So after considerable delay I have been able to edit my blog from an outside blog authoring tool. I tried to use Windows Live Writer but while it would now connect, it would not permit me to save to the blog. Two steps forward, one step back. This post is being edited by Zoundry Raven which now has no trouble connecting or posting...
Bill
After considerable delay, I’ve been able to repair my blog(s) so that they again support Windows Live Writer and (hopefully) Microsoft Word as blog authoring tools. Six-Apart systems helped get Movable Type to push out this release before I started to draw Social Security.
After considerable delay, I’ve been able to repair my blog(s) so that they again support Windows Live Writer and (hopefully) Microsoft Word as blog authoring tools. Six-Apart systems helped get Movable Type to push out this release before I started to draw Social Security.
This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (67cc6f5d-0511-43fd-a0e5-afd57bf82482 - 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
I've been writing for... well, for a long time. Since I first started turning in assignments to Mrs. Carlson, my English teacher at International School Bangkok in the '60s, I've always wanted to be able to make a few last-minute changes. That's because in the olden days, books might just as well have been scribed into wet clay. When the clay dried, changes were impossible. This meant when I said something I really didn't mean, or described something I really didn't understand, the words were still cast in stone to prove just how naïve or dumb or ignorant I was in any number of ways.
Once I started working with technical editors, content editors and copy editors, some of my stupidity, clumsy grammar, or lack of experience or understanding was masked from my readers. Only my editors knew what a dolt I was. Writers without editors really do seem pretty challenged--I've at least learned that much. But all authors know, or eventually learn that lesson.
But what about my eBooks and my self-published works that get burned into paper? Sure, I've had these edited, but I (and my readers) still find a sentence here and there that does not flow, or a paragraph that no longer adds to the plot, or has a missed quote or misspelled word. What should I do? After all, the books have been "published." Are they sacrosanct? Are authors never permitted to polish them again to improve their readability, to correct mistakes, or to add a small detail to a character that's been reborn in the sequel?
My traditional brick-and-mortar publishers were hesitant to fix anything once the book was released. Because they've printed 5000 copies or more, they didn't want to sully the value of the existing "old version" editions, or go to the expense of retypesetting the whole book because I added or removed a paragraph. I don't blame them. Given their archaic Gutenberg approach to printing, it was quite labor- intensive to make changes. And what would the bookstores do? Send back the V1.0 editions?
Today's technology makes a book's evolutionary changes not only possible, it makes it easy. Now I can re-open the book's Microsoft Word™ document, make the edits, save as a new PDF and repost the changes to the online publisher in less time than it takes to get a waiter to come to your table at a restaurant in Cleveland. Twenty-four hours later, customers are downloading the new Kindle™ version or then can order the updated books from CreateSpace™.
That's what I just did. I just made a number of subtle changes to The Owl Wrangler and posted these changes to Amazon. No, Weiger did not discover why his sweetheart was kidnapped, or find a new source of income, and Kassie did not get a new set of powers. But I did smooth out the first chapter (it's the one I read to the English classes that invite me to speak about writing) and fixed a number of punctuation and word-choice issues that I and my editor missed, but my readers caught.
I'm convinced this is the way of the future. I envision (edited) books being published online but with the understanding that readers are encouraged to provide feedback and actually expect the author to adjust the manuscript. This way, new readers get a better book and existing readers feel more involved.
Comments?
As I work on contest submissions for The Owl Wrangler and the newly retitled second book in the trilogy Guardians of The Sacred Seven, I have posted new versions of The Owl Wrangler up to Create Space and Kindle. It will take a day or so for the changes to get posted to the Amazon sites. Please be patient.
For those anxiously awaiting Guardians, you'll be pleased to know the book is now over 60,000 words long and getting really exciting. Kassie and Hisbil have taken their relationship to the next level, Weiger is badly beaten and thrown down a mine shaft and Anasta is in trouble again. Alred is nearly killed by a rogue Protector and he's uncovered a plot to steal the Sacred Seven.
I'm excited about the book and I can't wait for my readers to get their hands on it.
See me in person Saturday March, 3rd at McDonald's Bookstore in Redmond, Washington.
Bill
I don't usually write about technology in my "fiction" blog, so please forgive the tangent. I've spent the last forty years up to my keister involved with computer technology. I've taught it, written a dozen books about it, written a bazillion programs and architected and built a dozen systems. My lab looks like a scene from an office in Brazil (the movie).
