One of the first places a story of mine appeared was at a site called SoulEngravings.com or ATSOISE (A Tangled Script of Intangible Soul Engravings). This was an odd place for me, but my story fit in well. The writers were an odd mix of interesting people who called themselves The Mad Wordsmiths. The site’s editor and spiritual leader, Mark Kevin Gilbert, died of cancer soon after I first spoke with him.
Without Mark, the remaining Mad Wordsmiths have gone their separate ways and the website was a neglected wreck that appeared and disappeared. I’ve been getting hits on my blog entries where I mention this site. I was curious and tried to find any news, only to discover that the domain name has once more expired.
I put a back-order on the domain and if I get it, I will try to bring back the site. It was an interesting place that dealt with dark fantasy and moody poetry – very gothic, perhaps, but still very well done. I am not an editor – I have proved that, but I would like to try this roll again and with a little patience, perhaps, bring out a few stories.
4e, if he were alive (I’m not sure he isn’t), would be 93 today. He was famous as a man who just liked Science Fiction a whole lot. He knew everybody, went to all of the conventions, and everybody liked him.
He had the best collection of science fiction books and memorabilia in history. It is being slowly auctioned off, and I buy a piece or two when it looks like something is going cheap.
I sold my story Nigerian Soul to Adicus Ryan Garton at AtomJack Magazine after 103 days in the slush. I am very happy about this, as it is a good story and sold the first time out.
I am also assuming that J Erwine will include my story Reefs of Jupiter in the upcoming print version of The Martian Wave. He asked for a rewrite, which I asked Erica to do, and the story came out nice and clean. I shipped it off last week. J has announced that he is working on formatting the magazine. He did not acknowledge the story, but I think it is a slam dunk.
There was a discussion about the realness of SF over at one of the Nanowrimo forums. It seems that they read my “Laws Science Fiction” page and I was trashed – the page and me personally.
Also – I wouldn’t worry too much about that website. Personally, I think their “laws” are a load of crap, and that anyone who talks about “laws of writing” in that way should probably go take a hike. :-p
And another:
That website is crappy. Just reading the laws show their ignorance of Science Fiction. I doubt they’ve ever read Asimov.
My own personal opinions are stated clearly in the list of laws, so you might be able to guess what I think about the kind of writing that these people produce.
I imagine that I have sold more stories than everyone on that thread combined. In my brief stint as an editor, I had to read a lot of the stories that these people obviously prefer, and my eyes still hurt when I think about it.
The web site referenced has some good points to make, but it takes some uncomfortable hard lines on some things.
The author then goes on to describe how his or her novel is about an alien that (in my view) is really a human in a rubber suit. If you want to write about humans. Using SF to hide your true intentions seems like laziness to me. I guess some people find it easier to cast a story in a an sf setting so they will not have to do the hard work of character development and creating believable conflicts and plots.
There was only one criticism to my list of rules that I could buy into. Writing SF is fun so writing a story that breaks all the rules, but is fun to write and read is the only excuse for not following the rules.
This give me the AHA moment and I will add a disclaimer at the end.
Here’s a list of downloadable audio books for your mp3 player. I will start the downloads tonight and load up my ipod.
Most of these are not professionally done, but they are well performed, at least the ones that I just sampled. My only objections is that there is some echo added to a one of the readings to improve the depth of the reading. Echo or reverb goes a long way and should be used very sparingly.
Hey, I also discovered that I had a cafepress.com store where I actually designed a Phillip K. Dick T-Shirt and Mug. I checked the sales figures and I even sold a few, although CafePress sits on the cash until you reach some very high minimum.
I’ve came across a bunch of stuff that I had at some of the domains that I let slide. I used to have a bunch of domains that I had ideas about using, but I am letting a few of them expire.
One of the domains had some media oriented projects like the stencils I made of Speculative Fiction Authors. I saved these and now they are on this website.
There is an article in Computer World about the future of super computers. They are talking about Exaflop systems.
