Posts published in “Uncategorized”

Too Many Projects … or an External Memory?

Published March 14, 2012 by centaur

Anyone who knows me in detail knows I'm a pile person. You can see the all the windows open above, but that's not the half of it: I had 14 tabs open in Firefox, 3 windows with 17, 13, and 3 tabs open in Chrome, and ten windows open in Finder, Mac OS X's file browser. I hammer my operating systems, loading them with as many windows, programs, files and fonts they can take.

But it's not just operating systems. I've got a huge folder of todos in my jacket pocket, a pile of books in my bookbag, on the table, in my car. My library, office, spare office and even kitchen table are filled with piles, as is my desk at work.

On the one hand, this could simply be because I'm a hoarder and need to learn to clean up more, and maybe I do. But most of the piles are thematically organized: in the shot above you can see (slightly overlapping) piles for a young adult and urban fantasy series, an art pile, a pile of bills, CDs being organized, and so on.

Some of this is, again, a product of mess, but the rest of it is a deliberate strategy. A collection of books on a topic serves as an external memory that augments the goo we have in our heads. This is part of the theory of situated cognition, which posits that our memories are elaborated through interaction with the external world.

William Clancey, one of the founders of situated cognition, puts it this way: his knowledge of what to take on a fishing trip isn't in his internal memory: it's in his fully stocked tacklebox, which represents the stored wisdom of many, many fishing trips; if he was to lose that tacklebox, he'd lose a portion of his memory, and become less effective.

My toiletry bag for flying serves the same role. Its contents have been refined over dozens, maybe even hundreds of trips. It doesn't just have a toothbrush and toothpaste, contact lens solution and hairspray, it has soap, shampoo, cough drops, nail clippers, bandaids and more. If I forget it, and try to recreate the toiletries that I need for a trip on the fly, I almost always have to go back to the store.

Situated cognition has been challenged, and I couldn't find the perfect reference that summarized what Clancey said in the Cognitive Science Brownbag talk I attended at Georgia Tech so many years ago. But I know how I work, and I know how it's influenced by that framework.

When I'm tackling a project, I build a pile. It might be a pile of tabs in a browser, folders of links in my bookmarks, files in a directory, books from my mammoth library. These serve as references I use to generate the text, the material I use to generate my writing, but they also serve as something more. They serve as a pointer to return me to an old mental state.

If I have to close my browser, reboot my machine, put a project aside, switch to another book, I can keep the pile. I have mammoth collections of files and bookmarks, and a mammoth library with something like 30 bookcases (that's cases, not shelves). And when I'm ready to reopen the project, I can start work on it again.

I've done that recently, restarting both my work on the "Watch on a Tangled Chain" interactive fiction and an exploration of programming languages - one project I hadn't worked on for a year, and one maybe for several years. But when I found the files, I was able to resume my work almost effortlessly. With physical piles of books, the process is even more joyful, as it involves reading snippets from half a dozen or so books until I'm back into the mindset.

So thank you, my poor processor, my crowded browser, my packed library. You make me more than I am on my own.

-the Centaur

The Future of Warfare

Published March 12, 2012 by centaur

Every day, a new viral share sparks through the Internet, showing robots and drones and flying robot drones playing tennis while singing the theme to James Bond. At the same time we've seen shares of area-denying heat rays and anti-speech guns that disrupt talking ... and it all starts to sound a little scary. Vijay Kumar's TED talk on swarms of flying robots reminded me that I've been saying privately to friends for years years that the military applications of flying robots are coming ... for the first time, we'll have a technology that can replace infantry at taking and holding ground.

The four elements of military power are infantry, who take and hold ground, cavalry, which break up infantry, artillery, which softens up positions from a distance, and supply, which moves the first three elements into position. In our current world those are still human infantry, human piloted tanks, human piloted bombers, and human piloted aircraft carriers.

We already have automated drones for human-free (though human-controlled) artillery strikes. Soon we will have the capacity to have webs of armed flying robots acting as human-free infantry holding ground. Autonomous armored vehicles acting as human-free cavalry are farther out, because the ground is a harder problem than the air, but they can't be too far in the future. Aircraft carriers and home bases we can assume can be manned for a while.

So then soon, into cities that have been softened up by drone strikes, we'll have large tanks like OGREs trundling in serving as refueling stations for armies of armored flying helicopters who will spread out to control the ground. No longer will we need to throw lives away to hold a city ... we'll be able to do it from a distance with robots. One of the reasons I love The Phantom Menace is that is shows this kind of military force in action.

Once a city is taken, drones can be used for more than surveillance ... a drone with the ability to track a person can become a flying assassin, or at least force someone to ditch any networked technology. Perhaps they'll even be able to loot items or, if they're large and able enough, even kidnap people.

It would be enormously difficult to fight such a robotic force. A robotic enemy can use a heat ray to deny people access to an area or a noise gun to flush them out. Camera detection technology can be used to flush out anyone trying to deploy countermeasures. Radar flashlights can be used to find hiding humans by their heartbeats, speech jammers can be used to prevent them from coordinating, and face detection you probably have on your phone will work against anyone venturing out in the open. I've seen a face detector in the lab combined with a targeting system and a nerf gun almost nail someone ... and now a similar system is in the wild. The system could destroy anyone who had a face.

