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All posts for the month January, 2012

Attack of the Killer Typos

Posted by dougdandridge on January 31, 2012
Posted in: Caliber, eBooks, Kindle, Proofreading, self publishing, Typos, Uncategorized, Websites, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , . 1 Comment

Ah typos.  You gotta love em.  Well, actually you don’t.  I hate them.  They frustrate me.  They complicate my life.   Someone on tweeter put it so well recently.  They reproduce.  And they are horny little buggers.   You think you’ve got them all, every single one.  And when you look back there they are again.  One of the main problems with proofing is that we don’t always recognize the inconsistencies.  And spell checker only catches the words that are spelled wrong, not those that are spelled correctly but used improperly.  I personally have a big problem with wont/won’t.  Easy enough to correct now that I know what to look for.  Another big problem is getting rid of all the underlines and replacing them with italics.  There is a difference in the formatting of a document sent to a publisher or an agent, and one ready for a reader to peruse.   In the manuscript sent to professionals words and phrases denoting thoughts or names of objects like ships are underlined.  I guess because it makes it easier on their eyes.  But look in an published novel you can pick up from the shelves of any bookstore.  No underlines.  They become italicized.  You would think that underline words would be easy to find and change.  And you, my dear reader, would be wrong.  I have gone over a manuscript a half dozen times changing, correcting, etc.  I have formatted the manuscript to eBook format, checked it out, and found a damned underlined word.  Remember what I said about reproduction.

Formatting is its own issue.  I have uploaded documents to the major epublishers that I was sure were perfect as far as formatting was concerned.  They looked very good on my computer.  No problems with fonts, indentations, all the bolds and italics in the proper place.  I have even checked the books on Kindle and Caliber, and raged at all the stupid mistakes it made to my formatting, moving things around, destroying the perfect alignment.  So I have gone back in and corrected the errors, and then sent my perfect baby to the publisher website.  And then the eBook version arrives on virtual shelves, and it’s a disaster.  My first online review said all the good things about my book, then blasted me on formatting issues that I didn’t even know existed.  I was heartbroken.  But the only solution was to find out what went wrong and correct it, develop new strategies to make sure the past mistakes don’t become present and future mistakes.

So like most things I am having to learn from scratch.  Learn the formatting in the background that ruins the reformatting to e format.  Learn how to find those typos, and underlines and other undesirables.  Zoom out of the page where I can ignore the individual words and look at the patterns of blue underlined, green underlined and red underlined words.  And then zoom, see what needs to be done (I have found that not all grammar corrections are correct).  Maybe that will get them all.  Maybe a few will hide in the shadows and scurry back when I have passed to a new page.  I wouldn’t put it past them.  I have also found that there are a lot of proofreading programs out there, many of them very expensive, a hundred dollars or more.  I am not quite ready to take a plunge into something that might not even do what I want it to.  Maybe someday.  Until then I will continue to do it on my own, with a new respect for proofing.

The Scorpion

Posted by dougdandridge on January 24, 2012
Posted in: eBooks, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Military, Near Future, science Fiction, self publishing, Writing. Tagged: , , , . 2 Comments

This last weekend I released my fourth self pub novel, the science fiction adventure The Scorpion.  The plan is to have eight novels up by summer, the fruits of many years of production.   The Scorpion is a near future novel, set in 2047.  I really prefer writing far future novels, though near future are much easier when it comes to research, and I expect people will pretty much be the same in the mid 21st Century, while they might act in completely different ways four centuries from now.    There may be different slang, different fashions, different entertainments, but they will still be the mostly selfish and greedy b#*stard ruled by the same kind of leaders as today.  Or maybe I’m just being optimistic.

The Scorpion came from an idea of what the world might be like if fusion power was developed into a workable technology.  Power would be cheap, which means hydrogen produced by the electrolysis of water would be cheap.  Which would mean that oil and coal, dirty sources of power to say the least, would fade from the economic scenery, except in those countries that cannot afford the new tech.   How will this affect the Opec countries?  They will again become poor third world countries outside looking in.  And they will be mad as hell, spawning a new generations of terrorists to shout their rage to the world.  This will result in an increase in the security tech and resources of the have nations as they try to combat the have nots.  And tech will make the difference, just as it does today.

