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I hate to urinate during somebody’s eulogy but …

Published February 24, 2011 by centaur
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Dwayne McDuffie died. He's the author of many comic and series, including a run I enjoyed of the Fantastic Four. He will be missed. But I have to take issue with the article announcing his death:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/02/23/133988062/dwayne-mcduffie-rip-championed-diversity-among-champions His individual contributions as a writer and producer, which I'll get to in a bit, remain impressive. But McDuffie was more than a writer, he was a voice — a passionate proponent for change in a genre (superhero comics) that reflexively resists it. And it's that voice that will be most acutely missed.
McDuffie will be missed, and perhaps he was a passionate proponent for change ... but what superhero genre, precisely, has the author of the NPR article been reading over the last forty years? Because it sure ain't the one I've been reading. (NOTE: the author of the article claims to have started reading in the early 1970's and to have skipped the 1990s, and I started reading in the later 1970's and skipped part of the 1980's which I've since mostly caught up on, so we are essentially contemporaneous). Superhero comics were a force of stasis in the 1950s to the 1970's largely because of the Comics Code Authority, which effectively censored comic book content; innovation existed but largely got squeezed out into underground comix whose heyday was the late 60's to early 70's. But issues of social relevance - drug use, alcoholism, environmentalism - began to kick in in the 1970's. Titles like Squadron Supreme, the Dark Knight and later Watchmen subverted the conventions of the genre in the mid 1980's. By the 1990's, the modern age of superhero comics and its antiheroes had begun - and the genre has continued to evolve, with newer iterations like widescreen comics changing how stories are told. Examining other areas, for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered comics we've gone from demonizing and censoring them to talking about it and introducing characters in the 1990's to putting them front and center in the 2000's, including the modern Batwoman, a female superhero and lesbian of Jewish descent. Even on the author of the article's signature issue, race, we've gone from ridiculous and marginalized cariactures to prominent front and center characters to Ultimate Nick Fury, based on Samuel L. Jackson and later played by him after he considered the comic version a flattering portrayal as the ultimate nexus of coolness in the Ultimate Marvel Universe ... Need I go on? No. There will always be people marketing towards the least common denominator, but that subset does not define or limit or even accurately describe the arc of the superset - a very typical mistake that people with axes to grind will make. Clearly, comics has a lot of work to do, and I'd never suggest it doesn't have further to go. Resistant to change, however, it has not been ... not at least for the last forty years. -the Centaur

