Microphone Available

I have finally put up a PayPal buy-it link for my HP Multimedia Microphones. These are great for authors who want to produce audio versions of their stories. It is at my AudioCD.com website. The coding goes slowly. I have cleaned up almost all of the HTML, but the database stuff is not ready for prime time.

Losing Touch - Flash story at AstoundingTales,com

I have a flash story (1000 words or less) at AstoundingTales.com in the Pole 69 contest. I'm not in the contest officially because I am an editor. Arthur is putting together the best of AstoundingTales part deux - the best flash. I wanted to be in the book, so I cobbled up a story out a dream I had the other night.
It features none other than Gracie the Wonder Cat!

The Harrow

I received a rewrite request on a story that I sent to the Harrow. I am surprised at this. The story, Gremlins Over Normandy, is a light-weight piece. It is only 1900 words. The editors liked it, but thought that a few changes might make it a better story. I am faced with the dilemma of taking the time to rewrite a story that I'm not fond of, or forgo a possible sale on a story that I had considered trunked.
Here's a little of what editor Michael R. Colangelo said:

Thanks for submitting 'Gremlins Over Normandy' to The Harrow. We're going to pass, but I'd like to suggest a bit of a rewrite and (hopefully) see a resubmittal from you... I think the style actually lends itself to the story... Gives it a bit of a pulp flavor, which supports the theme quite well.

I love the pulp flavor comment because that is exactly what I was going for. Hey Arthur, would you like to do the rewrite?
They have a smeerp-ish slush management system at The Harrow. I submitted there mostly because I wanted to check out their system. Their response was 55 days - way too long. One would think that the automated system would speed things up.

Voice to Text

My friend, John Ballard, has some audio interviews that he is trying to convert to text to help him with a book that he's writing. He downloaded some software to try to help him.

I have been trying to convert text files to speech, but converting from speech to text is nearly impossible. The results are almost satanic, as though a demon is working as his personal secretary.

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Larry and Ward's Underwater Pictures

My brothers, Larry and Ward, went to St. John Virgin Islands. Larry had a camera that would take pictures underwater. He made me an image cd for the blog. Some of the pictures are a little blurry, some are pretty good. Larry's Underwater Pictures.

A Place to Hide

I recorded my first short story using one of the microphones that I will be offering to writers. The quality of the audio was excellent, although I am not that good a reader. I used Audacity to record it, normalize, bass boost and then equalize the audio. I re-recorded the title and there are some pops as a result. I don't know how to blend the re-recorded stuff. You can listen to it. A Place to Hide Short Story MP3.
The story is 1,000 words (it originally appeared in Anotherealm.com flash in 2004). It is exactly 5 minutes long. I think that I read fast, but this should be useful information for those that want to gauge how long their stories will take to read. Multiply the word count by 5 and divide by 1,000.
If you listen, you will hear Ollie's bell as he tries to get my attention.

Outsourcing SpecFic Publishing Projects

Since all of the Java programming jobs have gone to India, I might as well try and make the most of it. The same economic conditions that have cut my pay by two thirds in 5 years can be used to make some money.

I am going to try to outsource some short run printing of Speculative Fiction to India.

There is a large demand for POD and Short Run printing. Small runs of books can be quite profitable. I am acutely aware of this because I have been published eleven times in short run books and magazines in the last two years. Speculative fiction, especially, appeals to a distributed audience. In SpecFic, either you are a best seller like King, or you are an occasional writer like myself with very little in between. The prozines, like Analog and Asimov's, publish a few hundred stories per year. The not-so-pro zines publish thousands of stories a year, mostly on the internet.

Each story in AstoundingTales.com is read about 150 times on the average, most well over 200 times. I like to think this is above average. Since I have no other data, I will guess that stories in the 500 or so regular zines are read about 100 times each. Stories in the small SpecFic zines, by my guess (no data of course), get five million views per year. Online Magazines like Strange Horizons and the late Sci-Fi might total ten million views per year. Baen might do as well.

My point being that there may be as many as a million SpecFic readers out there, each reading dozens of stories.