The military has always jumped on the chance to get an edge on the potential enemy, even when that jump is a knee jerk reaction in the wrong direction.  I don’t see how they will fail to take advantage of emerging nanotechnology and genetic engineering, and the integration of the two, to get a leg up on the opposition.  The militarization of space will proceed, despite all the rhetoric against it.  The world will continue to teeter on the edge of wars.  Genetic engineering will result in designer pets, including new security and home protection animals.  I didn’t really touch on the affects of climate change, maybe from an optimistic viewpoint that fusion will save us.  The big hocking airships for military and commercial use?  I just thought the idea was really cool, so I put it in there.  Yeah, the big assault ships might be too vulnerable, but maybe with high tech systems they could be defensible.  But either way they are a cool image.

Below is an excerpt from the book, which is available on my website, Amazon and Smashwords.

 

Jackie Seager had been a water works technician for the City of Omaha for going on twenty years.  In that time she had gained the ultimate security clearance needed to access the heart of a system that provided clean drinking water to hundreds of thousands of citizens.  She was up before the sun to commute to work.  As a technician in a very hands on industry she did not make herself up for the job.  But she still took her appearance seriously, and wanted to look sharp in front of her subordinates.

Her long brown hair was not responding this morning to her efforts.  The mirror showed a youthful face under the unruly hair.  The face was the benefit of exercise, diet and the most modern of rejuvenating treatments.  She knew she could look forward to making it to at least a hundred, with one twenty being a very real possibility.

Jackie promised herself that she would have the hair cut short as she walked out of the bathroom and finished dressing in her coveralls.  She grabbed her purse and headed for the door.

“Bye Pudding,” she said as she stooped to pet the cat that had rubbed against her legs.  “You be a good kitty.”

Jackie turned the old fashioned dead bolt on her door, then pulled the door open.  She had been looking down as she went through the doorway, and almost ran into the person who had been standing outside it.  The first she knew that someone was there was when shoes appeared in her vision.  With a start Jackie looked up into the face of the person, noting with relief from the swelling of breasts under the shirt that it was a woman.  Relief turned to shock when the face that appeared before her was her face.

“What the hell?” said Jackie, shuffling back.

The doppelganger exploded into action, springing forward, striking Jackie in the nose with the palm of her hand.  Jackie grunted in pain as she fell back, then huffed out the air in her lungs as she hit the floor with her back.  Pudding hissed in alarm as she ran from the room to seek cover.

Jackie pulled air into her lungs to let out a scream as a small pistol appeared in the look alikes’ hand.  She was looking down the barrel of the mag gun as she attempted to force the scream out of her mouth.  The gun phutted in near silence and blackness fell in front of her eyes.  A blackness that she would never come out of.

*    *    *

Al-Agrab closed the door and grabbed the body by the ankles, grunting with the effort as she dragged the corpse out of the living room and into a bedroom.  She pushed the body up next to the bed and pulled the comforter off of the sleeping platform, draping it over the dead woman.  She then washed her hands in the bathroom and rifled through the closet.  Finding another work coverall she climbed into it, then put on a pair of Jackie Seager’s work shoes.

The Scorpion pondered the trail of blood leading from the living room to the bedroom, the result of Jackie’s life blood leaking out of her ruined skull.  With a curious shrug of her shoulders, left reaching up to her ear while the right barely moved, the Scorpion decided nothing could be done at this point.  They were liable to be on to her soon, and she would probably be dead by the evening, so covering the evidence of a murder didn’t seem that important.  Picking up the woman’s purse the Scorpion was out the door, locking it behind her.

Moments later Jackie’s late model Chevrolet pulled out of the building’s parking garage, the woman inside waving at the camera.  It accelerated onto the parkway and headed out of Omaha, toward the water works.