My Favorite Borders, Closing …

Published February 16, 2011 by centaur
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Two of my favorite bookstores are closing ... along with many other Borders in the Bay Area:
(ABC News) A list of store closings planned by Borders as it tries to reorganize in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, state by state. Closings are due over the next few weeks. Some clearance sales are expected to start this weekend: For the full list look here.
Or put another way, the closest 3 stores to my address are closing; check out these search results:
  • San Jose - Oakridge Mall: Closing
  • Los Gatos: Closing
  • San Jose - Santana Row: Closing
Which goes back to ... fffffffffuuuuuuuuuuu! Some of you may be thinking "ah, the e-reader and Amazon have killed the bookstore at last." Uh, no, though that may still happen. The fate of Borders can be laid at the feet of giant discount stores like Walmart, Costco and Target, who can sell books up to five bucks cheaper than a typical bookstore. Contributing to this is the recession, of course, and American corporate culture, which tends to think of businesses as interchangeable moneymaking commodities and not living organisms that need to be helmed by people who understand the business. Don't get me wrong - the management of Borders puts together superb bookstores. They've been my favorite chain for years. But a fair number of analysts of Borders have suggested that a lot of its recent management hasn't had the handson bookstore experience to make the right choices. It was owned by K-Mart for a while, for instance. Ugh. And I'm not critiquing K-Mart, but perhaps there wasn't quite enough skill transfer there. (Full disclosure: I'm a former Borders shareholder). I've seen many other bookstores go: the Science Fiction Mystery Bookshop and the legendary Oxford both of Atlanta. Many other bookstores have survived, and will no doubt continue to survive. But they're going to have to change, and consolidate - the industry is changing. I love my e-readers, particularly my Nook Color, and I love the selection and choice of Amazon and to a lesser extent Barnes and Noble online. (Full disclosure: I'm an Amazon shareholder). Some online publishers are particularly attractive, especially O'Reilly, which will typically sell you a DRM-free PDF of your book for an extra ten bucks. And I, personally, as an author sell ten times as many e-books as physical books. But there's something wonderful about going into a bookstore, browsing the shelves, and flipping through books. I could blame it on the idea that for the time being, at least, the technology does NOT exist to make flipping through books as fast on the web as it is in real life - to see why, check out the High Performance Web Sites site and look carefully at the latency that goes into rendering a single web page. You're looking at second-level latency at best. Then go pick up a five hundred page book and flip through it rapidly. You're looking at second-level latency at best. See the problem? But if that wasn't a problem, the physical layout of a bookstore, the related books sections, the browasbility has a real value - as do the omnipresent coffeehouses found in many bookstores. I could see bookstores evolving into showrooms, with much more varied content, single copies of most books, and people wandering through them with their Kindles and Nooks and Kobos and what have you, reading a book and then waving their e-reader at it to add it to their collection. The physical books will often be printed in the stores themselves with cheap on-demand presses. But even in this blissful world, there will be a need for fewer bookstores-as-showrooms than the bookstores we have now. Places like Recycle Books (a kind of micro-Oxford Used Books in the making out here in the San Jose area) Bookbuyers (a solid competitor to Oxford Used Books), Kepler's, Books Inc. will survive both as community centers and as online presences - they're quickly making the move to selling e-books through Google Books. And cultural institutions like City Lights will also survive - it's also a publisher. But how many of the big box bookstores that I love will survive? Not certain. And their closing will have side effects: on authors and publishers, on communities, on books and reading in general. It isn't the end of the world ... but it's the beginning of a tectonic shift. -the Centaur Pictured: the Borders at Oakridge Mall ... its cafe unusually deserted for a Wednesday night.

Taking a Sabbath from Microsoft Word

Published February 6, 2011 by centaur
