Shatner does Palin’s farewell speech with bongos. This is true art.

The nbc server seems overwhelmed. You might have to try again in a day or so.

I won’t be going to Worldcon in Montreal. When I was thinking about it last fall, I priced the whole trip at around $850. I just priced it out and it comes to around $1400 and that is not at the main hotel. Last year I could have reserved a luxury room there quite cheaply, right now the nearby hotels are full.

Next year Worldcon is in Melbourne Australia. It would cost around $3500. As nice as it would be to visit Australia, I think I’ll have to pass on this one, too. The $3500 is for tourist class and I don’t think that my 6′3″ frame could survive long in seats designed for 5′6″ people.

That leaves 2011 and Reno – that actually sounds like fun. Winter of 2010 I will make a decision, but I would like to attend at least one Worldcon before I’m too old to enjoy it.

I went to see Roxy play over at the Tarrytown Park. It’s beautiful there with a great view of the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Hudson River. I got a couple of nice shots of the sun setting over Central Nyack across the river.

Roxy July 30, 2009

DefenseTech.org (I read it for the SF story ideas) has an article about newly released records from Russia about close encounters with alien spacecraft – underwater!

I seem to remember a movie about an alien spacecraft on the bottom of the ocean, but I can’t think of any alien submarine stories. It would make sense that an alien civilization might be water dwelling and come to our planet and pretty much ignore the dry land.

It goes into the story idea list, but I am not sure what kind of story I would write. It would make a good anthology because there are so many possibilities.

It would make a good screenplay. I have to think about this.

Defense Tech: UFO IN OUR BAFFLES, COMRADE CAPTAIN!

I’ve been doing Critter.org critiques for a couple of weeks or so. I have written half a dozen critiques and read (or started to read) a lot of stories. I am amazed at the good quality of the writing.

This is counterintuitive, yet I should not be surprised that the critters stories were better than anticipated. Any author who wants his stories to be criticized by a bunch of strangers who have no more experience writing stories than he does, is a brave soul. Authors who submit their stories to critique are interested in finding the flaws in a story and improving the story, so their work has probably been rewritten and edited before it was submitted.

The main thing that I criticize is that almost all the stories are too wordy and can be cut. I also try to identify where transitions are choppy or easily misconstrued. I want the stories to flow, so I try to identify places where I stumbled while following the plot thread.

I don’t say much about characters, and only occasionally did I talk about setting. My thing is getting the narrative tightened up.

I think that mostly the style is very good in these stories. Some of the authors seem young, either through their subject matter of the way they treat the characters. Almost all the characters have been teenagers or younger adults, so I figure the author’s age to be near that of their characters. I think it is remarkable how well these kids (to me anyway) can craft a sentence or a paragraph. They are generally much better at it than I am.

There is one thing that almost all the stories have in common and that is what I call The Big Flaw. This flaw is a problem with the concept, plot, or setting, that makes the story unrepairable. It is the element of the story that makes it impossible to rewrite without actually writing a different story.

One story had 15,000 words about a character NOT named Conan who kills a sabre tooth tiger, but nothing else happens. One story is about young androids who have sex, and not much else. On story is about a gay robot who has sex. Almost all of the fantasy stories were about women with magical ability and the problems of being a woman with talent in a man’s world.

All of these stories were lovingly crafted, well written, but not one of them was a good story.

I now have to look at all of my stories in a new way. What is the big flaw? I am too busy trying to put sentences together so they make sense, and perhaps I am missing the major flaw in idea, plot or characters. How do you spot the big flaw when you are so close to the various mechanical parts that build the story?

My first story is due to be critiqued in three weeks. I have three stories in my to-do list and I hope to find time to write them soon so they can be critiqued. I hope that the critters group don’t pick nits with the stories, but have the courage to tell me what The Big Flaw is in my stories.

Steve Davidson has a longish post that starts with whining about someone who declared that SF is not “literary“. I am not concerned with the debate. I know enough to realize that at least one person in the debate is an idiot and not worth my comment.

