Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

Anomaly Con 2011 Wrapup

I got back from Anomaly Con 2011 last night, and realized by 9 PM that it had worn me out. I used to do weekends of nonstop socializing and concept-absorbing without blinking, but those days are gone, and I just don’t have the stamina anymore. My collaborator Jim Strickland (left) did much better than I, but I’m guessing we both slept pretty well last night. I certainly did.

Not that I didn’t learn a lot, nor enjoy it. To the contrary: It was a great time, and I suspect I made a few new friends, even if I didn’t raise my profile as a writer very much. One of the things I learned is that the steampunk phenomenon is less about books than about culture, and it’s held together much more via social networking than I would have predicted. The sessions on clothes and characters and even absinthe were SRO. The sessions focused on writing were less so, though anything involving Sarah Hoyt was reasonably well-attended.

I haven’t read her yet and intuit that her work isn’t exactly my thing, but Sarah in person is insightful, funny, and completely on top of the writing game. Furthermore, she’s willing to dump on all of the writerly rulebookisms now doing the rounds at workshops, like never use any said-bookisms, avoid adverbs, and so on. Though she didn’t say it straight out, the summary is simple and would-be writers need to drink deeply of it: You can’t write well by rules alone. Black-and-white thou-shalt-nots of this sort are particularly misleading, and are perpetuated by people who make their living trying to teach people without a good ear for the language how to write. Backwards, backwards: Get your ear first, then apply the rules when your ear detects a rough spot.

One great surprise for me was Pandora Celtica, a (mostly) a capella group of five who do Irish folk songs and their own Celtic-themed compositions in marvelous close harmony. It was accidental: I was on my way to the men’s room when I passed the group’s vendor table, just as they were striking up an impromptu number. I bought two of their CDs on the spot, and was not disappointed.

A couple of my conversations suggest that a rift is developing in the steampunk world: Those who would like to see steampunk remain true to its roots, in fiction faithful to the science, technology, and culture of its time, versus those who feel no hesitation in pulling steampunk ever more toward deep retro urban fantasy. I need to read more on both sides before I can have strong opinions here, but something of this sort was happening in the 1960s, when the New Wave was taking on traditional hard SF and enough bricks were thrown in both directions to build several thousand brick moons. The New Wave eventually drowned in its own self-indulgence, but in fairness, it freed both fantasy and hard SF to explore sexual themes in ways simply unthinkable prior to 1960. The term “steampunk” may have to be broadened to include any fantastic literature in a Victorian setting–which will clear the way for others to create “hard steampunk” as a distinct subsubgenre.

The Tivoli Building at the Auraria Campus is not brightly lit, and many convention events were held in cavernous spaces where my pocket camera couldn’t grab enough light to image well. So (having reviewed everything in the camera this morning) I don’t have much in the line of photos to show you, and nothing at all of me. Jim may have some better shots (he had his DSLR with him) and if so I’ll post what I can in coming days.

Back Off, Man. I’m a Steampunker.

Mar 27th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

At the first annual Anomaly Con in Denver, at the Tivoli Building on the Auraria Campus downtown. It’s a specialty SF convention, catering to the steampunk subgenre. I came up Friday night and met Jim Strickland Saturday morning as the con opened. Jim had set up a panel for us with the concom, and readings from the two halves of our double novel.

I freely admit I had no idea what to expect. I have never been to a comics or media con, and in fact haven’t been to a traditional SF con in four or five years. I used to go to three or four every year, back long ago when the world and I were young and I was writing a lot of SF because my life was simple and I had not yet broken into computer books.

This was, well, different. There have always been a few people at cons in hall costumes. At Anomaly Con, probably 85% of the congoers are in hall costume all the time, and some of them are doozies.

Most, as you might expect, were Victorian gentlemen and ladies, plus the occasional mad scientist. But beyond that were some western card sharps, a few outfits clearly adapted from Civil War re-enactments, a couple of pirates, at least one pith-helmeted explorer, plus a scattering of zombies and a handful of imponderables that might be from some subsubsubgenre I haven’t heard of yet.

