mortal ears, Doc. But I'll tell you this much. I am thinkin' about it. And I ain't convinced Ed's wrong."

There's an uncomfortable silence. Town folk get that way when they remember I work for the Federal Government. Which isn't very often. It's not something I brag about. Ed breaks the silence after a moment. "For the record, any advice to the citizens if they think they’ve found a Dope?"

"Sure. Run. Swim, if there's any water around. Doppelgängers don't float."

Ed laughs softly. He thinks I'm joking. "You have a good day, Marshal."

"You too, Ed." And with that, the moment is broken, and we all live in the same town, drink at the same bar, keep our eyes open, and try to keep the place from going too entirely crazy together in the peace we all fought so hard for. I watch the two of them walk away, and I watch them go, leastwise until the hair on the back of my neck prickles and I turn to face the woman coming up behind me, quiet as a breath of wind.

"Marshal Blackmore?" she asks, shrinking back.

"That'd be me. What's on your mind, young lady?" I ask her. I look the girl over. She's tiny. Not more than five foot tall. Her skin is perfect, pale, but the folds in her eyelids, the tilt of her eyes, and the broadness of the bridge of her nose tell me a different story. The voice is surprisingly rough. Voice of someone who shouts a lot. Or screams. There's a hardness to her eyes, too, that belongs on an entirely older face. She dresses the fashion, leastwise as much as I'm aware of it, but her dress hugs her just a little too tight, the skirt drapes to show just a little too much of her ankles when she walks. Trying too hard, basically. An adventuress, probably, or an outright public woman.

"I ain't no lady." she says. "But I read in the paper about you an' the Dopes. The Doppelgängers, I mean." She leans closer, and whispers, "You gotta help me. One's after me." She shudders as she says it. "She's after me. They made her out of a friend of mine, and now she wants to do the same to me. I was in the Node. I seen the whole thing."

"Were you now?" I ask her. But I can see it in her. Clenched jaw, eyes that stare, then flit over my shoulder, as though a Dope might be fool enough to step out onto my street at any given moment. She's seen it. I know she has. I spent enough of the War fighting my way into Nodes to know the look. She has the fear. Stretch my own jaw and take a slow breath. "What's your name?"

"Jo" she says. "You believe me, right? They say you're the expert 'bout these things. You don' think I'm just some plain half-Chink whore out to make a buck on a story, right?" She says it in a rush, in one breath, like there's not a moment to spare.

Shake my head. "I ain't one to judge a lady by the work she does, or the shape of her eyes. Not anymore. I think you got a story to tell me."

She shakes her head. "Not here." she whispers. "Someplace private. Someplace they can't get in."

MileHiCon Followup

2010-10-25T16:55:00.001-07:00

MileHiCon 42 has come and gone. We gave out about 240 light sticks that look remarkably like the graphic at the top of my website (at least until I get round to the full overhaul that the website needs), talked with lots of people, bought art, and generally had a good time.

Highlights:
Robert Stikmanz. He's got a new short story out in The Sorcerer's Scrolls Magazine called Death on the Toilet. It's Robert's usual combination of absurd humor, deep character, and intensive story, and highly recommended - I went to the reading.

Ron Sering's story K.O.T.L., which he read at the same reading with Rob Stikmanz, is also very good. It was published in Cemetary Dance Magazine #41, in 2002. The reading was a trifle rushed, probably due to time constraints.

The two panels I was on - Psychology of Fandom and Bionics Now and in the Future were good panels, with a group of excellent panelists. It was interesting in the latter to hear all my panelists agree that the real thing holding back the development of bionics is lack of government and industrial will. My usual bleak view of industry is that if there's a market, someone will make money at it. The idea that nobody's willing to fund blue-sky research on an area that would be a license to print money if it pans out seems awfully short sighted, even for industry and government. But, I suppose, nobody ever went broke underestimating Industry and Government's short-sightedness. As a side note, DARPA, the organization that brought you the Internet, is working on the Luke arm - a fully neuro-controlled upper extremity with full sense feedback within the next ten years. It's named for the hand Luke Skywalker got after his first duel with Darth Vader.

And then came the exquisite corpse reading. When I first saw it in the program, I assumed it was a horror themed reading and prepared my short story, Brass and Steel accordingly. After a day or so, I started to wonder if Exquisite Corpse wasn't a book title, to be read Eye of Argon style, where you go around the group reading as much as you can stomach, then hand it off to the next person.

As it turned out, there is a novel entitled Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, and it is indeed a novel for the strong of stomach. I've been dismissing it all weekend as serial killer slash fic, and there is a great deal of that in the story, though there's somewhat more lurking below the surface. I'm not sure I'll finish it to find out, though.

What an Exquisite Corpse reading is, as it turns out, is a reading where you bring some piece of work or other to the reading. Read a paragraph or so, and the next person jumps in with a paragraph or so from a completely different work, usually with hilarious results. My lovely wife M found me a copy of the novelization of Star Trek 5, and parts of it, when bolted on to Laurel K. Hamilton's rather er... sticky narratives recast the paragraphs I read into whole new meanings. Speaking of slash fic…

So kudos to Rose for some very fun panels, a shout-out to Rob Stikmanz, the panelists of both panels, Donita K. Paul, with whom I shared my reading slot, and to Donato Giancola, the artist guest of honor, for a drawing that I didn't buy but that gave me a whole new vector to take the current novel in. A virtual light-stick (see the top of my website) to everyone who somehow didn't get a real one from me, and I'll be back next year.

-JRS

The Stuff in my Head - Freakies

2010-10-25T16:12:00.001-07:00

In 1974, I'd have been about 6 years old, in Kindergarden, and watching Star Trek in syndication on Channel 2 out of Denver, and that year, the video below hit the airwaves, nestled amongst the saturday morning cartoons. This is the stuff that sticks with me. This is the stuff in my head. For no reason I can fathom save repetition and impressionability, I can still recall the refrain from this exact jingle, on key, and with the correct lyrics and pacing, though I can't remember the actual video (save that I just watched it), and I certainly never saw it in color.

As for Freakies themselves, I recall I convinced my mother to buy me a box at one point, and they were so bad that even a six-year-old's sweet tooth wasn't enough to make me gag them down. I recall it being a stinging disappointment, and I never quite forgave the makers of the cereal for it.

According to the wikipedia article, the cereal itself lasted only two more years, which suggests a lot of people had the same experience.

Now, if only I could get this jingle out of my head. There are far more useful things I'd like to remember so permanently.

-JRS

New Look on the Website

2010-10-20T15:11:00.001-07:00

If you haven't visited the website in the last few hours, there's a new look on it, and some code tweaking in the background. Please let me know what you think, and especially if it doesn't work right for you. I haven't had time to really sanitize it so it's 100% standards compliant, and I know it's very broken for old versions of IE - which I intend to drop support for in the coming overhaul anyway.

-JRS

MileHiCon Schedule

2010-10-20T15:09:00.001-07:00

It's MileHiCon time again, and once again, I'm on the schedule. :) So if you're looking for me, here's where and when to look:

4:00pm Friday - Wind River B - Author reading with Donita K. Paul.

3:00pm Saturday - Wind River B - Psychology of Fandom Panel

11:00pm Saturday - 12th floor - Exquisite Corpse Reading with A. Bugg, T Kroenung, and N. Leyba.

2:00pm Sunday - Wind River A - Bionics now and in the future (I'm moderating this one)

This year, I'll be handing out some promotional thingies, starting at my reading on Friday, and after that there will be a basket of them out somewhere. I'll probably save some to give out at the Exquisite Corpse reading too.

Hope to see y'all there.

-JRS

Donald Duck discovers Glenn Beck's talk radio show

2010-10-03T13:09:00.001-07:00

A great mashup cartoon, which the creators assert is covered under fair use because it's a parody. Given Disney's stance on copyrights, I expect their lawyers will disagree expensively come Monday, so I'd say get it while it's hot.

Ebook Geekery

2010-08-16T19:21:00.001-07:00

I happened to look over my April 5th posting on Ebook toolsets for mac, and on a lark, followed the links again. Turns out Kindlegen has been updated, and also, Amazon has released a kindle previewer for mac and PC.

Full info HERE.