There have been attempts to convert the freeloading surfers into cash customers. Selling subscriptions has worked in a few cases. Selling merchandizing and page ads have been tried. Some sites beg for donations. Unless a site has a sugar daddy, as I suspect some of the big sites do, the zines must operate in the red.

A more successful route has been to sell POD (Print-On-Demand) anthologies or short run magazines on paper based on the web zines. SamsDotPublishing.com claims some small success by selling hard copy versions of some of its zines, some chapbooks (short, magazine-like books) and even some stand-alone novels and collections.

The best POD publisher is LuLu.com, which does a good job and is somewhat cheaper than CafePress.com. Still a LuLu.com book usually goes for $10 or more. These are very high quality trade paperback style books, but they can't compete with the 400 page novels that sell for $5 at the book store.

Short run book printing is not any better than POD, as far as price. I have received price quotes from some of the large and small "Vanity" publishers such as iUniverse and the price per book (including a little profit for the author) is hard to get below $10.

Enter my friend Kochumma from India. Koch is a fellow programmer. He has relatives in the printing business back in India.

At this point we are guessing that I can get a book printed that would cost $10 on LuLu.com for less than $2. The quality would not be as good (I don't want heavy paper or thick covers). I would have to forgo proofing, as the turnaround would be too long. Shipping of the completed project would be six weeks. The minimum run might be 500 copies. This is all conjecture, though and I will hear some details in a week to ten days.

If the price is low, if the quality is good, if the minimum order is low, if there are no problems with customs... Lots of ifs. If this whole idea seems to work, I will go into the short run publishing business with my new Indian partners.

I think that POD sales are low due to the very high price of the product. I think that many more websites would produce anthologies and many more authors would self publish if the cost was lower. There is a pent up demand that can't get over that elasticity hump occupied by LuLu.com. I think that I might be able to provide the next lower price level of short run publishing.

If this works out, my first book will be" how to create audio productions of creative writing". I will be writing a 20 page booklet and I that will be my tryout of the Indian printing facilities. I will then set up a website and start a submission process. I will try to pick a few books that I think might sell. I will want anthologies of web zines. I would also like to try a few "How-to" type books.

I will set up a drop ship system where websites can sell the books in my catalog by putting a snippet of JavaScript on their pages and get a kickback on each of the books sold this way. The authors can also buy books at a discount and ship them out themselves. I am hoping that viral marketing might make this a success, without asking writers to buy their own books or be the only source of promotion.

I hope to be legit publisher in the long run. I don't want to charge for publishing like iUniverse and I don't want to have a marketing model that requires authors to buy their own books like Publish America, but I do want to create a system where small run "vanity" publishing can be made profitable. I can do this through outsourcing the printing and being creative with a web based support system.

So stay tune, boys and girls. There will be more on this. It may all come to nothing, or it might just turn into something interesting. Stay tuned.

Even More Cute Cat Pictures

Justine demanded more cat pictures, so here you go. Ollie jumps on me and digs at my sweater. I had the camera out so I took some pics.




Here is a closeup of Blue. He doesn't look so wild here. He was feral when we got him in the house and he lives under a chair. He is slowly getting used to us and this morning he made it up the stairs all the way to the landing. He is getting bolder and braver.

Blue is a fancy "Raggamuffin" cat. He probably cost his owners $2000 and they wouldn't pay $75 to get him altered. We also have Ffafhrd and Max, which were both unaltered Males that wound up on our doorstep.

Ollie soon to be Famous

Valley Cottage Animal Hospital has asked us to provide some pictures so that Ollie can be featured on their website. Here is what I wrote up.

