Posts published in January 2016

Unexpected Acts of Kindness

Published January 13, 2016 by centaur

For those of us who are hermits, it’s sometimes good to get a reminder of the great things that can happen via social support. At the recent Write to the End meeting, I stepped up as facilitator when Keiko O’Leary was delayed on a plane flight - but when she showed up, after an offhanded comment by one of the members, we all decided to pretended that she was new to the group! We asked her to introduce herself, welcomed her warmly, and explained everything as we went, which she found hilarious - and comforting, since she didn’t have to do any work handing out prompts or monitoring the time. It was a great writing session for all, and couldn’t have happened without the happy synergy of all the different people working together.

I had a similar experience at lunch at work recently - I’m a loner, and normally go off on my own to read or write my books, but I do try to join the team a few times a week. At the lunch table, thinking of one of my problems, I said: “Wouldn’t it be neat if we could apply X technology to Y”? Suddenly, EVERYONE was chiming in: one TL scoped out the problem, another coworker had great suggestions, and after twenty minutes of discussion I offered to go write it up. But I didn’t have time before I had to interview a candidate, so when I came back I found a one-pager written by a coworker. I sat down to expand it, realized my coworker had a key insight, and ended up producing a half-dozen page design doc. I may have been the first person to utter “apply X to Y” but the final idea was very much a joint product of every person at the table - and could NOT have been done alone.

As an on-again, off-again follower of Ayn Rand, I guess this is exposes one of the many flaws of traditional Objectivist thinking: its black and white nature, particularly with regards to committees. Several of Ayn Rand’s books lambast the work produced by committees, and I indeed have seen horrors produced by them - but call a committee a “brainstorming session”, and you can literally produce things which no-one could have produced alone. Of course, a single person or small group must then refine and focus the ideas so they can be implemented, or everyone will go driving in different directions - but even that seeming aimless search can be a success if you’ve got a large technology space to explore and a diverse group of committed, dedicated engineers to explore it.

But the possibility of brainstorming is not really what I want to focus on: it’s the great things that come out of treating your fellow people right. Being nice to each other greases the wheel, sharing your ideas and being open to theirs improves intellectual debate, and treating one person as special on a special occasion can really lift their day - whether it’s a thank you card and gift to a former manager, a day off for the facilitator of a group, or just giving a friend who’s into centaurs a centaur statuette that you happened to pick up two of by accident. These little things don’t just brighten our day - they change it, making the world a better place, one small act of kindness at a time.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a gift of a friend, via a friend, the first of whom professionally collects genre materials and ended up with two of the same statuette, and the second of whom brought it to the writing group for me because she knew I liked centaurs.

Shamelessly Meta

Published January 13, 2016 by centaur

It occurred to me that I could get a cheap blog post by commenting on my process of trying to do blogposts, so here goes. What I’ve found so far is that it’s hard to keep up the “write two blog posts a day” regimen - which is why you see my buffer dropping to almost zero yesterday (2016/01/11, as of this writing) when I skipped my blog posting because I ended up having long coffeehouse conversations. Conversely, once you get started again, it’s easy to get started - this post is my second blog post written on January 12th, so I’ve got a tiny little buffer again - this post, one more finished post, and one I plan on typing in which is in my notebook.

It’s hard to stay ahead. But even one or two days of buffer enable me to get up to speed quickly, so the payoff for getting ahead is huge. Conversely, the payoff for letting things pile up is … well …

Let’s just say I need to keep up with things a bit more beyond blogging too. This isn’t the half of it.

-the Centaur

The Future of Books is Bright

Published January 12, 2016 by centaur

Some time ago my good friend Jim Davies said, "If I was a traditional publisher or bookstore owner, I'd be very worried about my business with the rise of ebooks" - and he's right. While the demise of the bookstore Borders may be more properly laid to the feet of Walmart and Costco than Kindle and Kobo, ebooks have disrupted the traditional publishing industry. Once you had to, like, go to a place and shell money to get a thick tome; now you can pull books out of the air into a wedge of magic in your pocket, sometimes for free. If I owned a publishing company or bookstore, I'd be worried: the number of people who buy traditional books is dropping, and from Borders to Borderlands to Bookbuyers to Keplers, bookstores are in trouble.

