Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Two months is a long time to go between blog updates. Things have been crazy busy around here, more chaos than usual.

I mentioned a few posts back that I’ve been having issues with hosting this site. Still am (my internet connection was just out for 2.5 days; that sucked), but I have a plan. As soon as I figure out an easy way to port the content database, this site is getting rehosted on a commercial provider (right now it’s on a server about ten feet from where I sit in my basement office). I’m giving up some control and gaining a bunch in reliability and connection speed.

I’ve already been using that provider to host the MagicBakeshop. As I explain there, the name Magic Bakeshop is adapted from Dean Wesley Smith’s “Magic Bakery” concept, the idea being that stories are like magic pies: you can keep selling (or giving away) slices of them and still have the whole thing. MagicBakeshop’s first product is a computer app to help authors and indie publishers track their sales through Amazon, Pubit, Smashwords, etc. If that’s up your alley, check it out.

Partly because I’ve been working on the above software, and partly because of some of the other events going on in my life, I haven’t been spending as much time writing as I’d like. I have two stories (shaping up to be novelettes in length, perhaps) about half done, one a Jason Curtis story, the other set in what may well be T-Space, but in our past rather than the future. I’m having a lot of fun with both of them, I just wish I had more time.

I have several more stories (including “Stone Age” from the June Analog) almost ready to up as ebooks. And I really need to get that redraft of Alpha Centauri finished.

Anybody got a time machine I can borrow?

A discussion on Slashdot today mentioned a story that Don Lancaster told in one of his columns. I’ve enjoyed Don’s column in The Midnight Engineer for years, and I built some of the projects in his many books, including the Cheap Video Cookbook back in my days playing with a KIM-1 (one of the first-ever microcomputers, a single bare circuit board with just pushbuttons and an LED display; I had to build my own power supply for it). An anonymous poster on Slashdot related Don Lancaster’s “flute story”, and I looked it up on Don’s site. He’s repeated it several times in his newsletters and books. Here’s the Slashdot version:

“Many years ago, I was at a rock concert. The opening act was a single flute player standing solo in front of the closed stage curtains. His job was to warm up the audience for the high priced talent that was to follow. He was good. But as he went along, the musical vibes got stranger and stranger, then totally bizarre. He was playing chords on his flute. Combined with utterly unbelievable riffs. Much of the audience got impatient and bored at what seemed like a bunch of god-awful squawks. Then I happened to notice a friend beside me who had both been in and taught concert band. He was literally on the edge of his seat. He turned to me and slowly said ‘You Can’t Do That With a Flute.’

Of the thousands and thousands of people in the theater audience, at most only five realized they were witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime performance of the absolute mastery of a difficult and demanding instrument.

Always play for those five.”

Another Slashdotters wondered cynically if the effort was worth it. I think that represents a certain lack of pride in his work. Maybe you’re not up to a high skill level, but isn’t it something to strive for? If you have that skill, isn’t it worth demonstrating?

My son Arthur is something of an amateur magician and we know a few professionals, and how many of the standard tricks are done. While most of an audience is impressed at the mere performance of a trick (so long as the magician is competent enough to keep from accidentally revealing the method), other magicians in the audience will be impressed at how skillfully it’s performed — especially if the magician can do what seems to be the old trick in a new way that even fellow magicians can’t figure out. Or, who like Penn and Teller performing the ancient cup-and-balls trick with transparent cups and telling the audience what they’re doing, can still pull a few surprises. Penn and Teller are playing for the five.

I write (among other things) hard science fiction. I like to get the details right, even in off-the-wall stuff like a conversation with an intelligent slime mold (“Light Conversation”). Sometimes I’ll take hours to get details right, calculating orbits or the exact distances and directions between different stars. Most SF readers will neither notice nor care, they’re just looking for a good story. But I care. Of course I want readers to enjoy my stories; it’s important that the details don’t get in the way of the entertainment, and if they do I’m failing my primary purpose. However there are a few who will notice, who may even do the math. They — you, since probably some of you are among them — are the ones I take that extra effort for. Sure, I want everyone to enjoy my writing (although realistically I know that it’s impossible to please everybody), but I write for the five.

Like Don said, play for the five.

“The sleeper ship Raven sliced the icy, inky, tans-Plutonian darkness a light-year out from Earth.” So begins “Poetic Justice”, a deep-space psychological horror story that’s also a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado”. I wrote this for the anthology Space Horrors, and it is now available as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers.
It was a lot of fun to write and I think it’s one of my better short stories to date.
To help launch it, I’m offering a 100% discount (that is, free) off purchases made at Smashwords. Enter the coupon code QF56Q; the coupon expires May 8, so you’ve got a week. All I ask (beg, plead, implore) is that you give it a rating, ideally on both on Smashwords and Amazon (or B&N, if you’re a Nook reader). If you feel so moved, I’d appreciate reviews, too. Thanks! (In fact, I’ll offer a free e-book to the first five reviewers, good or bad — I want honest reviews.)

My friend Brad Torgersen, who’s writing career is really starting to take off, has an interesting blog post, No Battle Plan Survives Contact that illustrates how the shake ups in the publishing industry can change even the plans of nimble newbies on a month by month basis. He and I are pretty much on the same wavelength as far as this goes: I’m going to be taking some new approaches to making my work available (and writing more of it!) too.

Brad’s also just published Blood and Mirrors, a “noir, detective, somewhat erotic, somewhat cyberpunk” novelette that sounds great fun.
Real Soon Now (too many things in the queue!) I’ll be reissuing some of my existing e-books to clean up minor formatting issues and change the interior illustration (which in several cases is the old cover image, not the cleaned up new one.) And Poetic Justice should be out tomorrow or so.