Over the last few years, I've noticed more and more applications being marketed to consumers (that's you) that require a dependency on "The Cloud" whether you know it or not. Okay, the average consumer (that's not a tech geek) probably doesn't know about The Cloud, so let me boil it down to cool water. Basically, The Cloud is a way to provide vast amounts of disk space and equal amounts of computing power to customers without requiring them to buy and maintain computers. Sounds cool, but who cares? Please stick with me for another moment. So, all a Cloud customer needs is a web connection fast enough to access it and an Internet browser application--most of us already have these. Sounds nice. It means that customers don't need a home computer, or a bigger hard drive to store pictures of Sally's birthday, or that priceless photo of the Grand Canyon. This also means computers can be really small, and a lot simpler to maintain. Again, this sounds great.
But, hold on, there's a catch. What happens when your broadband connection goes down? Since you're storing your taxes and your pictures, your documents and your divorce papers on The Cloud, you can't get to them if your Internet service provider (like Frontier or Comcast) is having a bad day, or there's a storm in Bhiminiy, Minnesota or a volcano erupts in Iceland where the massive Cloud systems are hosted. Sure, you've all had temporary outages when that turkey cut into the main fiber link when he was putting in his new fence. But what happens when the outage is on a larger scale? It happens every single day somewhere in the country. The only thing that's connecting you to all of your pictures, documents and Aunt Sally's recipe for fudge is a single strand of optical fiber or a pair of copper wires installed in 1950.
Consider as well that the Internet is younger than your cousin from Ohio who still isn't old enough to drink and the most sophisticated aspects of the Internet are far younger. The Cloud is one of the youngest kids on the block, and less experienced than your nephew Alex's daughter who has just learned to use the potty. Anyone in the technology field (been there, done that, got the t-shirts), can tell you that stuff happens from time-to-time and more often when the technology is under stress. I'm just saying that technology tends to break, and when it's "fixed" the repair often causes collateral damage caused by the unintended side effects--pretty much like "precision" bombing that takes out the guy in the pickup truck, and the surrounding block of houses. But I digress.
One of the books I have on the back-burner is a post-apocalyptic piece that describes America after The Cloud evaporates. In this story, a mysterious electromagnetic pulse centered over Crawford, Texas, takes out the entire country's Internet and virtually everything that uses electrical power to operate--even Uncle Sirus' pacemaker. This means that phones, cars, TVs and iPods are reverted to so much sand and copper. It's not long before teenagers and adults addicted to Facebook and Twitter break into Radio Shack stores all over the country looking for batteries in a desperate attempt to get a technology fix. The rich are penniless and roam the streets begging for croissants because banks have been using The Cloud to store their hard-earned dimes--they've been doing it for years. Ironically, when news of the panic reaches Haiti and Bangladesh, there's barely a stir. But that's another story for another time.
My point? Consider that it would take a relatively small event to trigger a complete collapse of our electronic world--or even a partial, wide-spread failure. It does not take the talent and foresight of Jules Vern to see how vulnerable we have become. My plans include keeping my feet on the ground and not giveing up my manual typewriter and my mechanical pencil shapener. Who knows? They might come in handy one day. What can you do as a consumer? In a word: backup. Make physical prints of your pictures and save hard-copies of your documents ands photos in a place where a fire won't erase your memories and your finances.
Bill
I've just finished The Hunger Games trilogy and after having read (some of) Percy Jackson's exploits as well as the Twilight series and Harry Potter, one theme keeps emerging: These (very popular) books are violent.
I've been an author for a long time, but up until I wrote The Owl Wrangler, I've stuck to the realm of technology where the most violent topics I describe (in gory detail) are crashing databases and booting a BIOS down a flight of integrated circuits. Now that I'm writing in the YA space, Fred (my English-major daughter) suggested that I read more YA books. Good idea, says I, so off I go to bury myself in the most popular YA books I can find. I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Brilliant, with very little man vs. man or man vs. child violence. Sure, it has some arm-twisting and some mental stress with adult themes, but a good kid-friendly story with a nice educational theme.