But are books? At the time I interpreted what Jim said as indicating the demise of books, but he didn't say that at all: he just pointed out the existential threat a business faces if two thirds or half or even just a third of its customer base disappears. A ten percent drop in a business's sales might mean the difference between smiles and Christmas bonuses all around and a death spiral that five years later closes the business's doors as prices inexorably rise and profit margins plummet. My fear was, as ebook readers get better and better and physical book purchasers got fewer and fewer, that the economies of scale would not favor book publishing. I had imagined that as fewer and fewer people bought books, the unit cost would go up, it would no longer be profitable to print books, and both books and bookstores would go away.

Now that I've helped found a small press, I've learned the economics don't work that way.

Once I thought that Barnes and Noble and similar stores would shift to an on-demand model, with shelves filled with single copies of books and with book printing machines behind the counter, running your order for your chosen edition while you got a cappuccino in the bookstore's Starbucks, and, hey, maybe that will happen. But one thing I didn't anticipate was the ability for print on demand distributors to create an effective and useful FedEx-like just in time model, where books are printed essentially as they're needed, rather than enormous stocks being kept on hand - and the other thing I didn't anticipate was applying paper arts to book production to create a new category of books as art, encouraging a bite-sized reading model and a love of the physically printed word. Now, I don't know the details of Amazon's or Barnes and Noble's warehousing model. I do know that most of the books you see above were printed just in time for a recent event, and all of them represent departures from the traditional publishing model.

Some people have argued that we’ve hit the bottom of the bookstore market and it is getting better; it isn’t clear whether Barnes and Noble will survive, but local bookstores are having a comeback - but it’s not hard to look at the march of technology and to assume that things are going to HAVE to change. We no longer print books on scrolls, or parchment; the printing press disrupted the illustrated books model, and online news sources have dealt a serious blow to the newspaper industry - I wish I had a picture of all the newspaper boxes in Mountain View; there are a dozen of them at two or three places, and they don’t have any real newspapers in them anymore, just free magazines. This industry has collapsed radically within the last few years, and it’s hard not to think the same thing will happen to books as e-readers get better and better.

But technological updates are not always replacements. Phone screens are not a replacement for watching TV, and TV is not a replacement for movie theaters. I’d argue that more movies are watched on cell phones than at any time in history, and yet the most recent Star Wars movie has made something like a billion dollars from people going to an actual darkened room to watch the movie with friends and a bucket of popcorn. Similarly, movie theaters are not a replacement for actual theaters, plays performed with real humans in front of a live audience: even though movies have largely displaced plays, they haven’t displaced them completely. Perhaps one day they will, if only in the sense of being able to expose a wider audience to that of a play; but the experience you have watching a real human playing a role right in front of you is completely different than the experience of film.

The same thing is true of books. Sorry, e-reader folks: your interfaces are a joke. The contrast is poor, scrolling is slow, you can’t easily make notes or create bookmarks or - oh, I’m sorry, are you about to say that your bad low resolution stylus and awkward commenting interface and hard-to-discover notes and general lameness are somehow a replacement for flipping through a book, tossing in a piece of paper, and writing a brief note? Oh, go on, try it. I’ll write an essay before you’re done figuring out how to leave a comment. The point isn’t that it isn’t technologically impossible to solve this problem - it’s that right now, the people who make e-books aren’t even trying. They’re trying to increase contrast and resolution and battery life and page refresh rates and e-book distribution. The things I want out of books - that tactile sense, rapid note taking, rapid access, discoverability, the ability to stack a set of them in a pile as a reminder - are literally twenty or thirty years away. E-readers are, technologically, at the days of vector graphics, when real books provide you a tactile feel and a random access interface that’s superior to the best 3D TV.

