writing

Taos Toolbox 2011, Part 2

Jim And Nan Coffee 500 Wide.jpg

(Part 1 here.) The Snow Bear Inn is really a set of ski condos only a quarter mile from one of the Taos Ski Valley lifts. The units are complete apartments including kitchens, some with single bedrooms, some with two. Jim Strickland and I shared a two-bedroom suite. The kitchen was well-equipped; indeed, far better equipped than we needed. It had a separate wine refrigerator, coffee grinder, four-slot toaster, blender, crockpot, and probably a few other things on the high shelf that we never poked at. Food was provided in the common room for tinker-it-up breakfasts and lunches. Four dinners a week were catered in by a local woman who really knew her stuff.

Jim and I quickly fell into a daily routine: I’d be up at 6, showered by 6:15, and shoveling grounds into the coffee maker by 6:30. Jim got up about then, and I’d scramble two eggs for each of us. By 7:30 we were already hard at work unless someone stopped by for coffee, as Nancy Kress did more than once. (See above.) But even with morning visitors, by 8:30 both of us were reading mail and hammering out notes on the manuscripts up for critique later that day.

By 10:00 we were gathered around the conference table in the common area downstairs, and if anybody wasn’t there by precisely 10, Walter would lean out the door and give a blast on the Air Horn of Summoning. This happened rarely; mostly we were all present and ready to roar by 9:45. On most days work began with a lecture by Nancy, followed by a short break and then either two or three stories for critique. Lunch happened as time allowed, often before the third critique but always limited to thirty minutes. The class day wrapped up with a lecture from Walter. At that point, typically between two and three PM, we would shift into edit mode, and begin work on the following day’s critiques and our own second-week submissions. Some worked in the common room. Most of us went back to our own rooms. (Alan Smale preferred to sit with his laptop on a folding chair between the buildings.)

I quickly fell back into college-student mode, taking notes on a quad pad in my frenetic block printing, precisely as I did at DePaul in 1974. By Tuesday July 12 we were definitely into drink-from-the-firehose mode, critiquing first-wave submissions (distributed via email before the workshop began) that ran as long as 11,000 words. Toward midweek we were also working hard on our second-week submissions, which nominally demonstrated what we’d learned in the first few days.

Peter Ed After Dinner.jpg

Dinner was catered in at 6PM every day but Friday. While not exotic, the fare was beautifully prepared, and included barbecued ribs, coconut shrimp, broiled tilapia, grilled steaks, baked chicken breast, home-made potato & egg salad, and lots of other things I may have been too tapped-out mentally to recall. There was always good conversation over dinner (see above: Peter Charron and Ed Rosick) but by 6:45 most of us to our scattered laptops went, continuing work for the following day. I sometimes kept hammering until 8 or 8:30. At that point I was toast and generally gave Carol a call before falling exhausted into bed. There was a little late-night fellowship over bottles of wine down in the common room, but it all happened long after my bedtime.

Some people managed to get the 20-odd miles down the valley to Taos for occasional shopping or touristing, but my old bones preferred to stay put and rest while rest was possible. The impression I want to give here is that this was boggling hard work, and unlike my Clarion experience back in 1973, there was almost no clowning around.

My camera doesn’t do a great job with indoor shots. For a good collection of captured moments from the workshop, see Christie Yant’s Flicker album.

Next: How critiquing worked.

Taos Toolbox 2011, Part 1

Jul 24th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

I got home yesterday afternoon, and the smoke is still coming out of my ears. I haven’t posted here recently because it was all I could do to stay ahead of the coursework and the critique. My friend Jim Strickland described it as “a 500-level course on the art of the novel crammed into two weeks.”

That’s putting it mildly.

What I’m talking about is Walter Jon Williams‘ Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop, which just concluded yesterday morning at the Snow Bear Inn at Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico. The workshop was taught this year by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress, with a guest lecture by Jack Skillingstead. Jim Strickland drove down from Denver Sunday morning and stashed his car in our garage, then joined me in the 4Runner for the 225 miles to Taos. I took my completed steampunk computer table, to which I had grafted the Aethernet Concentrator scant days before we left. Carrying the table, the pipe legs, the Concentrator mast, a Dell GX620 system with 20″ monitor, an ammo can full of tools, plus clothes and a cooler full of food up the stairs from the parking lot took some doing, as we were at 9,800 feet. Mountain geek I may be, but one chases oxygen atoms like fireflies up there.

This is not a workshop for beginners. Jim and I were two of fourteen students, of which I was the oldest. Not one was under thirty. Most of us had already sold one or more short stories, and at least three of us have sold novels. Jim has two novels in print (plus a short Drumlins novel), and astrophysicist Alan Smale was recently nominated for the Sidewise Award for alternate history. Christie Yant is Assistant Editor at Lightspeed Magazine. One had the sense of a mass of talent around the common-room table that could (with just a few more neutrons) go critical.