The effort and ingenuity that went into some of these costumes was boggling, and the cleverness factor off the charts. My vote for Best of Show goes to Matt Schaps, a young man who created a steampunk Ghostbusters proton pack out of the guldurndest collection of retro junk, including a 3-gang variable capacitor, a Model T Ford ignition coil, a J-38 Morse Code key, five or six vacuum tubes, a couple of IF cans, and a biggish woofer behind a brass shell salvaged from a ceiling fan.

At our panel, Jim and I discussed the necessary conditions for the evolution of a Victorian-style industrial age, and whether it was a fluke or an inevitable stop along the path from mud huts to interstellar empire. We used my Drumlins universe as an example, and explained how factors like freedom of thought, economic freedom, relatively benign religion lacking monasticism (and the nasty dualism that monasticism inevitably carries with it) and cheap energy would almost invariably create something like the England and the US of the 1890s. The panel was well-received, and afterwards we spent a lot of time at the tables in the hall tossing ideas around with interested attendees.

I’m about to head over there again, and will post additional photos this evening or tomorrow. My own hall costume is limited to a western-style vest and the ill-fitting top hat I bought for the Coriolis Millennium Christmas Party in late 1999, but it will do for now. Next time I might well lean a little western, since the Drumlins stories I’ve done so far tend toward space westerns more than steampunk. (Drumlin Circus incorporates some of both.) It’s been a lot of fun so far, and the setting is perfect: In the room where we held our panel, a huge two-cylinder stationary steam engine with a 10-foot flywheel lay in state, with small boys dressed like Oliver Twist scrambling all over it and spinning the handwheels. Crazy world, yes, but a good one.

The Star-Rite Type C Heater

Mar 18th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

17 comments

I happened by a consignment antiques shop yesterday while shoe-shopping. My first thought on seeing this item in the window was Captain Nemo has hocked his labs! So I bought it. It’s a Star-Rite Type C heater, made circa 1925 by Fitzgerald Manufacturing Company of Torrington, Connecticut. 630W at 110V, and it even works, not that I left it plugged in for very long. It’s seen some hard use but the paint appears to be original, and only the clips holding the wire cage to the dish are missing. (The cage stays in by spring pressure, and not much of that.)

The parabola seems reasonably accurate, and when I took it out on the deck and pointed it at the Sun it smoked a piece of an advertising flyer in a second or two. It needs a little cleanup, but nothing heroic. Anybody care to guess what I’m going to do with it?

Taking a Breath

Mar 12th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

This has been a helluva month. To finish Drumlin Circus I wrote 26,000 words in two weeks, and then by six days later had polished it, laid it out, proofed it, and combined it with a second short novel (by the formidable Jim Strickland) to make something book-sized, with a twist. (More on the twist in a later entry.) We’re now waiting for the cover art, and so for a day or two I’ve had a chance to pick up my office, read a little, run the dogs around, and ruminate on what I’d learned.

Oh, and I bought a TV for downstairs. A TV. 55″ wide and 1.37″ thick (!!) by my digital calipers. Sure, I’d like a flying car. But this again reminds me that we really do live in the future.

The do-it list was getting long. I’ve needed to replace a couple of coin cells in the Dell USFFs we have here and at church for some time. In most PCs this isn’t difficult, but Dell put the coin cell holder in a bad spot, especially in the SX270. Pulling out the old cell, no sweat–that’s what God made needle-nose pliers for. Reinserting a new cell would be easier too, except that the pliers would short out the cell. So I put a short length of shrink tubing over one of the two jaws and held it over a match for a bit. Shazam! The cells survived the operation, and I broke no fingernails trying to coerce them in either direction. It’s a trick worth remembering if you can’t use your fingers to get coin cells into place behind that plumber’s nightmare of a heat sink you’ve got.