The interesting thing is that Steve gets to the heart of what makes good Spec Fic by bringing up what he calls a sensawunda. I don’t know who first noticed that a Sense of Wonder was one of the main ingredients of Science Fiction, but I’ve been using it as my yardstick for what makes Spec Fic excellent for a while.

Steve equates this sense of wonder with participation in the story by the reader or viewer and by way of example compares the classic movie “Forbidden Planet” with “Star Wars”. Forbidden Planet, by way of incomplete information, encourages the viewer to fill in the blanks with imagination. Star Wars leaves nothing to the imagination. Star Wars is passive viewing, where Forbidden Planet requires the viewer to participate in the movie in order to fully appreciate it.

This is an interesting twist on a Sense of Wonder, and although it is not a full explanation, it definitely augments the idea.

Speculative Fiction will always be a genre and will usually be non-literary (whatever that means) at least to those who think they know what literary means. It will remain true that Speculative Fiction will only excel when it incorporates a Sense of Wonder.

Why Traditional SF is BETTER Than ‘Literary’ SF | The Crotchety Old Fan

Stumbleupon has hit this site hard for the past few days. The site received over 800 referrals yesterday.

They are all for the cliches page, though, and stumbleupon traffic is useless. They look at the site, say “son of a gun”, and move onto the next site. They don’t even bother to bookmark it. All of my other pages received the usual traffic and there were practically no referrals from the cliche page.

I wonder how you get delisted from stumbleupon?

Update: Wednesday cthreepo.com had its best day ever. It received 5,461 page views from 3,278 visitors.
Cliches got 2851 hits.
Math Page got 326 hits.
Map of Middle Earth got 250 hits.
Google Sky star finder got 329 hits.
The Blog main page got 341 hits.
The rest went to some of the other odd pages.
KeithGraham.com (mirrors this site) got around 500 hits, mostly for the stars.

I am about half way through Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. The book is hard to describe. It might be compared to something James Joyce would write while tripping on LSD. It’s a difficult book, and like Ulysses, requires quite a bit of background. Unlike Ulysses, this is background that I have.

Brunner’s definition of reality ties in with information theory and the whole idea that real ideas and real information have the quality of surprise.

Realty is what Surprises You

I think that this is even better than Philip K. Dick’s definition of reality:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

I have a computer, Dual Core, 2.83ghz, 3.25 gigs ram (I could have used 4 gigs). I am trying to restore all the stuff that I need to get work done.

In the process, I was able to finesse a second monitor so now I have one monitor with email and another with work on it. I still have the little computer, but it keeps shutting down. I have to see if I can stop it from going to sleep every few minutes.

I will not be productive until some time tomorrow.

I found and appropriated a very small computer that was to be used in the Parks Department Kiosk project. This involved a kiosk that was to be placed in various places with County information. I wrote the whole thing, but the old Kiosks had screens that did not work with modern machines. The drivers were for Windows 98 and new ones weren’t available. We had to go with new kiosks. The old Kiosk with the new computer still sits in my cubicle (strategically placed so that passerbys have trouble reading my screen). The PC is a fairly nice one and only three years old. It has limited RAM, but I can live with it.

I formatted the disk and installed XP pro. I am in the process of updating it with software tools so I can actually use it for work. My old machine was declared officially dead by the Desk Top group and I am getting a new machine that has to be assemble and loaded with official software; that’s what’s taking so long. When it comes I will have two machines for work so I can do all kinds of nice things like debug on one machine and edit on another. When I worked at IBM I had five machines at once.

I miss my bookmarks most of all and I haven’t read my regular blogs in a week. I was also surprised to find that Lockheed stock took a big hit and my 401K lost around $10,000 while I wasn’t watching it.

