Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Last Typewriter Factory in the World Has Closed Shop

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According to an article in the Atlantic, the last typewriter factory has shuttered, as it was becoming too expensive to maintain, and not enough of a market to make it worthwhile. Sadly enough, I remember that the very first novel I wrote, Innocent Until Proven Guilty, was written on one of the first personal computers, but because I was so convinced that a writer needed to write a novel on a typewriter, my second novel LOSER was written on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Then my third novel, The Armageddon Project (which later became To Touch the Unicorn, and will soon become 72 Hours in August) was written on a manual typewriter I wrote, convinced that this was the way that a novel needed to be written. Since then, I’ve moved back to computer, and all of my writing tends to be on paper first (handwritten), and then typed on computer. I’m probably one of the last to write this way.

But one can’t feel a sense of loss in that we don’t use typewriters any longer. When I was a counterintelligence agent, we had IBM typewriters throughout the office, and it was the “in” thing to have those. I had an assistant who typed up my reports for me, and there were times when I’d type them myself, feeling that I wasn’t really doing the full job unless I typed up my own reports. But even then, we got a hold of a Wang word processor (Microsoft Word was still someone’s garage fantasy at this time), and literally the universe changed overnight. I even created my first database on the Wang computer. I knew then that the world would never be the same.

So, if I drank, I’d open up a beer for the loss of the last typewriter factory. But I don’t drink, so I’ll just wave my hand and give them a few moments of silence.

Writing How To: The Overwhelming Desire to Make Fantasy Seem Fantastic

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Okay, here is the next in the series of commentaries on writing. Today, I thought I would talk about the genre of fantasy, because a lot of writers seem to be finding themselves falling into this one a lot. Therefore, it’s probably important to point out one of the failings that often separates a writer from anyone who might want to read any of that writer’s writings. Today, we’re going to focus on the desire to make fantasy overly fantastic.

Let me start by including a little scene I’m going to concoct for the nature of pointing this out. In this scene, the Princess C’lagrisha’nte is planning for her royal wedding to the prince of the Grishandens Empire. Let’s listen in:

Zvastran’cha, the Secondary Triumphant Parlour Midwife Maid, picked up a Hee’chanta vase and poured water onto the Bracklit plant before moving onto the array of Sxraxxan tapestries that were overlayed upon the Royal Foundry of Makkappala. Before she could reset the seal, Vleekorando Vrippzee approached her with his Lantee spear at a position of rest and tapped his Bryee visor twice, indicating his displeasure at the events that occurred over the Kalamaster Ceremonies of Trijent’a. It was obvious that a future gathering of the Proxilia Council was most likely to result in the Second Rigor of Nixtraxa. Which, of course, meant blah blah blah

What we have here, in the words of a great Southern prison warden is “a failure to communicate”. At one point, it’s really cool to add all of this visual scenery and fantastical elements that show we’re not in Kansas anymore, but at some point the amount of unknown verbage starts to become noise, and the reader turns off most of the visuals because they stop making sense. Add in numerous characters that all have really bizarre names, and you end up with a tale that becomes so easy to toss out the window, that the chances of you ever getting anyone to finish it are very limited. It doesn’t matter if the writing is stellar, and the story is great; at some point, the amount of confusion is going to overwhelm the reader, and the story ends before it ever gets told.

A solution to this problem is to introduce foreign elements into your world sporadically while including familiar sensations alongside the foreign ones. The little inclusion I used to explain this problem isn’t even that bad, to be honest. I’ve read some stories where I’ve gone entire paragraphs where I had no clue what the writer was talking about because EVERYTHING on the page was so foreign that at some point I gave up trying to figure out what a Hgjasfjsfjlijn was and just started thinking about a wonderful lunch I had the day before. If you fill your story with enough elements like that, causing your reader to abandon your story, you may have defeated your reason for writing in the first place, which should always be kept at the forefront of everything you write: You’re communicating, and as long as you can continue doing that, you’re on the right track to storytelling instead of just filling pages with gibberish that will eventually be ignored.

