- I don’t think I’ve announced it broadly yet, but I am now agented, for both fiction and nonfiction. Either is a first for me, and it may make any number of things better on the writing side.
- This isn’t glaciation, obviously, but having been researching the coming Ice Age for a year or so now in the service of a Neanderthals novel, I was riveted: A calf-deep wave of ice fragments advances across the land like a cross between Jack Frost and The Blob.
- One way to solve the Raspberry Pi stuttering keyboard problem is to use a wireless keyboard/mouse set. The one I have (the Logitech MK520) works beautifully. Stutter gone. (The high road, of course, is to power everything, including the RPi itself, from a wireless hub.)
- Microsoft has offered B&N $1B for the entire Nook business, including the readers and all facets of the B&N store. This says a lot less about Microsoft than it says about B&N–none of it good.
- Here’s an inside look at a dedicated bitcoin mining machine. Now, could the same box mount a brute force attack against password hashes?
- A bunch of do-it-yourself Muppets present ten reasons why time travel is no good.
- I’ve discovered a spectacular new cheese: Uniekaas Black Label 3-year-old gouda. (Scroll down.) Bears about as much resemblance to the gouda I knew as a Porsche does to a Trabant. Pair it with any dry red; I’ve had it with Middle Sister Rebel Red and Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel. Actually, it pairs well with Real Sangria. Or, for that matter, whole milk. Sheesh, even dead air. We get it at Whole Foods. Try it.
- Still another voice calling for an end to team sports in schools. Team sports are how we teach high schoolers that alpha males can do whatever they want to the people below them on their ill-begotten ladders.
- Want another reason? The most highly paid state employees in nearly all states are…college sports coaches. And we all know how “college” college sports are.
- Watch out, Colorado. Here come the pot machines.
writing
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Yes, I am now writing a Raspberry Pi programming book. Details to come.
- While I do, I’ll be scoping out my next novel. Hard SF, oboy yes. One possibility is something I call Fire Drill, about what happens when you’re mining the moon for nickel-iron and you hit gold. The other, hmmm, let me give you a hint: “Well, hello, Mr. Sangruse! How nice of you to drop in. Please stay awhile. My name is Oscar, and I am a…beautiful…thing.”
- This is why I am very careful about “liking” things on Facebook, particularly memes and idiotic quizzes like “What word for ‘moron’ has two ‘o’s?” It’s all about helping somebody else make money. No thanks. (But yes thanks to Marty Coady for the link.)
- And here’s another item about “like farming.” If I don’t share that photo you’ve posted, it’s not just because I think that Facebook memes make you look like an idiot. (Most of them do.) It’s because you’ve basically sold yourself to someone you don’t even know. (Thanks to Julian Bucknall for the link.)
- From the Governments-Are-Idiots-Squared Department: The city of Provo Utah is going to sell its fiber-to-the-home network to Google…except that nobody kept any records of where the fiber is buried.
- Cripes, guys. I don’t want to run out of energy, and neither do you. If you’re going to crap on nuclear power, you’re gonna be stuck with hydrocarbons. And they won’t run out anywhere near as soon as you think. Live with it.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: churnalism, the practice of publishing press releases verbatim.
- Steampunk short ribs, all the way around! (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
- From the same site: Like Mr. Bigweld said, see a need, fill a need!
- Multiple long-term studies seem to indicate that the way to live a long life is to be conscientious and organized. Well, one of out two ain’t bad.
- Southerners may be no fatter than northerners. They just don’t seem as inclined to lie about it.
- Some dads build their kids playhouses. Some of these playhouses look like spaceships. Shades of the Silvercup Rocket. The bigger kids dream, the better their smaller dreams will come true. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Yet another reason that Woodrow Wilson was the most evil president the Republic has ever had.
Novel Compression Schemes
I’ve been selling my writing professionally since I was an undergrad, now literally forty years ago. I’ve had to do remarkably little selling. My first story and first article both sold to the first places I sent them. I’ve never had a publisher turn down a computer book proposal. (Granted that selling books to a publisher you co-own is rarely a challenge.) My fiction has been a mixed bag, but in general a story either sells quickly or not at all.
All changed. This is the toughest market for novel-length SFF since, well, forever. I’ve just spent two years writing Ten Gentle Opportunities, and now the selling begins. This is a new thing for me. I’ve historically considered tireless self-promoters to be tiresome self-promoters, and now I are one. I hate to go that way, and if there were another way I’d already be taking it.
