Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in July 2010

Hester Furey’s Little Fish

centaur 0
Finishing Line Press is about to publish a chapbook of my friend Hester Furey's poems, titled Little Fish. Little Fish is available for pre-order at $12 with $3 shipping through September 1st. After October 29, it will be available on Amazon, but production is based on what people order now, so if you order now, it will help her and her publisher.
Hm. They don't make it easy to include a link to buy the book, do they? You can find it if you scroll down the page, but in case you miss it ... let's see, Google Chrome has a nice element inspector ... doop de doo ... grabbing the HTML ... OK. Let's try this: you can preorder Little Fish here: That should send you directly to the Finishing Line Press PayPal page where you can preorder Little Fish. Hopefully that will work! So please, check her work out, and support Finishing Line Press!
-the Centaur P.S. You can also find some of Hester Furey's earlier scholarly work via Project Muse and JSTOR. P.P.S. Me saying something nice about Finishing Line Press does not mean I don't also want you to go check out the many fine books available from Bell Bridge Books. Yes, yes, yes, I know they don't even remotely compete, I'm trying to show support, work with me here.

Guest Posting for Blogathon at A Novel Friend

centaur 0
My friend from the DragonWriters, Trisha Wooldridge, is participating in the Blogathon - sort of the 24 Hour Comic Day for bloggers - and I'm sponsoring one slot with a donation to Bay State Equine Rescue and a guest post on "Greed and Charity". A teaser:
At the beginnings of their careers, a lot of authors and other creative types are obsessed with making money off what they produce and are deathly afraid of people stealing it. I've seen people charging their friends for copies of short stories printed in magazines, putting their artwork on the web behind passwords or with huge watermarks, or pricing their software out of reach of the people who want to buy it. But this doesn't help them - in fact, it hurts. And I'm here to tell you to give stuff away for free.
If you want to read the whole post, please check it out at her blog, A Novel Friend - it should go up sometime this weekend. -the Centaur

Comments … STILL Moderated

centaur 0
Um, automatic robot gang, I just have to tell you: the following scheme doesn't work well for comment spam:
Hi! Just checkd out your site! Keep up teh good information. Very nice work? Do it youself?! Very relevant to me, we also have a community with theme similar on similar information. Is Blogger the WordPress? Ima Spammer http://cheapfreeviagra.malware.org/
Especially if there's no relationship between the salsa of text and the post. I mean, come on, if you're going to comment on my WordPress theme don't do it on the Pound Cake Alchemy post. 8 more spammy comments ... marked as spam. -the Centaur

Comic-con @ an end again

centaur 0

Some issues with lines but ... not the zoo it was last year. Maybe I am better at navigating it; maybe they're working out the kinks. Regardless, a great con this year - the highlights for me were the urban fantasy and ya panels and the bigscreen finale of Doctor Who.

Recommended!

The n-1 rule

centaur 0
When ordering at a Thai or other Asian restaurant, find out if they serve family size portions. If so, order n-1 dishes where n is the number of diners, or you will be sad. I am quite sad right now :-( -the Centaur

Lines, lines and comicon

centaur 0
O.M.G. What a ridiculous mess. Some people are nice. Some lines make sense. But more often it seems that the nicest people are stuck enforcing the stupidest rules, and the reasonable rules are enforced by people who literally go far out of their way to be total assholes. Geez! With apologies to all the many hardsuffering comicon employees who try to be nice, if people would just let them.

Conventions … not the fan kind

centaur 0
I've picked up a fair number of conventions over the years ... notations, ways of writing things to make the type of thing that I'm writing clear. Most of these I've picked up from others, some are my own. Here are a few of them:
  • Novel titles are written in ALL CAPS
    You write novels this way to make it clear that it's a BOOK you're talking about, dag nab it. Examples: FROST MOON, ATLAS SHRUGGED, ULYSSES. I picked up this convention from my publisher, Bell Bridge Books.
  • Search queries are written in [square brackets]
    You write search queries this way, rather than with quotes, because quotes can appear in search queries. Examples: [frost moon], ["frost moon"] - note the results are not the same. I picked up this convention from The Search Engine That Starts With a G.
  • Command line text is indented in a special format where the prompt is bold, the command is bold italic, and the command response is plain text.
This last one takes more explanation (and breaking out of the unordered list to overcome WordPress CSS theme issues). When including command line responses in email, you indent the entire excerpt to set it apart from your message, then put the command prompt in bold, the command in bold italic, and its response in plain text, like so:
centaur@mobile (Sat Jul 24, 00:44:54) [501] ~:
$ imagelink comicon-2010-01.jpg san diego comicon 2010

<a href="http://www.dresan.com/images/comicon-2010-01.jpg" alt="san diego comicon 2010"><img src="https://www.dresan.com/images/comicon-2010-01.jpg" alt="san diego comicon 2010" border="0" width="600" /></a>
Some WordPress or theme weirdness is making this formatting a little harder than it is in Gmail. I think this is fixed to the point that you should be able to see that the "informational" part of the prompt (when the command was executed) appears on its own line, with a colon and line break to separate it from the command proper. The command proper is prefixed by a dollar sign, a UNIX standard that distinguishes it from the response text that follows. This communicates and distinguishes when you did it, what you did, and what you got. This one is mine. I've been developing this convention over the years as a way of communicating results from the command line in email. I have to admit, this is driven in part by a bit of egoism: I want people to know that the results I'm sending them can be done in one line of Bash, Sed and (g)AWK. And the remaining part is, I want people to learn that yes, they too can in a minute do immense amounts of computation with Bash, Sed and AWK. That's all for now. Next time: why the Einstein summation notation is cool. -the Centaur

Guest Blogging on Manga Maniac Cafe!

centaur 0
I am (or, I guess at this point, just have) guest blogged about FROST MOON at the Manga Maniac Cafe, which is running a Got Books event through today. Julie at the Manga Maniac Cafe had these kind words to say about me:
Today is the kickoff for the Got Books Event, which lasts until tomorrow. You can win all kinds of books and book related swag, just by visiting the site and then visiting the other participating blogs. I’m super geeked to have Anthony Francis, the author of Frost Moon, here to join in the celebration. To make things even sweeter, we have 5 (FIVE!!!) copies of Frost Moon to give away to readers. Let’s get things kicked off by asking Anthony a few questions about his book!
So please go check the site out, and support the Manga Maniac Cafe and Dakota Frost! -the Centaur