One of the things I had to do to write Drumlin Circus was adopt an older style for the first-person narrator, who is an educated city guy in an 1890s sort of culture, albeit one not on Earth. This isn’t normal diction for me and I had to train myself to do it, first by reading largish chunks of The Time Machine and Food of the Gods, and then by going back to Gene Wolfe’s boggling 5-volume New Sun saga, which I hadn’t been through in ten or fifteen years. Again, the complexity of the tale boggled me a little (as did more than a few of the words he repurposes but never invents) but this time I was ready: I had ordered Michael Andre-Driussi’s Lexicon Urthus and kept it at my elbow. It’s a 420-page index of terms, concepts, and proper names from the series, with not only their meanings in the story but also their derivation from myth, religion, and other languages. If you intend to read the Urth cycle closely, you’re gonna need this. Highly recommended.

Over the next few days here I’ll try to cover a few more noteworthy things associated with Drumlin Circus. Mostly I want to reassure you all that I’m back and looking forward to writing here a little more regularly than I’ve been.

The Long, Long Circus

Mar 3rd, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Whew. Drumlin Circus is done. Or at least complete and intact, if not finished. (Stories are a little like software to me: They’re never finished, not in a truly final sense of the word.) I had dared myself to get it all down by last night, and come four PM I found myself staring at the screen, thinking that I needed a short “resonance” scene to wrap it all up but couldn’t figure out what it might be. (Such scenes are not part of the outline.)

So I sat down this morning and started reading the whole thing through from the beginning. By the time I got through it about 11:00, I knew what I wanted, and fifteen minutes later the words were on the page.

The story came out a lot longer than I planned. 33% longer, in fact: I planned for 35,000 words and my subconscious handed me 53,000. The same thing happened to me in 1998 and 1999: I had intended The Cunning Blood to come in at 90,000 words, and by publication in 2005 was 145,000 words long. Several people have told me that that was a major reason none of the big houses would publish it.

Getting the flu in January slowed me down radically. To make our deadline of introducing it at AnomalyCon at the end of March, I set the completion deadline for March 2. That was a tough one, and in fact, I wrote 25,000 words in the last fourteen days alone. I don’t think I’ve ever written that much fiction in that little time, at least since I was in high school and did little else.

How did it turn out? Reasonably well. It was an experiment on a number of fronts. I’ve never written anything in that length class before. I have a completed but unpublished novella that came in at 27,000 words, and nothing else much past 12,000. It was also a conscious effort to bend the work in a steampunk direction. How that worked I’m not sure yet, though sooner or later people will probably tell me. I wedged in almost every steampunk trope there is, even if briefly: airships, goggles, steam locomotives, strong women dressed provocatively, long-barrelled pistols, and as much brass as I could mention on a planet more or less flooded with intelligent nanocolonies of alien metal. I even tipped the hat to zombies, if only in a metaphor. (Calm down. There are no actual zombies in the story. None.)

I read some Verne and Wells before getting down to business, so that my first-person viewpoint character would sound like an educated city man from 1890, and not like the cowboys and farmers who have dominated the drumlins canon so far. Again, I’m not sure yet how well that worked out. We’ll see.

The story needs some cleaning up, some continuity checking, and as much peer review as I can gather in the next couple of days. Cover art is in progress, and if all the streams collide into the same river, we’ll see Drumlin Circus in book form on or before March 27.

Drumlin Pressure Cooker

Feb 27th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

I guess it’s time to at least let you all know that I’m alive, but I’m in death-march mode on Drumlin Circus. In ten minutes I’ll begin writing the action-packed climax, with repeating pistols, flamethrowers, a small hydrogen airship, a self-modifying steam calliope, and the Big Ball of Cesium. Oh, and a few deinotheria, a couple of woolly mammoths, a dire wolf, and all the expected smilodons. And did I mention a coven of witches who don’t believe in magic because they have something better?

This is a collaboration with Jim Strickland, and we intend to have it finished, laid out, and printed by Lulu before AnomalyCon on the 27th. Cover art is on the way, though not having it won’t stop us. (The dog-ear on the cover will say, “Uncorrected Proof” because that’s the standard excuse for slightly overaggressive deadlines. If I hadn’t had the flu for three weeks the damned thing would be done already.)

I’ve written over 8,000 words in the last four days. I have 38,000 words down, and expect the climax to take another 5,000. The story must be finished by 4 PM Wednesday. I expect to make the deadline with difficulty; hell, do you think writing adventures in Victorian diction is easy?

