Yay! Updated website!

The big news: Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences are BACK IN PRINT on Kindle Unlimited. This means that if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can get my books for FREE with your subscription. If you don't, they're $2.99 each through the regular kindle store.

Both books are at edition (version) 2.1, which means I've cleaned up various typos that made me cringe over the years, and sanded out one or two spots where I meant to edit something when I wrote them and forgot. Both books also come with a brand new forward and new (better) typesetting including embedded fonts.

The cover art is the biggest noticeable change. Looking Glass's cover is built from iStockPhoto images, composited by yours truly. Irreconcilable Differences' cover is also composited by me, but from photos sourced from NASA (free!) and Second Life (Also free, but I had to buy the props.)

What does this mean?

I've finally decided to take control of my fiction. I'm no longer interested in having some publisher take 3/4 of the purchase price to throw it out into the world, leave it to languish there, and then not pay me when I'm owed royalties. They all seem to do it, they all want sickening control over the work, and most importantly, the trad publishing industry is in a state of contraction. This means companies are being bought and going bankrupt. The very last thing I want is one of my books to become an asset of a company being bought or going bankrupt, where it may sit for years while the litigation is sorted out, and then be simply misplaced forever. Likewise, I've been a creditor of a (functionally) bankrupt publisher. I don't do debt collection happily.

Moving forward, yes, there will be new books coming that have never seen the light of day before. Watch this space.

Also, I am in the process of getting Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences set up on CreateSpace so you can buy hard copies of my books again.  On this, I should say that if you see the older orange and green covered books, do please buy them. Some bookseller took a chance on me in the Flying Pen Press days, and I'd like to reward them. Most of them are selling at a discount below what my list price will be anyway. As I get into the new work, it too will be coming out in both KU and CreateSpace. I still haven't stopped getting a little giddy when my work appears in dead tree editions, so I'll be doing that for the foreseeable future.

Also, my website update now sports a "Technical Writing" section, and so far its only occupant is "Learning Linux System Administration,' a series of videos I did with Infinite Skills (part of O'Reilly) last summer and talked about at some length. I'll keep you posted right here when the next technical book comes out.

-JRS

Scrivener, Word, and Tracked Changes

So it's not a very closely guarded secret that I'm working on getting Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences back in print. (Soon. Soon.) My modern toolchain for these old books (for those keeping score) is: Nisus Writer -> RTF -> Scrivener -> Epub -> Jutoh -> Epub, Mobi, and Epub for ibooks. For the hardcopy, it's Nisus Writer -> RTF -> Scrivener -> RTF -> rtf2latex->Tex->XeLaTex -> PDF. This sounds like more work than it really is. I have the RTF manuscripts, the same ones the Flying Pen Press typeset was done from. I imported them both into Jutoh years ago when I stopped making ebooks by hand. I imported them into Scrivener for all the modern maintenance, mostly cleaning up weird typos that seemed to crop up.

Fast forward to a few days ago. While finishing up the ebook version of Looking Glass, I decided to go through it one more time with the Jutoh spell checker. (Jutoh's spell checker is awful. Slow, primitive, based on ispell or aspell (I forget which), and Jutoh likes to hide the cursor permanently when you've been spell checking a while. It also crashes occasionally.) And I turned up dozens of errors. Looking closely at them, some of them I /knew/ I changed back in the early days of 2007, when we were editing the book. Something was horribly wrong. Looking more closely, these were present in the PDF as well. Walking back through the toolchain, I discovered them in the Scrivener file. When I reimported the original manuscript into Scrivener, I got the same results, plus a lot of "typos" I'd chased through the ebook version over the years. 


My first thought was "Oh crap. Is the file corrupted? Is the import process broken? Is this somehow in the original manuscript?" So I went back to the original manuscript, last edited when I cleaned it up prior to hand-making the first ebook version. Some time in '08, I think, and opened it up in Nisus Writer, just like the old days. When I searched on one of the errors, up it popped - in tracked changes. Every one of those glitches was a change Scott or I had made with Word tracked changes. Every stinking one. About 400 of them in all. Those changes were invisible on the body of the text in Nisus, and in Word too. Somehow, during the import to Scrivener, they were being re-exposed. The book was, essentially, being un-edited.

I sat down to file a bug report. On a whim, because I know that Scrivener leans heavily on OS X's RTF libraries, I tried importing the file into textedit, Apple's default text and RTF editor in OS X. Same result. Same stinking result.

The upshot? OS X's RTF libraries do not do anything sane or intelligent when presented with tracked changes. They concatenate the original and the changed text, and send it on up the pipeline. I do not now recall how I did the original port to Jutoh, but I very much suspect, given the number of people who've complained about the typos in the ebooks over the years, that it used the same RTF library somewhere along the line.

The solution? Fairly straightforward. Open the original RTF up in Word, make a copy, and tell word to Accept All Changes, and save it to an RTF. When I reimported that RTF, it was clean. Nisus Writer doesn't seem to have that capability (or I couldn't find it.) It was fairly well hidden in Word.