It begins this weekend, when I have a chance to pitch to a major SF publisher at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference. The pitch happens in a time slot literally eight minutes long. I have eight minutes to make a bleary editor hungry to read my book. No pressure.
The primary challenge is to summarize the novel in synopses of various sizes, from 5,000 words down to…140 characters. Various markets and agents prefer synopses of various sizes, so they’d all better be right there on the shelf, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
This is harder than it looks; nay, it’s diabolical. The story itself is insanely complicated to begin with: One of my beta testers described it as “a Marx Brothers movie with twice as many Marx Brothers.” That’s just how I write, as anyone who’s read The Cunning Blood will understand. I have a mortal fear of not giving my readers their money’s worth, and a venial fear of being boring.
The way to write synopses of five different lengths is to start with the longest one, and write each one from scratch. In other words, don’t write the longest one and then try to cut it down to the next smaller size. This is like trying to turn hexacontane into propane by pulling carbon atoms randomly out of the middle; sooner or later the molecule has too many holes and falls apart.
It’s work, but it works. I finished the 300-word synopsis earlier this morning, and then set my hand to the gnarliest task of all: the “elevator pitch,” AKA logline. I get to summarize a manic 94,200 word story into 140 characters. I’ve actually been trying and failing to nail this for literally six months, since I finished the first draft. I first thought it would be easy, as I used to write cover copy for early Coriolis books. Heh.
The solution, as I said, is to start from the beginning. Each time I wrote a synopsis from scratch, I was forced to take two more steps up the ladder, and look down at the story from a little more height. You literally tell it again, each time with half the words you had last time. In the process, you get a clearer sense for what the story is about, and what the major themes are. Finally you end up with something you can say in an elevator between two adjacent floors:
A spellbender flees to our world with ten stolen nuggets of magic, and a crew of AIs helps him battle a repo spirit sent to retrieve him.
Will this work? Dunno. I guess I’ll find out this weekend.
Odd Lots
- It’s not cinder blocks, but something altogether more boggling: a pair of quadricopters tossing a pole to one another, catching it, and balancing it like I used to do with rakes, only way better. (Thanks to Bill Higgins for the link. )
- Salon can’t seem to decide if self-publishing makes sense, or if it doesn’t.
- 10 thoroughly obscure terms, of which I knew 7–which makes me a bit of a language geek. I knew everything but “pataphor,” “isograms,” and “capitonym.” I suspect those are relatively recent coinages, compared to “zeugma.” (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.”
- NPR: Kids who drink whole milk are thinner than kids who drink skim milk. Fat makes you thin. Carbs make you fat. The evidence just keeps on a-pilin’.
- It gets worse: Life extension by calorie restriction doesn’t work. Starving yourself doesn’t make you thin, doesn’t make you live longer, and beyond the continuous suffering it entails, may make you so unpleasant to be around that people will run when they see you coming.
- Related: From the Terms I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: The second meal effect : The glycemic index of the food eaten at any given meal will affect blood glucose levels at subsequent meals as well. Eating low-GI all the time may be necessary to keep your blood sugar in line.
- And while I’m being a party pooper: Why restaurants make you fat. Carol and I make a point of not eating out more than once a week. In a lot of months, we have a sit-down restaurant meal maybe twice.
- People think that food labeled “organic” tastes better. It’s supposed to, therefore it must, I guess. (I drink organic dairy products to avoid hormones; beyond that, it’s case by case.)
- As if we didn’t have enough to worry about these days, H7N9 may get airborne.
- Web publishing favors cats. Print publishing favors dogs.
- The latest Nuts & Volts (April 2013) has a cover story on a modern reconception of the classic AM low-power broadcaster, using a 12K5 space charge tube. The twist is that the broadcaster is fed by an Arduino board called VoiceShield, which can generate all sorts of audio signals.
- From Kent Kotal: Behold the 20 richest musicians of all time. Note that the richest one is not a rock star.
- Also from Kent: Chicago radio legend Clark Weber will be doing on-the-air commentaries on WIND-AM. Clark is also a ham radio op (W9FFB) and I contacted him a few times back in the late 70s while I still lived in Chicago.