More when I can take a breath.

Accidental Steampunk

Feb 16th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

5,000 words in two days. Wow. I haven’t done fiction at a rate like that since I was wrapping up The Cunning Blood in early 1999. It’s the main reason you haven’t seen me here much recently: I have a hard deadline for a story (this is uncommon; deadlines are for things like computer books and articles) and if I don’t produce at this rate for a little while longer, Drumlin Circus won’t be finished and laid out in time for AnomalyCon in Denver at the end of March. I have 27,200 words down now, out of a target 37,000 – 40,000. That’s heading out of novella territory into the strange turf of short novels, where I’ve never worked before.

But that’s the idea. Ruts are horizons pulled in too close, and I’m trying to push ’em back as much as I can, in as many ways as I can. Those who are familiar with my drumlins stories have gotten comfortable with a sort of Weird Western ambiance, and perhaps a hint of Cowboys & Aliens, except that the aliens are gone to parts unknown, having left all their incomprehensible machinery behind. (I was actually inspired more by Fred Pohl’s Gateway novels, at least in terms of the alien machinery.) So far I’ve focused on the rural and frontier areas of the drumlins planet, but much of Drumlin Circus takes place in the planet’s largest city. There were cowboys aplenty in 1890s Colorado, but out east in 1890s Chicago or 1890s New York, society was radically different.

The Drumlins Saga as a whole is about human castaways on an Earthlike planet who slowly re-create Earth technology and civilization, hoping eventually to repair their starship and return home. They “pass through” stages of technology roughly corresponding to advances in Earth history, and at the time of Drumlin Circus they’re basically gotten to 1890, with steam power and the beginnings of electricity. (The first three Drumlins Saga stories are collected with others in this book. More are planned.)

However, there’s a wildcard: alien machines scattered all over the planet, analogous to 3-D printers with a back-end database of manufacturable parts. Enter a 256-bit binary code, and…something…comes out. Some of these somethings are familiar and useful, some can be repurposed, and some, well, they’re just weird–and maybe dangerous. (Furthermore, there’s a lot of somethings. Do the math.)

So it’s 1890 with a twist.

Drumlin Circus itself recounts a sort of low-level war between a traveling circus and a cultlike research organization called the Bitspace Institute, which is very much a steampunk bad-guys version of the Ralpha Dogs from TCB. The steampunk part wasn’t deliberate, and when I was first defining the Drumlins Saga back in the early 2000’s, I hadn’t read any of the steampunk canon yet. But it’s tough to set a story in an 1890s technological milieu these days and not be accused of steampunking, so at some point I gave up and said, Awright awready. I’m a steampunker. (I’ve even had a top hat since 1999, and you’ve seen this. And this.) I’ll deal with it.

(More tomorrow.)

Snow Witches In Your Area!

Feb 1st, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

I am not completely (or even mostly) recovered, but I decided to get out of bed, put real clothes on, and walk around some today. My chest congestion is lingering even as runny nose and burning eyes improve, and it is possible for a weakened individual to contract hypostatic pneumonia just by lying horizontal in bed for too long.

That all by itself was motivation to stop living in my robe. I am not running any marathons (not when it’s -5F outside) but I’m fighting back the chaos in my inbox and eating real food on a regular basis.

And I was watching Tom Skilling this morning on the WGN cable feed to get a sense for the precedented (I froze my 14-year-old ass in the precedent) but still impressive snowstorm about to descend on Chicago. I found myself paying attention to something I typically ignore: realtime closed captioning. Carol had turned it on last night while she was grinding the Pack’s collective toenails with her very effective but noisy cordless Dremel. Captioning does help in noisy environments, as anyone who’s watched TV in a crowded fitness center will testify.

I soon discovered a wonderful source of found humor. When one of the announcers said, “If you go out in the snow, please dress appropriately!” the caption read IF YOU GO OUT IN THE SNOW PEAS DRESS APPROPRIATELY. Later on we had a Web cam view from POSOLE, OKLAHOMA, where the snow is coming down as thick as…hominy? (I don’t recall what the audio actually said.)