For two weeks we heard lectures, took notes, discussed the issues, and presented both written and oral critiques of one another’s work. Oh, and sometimes we ate and (more occasionally) slept. When we were not at the big conference table, we were back in our respective lairs, reading manuscripts and hammering on laptops or (like me) larger iron. All told, we each read and critiqued about 200,000 words of material. It took ten days for us to loosen up sufficiently to set aside time to crack a few bottles of wine and a bottle of The Kraken 94-proof dark rum. (This was highly appropriate, as student Jeffrey Petersen had presented a novel starring a giant…flying…squid.) Walter complimented us as being the hardest-working class he’s hosted in several years conducting the workshop. We worked so hard that almost nobody hit the hot tub. By the last day, Nancy Kress herself told the class, “I am just about out of words.”

Words. It was about words. It was about making our words do precisely what we want them to do, and then getting them into the hands of our readers. It was one of the most intellectually challenging things I have ever done. I left emotionally and physically exhausted and am still catching up. It was expensive, but worth every penny. It may have rebooted my career as an SF writer.

More tomorrow.

Drumlin Neologism

Jul 9th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Now that the Copperwood Double #1 (containing Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings by Jim Strickland) has been out there for awhile, people have begun asking me again:

You do know that a “drumlin” is a kind of hill, don’t you? (Yes.)
Whythehell did you call your alien whatchacallits “drumlins”? (Read on.)

Language evolves to meet the needs of ordinary people. When a word doesn’t exist for a new concept, one will show up pretty quickly. Trade names will be genericized (xerox and kleenex are the best examples), wordsmiths will glue two or three things together, sometimes existing but obscure word will be repurposed, and occasionally something brand new will just appear out of nowhere.

SF writers are faced with this problem all the time. Back in the Sixties we assumed that three-dimensional television was just around the corner, and we struggled to come up with snappy terms for the idea. In my very early SF I used “triovision” and (later) “tridiac.” William Tenn’s “teledar” has always been one of my favorites. It has to be short and it has to trip easily off the tongue, or nobody will use it. Utterly invented words are hit and miss: I have long gotten flack for using the (invented) words “snerf,” “gront,” “blik,” and “frot” in stories involving witchery, as in “Whale Meat“; they are terms for difficult-to-describe mental powers that ordinary humans do not have. This was dangerous pre-Google: I innocently thought that I had invented the word “frot” in 1974 but, alas, I had not. (The witch-power later became “zot.”) Schmitz did a lot better with his “Sheewash Drive”, and never explained the origin of the term. Wholly fabricated words like that often sound silly, and work much better in whimsical or outright humorous tales. (Remember “lesnerize“?)

So there I sat in the summer of 2000, working out the details of a new story that I eventually called “Drumlin Boiler.” The concept had been cooking in the back of my head for some time: A starship full of human castaways on an unknown Earthlike planet discover alien machines scattered every few miles across the landscape. Today we might call the alien machines 3D printers or nanofabricators, because they make things: You tap in a 256-bit binary code to the machines’ two control surfaces, and an artifact bubbles up from a wide, shallow bowl filled with gray dust. What would people call the machines? I considered and threw out a number of outright fabrications, none of which I clearly recall. I tried a lot of derivatives, especially compressions of existing terms. “Cornies” was short for “cornucopias,” but it sounded more like breakfast cereal. Pass. Ditto “nanners,” for “nanofabricators.” “Tappers” had a lot more promise, and the alien machines were almost called tappers. I hesitated because the machines were not what was doing the tapping. Ultimately I went with “thingmakers,” because, well, that’s what they did.

I still needed a snappy name for the artifacts that came out of the thingmakers. My first candidate actually won, in a way: “thingies” are what rural people call the devices constructed by the thingmakers, particularly ones with no obvious use. It’s evocative, but it’s also inherently informal. I needed something better, something city people might use as readily as rural people. I had a long brainstorming list, which has perished, but included existing and invented terms like “dusters,” “drigs,” “drins,” and “yaags” (Yet Another Alien Gadget). The short list favorite was “tappit.” About then I got the notion that the two control surfaces would provide feedback with distinct sharp sounds. Adding sound to the images in my mind, what tapping out a code on the thingmaker pillars suggested more than anything else was banging on a set of bongo drums. Drummits? I liked that better. Drummings? Closer to purely descriptive–but somehow it suggested the slightly silly word “dumplings.” Then the word “drumlin” popped into my head. I’ll admit, I had heard the word before but didn’t know crisply what it was. I looked it up. I liked the word a lot. It spoke easily and suggested a thing that came about by drumming. The true definition seemed mighty obscure to me: A teardrop-shaped glacial hill. I figured not one person in fifty would know that.