Rudy Rucker, in his Software/Wetware books, discussed the future of computation and he felt that Teraflop machines would be common in the 2020s. Currently the fastest machines are Petaflop supercomputers.
The next highest step, Exaflop or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 18 zeros) floating point calculations per second is due around 2018.
No matter who you ask, an Exaflop exceeds the computing power of a human brain. Of course these super computers won’t be programmed to emulate a human brain, but they will be given problems that human genius cannot solve just by thinking.
The article talks about the Energy Department using this computer for Grid control and possibly designing an Atomic Fusion power generator. (This on the day it was announced that we are running out of Uranium for fission reactors.)
The computers will be used for the very complicated systems computing used to predict weather, but I think that analysis of the human genome and the modeling of human biology with the idea of curing disease will be important. The computer will be capable of designing billions of possible drugs and then testing them on genetic models refining the results so that shortly after these Exaflop computers appear there will be cures for all diseases.
2018, by the way, is right in line with estimates for the Singularity. I want to believe!
My cat Max crashed today. He couldn’t stand up and was really scary looking. We too him to the vet. He’s on all kinds of medication for his bad thyroid. We’ve been careful to make sure he eats and he has gained weight.
He is dehydrated now. They are giving him ringers to rehydrate him and he will probably feel better almost immediately, but we have to leave him at the vet for a day or two. Max hates the vet.
I hope we can address the underlying cause of the dehydration. This was very frightening. I though that we were going to lose him and he’s not out of the woods, yet.
indenti.ca has a Twitter alternative that can be used in conjunction with Twitter, but seems to be designed for more serious information sharing.
Adicus Ryan Garton at Atomjack magazine has been these “dents” (as opposed to tweets) to post his rejections. I know because I have been waiting with bated breath for my reject.
I enjoyed the following rejection notice: rejected: reincarnation (twice!), nazis, twist ending.
I guess that the writer did not heed my No Nazis law on this site.
I like this. I will watch for my notice to come up – It will read: Reject: Robots, nigerian scam, teleogy, numerous typos.
93 days and waiting. Adicus can’t be recording all of them – just the doozies.
I have two stories waiting. One of them has been out for 92 days. Three months is a long time to sit in the slush. I think that I might have sold this story three or four times by now, but I chose a venue that had all of its editors quit a while ago and it is taking a long time for the one reader left to work through the pile. Reports have it that the reader is rejecting stories that are about 95 days in the slush so that I might hear before the end of the weekend. I am walking on thin eggs (as Jim’s Mom was fond of saying).
The other story is at a site where I heard that the editor has just cleaned out the slush so my story is one of the next he’ll read. This story has been sitting around for a while because I needed to punch it up. I tried to make it stronger, but it is not a slam dunk. I hope the editor doesn’t hate it, even if it is not accepted.
I have one other story almost ready to go out. It has a slow spot in the middle that I need to rewrite, but my boss is wandering around like Hamlet’s Ghost, so I can’t work on it. Maybe next week I can find time. If one of the two stories out is a sale, I will be encouraged to work on the nearly done story.
I released, with some stumbling, my wordpress plugin to track outbound clicks. This lets me know where people go when they leave the site. It’s like the myBlogLog, only I get to see the stats in real time for free and I can even create some more interesting reports and I will add them to the plugin when they are working correctly. It is nice to see all of my readers leaving the site when they click on ebay links.
When I first released it, I accidentally copied another plugin to the WordPress site and the first 4 people to download it got the wrong plugin. That’s all right because I think that on the first day there are mostly robots downloading the code. I don’t know why this is. I corrected the problem almost immediately.
At the same time I released the 1.2 update to my Permalinks Finder plugin (hence the confusion). I made a mistake in the permalinks finder code and had to re-release it with an enhancement that I was still debugging. Luckily it still works, but the extra enhancements aren’t described in the documentation. It is a nice fortune cookie for anyone who actually needs the extra feature.
As you can see, I am an advocate of “Agile Coding” methodology, and I always have trouble in environments where I have to go through boring ocde reviews and beta releases. I like to throw caution to the wind, let the chips fall where they may, and let sleeping cliches lie.