And don't get me started on terminators and powered armor.

Now, I am a futurist, transhumanist, Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, very interested in promoting a better future ... but all too familiar with false prophecies of the field. Critics of futurism are fond of pointing out that many glistening promises of the future have never come to pass. But we don't need a full success for these technologies to be deployed. Many of the pieces already exist, and even if they're partially deployed, partially effective mostly controlled by humans ... they could be awesome weapons of warfare ... or repression.

The future of warfare is coming. And it's scary. I'd say I don't think we can stop it, and on one level I don't ... but we've had some success in turning back from poison gas, are making progress on land mines, and maybe even nuclear weapons. So it is possible to step back from the brink ... but I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater the way we seem to have done with nuclear power (to the climate's great detriment). As my friend Jim Davies said to me, 99% of the technologies we'd need to build killbots have nothing to do with killbots, and could do great good.

In the Future of Warfare series on this blog, I'm going to monitor developing weapons trends, both military systems and civilian technologies, realistic and unrealistic, in production and under speculation. I'm going to try to apply my science fiction writer's hat to imagine possible weapons systems, my scientist's hat to explore the technologies to build them, and my skeptic's hat to help discard the ones that don't hold water. Hint: it's highly likely people will invent new ways to hurt each other ... but highly unlikely that Skynet will decide our fate in a millisecond.

A bright future awaits us in the offworld colonies ... but if we want to get there, we need to be careful about the building blocks we use.

-the Centaur

Pictured: an OGRE miniature. This blogpost is an expansion of an earlier Google+ post.

The Rules Disease at Write to The End

Published March 7, 2012 by centaur

I've a new essay on writing at the Write to the End blog, called "The Rules Disease." A preview:

Anyone who seriously tackles the craft of writing is likely to have encountered a writing rule, like “Show, Don’t Tell,” or “Never Begin a Sentence with a Conjunction.” “Don’t Split Infinitives” and “Never Head Hop” are also popular. The granddaddy of all of them, “Omit Needless Words,” is deliciously self-explanatory … but the ever baffling “Murder Your Darlings” is a rule so confusing it deserves its own essay.

This is part of my ongoing column The Centaur's Pen.

-the Centaur

GDC 2012

Published March 6, 2012 by centaur

The Game Developer's Conference 2012 ... it begins:

GDC is an amazing conference for game developers. Imagine a film conference where Steven Spielberg's keynote is likely to be followed by an indie filmmaker roundtable discussing how you could shoot on the cheap without a license, where almost everyone at all levels is hobnobbing on the same floors. Translate to games ... and you get the idea.

I come for the AI Summit, which is generally of very high quality. I won't post any pictures of teh slides, except the one above, which gives you a flavor of the kinds of talks they've had over the past few years (not just at the AI summit, of course, but usually in the programming tracks). Ok, wait, I will post one more to give you a little more flavor:

A lot of the people in game AI say "they don't do AI"---one of them said today Academic AI and Game AI share only two letters---but I'm afraid I can't agree. I'm interested in Game AI because it's AI that has to work, which is refreshing after years of arguments between symbolic/neural fuzzy/scruffy mathy/empirical logical/architectural oh would you all please shut up about how you're better than each other and make something that WORKS and get back to me thank you very much. Not a problem at GDC!

On the first two tutorial days (Monday and Tuesday) it isn't so bad (oh and hey there Apple logo! Nobody's fooled that you're trying to horn in on our event for free publicity), and it never gets like Comic-Con ... but by the end of the week it becomes a zoo. Here are a few tips to surviving it. First, if you want lunch at Chevy's, sneak out during the Q&A of the pre-lunch session before it ends up looking like this:

Second, park in the 5th and Mission garage, and if you do, it has many food options. Skip the uber-long lines at the Starbucks in the morning (sorry, guys!) and either hit Mel's Diner (with the fastest bussers in the West) or grab a bite inside the Moscone Center itself. Also, note the excellent 'wichcraft sandwich shop across the street as another food option.

While the snacks in the Moscone Center are good, my kerfinicky stomach does not leave me able to recommend the (actually not bad) lunch they provide on site, so I usually forage for food, at Chevy's, 'wichcraft, Mel's, the restaurants of the Metreon next door, and if you parked at 5th and Mission, note the Bloomingdale's across the street? That's actually part of a huge Westfield mall, with an excellent, giant food court hidden therein that somehow I've missed all these years.

There are more tips ... like hit the GDC Bookstore the first day to pick up t-shirts and schwag, but wait until the Exhibit Hall opens later in the week to score deals direct from the publishers and only go back to the GDC Bookstore if the publishers are missing something (they will be) ... like make sure you give yourself four to six hours to hit the Exhibit Halls, that you check out the Independent Games demos, and be sure to hit the AI Roundtables if you're into that sort of thing, which is a gateway into the AI Programmer's dinner, which led to me being able to ask the developer of some of the software I use a question today because she knew me from previous years. So be sociable! That's half of what this conference is for!

But the biggest tip for someone like me, who lives an hour and ten minutes away in no traffic, or two hours in morning traffic?

Get a hotel right up the street.