I am still getting paid, but I have nothing to do but sit here in the computer lab and surf. All the bosses are on vacation. Normally, this would be a very productive time – I do my best work when the bosses are gone. Unfortunately all of my tools and resources are on a hard disk somewhere that has been reformatted by now. I’ll probably lose a few thousand words of short story work in progress as well as several hundred lines of code.

My story Farewell Tour, is up at Freezine. It is a Rock and Roll ghost story, not Science Fiction.

John Shirley, one of my favorite writers, is serializing an old fashioned pulp style adventure fantasy so my story is sandwiched between an exiting story that people are actually reading. I hope they hang around long enough to read my story.

Ten days ago I made a post about using a simple php script to create a web page of things for sale on eBay. I chose as an example Shimano Bicycle parts. I know little or nothing about bicycle parts, but I did a little research on eBay and found that there is a large subsection that is concerned with different brands of bicycle parts and Shimano was the largest section.

I created the RSS feed on the Ebay Partner Network and used my PHP script to convert that into a formatted picture list of ebay auctions. The script is set up so that if anyone is high bidder on one of the auctions I get a chunk of change. (The chart at left shows the clicks – blue line, and the revenue – yellow line. I made $4.46 on the best day. On the best day I got 44 clicks.

The web page received a low volume of hits. On the most active day it received less than 50 hits on the web page, which is hardly anything and it averaged less than 15 a day. I made, however, $15.68 in those ten days on one page of bicycle parts. I had just one blog entry pointing to the page and one link on my Facebook profile. This was enough to get the 150 hits in ten days on the page from people searching Google and Bing for Shimano parts (Bing is getting bigger).

This is magic. It’s free, and it’s not hard. I am glad that not many other people are doing it. I spent a day looking through eBay for high volume search items. I have a dozens of these pages out there and I am looking for more. I’m up into the hundreds this month.

I just read this post back and it reads like a sales pitch. I’m not selling anything. All I need now is testimonials.

It’s Karma.

I gave Crescendo a bad review and in the time it took to write the review I received a couple of unkind reviews of my own short stories.

It seems that this time the editors went out of their way to express their dislike for my stories. It doesn’t help me feel any better that these are two stories that I had trunked because my own opinion of them was that they pretty much sucked. I just don’t want to hear it from others.

Well, too more stories for the bit-bucket. Copies of these stories are scattered around my archives. I wonder what it would take to delete all evidence that they ever existed?

I was doing a Google search for Speculative Fiction in Rockland County, NY. I wondered if there were any clubs or readings in my neck of the woods.

I found Crescendo, which was written using some settings in my neighborhood. I decided to buy it and found it on Alibris.com for $1.99.

Crescendo, according to an interview with the author, is inspired by the works of Stephen King. The cover declares “Not one for the Squeamish.”

I was hoping that it would be good and that I could pass it on to my mother. The book, however, is a difficult read. I am not sure who the protagonist is or what it is about, except that there is a character who has bad dreams and waking images about death and gore. I read the first 50 pages and will try to read a little more on the way home, but I can tell you now that I won’t finish the book.

I am not the one to judge, because horror is not something I enjoy reading. This one is too dark and bloody to read for pleasure. My main problem with it is that I have read over 50 pages and I don’t know what the book is about, who is the villain, or who is the hero. Viewpoint seems to flit about from person to person so I don’t know who is the main voice.

That being said, the person writes well. Each page reads very well, but the overall structure seems to be off. It needs a much stronger narrative line and fewer beautiful words and less intense imagery.

It turns out the book is a published by a vanity press, Publish America. From what I have heard about this publisher, the cost can go pretty high to publish a few hundred books. I am guessing that this book cost the Author upwards of $2,500 for 100 books @ 343 pages (PA claims that it publishes for free, but closer look shows most authors pay for extras and buy numbers of their own books for self promotion). The book has a price tag of $24.95 for a trade paperback, which I suspect is near break even, if the books sold. No one would pay $24.95 for a trade paperback.