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The Notes on Blood Rock I'm not a very literal Christian, but I do believe that a lot of Christianity is good. But I don't think it's good because God says so - I think it's God said so because it's good for you. One example is the Sabbath. But what is a Sabbath? Going to church on Sunday, then sitting around reading psalms? No, a Sabbath is first and foremost a day of rest, and second a day of worship. And God doesn't ask us to observe it because he's needy for worship: he asks us to do it because we need time off. I'm not going to go into the Episcopal theology which suggests that Jesus doesn't care what day you take your Sabbath as long as you do take one - I'll let my fundamentalist and atheist friends thumbwrestle over that one. I'm just going to take it as a given that we need a day off. So ... what does the Sabbath have to do with Microsoft Word? In my personal life, I'm like a submarine: I disappear into whatever project I'm working on (see the bursty timing of my blogposts as evidence for this). And even though I usually have something on the order of four to six major projects going at once, I'm really only good at focusing on one of them at a time. My current project: revising my second novel BLOOD ROCK, which I've been doing since something like September, responding to hundreds of comments from my editor. I'm down to the wire now. The book is over 100 pages shorter and tighter after months of edits. I've gone from a HUGE list of TODO items that sprawled over two pages down to a short list of items I'd written on the back of a receipt. One of my last items is re-reviewing all the remaining Microsoft Word comments, which I've been doing over the last several days. But as I did so, I found that somehow I'd either lost my memory or Word had neglected to show a whole bunch of comments to me. Months ago, I went through the entire document in detail resolving differences and addressing comments before starting my big tightening edit, and yet there are real, material important comments I would remember if I'd seen them that only showed up in the last few days. Having observed Word's behavior looking for possible bugs, I'm guessing either it was collapsing comments when there were lots of edits on a page, or, more likely, this is a scrolling bug that caused some comments to appear "over the top of the page" and thus effectively become invisible. Another alternative is that it might have to do with the "ribbon" ... I recently switched from Word 2004 for Mac to Word 2011 and the interface for comments seems to have changed. A simple interface change; they happen. But that's not the point. My frustration is that even minor offhand comments from the editor can lead to big changes. If she asks me to delete something on page 204, I might just do it --- but if I don't agree, I generally think hard about whether I need it, whether it's important to me, and if so how to integrate it so deeply into the novel that it's inevitable --- ideally to the point where she'd tell me to put it back in if I took it out, though I don't know if I ever achieve that. :-) So now I have a whole load of comments that I'm essentially getting fresh. Worse, they're commenting on things in sections that I had previously reworked in response to the editor's written comments, sections where I didn't think there were major in-line comments. So I've spent a great deal of effort fixing things in response to the revision email, the suggested changes, and a long hallway conversation with the editor at Dragon*Con, but I'm now finding dozens of things, both little and great, that would have potentially changed what I would have done. So ... what does Microsoft Word have to do with the Sabbath? Well ... I am taking today off. :-) I have a great job at the Search Engine That Starts With a G, but it takes a lot of time - partly work, partly travel time, partly mental recuperation time. And I have a wife, and friends, and cats. By lugging my laptop to breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee, I can eke out 3-4 hours a night 3-4 days a week, but that's not enough, and generally need to work on my writings on the weekends. This gets especially intense when editing, because I can't futz around doing research reading or shift gears to another story if I'm stumped; I've got to keep my brain focused on the EDITING process. But my frustration reached its limit last night. I blew my stack and fired off a few frustrated emails to the editor, and decided to take today off. To use the Sabbath that God gave us. I don't have a link to the great sermon that Father Ken of Saint Stephens in the Field gave on the topic, but I do have a link to my atheist friend Jim Davies, who takes Saturdays completely off so he is free the rest of the week to pursue the top priority items on his nobility list. The theology is different - but the idea is the same. The point? The moment I decided to take the day off, I felt completely liberated. I'm going to do something fun like ride a bike or design a robot brain - or maybe visit a bookstore for something other than their wifi or coffee. Before writing this blog post, I spent the previous hour implementing "Hello World" in every language installed on my new Macbook Air as part of a project to crack my programming knuckles again (and oddly, the hardest language was Awk, which I actually use so much at the command line it's like a reflex. Weird). I've been wanting to do this for weeks, but I've spent it revising. Now instead, I've had a little fun. My batteries are already recharged. Maybe you're one of those people who find it easy to take time off. Good for you. If you're not, especially if you live in the Bay Area ... take a break. Maybe not even take a break from work; take a break from whatever you won't let yourself take a break from.