More news as it happens. The AI Summit has been very quoteworthy so far and I've taken a lot of notes.

-the Centaur

Scientific Citations in Popular Literature

Published March 4, 2012 by centaur

Lightly edited from a recent email:

Here's the revised version. Rather than just including linked references [in that middle section as you suggested], I actually expanded that section so that it was clear who I was citing and what I was claiming they said. Citations work for science types but I want to learn (create? promote?) a new way of including references for popular literature in which, rather than saying something like, "Scientists think it's OK to start sentences with a conjunction [Wolfram 2002]." I instead want to say things like, "In the foreword of his mammoth tome A New Kind of Science, computer scientist Stephen Wolfram defends starting sentences with conjunctions, arguing forcefully that it makes long, complex arguments easier to read." Yes, it's longer, but it's more honest, and the [cite] style was aimed at scientific papers with enormously compressed length requirements. Tell me what you think.

What do you think about the use of citations in non-scientific literature? I think we can do better. I'm just not sure what it is yet. Textbooks have generally solved this problem with "info boxes," but that's not always appropriate. -the Centaur

Is Spam out of Control?

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

I don't know, you tell me. According to reports, somewhere between 75% and 90% of all email is spam, and if I read the numbers right, over 99.5% of all comments on this rather minor blog are spam. Yeah. That's extraordinary. That beats it all. -the Centaur

How Crazy is Comic-Con?

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

How crazy is Comic-Con registration? I logged on at 8:00am this morning to get in the waiting list and by the time I cleared the "waiting room" for the signup page (at 9:10ish) it was completely sold out. This is what I saw when it finally "let me in" to register:

I hate to do it, but I have to lay the blame squarely on Gmail. Comic-Con sent me a registration form, I clicked on the link at 8:00am, just like they told me to ...

The wait is over! Comic-Con 2012 badges will go on sale at 8:00 a.m. PST on Saturday March 3rd, 2012. To access the EPIC online registration website, click the following link: (link deleted for security reasons)

. The link kept timing out, as one might expect from an overloaded system, but after 5 or so minutes of click ... timeout, click ... timeout, I started to get suspicious.

But the problem wasn't in the site ... it was in something Gmail was doing to the URL. Clicking on it didn't work; copying the link location didn't work. Copying just the text and pasting it ... got me in at 9:10AM. Too late. Ah, Gmail, can't live without you, but every once in a while...

BANG! ZOOM! To the moon. Oh well, here's hoping I get in as a professional like I did the last two years ... this year I have even more claim, I guess, as I have a second book out, appear in two more books, and am involved with Blitz Comics. Crossing my fingers! -the Centaur Pictured: Lots of stuff. Fair use and whatnot ... parody, informative commentary, transformative and educational uses, and so forth.

Involves politics, but not really political

Published March 3, 2012 by centaur

Andrew Breitbart is dead at 43. He was apparently a conservative commentator; I wasn't too familiar with him except for some of the scandals he broke. But the point, as John Scalzi said, is that he was 43. I'm used to hearing about accomplished people who are much younger than I am ... Larry Page, Britney Spears, Christopher Paolini, that last born when I entered high school. Occasionally people in that age bracket die. It's a damn shame, everyone says, they died so young. But when Andrew Breitbart died, while it was clear that he died young - to the point of spawning (what at first appear to be ridiculous) conspiracy theories - no-one is too surprised. Because a male's chance of dying of a heart attack triples when you move up to 35-44 year age bracket, and triples again when you roll over into 45-54. I'd enter some snark about white males like myself being worse off, but it doesn't seem to be the case. So Andrew's about the right age where people should start worrying about dying of a heart attack. So am I. God speed, Andrew. And may God be with us all. -the Centaur Pictured: a memento mori featuring my cat, Caesar, curling up in the lap of luxury next to the skull of one of his less evolutionarily successful distant relatives. Looks like Caesar had an easier time taking down that giraffe than his buddy there.

Can you conceive of a situation where you wouldn’t vote for Obama?

Published March 2, 2012 by centaur

I try to avoid too much of the politics here. My experience of blogs that dip political is that they're often shrill, partisan, and most likely to make mistakes about the things they're most likely to post - the same trap I usually fall in when I post to my friends's shared mailing group. When you're engaged enough to respond, you're enraged enough to gaffe.

But a friend and I were discussing the recent election, I said something complimentary about Romney "even though I wouldn't vote for him" and my friend responded: "Can you conceive of a situation where you wouldn't vote for Obama?" And that gave me pause.

I try to be open minded. I currently vote liberal, but I was a College Republican, with deep admiration for President Reagan and President Nixon (no that wasn't a typo), and even though accepting reality forces one to lean to the left (and trying to be moral leans one even moreso), there are very important values on the right we can't just throw out with the bathwater. Economic freedom. Gun rights. Lower taxes when possible. Limits to the size and reach of government. Promoting the needs of families, businessmen, farmers, soldiers. I'd call myself a libertarian, but that's not a good descriptor either. Short story, i try to keep an open mind.