I'm looking at Calibre's underlying command-line tools, and starting to think that it may be time to revisit how I generate the HTML for my ebooks. I do a lot of work cleaning up after the html generator I'm currently using. I need to poke at Calibre generally and see what parts of the front-end of ebook generation it can do for me without sacrificing the control I've come to want. I'm not investing any time in it right now, as I have no new content to put into ebook format(s), but there may come a time rather soon.

-JRS

Comment counting fixed again

2010-08-07T14:24:00.001-07:00

It looks like Blogger has changed their comment feeding system again, this time for the better. There's now an explicit value in the feed, where magpie can get at it, that says how many comments have been made. So I've modified the newsfeeder again to use that new value. If you notice anything other than working comment counts and a performance increase (you really don't want to know how I was counting comments before. Really) please let me know.

-JRS

Brass and Steel: SOLD! :)

2010-08-01T19:01:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was a red-letter day for me. I sold my first short story ever. Brass and Steel is slated to appear in Science Fiction Trails some time in December.

My short summary of it goes like this:

After winning a 12 year war with the Hive; a mysterious organization of techno-zombies called Doppelgängers and their human supporters; the United States has had two years to rebuild and exploit the technology looted from their conquered foes. The result has been a steampunk explosion of Victorian proportions. In a thriving gold town called Perdition, Marshal Dante Blackmore, once a soldier and an investigator for the War Department, tries to keep the peace, and mops up any leftover doppelgängers that turn up. An adventuress named Jo seeks him out with an urgent story to tell...

I must say about the Brass and Steel world, that it was fun to write in, and fun to create. Steampunk by its nature isn't a hard-scifi genre, and I can see why people write the other kind. It's fun. I got to spend my research time on things like 19th century American slang, and things like that. :) I may have to revisit the world. I don't think I've spent all its DNA yet.

JRS

Technorati Tags: Brass and Steel

Disasters, like war, spawn inventions

2010-07-18T23:33:00.001-07:00

In light of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of chemists led by Dr. George John at CCNY, has developed a new, nontoxic, biodegradable, renewable, etc etc oil recovery agent.

More details here: http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/CCNY_Led_Team_Develops_Non_Toxic_Oil_Recovery_Agent_999.html

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. And disasters on this scale put money in the development.

-JRS

The Long Quiet

2010-07-14T20:16:00.001-07:00

I have to be honest. I've been struggling with Einstein's Blues for a while. Trying to find the voice of the novel and more, trying to figure out its plot. It's been frustrating. So I took a break.

For the last month, I've been busy writing. First, I've finished the first draft of a novella set in Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world, tentatively titled On Gossamer Wings. It still needs much editing and refinement, but I'm pleased with the first draft. It's about 1/3 the length of a novel, and while there were times when I had to wrestle with it, it came a lot easier than work on Einstein's Blues was coming.

On Gossamer Wings started out to be a short story - primarily an exercise in third person writing and in writing characters without lengthy introspective inner dialogues, and finally, in harming my main characters, something I've found more difficult to do while working on Einstein's Blues.

Right now I'm working on a short story to submit to an anthology. It's a bit of a departure for me, being more Steampunk-horror-western than cyberpunk/scifi. But I've written steampunk before. The very first novel I ever wrote was called Codename: Mata Hari, and was set in a steampunk universe around 1905. This one's set in the late 1800s in a town I'm calling Perdition, Nevada. Horrors lurk there. It's going to be a very dark story.

So the upshot? I'm doing a lot of work refining my writing, and figuring out where my writing is now, as opposed to 2006, when I started work on Einstein's Blues. There will probably be a heavy rewrite of Blues coming when I'm done with these two projects.

As far as publication of these two pieces, nothing's definite on either one. Jeff and I are talking about rolling On Gossamer Wings and his forthcoming Drumlin novella called Drumlin Circus together in something like an old Ace Double, which would be a ton of fun. Jeff's a great writer, and it would be an honor to share the book with him as much as it has been to use his world.

The other is for an anthology I was invited to submit work for. I've never done this before, so I have no idea whatever if they'll like the story I'm writing, so it's all very much up in the air.

Even if neither piece ever sees the light of day the work on my writing has been worth every second. I'll probably post more about them once my editing passes are done on both. I'm always loathe to say "it's a story about foo" only to discover that "bar" turns out to be more important as I edit.

I'll keep y'all posted.

-JRS

... until there are no more years left

2010-06-10T22:33:00.001-07:00

XKCD again. Life is a balance between this moment and the hopes and dreams of the next. Somehow, we have to do both.

-JRS

Cold Hands

2010-06-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

Copperwood Press has just released Jeff Duntemann's second anthology of short stories called Cold Hands and Other Stories on Lulu. Where his first anthology, Souls in Silicon, which I reviewed on GoodReads, deals with Jeff's AI fiction, Cold Hands and Other Stories collects what he describes as "everything else" - Spaceflight, aliens, religion, calculus, witchcraft, and Steam Locomotives. Particularly steam locomotives cobbled together from parts made by alien maker machines that were intended to be something else entirely.

To expand a little on that last bit, there are two stories set in Jeff's Drumlin world. I've read both the Drumlin stories included in this book (though Drumlin Wheel may well have been an earlier edit than the final one in the book). The Drumlin world is a planet nobody actually intended to colonize. Nobody even knew it existed, for that matter. Through a severe malfunction of their starship, however, a group of colonists did wind up marooned there, and they found it passing strange. Most notably, besides being extremely similar to Pleistocene era Earth, there are these alien artifacts called thingmakers that will make objects if you tap patterns into their drums…

It's an interesting world, and the more I delve into it (to say nothing of pestering the hell out of Jeff with questions and extrapolations on it) the more it's intriguing me. More on that later. Meantime, I've already ordered my copy of Cold Hands and Other Stories. and I have no qualms about recommending it on the strength of the two stories I've read, and of his other work. Jeff can Write. I'll post a review when the book gets here.

-JRS

Glucose Fuel Cells

2010-05-24T11:29:00.001-07:00

One of the big problems science fiction (to say nothing of actual medical science) has had a problem with is how do you power all these cool cybernetic gismos you, the author, want to put in someone's body. Going back to the Six Million Dollar Man (and Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels upon which the series was based), the most common power source seems to be nuclear, robably Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. They certainly have the longevity for the job, with endurances measured in decades. Indeed, these devices were used in pacemakers in years past, and according to the Wikipedia article, some ninety of these are still in service.

Realistically, though, equipping j random cyborg with plutonium pellets seems problematic on a number of levels.

This is a problem I've wrestled with before, and my solution, as it appeared in a brief mention in Irreconcilable Differences was the glucose fuel cell. I reasoned, positing it, that since fuel cells can extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels such as alcohol or gasoline, it seemed reasonable they could extract it from carbohydrates like glucose, which the body conveniently supplies from food energy. As long as one didn't get carried away with them and exceed the fuel supply the body could deliver, it seemed like a nice solution.

Using these gadgets gave my cyborgs a different feel from the brute force cybernetics of yesteryear. It meant that they were predominantly meat with hormonal implants and small, low power cybernetics.

It also appears to be practical. Via Singularity Hub, comes the news that scientists in France have not only built such a thing, but implanted them in rats and had them function. The scientific paper is here.

Interestingly, the paper also discusses using urea as one of the fuels, though not with this particular fuel cell. If practical, such a fuel cell would be even better, as it would use metabolic waste as its fuel. This, by contrast, had not occurred to me, and it's a great addition. The body can afford to be far more generous with its waste products than its primary fuel chemistry.

The future just keeps arriving, doesn't it? :)

-JRS

Technorati Tags: Irreconcilable Differences, technology

Heh

2010-05-18T22:21:00.001-07:00

XKCD - Looking Glass felt a lot like this during the writing process. :)

-JRS

A moment of silence for Frank Frazetta

2010-05-11T19:03:00.001-07:00

A moment of silence for Frank Frazetta, master of the chain mail bikini, illustrator of fantasy book covers, comic books, and heavy metal albums. He was 82.

I first encountered his art work in an art book belonging to my mother, and in posters she purchased, laminated, and used in the art classes she taught to grade schoolers.

-JRS

Ebook toolsets for mac

2010-04-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

Spent a lot of time today tweaking my ebook tools.

First, there's a new version of epubcheck here. It caught some minor errors in my most recent epub books - Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences, which appear to make some small difference rendering my HTML/CSS in epubs.

