Last year, a colleague of mine noticed this contest involving a near-future timeline, program source code, and a Vinge-ian flavor, and said ‘you really ought to enter something here. The end result: I did, and my story took the top prize. It will appear later this year as the final chapter in the book Finding [...]
I see lots of articles like this, talking about consumer confusion over ebook pricing. The lead-in goes something like…aw, I’ll just quote it. Publishers are making a killing on e-books because they cost nothing to produce, distribute and sell and are almost 100% pure profit. At least, that’s what many consumers think. Another statistic often [...]
OK, here’s the deal. I read quite a bit, as does my wife. As does my daughter. (Yeah, the one from FOGcon). As will my other daughter in a few more years. We’ve settled on Kindle ereaders for the moment, but that could change in the future. Let’s say that all of us want to [...]
I’m reading a charming, well-loved 1965 Book Club edition of Dune from the local library. We take Space Opera for granted today, but observe how it needed to be described back then. Inside flap copy, after some standard stuff about Duke Leto and the great rival house of Harkonnen: (italics are from original source are [...]
I’m delighted to announce: my story Ritchie Boss: Private Investigator Manager took first place in the Singular Source contest and will be published as the final chapter in the book Finding Source Code on the Web for Remix and Reuse due out later in 2012. The story will be released under a Creative Commons license and will [...]
This is a FAQ I’ll be pointing people at in the future, and updating as needed. EPUB is the name of a format for electronic books and other publications. It works pretty well, it has small file sizes, it’s compatible with business models that both require or don’t require DRM, and it’s actively maintained and [...]
Here’s a recent trend I can get behind: shared worldbuilding. Mur deserves credit as one of the pioneers here, with the rollout of Playing For Keeps and all the Stories of the Third Wave. Another that caught my eye was the Mongoliad, a serial novel by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and others, with lots of [...]
Writer writes story. Writer submits story to market. Market requires submissions in Standard Manuscript Format. Market requires submissions as DOC or RTF. This narrative plays itself out every day. But it’s a problem for users like me that don’t rely on Microsoft tools. I get notes back from editors kindly mentioning that the story didn’t [...]
Now official; check it out. My story The Knuth Number has been published by On The Premises issue #14 with the theme “Numbers, numbers, numbers”. Editor Tarl Roger Kudrick was a breeze to work with, and I’m thrilled to have made my first sale in a fiction market. Tonight we celebrate (by writing more).
Why 14 months? Because numbers are arbitrary, and there’s a better beginning, middle, and end this way. The primary drawback of my choice of writing as an avocation is that on top of a sedentary, computer-centric work day of 8-10 hours, I throw on a few more hours of the same. There’s a serious risk [...]