But I laughed until I coughed (not that that’s hard) when the announcer said “…of the snow which is in your area” and the caption read …OF THE SNOW WITCHES IN YOUR AREA.

Eek!

So don’t blame the Jet Stream. Or moist Gulf air. Or global warming. It’s the witches, people. WGN said so. Quick, Aslan, the Flit!

Luck Happens: The Blotter and the Pocketwatch

Jan 23rd, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

A couple of people have asked me where I got the Windows blotter wallpaper discussed and shown in the photo on my January 19, 2011 entry. I stumbled across it while looking for art depicting steampunk airships. Jim Strickland and I have been tossing ideas around for a drumlin airship, and I wanted to see what other people had done in that area. Just clicking around, and alluva sudden I was looking at this. Egad, it’s 1600 X 1200 too–no need for me to do any resizing. If you’re widescreen, you might consider this one instead.

I like blotters. I had a desktop blotter at Borland that was an Ampad Efficiency Deskpad 24-003. It was basically a faux-leather frame surrounding a pad of 17″ X 22″quadrille paper, which I have always liked for sketches and off-the-cuff coding. When Borland laid us off they told me I could have it, since they were just going to dump it (and everything else in my desk) anyway. It’s followed me around ever since, though I’m not sure the quadrille paper for it is available anymore.

The only thing that bothered me about the blotter wallpaper was the pocket watch, which (while well-drawn) was just an image, and always read 3:37. (Days later, I found a version of the blotter wallpaper without the watch.) If the watch had to be there, it had to work. And then I remembered something I had seen a long time ago and forgotten.

There’s a widget engine for Windows called Rainmeter. It was mentioned on one blog or another that I followed back in 2008 or 2009. A widget engine is an app that runs without a conventional windowed UI, and allows you to display frame-less output on your desktop. The widgets are basically skins, and the output can be drawn in easily parameterized ways. There are myriad skins for Rainmeter, and while I was experimenting with it back then I ran across a clock skin called Pocketwatch. It looked a little bit Stickley (as does much else in this house) and I would still have it running had I kept Rainmeter across the last couple of Windows reinstalls. (I did not.)

On a hunch I did the obvious: I took a 6″ steel rule and measured the size of the Pocketwatch widget on the screen, then measured the static pocketwatch image on the blotter wallpaper. The face of one was precisely the same size as the face of the other. (The Pocketwatch skin is the face only; the blotter has the whole pocketwatch.) I quickly installed Rainmeter and Pocketwatch. I centered Pocketwatch over the face of the pocketwatch image, and then un-checked the Draggable setting on Pocketwatch’s context menu. Bang! The watch on my wallpaper now keeps time. All free, too. C’mon, people: What are the chances? Sometimes luck just happens.

Akismet

Dec 9th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

10 comments

I didn’t get much comment spam the first year or so that the main Contra instance was on WordPress. (The LiveJournal instance is a mirror.) I moderate all comments from new commenters, and now that the daily comment spam rate has crept from three or four up past thirty or forty, I figured it was time to do something.

So yesterday morning I installed Akismet, a server-side comment-spam detection plug-in for WordPress that applies a Bayesian signature scheme to incoming comments, and bins the ones it considers spam. Installing it was effortless, and for personal blogs like mine it’s free. (For commercial entities the Akismet service is $60/year.) So far, in about thirty hours it’s identified 80 spammy comments, which remain in the bin so you can scan for false positives if you want. Everything Akismet has fingered so far has proven to be spam. However, I’ve gotten no genuine comments on my WordPress instance since installing it. If you posted (or tried and failed to post) a comment on my WordPress instance today or yesterday, let me know. If nothing is in fact interfering with legitimate comments, this thing is a godsend, and if I sound a little nervous, it’s only that it feels maybe a little too good to be true!

[UPDATE 12/10:] Well, four comments successfully posted, and nothing spammed that shouldn’t be (or not spammed that should have been) suggests that Akismet is a win and I should stop worrying.