Second, also for the epub world, Adobe Digital Editions seems to have a less flakey version out for mac, although their flash installer fails, as one might expect. You can download the standalone installer here.

Second-and-a-Half, in a nice also-ran, is the Barnes and Noble eReader. It does a tolerable job of rendering ePubs, though it still ignores more of my CSS than Adobe's offering. The user interface is /much/ nicer, though a bit idiosyncratic, than Digital Editions. The thing does crash fairly reliably if you feed it two different versions of the same book, so it's problematic for ebook testing in my case. It's available here.

Third, and long, long overdue, Amazon has released a version of the product formerly known as mobigen now known as Kindlegen that is native for mac. If you didn't know, I've been running mobigen for PC in Wine's occasionally flakey emulation since I got my kindle. Now I have a native executable that runs in MacOS X. Much faster, much less flakey, and I don't have to wait for x-windows to start up. Otherwise it appears more or less the same. You can get Kindlegen here.

Fourth, also courtesy of Amazon, OS X finally has a decent mobipocket reader that runs natively in the form of Kindle for Mac. Another tool I've had to use in Emulation, and the only reason I have been maintaining a Windows 7 beta installation in Parallells, so I could verify that my mobipocket files actually worked on anything besides an actual Kindle, which also have. You can get Kindle for Mac here.

I'm not sure what to make of the spate of new tools for Mac. It's easy to say B&N and Amazon are afraid their book readers will be swept away by iPad, so rather than continue to disenfranchise Mac users (in Amazon's case) they finally decided to support Mac. I don't actually know, and I don't care that much. I have a Kindle and I use it when I travel. I have an iPod touch that I use constantly. Both can read my kindle library, as can my desktop. Theoretically (though I haven't tried it on Kindle) both can read free epub books as well. From the standpoint of /making/ ebooks on my desktop, having these new tools is a godsend. Oh, and one other thing. They're all free (as in beer).

-JRS

Apple, iPad, and the education market

2010-03-09T22:16:00.001-08:00

One thing I think all the pundits miss when they either praise or condemn the forthcoming iPad is who its primary market is.

Consider. Apple has sold and continues to sell a huge number of laptops to the education market. I would not be surprised to discover that, in fact, this market is the one that continues to demand the white plastic shelled MacBook, which Apple has reduced to a single model at the low end of its laptop products.

Consider that one of the biggest costs of these programs is supporting the laptops. Laptops are fragile. Hinges break. Hard drives don't like large jolts. Power supplies get lost. Software gets deleted. The list goes on and on.

Now imagine you're an educator and Apple comes to you with a machine that is more robust, has fewer moving parts, lives in a walled garden of software that can be restricted further by the teachers.

IPad would be ideally suited as a textbook replacement. Unlike other ebook readers (cough kindle) it can display in color, and it can display fixed pages in PDF. Textbooks are a media consumption system, and that is what the iPad is designed for.

I suspect you will see Apple pushing them out to schools, and I would not be surprised if the white macbook, last scion of the old ibook that the schools loved so much, shuffles off in the next major product update.

Speculating wildly here. :)
-JRS

Technorati Tags: technology

Ebook Rebuilds again

2010-03-08T19:24:00.001-08:00

The rebuilt version of Irreconcilable Differences in Mobipocket is up.

JRS

Ebook Rebuilds

2010-03-07T00:43:00.001-08:00

Just a quick note. I've rebuilt both ebook versions of /Looking Glass/ and the epub version of /Irreconcilable Differences/ so that ebook software with limited memory won't gag on them anymore. I'll get the new version of /Irreconcilable Differences/ in mobipocket out probably on Monday.

-JRS

Wind Farming for Farmers is Profitable

2010-01-26T10:29:00.000-08:00

Turns out I was right about farmers and wind farming. But good grief, if my calculations at the time showed how little a farmer makes per acre growing food and grain, I missed it.

-JRS

A Little Music Theory, Maestro...

2010-01-20T18:17:00.001-08:00

There comes a time, when you're writing about a professional musician and how she thinks about music, that you'd better have some music theory under your belt. This has proven to be a problem. I play guitar (occasionally), but everything I know on it I learned by rote, with none of the underlying theory. I don't read music, either. It's all strictly by ear.

This makes for a frustrating day, when you're trying to put words in the mind of someone with advanced degrees in music.

So in desperation, I was combing the web for some theory, and decided to start with pentatonic scales, since they seem to come up a lot, and are said to be the foundation of blues and rock music. A little digging turned up videos from justinguitar.com, and damned if he doesn't walk you through your minor pentatonic scales, slowly and carefully, in each of five positions, in one video. Free (donations requested). You'd better believe I'm donating. His site is a wealth of guitar lessons, all the stuff I never learned because I learned guitar by ear (my ear is pretty good) and by rote, the same way my father played.

Having learned some pentatonics, it dawned on me that I've been /playing/ those in one lick I picked up a long time ago described at the time as "stolen from the fingers of Elvis." Elvis undoubtedly knew his pentatonics, either by rote or as a theory, and now I understand them as well. Twenty years I've been playing that lick and I never understood what it /was/.

Writing novels is like that. You use little tidbits of knowledge you gathered up over the years, and then wind up learning entirely new subjects just to apply them in the story. Writing Irreconcilable Differences, I learned more than I ever wanted to about tactical nuclear weapons, windmills, babbitt bearings, and how the auto industry was evolving at that point. Einstein's Blues is proving no different. These searches seem less likely to bring me to the attention of the FBI, though. :)

-JRS

Technorati Tags: Einstein's Blues

Induction Rigs, Kind of.

2010-01-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

Well, here it is 2010, and if you crunched the math while reading /Looking Glass/, you'll realize that while there's all kinds of promising technology towards direct neural interfaces, unlike my predictions in /Looking Glass/, the first practical ones aren't out yet, and things aren't looking too promising for them by the end of the year. Oh well, the risks of writing near term science fiction, I suppose. :)

Exceptthis, which I stumbled across on Make: Online. The EPOC Headset claims to be able to translate thought patterns (and presumably surface muscle activity) from the head into keystrokes for your computer. It also has a gyroscope to monitor head position and whatnot. I suspect it's doing a lot with physical cues as well as neurological interfacing, and certainly it's not writing back to the wearer's brain. Yet. But. It's a step.

Just what I need. More expensive toy lust. :) At least the CupCake CNC machine is mac compatible.

-JRS

Google Analytics

2009-12-23T19:20:00.001-08:00

Just a quick update. I've hooked Google Analytics up on jamesrstrickland.com on all the main pages. If you see any bugs, slowdowns, or weirdness, let me know.

Also, I have not and will not hook up Addsense, so if you see ads on my website for anything that doesn't seem like one of my novels, please yell.

-JRS

Assuming a technological advantage: FAIL

2009-12-17T11:02:00.001-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8419147.stm

I've been predicting for some time that remotely operated drones won't be the wave of the future, because they can be co-opted. In this case, apparently, it's the result of stupidity rather than a technological defeat. But there will come a time when digital command and control are a liability. One hopes the military planners in the civilized world have planned for this. Given the above, I have my doubts.

[edit: link activated.]
-JRS

Still lurking about

2009-12-02T17:31:00.001-08:00

It's been a while since I've posted here.
I have a project I'm working on to try and export the playlists I listen to into some useful fashion onto this blog. So far, it's been unsuccessful. Itunes has a lot of useful information locked up in it, but it's irritatingly tight-fisted with letting anything else see that information.

Meantime, I gave up on National Novel Writing month this year. It was giving me too much stress and I was ten thousand words behind by the time I gave up. I'll try again next year.

I have been plugging along on /Einstein's Blues/ what was originally my 2006 Nano novel, in hopes of finishing it ready to sell some time this spring. I gave a short reading from it at Mile Hi Con, which was remarkably well received, which was a great boost.

Working on Chapter 4 today, and came up with this paragraph, brand new today, that gives you a bit of the tone of the novel:

Lander, like most colonial cities, grew like tree rings around the point where the colonists' boots first touched the ground. The first years after arrival at a new planet are tough, and the city developed in a thin, tenuous ring clinging to the brand new, prefabricated lowport end of the cable that led to the ship above. Over time, as more ships arrived with more people and materials, Lander grew around that first ring, more in good years, less in bad years, expanding into those first generation agricultural fields, into the Mordor plain, as D pointed out, and up over the Spender hills where the dragons once roamed. Inevitably, though, the growth slowed down. The colony ships were all gone, save the one they cannibalized as the highport on the orbital wire. Interstellar commerce hadn't really picked up. LowTown, as first few rings around the lowport became known, became a morass of run-down, empty warehouses, unlicensed brothels, titty bars, rough clubs, cheaper flop houses. Lander's very own honest-to-god nasty shithole of a slum. Naturally, this attracted musicians.