The last election cycle was ideal for me: a Republican I admired and had supported up against an eloquent technocrat who finally broke the color barrier. I couldn't lose. I printed out Obama and McCain's political positions and went through them with a fine tooth comb, and found myself on the fence, 50-50. I was undecided right up until August 29, 2008, when McCain selected Palin as his running mate. I take running mates very seriously, especially with an older headliner, and while McCain had earned my admiration and reflected my values, Palin ... hadn't, and didn't. So (big surprise) I voted for Obama. A Democrat.

Fast forward almost 4 years, and our conversation about Romney. I saw this article, and was impressed enough to write:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romney-im-not-willing-to-light-my-hair-on-fire-to-win-conservative-votes/2012/02/28/gIQADDk9fR_story.html

“I’m very pleased with the campaign, its organization. The candidate sometimes makes some mistakes, and so I’m trying to do better and work harder and make sure that we get our message across,” Romney told reporters during a visit to his campaign headquarters here. “In the final analysis, I anticipate becoming the nominee.”
Q: Candidate Romney, where does the buck stop?A: Where does the buck stop? The buck stops here. Next question.

But (based on other conversations) my friend's a bit bitter, as he thinks there's nothing that's going to stop Obama, and was probably frustrated to see me say I'd never vote for him. That lead to the question: "Can you conceive of a situation where you wouldn't vote for Obama?" ... and this (correcting a few typos) is what I wrote:

TL;DR: No.

Conceive of? Sure. He's unmasked as a space alien or secret Communist plant or something. Or contrafactually, had McCain selected almost anyone else with real credentials combined with appeal to a moderate base (Pataki? Powell? Rice?) it could have happened in 2008.

Realistically? No, for three reasons.

The Republican establishment has moved too far to the right, becoming deliberately obstructionist (you can verify this with their public statements) turning their backs on even hardline conservatives (you can also verify this with their public statements) and now see "moderate" as a dirty word. When you vote for a President, you vote for his party, and I cannot in good conscience vote for the Republican party. When the current conservative movement implodes and the party once again is open to a variety of opinions then I'll reconsider.

Obama's values, governance and style reflect my values, understanding of the facts, and preferred way that politicians should operate. He's not a Dukakis, or Carter, or LBJ, or one of the scarier people the Democrats have waiting in the wings ... he's more like a Clinton or JFK. SO he's not a bad choice to have up there, regardless of the Republican opposition, with the possible exception of his positions on space and domestic spying.

You don't change horses in a river ... or a President in wartime.

Put another way, from the perspective of a liberal moderate, Obama is one of the most successful presidents in history, so no, too much would have to change. The Republicans would have to radically shift to the center, and Obama would have to turn into some kind of monster.
In 2016, however, who knows? Bloomberg? Romney? Christie? Could it be ... Jeb Bush? (And yes I looked up their political positions before making that statement, though I reserve the right to change my mind if they have diarrhea of the mouth in the 2016 campaign).

Partisans may pshaw at this, evidence free as their reasoning is, because I'm not even a RINO (Republican in Name Only). If you have to put a name on what I am, I'm a left-leaning moderate. I haven't voted for a Republican President since Bush's dad. But Republicans are doing nothing to sell me on their party. I listen carefully to their positions. I'm trying to learn from their wisdom and defend their important values: the steering wheel of state needs to turn both ways.

But they've been drifting to the right since Bush lost to Clinton, since Bush violated his campaign promises and drifted to the right, and people like me ended up voting for the other guy. I still remember that day when a conservative shopkeeper, who had in front of him a voter telling him he switched parties because Bush went too far to the right, stood up enraged and told me that the reason Bush lost was because he wasn't conservative enough.

Keep telling yourselves that.

In the meantime, the left of us are going to vote for the guy who passed healthcare reform, repealed don't-ask-don't-tell, ended the war in Iraq, repaired our relations with the world, and made a good-faith effort to close Guantanamo, and the moderates among us are going to vote for the guy who saved the auto industry, passed the stimulus, refused to prosecute those who were prosecuting the war on terror, repeated Bush's surge trick in Afghanistan, piffed Osama bin Laden, and finally put the smackdown on Gaddafi the way Reagan wanted to oh so many years ago.

I'm sure if I went through and extensively fact-checked this article I'd have to blunt some of my criticism and praise; the real story is always too big to fit in the boxes that we want to fit it in. In particular, I know Obama's not perfect. But I'm going to go with the guy who's willing to take on ideas from the other side, if not their votes, because all the other side is trying to do now is make him fail - even if it means turning on their own ideas ... or turning on their own. There's a lot of good on the right ... but right now, on many issues, the right's in the wrong, and is extraordinarily resistant to accepting facts, reason, or even their own history, even in areas where Obama's choosing to follow firmly in Bush's footsteps to the point some of the left want to tear their hair out.

In the end, it's not about parroting the current set of litmus positions to establish one's group identification.

It's about being effective at doing what's right.

-the Centaur

P.S. For the record, while I admire Ron Paul's clear moral compass, and would love to see Newt Gingrich debate Obama just for the fireworks of seeing two powerful minds clearly articulate their conflicting ideals, if I did have to pick a Republican candidate I would pick Mitt Romney because I think he's the most experienced, levelheaded, and dare I say moderate of the current pack. I agree with my friend: he is the best choice out of the Republican field, even though I have the option of selecting a different candidate from a different party that better reflects my personal values. Best of luck, Mitt, though I will be voting for the other guy.