So I repurposed it.

The word works very well in its new context, and the hills it truly refers to are rare enough so that I don’t think much confusion results. It can act as both a noun and an adjective. I think most people, especially those outside the hiking and skiing communities, probably assume that it’s a neologism.

The Naming of Invented Things is a serious challenge in SFF. I’ve written about it before. It’s about making the un-real not only sound real, but familiar–and it’s way tougher than it looks!

Odd Lots

Jun 28th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Strahinja Markovic, the chap who created the very good Sigil epub editor while he was a CS undergrad, now has a master’s, a good job, and…a life. (How dare he? ) In a recent blog post, he’s asked for prospective maintainers of the code (which is open source) to introduce themselves and make a case to him as to why they should be trusted to carry on the work. He doesn’t know me; I’m just spreading the word, because I use Sigil and I want it to continue to evolve.
We have the same problem with the Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML editor; poor Fabien “Kaz” Cazenave has a new job and very little time to devote to the product. I like Kompozer but it has some rough spots, and I hope someone will take over and keep the wheels turning.
In the meantime, I’ve installed and am testing BlueGriffon, and so far I like what I see. The editor incorporates the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox 4, so if it looks good in BlueGriffon it’ll look good in Firefox. It has HTML5 and CSS3 capability, and an interesting business model: The editor is free, and the developer sells various add-ons. That doesn’t bother me at all; the whole suite of 9 add-ons can currently be had for $35 Euros, or about $50US. If BlueGriffon performs well on my existing Web documents, I’d pay that like a shot, even if I don’t use the add-ons.
As brilliant as the original Turbo Pascal was, it wasn’t alone. From Andrew Stuart comes a link to the deep history of Nick Gammon’s G-Pascal, an enviable piece of assembly-coding work that put a potent Pascal compiler for the Commodore 64 in…16K. If you used G-Pascal back in the 80s, this is a must-see, especially the links at the end, to the sorts of ads and programming newsletters that were the lifeblood of personal programming in the early 80s.
I don’t know if you’ve ever needed an 18″ USB A-B cable, but I did, and after a great deal of looking around, I finally found them at Other World Computing. It’s mostly a Mac shop, but has the short A-B cables for both USB 2 and USB 3. The cable connects the USB hub on my Dell 20″ monitor to the GX620 USFF machine mounted immediately behind it, and keeps cable clutter down behind the monitor.
Little things sometimes matter: The Toshiba Thrive has a full-sized SD card slot. Not micro. This means that I can use the SD cards I already have. A mini-USB adapter will also allow me to use my existing thumb drives. Ports and card slots have been the deal-killer so far on tablet after tablet. This one (though it won’t be in stores until July) still has an edge. (Bill Roper reminded me that I needed to post about this.)
From Smithsonian comes a long and detailed article on what amounts to beer archaeology. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom for the link.)
For those who asked: Simple Simon’s formal name (from my entry for June 26) is Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor, and yes, the acronym was highly deliberate. His robotic factory is the Automated Reprographic Fabrication Facility, and (as you’ll learn in the novel) the project had always been a dog.
WUTZ 4 DINR?

Sampling Yesterday’s Output: Ten Gentle Opportunities

Jun 26th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Getting back from Chicago a few days ago took a fair amount of doing: Our 8:30 PM flight did not take off until 11:45, and when we landed in Denver we called for a shuttle to the hotel. It was 2 AM, and the driver who handled such calls after midnight served a whole list of hotels. Alas, he didn’t know where ours was. He got lost. After half an hour of confused wandering around the wide empty spaces in the vicinity of DIA, a young woman in the first row of the shuttle bus looked up the hotel on her GPS smartphone, touched a button, and held the phone up in the air. The phone then began dictating directions to the hotel right out loud–and the driver, perhaps a little reluctantly, obeyed. Ten minutes later we were at the hotel, though I doubt we were asleep until 3:45 ayem.

It sounds like a story, but no, it really happened. I’ll have to tuck it away for future reference.