One day they’ll get there. And one might assume that those awesome e-readers of the future, with all the books in history on them, in sharp color, with a fast random access - I imagine something that looks actually like a large paperback book, with a hundred or so flexible pages, all in glorious color that you can flip through, mark up, whatever, except you only have to carry one book - will kill traditional bookstores. But then I go into Barnes and Noble and see a section of vinyl records and go what the hell? There’s no way that you could have told me ten years ago that we’d be in a world where we’re not just likely to move past CD’s, but to move past iPods with local storage in favor of streaming, but that at the same time vinyl is having a resurgence. Supposedly this is because DJ’s like to scratch records, and audiophiles prefer the analog sound. Who knew?

And yet, at the same time, the production of books themselves is getting better and better. They’re being printed on better paper, with better typography, better book design, color covers, printed and embossed covers, the whole nine yards. As a publisher, I’ve been going around collecting new examples of awesomely printed books and just in the ten or so years I’ve been looking at this really closely the entire production process of books has become stellar and awesome. Sometimes I’m sad when I get an old book on a topic I like and open it up to find pages that look like they’re typed up on a typewriter. Back in the late 70’s, when Douglas Hofstadter published Gödel, Escher, Bach, it was possible to produce awesome books with awesome typesetting, but it was an epic struggle; Donald Knuth reportedly spent eight years developing TeX to help him produce The Art of Computer Programming. Now these tools are available to everyone with a computer - I’m a Word junkie, but even I recently downloaded MacTex to my computer while sitting in an internet cafe. Now anyone can produce something that’s truly awesome and get it printed on demand.

SO I can’t see the future of books being anything but bright. Physical books are going to be around forever, at least as a niche product, and possibly more; they’re getting better all the time - but if they get replaced, it’s going to be by something even better, and even if they do get replaced en masse by something awesome, there will always be people who will love and preserve the printed medium forever, bibliophiles motivated by the same love as theatergoers, audiophiles, and lovers of fine art.

-the Centaur

Welp, we missed it, but that’s OK

Published January 12, 2016 by centaur

One way to make yourself feel overwhelmed is to take on too many projects; the other is to take on too many responsibilities; the best way is to do the same thing at the same time. We missed our blogpost for yesterday; file it under (a) “you need to work a little bit harder than you want to” and (b) “best laid plans sometimes need to be set aside” again, as I ended up (a) trying to finish a bit of documentation, succeeding, but leaving work an hour late, and (b) having an hour and a half of conversations at the local coffeehouse, with only thirty minutes work time. Add to this a weekend mostly spent trying to solve my wife’s Audible problem and working on small press stuff, and I am so far behind on my writing.

The good news is, I got the first of my puzzles done for my proposed Cinnamon Frost puzzle book. The bad news is, that’s about eight projects deep on the stack of things I should be working on now. Hm, is that an accurate estimate? There’s the revised CLOCKWORK opener, the SPECTRAL IRON revision, the HEX CODE revision, the THIRTY DAYS LATER publishing tasks, edits for the 24HCD Survival Guide, first draft of PHANTOM SILVER, first draft of BOT NET first draft, and the rough draft of FAERY NUMBERS, plus the math groundwork for FAERY NUMBERS, not to mention a whole host of other small writing tasks we’ll lump into one, plus blogging - so I’m working on a pointer to something twelve items deep in my stack.

A proper computer scientist would be appalled, as might my editor for CLOCKWORK (it’s progressing, I promise! but it’s got to be awesome). But the good news is that I got a start on a wholly new project, seizing the inspiration before it evaporated.

And that’s how you catch lightning in a bottle. That and lots of caffeine.

-the Centaur

It’s an Anger Problem, Not an Anger Management Problem

Published January 10, 2016 by centaur

Periodically I say something like this to my wife: “Excuse me, I’m going to go take this piece of electronic equipment outside and smash it with the baseball bat.” I say it politely, generally with a piece of already-broken electronic equipment in my hand, right after I’ve spent a couple of hours trying to make it work and definitively failing, and right before I grab the baseball bat, head out the front door, and smash the thing to blithereens on our driveway.