After loosing two beloved cats to cancer in quick succession, we adopted from the pound two kittens, Gracie a small gray tabby girl and Ollie. Ollie, a bright orange tabby boy, was a sweet little fellow with a sweet temperament. We did not have him more than a few days, though, when he got very sick.
The vets at the Valley Cottage Animal Hospital quickly diagnosed the little fellow with Feline Panleukopenia, a highly infectious viral disease of cats. They warned us that the little kitten would probably not survive. Ollie was extremely ill. He was loosing blood from the damage the disease did to the lining of his intestines.
VCAH vets arranged that Ollie would receive around the clock care and blood transfusions from a heroic donor cat who often comes to the aid of sick cats at the hospital.
When we brought Ollie home, he could not stand up and we had to feed him with an eyedropper. Little by little, the little orange kitten recovered.
Today, Ollie is an active and curious 3 year old and is extremely affectionate. He demands to sit on our laps and sleeps curled up against us at night. He is smaller than his other cat friends, but he makes up for it with a big personality.

Here are some pictures of Ollie. None of them captures his smile, although his manic personality comes through loud and clear.

Audio Update 2

Well, my attempt to create audio versions of my stories using the little digital voice recorder was a failure. The voice was very compressed and distorted and there was a loud hiss. On the plus side, I was able to record two stories (one of them twice) in one lunch break. They were shorter stories, 1,000 words and 1,300 words. By the time I was finished, my voice was hoarse.

(The rest of this post is geekspeak)

---

No response yet on selling my domain AudioCD.com. It looks like it was only a nibble.

My HarpAmps.com website crashed and I need a new Java host. I am in the process of consolidating all of my websites into one host. (Yes, putting my eggs all in one basket.) It will save me around $400 a year. It will be easy for most of the sites because they are just pages with no database or dynamic content. A few, like smeerp.com, will give me headaches. There is a lot of data there.

I am transferring my last domain out of Network Solutions to Register.com, and then I'll point jt30.com to the new site. This is an old site and makes me good money. I have to be careful and make sure that the store software still works. I can turn it into a blog as soon its off the old hosting company. They were incompatible with blogging software.

Audio Update

For a over a year, I've been wanting to produce audio versions of my own stories and encourage other writers to make some, so that we could sell the results. I vowed that I would read a couple of my flash pieces into a PC and make them available this weekend. I did not do this. I brought my little voice recorder with me today, and I will go out to the truck at lunch and see what happens.
On the plus side, I bought 40 tiny microphones for PCs on eBay. I will make these available packaged with a copy of Audacity audio editing software for the cost of a box and postage on one of my websites. I hope this will encourage authors to produce audio copies of their stories.
There's another issue here. I intended to do all of this using the URL AudioCD.com that Phil Chadeayne and I bought more than 10 years ago. I've done little or nothing with the site in many years. At first I made a store for CD and Tapes sales like half.com. This was before half.com and I did not have any way to promote it so it never took off. Then I made it an MP3 message board where you could trade MP3 files. That took off in the wrong direction and became a pirate board so I took it down. I then made it a search engine for music powered by affiliate links and it has paid its way since then.
Recently, I took the affiliate links down and started writing the audio exchange software to create custom stores for people who want to sell MP3 files. That has been stalled for a year by the lack of any MP3 files to sell.
This weekend I received an offer from someone to buy the domain name. I may be able to sell the web site. This would be one less domain to worry about, but I'd have to use another domain to sell the audio files.
I have WapFiction.com, Strangetales.net, AstoundMe.com, and PaperTheTown.com that I could use. WapFiction refers to WAP protocol used in cell phones. PaperTheTown was a resume site that tried to write, but gave up on (there's no money in it). AstoundMe is the site that I use for my media related projects so I might use it. I also could use CThreePO.com, but I'd like to sell that, too.
This project does not seem like it will ever come together.

Low Tolerance for Rudeness Today

This kind of thing happens to everyone. Last night I went to buy some groceries. I had 9 items and I got in the 15 items or less line. The person in front of me had about 30 items. So they divided it into two orders and paid twice in order to avoid waiting in the slower lines. Not only did they make us all wait because of their larger order, but they made us wait while they paid twice. I guess they thought they could get through on a technicality. Just rude. They knew that they were being rude, but didn't seem to care.
Here's another: On a discussion board, someone asked a question on PC maintenance. I answered with a rather long post giving my advice. I am a PC expert and I make my living giving companies my opinion. I was giving it away there for free. The person answered back "Thanks for your two cents". How am I to take this? Is this a casual use of a phrase or a comment on the quality of my post? It sounds sarcastic to me. It is difficult to tell without facial expressions or tonal quality of a voice. The post did upset me. I did not reply.
Perhaps I am being overly sensitive, but I am in a lousy mood today so don't cross me.