*    *    *

“McMann,” Kestrel subvocalized into his com link as the unit woke him.  Sharone groaned for a moment beside him as he sat up in bed.

“This is Sulu,” came the voice of the FBI Agent over the link.  “We have a situation in Omaha.”

“Hold on a moment, Agent Sulu,” said McMann as he dug an elbow into Sharone’s side.  The Israeli agent sat up with blurry eyes as McMann switched the incoming channel to his house system.

“Go ahead, Agent Sulu,” said McMann, motioning for the Israeli to be quiet.

“A powerful genenged bio-toxin was released into the Omaha, Nebraska water supply this afternoon,” said Sulu.  “It has infected and killed over two hundred people.  Almost four hundred more are in the hospital.  The system identified a concentration of the toxin and shut down, or we might be looking at tens of thousands of casualties.”

“My God,” said McMann, springing out of bed while signaling the wall mounted Trivee to activate.  CNN was immediately on the screen, with the caption Omaha showing below the talking head.

“Do you have a suspect?” asked McMann.  Sharone pulled herself out of bed and he found his attention straying to her tight naked body.  She threw a grimace at him while she grabbed her bra and panties from the floor and looked at them as if she didn’t know what they were.

“We have dozens of suspects, Agent McMann,” said Sulu.  “We’re going to start rounding them up within the hour and question them.”

“Any suspects who have been out of the States in the last year?” asked McMann, going to his dresser and pulling a clean pair of briefs from a drawer.  “Particularly to the Middle East.”

McMann turned to look at Sharone sliding her bra over her small breasts.  She saw him looking and stuck her tongue out at him.

“Let me see,” said Sulu.  “We have four that have been out of the country in the last year.  Two to the European Union, one to Australia, and one to…, Israel.  That would be Jackie Seager.  She’s a long time employee and a department director at the water works.”

“Leave that one alone if you can,” ordered McMann as he slid into a pair of pants.  “Keep her under close surveillance and don’t let her out of sight.  If it looks like she’s gonna bolt arrest her, but otherwise leave her to me.  I’ll be up there in less than two hours.  McMann out.”

“You think they might have something?” asked Sharone as she sat on the bed and pulled on her own pants.

“Maybe.  The perp didn’t get killed this time,” said Kestrel as he pulled his shirt over his head.  “That might be a break if we can get them in custody and get some information out of them before they suicide.”

“And you don’t trust anyone else to do it?”

“Of course not,” he agreed as he slid his shoulder holster onto his arm and buckled it.  “Would you trust someone in another agency to do something you could do better?”

Vampires: A Pain in the Neck.

Posted by dougdandridge on January 19, 2012
Posted in: eBooks, Fantasy, self publishing, Undead, Vampires, Websites, Writing. Tagged: , , , . 1 Comment

I have always been fascinated by those kings and queens of the supernatural monsters, Vampires.  The ultimate evil, they spread like a plague, multiplying geometrically until they control an area.  I remember all of those wonderful Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee movies as a child, based on the classic by Bram Stoker that was also a childhood favorite.    There are still vampires out there that fit that classic mold, but most modern interpretations of vamps are what I call clubbing vampires.  In that they get their blood and then go to the dance club to have fun.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I have enjoyed stories, movies and TV shows with there kind of humanized vampires.  Buffy was one of my all time favorite shows.  I love the vampires of Tanya Huff and Jeanne Stein.  And the German Independent Movie We Are The Night is now one of my favorite movies of all time.  But when I decided to write a vampire novel, I made a decision to go back to the old standard in order to get something new.  First I have to admit that I wanted to pursue something that was successful on today’s market.  In 2008 I  looked up science fiction and fantasy sales on Publisher’s Lunch.  Science fiction, at least the technical military kind I write, was not selling very well, unless your name was Weber or Ringo.  Seventy-five percent of sales were in Fantasy, and of those the majority were about blood suckers.  So I made a plan, plotted out a book, and wrote Hunger, later changed to The Hunger when I saw there was a competing title out there.