Pictured: White Flag by Jasper Johns, currently hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Five Favorite Noises

Published March 2, 2012 by centaur

My friend Keiko started a meme over at Write to The End: what are your five favorite noises? The rules:

Don’t take too long on it. I’d say post your list within 24 hours. And don’t worry about trying to get your absolute top 5 favorite sounds ever. When you’ve collected 5 sounds you love, just post the list. We know this is just for fun, and we won’t hold you to any of your stated favorites. (And if you think of 5 more, you can post those, too!)

My favorite noises are:

Gabby's Purr

Dad's Whistle

The Enterprise Going to Warp

The Sound of a Lightsaber

The Engines of the TARDIS

Runner up goes to the weird noise I can make in my throat.

-the Centaur

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternally Inspiring Tome

Published March 2, 2012 by centaur

This is the book that got me started on artificial intelligence ... and now has inspired me again to attack my craft with greater vigor. I was writing an essay for The Centaur's Pen column for the Write to The End site and realized it depended on a concept - true, but unprovable theorems - which isn't in wide circulation. So I've started an essay on that topic for this site, and decided to go reread Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book which introduced me to the concept.

At the writing group, the topic of the essay and Gödel, Escher, Bach came up, and we all started discussing how intricate, how rewarding, and how friendly Hofstadter's immense tome is. It's a work of genius that continues to stagger me to this day. And then my writing friends told me that in the new edition there's a foreward with the entire back story of how the book came to be.

I picked it up last night, and reading the new intro I was gratified to learn that I understood his basic thesis - that conscious intelligence arises from bare matter by grounding its symbols in correspondence to reality, then inexorably turning that grounding inward into a spiral of self-reference with no end. Hofstadter and I might disagree about what's sufficient to produce conscious intelligence, but we'd just be quibbling about details, because I think he nailed a necessary component.

But after the intro of the foreword, when I began to read the story of how this 750 page long Pulitzer Prize winning book started its life as a 20 page letter that Hofstadter decided needed to be turned into a pamphlet, I was stunned.

He wrote it in 5 years.

Well, it actually took 6 to complete, because he typeset it himself---through a happy-but-not-at-the-time accident, twice---producing an amazing work that was polished far beyond his original intention. But he wrote it while in graduate school, while teaching classes, while traveling cross-country. He put it down for a bit finishing his PhD thesis itself, but basically the book's a white hot blaze of inspiration polished to pure excellence.

I'm inspired, all over again.

-the Centaur

I have to fall in love with a story

Published February 29, 2012 by centaur

My fundamental philosophy about writing is very simple: I want to have fun, I want my readers to have fun, and I hope, if we're both lucky, that they learn something.

I've long understood that the third part of this troika, the learning, is both a product and a cause of the mammoth amount of research I do for even the simplest pieces. (And yes, I did look up Fat Albert on Wikipedia just to write the first sentence of this supposedly throwaway blogpost).

I've also understood that the second part, my readers having fun, is why I need to constantly work to hone my craft. That's why I don't self-publish, but work with a publisher with a strong editor who serves as a gatekeeper and holds my work to a high standard. That's why I attend a writing group; that's why I work with beta readers; and that's why I'm writing a monthly column on writing called The Centaur's Pen over at the Write to the End blog.

But only tonight did I realize the first part is why I need to fall in love with my own stories. When I'm writing a story, I can power through it if I have to, daydreaming sequences inspired by music, character and knowledge, weaving those scattered fragments together with the rules of plot and conflict, and winnowing the chaff until what's left is a cohesive whole.

But I'm better off if I fall in love with a story. I need characters to spring to life in my books and derail them, like Cinnamon in FROST MOON or Beneficenitor in HEX CODE (in progress). I need settings l fall in love with, like the Werehouse in FROST MOON and BLOOD ROCK or the Werehold in HEX CODE. I need vehicles on which I want to lavish detail, like the doomed Abadulon in DELIVERANCE (unreleased) or Independence in MAROONED (forthcoming). And I need scenes that I desperately want to write, like Dakota's challenging encounter with Transomnia in FROST MOON or her somewhat different encounter with the Streetscribe at the end of BLOOD ROCK.

I realized this need for love of my own work when I caught myself daydreaming about the first encounter of the Freemanship Independence with a mammoth Dresanian starship near the end of BESIEGED, the third book I have planned in the Seren series. A clip of "The Planet Krypton" shuffled through my iPod, I realized how the aftermath of the climactic battle could be shot in the movie ... and then began daydreaming how all the characters would react to what's happening.

Visualizing the Independence docking against the backdrop of a giant door like a Michael Whelan painting, a scenario I can visualize so strongly I was inspired to scribble it down on the spot, the question occurred to me: "Would the hero Serendipity finally secure sanctuary for her people ... or would the war criminal Seren finally be called to account for her crimes?" And how would the crew of Independence react if someone else came to claim someone they'd chosen to claim as their own?

That's falling in love with your story: when you think about it so much that random clips of music inspire you to write scenes, but you don't just visualize them, you are forced to think through how all the characters will react to what happened, how it fits their own personalities, the setting, the story.