-JRS

A review in Danish

2009-10-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

/Looking Glass/ got a nice review today. That always makes my day. To actually read this review, though, I had to work a bit, since as you can see, it's not in English. My first thought, from the spelling, was German, but this didn't translate more than every fifth or sixth word. Then I caught the occasional slashed o character and realized I was looking at a Scandinavian language. Translating from Norwegian gave me bits and pieces, but a lot of the vocabulary wasn't being translated. When I studied Norwegian in college, one of the things I was told is that Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are close relatives, and that Danes can read Norwegian, but it sounds different and Swedes can understand it, but it's written differently. Given that nearly twenty year old tidbit, I tried Danish, and got a pretty darn good translation. Why does Google Translate do so well with Scandinavian languages? Well, Modern English inherited its sentence structure from Scandinavian languages, so presumably all the translation software has to do is translate the words themselves, for which it does not have to understand the meaning. Surprisingly effective.

Getting back to the review, I sometimes wonder how a given reader stumbles across my work, but seldom moreso than today. Whoever you are, mange tak. :)

Click here for the translated version.

-JRS

Followup to "It'd Be Faster by Carrier Pigeon

2009-10-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

Turns out there's an RFC spec, RFC 1149 for A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, and a second, RFC 2549 which adds Quality of Service info.

According to the Wikipedia article on the matter, both specs were April fools jokes, 9 years apart, and IPoAC was actually implemented on one occasion by the Bergin Linux user group in late April of 2001 for a brief test of 9 packets. The resulting ping data is included in the wikipedia article.

So the joke, it would seem, is on me. :)

-JRS

My Schedule for Mile Hi Con 41

2009-10-20T13:28:00.001-07:00

My Schedule for Mile Hi Con 41

So the schedule seems to be nailed down, and I have to say I'm in some awesome panels. Only two, but two I can really sink my teeth into. I'm also thrilled to be in the Mile Hi Con Meet Munch and Mingle/Autograph Alley. I will be keeping company with a /lot/ of really talented people at that. I also have a reading, at which I'll be reading from /Irreconcilable Differences/ and, time permitting, possibly a teaser from /Einstein's Blues/, which I'm working on now. Even my wife hasn't seen anything from Einstein's Blues yet. :)

So, the schedule as of now is:

Friday, Oct. 24, 3:00pm Grand Mesa B-C Stage: Sci-Fi High Finance.
Friday, Oct. 24, 8:00pm - 9:00pm Atrium: MileHiCon Meet, Munch, and Mingle/Autograph Alley

Saturday: nothing scheduled.

Sunday, October 25, Noon Mesa Verde C: Reading with CT Adams
Sunday, October 25, 1:00PM Wind River B: Being Human

Looking forward to being at the con. MHC is always a fun time.

-JRS

Mile Hi Con

2009-10-14T13:15:00.001-07:00

Mile Hi Con 41 is coming - October 23d to the 25th. My wife and I will be there. I am on the schedule for several interesting panels, as well as a reading and time in autograph alley. But please don't be shy. If you run into me in the hallway and have something by me you want signed, please by all means let me know. This kind of thing makes my day.

Mile Hi Con is a great con. The lines are short, the content is good, the people are friendly, the art show first class, and then there's the critter crunch - a robot combat thing that predates all the robot wars games on tv in the 90s. Good fun, and at only 42 bucks a head at the door for the whole weekend,

Click here for their website.

-JRS

Nice double review

2009-09-27T21:53:00.001-07:00

Some time ago, fellow author Robert Stikmanz and I began corresponding, shortly before the release of his most recent novel, Sleeper Awakes. And so, while it was not entirely a surprise when he wrote this really nice double review of both my novels, it's nonetheless an awesome review, and I'm very grateful. You may expect a review of Sleeper Awakes in the reviews section very soon, but the short short version is, it's good, it's funny, it's like a private little drug trip with no munchies afterwards. Highly recommended.

JRS.

Islands of Stability in the Periodic Table

2009-09-24T17:18:00.001-07:00

Filed under "Mike would have loved this." Way back, way /way/ back, talking high school or so, friend Mike first mentioned research he'd read about talking about islands of stability - super-heavy elements that, unlike most elements heavier than plutonium, were stable for more than a few fractions of a second.

Apparently researchers at Lawrence Berkeley are getting closer. They've apparently made element 114, which hung around for a tenth of a second.

Mike had a lot of ideas about the properties of elements from the island of stability, but I sha'ant put his high-school era science to the test posthumously, and I don't recall them clearly anyway. It's possible he was making them up for gaming purposes anyway.

Anyway, the full article is here, linked from Portal to the Universe

-JRS

It'd be faster by carrier pigeon....

2009-09-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

There's an old saw in the networking industry that goes something like, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a VW Microbus loaded with magtape doing 60 down the highway." Apparently an IT firm in South Africa was frustrated with DSL speeds (if my calculations are correct, they're getting about 177kbps - which /is/ pretty pokey, even by Qwest standards - see my livejournal entry of Feb. 22, 2005). Apparently someone in the organization was heard to say "it'd be faster if we sent it by carrier pigeon." Thus, a publicity stunt was born.. Now, doing the math, and using decimal approximations for the binary numbers (because it's easier), we can work out the bandwidth of that carrier pigeon. With a four-gig packet (since the pigeon handles all routing and addressing information itself), we get a bandwidth over the 60 miles traveled of about 444kbps. Pigeon for the win. No information was given on whether the two hours included the time to put the data on the flash stick and to get it off. Let's assume it did.

However, let's push this a bit further. We can increase the packet size dramatically without increasing time to travel. Ain't physical media great? Let's take it to 128gB, which are the largest flash sticks I've seen. Let's assume we're using cheap sticks, too, and are only getting 120mb/sec transfer rates on and off the stick. So. Load the stick with 128gB of data. Load time, about 2.5 hours. Transit time, 2 hours, same as in the test. Pigeon returns with an empty stick or no stick, thus ACKing transmission of the packet in another two hours. Meantime, the packet is unloaded from the flash stick, taking another 2.5 hours. Total time for the packet: 7 hours. Total bandwidth, about 4.06mb/s. With 6.5 hour latencies (remember, the pigeon headed back while the stick was being unloaded). If you're not in a hurry but have large amounts of data to move, the bandwidth becomes the most significant number. Not so different from using a satellite. Assuming your satellite is orbiting Pluto. (about 5 light-hours away).

So given that we've established a packet header system that handles routing and addressing and is also the transport layer (the pigeon), and a quite-large packet size (128gB) and an ACK system (the pigeon again) we need only add a sequence number. Let's stick an RFID chip in the pigeon. They're light, and if we put one in that's reprogrammable we can change the number for each flight. Sending a packet would then amount to: set the sequence number on the pigeon. Load the flash key. Strap the flash key to the pigeon's leg. Send the pigeon on its way. On the receiving end, catch the pigeon. Read the sequence number from its RFID. Unload the flash key. We now have all the pieces we need to run IP, and thus TCP over this new hardware layer. I propose we should call this new hardware protocol CPPTP - Carrier Pigeon Point to Point protocol.

If I ever write Steampunk again, you may expect to see CPPTP /somewhere/. :)

-JRS

*edited - I forgot to factor the load time in on the latency calculation*

David Byrne on Kindle DX

2009-08-29T11:49:00.001-07:00

Interesting review by David Byrne (frontman for the Talking Heads) of the Kindle DX. Especially interesting to see Byrne's perspective, since he's been part of the music industry through their whole DRM era.

I've been pretty busy of late, working on the new novel, visiting my mother over my birthday, having the kitchen counters redone, and we have adopted a kitten. Pictures soon. :)

-JRS

Bamboo Bicycles and natural meta-resources

2009-07-29T14:44:00.000-07:00

In my previous posting about metar-esources, I focused exclusively on manufactured goods. But taken another way, humans have been meta-resource users longer than we've been human - as long as we've been tool-using primates. Wood could, for example, be considered a meta-resource, since the tree has gone to the trouble of manufacturing a rigid, easily worked cellulose structure.