Review: Invisible Tears by Abigail Lawrence

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Invisible Tears: The Abuse, The Rebellion, The Survival, Despite All Odds

This is one of those books that is extremely hard to read, especially if you’ve ever lived through any type of abuse yourself. When I first started reading it, I went into it completely oblivious to what the story was about, and then I had to back out and re-read the write up to realize what I was reading was, in fact, a true story. That, immediately, changed my perspective on reading this book. You see, if this had been fiction, I probably would have stopped reading after about the first tenth. It’s just that hard to read through the impacting scenes that take place in this young girl’s young life. But once I realized this was supposed to be a true story, I forced myself to keep going because if this really happened to someone, she at least deserved having someone try to understand it.

And I’m glad I did because the rest of the book actually makes the journey worth it. To be honest, the first 1/3 of the book is really hard to read through. But once you hit the 35 percent mark (the Kindle is really cool for telling you exactly that), the story changes, and you start to experience a different kind of a tale, one that’s no longer about abuse, but one that tells the struggle of a young girl becoming a woman who is attempting to find herself as a result of the previous abuse. What you discover is that she spends the rest of her life trying to find some sense of acceptance, whether it be acceptance from others, or just a solitary acceptance of other people and some semblance of belonging in a world that appears mean and cruel, and sometimes oblivious to the struggles of others.

I will admit there were a couple of points where I almost didn’t finish it, but then perservered, a lot like Abbie pushes forward through the travails that life continues to throw at her, and in the end it really was all worth it. Someone who reads up to that first part of the book and then stops would probably be impacted as well, almost needing to read the rest of this book to get the closure that seems desired and needed through this book.

Story: 4 stars
The narrative throughout was well worth reading, and the story crafted was one that leaves an impression. It’s very hard to do that with a non-fiction narrative, and there were times where I found myself comparing events with Dave Pelzer’s “A Child Called It” to the point of outrageousness. The beginning of this book is really hard to read, as it goes from child abuse to child rape to continuous child exploitation, almost to where it felt like the events were trying to outshock previous events. But then you’re left realizing this is a true story, so you can only feel compassion, and when the story is complete, feel anger that there are those out there who will go unpunished for the unspeakable acts they have carried out against innocent victims who have no way of ever striking back. The epilogue alone is poignant and casts its own shadows of despair on the depravity of humanity.

Voice: 3 1/2 stars
Although non-fiction, the author struggles to maintain a singular voice throughout the tale, as she sometimes juxtaposes the tale from fluidity to a sense that some prose the tale contains is still difficult to convey, making it disjointed at times. But overall, it carries forward very well and you get the sense of a very young girl’s memories being relived through the prism of someone decades after the events.

Mechanics: 3 stars
The book could have used an additional edit. There are numerous spelling errors, “theres” instead of “their’s”, and other mechanical errors throughout. But overall, it holds up well. There were also a number of port problems from the original manuscript to the Kindle version where the justifcation of the text was off, but as someone who has worked with porting to a Kindle myself, I completely understand that problem as there are times where it happens, and no matter what you do, it just can’t be fixed.

Cover: 4 stars
There are any number of different kinds of covers that could have been used to convey this story; the one chosen seems to do a pretty solid job. Having seen some really outrageous covers for some books on Kindle, it’s nice to see a simple, telling piece of artwork that doesn’t go out of its way to overdue an appeal to attention.

Summary: I would recommend others to read this book, keeping in mind that the first 1/3 is VERY difficult to get through.

Overall: 4 stars

Review: Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper

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This is one of those stories that grabs onto you from the beginning and pretty much never lets go. I was apprehensive about reading this book, because I’m not really that much of a cat fan (more of a dog pet person myself), but the blurb on the cover kind of hit me, and I was intrigued about finding out more about a blind kitten.

One thing that got me right from the start was the same thing Gwen talks about in her book throughout, and that’s the wrong impression someone gets from expectations of Homer right from the start. People expect this little kitten to be helpless, and you immediately find out that he’s nothing but that. He’s resourceful, full of life and pretty much the life of any party because no one ever taught him that he’s supposed to feel sorry for himself, or even that he’s blind. He is blind from the very early days of his life, so he’s never even known what it’s like to see. But he turns out to be the bravest, most resilient little tyke one might ever experience.