That's what you should strive for in your writing: a love for your story that goes all the way down to its bones.

-the Centaur

The Big Apple

Published February 18, 2012 by centaur

Prior to Thursday, I'd visited New York maybe five to seven times ... all total for probably less than 24 hours. Maybe even less than 12: four, or maybe 6 brief layovers, and one 6 hour trip for a product announcement when I worked for Enkia, where quite frankly I should have stayed home because I just stood behind our CEO Ashwin in a show of support and then missed my scheduled interview because me and my interviewer couldn't find the Enkia booth. So I felt I'd missed out.

But now my beautiful wife works in upstate New York, and for a rare occasion knew what her schedule was, so we're taking the weekend off together in a belated birthday / Valentine's Day / repeated honeymoon extravaganza. And the first thing you notice about New York? The traffic sucks. HA! Not really, I've been to Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco, not to mention Athens and Tokyo, so the traffic here is just fine. No, no, the first thing you notice in New York is the buildings.

Like Chicago, New York has wonderful architecture, but where Chicago is ornate, New York is monolithic.

Spires stretch again and again far up into the sky.

The second thing you notice is how friendly all the people are. Unfortunately I'd been prejudiced against New York City by a few bad encounters with arrogant New Yorkers - one of whom called Atlanta, the ninth largest city in the U.S., a "small town." I shouldn't take offense at that, of course, but having been from a town less than a tenth of the size of Atlanta ... and knowing that THAT wasn't even a small town, I had the temerity to correct her ... at which point she seriously tried to defend that proposition, demonstrating in one short conversation that she had no knowledge of small towns, the properties of the power distribution, or the concept of orders of magnitude (and this from a supposed math major). One bad encounter led to pure prejudice, I admit it. Well, actually three bad encounters - two involving traffic cops waving cars into places they shouldn't have gone. So three bad encounters led to pure prejudice, I freely admit it.

So I was expecting the worst when I arrived ... but in my whole time here everyone has been so nice.

True, there have been a few stereotypical "New York Characters" lurking in the backgrounds - clueless traffic cops who waved cars out into oncoming traffic, a pedestrian who blithely walked out into traffic and then kicked at the car that nearly ran him over, an 'ey, buddy, watch where you're going' wiseguy in a cafe, and an overweight construction worker who looked straight out of central casting. But they've been extras, off the main stage.

The cab drivers are all nice, and even roll down their windows to give directions to other motorists. The waiter at a tiny cafe which charges outrageous New York prices is careful to list every separate charge "because I don't want you to be surprised" and to warn diners if they've ordered a dish that might take longer than the others. Parking garage attendants say "hey, no problem buddy" when you've unexpectedly got to hold up the line a bit to remove something from your car. Bookstores don't ask you to check your bags; bookstore clerks try to be crystal clear about what they can and can't look up for you out of the textbook computer. Shoe salesmen don't take offense at "made from real leather, made in the USA" but actually help you find things, and chat with you about the music while your partner tries on shoes. Even the security guards were really nice.

So yneh, stereotypes of New York. Pfui on you.

The next things you notice are the vibrant street culture and the vibrant mix of people. The bottom levels of every building seemed filled with shops, restaurants, and what have you, and the people milling about are more varied than almost any other place I've been to save perhaps Washington D.C. or global monuments like Stonehenge, Loch Ness or Olympic National Park.

Like other cultured urban centers I've been in, such as San Francisco, certain parts of San Jose, and certain parts of Atlanta, there's a definite ... cultural class barrier. It's hard to describe, but the first time I went to Santana Row in San Jose I definitely didn't feel welcome: there was a certain snootiness, or projected disapproval, for people who didn't quite fit in.

Unlike my beloved Santana Row, however, where I still don't feel like I fit in because I'm the guy lugging the bookbag looking for a quiet corner coffeehouse while everyone else is trying to look hip, young and single, in New York I find it is pretty easy to look around, to see how people are adapting to their environment, and to fit right in.

Or maybe I'm just a goofball wearing a scarf because it was frigging cold (but not like Boston).

There are many beautiful things we've seen in New York ... gleaming skyscrapers, ancient buildings, wonderful restaurants, variegated shops, the Stomp show and many, many people in fantastic clothing and even more awesome boots. :-) But the thing I'm most interested in? Well, you guessed it: the books....

Tomorrow it's the 9/11 Memorial, the Metropolitan Museum ... and whatever else we want.

-the Centaur

Now that’s a sign we have a protagonist on our hands…

Published February 9, 2012 by centaur

Above is a wordle of the near-completed first draft (as opposed to rough draft) of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. Wordles are great visualization tools for your texts, and this one reveals ... well, yes, Jeremiah is the protagonist.

Actually, now that I think of it, the full title of the book is JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE so I should have expected that her name would bubble to the top.

Jeremiah's also the protagonist of "Steampunk Fairy Chick", which was published recently in the UnCONventional anthology now available on Amazon ... why yes, that was a shameless plug, why do you ask?