Need a mental tuneup?

Published January 5, 2011 by centaur
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XKCD on Misconceptions What do you get for somebody who thinks they know everything? A dose of realism! Here are a few useful links to get started: Follow the links, then follow more of them. Lots of good stuff in there - I sure found holes in what I thought I knew. -the Centaur

Good morning, pilgrims…

Published January 2, 2011 by centaur
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lenora on the cat condo ... this is still not warrenellis.com. If it was, we wouldn't be leading off from the Episcopal Lectionary for the Second Sunday After Christmas:
Now after the wise men had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.
There are lots of ways to interpret this passage, but I'm most interested in the one by Reverend Ken Wratten of Saint Stephens in-the-Field church. Joseph is performing an action in faith - he's moving to a different country based on a voice he heard in a dream - but based on a realistic response to circumstances. Historians dispute whether the massacre of the innocents really happened, but not that Herod was a tyrant and madman who murdered his own family. So even though we don't normally follow the advice we get in our dreams - and, for the literalists among us, note that in some circumstances the Bible specifically warns us not to - it was nonetheless a reasonable response to the circumstance for Joseph to heed that voice and get the heck out of Dodge. Father Ken's interpretation of this is that we should respond to the circumstances of our life in faith. Not assume that faith will magically shield us from all woes, but realistically look at the circumstances we have and, based on faith, take the response available to us that best fits God's will. If you are not a Christian or other believer, substitute the idea that you should not rely on your ideology to save you, but you should nonetheless take the best action available to you consistent with your values AND the circumstances. (There's more to Christianity than just Always Do The Right Thing, but I digress.) So what does this have to do with cat spray? gabby 5 seconds before whapping caesar just as he relaxes One element of responding in faith is that God can use changes in our circumstances to prod us to action - if we are willing to look at our circumstances in faith and try to see how we could, indeed should turn it to our advantage. No matter how trying the circumstances... Recently, we noticed a whiff of an odd smell and realized the cats had been spraying under a desk in our library, which I've been reorganizing. I wiped up the spray, picked up the stack of three plastic tubs of computer parts, and turned to take them into the kitchen - and a stream of cat urine slid out from between the boxes and dripped all over a pile of papers I'd set out to file. For those not familiar with cat urine, it's the substance they used to "eat through the floor" in the movie Alien. (No it isn't; that's a joke. See the link below). The cats had sprayed most of the under-desk shelf but the ridges of atop the plastic tubs had sealed it in and trapped the smell - until I moved it, when the funky urine landed on my pile of junk. Everything was trashed: the box for my MacBook Air, an old drawing book, some papers, a record ... but, miraculously, not my comic book artwork, which, in one of those circumstances which gives succor to those of faith and drives our skeptical friends nuts, was completely spared. God uses circumstances to prod us to make changes we wouldn't do on our own. I had already decided, in a sort of general way, that I needed to purge my library: this brought the point home, and even helped me decide what to purge. My wife and I already knew we needed to get all three of the cats integrated or get rid of one or more of them: this brought that point home, and led immediately to a new plan of action. And we already knew we were a team, but had yet to really accept that we had complementary work habits, but when she cheerfully worked to 5am cleaning while I slept, and then I cheerfully took over while she slept, that brought that point home. Religious believers, Christians, look on this as a reminder to look at the circumstances that befall you in faith, and try to find the action God has given you that doesn't just cope with the situation, it actually improves it and brings you closer to him. And for skeptics, remember: fundamentally, we live in a spot of this universe where it is possible for life to thrive for billions of years. It may sound cheesy, but life will find a way: and no matter what the circumstances, you can too. Like pilgrims, you may find it takes a long journey, but at least it's possible to reach the promised land. -the Centaur Pictured: Lenora irritated by a cat toy, our warring tomcats Caesar and Gabby, and a Youtube experiment attempting to replicate the "acid burning through the floor effect" from Alien.

BLOOD ROCK now under 500 pages…

Published January 1, 2011 by centaur
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Me at work at the kitchen table Editing BLOOD ROCK in response to the notes from Bell Bridge Books is progressing. It's been quite the challenge, but I've preserved the bulk of the book and got it to under 500 pages. I'm going to try to get this editing pass (#2) done today, a third editing pass done next week, and send it to the editors the following week. -the Centaur UPDATE: BLOOD ROCK is now 488 pages (as my personal reading copies are formatted, which is probably about 400-450 pages of a normal novel), meaning I've successfully cut 100 pages from the novel. And, as I hoped, I JUST FINISHED THE SECOND REVISION. On to pass 3.

New Year’s Resolution: Finish The Hanging Tasks

Published January 1, 2011 by centaur
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The "take one" slip for one of Office Depot's 5-shelf bookcases I use. In the past I've tried various complicated New Year's Resolutions. I'm going to try something simpler this year: I'm not taking on any "resolutions," except for one I'm going to come back to later. Instead, I'm going to review my past Resolutions and my Life Plan, update them, and come up with a set of goals that I'll try to achieve. No ridiculous list of resolutions filling up my life in January, then forgotten by February. No public declarations of things I can fail at. In short, no pressure. Just a private set of goals, which are subject to tradeoffs based on my best judgment. The one "resolution" I'm going to take on: in January, come up with a list of eleven Hanging Tasks, and tackle them, one per month, in 2011. I define a "Hanging Task" as: something I've wanted to do for a long time, that I need to do or would be good for me, that I've made significant progress on, yet not completed for a long period of time---but, when completed, would be over and done with and off my radar. So things like exercise, karate or learning new programming languages don't count because they have no fixed end point, but reorganizing my library definitely does. One concrete example of a Hanging Task is an essay on futurism which I was going to call "Ten for '10", but missed that deadline through a combination of procrastination and a genuine last-minute disaster that ate up the allotted time I'd set aside to finish the essay. As another example, there's a nasty financial issue I need to deal with ... in theory I could literally put it off until I retire, but it will make my life much easier in the meantime if I resolve it now. The problem? It involves a whole bunch of grungy paperwork which I've been "putting off." Putting off? Not really. There are a lot of things I'm good at getting done; there are others that I'm not. If I'm at work, I'll almost always choose working on work over taking out an hour to do errands, even though some errands, like the grungy paperwork above, need to be worked on during business hours while talking with someone on the phone. If I'm not at work, I'll almost always choose writing over blogging. It's not that I don't want or need to do those things; it's just that I'm not good making space for them in my life. So, for 2011: I will pick 11 of these (I've already got four off the top of my ghead). Set aside time for them, a few days each month, until each one is dealt with. The result: I'll have 11 less things to worry about ... and that much more mental space for something more productive. Cheers to the New Year! I hope you enjoy yours. -the Centaur Pictured: the tag to purchase an Office Depot 5-shelf cherry bookcase, purchased late last year as part of my library reorganization project. I have approximately 12 of these 5-shelves from Office Depot, 13 2-shelf ones, 1 three-shelf one, 6 more 5 shelfs from Ikea, at least 4 more miscellaneous 5-shelf bookcases, and two wall-sized units, one from Ikea and one built by myself.