Okay, it's a stretch.

It's still interesting to see natural products taking their places beside the most modern. In the case of Bamboosero they're making bike frames out of bamboo, hemp, and (if I understand correctly) polyester resin. Apparently they compare favorably to carbon fiber. Consider that a moment. Bamboo, a fast growing grass (three years from seedling to harvest for bike frames), when heat treated and wrapped in hemp, a crop plant grown for its long, strong fibers for thousands of years (the discovery of and breeding for THC content is comparatively recent), and soaked in polyester resin stacks up to polyester resin soaked /carbon fiber/. Apparently the bike frames are a little more flexible than their carbon fiber counterparts, but this helps them absorb shock better. It boggles the mind, and makes one wonder how many other good materials for space-age material-science have been ignored because humans didn't invent them.

And yes, I understand the role the resin is playing here. Let us not underestimate it or its man-made nature. But I start to wonder if hybrid materials (to coin a phrase) - man-made with natural might not be a strong force as we look into the future.

The constraints are, probably, a lack of engineering data and engineering consistency with natural products. Consider that in the last 20 years or so, as the housing industry has moved to building with lumber exclusively from farmed, fast-growing trees, that the engineering specs on a 2x4 are rather different from 2x4s sawn from old growth pine forests. That kind of thing has to drive engineers (and architects) insane. I wonder if that, as much as techno-snobbery, is behind the lack of utilization of these natural materials, including the gradual replacement of wood with manufactured timbers in homes.

(As an aside: my current house has natural-timber floors. They /give/ a lot more than the old house's manufactured timbers did, and especially under the front loading washer, this is not a positive thing.)

Changing venues to a craftsman-driven, boutique technology realm, whether at the high end in industrialized nations, or the lower end in emerging nations, changes the need for material consistency. Instead of an engineer trying to model what the material will do mathematically, a craftsman knows the material and how it will react in what he/she is making, and presumably how to evaluate the stock. Watch Norm Abram pick out wood for his projects some time, if you want to see that practice at work. (Okay, Norm has degrees in mechanical engineering and business admin, so he might be doing the engineering in his head. But still.)

Meta-materials, naturally occurring or otherwise, because of their variations, might not lend themselves to mass production, but for cottage and craft industries, it's a whole different ballgame.

-JRS

Amazon/1984, Endgame - Besos Apologizes

2009-07-23T22:26:00.000-07:00

Okay.. I've never been a Jeff Bezos fan. Until now. This, sports fans, is a CEO owning up to his company's mistakes. Shrewd move? You bet. The blunt, unambiguous apology and admission of wrongdoing is the kind of thing that sets bloggers' hearts a-twitter. So to speak. I am astonished. Well done, Mr. Bezos.

-JRS

Meta-resources and the future

2009-07-23T09:30:00.001-07:00

(As promised some time ago, here's my big post from my personal blog on meta-resources and why they matter. I've updated it a bit from that original post, and as always, corrected egregious typos. This was originally written in 2006, and IMHO the situation has only accelerated.)

For some time now, I've been subscribing to quite a number of mailing lists and blogs that I refer to as ingenuity sites, such as Make: and Craft:, evilmadscientists, AfriGadget, and, of course, reading sites about home made machine tools, machine tools made from old car parts, home made scanning tunneling microscopes, micro CNC equipment and so on. A body'd think I don't have enough to do. :)

But seriously, I've been noticing some interesting commonalities among all these sites.

First, there seems to be a gradual democratization of the ability to manufacture advanced technology. People do surface mount technology in their basement, using a toaster oven for the solder flow machine. I've seen a dozen different ways to make circuit boards, but most of them start from laserprints. One recipe etches the boards in salt water. You can get pretty reasonable circuit design and layout software for free online. A friend of mine tells me that certain types of off-the-shelf Epson inkjet printers with certain off the shelf ink packs, special software, and lots of tinkering, can print crude (and not especially reliable) semiconductor integrated circuits on plain paper. Also interesting (to me, at least) is the book "Instruments of Amplification" wherein the author spells out how to make your own vacuum tubes.

On the mechanical side of things, there are Gingery's books on how to make a full (manual) machine shop from scrap aluminum, as mentioned in the link above. Backyard metal foundries seem to be far more common than one might expect, and the technology level is rising sharply for these hobbyists. Some of them are building computer controlled mills out of what amounts to the guts of a couple old printers and a dremel tool, and using them for some fairly precise, reproducible work. You can now buy such systems as kits, or turn-key for slightly less than a Laserjet 4 laser printer cost in 1996. (And you'd pay for it in dollars that aren't worth as much, too.) Hell, even American Chopper shows, without really meaning to - they make it to be a soap opera, basically - that a small(er) business can buy these sophisticated tools, guys with junior college educations can learn to use them, and produce amazing, professional things. (Okay, I'm leaving that paragraph in, because that's what I wrote in 2006. Since then, however, I've become a lot less of a four-year-college snob. President Obama's focus on junior colleges really put it in perspective for me. I think he's right.)

If I were a large manufacturing corporation, I'd be worried by this. This democratization of sophisticated technology seems like it's going to encourage cottage industry (again, like Orange County Choppers, from American Chopper). Economies of scale will still be in the favor of the big corporations, but where the quality of the product really matters, boutique industry has an advantage. Cottage industry is also not saddled with an ossified bureaucracy, so they can react to markets faster. (Since I originally wrote this in 2006, the best example of ossified bureaucracy stifling product engineering - the United States auto industry - has essentially collapsed. So who knows, this particular problem may be reaching the end of its road.)

Cottage industry also has the advantage of working where there isn't the capital to establish large corporations, in this case the poorest countries in the world.

As a side note, those poorest countries of the world, as cottage industry takes off, have the option of picking and choosing what technologies from the developed world they really want, and there are some interesting choices they can make, since they're starting from closer to scratch than we in the developed world can.

Anyway. The second point that has risen to me out of all this reading is the rise of meta-resources. AfriGadget, MultiMachine, and quite a few others from time to time, frequently use car parts as resources. For the Multimachine folks, engine blocks are a readily available (even in the underdeveloped parts of the world) source of precisely machined, flat, rigid structures, which are absolutely fundamental to building precision tools. Car alternators find themselves repurposed as wind generators fairly regularly. Tires, wheels, shafts, and wheel bearings get remade into carts, engines turn generators and pumps, and there are whole cottage industries built around taking the parts of a bunch of old cars and making a running car out of them.

It's not limited to cars, either. Another site had information on street vendors in India who will fix your cell phone, usually by cannibalizing parts from other phones of the same model. These electronics we in the developed world consider a menace in landfills (all that lead, etc), are repairable as your cost of labor goes down, despite being manufactured with no thought to repairability (or no thought *for* repairability, at least) being made.

Heck, even in the United States, the superabundance of shipping containers that pile up at our port cities are starting to be sold and repurposed as modules to build homes out of. Apparently they work quite well for this.

This rise of meta-resources is fascinating to me. We're always taught to think of resources as *natural* resources, that is, the raw materials we scrape out of the planet. But the things we make out of those raw materials are, themselves, resources, and not just in the sense of recycling them back into the raw materials (IE melting them down) but in their finished states, they can be reused and remade, and, in fact, that meta-resource may be more useful due to some factor of its original manufacture than the raw material. The original use of the resource added value to it which can, itself, be reused.

Why does all this matter? Well, it matters to me, because I write science fiction, and looking into the future and guessing what it might be like is part of my job. It's also interesting in that you can see how the world is changing. People in underdeveloped countries are aware of what they don't have, and they are learning the skills to make what they want, and they are leaping past whole decades of technology to pick and choose from the long chain of technology we in the developed world had to go through step by step, and they're making use of the products they've /already/ bought from the developed world to do it. In some cases, they're deliberately buying the West's garbage /as/ a resource. The ship-breaking yards in Bangladesh are a fine example. (Yes, I'm aware of the appalling environmental and human cost of that operation, but at the same time I respect their ingenuity and meta-resource use. The ship-breaking yards produce 80% of Bangladesh's steel. If Bangladesh had iron ore to mine, does anyone really believe the mining and smelting operations would be any better? And were they in 19th century England and America?)