I made my vampires evil.  They kill to feed, then go back to their resting places for the night, which includes some the soil of their original grave.  I decided to modernize the plague concept some.  Unlike Salem’s Lot, I thought that modern vampires might be a little more leery of letting the World in on their existence.  Modern technological man is more than a match for vampires if they know the danger.  Baptists ministers backed by the National Guard would probably be more than they could handle.  They already have a rap about this whole immortality thing, when most of them can’t last out the week.  So vampires feed, but they try to do it on the sly, while still adding select members to their numbers.  In the old vampire tradition I made it so that feeding on and killing a human doomed that person to rise again in three days, one of the undead, unless they were prevented in some manner.  I thought it would be cool if they could transform in different creatures such as bats, rats and wolves, and transform into mist.  Weather control was also a power I thought would be cool.  And the more ancient the vampire the more powerful.

I came up with the idea of Lucinda Taylor, a woman who was beaten out of her house by her abusive husband and ends up as an drug addicted prostitute on the street.  Her pimp slits her throat, but before she dies a passing vampire finishes her off in order that he can add her to his collection.  He later dies and she becomes a free agent.  She is one angry vampire, and she decides not to go the normal route of killing innocents.  Instead she preys on the kind of men who tormented her in life.  Pimps, drugs dealers, and those who supply them.  And she makes sure they don’t rise again by taking their heads off.  She is pursued by a Catholic priest who gave up his position of Bishop to become a vampire hunter, an FBI agent who blames her for kills she didn’t make, and an ancient vampire who fears that she may let the game out of the bag.  And finally the enormously strong new blood she made by accident, who is after her ass.  The idea of Deshawn came from being a football fan.  I thought, if a vampire is strong, then a six foot seven two hundred and ninety pound ex-NFL defensive end would be massively powerful.  He picks up cars and throws them around in battle.  He is a force to be reckoned with.

I sent Hunger of to three publishers and got the standard form rejections.  Last year I sent it to fifty agents.  Most gave the standard form rejections.  A couple wrote back with the market is flooded replies.  The few who requested more material, stating that my work seemed original at least, finally rejected it with replies that although I was a good writer with an interesting story, it was not right for the market.  Story of my writing career.  So I decided to self publish this one.  Those who have read it so far have all been positive, some enthusiastically so.  Hopefully it will do well.  Be warned though.  It is an adult book with adult themes.    Not for children or the faint hearted.  An excerpt is included below.

She could feel the connection forming, the connection with the dark lord who gave her the powers she possessed.  She could feel its anger at her, the anger she had brought by her refusal to do his work on Earth.  The anger brought on by her destruction of evil and the foiling of the dark lord’s plans.

    You will do my will, my child, came the thoughts of Satan to her mind.  You are an insect, a speck in the eternity that I am.  You do not have the power to resist me.  Do my will or you will be punished.

    Bring it on, she thought back at the anti-God, forcing all of her will to battle that of the arch demon.  I am my own creature.  Not yours.  And you will bow to my will as a child of God.

She could feel the power of the demon battling her, as its will beat down upon her like storm waves upon a lone, struggling swimmer.  And like the lone swimmer she fought to stay afloat, to resist the power of the waves that sought to drown her.  She could feel the strength leeching from her body, as the demon lord of Hell pummeled her.

    I defy you, she screamed in her mind.  I renounce you and all of your plans for the race of man.  And I will use you as you sought to use man, for my purposes.

She felt the presence of the demon as some of its essence was pulled into the circle of the pentagram.  It fought her with all of its power.  But once a part of it had entered the circle, more of it was pulled inexorably into the symbol.  More and more flooded in, until Lucinda felt as if the power of a Sun was in the air before her.

    Yes, weak one, said the demon’s voice in her head.  Bow down before my might and worship your true God.

Lucinda opened her eyes and looked skyward, her cruel laughter echoing into the night.  She brought her gaze down, her red eyes burning into the shadowy form of the demon within the circle.

    You are the weak one, she thought at it.  A liar and deceiver, who pretends to be his master.