Sadly, I bought this book used from the Fairfax County Public Library. The author probably sent a bunch of books out to libraries in order to publicize the book at her own expense. The book is marked “Withdrawn from Circulation” with the reason “Low Demand” checked off. The circulation slip show no one ever checked the book out to read.

Every once in a while I think about formatting a collection of my short stories for a POD vanity press like LuLu or Amazon. If I ever do it, shoot me to put me out of my misery. If I can’t sell to a publisher who pays me rather than me pay them, forget it.

My work machine wouldn’t boot this morning. This has been coming for a while. I have been getting frequent errors.

The help desk will get me a new machine soon, but it means that I will spend a day or two reinstalling all of the software and tools that I use on a day to day basis.

I found an ancient unused computer in one of the labs and I can coax it to do email and blogger, but that is about the limit of its abilities.

When I get a new computer I will have lost all of my Works In Progress. No great loss as I have uploaded anything good to Google/documents. Still, I have lost quite a bit of time and data.

I am a lousy copy editor. I can’t see the errors that I make in my own manuscripts. I have noticed from teaching that a programmer has difficulty finding his own bugs where another eye will spot them easily. I think writing is like this.

I joined Critters.org because three or four editors suggested that I do it when a story was particularly buggy. You can use critters to proofread manuscripts and hope that the critic is not too nasty.

I critiqued two stories this morning. One was a very long Harry Potter clone, and the other was a female viewpoint high fantasy that is something that I would not ordinarily read. Both had storytelling issues and a few typos. I tried to be nice and corrected the typos first. (I feel weird correcting typos – I am not the right guy for that job.) I tried to be kind about the story issues and I did not say that I did not like anything without a good reason and never without a suggestion for fixing it.

I then decided to see how other people handled the critiques. I was shocked. People are often insensitive, if not outright unkind. Here are some actual examples of what people said:

I’m a bit confused. What, exactly, is the point of this story? What I mean is, what is it you’re trying to convey? It reads a bit like a tone-deaf version of Les Miserables

This story seemed kind of cobbled together, to me. In some areas, it seems like there is too much detail, but more often, it seems like there isn’t enough detail to flesh-out the story. Some of my comments here may be worded as questions. I don’t expect personal answers for them. Their purpose is to point out spots that may be unclear or confusing for readers. Remember, these comments are my opinions, not facts.

I’ll start off by saying that I didn’t much care for this story. I didn’t find the world to be compelling or interesting. One thing which annoyed me was how the sentences and paragraphs were so short. Now there is nothing wrong with short sentences or paragraphs per say, but I find that they tend to break-up the flow of the story. I describe some of the other problems I saw below.

My initial opinion of this story was that it was very preachy. By the end, I decided that it was still preachy, but I wasn’t sure what it was preaching. The real “message” behind the story seemed muddled.

I think the beginning of the story was too jumbled and I didn’t really get it.

Some of these people were nasty. Most of them refused to follow the guidelines as how to actually do a critique. Most of them were opinions about the subject matter of the story or how they did not understand what was going on. Some of them were impossible to read because the program does not handle various kinds of text very well so they looked like garbage characters. Someone uploaded a zip file as an attachment (a virus?).

I am afraid to to submit any stories to the group for criticism now. I will try to do a few more critiques and next week see how other people handled the same story. If even a few were reasonably kind I can ignore the unkind reviews.

I also need to decide which story to send them. I should send one that I like, but has not sold like the one I have that has about 30 rejects. I should send a story that might have a better chance of selling, though. Maybe I should start with a story that is already sold.

Note: I sent them The Perfect Gold. A story I sold 2/3/2004. This was the second story I ever sold, so it was fairly choppy. I did a rewrite – enough to add many typos. We’ll see what people say.

I just read in a local paper about a psychic that is predicting “Serious earthquakes will strike in Pearl River and West Nyack in a decade”.

I live in West Nyack. We are not on a fault line, although a minor fault line passes 20 or so miles north and west of us. We get earthquakes in the fault line of about 3.5 to 4 every few years. The people near it says that it sounds like a heavy truck going by, if they hear it at all.