-the Centaur

“Stranded” Away

Published February 6, 2012 by centaur

"Stranded", the novelette which is the first third of the first book of my new young adult space pirates trilogy, is away to the editor! It came in somewhat over the desired length, so I hope she doesn't hurt me, but it is the first third of the first book of a planned trilogy, so some of that length is unavoidable. (My awesome beta and gamma readers liked it. :-)

"Stranded" tells the story of Serendipity, a young centauress explorer who must come to the aid of a shipload of children who've crashlanded on a world she wanted to claim as her own. It's got aliens and fungi, spaceships and rayguns, and plush robots and kung fu, but it's really about how people should be treated and learning to stand up for what's right.

Here's a teaser, illustrated thanks to my work on 24 Hour Comics Day:

Sirius flinched as sizzling grey bullets tumbled around him in zero-gee. The grey dented veligen pellets rattled through the cramped innards of Independence’s life support plant, stinging his nose with the scent of bitter almonds as his hands strained at the yellow-striped master fuse. The girls shouted, their guns fired, more bullets twanged around him, ricocheting off the ancient, battered equipment, striking closer with every shot—but Sirius just gripped the hot, humming tube harder, braced both booted feet, and pulled.

Andromeda and Artemyst screamed for him to stop. Dijo, the engineer, screamed for the shooting to stop. Even the air screamed, out a bullet hole in a vacuum duct near his feet. But with every second, Independence shot a half million clicks farther into the deep, flying away from the Beacon that was their only hope of survival, so Sirius didn’t stop: he just screamed too, pulling, pulling, jerking—until the master fuse popped out and he shot free, bursting the hatch open.

Sirius flew out of the life support service chamber into Independence’s cavernous cargo hold. His head clanged off a handrail, knocking him into a dizzy spin in zero-gee. He smacked into the tumbling brassfiber grille of the hatch he’d knocked free, halving his spin—and leaving him right in the crosshairs of Dijo, Artemyst and Andromeda, all clipped to orange handrails far out of his reach. All had their guns on him, red laser sights on, green safety lights off.

Then the ship’s lighting flickered, and the whine of the air cycler slowly spun down.

“Halfway Boy!” Andromeda said, staring at the yellow and black striped master fuse in Sirius’s hands, her eyes as wild as the spray of feathers sticking out of her snakeskin cowl. She motioned to Dijo, who kicked off towards the life support plant. “What have you done?”

“Saved all our lives,” Sirius said, still dizzy, still spinning. “You can thank me later.”

Assuming the editor doesn't put me in the hospital over the length issue, we hope the story will be out in an anthology later this year. "Stranded's" parent novel, MAROONED, will hopefully be out mid 2012. So I guess the above is really a teaser. Sorry about that. Well, not really. I hope you enjoy!

-the Centaur

(No) More Procrastination

Published February 2, 2012 by centaur

Finally finished my "From Nano to Novel" pep talk for the National Novel Writing Month site ... should be coming out later this month to the donors list. (What? You're not a Nanowrimo donor? You can fix that here: https://store.lettersandlight.org/donations). But I've posted that to Facebook and to Google+. Posting it again here is, I think, a good idea to make sure people know what I'm up to, but in another way it's just procrastination ... I've got the gamma comments on "Stranded" to work on and this is not that. Back to work! -the Centaur

Last gamma comments for STRANDED in…

Published February 2, 2012 by centaur

Alright, the last gamma reader comments for "Stranded" are in. (Gamma, because this is actually the second round of beta readers. :-) "Stranded" is the first novelette of three in a planned YA space adventure novel with the working title MAROONED. This will be part of a trilogy including MAROONED, PURSUED, BESIEGED, SHANGIAIED, COMMANDEERED ... oh damnit I've done it again, haven't I? "Stranded" is also the novelette I adapted for 24 Hour Comics Day. Don't know if I'll get back to that as I have already 3 books plotted out in this series and parts of the next two outlined. Hope to get "Stranded" the novelette out to the editor in the next two weeks for inclusion in an anthology maybe later this year (with MAROONED coming out next year we hope). When "Stranded" is away, then it's back to LIQUID FIRE (finishing the draft) and THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (polishing the draft to send to beta readers). -the Centaur

Quit Procrastinating

Published January 28, 2012 by centaur

One of the most important things a creative person needs to learn is to recognize when you're procrastinating. For example, I often have ideas to put on this blog - two or three times per day - but I'm a quiet person, and I think far more strings of speech than I ever put to paper. So it's important for me to blog whenever I can.

So I've had several blog ideas today - "Getting Traction", "Logic Versus Rationality", "Rating Your Own Work (and How I Rate)" and the one I just thought of that made me open Ecto, "Advantages of Offline Blogging Clients" and its companion piece "How to Use Photoshop Filters and Photo Booth to Make Watercolor Art Because You Don't Have Clip Art Handy."

All of these are procrastination.

I owe my editors feedback on Traci Odom's reading of the audiobook of FROST MOON. I didn't get to send it after I finished it because I finished it at 3 in the morning in the hospital and then spent the next day getting my loved one back home safely before hopping on a plane and getting back to all the work delayed by this unexpected trip.

During this whole family quasi-emergency this week, I deliberately focused on taking on tasks like listening to FROST MOON or blogging or cleaning up my hard drive, all of which didn't require building up a lot of mental state, which made them ideal for tasks for sitting up next to a hospital bed ready to help at a moment's notice.