January Trip to the Beach

We took a trip north this Sunday. In the previous post, I showed some pictures of United House Wrecking. When we left there we continued north to South Norwalk and Calf Pasture Beach. The Mural above, titled Calf Pasture Beach, by Alexander J. Rummle, is from the Norwalk City Hall, Common Council Hall.
Erica and I stopped by the beach on a brisk January Sunday and enjoyed a long walk along the shore. As you can see, the sand has been eroded by the recent nor'easters. I love the beach in the winter. It was not too windy. The temperature was in the low 40s so it was quite pleasant.
Click on the image on the left to view the image gallery.

Weekend Joy Ride: United House Wrecking

This weekend we went up to United House Wrecking in North Stamford, Connecticut. It is like a museum of interesting, oversize overpriced furniture and architectural pieces. I would love to own some of this. I would love to own a house that could fit some of it. They have free donuts and coffee, which made it worth the 40 miles to go visit. My only objection is that they mix reproduction items with the authentic antiques. The antiques say antiques, but the repros don't say repro.
Click on the image to see the image gallery.

Mood-altering cat parasites make women friendly and men into jerks

BoinBoing has a post about a cat parasite, Toxoplasma, that alters the brain chemistry of those infected with it. It supposedly makes infected rats easier to catch.

A parasite that causes rats to sacrifice themselves to cats may also change human behavior, making women more outgoing and warmhearted, and men more jealous and suspicious. The Toxoplasma bacteria is shed in cat feces, which are eaten by rats; infected rats become fearless in the presence of cats, which makes them easier to catch, which, in turn spreads the disease to new cats.

This explains everything.
Click the title link to see the original article at The Loom.

"Intelligent design" not science: Vatican paper

"Intelligent design" not science: Vatican paper

In an article L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, there seems to be support for evolution over intelligent design.

"intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the demand it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation," said the article in the Tuesday edition of the newspaper.

Evolution represents "the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth" and the debate in the United States was "polluted by political positions," wrote Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at Italy's Bologna University.

"So the decision by the Pennsylvania judge seems correct."

I guess that the church has learned her lesson from Leonardo's trial.

I have always enjoyed the works of the Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin who said: "Christ is realized in evolution." Although I am not a Catholic, I am comforted that the Vatican has shown some good sense.

These are bold words for these times where the political world seems intimidated by the religious right.

Working at Home with Cats

Today there was a terrible storm and the Tappan Zee Bridge was closed to traffic all morning. I could not get to White Plains unless I went north to the Bear Mountain Bridge and experience tells me that the Bear Mountain route takes at least two hours when the TZ bridge is closed. I had a meeting that I had to be in at 11am so we set it up so that I would could call in and do the meeting from home.

I went up to the bedroom where it is quiet and I would not be disturbed during the call.

When the phone rang, I joined in on the discussion of the finer points of Document Workflow. Our cat Gracie, hearing my voice, joined the meeting. As I talked, she rubbed up against me, demanding to be petted. She soon realized that she didn't have my complete attention and let out a loud meow that must have been heard by all of those on the line. I pushed her off the bed and continued on the call, but she jumped up and did it again. She even rubbed up against the phone, purring loudly while I tried to follow the conversation.

One of my New Years resolutions was that I should try and find a job where I can work at home. If I do, I will try to remember to lock the bedroom door during conference calls.

Most Fertile Irish Male

Way to go, Grandpa Niall! Scientists discover most fertile Irish male.

Windows Live Local

This is my house as seen from live.com.
Here is the new Microsoft map site. The aerial images are extremely clear.
Windows Live Local

UFO Spotting

I am converting some home movies with the Neoros MPEG4 Video recorder. About 10 years ago, My brother Larry and I went to West Virginia for Blues week. Somewhere in Maryland, Larry caught this clip of a 4 UFOs hanging in the distance.