I am not sure why a psychic’s prediction is news. It is unfortunate that people take this seriously.

On the other side, I would rather like it if a few of the houses around me collapsed and were never rebuilt.

Psychic’s future may be fame | recordonline.com:

Check out this loving tribute to Jack Vance, a great SF and Fantasy writer. I was surprised to learn that he is still alive and cooking. I did not know that he was still writing and I took the recommendation of a friend and ordered one of his recent works from Alibris.com.

I read a bunch of his Dying Earth stories and I think they are the best.

I’ve been trying to find his address in Oakland, Ca so I can send him a book to sign.

Jack Vance in Times

I had as many as 7 stories waiting in slush piles last week, but the quick editors are starting to come back. One was a form letter from futurismic on a real clunker that I rewrote and sent out again. I have more ideas on how to fix it, so when it comes back I’ll do another rewrite on it.

I wrote a quick flash for a free site that needed some help. I saw some typos after I sent it out, but I am not going to annoy the editor by sending a rewrite so soon after a submission.

Another flash came back after 6 days. A zine called Ruthless Peoples (possibly the worst zine name I’ve seen) gave it a nice response, criticizing the exposition in the middle. I had to compress it to under 1000 words so I did a Tell rather than Show in the middle to tie up some loose ends and got called on it. The editor, was very nice and understanding and wrote:

I’m left wondering whether you have sacrificed too much to squeeze this scene and the relationships surrounding it into 1,000 words.

The editor hit the nail on the head. The story should be three times as long with well developed characters and motives and not a flash at all. That being said, the story is basically a bit of a joke with a punch line and does not deserve a longer treatment. I’ll see about fixing the exposition in the middle and send it out again as flash. The infodump in the middle is not a bad thing per se, but most editors have been brainwashed by Clarion and its evil spawn. Since infodump is easy to spot, they call you on it.

It is good, though, when an editor says something in a rejection letter that I can use – much better than the "This piece sucks but I can’t tell you why" type of response that means that they really wanted zombies or gay teenage angst stories.

I have five stories out now. Since these are mostly old trunked stories with many rejections behind them, they stand little chance.

In 1965 or 66 I bought the Ace editions of the Lord of The Rings. I bought the second two books, but the Fellowship was backordered and I had to wait a month for it. My friend, neighbor, and fellow reader, Randy, borrowed The Two Towers and, to my horror, read it without first reading the Fellowship. When I finally received the first book, I rushed through the three paperbacks in less than a week. I will always regret that I did not read the trilogy that first time slowly, enjoying the flavor of Middle Earth.

During the month that I waited for Fellowship, I remember looking at the covers by Jack Gaughan and trying to imagine what the books would be like. By the time I started reading, I had a clear idea in my head of what the story would be. I, of course, was very wrong. Today, when I look at the books (I still have them), I get a glimmer of the world that I invented to match those Jack Gaughan covers.

Recently, I have made several outlines of stories for each of the covers. I don’t know if I will ever find time to write any of them, but these are images that have stayed with me for nearly 45 years and they need to be put into words.

I challenge you, my several and varied readers, to write a fragment, poem, or flash to go with these pictures. If you do and it is not marketable send it to me and I’ll post it here. Do not send me work for which there is a remote chance of being paid for as I cannot pay you.

The covers:

I am guessing that John was able to get a hold of some good drugs and worked his way out of the mid sixties funk that he was in. This is a much more enjoyable book than the last few by Brunner.

My Review: Timescoop by John Brunner (1969)

I came of age in the late 1960s. I listened to the birth of hard rock on vinyl records with phonographs I made myself out of old TV sets. I learned to play guitar and I grew my hair long. We were on the verge of something great in those days, and we had the power of the music behind us.

Then in the early seventies it was all lost. It was replaced by the God-Awful elevator music called Disco. Disco killed everything. It sucked the life out of a generation.