But the operation's over, the result's a success, the loved ones are back home and my reading's done. When you've got an outstanding task that requires thought, it's SO EASY to switch gears to something that doesn't require a lot of mental effort. But no. Not this time. Time to write the notes, record the pronunciations, send the email, and get this audiobook out the door.

Finish blogpost hit Publish.

-the Centaur

“He likes to take pictures of his food.”

Published January 27, 2012 by centaur

Those familiar with my Google+ stream will have noticed I take a lot of pictures of food, generally posted in my album Cuisininart (pictures of food - cuisine in art - cuisin-in-art - a riff on cuisinart - get it? No? Oh, you don't WANT to get it. Oh well.). This got started because I wanted to do restaurant reviews on this site. I love eating out; I'm a definite foodie, and I think a lot about what makes a good restaurant, from a dive bar to a five star. I've evendone a few reviews but I noticed I wasn't writing reviews because I wasn't taking pictures. I prefer using pictures in blog posts based on the ideas of my good friend Jim Davies (and seconded by my wife Sandi Billingsley) who both think pictures make blog posts stronger. This is basic comics theory: words and pictures are stronger together. So I started taking pictures. As usual, I found I was really good at collecting input, not so much at producing output. I was taking pictures all the time and not doing things with them because most of my free time is spent writing.

Around the time Google+ came out, I had a brainflash: why don't I just post the pictures I've taken as a way of using them up. So I created the Cusininart album ... which prompted me to take more and more pictures, even without reviews in mind. I got so good at taking pictures of what I was eating it became a joke. My wife once explained it to a friend joining us for dinner: "He likes to take pictures of his food." Which in turn prompted this post of me explaining this to you. But I'm trying to turn this into more than just random photographs. Following the example of people like Jim Davies, Andy Fossett and Waldemar Horwat, I'm trying to make this a learning experience, to discover how to take good pictures of food.

What I've found so far isn't scientific by any stretch of the imagination; consider this lessons learned from a few case studies.

Don't use your camera's flash. As many of you probably already know, camera flashes wash out the pictures. Don't use it unless you absolutely have to; try increasing the exposure of your camera to instead.
Take lots of pictures. Take pictures of each dish, of the whole spread, from more than one angle. It's not just that two or three shots of each one helps you avoid loss to a blurry jiggle; it gives you more choices for the article.
Take pictures from different angles and distances. Thirty to forty-five degrees seems to be a good angle, but you should experiment with closeups, overhead shots, distance shots. You'll be surprised what looks best once you review the pictures later.
Most of the shots should be of food. For what I want to achieve in my albums, having most shots be of food works best. Restaurants are less interesting than their dishes, unless it's a special restaurant. One out of five is OK.
Keep it candid. It actually helps to take pictures before you've eaten, and even to spend a moment posing some of the food. But don't waste a lot of time on it: the immediacy of the dishes in their natural arrangement is often enough.

I'm sure I could refine that list more. Perhaps I will after I spend more time experimenting more systematically, maybe even throwing in findings from food I have cooked. But until then ... that's what I've learned from taking pictures of my food. -the Centaur

The Stack is Growing

Published January 27, 2012 by centaur

FROM THE WRITER'S ANONYMOUS 12-STEP SUPPORT GROUP MEETING: Hi, I'm Anthony Francis, and I'm an author. ("Hi, Anthony!") To feed my addiction, I get stuff published.

My first published novel, the urban fantasy FROST MOON featuring magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost, won an EPIC e-book award. It's out in paperback, Kindle, in German as SKINDANCER, and soon to be audiobook thanks to the wonderful reading skills of Traci Odom. The second book in the series, BLOOD ROCK, came out last year to good reviews, and the third book, LIQUID FIRE, will come out later this year. A spinoff series starring Dakota's daughter Cinnamon Frost, HEX CODE, will come out next year, also part of a planned trilogy.

One of my short stories, "Steampunk Fairy Chick," was recently published in the UnCONventional anthology. The story, featuring steampunk adventurer Jeremiah Willstone, is based on a novel called THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (again part of a planned trilogy) which I've got in rough draft form with a possible release late this year or early next year. Another of my short stories, "Sibling Rivalry," was published in The Leading Edge magazine in 1995, but is now available on my web site. I also write flash fiction. One of my flash shorts, "If Looks Could Kill", was just published in THE DAILY FLASH 2012 (pictured above) and another, "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms", was just published in Smashed Cat Magazine.

My nonfiction research papers are largely available on my research page, including my nearly 700-page Ph.D thesis (hork). I and my thesis advisor Ashwin Ram have a chapter on "Multi-Plan Adaptation and Retrieval in an Experience-based Agent" in David Leake's book CASE BASED REASONING: EXPERIENCES, LESSONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS, and Ashwin, Manish Mehta and I have a chapter on "Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities" in THE HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON SYNTHETIC EMOTIONS AND SOCIABLE ROBOTICS.

I have more writing in the works, including a novelette called "Stranded" set in the Dresanian universe from which this blog takes its name, and more writing on the Internet. But what I list above is The Stack At This Time - what you can get in print. Enjoy!

-the Centaur