Because what I have is an anger problem, not an anger management problem.

I get really angry. A lot. I regularly scream into the dashboard of my car as my hands clench or beat the steering wheel, raging about the crazy of the day. Sometimes I get hoarse doing that, even hurt my voice. But other than occasionally hurting my voice, I never take it out on people - not anymore. My wife actually says she finds it hard to believe that I have an anger problem, because I so rarely show it. And to me that’s the difference between an anger problem and an anger management problem - whether you take it out on others or not.

Personally, I’d rather not get angry, and I think the degree to which I do get angry is the problem - like David Banner says, that’s my secret: I’m always angry. But I’ve also grown to think about anger like Stephen Covey - anger is an alarm, a signal that something’s wrong, and the first thing you do with an alarm is to turn it off and deal with the problem.

I didn’t used to have that resource available to me. I’ve knocked pieces from a chessboard, stormed out of a Risk game, yelled at people, gotten into fights, even smashed important computer equipment. When playing the raconteur I always like to exaggerate, to tell the true story about punching one of my best friends in the face - twice - and now I can add to that kicking another friend in the face - but the problem with all of those is that they were accidents, so they don’t tell the truth as much as, say, mentioning that I’ve ripped off my Android watch three times in the last year because it was so annoying.

But even that’s a part of the management, not the problem. The Android watch-toss generally happens when I’m driving, when it’s firing some alert and won’t stop, and I need to pay attention to the road - so I toss it off so I can focus on driving, not dying. One day, if it gets too annoying when I’m driving, I may tear it off and toss it out the window, but if so, I won’t look back - because as much as that’s an expression of anger, it’s also something that I’ve calculated in advance, a deliberate choice that if this little widget distracts me too much when I’m driving a ton of car at three times the speed human beings were designed for, it’s time for the widget to go.

So the anger is still there, but under control. I no longer smash cordless phones or toss cell phones, unless I’ve determined the device is actually a loss, and then, heck, I’ll give it a go, or pull out the baseball bat. Supposedly the cathartic theory of anger isn’t any good, that screaming or smashing plates will, rather than releasing your anger, actually make it worse; however, it certainly does feel good to just get that anger out and to move on.

But I had to spend fifteen minutes fixing a bent pin in my watch after the last watch-toss, and I really don’t like the pain in my throat after yelling in the car - and I still remember smashing those pieces from the chessboard, thirty-five years later, with a little bit of shame. So I know I have an anger problem - but one thing I’ve committed to is making sure I manage it.

-the Centaur

Postscript: Since this was written, I sat down with my wife to fix a problem with her Audible account after she moved to a new computer. During this process, we found out that Audible employees had NOT, as they had previously claimed, successfully fixed a problem that we’d had with her books when she accidentally got a second account - to the tune of a lost $500 in books - and THEN we found out that Audible employees had lied to her about whether she actually owned the books she downloaded, to the tune of $17,000 dollars in books encumbered with DRM that makes them effectively a rental, not ownership. My wife got so angry about this she had to take a walk. Me? I got angry because I spent two and half hours trying to resolve a problem which should have taken fifteen minutes, so angry at the end, when a error in Google’s interface repeatedly thwarted me trying to execute a simple search, that I wanted to smash my hand against the glass desk. My wife raised her hand to stop me, but I just said, “Don’t,” and then lowered my hands to the desk, took a deep breath, switched to Bing to resolve the problem. I then spent the next half hour calming my wife down about the horrible state of DRM in this country and how Audible employees lied to fuck her over. (And I was in on the call; they did lie - as my wife put it, they said whatever they had to to get her to enter her credit card number). In the end, I had calmed my wife down, I had found a solution for her problem, and I had not put my hand through a desk made of glass.

Scorecard: anger, zero; anger management, one.