Here is an example of why I hate disco:

Stella is currently filming Runaways, a film about Joan Jet’s first band. She is playing the part of Sandy West, the drummer. Stella can actually play the drums a little, as her father is a jazz drummer and gave Stella lessons.

Stella is costarring with some major personalities that I, of course, have never heard of, but I am assured are a big deal.

By the way, I like the image. Stella played such an unlikeable character in Gossip Girl, that I am happy to see her looking natural and happy.

Stella’s Mom, Polly, sent me the link. Naturally she is kvelling. Jim is happy Stella is such a success and brags about her at poker.

The Runaways – Cinematical

1967 was not a good year for Brunner. I prefer the earlier pure space opera and the later “big theme” novels. In 1967 Brunner was scratching out the bad novels and not producing anything readable.

Read Review: Born Under Mars, John Brunner (1967)

I’ve been lucky lately with eBay Partner Networks. This is an affiliate system where eBay pays you to send them customers. If one of your referrals wins an auction you get a large chunk of the eBay fees.

I wrote a little php script that can parse the eBay RSS feed and generate an auction listing page. This has proved very successful for me. I’ve been making lots of little pages with actions on them. None of them pay great but in in total I am impressed.

Here’s one that gets a few dollars a month for very few hits. Even if you don’t get much traffic you can make some spare change using the php file that I’ve included for download on the page.

Shimano makes a popular line of bicycle and fishing equipment. I get lots of search engine hits with the phrase “for sale, cheap”.

Shimano Bicycle Parts, Cheap

BoingBoing listed this. I had a great time listening to this. I think, though, that Bruce is wandering a little in his old age. He needs, perhaps, a little more focus. It’s a little long, but full of Cyberpunk futurism. He’s spot on about some things, but he’s talking to a European audience and is compensating, I think.

Bruce Sterling – reboot 11 closing talk – reboot video

In a genre that is geared towards a twelve year old soul, Brunner wrote for adults. Quicksand is an example of a Science Fiction story written without very much science and fiction which is too personal and too real.

My review of Quicksand by John Brunner

On TODAY’S DATE July 8, 1947 the U.S. Army announced it had recovered a crashed flying disc near Roswell, New Mexico.

I found the little 20 gig disk drive that I had used to make backups last year. My machine at work is not private and anyone can and does wander through my files to see what I am working on. I can connect the little disk drive via USB, work a little during lunch on a story, and then disconnect it without any danger of someone complaining.

I found a bunch of finished stories that I thought might be lost on the backup disk, and I copied them all up to Google Docs. I have decided to use Google Docs to keep track of my stories in a centralized place, rather on a disk that can be lost, stolen or broken.

I updated my stats and reworked my submissions spreadsheet. In total I have 68 finished stories on Google Docs. 52 are published, although this includes a dozen flash pieces that I put out at various sites. These flash stories (less than 1000 words) don’t actually get accepted on these sites, they just don’t get rejected.

That leaves about 16 stories that I have not been able to get published. Mostly these stories are just not very good, but several are not spec-fic and I don’t know what to do with them. Some are just not a good fit for any of the venues. For instance, I’ve written a couple of Lovecraft style stories.

I also found about 35 stories, longer than 1,000 words, that are not finished. They either had a bad start or I decided that it might not be worth finishing them, or I just never got back to them. I put these on Google, as well, in a WIP folder with the hopes of finishing a few.

I did a little looking through Ralan and Duotrope and discovered a Lovecraft venue so I gave one weird tale a polish and sent it out. I submitted three stories to various Science Fiction venues. These are from the stories that I didn’t think were that good, so the odds are against me. (Actually, I worked on these stories and I think they might be pretty good.) If I have time I will send out a few more.

Currently I have five stories out waiting for the inevitable rejection. This is more than I’ve had out in a couple of years. Perhaps I will have some good news on one of them in a few weeks.