- For a trifling $44M, you can live in the fortress of Roman Emperor Tiberius. My only concern: If it’s haunted, it’s gonna be way haunted. (See Tacitus, Annals V1.) Thanks to Steve Sayre for the link.
Odd Lots
- This Easter, automate your Easter-egg rituals with an open-source egg-drawing robot.
- Here’s more on the comet that may hit Mars in October 2014. Whether it hits Mars or not, that comet will come mighty close, and from here it could be a fascinating show indeed.
- Walter Jon Williams is still taking applications for his Taos Toolbox SF/fantasy writers’ workshop. I attended in 2011 and it was spectacular . (I didn’t finish the Contra series because my house almost blew up. However, I wrote a little more here.) Powerfully recommended.
- OMG! Jeff Bezos has invented mainframes!
- George Mason University has an elaborate 50-state ranking on freedom, broken out by category and pulled together by color-coded maps of the states.
- Wikipedia has a nice chart indicating the colors given off by various gases when used in gas-discharge lamps.
- People are still making cantennas to throw their microwaves a little more sharply in one direction, but here’s a cantenna that isn’t a waveguide. (Watch those edges!) Hacker Dave Mirecki builds something similar but much larger using foil-backed duct insulation, in Ten Gentle Opportunities.
- Here’s how a strike that essentially shut down the American music industry allowed unconventional (and largely non-white) music to rise to public prominence.
- Once people begin making dieselpunk keyboards, will dieselpunk itself move from being a blip to being a trend?
- Shop carefully, lest you choke on a banana bone.
Odd Lots
- Egad. No, egad squared: A major literary agency has asked to see the full manuscript of Ten Gentle Opportunities. The novel is done, but I still have to format it for submission and write the synopsis and logline. I’m going to be busy for a few days, that is fersure.
- IBM is taking a new slant on fluidic computers, one that operates via charged fluids. The hope is that this will allow better modeling of human brain operation. I’m skeptical, but hey, it’s a species of nanocomputer, and I’m certainly bullish on those. (Thanks to Mike Reith for the link.)
- If anybody reading this has a 3D printer, I’d like to ask: Does the extruded plastic stick to clean copper-clad PCB stock? The obvious idea is to lay down a single-slice pattern in the form of PC pads and then etch the board with the plastic as resist. I don’t see much about this online.
- From Chris Gerrib: How American radio stations got their call signs. One minor refinement: US callsigns beginning with AAA-ALZ and NAA to NZZ are not exclusively military. Amateur radio callsigns have used those prefixes for at least 35 years. (An OTA friend of mine outside Chicago got his Extra and selected AA9J as his call in, I think, 1976.)
- People always seem to be recording meteors on dash cameras. I now have a dash camera. If I put it on my dash, will I see a meteor? Or will I get my money back? (Whoops. Found it in the bushes. All finds final. No refunds.)
- Speaking of dash cameras: The manufacturer of the little sports camera I found in my bushes issued a DMCA takedown notice to a reviewer, on trademark grounds. (The DMCA has nothing to do with trademark abuse.) Hey, GoPro, Barbra is singing. Backtracking about the blunder will not help you. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for alerting me to this.)
- Salads are way more dangerous than hamburgers. Alas, you can’t grill salad until it’s done to the center.
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a story about how a Medieval copyist’s cat peed on his manuscript. The scribe drew a peeing cat on the damaged section, with an appropriate curse in Latin.
- And we think we have a junk DNA problem: Amoeba proteus has 290 billion (yes, billion) base pairs in its genome, as compared to homo sap’s piddling 2.9 billion.
- The reason all of us baby boomers didn’t die as grade schoolers may be that none of us lived in rich-guy gonzo-modern homes like these. (Why did I think that these houses were designed to ernhance estate tax revenues?)
The War on “Moist”
I have heard the angry voices (particularly God’s and Stephen King’s–or maybe it was just Stephen King’s) raised against the spreading curse of words that end in -ly, with particular emphasis on dastardly constructs like “only” and “early.” Today, for the first time, I’ve seen lexical blood spilled on a new front, against the horror of the word people are said to revile above all others…
…moist.