The story deals with Homer, Vashti and Scarlett (who are two of Gwen’s other cats), and it specifically deals with the life of Gwen herself. Where the story starts to bog down a bit is when it gets into Gwen’s own story, and mainly during the first half of the book, it really does sort of slow down as we start to experience more of her memoir than the story of Homer and his fellow cat family. Then it moves onto the author’s love life with Laurence, before it moves onto its conclusion.

However, it’s still a strong recommendation from me because the strongest moments of this memoir come from reading about Homer himself and how nothing you do ever stops him from completely enjoying life as it was meant to be lived. A couple of (SPOILERS HERE) critical moments also make up the narrative to where the story becomes where it deserves its bestseller status, specifically every time Homer experiences a new home and has to acclimate, the time Homer comes to the rescue of Gwen (when a stranger breaks into her house), the horrific period that Gwen goes through during 9/11 when the towers come crashing down (and she lives 5 blocks from Ground Zero), and a gut wrenching moment where Homer hits older age and runs into a near death experience towards the end of the book.

Four (4) out of Five (5) stars: 4/5.

Reviewing Books

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Well, today is my final day of teaching for the semester. I doubt I’ll be teaching during the summer (that’s something the full timers do, as they have to do something to raise their pay above $100,000 per year; the rest of us part-timers don’t get hours during the summer, for the most part). This means I’ll have some time to devote to something. I was going to devote my time to writing a new novel, but screw it. Writing is stupid. No one buys my books, so why even try? Instead, I’m going to devote the summer to reading the books of others. And then, who knows? Maybe I’ll kill myself. Not really sure yet, as I haven’t thought that far forward yet, but I’m keeping all options open. Just haven’t decided whether to go with drugs or jumping off a bridge yet. But that’s for another post obviously. This one is about reviewing books.

So, what I did was post on kindleboards.com that I was interested in reviewing the independent books from the various writers there. And a bunch of them jumped up and started giving me their best works, so I’m started buying their books on Kindle, and starting tomorrow, I’ll be devoting my time to doing nothing but reading their books and then reviewing them.

I’m thinking of including the reviews here on the blog, and then I’ll probably build an additional site that’s all about my reviews. And of course, I’ll include the reviews on the Kindle site for their individual books. Plus, I’ll build a set of lists about different genres where I’ll include books that I’ve reviewed.

I figure if no one is ever going to read my books, I’ll contribute this way, and then when I get tired of it, well, I’ll just end it. Sounds like a plan.

Why Didn’t Blu-Ray Take Over the World?

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There was a battle over dvd standards a few years back that was similar to the fight between VHS and Beta Max a decade or so even earlier. Sony had released their Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba had invented a rival called HD DVD. On the surface, the upcoming battle didn’t really seem all that significant (DVDs were still working fine), but Sony was about to release its Playstation 3 with a Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba was putting its HD DVD into the new XBox 360, made by Microsoft. So, the battle waged.

Strangely enough, even though the XBox 360 was the stronger seller (Sony dropped the ball and took way too long to release the Playstation 3), in the end, enough movie companies fell into Sony’s camp, and the Blu-Ray player eventually defeated the HD DVD format, becoming the only survivor. I don’t even think you can find an HD DVD movie anymore.

Yet, for some reason, even though Blu-Ray beat HD DVD, it still has yet to surpass DVD as the standard way of releasing new content for movies, TV shows and computer games. Instead, there has been an almost rebirth of the normal DVD player, the Blu-Ray remaining a higher end product but with an inability to maintain its dominance based on superiority alone.

And it is superior to DVD. In all ways. If you put a DVD player next to a Blu-Ray player and play them both at the same time, it’s obvious which one is better. But is that enough to make a difference?

You see, a couple of other things are going on that made the move to Blu-Ray not happen. First, Blu-Rays never replaced DVDs when it comes to price. In order to be the replacement, the price needs to be set at what people are willing to pay for movies and TV shows. For an average movie, there was a set price that people were willing to pay, and this came from years of establishing that market. Blu-Rays are almost always much more expensive. This was supposed to change over time as they took over the market, in that the prices would come down to match what DVDs used to be, so that they would effectively replace them. But that never happened. Instead, if you paid $19 for a DVD, you were always paying $29-35 for a Blu-Ray. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, it is when it comes to the economics of how DVD entertainment was expected. As long as Blu-Rays remained higher in price, it was always going to be seen as an exclusive item, and more of a luxury.