Criticism

Published December 6, 2010 by centaur
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skepticat skepticals your integrity I had this thought after reading a long critical blogpost on a recent scifi novel: The longer, more detailed, and, especially, the more clever you make your negative criticism of something, the more I suspect that you're doing a hatchet job on a work that's actually good, but simply something you don't personally like ... and that you've lost the ability to tell the difference. -the Centaur

Back to Qumana

Published December 4, 2010 by centaur
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The Balcony of Borders at Santana Row

Now that we're on WordPress, let's give this a try again and see whether Qumana plays better with WordPress than it did with Blogger.

ANSWER: Worked just fine. Borders was closing up shop so I had to go back into WordPress later to add the post tags, but I assume that's somewhere in the Qumana interface I didn't have time to find. Image posting was relatively easy - actually slightly easier than the WordPress interface itself, though that's more a web app issue than a UX design issue.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my mobile office on the balcony of Borders at Santana Row. Software: Android, Camera Sync, Mac OS X, Chrome, Picasaweb, Qumana, WordPress. Hardware: Macbook Air 13 inch, Nexus One. Foodware: the staggeringly unhealthy and delicious Cookies and Cream JavaKula.

Powered by Qumana

Tricking Yourself Into Doing The Right Thing

Published December 3, 2010 by centaur
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Ribeye Steak, Tabbouleh, and Cognitive Neuroscience

Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing. For example, I enjoy eating dinner out. There's nothing wrong with that; but it's always easier to eat out than it is to fix dinner, as I can have high-quality healthy food made for me while I read or write or draw, whereas cooking at home involves shopping, cooking, and cleaning that I'm fortunate enough to be able to pay other people to do (and that through the absurd good luck that the rather esoteric work I was most interested in doing in grad school turned out to be relatively lucrative in real life).

But that's not fair to my wife, or cats, nor does it help me catch up on my pile of DVDs or my library cleaning or any of a thousand other projects that can't be done out at dinner. Sometimes I deliberately go out to dinner because I need to read or write or draw rather than do laundry, but I shouldn't do that all the time - even though I can. But, if I keep making local decisions each time I go out to eat, I'll keep doing the same thing - going out to eat - until the laundry or bills or book piles reach epic proportions.

This may not be a problem for people who are "deciders", but I'm definitely a "get-stuck-in-a-rutter". So how can I overcome this, if I'm living with the inertia of my own decision making system? One way is to find some other reason to come home - for example, cooking dinner with my wife (normally not convenient as she eats early, while I'd normally be at work, and even if I did try to get home her dinner time traffic puts me an hour and a half from home; but we've set a time to do that from time to time) but she's out of town for business in New York, so I don't have her to help me.

So the way I've been experimenting with recently is treating myself. Over the weekend I made a large bowl of tabbouleh, one of my favorite foods, and pound cake, one of my favorite desserts. The next evening I grabbed a small plate of sushi from Whole Foods and made another dent into the tabbouleh. I had a commitment the next night, but the following night I stopped to get gas and found that a Whole Foods had opened near my house, and on the spur of the moment I decided to go in, get a ribeye steak, and cook myself another dinner, eating even more of the tabbouleh.

The tabbouleh itself is healthy, and maybe the sushi is too; the steak, not so much. Normally I wouldn't get another steak as I'd had a few recently, both homecooked and out at restaurants; but I wanted to overcome my decision making inertia. It would have been so easy to note the presence of the Whole Foods for later and go eat out; instead, I said explicitly to myself: you can have a steak if you eat in. And so I walked in to Whole Foods, walked out a couple minutes later with a very nice steak, and went home, quickly cooked a very nice dinner, and got some work done.

