Here’s a CD coming out in January that I think I might buy.
Songs:
1. Flying Saucer Boogie
2. Rocket Boogie
3. Trail Of Haley’s Comet
4. Two Little Men In A Flying Saucer
5. Honeymoon On A Rocket Ship
6. Jet Propelled Papa
7. Space Guitar
8. Rocket 88
9. Flip
10. Rockin’ With The Rockets
11. Nagasaki
12. Rocket 69
13. Radar Blues
14. Death Ray Boogie
15. Golden Rocket
16. Rocket 88
17. Baby Doll
18. Skyliner
Chris has been working. I was shown my story at Static Movement and it has an illustration by Kevin James Hurtack. My only objection is that is suffers from a pixel resize by the browser. It needs some work in resizing it. I have smoothed the image and then resized it here. It is 1/5 the size and loads much faster and is much clearer. I will send it to Chris.
Chris fixed it!
The Telling bounced from Tales of Talisman – only 4 days. They wrote:
This was actually quite a strong contender. I felt the science and the concept were interesting.
I have a feeling that when I changed the sex of the protagonist, the sexual dynamics between the characters turned off the editor. I should change the character back to a man so as not to confuse the reader. I thought confusion would go over big at SH, Ideomancer, and A&A, but none of them bought into it.
I still think that this is strong story. It’s back to www.ralan.com – I’m not ready to send it Space Squid just yet. It may be strong enough to get a “nice writing, but” from JJA, but I don’t like going to the post office and waiting in line.
On the plus side, I wrote a 4k cyberpunk-ish story yesterday. I have to go back and make the tech understandable to average readers. I hate dumbing down my stories so that goofy editors can understand them. There should be a zine exclusively for readers who have finished at least some college, passed calculus, and can program in at least one language. What is that Heinlein quote about math?
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
I mostly agree, although my non-math friends do have endearing qualities.
You have to follow quite a few links, but the blonde joke is good.
Get some great Folk and Christmas MP3 files here. I’ve listened to the Bill Staines song twice now. I like folk quite a bit and I’ve never heard this guy before.
Keep The Coffee Coming
There are alot of old Christmas carols at falalalalala.com.
Chris Bartholomew and some of her friends is starting up a new zine called Static Movement. They’ve had some radical personnel changes and she got stuck without a webmaster. Since they bought one of my stories, I thought it best to insure that the zine gets out on by January 1. I spent a little time to redesign the site so that it will be easy for them to modify. I added a little css, ssi, and a flash banner. You can see the results at http://www.staticmovementonline.com/.
I hope to get them self sufficient soon and they can have fun with the zine without worrying about the techy stuff too much. If they ever find a permanent webmaster I am sure that he will tear my html out and do it himself.
I am afraid that the site is a little simplistic, but simple is good. It is a jumping off site. The original site was done with frames and worked well enough, but it was a little complex for what the site needed to do. I dumbed it down to nice simple pages and provided a template for growth.
The last time I submitted to A&A I got no response from them and eventually withdrew the story. I waited over a year before submitting another story to A&A, but it happened again. I queried and got nothing. I used Aleta’s email and she said she’d look into it. I had my hopes up because 35 days is good news when everyone else is rejected inside of a week. Now it looks like another big R for my subscription matrix and I’ll have to look for another place to send The Telling. Hard SF anyone? Reader must be aware that almost every planet out there will have higher or lower gravity than earth. Reader must know what a Red Giant star is. Reader must not be thrown when I use the term tidal lock. Reader must be aware that an alternative mode of intelligence could be a hive mind.
Update: It’s final – a reject. The usual at A&A and other “soft” sites – too much talk about the science. I tell stories from a masculine left brain viewpoint. I tried a trick to get around it by changing the gender of the protagonist, but I couldn’t slip it by them.
Erica and I went upstate to the Battenkill tree farm up near Red Hook, New York. It’s about 75 miles from the house, but it’s a different world. I did this five years in a row with my Dad. Two years ago he was so sick with cancer that he couldn’t get out of the car, but he never complained. I love going up and cutting the tree and I think it’s great getting a tree that you know wasn’t harvested a month ago. The tree is guaranteed to be fresh. It’s a sad time, though, because of the memories of my Dad.
Erica took this 
video of me cutting down the tree. The day was so bright that you could not see the image in the little LCD display so the image is shaky.
Here are some of the pictures of the tree farm. Click on a picture to get a large size image (suitable for descktop wallpaper).
I went to Philly today, but I left late and decided not to stop by Philcon.
I went down to South Street and did some Christmas shopping. The line out of Jim’s Steaks was so long that I never did get any cheese steaks. South Street has changed a little since the last time I was there. Zipper Head is gone. The Used book store with all the cats is gone and the retired surfer bar is no more. I did stop at Bluebond guitars and Society Hill Pawn, as well as The Record Exhange.
I explored the Indigo Gallery. I always want to buy something, but it doesn’t really go with my house, no matter how eclectic my decore is, Indigo is a little too much. I love exploring. I took some pictures with the crappy little pocket camera. The colors are really much more vivid.
My old friend Mark Hecker died last Wednesday. Mark was an artist who worked with me at Lockheed. He did web design and if you remember seeing banner ads from the late 1990s then you remember Mark. He produced thousands of them. Mark was also the art director for National Lampoon Magazine and Hustler Magazine. He had an incredible collection of images that wound up on the cutting room floor at Hustler.
Mark was one of smartest, wittiest and nicest guys that I ever worked with. In recent years we have grown apart.
The last time I saw him, he showed me pictures of the little girl that he and his wife had adopted from China. She was beautiful and smart and Mark loved her very much. I hate wakes and funerals. It will be painful to go to this one.
Click on the link above and check out his portfolio.
I have been receiving spam with something like the following:
In due time, Mr. Micawber’s petition was ripe for hearing; and that gentleman was ordered to be discharged under the Act, to my great joy. His creditors were not implacable; and Mrs. Micawber informed me that even the revengeful boot-maker had declared in open court that he bore him no malice, but that when money was owing to him he liked to be paid. He said he thought it was human nature.
Why spammers should think that Dickens should make good spam text is beyond me. I’ve had at least 50 like this over the last month or so. Each has the text and each has an image that my spam guard kindly blocks.
Things like this is why I sometimes think that I will never understand anything. All I can do is watch the world go by in wonderment.
Last year a woman was murdered 30 feet from where I park my truck at work. This year someone jumps. He might have used the bumper on the truck to climb up on the wall, it was that close. I didn’t see it happen, but all of a sudden there were many police and a dead kid on the sidewalk right outside my office window.
The holiday season is tough on some people. It will be worse for this poor soul’s friends and relatives. I use the Galleria garage to park because, as a consultant, I am not allowed to use the employee parking lot. I will park on the other side of the lot for a while and try not to look over in that direction.
Man plunges to his death from Galleria garage
My story is up at Fifth Di… They have this early 1990s approach to HTML. Their site needs a makeover to get into the 21st century before it’s over. This is the Young Adult version of the story God in a Bottle that was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Bottle Imp.
I mailed off submissions to Static Movement and Book of Dark Wisdom, the later story was Speed Trap and I expect a rejection some time in May. BODW is a very slow market, but I’ve run out of fast markets for this story. Speed Trap is now my favorite story and it is still homeless after too many tries. On the other hand, I expect a reply from Static Movement any minute now, as they are a new market and have set a fairly restrictive theme for their first issue. They got Note to Self, which is yet-another-time-travel-paradox story. (A reader from ASIM actually called it that.)
