Download Large Feline Collider in EPUB format.

Here’s the opening line:

“Basically, it accelerates cats around the ring at high speed and collides them head-on to see what happens,” our tour guide said as we gaped at the colossal machine, the final stop of the tour.

Please rate this story and share it with your friends. Post a review on your blog. It’s under a Creative Commons license, so go do something cool with it and post about it here to let the world know.

The fantastic  cover art is from Puss in Boots, who’s work also recently appeared in Absolute Visions. I love it.

As an aside, this is my first foray into self-promotion. I’ll be keeping close tabs on what kind of traffic this produces, and I might even report back here with some results. Look for more plugs and promotions in my Twitter feed and other venues. Offer me valuable advice.

If you’ve got a Kindle device and can’t read EPUB format, first read this; if you still are having problems, send me an email and I can get you set up with something you’ll be able to read.

Enjoy! -m

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 improved by an international forum of publishers. The standard itself is open and free for anyone to implement. Sounds like a good idea.

Except that the market leader, Amazon, refuses to support it in their products. I have nothing against Amazon. My family owns two Kindles, and will likely pick up a third one before the end of the year. Nonetheless, this is customer-hostile behavior for a company, and damaging to authors. If your only ebook reader is a Kindle, you should diversify. Look into other tablets and/or desktop software that can read EPUB files, or convert ebooks between various formats. Calibre is one such option. If you know of more, please add to the comments here.

If you find it outrageous that Amazon’s products don’t support an open standard for ebooks, let them know. Click ‘Help’ on any of their pages, and follow the link labeled  , and politely fill in the form that results. Or call their support line at (800) 201-7575. Or post on their discussion boards.

Food on desk: Xylitol mints, and some packaged tea in the corner. That’s it.

Papers on desk: Sticky notes, Togo’s receipt with miscellaneous notes written on the back, several letter-size sheets with notes, post oral surgery “instructions for care of the mouth”, Netflix envelope (unopened), some kind of mail-in registration card, Amazon receipt.

Novel: currently out to half a dozen beta readers. Should start getting some comments back soon. Current #wip would make Matt Fraction smile.

Morale: hobbling. I did a bad thing to my ankle early in Janurary, and haven’t been out for a run since. No exercise makes Micah a sad boy. Things can only go up from here…

-m

Even more recently, Adam Christopher and Angry Robot Books have opened up the fascinating world of Empire State. As a reader, I love this. When you get to the end of a story you love, it’s great to have more material ready and waiting. It’s such a shift from big-company-standard-procedure. (Can you imagine Paramount actively soliciting alternate Star Trek fiction?)

As a writer, ifwhen I get a novel published, I’m totally going to stealuse this idea.

1. A Memory of Wind, Rachel Swirsky
2. The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang
3. Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin
4. Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, Rudy Rucker
5. Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny
6. Story Engineering, Larry Brooks
7. Meanwhile, Jason Shiga
8. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
9. Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, Donald E. Knuth
10. 3:16, Donald E. Knuth
11. Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
12. Comedy in a Minor Key, Hans Keilson, Damion Searls (translator)
13. A Fire Upon the Deep [*], Vernor Vinge
14. Stripped bare – a light-hearted guide to getting the most out of writers’ critique groups, Patty Jansen
15. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
16. Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
17. 7th Sigma, Steven Gould
18. Anathem [*], Neal Stephension

That said, a calendar year is a natural place to stop and reflect, particularly in the age of the internet where sites you rely on to gather statistics prepare to reset for the next year. So here’s my year in numbers.

Goodreads: I read 34,653 pages from 100 books in 2011, and that’s only counting things with an ISBN, more or less. Lots of online reading, including stories at Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Lightspeed, The Drabblecast, Daily SF, Electric Spec, and so on aren’t reflected in that.  Perhaps the biggest missing piece, in terms of page count, was the Mongoliad, a serial novel which had to be at least 700 pages equivalent, of which I’ve read all 47 chapters published as of this writing.

Duotrope: I’ve found this story-submission-tracking website to be completely indispensable. There’s no way I’d be organized enough on my own to keep track of this in a system of my own devising, unless maybe I went off for months to build one. Bravo! According to the stats here, I submitted 17 different pieces a total of 53 times in 2011, with 2 acceptances (a 4.65% rate for those I’ve heard back from) and 6 personal rejections. Over the course of the year, I retired three of these stories.

The Duotrope site is strictly donation supported, and based on recent observations, under a fairly significant user load. If you use the site, please help them out. I suggest $1 per story sub if you can afford it. If you (like me) used to buy those thick annual market guidebooks, direct that money to these folks instead.

Other: On top of all that, I continued work on my novel. It went in front of an alpha reader, which resulted in a bunch of changes I’m really happy about. A careful editing pass corrected many of the systematic writing deficiencies I originally inserted into it, and added about 6k words. In 2012, it’s going out to beta readers (and beyond?). Looking at options.

I joined a local writers’ group, which has been terribly helpful. I made it to two cons, Potlatch and FogCon.

I don’t have any specific goals for the arbitrary period known as calendar year 2012. I will keep doing what I’m doing. With so much still to learn, I will keep improving where I can. I’ll be at Paradise Lost II for some remedial work. One thing that will be new, though: my first contact with the reprint markets.

Onward.

Update: even-more-late-breaking stats.