Normally I prefer to eat about one steak a month (or less), sticking to mostly fish as my protein source, but I'll let my red meat quota creep up a bit if it helps me establish the habit of cooking more meals at home. Once that habit's more established, I can work on making it healthier again. Already I know ways to do it: switch to buffalo, for example, which I prefer over beef steak anyway (and I'm not just saying that as a health food nut; after you've eaten buffalo long enough to appreciate the flavor you don't want to go back).

So far, tricking myself into doing the right thing has been a success. Now let's see if we can go a step further and just do the right thing on our own.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a ribeye steak, fresh fruit and mint garnish, tabbouleh in a bed of red leaf lettuce, and Gazzaniga et al.'s textbook on Cognitive Neuroscience.

60,000 New Words

Published November 30, 2010 by centaur
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Hit the 60,000 Word Mark!Victory! 72,037 words, 60,164 of them new. Boo-yah! I leave you with this:
“Fair enough,” Jeremiah said. “Alright. We know where we’re going, and how we’re handling this. And we all know who we’re facing: the Baron Abinger, who handed us all our hats on his last encounter. Be on your guard.” She looked up at Lord Birmingham. “Sir, I have said what I need to say,” Jeremiah said. “I now place myself in your hands. This ship, and this mission, are yours. At your discretion, Godspeed.” Lord Birmingham straightened. “Thank you, Commander,” he said. “All you need do is let Lady Georgiana and I guide you through the dark heart of Georgia, and then the rest of this mission is yours.” “Then take us away, sir.”
Now I go take nap now. -the Centaur

Cracked 70,000 Words

Published November 30, 2010 by centaur
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58,000 Added Words Just reached 70,000 total words in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE ... 58,735 total added during this month, so it looks good to hit 60,000 words tomorrow. Woohoo! As usual, Nano's raw rough-drafty stuff, but here's where we are in the story (suitably snipped and edited not to give too much away):
The engines of the Machine spun up with a terrific rising whine and discharged all at once, lightning in a bottle, illuminating the entire diving bell interior with a crackling foxfire glow. Even the handcuff that pinned her left hand to a support arch shimmered as the transelectric field rippled through it, but as she was grounded to the same pole it left her with little more than a shudder. As the Clockwork Time Machine rattled and clacked, ticked and swayed through the tunnels of possibility, Jeremiah hunched in a little ball by the pillar in her bloodied shift, her left hand high over her head, twisting uselessly in the cuff as two footmen stood over her, watching, their six-strings at the ready. It made her feel small and helpless, even though they’d made the mistake of cuffing her bad hand; but she hadn’t the heart to do her usual scheming for escape. She had to see this through.
-the Centaur

68,669 words … 56,755 of them new

Published November 29, 2010 by centaur
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Two days of Nano left ... God willing, there's a good shot I'll make 70,000 total words, perhaps even 60,000 added words. Progress continues!

I Can’t Stop Writing

Published November 27, 2010 by centaur
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[caption id="attachment_810" align="alignright" width="300" caption="At Work on the Clockwork Time Machine at Borders"]At Work on the Clockwork Time Machine at Borders[/caption]I've "won" National Novel Writing Month for 2010, but I just can't stop writing. I know I have bills to pay, books to edit, projects at work, and a massive cleaning project in my library ... but THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE has me right now and I can't stop. But ... really ... is that such a bad thing? Since I've "won", I've written 4200 more words, 2600 today alone. Fantastic! -the Centaur

Where is BLOOD ROCK?