In the meantime, I’ll give you a sample of the novel I’m working on, a bit of whimsy involving magic-as-alternate-physics and spells-as-software. It involves a jump between a magical universe and ours. It also involves 2018-era AI, and a robotic copier factory in a town I’ll call Merriam, NY. Here’s a representative 850 words of what came out of the keyboard yesterday:

Simple Simon’s office didn’t look like an office. Simple Simon’s office did not have a desk or a chair. “Simple Simon” had not even been his original name. The space in which he worked was not fully rendered, though there were artifacts here and there, most of them gifts from the painfully earnest Dave Mirecki and the infuriating Dr. Adele Sanderson. Simple Simon removed his five-pointed jester’s cap (which had once had bells, now mercifully deleted) and hung it on the hook beside the door. The lights came up, and Simon was now officially on the job.

To Simon’s perception, his office was a pale blue ellipsoid formed of countless minute polygons, and no matter where he walked within the ellipsoid, he was always at the center of the ellipsoid. Walking was therefore pointless.

So much, so infuriatingly much of the Tooniverse was simply pointless.

Like his costume: a particolored tunic over green tights, and shoes with points that curled up over the toes he didn’t have. They could have dressed him in a business suit like the managers wore, or (better) a polo shirt and khaki slacks like Dave. There had been a time, a comfortable, reasonable time, when he had been an unrendered polygon model like the Kid-until Dr. Sanderson began speaking of “resonances” and “human interface friction.” Dr. Sanderson was not the author of his archetype–that had been Dr. Emil Arenberg, founder of Zircon’s AI division and architect of its AI technology–but rather his Human Interface, what in older times was called his “skin.” She looked at his job, and declared him a jester. It was a metaphor, and wrong, at that. But nobody dared tell her that she was wrong, so they made him look the part.

On the wall hung a framed image containing three words:

Be the metaphor.

It was Dr. Sanderson’s slogan, and (evidently) a direct order. Simon resisted the order with all his might. He was not a jester.

He was a juggler.

“Thirty minutes,” said the Shift Clock. Simon nodded, and took a step backwards. He didn’t move, but the step was significant: All around him on the inner surface of his ellipsoid, Windows appeared and illuminated. Some were Windows to the desks of the humans who supervised the assembly floor, and the engineers who had designed it and were constantly perfecting it. Not all Windows were open. Dr. Sanderson’s was (mercifully) closed, as was Mr. Romero’s. (Ditto.) Dave was there, and waved to him. So did nine or ten others.

Most of the Windows were views of the Floor. 90% of Building 800 was a cavernous hall filled with industrial robots. There were seven-hundred fifty-seven robots in Building 800. Simon knew them all as though they were extensions of his own mind-which they were.

The boundaries between his mind and the building were “soft.” Simon leaned his head back slightly, and relaxed. The optical network channels opened to receive him, and he slipped into them, sending his awareness out to control hubs all over the building. At his touch, each robot on the assembly floor came to fluid life, testing the quality of its communication and the limits of its motion, all the while diagnosing its own condition. Each returned a status to Simon, and with each status signal Simon felt himself growing more and more complete.

The welders pivoted their laser heads down toward their testplates, and fired. Sensors measured the strength and purity of their beams, and responded. Parts bins vibrated and checked for the presence of parts in their chutes. Hydraulic drills spun up and down again, indexing forward and back.

He felt them self-test. He felt them reply. He became one with them. Ready. Ready. Ready. Ready…Ready!

Most critical were the Positioners. Nearly half the robots on the Floor did not wield lasers or wrenches or drills. Their job was to move assemblies and ultimately finished copiers around the Floor. At one time this had been done with motorized rollers and belts. No more. The Positioners were arms, with exquisitely controllable wrists and hands. The hands were coated with foam and equipped with hundreds of minute pressure sensors. Some were only inches wide. The largest had grips six feet across, on hydraulic arms as thick as a human’s thigh.

Together, they implemented Transfer Over Separated Spaces. Parts, assemblies, and finished copiers were not rolled around the building. They were thrown, on minutely calculated paths, each path computed and timed so that a part would arrive precisely when needed, with a Positioner’s hand opened to grip it, slow it, and then hand it to whatever device required the part to continue the assembly process. With the Floor running at full speed, as many as five hundred separate objects were in the air at once. Every single one of them was thrown, and tracked, and caught by the GAI Simple Simon, Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor.

Simon’s smile broadened as the last of the robots responded. Jester, no way. Juggler, yeah.

Sampling Today’s Output: Ten Gentle Opportunities

Jun 4th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Having gotten stuck on The Everything Machine a couple of days ago, I went back to my whimsical novel of magic-as-alternate physics (and spells-as-software), Ten Gentle Opportunities. Sales of my 99c ebook fantasy novelette “Whale Meat” (epub) have been unexpectedly good. You guys want magic? I give you magic: object-oriented magic. Oh, and zombies. Gotta have zombies these days. Here’s a snippet from this morning’s work, which comes immediately after the short piece I posted last Halloween:

Styppkk’s snerf-sense brought him fresh indication that Jrikkjroggmugg was hard at work on something on the other side of the wall. The angry Adamant had his number by now, and would not use any cheap stock spell that could be subverted by a mere Hkkrr.