And then I was assaulted by The Hunger Games. Each book in the series ratcheted up the gratuitous violence between children to (IMHO) an appalling level. But the critics acclaim the book as "...quite possibly the best SF novel for teenagers since Hauxley's Brave New World". Clearly a financial success, but at what cost to our young readers? The Twilight series (Stephenie Meyer) is another terribly violent series of books with several (very) adult themes. Again, the critics acclaim it, and again, clearly it's a financial success. But at what price? Do we adults, parents and grandparents of young people want our children to read these dark, troubled and terribly violent books? Do we as authors want them to? Sure, some few of us can make money doing so, but at what price?
I've heard that some of these books are really for "older" young adults. I would agree to some extent, but I saw The Hunger Games on the desks of several 6th through 8th grade "kids" in the schools where I've been giving a talk about authors. Aren't they a bit young for these titles? But it seems schools and parents are openly permitting (perhaps encouraging) access to these works. Of course, Animal Farm is also very dark and an important work. So is 1984. No, I don't think these or any books should be banned, nor do I believe in censorship. I do believe in guidance, and restraint on the part of parents, librarians, teachers. publishers and authors--especially for those authors writing books targeted toward young, unmolested minds.
I think of a young mind as basically a blank slate. While the human brain is not a digital computer, the way it behaves works very much like it had a CPU, flash RAM and wide-open, unfiltered IO ports. It's programmed by the things the ears hear, the eyes see, the hands touch and the mouth tastes. This is nice, it's warm and tastes good. This is evil, it's loud, it hurts and scares me. We know the brain is also "programmed" by the things we're taught and we learn through reading and video, and from what our parents and teachers tell us (and show us by example). If we're taught that black or white or yellow or fat people are somehow evil, we believe it until we're proven wrong. If we read or see that violence is a means to solve problems, we believe it and practice it until we're proven wrong. In my experience as a parent, its far, far harder to re-program a mind to "unlearn" a prejudice, belief, fear or violent response to these feelings than it is to learn them in the first place.
Perhaps the focus on violence as a means to solve problems is the reason for Columbine, Cal State, Virginia Tech and countless other school tragedies. Perhaps this is also the reason for the attacks by adults in Austin, Oklahoma City, Casa Adobes or other acts of senseless violence. Perhaps not, but were those violent acts brought about by examples of how violence was a means to an end?
I leave you with a single question: Don't we as authors, parents and grandparents have a duty to help our children's young minds learn that violence and inflicting pain on others is not a solution to anything? Do you think it's right to cash in on gratuitous violence? I don't.
I was pulled back into Mockinjay, the last of the Hunger Games trilogy over and over again in the last five days. I finished it last night and I'm glad I did, but perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. I've been to war. While I wasn't in the infantry--the men who witness and live the carnage and pain of war first hand, I was witness to the suffering, pain and traumatic impact it had on all of those who served. Mockingjay rekindled those memories--real or not real. The impact of its violence far exceeded the bloody carnage in the other Hunger Games books as it involved so many more innocents: children, caregivers and civilians just trying to survive. It was bad enough to have children fighting children in the 'games', but to spread that violence to the general population was beyond what I wanted to witness. Again.
The story did provide some excellent examples of multi-dimensional character development that I hope to leverage in my own books. Katniss clearly evolved from a girl to a killing machine and her soul and sanity paid the price. The ending was unexpected which is a plus. I was also moved by the portrayal of devotion--how individuals both young and old laid down their lives for Katniss and her friends and the greater good.
As I've said before, I was disapointed that there were so few good adult role models in any of the books. In Suzanne Collin's world there are very few honest, caring adults that would stand up to authority--and these played only minor roles. I met a fifteen-year-old whisp of a girl at a book signing this weekend who adored the books. I wonder what they are teaching her about violence and the human spirit and how parents should protect their children when governments play deadly games with their children. Yes, this is roughly the same theme portrayed by Harry Potter, but that does not make it right. It might sell well, but it does not mean this is what we should be teaching our children.
While there were a few minor technological consistency issues in the books, the author did recognize that air-power alone is never enough to vanquish a foe. In reality, it only radicalizes, solidifies and hardens the survivors so they can justify the horrific acts they perform on the 'enemy'--which is themselves.
Cheery? Consider that the Windows Home edition is several orders of magnitude more complex than the software used to launch the Apollo missions. Consider that Windows users blindly (or automatically) post updates to their systems from some unseen site somewhere in the cloud. What happens if somehow some Dr. No takes over these servers and "updates" everyone's systems?
Welcome to the 21st century.
Bill Vaughn
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