Published November 27, 2010 by centaur
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National Novel Writing Month Kickoff Card A fan wrote:
I would like to purchase Blood Rock, but I have not been able to find it anywhere.... Can you direct me to a site which has it for sale? If it is in fact for sale? I am a little curious since your site says it is in Beta release, but the site has not been updated in several months, so I am unsure as to the status of the book.
Well, sorry about that ... Blogger changed their terms of service and the Dakota Frost site is frozen until I can fix it. The answer? BLOOD ROCK is in editing right now - the publisher wanted some big cuts, but I'm in the last throes of National Novel Writing Month right now and had to put BLOOD ROCK down while working on my new series. I'm picking up BLOOD ROCK December 1st and hope to have it to the publisher before the first of the year, so if all goes well it will be out in March. I'm well into the sequel to the sequel, LIQUID FIRE, which I hope will be out the following October. -Anthony

Viiiiictory … A New Series

Published November 27, 2010 by centaur
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Winner's Badge for Nanowrimo 2010Once again, I have completed National Novel Writing Month! This year’s entry is the first in the Jeremiah Willstone series, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE:
On an alternate Earth, the feminist revolution started a century early, technological progress doubled ... and Mary Shelley's granddaughter Jeremiah Willstone is an adventurer defending the world in a flying airship! She's used to fighting off monsters with nothing more than goggles, an electric gun and the advice of a half-human computer, but what will she do when her own uncle changes the rules of the game ... with a Clockwork Time Machine?
I've posted a few snippets in this series ... let me see if I can find one which doesn't give any key plot elements away.
With Patrick’s blunderblast slung over her shoulder, Jeremiah whizzed through the streets on her autocycle, discharging its cylinder flat out, its teakettle scream and clanking frame adding another layer of mist and noise to the steam and bustle of Boston. Her legs were tensed, her knees bent against the pedals, half to jump the cycle over curbs, and half to keep the juddering vibration from the cobblestones of Beacon Hill from rattling her tailbone clean off. She squealed to a stop before the Moffat’s, pulled the cylinder and tossed it to a street urchin. “Top me off?” she asked, hopping off onto the sidewalk with a whirl and pulling her bag out of its basket in one smooth motion. “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said, taking the cycle. His eyes lighted on her vest, her denims—and on the big brass buttons on her lapels, a steering wheel, sword and airsail overlaid with a stylized V. “Are you an Expeditionary?” Jeremiah smiled. “Yes,” she said, ruffing his cap so that tufts of blond hair showed. “Maybe one day you’ll become one too. Polish the brasslite a bit and there’s a second shilling in it for you. Quick now; I won’t be long.” “Yes, ma’am,” he said, walking the cycle off. Jeremiah turned to the tottering three-story shop, glancing up at the enclosed balcony jutting out from the newer brick buildings around it. Beneath the balcony, carbide-etched into the thick window of carbonate glass, were the words: MOFFAT’S MECHANISMS & MYSTERIES Her mouth quirked; as usual, today she was in the market for a bit of both.
Unlike last year, I didn't have to write 38,000 words in only ten days. But I did do pretty well; I still have a few days of writing left and I'm going to try to push further on the story. [caption id="attachment_797" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Victory Point for Nanowrimo 2010"]Victory Point for Nanowrimo 2010[/caption] Prevail, Victoriana! -the Centaur

One. Day. Ahead.

Published November 17, 2010 by centaur
centaur 0
At last a day ahead...

At last, a day ahead on Nano ... 28580 words out of a needed 26666 ... even ahead of tomorrow, which needs 28333 ... excellent, it's all falling into place...

-the Centaur

“Then we shall follow,” Sir Alice said. “Commander Willstone!” “Yes, sir?” Jeremiah said, standing at attention. “It seems that Lord Christopherson has cracked the secret of travel to the past,” Sir Alice said, her own objections, once overcome, completely forgotten. “Outfit the Prince Edward with one of his own devices and hunt that blackguard down to the very ends of time,” she said. “I’ll see no-one destroy Victoriana on my watch, much less undo Liberation!” “Yes, sir!” Jeremiah said. “Prevail, Victoriana—” Lord Birmingham cleared his throat. “Sir Alice, might I remind you that the destination the Lady Georgiana has charted is over the dark heart of Georgia?”

Back it up (WAS Waiting waiting waiting)

Published November 14, 2010 by centaur
centaur 0
[caption id="attachment_780" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Backing Up As We Speak"]The Iomega Drive from Fry's[/caption]

[ Waiting waiting waiting ... ] at Fry's Electronics, because the deal on the USB hard drive I decided to get to improve my offsite backup was, indeed, too good to be true - WHOA!  They just gave me another 5$ discount for waiting! Go Fry's!

So now we're backing backing backing... -the Centaur