Ebook Geekery

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

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! :)

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

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

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

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

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