Every year, I donate to the Nanowrimo foundation to help them not just keep the lights on but to support young writers everywhere with their Young Writers Program. This year, consider helping them bring literacy and creativity to more people all around the world!
-the Centaur
SO! I love to write, and four of my novels are published - FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK, LIQUID FIRE, about magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost, and JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, about steampunk heroine Jeremiah Willstone.
You can read about the published ones at my Novels page, but even though life got a bit away from me this year, I haven't stopped writing - I have six more finished novels in the editing queue, not to mention half a dozen more in process.
And every single one of these novels, published or not, was largely written in National Novel Writing Month in November (or its sister challenge Camp Nanowrimo in April and July).
Nanowrimo is a 501(c)(3)that helps people find their creative voices - and certainly helped me transition from mostly not-writing to writing over a million words of fiction! (Way over, now).
Every year, I donate to the Nanowrimo foundation to help them not just keep the lights on but to support young writers everywhere with their Young Writers Program. This year, consider helping them bring literacy and creativity to more people all around the world!
-the Centaur
Every year, I donate to the Nanowrimo foundation to help them not just keep the lights on but to support young writers everywhere with their Young Writers Program. This year, consider helping them bring literacy and creativity to more people all around the world!
-the Centaur 
So my author reading IS on tomorrow, though you can't search for it by name (my name appears in the panel description, but not in the panelists), it does show up on the list at 11:30 tomorrow (um, today, Saturday):
As an author, I'm interested in how well my books are doing: not only do I want people reading them, I also want to compare what my publisher and booksellers claim about my books with my actual sales. (Also, I want to know how close to retirement I am.)
In the past, I used to read a bunch of web pages on Amazon (and Barnes and Noble too, before they changed their format) and entered them into an Excel spreadsheet called "Writing Popularity" (but just as easily could have been called "Writing Obscurity", yuk yuk yuk). That was fine when I had one book, but now I have four novels and an anthology out. This could take out half an a hour or more, which I needed for valuable writing time. I needed a better system.
I knew about tools for parsing web pages, like the parsing library Beautiful Soup, but it had been half a decade since I touched that library and I just never had the time to sit down and do it. But, recently, I've realized the value of a great force multiplier for exploratory software development (and I don't mean Stack Exchange): interactive programming notebooks. Pioneered by Mathematica in 1988 and picked up by tools like iPython and its descendent Jupyter, an interactive programming notebook is like a mix of a command line - where you can dynamically enter commands and get answers - and literate programming, where code is written into the documents that document (and produce it). But Mathematica isn't the best tool for either web parsing or for producing code that will one day become a library - it's written in the Wolfram Language, which is optimized for mathematical computations - and Jupyter notebooks require setting up a Jupyter server or otherwise jumping through hoops.
Enter Google's Colaboratory.
Colab is a free service provided by Google that hosts Jupyter notebooks. It's got most of the standard libraries that you might need, it provides its own backends to run the code, and it saves copies of the notebooks to Google Drive, so you don't have to worry about acquiring software or running a server or even saving your data (but do please hit save). Because you can try code out and see the results right away, it's perfect on iterating ideas: no need to re-start a changed program, losing valuable seconds; if something doesn't work, you can tweak the code and try it right away. In this sense Colab has some of the force multiplier effects of a debugger, but it's far more powerful. Heck, in this version of the system you can ask a question on Stack Overflow right from the Help menu. How cool is that?
My prototyping session got a bit long, so rather than try to insert it inline here, I wrote this blog post in Colab! To read more, go take a look at the Colaboratory notebook itself, "A Sip of the Tracking Soup", available at: 
The challenge on this one: no pencils, no references, just straight freeform inking. 
Boosting the signal ... I'll be joining my friend David Colby's panel APPLIED PLOTONIUM at 10am on Sunday at 
In addition to David and me, we've also shanghaied, er, convinced two of our mutual friends to join in: writer and chemist 
Wow. I guess a lot of books are going to be waiting for me when I get home tonight ... either the shipment of 
One more 
Q: Yak? Giant Chicken? Trebuchet? What gives?
DW: It started with a dare in our email planning with the authors for Thirty Days Later. One author found a picture of a clockwork yak and threw down the gauntlet: “Bet you can’t fit a yak in.” Challenge accepted. Rumor has it that there are multiple yak sightings (bonus points if you can find them all). Since that was deemed “Way too easy,” the chieftess of shenanigans, Sparky McTrowell, raised the yak ante for Some Time Later with a trebuchet, and somehow a chicken was thrown in, possibly due to an excess of caffeine and chocolate. And Yes. I fit them all in.
BJS: Absolutely. As chief cat wrangler for all three of the Later anthologies, I had to coordinate deadlines and revisions for not just the fifteen or so authors, but also our publisher’s staff. Why do I do it? The power, obviously. But in all seriousness, it’s the satisfaction of being an integral part of a fantastic collection of stories.
Q: What was your favorite story to edit/write for the anthologies?
BJS: That’s a tough one. There are so many great stories and they vary so much in theme, style, and content. I had a great time writing my own stories, especially the first one in Some Time Later, “The Descent.” That one allowed me to get my mycological geek on. I’m partial to Lillian Csernica’s Japanese mythology-inspired stories because they are unique but still feel steampunk.
Q: What excited you about Twelve Hours Later and the other anthologies in which you’ve participated?
SEC: Short fiction is an art form in and of itself. Expressing a full story in a little bit of space, means distilling the true essence of your message in a way that someone can read on their lunch hour and still feel like they got a complete picture. Having the opportunity to challenge myself within the framework of the anthologies’ themes made me work hard to present fully developed characters and concepts within those constraints, and it was a lot of fun! That the anthologies benefited literacy programs was the icing on the cake.
Q: Tell us about your latest book.
KW: Pressed to Death is a cozy mystery set in a wine country paranormal museum. It’s the second book in my Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum series...