Sunday Pics

I took some pictures. The first is a picture of my house from the driveway.

I went over to see Mom. It was 11:30AM and she still hadn't gotten dressed. Her excuse was that she got involved with the crossword puzzle.

Larry answered the door without pants. Larry, you are turning into a weird old guy who never puts on his pants! He needs a woman. Does anyone know a nice girl who whould like a 52 year old bass player who drives a fork lift for a living? He's been working steady for 35 years and as far as I know still has the first nickel that he ever made. Come on girls, he may be a fixer-upper, but he's a nice guy.

Latest Photos

I cleaned out the cameras. I've been carrying around Erica's Kodak Z740. It's a nice little camera and takes great pictures.
Lunch with Arthur Sanchez at Karumba. This is a Cuban restaurant with nice staff, great food and really goodprices in the center of White Plains. Look at the size of the fried steak that Arthur got. I ordered a Cuban sandwich, which is always great.




I drove up to Reinbeck, NY to do some antiquing and I saw this beautiful tray made of butterfly wings. I had to take a picture. I have the original, large image that shows some great detail. I wiggled the camera, so there is a slight blur. I should have taken more than one shot.



It snowed last night so I might go out and take some snow pics.

PC-Cases by Katsuya Matsumura's

This Japanese artist makes PC cases based on his favorite animated characters. He'll make customized versions of any character to hold anything. He has a few for sale. PC-Cases by Katsuya Matsumura's. Click on the "English tab" when you get there.

The Poor Get Children

I had some thoughts about what will happen after Alito is appointed to the Supreme Court. I am very sure that an ultra-conservative will be approved. I wrote up what might happen in the aftermath.

MOJINOS ESCOZIDOS - Ueoh

I have no idea what this is from or about, but I loved every minute of it. Arthur, please give me a rough translation

John Shirley's Demons on Audio Tape

I just finished an ex-libris copy of John Shirley's book Demons, that I won on eBay. Structurally, Demons is two shorter books with the same characters. The first book tells of the coming of demons to Earth and the second is a more complicated struggle against the forces that brought the demons here. It reads like Science Fiction and I think of John Shirley as a Science Fiction writer.

Demons is horror, like a Coontz or King book, only inside out. Shirley starts with the demons walking around and breaks Lovecraftian horror rules by describing them in detail. His approach to horror is to make it seem ordinary and show how life continues in the face of the impossible terror of the demons. This is all allegory, of course, for the evils that are hiding plain sight in the real world. The straight line plotting and a simple solution flaw the first book. The second book in the tape is much more of thriller in its construction. Characters jet set around the world with alternating chapters for different characters and plot lines. Shirley spends quite a bit of time demonizing those that would destroy our world through greed and egotism. To an environmentalist, the book is preaching to the choir, to a King/Coontz fan looking for horror, it might lack impact without the political message.

Shirley reads most of the book himself, but Harlan Ellison does an over-the-top narration of one of the plot lines and breaks up the flow of the narrative, but in a good way. You can't help but enjoy Ellison's characterizations, even when they are awful. There are a couple of women narrating one of the plot lines, and even though they did a good job, Ellison's performance overshadows them.

Demons, with its flaws, is still highly recommended. Shirley is a great writer. I am thinking that perhaps his frequent poor choices in plots and characters make the books more interesting. I read a book of his where "The Fighting Jesus" comes into the plot as a character and mows down the forces of evil with a machine gun. That was just stupid.

When he is good, John Shirley is very good, and when he is bad, he is a lot of fun.

Demons is available on Amazon by clicking on the image above. There are some used copies at about $6 in the Amazon shops that you can get to from the main Amazon page. Buy it and listen to it on the way to work!

Next Random Blog

I made a web page that loads the next random blog. This is good because it sort-of keeps bad blogs from hiding the blogger bar and I will add the code that prevents sites from reloading the parent frame as soon as I find the code that I wrote a while back.
Update: I added the code to keep a blog from breaking out of the frame. The trouble is, you get the same message when you want to close the page or go somewhere else. I had to soften the warning.