Finally, it's reassuring to know that, not only is human ingenuity not dead, it is not limited to corporate environments, to engineers and specialists, and so forth. It's reassuring to know that, despite how complex modern technologies have become, individual contribution can, and I think will, make a difference. Perhaps make THE difference.

More on Amazon and 1984

2009-07-18T10:52:00.001-07:00

Amazon sent an email to the New York Times about the whole mess with 1984 and Animal Farm that explained things a bit. Apparently I'm right, that someone published versions of the books who didn't have rights to them, and when the rights holder informed them, they felt they could legitimately go take them back from the customers and give a refund.

Apparently the negative press has been enough to get their attention, as the same email says, as quoted by Brad Stone of the New York Times, "We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances[...]".

In the long run, that might be enough. I rather hope not. I'd love to see the whole DRM and 'business controlling what you own' thing go up in flames, but I think the Kindle is too small a market to generate the kind of political will to change it.

In any case, while I'm still a little uneasy about them having /any/ control of what I've purchased and downloaded already, and while I detest their DRM for a variety of reasons, hopefully they've learned something important here, and really won't do it again. That'll have to be enough for now.

-JRS

Amazon goes 1984 on 1984

2009-07-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

DON'T BUY A KINDLE UNTIL AMAZON RECOGNIZES THAT WHEN WE BUY A BOOK IT'S OURS.

An interesting thing happened with some Kindle store versions of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. They disappeared. There's a lot of speculation whether the books were illegally pirated, or exactly what the situation is, and it's muddied by the fact that other editions of the books are still for sale in the Kindle store. They may, in fact, have had perfectly legitimate reasons for pulling that edition from the store. Amazon, of course, said nothing. They emailed owners that there were 'problems with the book(s).' That's all they said.

Then Amazon reached out and deleted the books from everyone's Kindle, with a full refund.

So to anyone who's listening, DON'T BUY A KINDLE OR KINDLE BOOKS UNTIL AMAZON RECOGNIZES THAT WHEN WE BUY A BOOK IT'S OURS. They don't have to archive it forever if it's not legit. They don't have to keep selling it. The terms of service on the Kindle publishing system already clearly state that those of us who put material up for the Kindle indemnify Amazon for any license infringements. That's all fine. But taking books back like this is NOT fine. As long as this mechanism exists, the potential for its misuse exists, and if e-books are ever to take their place beside real books as a source of literature and ideas, then we must be able to trust that when a book is bought, it stays bought. Revised editions can be sent, provided the original is not deleted. But touching the library in my kindle is the same as touching the library in my house, and I will object strenuously. And if they want to kick my blog off their site for objecting strenuously into their RSS feed, so be it.

-JRS

Refurbed Kindles for $199

2009-07-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

Looking for a Kindle? Want it cheap? If you don't mind getting the original Kindle (the same one I have and like), Amazon is selling refurbished ones.

These have some features the newer kindles lack. Most notable is the SD card slot. I've yet to fill my Kindle's relatively small wired memory, but the knowledge that I can use the SD card, and when it's full switch to another (theoretically - haven't tried this) seems like a positive thing. The downsides to the original Kindle are that the battery door comes off easily, and the leather folder it comes with /does not fit/.

(Me, in February of 2008) The best way to fix the otherwise worthless cover that comes with your Kindle seems to be to cut out the straps that it comes with to hold the Kindle in place, and to put self-stick velcro inside and on the Kindle itself. Once that's done, it's a pretty reasonable cover. It's just that the mounting straps inside don't actually *fit* the Kindle.

I would add to this that the velcro does not need to be the super-strong industrial stuff I use in combat robots. That tends to rip the battery door off the back of the Kindle. Oops. :)

-JRS

Forget Health Insurance. Get a support contract

2009-07-07T10:30:00.001-07:00

One thing I've posited right along in the LookingGlass world is the end of healthcare as it's done today in the United States. (Today being July 7, 2009 - Congress is in session so there's some chance we might see meaningful healthcare reform here. Maybe. If the special interests don't wreck it.) I assert that it will be done more like support contracts for computers, in the fine old, late lamented tradition of DecSupport - Digital Equipment Corporation's support organization for their computer systems. This really never came out in either of the books that are published that much, although it's brushed past in Irreconcilable Differences when Kari mentions not having a support contract.

So I'm not sure if I'm pleased or appalled to discover that, in fact, support contracts for humans are starting to happen. Apparently for an /extremely/ reasonable fee, these doctors can provide unlimited primary care and forgo the massive expense, slow payment, and other high-bullshit-factor activities involved with insurance altogether. Or at least they can get venture capital on the idea. I suppose we'll see if it catches on.

-JRS

/Virtuality /TV show - recommended

2009-07-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

On the strength of regular commenter John Foberg's recommendation, I spent the two hours watching Virtuality, the pilot for an (apparently) failed TV show that Fox tv was going to do.

Virtuality is the story of twelve men and women on the world's first interstellar flight. They've signed on for ten years, and as the pilot begins, they're approaching their go/no-go decision - do they slingshot around Neptune and fire main drive - a system derived from Project Orion, and go on their ten year mission, or do they abort and go back to Earth? They are also the stars of /the/ most popular reality tv series on tv, with two billion viewers, so mission control may not always be on their side so much as on the side of what makes good tv.

I'm still digesting it, but I have to say there are some things that stand out in my mind. First, kudos to Fox for having the stones to, yanno, take the chance on something other than reality tv. Second, razzies to Fox for not having the stones to actually make the series.

First thing. /Virtuality/ was supposed to be a tv show pilot. So let's look at it the way it was meant to be seen, instead of as a tv movie.

I've read other reviews of the tv series calling it formulaic. There's some truth to that. As the title might suggest, the virtual reality system on board - used for maintaining skills, recreation, and occasionally as a user interface for complex ship systems - is a fundamental plot device to the story, and probably would have been throughout the series. The problem with this is that it's all been done before, albeit badly, by the holodeck-centric episodes of /Star Trek the Next Generation/ and its descendants.

Virtuality also leans heavily on the formula of the ship's AI who may not have your best interests at heart. This, too, has been done before. /2001: A Space Odyssey/ is the canonical AI-goes-bad story; /Star Trek/ covered it repeatedly; /Alien/ had a dose, /Terminator 1 - n+1/ thrived on it, and of course it was the very bedrock of /The Matrix./ (One might also point out certain elements of this trope in my work, I suppose. ;)

There's also a healthy dose of claustrophobia reminiscent of pretty much any submarine movie you can think of, and a slight dose of /A Nightmare on Elm Street III/ and you pretty much have the plotlines we're dealing with. Except of course, the reality show angle that distorts all of them and makes you wonder which part of the truth you're being told.

At what point do these formulas become tropes, and at what point do tropes become archetypes? I think all of these elements are actually good elements of the story. They're tropes because they /work/ and they can be rethought and re-imagined and repurposed again and again.

It would have taken some discipline for the writers - something it's doubtful Fox TV could have maintained - to keep the virtuality plot device from getting stupid, overused, and campy (did I mention Next Generation's holodeck problems?) and still keep it a vital part of the story.

So.

The final question is, would I have watched the TV show, had it been made (and had Mr. Forberg brought it to my attention, instead of an orphaned pilot?) I think I would have.

I would, at least, have bought the series on iTunes and thrown it on my iPod as I did with /Farscape/, for watching next time I'm sick in bed. It's an interesting story, and the characters are interesting human beings. Flawed (arguably a bit too flawed - although the lack of professional unity of the crew can be explained away by the reality show sponsorship of the mission), believable, weird around the edges. People who it's interesting to see what goes on in their heads, but at the same time a little uncomfortable. I'd have liked to see the mystery presented unwound and exposed, although if it took more than a season I'd probably have given up. But I would like to know what was going on. So. A mixed review from me. Easily a mini-series worth of plotlines to unravel in /Virtuality/, maybe not a whole series worth. In any case it's free to watch, and it's well done, so check it out and enjoy what might have been.