Blank Blu-Ray dvd prices never came down. They’re really expensive. A colleague pointed out to me that a dvd with the actual movie on it is sometimes cheaper than a blank Blu-Ray dvd. As long as that’s the case, you’re never going to get full adoption of the product. Plus, the players are still very expensive. It’s a no go all the way through.

One problem that Blu-Rays have that you never had with dvds is that you often have to make firmware upgrades. People don’t like that. Sorry. When they’re forced to keep updating their software for their dvd player, they get annoyed. With a dvd player, they don’t have to do it. Chances are pretty good, they’re not going to switch. When many dvd players are not connected online, you have even more of a problem.

The last point is probably the most important for the current situation. Blu-Rays needed to be the replacement for dvds, but instead we’re quickly moving online to streaming technology. People don’t even need dvds anymore, and if they see that as the obvious future, the replacement of the dvd is almost dead on a arrival. The thought was that people would pay more money for better quality, but instead streaming has gone the opposite direction, where people are willing to take less quality with more convenience. With that trade off, you might see why Blu-Rays might never take over the world.

It’s a great technology, but it may have been brought in too late to replace the model that was already going to be replaced by something different. Not necessarily better, but more convenient. Unfortunately, not always does the obvious successor become the winner.

Government Indifference to the Common Folk

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About five years ago, I left California and moved to South Korea to work as a debate instructor. At the time, it was a stupid choice to make when it came to employment, but the recession had just started up, finding a job was extremely difficult, and I was doing anything to survive back then. So, I packed up everything I owned, sold most of it, and set off for a new adventure in a far off land. Okay, Heminway aside, one of the last things I did before leaving was sell my car to a colleague in graduate school, pretty much giving her a really great deal on a 2000 Saturn. Firing off a bill of sale on my computer, I gave it to her so she could turn it into the DMV, and I ventured off to new horizons.

The trip to Korea didn’t go well. A year into the trip, I was seriously cheated by the company that was paying me, and to avoid another long story for another article, I ended up barely getting out of a very bad situation, ending up back in the United States with a little more than the shirt on my back. Customs took all of my luggage, and for reasons that to this day have never been explained to me, never gave it back. As it was all clothing and paperwork, I finally gave up on ever seeing it again, and then started a brand new life in Michigan.

Well, at the beginning of 2011, California sent me a bill for $140, stating that I now owed them money for parking tickets not paid on that car I gave up five years ago. The tickets were racked up about four years ago.

I sent California’s DMV a letter explaining the situation, and then sent me a form letter back, indicating that I had to produce paperwork proving I had sold the car to a graduate student I had lost contact with shortly after I left the country. I had to prove it by providing paperwork that her full CURRENT address, and I had 15 days to do it.

OR THEY WOULD SEND ME TO COLLECTIONS.

Seeing as I have absolutely no way of producing this particular form of paperwork that does not exist, I’m at a loss as to what I should do. Principle tells me to go tell them to go fuck themselves, but in the end, I’m still going to get turned over to collections, and no matter what I do, some debt collector is going to make my life miserable because he’ll want $140 (probably jacked up to about $300 by the time he gets the account), and there won’t be any conversation that changes the outcome. The debtor is ALWAYS guilty.

This reminds me of when I got out of the Army. I had been out for a few years, and it dawned on me that I didn’t actually have a copy of my honorable discharge. So I wrote the government and asked them if they could supply me with it. Their response was that somehow I owed the government $212.42. Thank you for your service to this country, but you owe us $212.42. Please pay up today or we’ll make your life a miserable hell. And thank you for using our service.

This is the problem with government in how it deals with the common person. During this whole big budget debate lately, there’s been a lot of talk about how the government NEEDS more money, and that the American people are responsible for fixing the problems that the members of government have caused. When it comes to delivering money, it’s always our fault, and our responsibility. When it comes to actually getting something back from the government, it’s “please take a number, sit down, and be happy if someone actually gets to you.”

