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.

Obamacare - Cliffs notes version

Ran across this online:Explain Like I'm Five: What exactly is Obamacare and what did it change? And this followon: Obamacare Point by Point I have to say, "Well shit, tell me how this is a bad idea again?" Let's just say if the numbers I'm seeing come to pass, it reduces the insurance cost for 40something self-employed writers quite dramatically.

This is something I've cared about for a long time. One of the LookingGlass World's fundamental tenants: that if you can't pay for your healthcare, they let you die or euthanize you. The LookingGlass world is from 2004. At that time, it looked very much like that's where we were headed, and I modeled the care after what stray animals get. What's that you say? I never made that clear? Well … it figured prominently in what was supposed to be the second novel in the series rather than Irreconcilable Differences, but that novel is unlikely to see the light of day in any recognizable form. It was always so in my world notes, and Kari mentions it briefly in Irreconcilable Differences.

Anyone who's read this blog for long is probably not surprised to find I lean in favor of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). We, as a nation, have agreed that we aren't willing to let people die on the steps of hospitals for lack of money. This act is basically admitting that emergency room care is suboptimal and we'll save money with proper health care. Also, it is against all of our best interests to allow through unaffordable healthcare a reservoir of disease to exist in our civilization. We are all in one epidemiological boat together, and it behoves everyone to help his or her fellow traveler to stay healthy.

-JRS

Disarming a Civilization

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