These updates have been in the works for weeks, but things are hectic here. I have three more plugins to release. One is the eBay store widget and another is the amazon random display widget (which by default shows the last 50 hugo award winning novels). When things settle down and people the 9th floor starts finding new jobs, I will have time to polish these up and get them out there for people to download.
I have a plugin that displays a random Beatles verse. I have a feeling though that Wordpress will kill it because it violates copyright laws.
I sold a story, “You Can’t Think About It” to Tyree Campbell at SamsDotPublishing after a 125 day wait.
I submitted my SF story ‘The Reefs of Jove” today after I read that J Erwine had only one spot left to fill in the next issue of his magazine. I was sitting on this story waiting for inspiration. It wasn’t as strong as I wanted it to be. I added a little bit of a side plot that I hoped would strengthen it, but I am not sure. The story is OK, but I wanted it to have more punch.
I have on another story out for 90+ days and I almost hope that it doesn’t sell so I can send it to Tyree. He would have gotten it in the first place, but he took too long on the last one.
I have to write another story that has been taking shape in my head, but things are tense at work.
I bought this book at a booksale at the Rhinebeck, NY library. Talbot Mundy is a cross between Robert E. Howard and H. Rider Haggard. I read a little of this book and I’ve decided it will be my next bus book. It is a little like She by Rider.
There are four pen and ink illustrations in the book by Joseph Clement Coll. I scanned them because they are interesting. I thought maybe one of them might make a good book cover since the book came out in 1918 and is long out of copyright.
I finished what one of the last pages for the new improved cthreepo.com website. I wrote this the first time around 1999 and then forgot about it. It appeared in a sloppy form on the old website.
I complete rewrote it. I moved the inflammatory “No Nazis” law down and put a politically correct law at the top. I got rid of the weaker laws and some of the casual remarks so as to tighten it up. I then listed the laws backwards starting at 10.
The website is getting over 1,000 users a day now. The new site layout and ranking have helped quite a bit. I have been “Stumbled” by stumbleupon.com on three different pages. These have been writing pages as well as science pages so I have a whole bunch of new readers.
I had to blog this. It is a very Golden Age of SF idea and very Heinleinesque. (Coincidentally, I started reading Heinlein’s 1942 Beyond This Horizon, this morning.) More recently, William Gibson set the whole second half of Neuromancer in a Space resort circling the earth.
It’s $4.4 million for a spot. I’ll wait until the price drops a little before I make reservations. If there is a contest, I will use the entry technique from Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will Travel, to make sure I win.
Every one here at work is depressed because of the political changes. I am guessing that it is because they don’t like the uncertainty. I keep hearing about how 15 years ago a County Executive outsourced the IT department to IBM, which turned out to be a total disaster. Another theme is that the new Executive (I have to memorize his name) will sell off Rye Playland to developers. Playland is one of the projects that keeps my group busy. We do their programming.
I haven’t heard from the 9th floor (executive territory) all day. I think everyone is using up their sick days and polishing their resumes. The lawyer types that I deal with will all have to find work after January. I can’t see them bothering much in the next couple of months. Many of my projects came from the 9th floor. I am lucky in that I have a wide variety of projects and I don’t do all that much that is political.
I have not often voted in the odd year elections, but my job, working for county government, gives me the day off so I have no excuse.
The TV is full of ads for New Jersey governor, and NYC mayor. I live in New York, but upstate, so these ads are just annoyances to me. There has been some small number of ads on the cable channels for Rockland County executive. My mom is friends with the current excutive, but I am a big fan of my Father’s voting strategy. He said that you should vote agains the incumbent. All parties are the same and all candidates are running for office to get their fingers in the public pie. The thing to do is keep anyone from getting good at getting the graft. With a new politician there will be a while where they have to learn the ropes and they will not be stealing as much.
I also wanted to vote against the only person running that I am personally acquainted with – I do not want this idiot in my government.