So, moving forward, I remade both the ebook versions and the LaTeX typeset version yesterday and today. It gave me an opportunity to clean up some LaTeX code and some of the sloppiness in the way I'd set it up in Jutoh. And I finally solved the mystery of why my later ebooks were such a mess. If you're reading this, and you have one of those messed up ebooks, email me and I'll hook you up with the new version. Meantime... watch this space. I hope to have the thing for sale fairly soon.

-JRS



Render unto Proprietary...

Render unto proprietary formats (Kindle) that which is proprietary (a novel) and with proprietary tools (Kindlegen.) Calibre, with their obsession with reverse-engineering the kindle formats, can't produce output that KDP will accept without mangling, but they continue to shriek that plugins to use kindlegen aren't needed. Pedantic behavior like that, I can live without. Just have to redo the book in Jutoh. What book, you ask? Well, a little bird tells me that Looking Glass may be back on the market in the foreseeable future.

Cha cha changes

As of tomorrow, Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences are officially going out of print. (How long this will take to percolate out to Amazon, I have no idea.) I will be removing the free downloads some time tonight or tomorrow and modifying them to reflect that they are no longer available through the auspices of Flying Pen Press.

This isn't an acrimonious separation. My contract with FPP allowed me to pull the plug starting in 2010. I didn't do so then, and I didn't do so now. Mostly it's about falling sales, and FPP refocusing on other product lines. Whatever else is said about Flying Pen Press, ultimately they took a chance on a science fiction writer with exactly zero publishing credits, got me professional editing, and made the book available to the public. If you're reading this, there's a good chance it's because of an FPP version of one of my novels. Their timing couldn't have been better, either. 2007, the year Looking Glass was released, was also the year my father passed away, but he did live long enough to see me published, for which I'm grateful, and it's been very valuable to me to have books in print all this time.

That said, what do you, the reader, do if you came here looking for one of my books to buy? Well, as of right now, it's still alive on Amazon. Hit the buy button quick. If it's not there anymore, there are a couple options. First, I own the ebook versions outright - I created them in the first place, and I've been updating the free download version from time to time, so once I've made a few small changes (mostly to the cover and copyright sections) I'll be putting those free downloads back up. Second: I have a fairly abundant supply of the Flying Pen Press edition of both of my first two novels. I will be making arrangements on my website so you can order one via email and paypal direct from me (signed, if you like.) Finally, I own these two novels free and clear again. Moving forward, I'm hoping to find them a new home, perhaps with a third book in the series, even if it's a matter of typesetting them myself (I don't own the FPP typeset version) and putting them on Lulu. You haven't seen the last of my cyberpunk books.

Meantime, I'm making good progress on City of Glass, finally. I added about 10,000 words to it this week, (very) rough drafts of several pivotal scenes that help a lot in fixing the book in my mind. That those four chapters were written in Wordstar won't be obvious in the finished novel, and probably aren't that interesting to you, but it amuses the hell out of me. There are a lot fewer distractions in a 1980s toolset, and it helps with focusing. :) (If you are interested, the computer is one of these, which I built myself, running CP/M 2.2 and Wordstar 4. I have a functional but incomplete Wordstar to rtf translator written that I'm using, and one of my side/hobby projects has been a complete Wordstar to rtf translator, to handle everything Wordstar can do. Turns out that's far more than I thought, so it's taking a lot more time than expected. :)

So yeah. Things are changing around here.

Regards,
-JRS

What I meant by 'Ice'

I did some confusing things when I wrote Looking Glass, back in 2004. (Egad.) One of them was I took Ice, as described by William Gibson et al as software, and redefined it to software + a dedicated, powerful, cheap CPU. Your deck, then, became the means by which this was displayed. Deck, tank, pocket computer, all these did the same thing - hosted the ice. That I failed to consider the TV as more than a peripheral to one of these is probably a sign of the times. It was 2004. Dedicated media computers were few and far between, and we still thought bluetooth was cool.

Anyway, I got the idea for this mechanism from Plan9 (From Bell Labs) which treats everything as a resource which can be accessed over IP - including processor resources, display resources, and so on. Having now tried Plan9, the UI shell is a turkey, but the idea still seems sound.

Fast forward nearly ten years (egad, again) to 2013, and we get this: http://liliputing.com/2012/11/closer-look-at-fxi-cotton-candys-199-any-screen-computer-video.html Which is an android or linux stick that plugs in to either your tv or your computer. It lets you execute apps on it, and virtualizes the output for display on your desktop machine, or displays it on your tv, whichever is handiest.

That's pretty much what I had in mind. Now these are expensive (though there are much, much cheaper ones), but suddenly the future I imagined seems to be occurring. When software makers realize that a dedicated CPU with software in ROM and some virtualization will mean their software is functionally copy-proof, things will change and change fast. I predict that when Adobe gets tired of renting photoshop CS6 at exhorbitant prices, they'll start shipping the suite on a stick like this with a cpu and gpu designed for the job, and you can buy the stick, or you can do without.

-JRS