Pictured: My first 3D printed model. It didn’t turn out so well. I did not, in fact, smash it, despite several hours of frustration.

Excuse Me, I Ordered the Large Box

Published January 9, 2016 by centaur

So what you see is a gift, a gift from my wife and myself’s, our gift to her sister and her husband, a gift given on the occasion of their 20th anniversary, a gift, by necessity, wrapped in a very, very large box. I think this is the largest single item that either of us have ever had to ship, other than perhaps a car - and other people did that for us. What is this gift? It’s “Petrified Coral”:

petrified coral2.jpg

For scale, it’s the artwork you see on this wall:

This “Petrified Coral” piece is one of a series that Sandi’s done - one I own:

Sandi worked on a third one, but it didn’t work out the way she wanted, so she mutated it into another piece.

With art this large, normal market forces start to break down. Regardless of what YOU want to pay for it, there’s a certain minimum amount that it costs to ship it, even to store it, so if you’re not willing to pay for it, you can’t play. Worse, Sandi likes working in this scale, but getting good at this scale requires working in this scale, so she’s got to store a lot of large pieces.

We’re happy to give "Petrified Coral 2” to Sandi’s sister, but we’re also taking this as an exercise in finding out how to ship these large pieces efficiently. The normal USPS or FedEx route seems too expensive, and not even Greyhound could fit it (yes, they ship). But people solve this problem, so we’re doing the research now.
If successful, then I’m sure Sandi would be happy to ship a large artwork to YOU.

(But not Petrified Coral 1. That one’s MINE.)
-the Centaur

That Sock Drawer

Published January 8, 2016 by centaur

Sock Drawer 2016-01-07.png

What to do with the stories in your sock drawer?

For those of you who don’t know, the “sock drawer” is where short stories go to die, named after the place you file manuscripts away after you’ve exhausted your efforts to sell, edit, or burn them. Stories go through a life cycle:

You Get the Idea: Sometimes, this is no more than a title. Most people stop here.
You Start the Draft: You actually start writing! Most people never get here.
You Finish the Draft! Most people who get to Stage 2 never get to Stage 3. Believe it or not, this is the hardest part.
You Edit the Draft! Some people get stuck forever here, or skip this entirely, like bloggers. :-)
You Let Other People See It! I call this the ”beta” stage because I generally don’t let people see stuff until I’ve edited it.
You Send It Out! You send the story or novel out for publication.
It’s Accepted Right Away! Editors ALWAYS accept stories, right?
???
Profit!

Actually, MOST of the time markets don’t accept what you send them. From what you see above, it seems like I’ve got a pretty good acceptance rate, but that’s actually counting by stories. If we instead look at how many times I sent them out:

Story Acceptances 2016-01-07.png

Yeah. And even that’s a bit exaggerated, since I get invited to write a lot of stories, so if i was to tease the data apart to look at my cold-call rejection rate, I would get very depressed. So really there are a few more stages which can happen after you send things out:

You Keep Circulating Your Work: If first you don’t succeed, try the next magazine or site on the list.
You Revise Your Work: A clever editor’s comment, or more insight, leads you to rework your story. Go back to Step 4.
You Get Stuck: You don’t know how to fix your work, but aren’t ready to give up yet. You’re essentially at Step 3.
You Give Up: You convince yourself the work can’t be fixed … and dump it in your sock drawer.

As you saw from the first diagram, I’ve got a small handful of stories in my sock drawer … not that I’ll never think of going back to them, but if so, it will probably be a ground-up rewrite harvesting the manuscript for whatever good ideas I’ve got. But I also have a larger tranche of stories I haven’t quite given up on yet, ones I think I can salvage, but which aren’t as important as my novels.

But if I’m not working on them, are they in the sock drawer, or not? Some of those stories went out to a dozen or more places and got as many rejections. Others I sent to one or two places, or nowhere. And if I read them again, what would I think? Is it worth going back to them? If it’s a choice between working on Dakota Frost, Cinnamon Frost, Jeremiah Willstone, or Serendipity the Centaur, I’m going to choose one of them over a short story I wrote back in 2001.

