Separating Work from Play, Update #1

For those who wondered, I'm still using the Linux box for gaming. It's still going well. I've switched from 32 bit Ubuntu to 64 bit Mint/Cinnamon (Olivia, apparently.) and things are remarkably less clumsy. I've also moved my uber-video card to the PC, where it works just fine despite being a mac version. The 5870 is quite a boost from the 9600. Also, when friend Jeff Duntemann sold me this case out of his junk box, he left the dead motherboard, still with a presumed-dead 2.4ghz quadcore in it. On a lark, I tried that presumed-dead CPU in my play machine and it works just fine. While I read over and over that a dual core 3ghz chip with 1333khz frontside bus will always trounce a quad-core with a 1066mhz frontside bus in gaming, I haven't noticed any particular difference. The game I play is so GPU-bound that my processor is seldom saturated either way. When running multiple apps, however, the difference is pronounced, just as one would expect. So now my junk-box PC is roughly the equal of my mac in its gaming heyday - quad-core 2.66ghz, Radeon HD5870 card (pc people feel free to chuckle. It's the best card that would go in my mac, and even then it was sickeningly expensive). Cost? Less than a hundred bucks. And I've missed screwing around with the hardware of my computer.

-JRS

The Next Big Thing, In Pencil

I've been busy doing something I've never done before: laying out a novel before it's written. One of the things I learned at Taos is the art of storyboarding, which seems much less restrictive than an outline, if only by breaking it up into easily modifiable chunks. With 6 or 8 of us working on it, we storyboarded out one brave member's novel, fixed where the plot hung up, and built the story line all the way out to the end. It took us about 4 hours, as I recall.

I gave myself a month.

In the planning, I've had all the usual plot problems. Things like, "Why is it bad to be a Doppelgänger?" "Is the main character causing this action, or just being dragged into it?" "Does this bring in the themes I want to bring in?" "Argh, the cast is getting too big!" and so on. The advantage is that instead of having thousands of words committed by the time these problems come up, I have one or two pages of hand-written notes, so changing things isn't that painful. I can revise, relocate, and rethink to my heart's content. It lets me lay out plots more complex than I can hold in my head at once. So far, so good.

A word about writing utensils: There's something very comfortable, not to mention focusing (no twitter in a legal pad) about using a jumbo #2 pencil, the same as most folks my age and older used to learn writing in kindergarden; about the smell of the cedar shavings and the moment of thought while I sharpen; the ease of erasure; having a nice big eraser; the joy of twiddling a pencil in my fingers that coaxes the ideas out. Maybe the cedar shaving and graphite smell smells like schoolwork.

Naturally I roll these storyboards into Scrivener when they're done, and have Scrivener give me a dump of all of them in order to move forward. Naturally, I'll have these storyboards at a keystroke when August rolls around and it's time to actually lay down the prose. I'm looking forward to writing this one, even though if anything it's rougher and nastier than Brass and Steel: Inferno. I call this next novel, Brass and Steel II: The City of Glass.

-JRS

ps: if you find yourself looking for the jumbo #2 pencils of our collective youth, it's surprising to find that they're not in most stores with back-to-school supplies. M found me some at Wallmart after much searching, and I mail-ordered about 48 of them in a batch from Costco, so I'm set for a while. I do go through them quickly though.

Shay locomotives

If, at some point in the future, you should read Prodigal Son/Color of my Blood/whatever it winds up being called and you should wonder what on Earth a Shay locomotive is, it's one of these. Toward the end of the steam era, there were proposed (but never built) much larger Shay locomotives with a 3 cylinder steam engine on both sides, and that's really what I was picturing. They're weird pieces of equipment, originally evolved for use on lumber railways with primitive wood and/or wood and iron strap rails, where a large, powerful rod locomotive would tear the track to bits or derail quickly. I figured these were just about perfect for the precision movement, lots of stops and starts, and so on of combat track laying. Yeah. Combat track laying. Welcome to armored war in the 19th century. :)

Why is the #844 called a rod engine when the Shay is distinctly not? Those long things on the driver wheels that connect them to the steam pistons? Those are called side rods or coupling rods. -JRS

Prodigal Son: Finished

Okay yeah, I started this story back in April, when it was known as The Color of Blood. I put it down a couple times to do other things - write another story whose approach I already understood, spend two weeks in Virginia on family matters, etc etc, but I finally got the dang thing done. It needs tinkering and tightening yet, but all its guts are in place and it breathes on its own. It's a Brass and Steel story. It's very much about race. Normally I try to avoid this topic, mostly by saying "it's 20 years in the future, we're long past /that/. People are people. Deal." I like to challenge myself to do things I haven't done before, and to touch subjects that scare me to work on, but sheesh. Anyway. When it's finally polished out, I think, I hope, it will be a good story that rings right for all concerned.

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

Work vs Play - Photoline 32

I've been a photoshop user since the early 90s, and it's either come with a digital camera of mine or I've paid for it (ouch). Frankly, that time is gone. I've got CS4 on my mac. It barely works on Lion, and I doubt it will work at all on Mountain Lion. What all of these large corporations would like me to do is buy a fairly high performance mac, then rent photoshop for about $50 a month. Really? I have a better idea. I've been migrating away from cs4 for nearly a year, and really most of my photoshop work falls squarely into the 'play' department anyway, and thus, belongs on the linux box. Obviously, GIMP, being free, would be the obvious choice. Except that I /hate/ GIMP. Now I know that some folks love the thing, and I've seen truly dazzling digital art out of it, but for me, GIMP's UI is constantly annoying, and when I do get the software to do something, I find it's missing important features. Like adjustment layers.

Enter PhotoLine 32. Truth be told, back when OS X was new (10.1, to be exact), photoshop didn't run on it at all. Your only option for editing images without going into classic was to buy PL32. As CS4 became more and more flakey, I downloaded the current version of PL32, updated my license (yes, they honored my early-aughties license for an upgrade. Try that with Adobe some time.) and I've been slowly migrating to PL32 over the past year or so. The catch, of course, is that there's no Linux version.

On reading the fine print on the Photoline 32 site (www.pl32.com), however, I noticed that they test photoline 32 with wine, the windows emulator for Linux, and make sure everything works properly. So I tried it on the linux box. Lo and behold, it works as advertised. Yeah I bought a new license, even though technically I didn't have to. For 59 Euros (about 77 bucks - 6% of the price of CS6, or about a month and a half of creative cloud last I looked), it was a bargain. Yes, when PL32 does a major revision, they'll charge me to move up - usually about 20 bucks. I'm still ahead.

Not much else newswise. I'm actively seeking an agent, dealing with family matters, and knocking out a third short story in the Brass and Steel universe. Hopefully I'll be getting back to work on Brass and Steel II, whatever it winds up being called, in the next couple weeks. Also, I know how the series ends. Our heroes will be fighting Armageddon. Stay tuned. :)

-JRS

Fixed the buy online links

Okay, yeah, I just noticed the other day, nearly 3 months after the fact, that my last big site overhaul broke something important. All the "buy online" links used to point, via an embarrassingly convoluted mechanism, to a page called "Buy". And then, in a fit of brilliance, I decided I didn't need that page anymore. Oops. So I've given the PHP some kicking around, and now the buy links point to Amazon once again. Also, I removed Brass and Steel, the short story, from the "In Print" page since it is no longer in print.

It's becoming abundantly obvious that I need to rethink the guts of how this website works. For 4 titles it takes entirely too much maintenance, and I'm getting tired of the theme.

-JRS