Quickly, then! Using his left pinkie as a lamp, Styppkk dumped both the material and immaterial contents of one of his many pants pockets on the ground. A zombie activator: basically a quarter of a prtynytty, ground fine and mixed with some blood, bile, and toad stool, all rolled into the payload of a small black-powder bottle rocket. A packet of obedience dust clipped to a packet of etheric intelligence booster might also be useful, assuming the trigger spell wasn’t broken. (Always a risk when you bought cheap magic at Shazam’s Club.) A reputedly unreliable can of generic zombie repellant rounded out the kit; next time he would pay another bkk to get real Zom-B-Gone, and worry less.

Styppkk stuck the little rocket’s bamboo tail into the eyesocket of a nearby skull and struck a match. After a moment for the very short fuse to sizzle, the activator rode a little arc of fire four or five cubits into the noisome air. With a quick pop! it burst, scattering its foul-smelling dust in every direction. Styppkk ran out toward the center of the lychfield, rubbing his hands in anticipation.

Through the twin daggers in the visor of his iron helmet he watched the process begin: little glowing wisps twisting and darting in short motions synchronized to the unheard but deeply felt double beat of the World Heart. Twist-twist and pause, dart-dart and pause, descending and flowing into the stiff bodies lying everywhere around him.

He watched them shudder and stretch, gathering limbs beneath them and shoving away from the ground. The odor in the air changed from the dull, dank smell of stagnation to the sharp reek of rot. In waves radiating out from the center of the lychfield they stood, staggered, and scratched their heads. Those that still had noses raised them, turning to follow the strong scent of magic that surrounded Styppkk. Step by shambling step, they lurched toward him.

Styppkk gave himself a few quick schpritzes with the bargain-bin zombie repellent–head, crotch, and armpits–in case things got a little too cozy. He then picked up a sit-by-nellie spell from the pile of oddments at his feet.

“You guys need something to do,” he said aloud. The spell seemed reasonably well-made and certainly strong enough, somewhere past yellow if not quite green. Styppkk cranked the range up as high as it would go, poked the repeat-until-break spot to set it, and then hit the trigger.

Tapping his teeth together to keep the beat, Styppkk began a hoary old folk dance he’d learned at his cousin’s wedding years ago: Hands out, hands flipped, hands on hips, hands behind head, wiggle butt, jump and turn 90 degrees. All around him the newly animated zombies imitated his every move. He went through it a second time (more slowly, to go easier on decomposing limbs) and then, spinning his middle finger for emphasis, poked the segno.

The auto-arrange property of the spell worked beautifully: In perhaps a score of beats the zombies had spaced themselves equally into a perfectly rectangular constellation of wiggling, writhing doom.

Styppkk had the cover he needed. It was now Jrikkjroggmugg’s move.

Ebooks and Adding Value to the Public Domain

Apr 29th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

I just got our first two Copperwood Press ebooks posted to the Kindle store, and they’re now available for sale: Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings and “Whale Meat.” No DRM. I’m still working with Ingram’s Lightning Source to get the double mounted and sellable in its print edition. It won’t be available from Lulu, and over time I will be migrating my other print books from Lulu to Lightning. Learning their relatively unforgiving system the first time involves a little hair-tearing, but once learned it’s learned.

There’s certainly plenty to do in coming months to get the rest of my material converted to good ebooks and posted on the major retailers. One issue I’ve found troubling for some months now is the ambiguity regarding public domain material. Both B&N and Amazon make a big deal about whether a work is in the public domain. PD titles get lower royalty rates and just generally seem libri non grati on the retailer sites. This isn’t surprising in some ways. The retailers are trying to avoid having 2,774 versions of The War of the Worlds on their servers, taking up space and confusing the readership. The definition of “public domain” varies legally by country, and what may be free in Australia or Chile is not necessary free here. So they do have to be careful on the rights front.

The issue matters to me because of The Old Catholic Studies Series, a project that I’ve been tinkering for ten years now. The goal was to scan, OCR, edit, and lay out clean, indexed versions of the foundational texts of Old Catholicism so that people wouldn’t have to pay $200 to read yellowed, crumbly, scribbled-in books printed in 1874. I have two such texts currently available in print editions: The New Reformation and The Pope and the Council. They were a lot of work, but they’ve sold reasonably well, and I consider the effort worthwhile. (It was also damned good practice in making books.) Not a lot of people want them, but the people who do want them have been very happy with them. I would have done another two or three, but John Mabry’s Apocryphile Press got there ahead of me, and put out facsimile print editions of the other major works I had considered. I prefer new layouts to facsimile editions, but Apocryphile’s scans are fairly clean and I do recommend them.