So why am I digging back at the boundary of Stalled and the Sock Drawer?

Recently, a friend told me about a short story submission deadline that was closing fast. I looked at my list of stories I’ve sent out to find one to send … but I’ve gotten much better at sending out my work, so, surprisingly, I didn’t have anything to send. So I had a choice: let the deadline pass … or find my best unpublished story and send it out.

I actually do have 2 or 3 stories on my shortlist of “this story is really good, but it never made it” but I want to edit these before I send them out again, so I thought about letting the deadline pass. Then I realized that if I never go back to those stories, I might as well consider them dead. I always mean to revise them - I have a folder of comments and notes on them - but somehow I never get around to it. So I needed to commit: lob the lot into the sock drawer, or take action.

I found the best of these that fit within the word count limits of the magazine. Then I reformatted it according to William Shunn’s manuscript guidelines, to give it the best chance for success. The very act of reformatting it gave me a new eye on the story … and I realized that inside that 10,000 word manuscript was a great 8,000 word story screaming to get out.

I didn’t have time to make those changes before the deadline. I did a quick edit, I fixed a few minor warts … and I sent it out.

If they like it, hopefully by the time they get back to me, I’ll have a great edit ready.

If not … I’ll have a great edit ready for someone else.

In the meantime, I added a tick to the count of Circulating Stories in the following graph...

Submissions 2016-01-07.png

… and blogging about it added a tick to this graph:

Building Inventory 2.png

Since I’ve seen, and done the alternative … sitting on stories forever ... I think this is was the “write" thing to do.

-the Centaur

Play on Words San Jose

Published January 7, 2016 by centaur

Play on Words is a great event which features short fiction performed by actors in front of a live audience. I’ve attended a couple of them since several of my fellows in Thinking Ink Press and the Write to the End group got their works performed at Play on Words.

Wednesday night, the Play on Words troupe performed short fiction by Keiko O’Leary, Betsy Miller and Marilyn Horn-Fahey; if you have a time machine, set the wayback to 7pm at Cafe Stritch (which incidentally has great jambalaya!), or, if your navigation circuit’s knackered, check out the live stream provided courtesy of South Bay Pulse magazine.

If you don’t have a time machine, there’s always YouTube! Find the link here.

And check it out! Next one is about three months out.

-the Centaur

“Solomon’s Baby” is up!

Published January 6, 2016 by centaur

Screenshot 2016-01-06 02.15.15.png

“Solomon’s Baby” is live at 365 Tomorrows! Go check it out - it’s only 300 words. Go on, you want to!

-the Centaur

Best Laid Plans Sometimes Must Be Set Aside

Published January 5, 2016 by centaur

So I started off this year with all sorts of big plans - blogging every day, hitting the ground running at work - and it’s kind of funny to stumble so close to the starting gate. I missed blogging yesterday, and I missed today at work entirely due to bleah.

But things happen for a reason, I think; the world looks deterministic and impersonal down at the level of the laws of physics, but there’s a structure to it at a higher level which, if not real, is at least something we can take advantage of.

Case in point one: I’ve been pushing hard to finish a revision to the first chapters of my novel, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but it’s slow going as I’ve had to rethink my whole approach to the book. Digging through my other Jeremiah material for inspiration, I found an almost-finished novella, which my obssessive-compulsive tendencies sucked me into trying to finish. (Procrastinating on one project with another project is worth further discussion, I think, but that’s another blogpost for another time, if I haven’t already blogged on it, that is). But I made myself stop after I took a pass, and tried to tackle my daily blogpost.

At which point a friend dropped by to talk. I was at Coupa Cafe, a hot spot for great Venezuelan coffee and Silicon Valley’s startup culture, which isn’t just about startups, but is actually a hotbed for intellectual discussion. In thirty short minutes, my buddy and I dove far into the intricacies of deep learning, something which affects me a lot at work - and just as that was winding down, one of his other friends dropped in, and started quizzing me about the mathematics in my urban fantasy novels. Turns out he’s an expert in precisely the same areas of mathematics that my young protagonist Cinnamon Frost is - so I see more conversations in our future.

