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November 28, 2005
Can You Spot the Home of Author Boy?
One of the houses in this admittedly blurry image is my place. I found it while playing with Google Earth just now. I started off just looking for Perth, which took some finding, but when I did find it, and started zooming in, all of this other detail about Perth and the metro area popped up. All of which was interesting in itself, and I idly wondered if I could find my own house. It looked like a tough challenge, until I noticed certain major roads leading to this very part of suburbia, and from there it was just a matter of remembering driving directions to find my way to my own home. I'm astonished that I can do this, I must say.
I shouldn't be: during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I was reading the blog of Kathryn Cramer. Kathryn is a sf book editor who, on the side, discovered she could use Google Earth and Google Maps to examine aerial images of pre- and post-flood New Orleans, and was able to identify individual houses, what condition they were in, and so forth--and plenty of people from that city, worried about what was happening to their homes, wrote in and asked her to have a look. More recently, Kathryn has been using these services and others to round up useful data about earthquake-affected Pakistan for relief agencies and, of course, people who've been evacuated or otherwise affected by the earthquakes. It is truly amazing that a person armed with a computer, an Internet link, and one or two free bits of software, can make such an extraordinary difference in the lives of people on the other side of the world.
* * *
In the quest to figure out what the hell is going on with my headaches, my mother proposed the wacky idea of giving up cheese for a month, to see if that might be a factor. I've already tried giving up caffeine, chocolate, and various other things on a trial basis, so I now find myself a week into the no-cheese challenge.
And, up until last night, I had no headaches. None. Five full days of pain-free bliss. This came as a major relief, but also the kind of thing where you don't think your luck can possibly hold, and you start sweating on when the streak might end, and that in turn becomes a source of worry and stress. It's always fun in my head! Tonight, the headache is back, but so far seems to be quite a weakling.
None of this proves anything. Coincidence is not correlation. I'm planning on going a full month, and then some, until Christmas, to give the trial a fair go. Meanwhile, ads on telly for cheeseburgers are already driving me bats.
* * *
And Author Boy has been busy, too, taking advantage of the pain-free bliss of last week to get a big chunk of scribble done, with the current total weighing in at almost 56,000 words. Today's effort was mainly to do with rewriting a key chapter, in which Our Synthetic Hero finds himself lured into very deep trouble--and in the process "gets lucky" for the first time in his brief and confusing existence. The matter is complicated a lot by the fact that he's been persuaded to overlook a profoundly serious breach of the ship's Standing Orders, and then finds himself wracked with guilt to a disturbing degree. Has he gone over to the dark side? Has he begun to lose his mind? Difficult to say. I can say things aren't going to get any better any time soon.
Posted by adrian at 08:50 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 20, 2005
Now This is Odd
I get these spam emails selling various quite popular medications, same as everyone else. As well as advertising their dubious wares, they often have a chunk of weird prose, usually at the bottom of the page. Sometimes they seem almost to have a weird (in the old sense of the word) poetry about them, vaguely reminding me of Allen Ginsberg, et al.
Today I got one of these, with an unusually clear bit of text attached:
enemy. He cried out to his captors, Pray spare me, and do not all present themselves before him, when he would himself choose
I ran this through Google, and got this page, one of Aesop's Fables, which goes:
The Trumpeter Taken PrisonerA Trumpeter, bravely leading on the soldiers, was captured by
the enemy. He cried out to his captors, "Pray spare me, and do
not take my life without cause or without inquiry. I have not
slain a single man of your troop. I have no arms, and carry
nothing but this one brass trumpet.""That is the very reason for which you should be put to death,"
they said; "for, while you do not fight yourself, your trumpet
stirs all the others to battle."(Translated by George Fyler Townsend, 1814-1900)
I might try this on drug spam emails in future and see what I get. Could be interesting.
Posted by adrian at 04:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 15, 2005
Umbra Breaks 50K!
This has been a long, long time coming: today the UMBRA manuscript ticked over the magic 50,000-word mark. This, at least in theory, means I'm about halfway through the book. And, at the current rate of about 1000 words per session--an achievable quantity on a regular basis--means I could be done in about 50 more work days. How many actual days that works out to, I could not say. But I could be done sometime early next year after about six months work.
If you've been reading my earlier posts about the book's progress, you know I've been plagued by all kinds of doubts and misgivings about it and about myself. All along I've held to this lofty ideal: if I can just crack 50K, I might have something. Way, way back when I was just a dumb teenager learning how to write novels on my own, and working on an Imperial 202 portable typewriter, amid daunting piles of finished pages, 50K was a goal so remote, so practically crazy ("why, no man on Earth could possibly climb a mountain 50,000 words high! It's surely suicide even to try!"), that it also had a kind of mad allure. I worked out my average words per page, divided the magic number by this words/page figure, and knew that when I hit Page 250 in a double-spaced manuscript, it would be time to break out the bubbly--no, wait, I was only a kid. Okay, it was time to break out the red cordial. It was a big deal.