The demon seemed to shrink in on itself as she exerted her will upon it.  It fought against her, trying to slash through the magical barrier that kept it imprisoned.  It went into a frenzy, but the circle of blood was too much for it, and soon its struggles ceased.

“You will give me the power,” Lucinda screamed into the night.  “It is mine by right of magic, and you will give it to me.”

Lucinda felt the power flowing into her as it was released by the demon that was now under her command.  She could feel it struggle to escape back to its realm, but her hold was too strong.  When the energy finally reached its peak, all that she could hold, she clenched her hands before her.

“Back to Hell, demon.  Back to the slime pits from which you came.  Obey me now and leave this realm.”

She could feel the demon’s power wane as it was sucked into the void that birthed it.  A final laugh resounded through her mind before it disappeared.

    One day you will be brought to Hell, came the last thoughts of the monster.  And I will be waiting for your arrival.  Oh yes, I shall.  And you will know torment through eternity.

And then it was gone, and Lucinda let out a mental sigh of relief.  The energy she had leeched from the creature was trying to explode from her body, and she must put it to its use quickly.

    Come mist, she thought with her entire focus, raising her hands again into the sky as she walked toward the seawall, carefully skirting the pentagram that still had a residual trace of the evil it had contained.  Lucinda looked down into the water, repeating the call in her head over and over, visualizing what she wanted from the water.

At first there were only a few wisps of mist, curling from the choppy water.  Then the wisps grew in number, as the atmosphere over the water became a thickening curtain of moisture.  It rose into the air, until a region of hundreds of yards in every direction was blotted out by the thick white covering.

Find The Hunger on my website Imagination Unlimited (http://dougdandridge,net) , at Amazon

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006RXWEZS) or at Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/118866)

Remember The Future

Posted by dougdandridge on January 17, 2012
Posted in: 2001, Future Prediciton, Golden Age, PhutureNews, science Fiction, Space Program, Writing. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Many years ago, when I was in the Army stationed in Germany, I remember seeing an album cover by a local band called Nektar.  The title of the album was Remember the Future.  I always thought it was a cool cover and a really cool title.  But what did that title mean, remember the future?  I believe we all make up our futures depending on what we see around us.  We predict, we plan, and most times we are wrong.  Each generation makes its own future.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Beyond The Farthest Star, envisioned a world where great air fleets battled the skies at supersonic speeds, with props.  That was what they saw as the ultimate in aerial technology, so they pushed the envelop with what they knew.  Back in the Golden Age it was thought that we would have moon bases in the 1960s, space stations in orbit, maybe even flights to Mars and beyond.  It was also thought that the world would have three or four massive computers and everyone would send their data in to be crunched.  Sure, we have mainframes, more than they imagined.  But no one saw the billions of smaller computers, desktop, notebooks, even intelligent phones, and the international net that links them together.

The future of my childhood was shaped by the space program.  From the west coast of Florida I watched the launches of Saturn Vs across the peninsula, their sun bright flames pushing them into orbit and beyond.  Man walked on the Moon.  There were plans to push the envelop, Moon Bases, Space Habitats, trips to the outer Solar System.   2001 came out in the 60s, a science fiction novel written by a real scientist.  It predicted Howard Johnson’s restaurants in orbit, regular flights into orbit (though Pan Am didn’t survive much past the novel), a major complex on the surface of the Moon, even a voyage of exploration to Saturn (the original destination, which was changed to Jupiter in the movie and subsequent books).  So WTF happened?  I think it was the Cold War that sucked all the funding out of the planned space programs of the two superpowers.   Fortunately the other prediction of the time, Nuclear Armageddon, also didn’t come to pass.