I’ve been prepping my space horror story “Poetic Justice” for Kindle, Nook and other ebook readers or reader software (like Kindle for PC).

You may remember this as the lead story in the Full Throttle Space Tales volume Space Horrors (edited by David Lee Summers) which came out last year shortly before Halloween. That book is still available if you want hardcopy, and contains many other fine stories besides. (Although I will likely be submitting “Poetic Justice” to Anthology Builder soon, too.)

I will be making some other changes to what’s already available. I think I will drop “Light Conversation” as a stand-alone (it’s only 1000 words — two pages in Analog) and include it in a collection, although I may offer it as a free sample from time to time. I’ll probably do the same thing with “Poetic Justice” (another short-short). I’ll keep you posted.

I finally bought myself a real Kindle. I’ve been using Kindle-for-PC software on my laptop for about a year, but the actual device is much more portable. Also, I want to be able to see how my e-books and e-stories look on the actual device. (I’ll get a Nook, too, at some point. Meanwhile there’s a Nook reader for PC.)

How do I like it so far? Great, with some reservations. I bought the wi-fi only model, because (a) I’m cheap (the Kindle 3 with built-in G3 wireless access is $50 extra) and (b) having truly instant access to Amazon’s Kindle store is a little too tempting for me. (But not for you; of course you want instant access to buy any (all) of my e-books). Public wi-fi access isn’t quite as ubiquitous as one might hope, but then I don’t really need to be download while driving. Most coffee shops and fast-food places have wi-fi these days, so it isn’t really a problem. The included web browser (in the latest software) takes some getting used to — a gray-scale image, and no mouse or touchscreen means you have to move the cursor around with the “5-way” pointer key — but I could easily read my favorite blog sites.

The built-in text-to-speech software can read your e-books to you, if the publisher has activated that feature (I do with all of my books/stories). It sounds rather robotic, and occasionally messes up pronunciation, but it’s great, especially for non-fiction where dramatic reading and voice inflection isn’t so important. However, it doesn’t handle section headings or bullet-lists well. If the heading or list item doesn’t have a comma or period at the end, the Kindle software just keeps reading without taking a virtual breath, which can be a bit disconcerting.

These pronunciation issues are probably easily fixed with some tweaks to the text-to-speech algorithms. On the other hand, Amazon earlier had a dispute authors and publishers who (with some justification) claimed that this infringed on the audio performance rights. The current state seems a happy medium between providing for the visually impaired (as does the Kindle’s adjustable font size) and the improved quality of performance that a human reader could provide. (Amazon also provides for publishers to opt in or out of enabling text-to-speech when the Kindle version is prepared.)

For the tinkerers among you, the Kindle is easily “rooted”. Dropping the right files into the Kindle when it’s attached to a computer (via its USB cable) will update the OS to allow access to the Linux-based operating system using that same USB cable as a network connection. Mind, if you don’t know what you’re doing you could really mess up your reader that way. Details can be found at www.mobileread.com and looking for “usbnetwork” and “jailbreak”. Consider those vague instructions as the equivalent of a childproof-cap; if you can’t find it from that, you probably shouldn’t be messing with trying to root your Kindle. 😉

I’ll always have a soft spot for paper copies of books, but I find I’m using my Kindle more and more.

I trust everyone survived April Fools Day? Personally I think it’s getting a little out of hand, you can’t trust anything you read on the web on April first. Okay, I’ll grant you that could also be said of just about every other day of the year, but still.

Anyway, it’s no joke that the June issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact is now on the news stands. The next (July/August) issue goes on sale May 10, so you have until then to buy a copy if you want to read “Stone Age”. 😉

The latest (June, 2011) issue of Analog just arrived and it includes my story “Stone Age,” my first Analog story that’s not a Probability Zero flash piece. Not that I have anything against PZ of course. They’re great fun (and a challenge!) to write as well as to read. But the length “Stone Age” gives me a chance to set up some real character and world building. It stands on its own (else Stan Schmidt wouldn’t have bought it), but in a slightly different form it kicks off my novel (pending publication) The Chara Talisman.

If you’re not a subscriber, the June issue of Analog should be on the stands around April 5th. (See the cover image over there on the right.) It’s also available electronically for Nook and Kindle. I’d be interested to hear what you think, good or bad.

I recently discovered Anthology Builder (www.anthologybuilder.com), a website and business which started with a brilliant idea, one which remains so even in these uncertain times for traditional publishing (perhaps especially now).

It comprises a vast and growing repository of short stories in various genres by many authors (both classic and contemporary). You build your own custom anthology by selecting the stories, selecting a cover, and then customizing (if you want) with an intro. Through the magic of Print-On-Demand (POD), you’ll have a printed and bound copy of that anthology delivered to you for no more than the cost of a traditional trade (large size) paperback. The authors whose stories are in the anthology then each get a cut of the sale price.

Quality of the stories is high: all have been previously published in professionally edited, paying venues, and are reviewed before being accepted into the Anthology Builder repository. (Disclosure: I have stories available for sale via Anthology Builder, but only because I think it’s a cool idea and it’s a good outfit to work with.)

Check them out.

At a reader’s request, I’ve added a bibliography page (link in the banner above). This lists most of my published work (the exceptions are old, irrelevant, and non-fiction) and I’ll keep it updated. The next update will be soon; there are projects in the works that I can’t announce yet, but one involves several rising stars in the SF world.