Definitively, that conversation was worth more than the schedule of my blogposts, so it was the right thing to do to fully engage with the human beings right in front of me rather than sticking mechanically to my plan. It’s really important to take advantage of these opportunities and to capitalize on them when they happen. That’s what this world is structured for.

Now, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to capitalize on catching my wife’s flu and waking up feeling like someone pummeled me with a half ton of bricks, but I’m sure there’s some lesson or opportunity in there. At least I … uh, dunno, got to drop off my dry cleaning on my way to the local restaurant for some hot chicken soup? Not sure what’s the lesson in there. (Though it’s probably a sign that I need to sit down with my laptop and catch up on writing documentation, which I can easily do from home).

-the Centaur

Building Inventory

Published January 3, 2016 by centaur

Building Inventory.png

I’m taking on a new writing project - posting once a day on this blog this year - and, naturally, the first thing I open when i start a writing project - after Word or Ecto, to write the text - is Microsoft Excel, to track what I’m doing. Maybe that’s a sign of my so-called “left brain analytical tendencies” (NOTE: the left brained / right brained nonsense is a MYTH, used here for entertainment value only); after all, Quentin Tarantino once said “you can’t write poetry on a computer” and I doubt he spins up Excel on his yellow notepads. But a lot of successful cartoonists I know, like Bill Holbrook of Kevin and Kell, got their start on their most successful projects by getting an inventory - a month or two of backlog that they could use to prevent themselves from getting behind, and the only way I know to get that far ahead is to actually track what you’re doing.

Screenshot 2016-01-03 15.24.54.png

It’s been a useful exercise so far. I found about half dozen old blog posts that never got posted (some quite stale now) and found many other ideas popping to mind just by writing them down. I also realized the limits of my Excel-fu, as the nice diagrams I generate for my Nanowrimo progress are actually the outcome of a lot of careful tweaking which I can’t easily replicate quickly.

Screenshot 2016-01-03 15.25.17.png

But the exercise is really helpful. Just like all the other things in my life I’ve gotten more disciplined about tracking - my Nanowrimo progress, my word count, my short stories, my TODOs, my office piles - I’ve found great benefits come quickly, and it brings clarity, focus … and a great feeling of relief when you hit Save and are one more unit ahead of the onrushing wolf.

-the Centaur

The Benefits of Social Support

Published January 3, 2016 by centaur

December 2015 Writing 1.png

One of the things I’ve noticed is that its a lot easier to do things with social support. "Back in the day we used to call that peer pressure, son.” - but not so fast, Tex; hold on. When you try to do something for yourself, by yourself, it’s easier to give up; but when you involve another person, it’s far easier to hold yourself accountable.

Now, I think there’s some actual scientific studies on this, but that’s not what I’m referring to: I think I have directly observed this in my own life. You are the easiest person to fool, of course, but I am trained as a scientist, which means, in part, that I observe the world, that I record what I observe, and I analyze it, looking for patterns. And above, you can see that the only two times I failed at a National Novel Writing Month like challenge were the two months I didn’t do it with the social support of the formal challenges - when I tried it in the off months of August and December.

December 2015 Writing 2.png

The same thing happened this year: my December writing, which I’ve consciously tried to keep up each day, has in truth been quite spotty. Now, there are vacations, holidays, and the year end crunch in there, but it’s surprising that I got so little done - and perhaps NOT surprising that the days I did best were the regular writing group days of the 29th, the 22nd, the 15th, the 8th, and the 2nd (at least best compared to the days immediately around them; the 22nd was thin).

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So I got a little over 1/5th of the writing done in December than my typical November (and a lot less than in this previous November, which was epic). Perhaps that’s because in Nano I’m writing new material, and in December I also edit, but still, the social support - a group of peers who are trying to accomplish the same goal - really seems to help.