It’s true that the source materials are long in the public domain (which at least in the US includes all books published before 1923) but technically, what I’m offering are derivative works. I scanned them, page by page, OCRed them to extract the text, and then went over the text character by character to eliminate OCR errors. (Some were a hoot: “The Frankish King Pepin…” became “The Prankish King Pepin…”) The books were not indexed, and I indexed them. I fixed a few typos (especially in The Pope and the Council, which was a hurried English translation of a work written originally in German) and Americanized the British spelling. Although I don’t claim to have done a copy edit on either book, I fixed a number of examples of what I consider regrettable diction. I wrote an introduction explaining what I did and how. I gave them nice covers. If I had another hundred years to live and no need to make a living, I would do a strong edit on both.

By any legal definition what I’ve produced are derivative works that are not themselves in the public domain. That said, anybody who took an OCR of The War of the Worlds and changed three words could make the same claim, and if enough people do that, the noise level at ebook retailer sites would go through the roof. Nobody’s PD ebooks would sell well enough for it to make anything like a reasonable new edition of any PD book worthwhile.

I don’t know precisely what the answer is. Vetting tens of thousands of $2.99 ebooks is a labor-intensive business, and what sorts of standards would apply? Refusing facsimile editions is obvious and easy, but I doubt anyone would even try to read 50MB page-image PDF facsimiles on a Kindle. (On the Nook Color it might be practical; grab something 1875-ish from Google Books and let me know!) A better suggestion might be to require an up-front payment from publishers for posting anything either fully in the public domain or significantly derived from the public domain. That would cut down on bothouse publications and allow people like me to genuinely add value to public domain material without drowning in unmodifed or barely modified PD books. I’d think $25 would be about right. My books would earn that back in a month or six weeks, and the bothouses couldn’t justify it.

It’s not often that I’d willingly ask to have my own costs raised, but publishing has always been a weird business, and sometimes, well, free is less than worthless.

Daywander

Apr 18th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

13 comments

It’s half-past April. Do you know where your seasons are?

One of ours is missing. My nephew Brian and I woke up this morning to find a blanket of snow on Alles Street, and while Carol out in Crystal Lake reported less, it seems like everybody in greater Chicago got whitened sometime during the night.

So it was a good day to stay inside and continue my ongoing struggle with malformed epubs. I created a number of them a few years back when the epub format was new and the tools barely past primordial, and I’ve been meaning to fix their innards for awhile now. The tools are better these days. One I upgraded just this morning was Sigil, a (mostly) WYSIWYG editor designed specifically for epub-formatted ebooks. Version 0.3.4 (released March 8, 2011) is a huge improvement on 0.2.1, which I’d been using for some time, and if you haven’t upgraded yet, go for it.

Sigil 0.3.4 provided my first look at FlightCrew, an epub format validator created by the Sigil team to do a better job of what the EPubCheck utility does: Test to see if an EPub file is intact, structurally complete, and internally consistent. FlightCrew is installed with Sigil and can be invoked by clicking a button in the Sigil UI. It detects more problems than EPubCheck does, and will tell you things like whether a graphics object shown in the manifest is unreferenced, and whether any essential element of the document is missing. (For some reason, my older epubs had no <language> element, which FlightCrew caught instantly–and then Sigil fixed automatically.) Passing FlightCrew does not mean your epub file is perfect, but it does mean that it will probably render correctly in any epub reader written with half a brain.

Sigil is a good first step toward pure WYSIWYG epub development, and it still has a code view for things not yet doable from the GUI, or imported from an old or incompetent editor. I’m still fooling with my epub edition of Willibald Beyschlag’s The Origin and Development of the Old Catholic Movement 1870-1897, but it now passes FlightCrew and I should post it sometime in the next few days. Better news is that I got my epub of “Whale Meat” clean enough to make available on the B&N Nook store, where you can find it for 99c. The first Copperwood Double went live there today as well, and I’ll have a lot more to say about the project once the book is available on Kindle and in print, which should be within a week or so.

This is my first foray onto the Nook store (with Kindle coming up next) and I will say that the B&N PubIt system was trivial to figure out and use. It does come with some small weirdnesses: The book description and author bio fields for the Nook store give you no way to italicize, so if you mention your other books, you either have to uppercase them or just live with un-italicized titles. There’s also a check box for specifying when an ebook is public domain material, but B&N doesn’t make any distinction between works in the public domain and works derived from public domain sources. Beyschlag’s original article is in the public domain, but I’ve done some edits to make it read more easily, and I would like to retain copyright on the edited text. (This is legal and there’s nothing dicey about it.) I guess it’s not an issue of huge importance, especially if I don’t charge for it.