Millions of email signatures

I am always looking for good tag lines. All the funny ones are here: http://phd.pp.ru/Texts/fun/signatures.txt

Oops - Story submission

I received a story back from Futurismic - a 19 day bounce. I sent it out last night to Neometropolis. When I got in this morning, I found in my submission notes file that Neometropolis does not answer queries, and the last story I sent them I withdrew at 75 days after I received no answer on two queries. There is also talk at the rumor mill that they ask you for your story for free even though they claim to be a paying market. In short, I should have never sent it in.

I hate to have to tie up this story for another two months, but the damage is done and I should just wait them out and give them the benefit of the doubt. I checked the website and they seem to be an on-going zine.

Justin Stanchfield just sold them a story (partially the reason I sent my story there.) Justin and I have overlapping markets. The stories that I read of his are probably a little better than my own, and he is a bit more prolific, but in style, theme and subject our stories are similar. I watch RM and see where he is selling and I figure I might be able to interest the editor in a similar, if not as good, story.

There is no history on Neometropolis in the Black Hole reporter, which should have been a clue not to submit.

St. John Blues Festival

I might just go for this - it satisfies the vacation resolution. St. John Blues Festival

How to handle a soul crushing job

This is for J: Working for the Man

YPN Dropped

I had the Yahoo Publishers Network (YPN) ads on the site for two months and I made only $2. It's a waste of bandwidth so I dropped it. I made $2000 off google at the same time from other sites. I am in trouble with google for one of my posts on the blog so I can't advertise here with them. I put a couple of links to canned Commission Junction ebay searches on the right. If you need to find anything on ebay, click these first as a get a few cents for each bid, and a more if you win an item, and a whole bunch if you register. I've only made an average of about $50 a month on all of my sites from eBay, but I am going to explore ways to get more out of the eBay affiliates program. I will add some more links as I have time.

Preditors & Editors Poll

The madness has started again. I refuse to get involved this year. Last year I spent entirely too much time in self-promotion and nail biting. If nominated I will not run, and if elected I will not serve. Preditors & Editors Poll

New Years Thoughts

I don't like making resolutions for the obvious and common reason that they are usually disappointments. J. Erwine in his blog said very much the same thing. But I would like to accomplish a few things. I can expect to be disappointed in lots of things, so let's try and set some goals.

1) Learn, really learn, Flash. I believe that HTML is limited. I have been using AJAX and some advance CSS stuff lately. I like the CSS buttons on this page, but I need to learn Flash and action script in order to move to the next level. I've tried before, but the tutorials are extremely basic and then a few pages later they make some kind of quantum leap and I'm lost. I need to find a good book and really learn it. In 2005 I learned PHP and in 2006 I will learn Flash.

2) I want to finish another scratch harp amp. I want to make the Twin-8 and get it working and then sell the kits.

3) I want to get a job where I can work at home. This is pie in the sky, but I am not needed or even particularly wanted at Westchester Gov, even though my three year anniversary is coming up. The next job should be a telecommute job. Just me and the cats banging away code in our pajamas.

4) I want a vacation. Since I have been consulting, I have not taken a vacation. That's five years. There were a few weeks unemployment in there, but you can't take a vacation when you can't pay for it.

5) I want to go back to the jams and play harp. All the blues jams have closed down or else they start late. I can't stay out until 1AM on a Wednesday night. I want to go to a blues jam again, so I have to find one or hope that a new one opens up in Nyack.

6) I want to finish Fumets and then rewrite it and send it to publishers. I want to try another novel. Perhaps I should enter nonwrimo next year.

7) I want to sell a story to somewhere in Ralan's Pro/semi page. This means writing such a story. I hope the idea comes.

2005 was a stinky year. 2004 was a very bad year. I would be glad when this decade ends, but I will be 58 years old when it does.

Here's hoping that 2006 will be an improvement. If I do any of the things on my list, I will be a little happy.

So far, though, 2006 hasn't been so hot. I got a reject today on the story that I sent out last week. All the other stories out are perennial losers so I can expect more big Rs in the coming weeks. If I want to sell a story, I'll just have to write a good one.