My wife and I have noticed the same thing at the gym; so has my friend Gordon. Jim Davies and Lou Fasulo do the same thing with their epic New Year’s resolutions. Agile development is a mixed bag at best and active, harmful voodoo at worst, but its daily standups nonetheless have the same kind of social effect.

So if you want to do something … consider finding a friend who wants to do it too.

-the Centaur

Solomon’s Baby at 365 Tomorrows

Published January 2, 2016 by centaur

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My flash fiction short, “Solomon’s Baby”, is going to be published soon in 365 Tomorrows, a daily magazine of flash fiction. By my count, this is my 13th accepted short story, and will likely be the 11th published (as I have 2 in the queue at the forthcoming anthology 30 DAYS LATER). As I’ve said before, this just goes to show that if you write, if you finish what you write, and you send out what you write, you’re much more likely to get published than if you stare sadly at the manuscripts at the bottom of your sock drawer muttering “if only … if only” as you slowly scoop shovels of chocolate ice cream into your mouth with a dull spoon. But hey! Your mileage may vary, so if that works for you, knock yourself out (or at least give yourself a great ice cream headache).

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-the Centaur

Welcome to 2016

Published January 1, 2016 by centaur

Hi, I’m Anthony! I love to write books and eat food, activities that I power by fiddling with computers. Welcome to 2016! It’s a year. I hope it’s a good one, but hope is not a strategy, so here’s what I’m going to do to make 2016 better for you.

First, I’m writing books. I’ve got a nearly-complete manuscript of a steampunk novel JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE which I’m wrangling with the very excellent editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books. God willing, you’ll see this come out this year. Jeremiah appears in a lot of short stories in the anthologies UnCONventional, 12 HOURS LATER, and 30 DAYS LATER - more on that one in a bit.

I also have completed drafts of the urban fantasy novels SPECTRAL IRON and HEX CODE, starring Dakota Frost and her adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost, respectively. If you like magical tattoos, precocious weretigers, and the trouble they can get into, look for these books coming soon - or check out FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE, the first three Dakota books. (They’re all still on sale, by the way).

Second, I’m publishing books. I and some author/artist friends in the Bay Area founded Thinking Ink Press, and we are publishing the steampunk anthology 30 DAYS LATER edited by Belinda Sikes, AJ Sikes and Dover Whitecliff. We’re hoping to also re-release their earlier anthology 12 HOURS LATER; both of these were done for the Clockwork Alchemy conference, and we’re proud to have them.

We’re also publishing a lot more - FlashCards and InstantBooks and SnapBooks and possibly even a reprint of a novel which recently went out of print. Go to Thinking Ink Press for more news; for things I’m an editor/author on I’ll also announce them here.

Third, I’m doing more computing. Cinnamon Frost is supposed to be a mathematical genius, so to simulate her thought process I write computer programs (no joke). I’ve written up some few articles on this for publication on this blog, and hope to do more over the year to come.

Fourth, I’m going to keep doing art. Most of my art is done in preparation for either book frontispieces or for 24-Hour Comics Day, but I’m going to step that up a bit this year - I have to, if I’m going to get (ulp) three frontispieces done over the next year. Must draw faster!

Finally, I’m going to blog more. I’m already doing it, right now, but one way I’m trying to get ahead is to write two blog posts at a time, publishing one and saving one in reserve. This way I can keep getting ahead, but if I fall behind I’ve got some backlog to fall back on. I feel hounded by all the ideas in my head, so I’m going to loose them on all of you.

As for New Year’s Resolutions? Fah. I could say “exercise more, blog every day, and clean up the piles of papers” but we all know New Year’s Resolution’s are a joke, unless your name is Jim Davies, in which case they’re performance art.

SO ANYWAY, 2016. It’s going to be a year. I hope we can make it a great one!

-the Centaur

Pictured: The bookshelves of Cafe Intermezzo in the Atlanta airport, one place where I like to write books and eat food.