One thing I looked at today that I don’t recommend is NookStudy. It’s an app for Windows and Mac that establishes a 180-day rental market for ebook textbooks. There is no iPad nor Android version. The app is basically a DRM wrapper for Adobe Digital Editions, and to even install it you have to have an Adobe account. NookStudy ties rented textbooks to specific computers (a maximum of two), not to a user ID, and if you need to change out a computer, you have to do all the legendary begging and pleading that you have to do to move Adobe’s Creative Suite to a new system. Worse, when the 180-day rental period expires, all your marginal notes vanish with the textbook itself. Sniffing around online shows that almost no one is happy with the system, which is a buggy and extremely limited way to use some very expensive ebooks. (The rentals are about the cost of a used copy of the printed book.) It’s not usable outside the US because of longstanding geographic rights issues that plague many areas of book publishing. Publishers are obviously terrified of what ebooks might do to the textbook industry, and in consequence, NookStudy is 40% barbed wire by weight–and made me glad I graduated 37 years ago, when textbooks were printed on rugged stuff and would last forever.

The Terror of Customer Expectations

Apr 5th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

As I’ve said any number of times, I loathe DRM and have since I first understood what it was. My reasons are these:

It makes content delivery systems fragile. DRM adds complexity to a system, and by its nature is constantly looking for a reason to cut people off. Jerry Pournelle made this point at least 30 years ago, when DRM was “copy protection” and floppies ruled the world.
DRM inconveniences paying users and does very little (if anything) to stop piracy. Because…
A DRM system only needs to be broken once. A single very bright individual (or a small cadre of them) figures out the crack, then wraps it up in a script or a simple utility that any fool can use. Bruce Schneier made this point at least twenty years ago.
DRM often ties content to one single company, generally through some kind of Internet permissions system. If that company goes under, DRMed content can become unavailable.
Related to the above: DRM often (admittedly, not always) ties content to a single device or family of devices. Users who want to move to a different content rendering system can lose everything they’ve paid for.
Very Large Companies Run By Comittees Of Clueless Egotists (VLCRBCOCEs) forget that the ultimate goal is to curry favor with customers so as to sell them stuff, and allow the pursuit of DRM to make them do really stupid things. Google “sony rootkit” to see how that works. Oh, and Amazon’s private dustup with the 1984 rightholders that led them to “repossess” books right off customer Kindles.
Consequences of much or all of the above: DRM turns paying customers into pirates. Piss off honest customers a few times, and they’ll start looking on the pirate sites before heading over to your online bookstore.

In short, DRM creates an adversarial relationship between content providers and content purchasers that benefits neither side. As a publisher, I have promised never to force it on my readers.

Which brings us to today’s issue: What happens when online stores force DRM on me? Jim Strickland and I are preparing ebook editions of all our SF, and as time allows I’m going to do the same for my Carl & Jerry books, and even the Old Catholic Studies Series. It’s not news, and certainly not news to me, but we’ve had to confront the fact that Apple forces DRM on book publishers who want access to its store. Jim and I will probably go along, and think of a clever way to get unencumbered epubs to paying iBooks customers.

I don’t know what that clever way will be yet, but you’ll hear more about it as we figure it out. In the meantime, it’s a headscratcher: Why the hell would Apple do this? I’ve been sniffing around and there’s no clear answer. Some think it’s because Apple owns the DRM technology (FairPlay) and it’s in their interest to sell books with FairPlay gunked to them. I doubt that it’s true (it’s like paying yourself for something you already own) and given that you can download bookstore apps from other vendors to iOS, encumbered ebooks are at a competitive disadvantage, right there on Apple’s home turf. (Amazon allows unencumbered ebooks on Kindle.)

If I had to guess, it would be this: One or more VLCRBCOCEs in the print publishing industry, as part of their deals with Apple, demanded that everybody selling on iBooks must be required to use DRM–or no deal. What’s really at stake are customer expectations. Big Print is in a panic over ebook pricing to begin with, as we learned a year or so ago when Amazon and Macmillan jumped down one another’s throats. Macmillan didn’t want Amazon to “train” customers to think that ebooks should cost $9.99. (I was on Macmillan’s side that time, though for a different reason: If they jack their ebook prices up to the sky, I can undercut them much more easily. Amazon, please let publishers control their own pricing–especially huge, clueless, suicidal publishers.) In this case, Big Print doesn’t want customers to think of unencumbered ebooks as normal and expected, and DRM-encumbered ebooks as undesirable anomalies.