On writing. My goal was to put down 50 kilowords of various short pieces. Here’s how I did, with the names obscured to protect myself and future slush readers, pity them: (unix command for the curious: wc -w *.text | sort)

     100 xxxx_xxxxxx.text
     104 xxxxxxxx.text
     274 xxxxx-xxxxxx.text
     299 xxxxx.text
     556 xxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx.text
     580 xxxxxxxxx.text
     598 xxxxxx-xxxx.text
     675 xxxxxxx.text
     757 xxxxxxxxxxx-xxxx.text
     856 xxxxxx-xxxxx.text
     965 xxx.text
    1201 xxxxxxxxx.text
    1219 xx-xxxxx.text
    1674 xxxxxxxxx.text
    1760 xxxxxxxx.text
    2523 xxxxxxxx.text
    2719 xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx.text
    2724 xxxxxxx.text
    3162 xxxxxxx.text
    3212 xxxxxx.text
    3298 xxxxxx.text
    3346 xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx2.text
    3626 xxxxxx.text
    4216 xxx.text
    4234 xxxx.text
    6255 xxxxxxxxxx.text
   50933 total

That’s a pretty good distribution of sizes. Certainly shows where my confort zone lies.

Why this was good for me at this stage:

• This was a welcome break from my longer piece, which is marinating prior to another edit pass.
• This taught me that 2k a day is eminently doable, even with a day job & family.
• This taught me a trick for battling so-called writer’s block: often when an idea is too “flat” I subconsciously recognize this and hesitate to plow on. Combining two ideas can work wonders.
• I managed to edit a few pieces, four in total, for submission.
• I now have a large pile of stuff to work on editing and/or submit for crit.

Why this wasn’t good for me:

• There were times where the incessant focus on word count seemed harmful. There were days where I wrote rubbish just because I had to lay down some words. (This is arguable–in one case, a story that felt this way suddenly picked up life halfway through. It needs a complete rewrite, but there’s something good buried in there.)
• I estimate maybe about 25% of these stories will get immediately retired with no further work.
• When writing many small pieces, there’s a tendency to abandon something that’s not working in favor of starting something shiny and new. Finishing what you start is important, and this could easily become a bad habit.

Net, it’s been good for me. Earlier Nanos, in which I wrote (or in one case re-wrote) 50k in a single story were good for me at the time, and so was this one. Will I do it again? Likely, but the exact nature of it will no doubt vary depending on the circumstances of my craft and career at that point.

I stumbled upon a neat trick for editing. Normally I edit front-to-back, which works well for flow and sentence-to-paragraph-level issues. But for this pass, I worked back to front, which helps one think about how bigger pieces connect together. It’s really nice for looking at character arcs and making sure all the foreshadowey bits are doing their job.

Food items present: Xylitol mints, ibuprofen (yeah, we’ll call that food), Tums (ditto) and a glass of Throat Comfort tea, the tast of which I’ve grown quite fond of. The back corner of my desk still holds an assortment of various tea and yerba mate packages.

I should finish this editing pass in the next few days, but I’m not out of the woods yet. Based on alpha reader comments, there are still some gaps that need to be filled in, but this is more akin to writing than editing, so I’m rolling these bits into the November festivities. Corroborating evidence: the low word count. I’ve added over 12k words so far this month, and it’s beginning to feel like a complete novel. I’ll likely need a light front-to-back pass to iron out any small scale kinks that have been recently introduced.

So, November. I’m not officially NaNo-ing, least of all because I don’t want to start a new novel with this one unfinished. But I do need some marination time, so I’ll focus on short stories. My goal is to write 2000 words a day of short fiction, in stories between 100 and 10,000 words. I have set aside a folder full of fragments–ideas that struck but that I valiantly resisted in order to finish some other project. There’s 841 words in all the files in that directory now. Let’s see if we can get it to 60k by Nov 30.

But I’m not starting until this edit pass is done. Gotta go, moonlight’s burning.

P.S. If you have serious/crazy/funny ideas for a short story, post them in the comments here. But be warned: no guarantee what I might (or might not) do with them!

Other than that, I have stacks of notes quite a few sheets deep, covering my novel and a short story in progress. Mr. Postman recently brought a new Netflix, “Through the Wormhole”, which looks like it will be excellent, albeit a test of willpower to get things done.

Drinking: Throat comfort tea. Black licorice & slippery elm. Also, delicious.

Food: somehow, the only food item on my desk is a nearly-empty container of Spry xylitol mints, “berry blast” flavor.

My current pass through the novel involves adding about 25 kilowords. So if I can manage 1K per day with only a few whiffs, it might be done by the end of October, just in time for NaNoWriMo. If I participate, instead of starting another novel with this one unfinished, I’m thinking about writing 50kwords of short stories. Should be fun.

I wholly support this notion. As one who attempts to meticulously follow directions like these (yes, even though I sometimes still screw things up) I’m all for filtering by degree of attention paid. It’s like Van Halen’s directive to remove all brown m&ms from the backstage area. He or she who cannot be bothered to follow small directions most likely has problems with bigger, more important things.

However, SMF by way of DOC or RTF is a poor candidate for this kind of vetting. As recent personal experience shows, these formats are not amenable to high-fidelity transmission, particularly when different kinds of software are involved. What the sender sees, in terms of fonts, spacing, alignment, margins, whether characters are in ALL CAPS OR NOT, and so on, can be different than what the receiver sees. To some extent, the formats themselves are to blame. For instance, did you know that there are ten different versions of RTF in circulation? Which ones do your word processor support? DOC format has other problems, for other reasons. In common practice, the uncertainty from the format swamps the obedience signal, and it’s often impossible to tell whether or not the sender did follow instructions.

What could be a possible solution to this problem? I have some ideas. Keep watching this space for more. Meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.