-JRS

Odd Lots

2009-07-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, fellow author Jeff Duntemann keeps a well regarded blog (though it's presently having provider problems). One recurring feature of it are little amusing things found on the net or emailed to him by friends. He calls them Odd Lots entries. It's too good an idea not to steal. :)

So, Odd Lots for today:

An ant, as you've never seen it before, composited out of 400 images from a scanning electron microscope. Via Daring Fireball

The first ethernet cable A lot is made about the broadband revolution - cable modem, dsl, fiber to the home, etc, and all of them talk about the 'last mile' - between the phone company/cable company and your place. Ethernet, for most of us, is the last /foot/ technology, as it's become the de-facto network standard for desktop computers to talk to the world. Yeah yeah, I know, wifi. But 802.11b/g/m/etc encapsulates 802.3 ethernet packets. They're extremely closely related. So yeah. Unless you're using a phone modem, you're almost certainly using some form of ethernet to read this message. And this is the very first ethernet cable. Via BoingBoing Gadgets, via Make: Online".

-JRS

Free (as in GNU) Fonts

2009-06-10T12:42:00.001-07:00

One of the things you tend not to think about when you read a book is that the font you're looking at? The actual shape of the letters? That's someone's art. And yes, oftentimes, they're copyrighted, and somewhere, someone has paid a license fee for that font. Sure, there are lots of free fonts out there, and a great many of them are wonderful for headlines, titles, etc.

Consider Hancock Park Laser, which was used on the cover of Looking Glass, and Beware that Flying Pen Press art director Laura Givens and I chose for the cover of Irreconcilable Differences. Nice fonts, truly. But you wouldn't want to read the novel set in them.

The interior font of a book has to look good, read easily, not strain your eyes, not readily reshape into other letters, and so forth. It really is a big deal. So it's always interesting to find good, readable fonts for large volumes of text. So I'm pleased to discover that there is a GNU font project out there, and that their fonts are /very/ readable.

See the GNU FreeFont project page. Note that the GNU FreeFont license GPL has an exception in it that allows you to use or embed the free font into your projects without GPL licensing your projects themselves. This is important, as otherwise the GPL license is, as I understand it, fairly toxic for work held under a traditional copyright.

Then you can download the fonts here.

Kudos to the Free UCS Outline Fonts project for these nice fonts. :)

-JRS

btw: GPL is the GNU General Public License under which a great deal of open source software is licensed. You can read all about it here.

then again...

2009-06-06T20:25:00.000-07:00

My previous note was about technology that might obsolete rotary magnetic media.

This wended its way through my RSS feeds this afternoon while I was out: apparently we as a species are still discovering new properties about magnetite that may let magnetic media be magnetized and demagnetized at the nano-scale. Click here for the whole article from the Carnegie Institution for Science, thoughtfully aggregated by Portal to the Universe.

-JRS

One terrabit per square inch for a billion years

2009-06-03T19:58:00.000-07:00

How's this for interesting?

Scientists at Berkeley Lab have created a nanomechanical memory system capable of scaling, in theory to 1tb/square inch, and which will remain stable for a billion years. As I understand it, it consists of an iron particle inside a nanotube, and when you apply a voltage to it, it moves to the other end of the tube. You can probe the state of the particle without disturbing it.

This seems like a great thing, except that I have to wonder if you couldn't erase the data by shaking it, like an etch-a-sketch. Physical stability of the thing wasn't discussed. I'd also be concerned about the level of heat this will produce, especially in high densities. I suppose it wouldn't be any worse than transistors in the same space.

If these things work, scale, aren't as sensitive to motion as it seems like they should be, and are at least competitive on a cost-per-bit basis, (very very big IFs) it seems to me we might finally be looking at the technology that replaces that most ancient of data storage systems, the rotating magnetic media.

-JRS

P.S. How old is magnetic digital data storage as a technology? According to the wikipedia article, drum memory, precursor to the hard disk we know and love, was invented in 1932. Computers in the 1950s and 1960s used it as RAM. Therein lies a tale.

Nice Review Makes the Author's Whole Morning

2009-05-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

Looking Glass hasn't generated a lot of reviews lately. It's far from a new book. Interestingly, though, the free/low cost ebook program seems to be garnering it some attention. First came this one, from a blog called "Books on the Knob", in which the blogger mentions FPP's $.99 Kindle books, mine included. So I don't know if the new interest in Looking Glass this generated caused blogger BonnieBelle to do this nice review on her blog, "A Working Title" or not, but whatever the reason, I'm grateful for such a nice review.

-JRS

State of the Author Address

2009-05-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

For those of you not following the comments to "Stem cell targeting with magnets", regular commenter John Foberg was asking when my next book is coming out. I thought I'd address that with (what was supposed to be) a short posting.

Einstein's Blues,
I have two more novels in the pipeline right now. One, tentatively titled Einstein's Blues, is a completely new direction for me. It's space opera, basically, although I give more than a passing nod to real world physics in it. Consider if you will, the life of a band leader for a traveling show on permanent tour in interstellar space without the benefit of faster than light travel. Einstein's Blues. You can get there from here, but because of time dilation, you can never go home. This novel is about half finished. It needs a lot of work, but I'm happy with the characters and the general flow of the story. It's likely to wind up very different from my previous work, though. The level of action is much lower.

Truth be Told
The other, tentatively titled Truth be Told is the third novel in the LookingGlass world. It's set in the UCSA, and is shaping up to be a cyberpunk mystery story, told by Detective Harlan Lewis. This story is much more in flux, as the 2008 Nanowrimo draft doesn't really work for me. No guarantees that Harlan will survive into the final draft, or that he'll continue to be the main/narrating character. I have a cloud of ideas for this story, and the existing draft taps very few of them, so it will be changing, and drastically.

Vox Humana
I have yet another novel in mind. I'm going to tentatively title this one Vox Humana, although it will almost certainly get renamed before I'm done. If I go ahead and write it, it will be the fourth and almost certainly last book of the LookingGlass world, as current events are rapidly closing in on the history of the LookingGlass world, and certain trends that seemed plausible in 2004 when I wrote LookingGlass are losing steam rapidly now in 2009, and I really don't want to break continuity or go revisionist on you. Nevertheless, Vox Humana persists in my mind as an idea.

Set your wayback machine to 1991, while I was in Ft. Collins, Colorado, in grad school, and the United States was embroiled in the first Iraq war - Desert Shield/Desert Storm. (For those too young to remember, see this wikipedia article. :) There I was, sitting in my rented room, thinking about how very bad it could get if there was a protracted, possibly nuclear war in the oil fields of the Middle East. Recall that at the time, gasoline was about $1.15/gallon. Expensive - about $1.44/gallon in 2009 dollars. (Data from here, as heaven knows I don't remember.)

So I set out to write a cyberpunk story set in a world where petroleum was too expensive to burn, and also set in the West where I was. Let's just say there were horses in it. But there was also a nuclear powered transcontinental train. The United States was gone, having been broken into several smaller countries and Canadian provinces. The net was utterly pervasive in people's lives, and it rather than close proximity in cities, allowed humans to maintain the synergy of minds that makes civilization possible. Does any of this sound familiar? It should. It was this novel that the LookingGlass world really was born to host.

Unfortunately, I got sidetracked, as young men often do, by chasing girls, class work, and by the first Gulf War's rather startling brevity. (Amazing what a conventional military can accomplish against another conventional military with a few hundred-billion dollars, one of history's great generals, and clearly defined goals.) That story went by the wayside, and I ultimately move to California to pursue my career in high tech, and marry one of the aforementioned girls I'd been chasing. :)

I have about a dozen pages of that 1991 novel - a couple scenes, lots of ideas that I cannibalized later for other projects, including Looking Glass.

So what is Vox Humana about? Well, the pieces I have are about a private investigator named Kimble McGee. Remember him? (Irreconcilable Differences - he's a supporting character. He's named after a grad-school friend of mine's roommate's cat.) Kim is in his 30s (which seemed like middle age to me then), and contracting police work out in a small town in Wyoming. The first scene of the novel has him encountering a really, really messy corpse and claiming the case to work on. The other scene I have introduces the other main character, a molecular cyborg named gloves. An engineered person, Gloves doesn't speak, is enormously strong and fast, has internal weapons, and is called an LMX, which stood for something, I'm sure. When we first meet her, she's climbing the side of a building and breaking in. And that's all I have of the story. The pages and pages of notes that went with those two scenes are long since lost, but I remembered enough and had enough notes from a later project that when it came time to knock out the first draft of Looking Glass in a month, I knew I had a good world to tell the story in.