That particular war has already been lost, pretty much. Conventional wisdom among the tech savvy is that DRM is bad, and few of the indies use it. Nontechnical ebook buyers will figure it out when they decide to move to another reader system and can’t take their purchases with them. (The ebook business is so new that most people are still on their first reader and their first forty or fifty ebooks.) The day will come in the next few years when Big Print will be a lot less big, and competing against a lot more ebook publishers who have long understood that DRM does no one any good.

And price expectations, egad. $9.99 is so 2010. Many independent publishers now think that $3.99 or even $2.99 is the new normal. Furthermore, Amazon is now worried about yet another price point–99c!–at which their own ebook business model becomes unsustainable. Ebook pricing is still a huge imponderable, and I don’t (yet) have much useful to say about it. I hope to have some real data for you by this time next year.

Do I have proof that Apple was railroaded by Big Print into requiring DRM from all comers? No. But it makes sense to me: Apple didn’t have the negotiating leverage that Amazon or B&N had. If they get bigger, things may change. And if they don’t get bigger, it may be because everybody else, and especially the indies, is eating their lunch. Either way, for weal or woe, Big Print is in trouble, and therein lie many more entries that I hope to write in the near future.

Daywander

Mar 31st, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Well, it’s the end of a long March, either way you want to see it, and finally we’re starting to get a little weather I’d consider springish. Old Dan Beard had this at the start of the kites chapter in his Outdoor Handy Book (1900):

Though marble time can’t always last,
Though time for spinning tops is past,
The winds of March blow kite time here,
And April Fool’s Day, too, draw near.

The winds of March were way too strong for any kite I have in the house–they were shoving my 200-pound gas grill all over the back deck and making my fireplace vent pipe sing like Lady Gaga–so here’s hoping April calms down a little and I can get something in the air again.

And on the air, too: For the first time in six or seven years I’ve been seeing daily sunspot counts (not smoothed sunspot numbers) greater than 100. Here and there midafternoon I’ve actually heard human voices on 15 and even 10 meters. Time to get the inverted vee off the shelf and set it up off the back deck again.

The long march this March was getting a new book produced in cooperation with Jim Strickland. I haven’t said much about it because I want it to be available before I start talking it up too much, but we’re finalizing the cover art and getting the ebook versions prepared, looking toward a launch on or about April 15. We read from the book (which consists of two short novels) at Anomaly Con last weekend. I hadn’t read publicly from my own fiction since the mid-80s, specifically at a 1984 SF event at SUNY Brockport where I read one of my stories (“Marlowe”) between Nancy Kress and Norman Spinrad. (No pressure!) I need to work on my presentation skills, which were honed in eighth grade, when I was chosen to be one of the readers for the daily morning masses at Immaculate Conception grade school. Carol critiqued me prior to the con, and suggested that I strive to make Drumlin Circus sound a little less like Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians.

If I didn’t intend to make all of my work available in ebook form before, I certainly did yesterday, after finally getting a little hands-on time with the Motorola Xoom at the Verizon kiosk at Chapel Hills Mall. Unlike the Galaxy Tab (which I briefly groped a few months ago) the Xoom has an ebook reader demo, and I spent a minute reading Jane Austen on its very crisp display. I would like to have loaded a technical PDF, but the Xoom’s XD card slot isn’t (yet) recognized by the OS, and that will keep me from pulling the trigger right now. My former collaborator Joli Ballew (Degunking Windows) is much of the way through a Xoom book, and she thinks that the XD slot issue (and a few other loose ends) will be corrected by summer. Let us pray.

And triggers, yeah. One of the most popular events at Anomaly was a do-it-yourself maker session for building steampunk ray guns. Pete Albrecht sent me a note about a whole category of real-world firearms that has a certain steampunk whiff about it: free pistols, which are highly evolved single-shot .22 caliber handguns designed and often hand-crafted to excel at target accuracy. They must be held in one hand only, and aimed using purely mechanical (i.e., metal) sights. The outlandish-looking wooden grips are designed to enclosed the entire hand for maximum stability, and are often sculpted specifically for a single competitor’s hand. The idea is to sink 60 rounds into the two-inch center of a target at fifty meters, each round loaded by hand and all within two hours. The sport is very old and was practiced in the Victorian era, so it has a steampunk pedigree, at least, even if the machinery is inescapably high-tech.

Much remains to be done here. The SF portions of my Web presence haven’t been touched since the release of The Cunning Blood in 2005, and need to be completely rewritten. The goal is to mount something useful on hardsf.com, a domain I’ve owned for over ten years without ever quite deciding what to do with it. I’m sure I’ll think of something.