So, I’m left in another quandary with government. I’m shit poor, and I’ve always been my whole life. I’d like to say that I took a vow of poverty, but there really wasn’t a vow involved. It just sort of happened, and my life choices are generally not the kind that leads to mass wealth and fortune. So, when government wants another $140 from me, it bothers me a lot. You see, I’m one of those guys who parks his car where I’m supposed to park it, putting money into the coin machine to make sure I’m parking legally. When I error, I pay my bills immediately, even though I make it a point not to error in the first place. Yet, here I am having to pay for the foibles of some other person who probably didn’t even register the car in the first place. I couldn’t control that. I wasn’t even in the fucking country at the time.

Yet, I’m going to be the one held responsible. Because that’s supposedly the American way.

And people wonder why the country has problems. If this is how you treat the members of your society who go out of their way to the do the right thing, good luck on winning over the other 98% of the population.

Another Writer Accused of Making Stuff Up

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The “Three Cups of Tea” author, Greg Mortenson, has been accused of making up stories in his book.  Accused by Jon Krakauer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Mortenson denies the falsehood claim and is not commenting further due to a medical condition he is suffering from recently. Unfortunately, with him out of commission and not on record to defend himself, the media frenzy will probably swarm him at this horrible time for him. Hopefully, he gets a chance to defend himself, and the truth is reached, regardless of what that truth might be.

With this accusation, the writing community appears to be undergoing yet another challenge, as it did when the whole James Frey controversy occurred with “A Million Little Pieces”, a book that featured numerous made-up events in a book claimed to be entirely non-fiction. Hopefully, the accusations will not continue to paint a dark light on the many works other writers have put out there, making it so that readers walk into every bookstore, expecting fiction in the non-fiction section and accepting each memoir produced as a “quasi-” real account.

I recently published my “Neo Revolutionary Messages” on Kindle and Nook, and I promise that it is entirely non-fiction, as it is an analysis of the August 1991 Coup d’etat in the Soviet Union (where Boris Yeltsin challenged the hardliners when they imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev). Yet, with stories like the one I linked here, there’s always the fear that a reader is going to think the author took liberties with the facts for the sake of trying to tell a better story.

DIY Publishing is a Lot of Work

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my self-publishing tasks. I can’t even begin to tell you how much work this has entailed. I know most people don’t really care, but as a writer, I’m finding myself with very little time to write because most of my time is spent preparing manuscripts, designing and redesigning covers, and trying to conduct social networking in order to somehow constitute a tiny bit of a writing career. I never realized how much work this would actually be.

Not surprisingly, a lot of DIY writers are learning this exact same thing themselves because the publishing industry has pretty much abandoned the average writer, mainly going after well known entities (who don’t really need the publishing industry because they’ve already made it) or celebrities who shouldn’t be writing books in the first place. The rest of us are struggling just to see if we can somehow make a connection that gets someone to read something we have to write.

Which, as I’ve hinted, makes it that much harder to sit down and write. Recently, I released Destiny on Kindle and the Nook. It’s an interesting book that I created a decade and a half ago, yet it started a series of stories that have been very much a part of my continuous writing career. While the book takes place around the Year 3000, the series of books and stories that follow it actually take place around the time of the Roman Empire, slowly moving their way to the Year 3000. It’s kind of an interesting arc that tells an epic adventure of the planet Reagul, where a transplanted group of Romans live out their future. It also tells the story of the sorceror Sarbonn, who you might realize, has been a part of my writing for a very long time now. That character sets the tone for the story that takes place on Reagul long after his death, as he spent most of his life fortelling the future events of the planet, including setting the stage for what would eventually happen in the novel Destiny.

I’ve probably published 20 short stories that are all about the land of Reagul, even though most of the editors at that time probably had no idea they were publishing something that was part of a series of related, connected adventures. So, it’s somewhat interesting and fascinating for me to be able to keep revisiting this world with future writings. Now, if I just had more time to sit down and write.

Anyway, not much more to report, but wanted to at least let you all know I’m still chugging along, trying to get the volumes of stuff out there. Why? Not sure. But seems like the right thing to do.

When it comes to the deficit, the numbers are just too much for the American people

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There’s a brilliant scene in one of the Austin Powers movies where Dr. Evil, played by Mike Meyers, is announcing to the UN, or world council, or whatever fictitious organization was in charge of the world in those movies, that if they do not give him what he wants, he will unleash his viciously evil plan. What he asks for is “a MILLION DOLLARS” and his advisor tells him that a million dollars isn’t a lot of money anymore, so he has to up his demand to “a TRILLION DOLLARS.” They replay that same scene in a subsequent movie where he time travels back to the 1960s and he demands “a TRILLION DOLLARS”, causing the world council people to laugh at him because they recognize there’s not a trillion dollars in existence in that 1960s period.