Ebooks and webcomics, oh my!
So that's where I am. One new universe and one, possibly two more installments in the Looking Glass world. Two novels in draft, and one still in the idea phase. And at the moment, I'm working as Flying Pen Press' ebook editor, so I'm busy turning their back catalog into ebooks, particularly for the Amazon Kindle, so I haven't been actively working on any of those projects. There is also a project afoot wherein I'll be turning one of my novels into the script for a webcomic, so watch this space. I'll certainly crow about it if that project comes to fruition :)

-JRS

Stem cell targeting with magnets

2009-04-06T14:34:00.001-07:00

I wish I'd thought of this. A team at Keele University, England, is experimenting with treating stem cells taken from a patient's bone marrow with magnetic nanoparticles. The advantage? They can guide the stem cells exactly where they want them without invasive surgery. Currently, according to this article on the BBC's website, they're using it to grow new bone and cartilage in mice. They're talking five years until they can use it in humans.

Prediction: If this works, it will revolutionize the treatment of brain damage, and there will be very real moral and legal questions about how much of your brain can be replaced with new neurons and leave the essential "you" intact.

Also, I need to check, but I'm pretty sure Masamune Shirow predicted this in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, although as a method to control the implantation of nanomachines, rather than of stem cells.

1980s high tech military - today's toy isle

2009-04-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

I ran across these toy infrared goggles in the toy section in Walmart today. For those too young to remember, light amplification and infrared illumination were two of the most important technologies used in combat in Operation Desert Storm (August, 1990 - through Feb, 1991), as they made night fighting much more feasible. Today, basic infrared goggles can be had for $80 in the toy isle. We live in interesting times, certainly. :)

I'm terribly amused. Not amused enough to part with $80 for them. Yet.

-JRS

Nanotech, brought to you by viral assembly...

2009-04-02T15:02:00.001-07:00

Drexler predicted that as the nanotech revolution proceeded, it would be intertwined with biotech, as cells do a great deal of the very kinds of nanoassembly the technology depends on already. Given this article, I would say we've begun reaching into that era. It seems scientists at MIT have engineered a bacteriophage - a virus that attacks bacteria - that assembles the anodes and cathodes of lithium ion batteries. The technology is in its infancy, but technologies grow up fast these days. I wonder if we'll begin seeing devices like batteries with a living pocket of viri in them that rebuild the anode and cathode over time, as it is the deterioration of these structures that limits the lives of these batteries.

Looking forward, I have to wonder how long it will be before we begin making micro-cyborgs - naomachines implanted into individual cells? Another longstanding prediction in science fiction. To be honest, I have to wonder how you'd draw the distinction by the time that becomes feasible?

-JRS

A moment of silence

2009-03-30T18:58:00.001-07:00

Some of you regular readers may have noticed that Mike S is no longer responding to posts. Unfortunately, he was killed in a traffic accident on Thursday, March 19th. Mike was my best friend for 26 years, fellow technology enthusiast, nerd, gentleman and scholar. He is sorely missed. More details can be had here

In the weeks and months to come, as life begins whatever shape will become the new normal now that he's gone, I'm sure there are little bits of the future that will come along, and I'll think to myself, "Mike would have loved that." or even "Mike and I would definately have to argue about that." I find there's some curious comfort in that fact. It's already happened once so far. One of Mike's enduring passions was the advent of machines that can replicate themselves and make other machines. This machine leans that direction.

The wind be at your back, old friend.

-JRS

Little bits of the future keep arriving

2009-03-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

Walter Jon Williams posted recently about his book HardWired, and how the present has caught up with the things he predicted therein. I've had the same experience from time to time with the LookingGlass world. What's worse is that unlike WJW, I still have unpublished (and one more unwritten) work set in that world. Damned inconvenient, that. Anyway. For those who've read Looking Glass and/or Irreconcilable Differences and wondered what I was getting at with the whole Penguini thing, well... pretty much something like this PicoTux except with more network interfaces on it.

-JRS

Kindle 2, two for Kindle

2009-02-09T10:29:00.001-08:00

Today, Amazon.com announced the Kindle 2, the updated version of their well known e-book reader. I've mentioned the original Kindle before, and I received one for Christmas in 2007 from my lovely and generous wife, so I had to work with my publisher to make my work available on that platform.

So in light of today's Kindle 2 announcement, I have an announcement of my own. Both my novels, Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences are now in the Amazon Kindle Store, for 99 cents each, available for instant download over the Kindle's wireless network.

The way I see it, e-books are poised to replace the old mass-market paperback format as the way to try out new authors without investing a lot of money. Books are expensive these days, and money's tight, and I understand it's a tall order to ask you to take a chance on an author you don't know and spend fifteen bucks for the privilege. If you have a Kindle or, soon, if you get a Kindle 2, you can try my work out for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

For those of you without Kindles, or with other kinds of e-book readers, these same e-books are available on my website for an even more attractive price. Free. :)

Links: Looking Glass for Kindle Irreconcilable Differences for Kindle The Downloads Page on my Website.

(Some browsers seem to be gagging on my download files. Please try right-clicking on the e-book links and saving the files, to prevent your browser from doing the wrong thing to the e-books when you download.)

Browsers?

2009-01-28T17:42:00.001-08:00

Would anyone who is reading this blog please let me know (in the next two days) if you are my 18% of users still using IE 6, or my 11% of users using IE 5.01? I'm in the process of making a huge overhaul of the website, and initial testing of the new design with IE5 (for mac) and IE6 (for windows under WINE) have not been promising at all. Before I go to the trouble of putting together a stripped down style sheet and style sheet switching to accommodate Microsoft's non-standard old browsers, I'd like to know if it's really necessary.

Thanks.

-JRS

Big Pipe Comes Home

2009-01-10T14:58:00.001-08:00

Some landmarks simply must be noted.

When I was in my early 20s, while I was a grad student at CSU, Fort Collins, I was working for the housing and food services department. When I approached them for a second phone line to run my modem over, they pointed out that it would be much easier to run an ethernet line up to my room, which is what we did.

You have to realize this was 1992, when most dorm rooms didn't have ethernet, and when I was used to a 9600 baud modem. Suddenly I had 10mb/s 802.3 ethernet right to the back of my pc.

Today, with one phone call and a cable modem reboot, I finally exceeded that bandwidth. Comcast is now selling me 16mb/s, faster than the wire speed of 802.3 ethernet.

It bears noting that CSU's link to the public internet in those days was probably a T1, running at 1.544mb/s, but still. The wire speed to my computer now exceeds the fastest link I ever had. Only 17 years later.

I'm sure it will feel slow eventually, but right now it's mind blowing.

-JRS

Smartpatch Technology, Revisited

2009-01-03T18:25:00.000-08:00

One of the technologies that features prominently in both my novels thus far are smartpatches. These dispense a drug into the wearer's bloodstream at a specific dosage by measuring the concentration in the blood and dosing until a given concentration is reached. In Looking Glass, the smartpatch also listens to your vital signs for specific changes and only doses you at all when certain parameters are met, thus saving your life. Pretty neat? Well, I thought so. I did always imagine the smarts to be in the patch, not the drug molecules themselves.

So the nanoparticle smart drugs this article is talking about are, frankly, something altogether different than what I imagined, but they're doing some of the same things, and this kind of thing fascinates me. :)

-JRS

Another view of the post-United States

2008-12-31T13:00:00.000-08:00

Friend Mike pointed me at this article, which recounts Igor Panarin's work on the possible fracturing of the United States. And Panarin seems to agree with the timeline I set for it in Looking Glass plus or minus a few years. Interestingly, though, Panarin is said to put the Eastern Seaboard states, the ones I assigned to the UCSA, as part of 'liberal Europe'. I think that ignores the great wealth of those areas, and the fact that there is a great deal of American military power centered in and around Washington DC. All the major wealth centers of the NorthEast are within a few days' drive or a couple weeks' march, and no nation which wished to survive would let them get away.

Also, hope y'all had a happy midwinter holiday of your preference, and have a happy New Year.

-JRS

NANOWRIMO - Wrapup

2008-12-03T18:00:00.001-08:00

As you might have guessed from my lengthy silence, things got a bit hairy with Nano. I was two days behind for most of the campaign, only catching up the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, then taking Thanksgiving off. I finally finished Saturday, November 29, in the middle of the afternoon at the write-in at the Tattered Cover, Highlands Ranch.

And now, of course, I have the inevitable post-nano cold. It's getting better, but this is why I've been silent so long.

-JRS