Well. I’m a cultured individual, long steeped in the ways of the world, and no stranger to the pleasures of the mind and the senses. I have tasted anchovies. I have drunk sweet wine. I have read Barry Malzberg. I have danced the Invisible Horse Dance with my nieces and nephews. I have cocked an ear to what was either interstellar noise or leaky capacitors. I have gazed upon the jade sculpture on my tall bookcase until I became…well, you know what I became. I signed up once to pet a naked mole rat, but the line was too long and we had to go home. Genuine WTF moments have gotten thin in this, the seventh decade of my life. But the war on “moist” caught me up short.
I thought it was the primary virtue of cakes. If not, well, what do you call a cake that isn’t dry? Wet? Damp? Sodden? Moldy? (HuffPo takes on this crucial question with elan.)
I see that this is nothing new. The war on “moist” began a long time ago, at least as long ago as 2009. I missed it somehow. The Colorado Springs Gazette did not run the story under a 500-point rendering of “WAR!” Nobody mentioned it on Slashdot, nor Ars Technica, which posts on lots of things it knows nothing about. The war on hated words was highlighted in the New Yorker in 2012, and while there was a long line leading to the word gallows (with “phlegm” and “fecund” fidgeting while waiting their turn) the word eye-to-eye with the Lord High Executioner was “moist.” Men who use the word “moist” are undateable. There is even a Facebook group called “I HATE the word MOIST!” (Well, that certainly nails it.)
So what’s the deal?
The question came up recently on the Facebook wall of a writer friend of mine. A woman whom I don’t know explained: “Just imagine your 65-year-old mother reading it aloud as she reaches a pivotal sex scene in a romance novel. Enough said.”
Enough indeed, especially if you knew my mother, who would be 88 this year if she were still with us. She spent a considerable chunk of her life keeping parts of her house from becoming a little too moist with spilled milk, dog vomit, and thrown cream-of-mushroom mushrooms, which are moist squared. I’m guessing she didn’t have to read sex scenes aloud to be moist-averse. Small children and dogs were plenty.
My view? This has already gone too far. The word “moist” has not been seen in actual use in several months, though many have spoken passionately about it. Alas, its parents “most” and “mist” have unearthed a suicide note. We bludgeoned it, we drew and quartered it, we broke it on Little Orphan Annie’s code wheel, and we mopped up the gore with a towelette. We will not have “moist” to push around anymore. Who will be next? Who? Who?
The New Yorker says: “Slacks.”
I’m in.
Odd Lots
- I just finished writing an SF novel (now in the final polishing stage) that postulates robots who throw things so precisely that there is no longer a need for assembly lines. Everything the factory deals with (parts, subsystems, finished items) are thrown from one place on the floor to another. The well-known Big Dog robot recently learned how to throw cinder blocks thirty feet. Once two can play catch with cinder blocks, I’ll call it a score.
- March Madness, Pope-style. In my unfinished (still) novel Old Catholics, Benedict’s successor is a reactionary Brazilian. Following the Brazilian is Chicago’s Cardinal Peter Paul Luchetti, born in Rome, New York…making him Malachy’s Peter the Roman. Now Benedict has gone and messed up the sequence by resigning before I could get that story into print.
- More pope-related tinfoil-hat stuff: There was no Pope John XX. Could Pope John XX have been Pope Joan? We later made up for the John shortage by having two Pope John XXIIIs. Alas, the first one was a pirate and a highwayman, and had committed every sin we knew about at the time. We call him an antipope, but the papacy was such a mess in 1410 that he had as good a claim as anybody. Fortunately, the second Pope John XXIII was arguably the best pope who ever lived. Funny how that works.
- This may not pass, but a law limiting the ability of non-practicing patent trolls to extort risk-free would be a damned fine first step in patent reform.
- Finally, a useful infographic: How long food lasts at room temps, in the fridge, or in the freezer. I didn’t know you’re not supposed to freeze potatoes.
- I used to think I was nuts for seeing faces in random patterns on our textured walls. Maybe not. We’re good at recognizing faces, which suggests that if a pattern can be turned into a face by our mental machinery, it will. Here’s even more.
- In the spring of 1970, I bought a novelty gas discharge bulb at a headshop (Sunny’s, at Harlem & Foster in Chicago) and built a little lamp around it for Carol. The bulb was an Aerolux bulb, and here’s a site giving the product history and some examples. The sixth image (purple swallow amidst green foliage) is the exact bulb I used.