Fast-forward to today, and the United States is trying to figure out its budget. The Republicans, the Democrats and President Obama are stuck on how to do it, how much to do it with, and what exactly they should be doing in the first place. The architect of the Republican plan, some guy previously unknown to anyone named Ryan, proposed a future budget cut over years of some numbers of trillions of dollars. President Obama, as of today, is announcing a plan to cut the budget by $4 trillion. Currently, we’re trying to head off a government collapse because our debt ceiling needs to be raised beyond its current level of $14.3 trillion, so there’s this request to raise the debt level even higher.

Here’s the problem. It’s not the fact that the government is now spending enough money that we’re currently $14.3 trillion in debt. Okay, that’s a problem. But the real problem is that $14.3 trillion means absolutely nothing to the average American, because the average American is lucky if he or she has $50,000 to access at any one time, and it’s easily arguable that most Americans are lucky to have $20 in their wallets at any one time. So talking about $14.3 trillion in debt is like saying we have a gazillion dollars that we have to cut because we’re already spending a quazillion each year. In other words, the numbers have absolutely no relevance to anyone.

Years ago, when the debt was somewhere around $1.2 billion, the news media used to do really inventive little games like say something along the lines of “if you lined up dollar bills all the way across the planet, you’d still have money left over after crossing the entire globe” or other equally interesting, yet ridiculously ludicrous examples. It would always cause the listener/reader to go, “wow, that’s a lot” but that’s usually all it would do. Then they’d go back to being oblivious to the events of the day because, to be honest, the events of the day didn’t really matter to them. Archie Bunker was on TV, so it was more important to get home and watch that.

Now, we have politicians on all sides of the aisle trying to convince the American people that this outrageous amount of money is important to the average American. But it’s not. Because it’s so much money, and so much out of control, that people just laugh at it and pretend it wasn’t mentioned. I mean, who wants to deal with the some ridiculous amount of debt when you might have debts of your own to deal with? I have a student loan I’m trying to pay off, so that number of thousands of dollars is far more significant to me than $14.3 trillion that was racked up without me ever having a say so whatsoever. Because when it comes down to it, they’re either going to figure out what to do with it, or the country is going to collapse. But no matter what they do, I’m still going to owe thousands of dollars in student loans. NO ONE is going to bail me out. Because no one cares about me like they seem to care about a phantom amount of money that was spent by people who were spending money that was never theirs to begin with.

And that’s the problem right there. The money we’re talking about was spent by people who took it upon themselves to dole it out any way they saw fit because it was never theirs to have to worry about in the first place. It was all fiat money that they imagined, yet they spent it as if it was real, lining the pockets of very rich people and very well-connected corporations. But when it came time to pay the piper, they turned back to us, the people, and said it was our responsibility to pay for what they fucked up because they never gave the implications a second thought when mom and dad went out of town and left them the keys to the liquor cabinet, the car and a credit card with no limit.

So, when the president gets on the horn and tells the rest of us that the debt is out of control, and WE need to do something about fixing it, he should sort of understand that rest of us really don’t give a fuck. We were never involved in the spending of that money, no matter how many arguments are made about how “we” put them in power to abuse the system in the first place. People we didn’t know had access to spending money they never should have spent, and now it’s time to pay up. Well, none of us are all that concerned. As a matter of fact, we see a lot of the bickering going back and forth between politicians as whines about how they don’t have access to more money to blow and spend like there’s no tomorrow. We don’t see the Republicans as the “fiscal conservatives” no matter how many times they try to pretend they are. And we don’t see the Democrats as the keepers of responsible government. All we see are a bunch of kids who had access to mom and dad’s credit card and now that mom and dad are at home, seeing the bill from the credit card company for the first time, there’s not a whole lot of compassion from the American people towards these kids who are now arguing about how we should raise their allowance because they already spent their money on video games.

So, if you’re going to try to convince the American people that they should care, you have a great deal of work in front of you. And so far, not a single politician has ever even attempted to do that.