I'm hoping the magic still holds, and the next 50K goes a bit easier than this first 50K. So far, it looks promising. I've just set off a major plot bomb, and the frustrated protagonist is finding himself in deeper and deeper trouble. In the next chapter or two more plot bombs will be going off, which should bring things to a nice head. So I'm not short of story to write. Sometimes it's more about, "geez, how do I cover all this material in a rational manner?" than about, "Ack! What happens next?"
* * *
Last week, Publicity Whiz Janice got in touch to ask if I could produce a short (under 500 words) synopsis or blurb for HYDROGEN STEEL right away. Hmm. So I went away, tried to write a synopsis that covered the whole story in under 500 words--and got to 450 words and found I was still dealing with stuff from chapter three. So I junked the "tell the whole story" stuff, and wrote a snappy blurb instead. The story has some humourous bits, so the blurb reflects that. Here it is...
HYDROGEN STEEL—short synopsisWhen retired top homicide inspector Zette McGee, late of Winter City, Ganymede, gets called out of her mysterious retirement to help Kell Fallow, a desperate former android accused unjustly of murdering his wife and children, she knows she has to help him, for Zette has a secret she is desperate to keep, and Fallow knows all about it.
With the help of her best friend, the elderly but very suave former secret agent Gideon Smith, and his ridiculously impressive personal starship, the Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Zette sets out (a) to help the accused man, but also (b) to keep Gideon from finding out her own awful secret, even as everything they learn in the investigation keeps pointing to it.
But when Kell Fallow is killed by a bomb he didn't know was buried in his guts, and when a homebrew android identical to Zette destroys her home on the luxurious Serendipity habitat, Gideon and Zette go on the run, only to run afoul of sabotage, spies, nasty infections, bad guys galore, and ordinary machines come to relentless, murderous life.
The case will take Zette and Gideon on a terrifying journey into the darkest reaches of human space, in pursuit of an ancient truth--and will bring her into deadly contact with that truth's keeper, the awesomely powerful firemind, Hydrogen Steel, an artificial consciousness evolved far beyond its original design, and which is utterly determined to keep that same truth from getting out, at any cost.
Hydrogen Steel is a tense and thrilling mystery within a mystery, a tale of secrets and truth, and a journey to the limits of existence--and a bit beyond!
Posted by adrian at 05:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 09, 2005
Neat SF Audio on BBC7
Earlier this evening I was listening to a reading of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I stumbled upon this quite by chance, on BBC7, which, if you have a squizz at that link, will show you they offer a lot of sf content, including original audio serial Dr Who stories featuring actual actors from the classic version of the show (Michelle loves these), and even Twilight Zone story adaptations, and much else besides. Do yourself a favour!
Posted by adrian at 09:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Free Online SF Writing Course
SF author Jeffrey Carver has produced a free, online science fiction-writing course, which you can find here. It's intended, the introductory blurb reports, for kids, but looks like it might have application for folks of any age wanting to write sf, or looking for some tips. Personally, I'm keen to have a closer look at it. Looks interesting.
Posted by adrian at 09:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 03, 2005
A Different Take on Recent Events
Special Prosecutor Indicts Scooter
by Philip Michaels — October 31, 7:52 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) — The investigation into who leaked the name of a covert CIA agent in an apparent effort to punish a critic of the Bush administration’s justification for war in Iraq took a shocking turn when Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Scooter, the long-time gofer on The Muppet Show.
The indictment of the 43-year-old muppet — long the right-hand man to Muppet Show host Kermit T. Frog — sent shockwaves through both Washington and the Muppet Theater, as the investigation moved closer to implicating other muppets, including Dr. Teeth, Sam the Eagle, and George W. Bush.
Go here; read the rest. It's a hooooooooot!
Posted by adrian at 05:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 02, 2005
Squidrophenia--the lesser-known Who album [cough]
You know how I love the Giant Squid?
Well, go here, and behold a fellow fan's full-size knitted giant squid! It's HUGE! And thoroughly squid-tastic!
Or just maybe I've been reading way too many knitting-related blogs with Michelle these past several months. Actually, you know you're reading too many knitting blogs when, even though you are a bloke, you're sitting there, looking at a given blog, and you can really see all the hard work that went into that shawl, and you understand "steeks", and could even explain "intarsia" to someone who happened to ask you about it.
Actually, I gather, from reading all these blogs, that there are a great many top blokes who knit, and more power to them.
Okay, I couldn't really explain intarsia without consulting Google. But still...
Posted by adrian at 08:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack