Arduino and Mile High Con

I will be at Mile High Con this weekend. I'm not on any panels or doing any readings. For the second year in a row, I'm just going as a fan. It just worked out that way. I wasn't sure enough I'd have new fiction out to sign up for anything when the deadline came...and went. But I'll be around, so if you have a copy of something I wrote and want it signed, hit me up.

 Some thoughts on Arduino: When I was writing Junkbox Arduino, I did not realize how much I was taking the Arduino IDE and compiler for granted. There are better microcontrollers out there, most notably the NXP LPC1114, a 32 bit ARM device capable of running at 50MHz, and available in a DIP package. It sounds great until you try to get a development environment for it. Just try, I'll wait. Waiting... You can get the non-free one from NXP, windows only, you can get the GNU suite (a big install, whole separate compiler and everything) or you can diddle Clang/LLVM to generate code for it... but libraries? Documentation? It's all fragmentary, and much of it seems to be unfinished. For better or worse, Arduino puts all of that in one convenient glob. (I hope they keep doing that. There's talk of a web based tool, which I can't get behind at all.)

 It's worse if you want to get into programmable logic. There, you're either stuck with closed source, licensed stuff (free as in beer in some cases, but still) or stuff that's reverse engineered and of questionable legality (to say nothing of the fact that it could be weeks or months before API changes are caught up with) Even with old ICs like GALs, the tools are either antique (DOS based) or good but undocumented (Palwiz), and all the programming devices are reverse engineered. If you're wondering why I haven't started a new technical book, this stuff is why. The proprietary BS is on my nerves in a bad way, and I have a lot of questions whether I even could write about these things without stepping on someone's IP if it's not in the datasheet. I got a taste of it with the PATA/IDE project in Junkbox Arduino, and while the ANSI folks were very kind and helpful, (full props to them) I still didn't like it.

 I may have to go back to software books. I can, at least, write about open source projects with impunity. Meantime, I'm starting to make some headway on Brass and Steel: City of Glass, the second installment of the Brass and Steel trilogy. All I can say right now is this: airship collisions are complicated. :)

 -JRS

MileHiCon Schedule

I will be at MileHiCon at the end of this week, and I have my schedule now:

Saturday at 11:00AM in Grand Mesa 8c: Researching Fiction (my favorite thing) How do you do research for fiction? What are good places too look? How much is too much?

Saturday at Noon in Mesa Verde C: Reading with Stant Litore. If I have the right guy, he's writing zombie horror, so it could get pretty ugly. :) (I might not have the right guy. Ask me some time about the exquisite corpse reading I was in once. The dangers of searching the interwebs.) I'm not sure what I'm going to read yet, but I may polish up one of my unpublished short stories from the Brass and Steel universe. Probably not the 7500 word one.

Saturday at 2:00pm in Wind River B: Future of Biology and Medicine. Where are we now, what do we see becoming science fact, limitations of genetic research, new medical tech.

The rest of the time I'll be wandering around like all the other fans. :)

-JRS

Progress Report, also MileHiCon

The first draft of Brass and Steel: The City of Glass is proceeding, and it's developing its own feel, which is good - if time consuming. Here's a quick tidbit. Annabel and her sister Josephine are the main characters of this story.

Annabel gets up to look out the window, down at the streets below, at the elevated train as it slides by silently on tracks stories above the street. A brigade of steam melters slowly advance down the street, melting snow with steam, vacuuming up the water, heating it in their specially designed autoboilers into more steam. She looks down casually with her mystical eye, and realizes they’re strictly machines. No human being guides them. They roll along, low slung black boilers with brass fittings gleaming against the snow and muddy water. As she watches, squads of them divide off from the main brigade to pursue side streets. Hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands, and each one apparently controlled by a Dejstrøm engine the size of a wartime Dope brain, without the bound soul to animate it. Probably rectangular, as most are now, to facilitate bolting them to the regular shapes men seem to favor when they build. She looks out further over the city, past more elevated train tracks and ignores the prickle of her scalp.

Also, I will be attending MileHiCon on October 18, 19, and 20, 2013. I have not yet been told what I will be doing there besides being a fan, so watch this space for more information.

-JRS

In which I prove I'm not dead.

So yeah, it's more than three months since I last posted to this blog. I've been head-down, banging out Brass and Steel: Inferno. Since I finished it in May, I've hacked about 10,000 words out of it and put a couple thousand new words in. Hopefully that's the end of the heavy revisions (replotting, etc). I'm also beta-testing my Firearms: A Quick and Dirty Guide for the Non-Shooting Writer document, version 2. And finally, I'm doing major surgery on my website to switch over to simplepie to aggregate this blog, my goodreads RSS feed, and twitter, so watch for those changes on the website coming soon. Also starting to cook ideas for Brass and Steel II in my head. Hoping to start storyboarding it out (new technique I learned at Taos) this week. I was at ChiCon 7, but participated very little (my wife and I were both not feeling very well, and the ChiCon folks didn't invite me to any panels when I offered.) Met up with a bunch of the Taos Toolbox 2011 gang, including Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress, our instructors, which was a lot of fun. Many pictures, especially of the Hugo ceremony, can be found here: Click These Words. Yes, new DSLR is sensitive enough to use the 500mm catadioptric lens under stage lighting. :) Finally, I will be attending MileHiCon again this year, and I am on panels. More info on that here as I continue to dig out. -JRS

MileHiCon 2011

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

Readings from MileHiCon Pt 3

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 MileHiCon

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

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

MileHiCon Schedule

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