- While looking around at other uses of the word “drumlin,” I ran across a current pop song from Two-Door Cinema Club. I’m willing to guess that it’s the only Billboard-charted song containing the word, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
Score! The Phone-Inside-A-Tablet Concept, Now From ASUS
I don’t know where my ideas come from, so don’t ask. However, I do get ideas. Most of them come to nothing. Every now and again, however, I score.
Back at Clarion in 1973, I wrote an otherwise dorky novelette entitled “But Will They Come When You Do Call For Them?” in which I predicted something very like the World-Wide Web. It was over twenty years later that I realized I’d been scooped by H. G. Wells, who published his idea of the World Brain in 1937. (I’d never heard of the World Brain until I read about it on…the Web.) Hey, if you’re gonna get scooped, get scooped by the best.
In 1993, I got an idea for something I called The All Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything. It came out of the Information Superhighway fever (remember that?) and did not postulate HTTP, which was a new and obscure protocol at the time I was doing my research. Functionally, however, it was Wikipedia, or at least Wikipedia minus its idiotic Not Notable fetish.
Jim Strickland told me that I came very close to describing Second Life three years before it went live, with my “RAD Mars” concept piece in the final issue of Visual Developer. I think there were other stabs at that concept abroad at the time, so I don’t consider it as big a score. Still, it’s a score.
Which brings us to a news item I ran across this morning while I was scanning the World Brain. (Or the Universal Data Engineering Project, as I had more humbly named it in 1973.) ASUS has unveiled the Padfone 2, a smartphone that plugs into a 10″ “dumb” tablet. Pull that animation around–it’s very cool. The PadFone 2 is the newest rev of a product announced last spring that I missed somehow. (2012 was the second-worst year of my life. I missed a lot.) Here’s another detailed description from Engadget. The ASUS PadFone product line is the first real-world stab at a concept I described here on Contra back in 2008. That was in the thick of the netbook era, post-Kindle but pre-iPad, and the notion of a general-purpose touchscreen tablet was still obscure. What I wanted was a dockable display into which my smartphone plugged, with storage and network communications on the smartphone. And dayum if that isn’t more or less precisely what ASUS offers in the PadFone.
So forgive me if I sound like I’m gloating. I’m gloating. This may be the most accurate technology prediction I’ve ever made, and I made it almost five years ago.
Back in 2008 I considered patenting the idea, but only briefly. A patent would have cost me $10,000 and more time than I had to spare right then. Worse, I consider the idea only half a notch more than obvious, and when people patent the obvious it makes my blood boil.
I am a big fan of ASUS, and I own a much-loved and much-used Transformer Prime. I wish them no ill, but guys, put that patent application down. I thought of it five years ago.
Does Steampunk Really Humanize Our Gadgets?
Bill Cherepy (and a couple of others since) sent me an interesting link to a piece on Boing Boing arguing (I think) that steampunk makes our gadgets more human. It’s a headscratcher, since I don’t think the article text supports the author’s contention. However, it’s an idea worth some thought. I actually agree, if for different reasons:
- Steampunk gadgets are comprehensible. Most of the tech in our modern phones and computers is black art, even to guys like me with considerable background in electronics. Electric, mechanical, and chemical tech circa 1900 was accessible to anyone with an ounce of brains and some willingness to study.
- Steampunk gadgets are reproduceable. At home. In your basement. Sure, it would take a little research and pratice, but with nothing more exotic than a lathe and basic chemistry gear you could build most of what we connect with steampunking. Dare you to do that with an iPad.
- Steampunk gadgets are personal. This is going to earn me some heat, but I think it’s true: Steampunk thingies are in-your-face, not on-your-friends-ist. One of the charms of the steampunk idea is that people interact face-to-face. This keeps trolling to a minimum and fosters at least superficial courtesy, which certainly beats the slobbering hatred that now dominates Facebook.
All that said, I admit that the majority of what I see under the heading “Steampunk” is a species of fantasy, be it of the supernatural (vampires and zombies) or just wildly off-the-edge assumptions of what 1900 technology could accomplish.
The big turn-off I found in cyberpunk was its coldness. Granted this was cultural and not really necessary, but when I played at the edges of cyberpunk years ago it stopped me in my tracks. Cyberpunk was cynicism writ large, and steampunk is optimism gone nuts. Given that cynicism is cowardice (it is, in fact, the fear and loathing of all things human) you can guess where I’m much more likely to tell my tales.