This generation’s vision of the future includes genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and virtual worlds.   Again we predict the future we think will come, as well as the future we hope to hell never rears its ugly head.  The old mainstays of scifi are still there.  Space travel, FTL, Interstellar Empires.  Most are set so far in the future that the writer does not have to worry about his world being destroyed by time.  Some still make the mistake of wishful thinking and make the technology come too fast.  My old mentor Charles Sheffield wrote novels in the early twenty first century that predicted an explored and settled Solar System in 2080, a date most thought was much too optimistic.  As far as more Earthly technologies, everyone’s guess is as good as any others’.   We can make predictions based on what we know about the here and now, and the logical progression of trends and technologies.  What we can’t always predict is the new and the unusual, things which come without warning out of laboratories and Universities.  The things which generate new trends, industries and cultures.  But we still take a shot at developing the future, the settings for new stories, new characters, new history.

Follow Future Trends on PhutureNews, a blog of some hot scifi writers and new comers.  Link on the side of the page.

Find my books, The Deep Dark Well, The Hunger, Diamonds In The Sand and soon The Scorpion on Amazon, Smashwords and my website, Imagination Unlimited.

Finish What You Start

Posted by dougdandridge on January 14, 2012
Posted in: eBooks, Fantasy, science Fiction, self publishing, Writing. Tagged: , , , . 2 Comments

I remember when I first started writing.  I was looking for all the information I could find on getting published, and I came across Robert Heinlein’s rules of writing.  I sat up and took notice as soon as I saw the name Heinlein, one of my all time favorites.  The first rule of writing was to sit your ass in a chair and write.  Sounds pretty simple.  If you want to become a writer you have to write something.  I can’t remember all of the people I have talked to over the years who have told me they wanted to write a book or novel.  They had wanted to for many years, but not the first word had been put on paper (or hard drive as the case may be).   It takes a lot of motivation to actually sit down and put together ninety to one hundred twenty thousand words of coherent story.  The motivation for my first effort came from anger and desperation.   I had been released from the University of Alabama just before I was about to go on my internship, a PhD in Clinical Psychology the goal.  At the time I placed all the blame on the Psychology Department.  I still think they are burdened with the majority of the blame, but that is another story.  Later I got a job with a Methadone Clinic in Tuscaloosa.  I was fired one month into the job for trying to actually do therapy with my clients instead of just signing their papers after letting them watch a video.  That and making a comment to the other therapist, my supervisor, that she really wasn’t doing anything.  So I left that job in righteous rage, no prospects ahead, newly married and with a family to support.  And I sat down and wrote, everyday for two weeks.  At the end of that time I had an eighty thousand word first draft of an expose’ of academia called The Tower Of Psychobabble.  In my naivete I started shopping the manuscript around to agents, and got an offer to look at the book.  Then, as luck would have it, the agent received another manuscript with essentially the same tale, from a California University, just before mine got to her mailbox.  So much for my fortune as a whistle blower.  I later wrote two more whistle blowing books about the mental health system that I worked in.  But after that first effort my mind turned to fiction.

The second rule of Heinlein was to finish what you started.  I finished three more novels that first year and proved to myself, after many mistakes, that I could plan, plot and finish a bookl.  One, Diamonds In The Sand, was good enough that with a little rewriting I have put it out as a free eBook on my site.  Another, The Convoy, may be released someday, but requires much work before I want it with my name on it out where the public can see it.  Another, a two hundred sixty thousand word epic, I relegated to the category of practice.  In the next couple of years there were several more completed novels, and several that were never finished.  I remember researching one that was to take place in Tanzania,  using a Masai protagonist.  A story about Were Hyenas, I research the Masai and their legends, their language, every fact I could find about a place I had never  been.  I never finished that book, though I had plotted it through to the end.  I don’t even know where the file is of the work I had completed.  Another book, The Beast Of Barnards Star, was to be a tale of a vampire who relocates to an colony around another star.  Also never finished.

To date I have written over twenty book length manuscripts.  I have also written some that never made it to the end.  In 2010 I wrote five manuscripts, two of exceptional length.  This year I plan to rewrite all of them, try to agent the three standard length novels, and self publish the two of exceptional length.  I hope those two will become the first books of long series.  And in 2011?  Well, the story is not so good for that  year. I started seven novels, and finished none.  It was just easier to start something new than to figure out the plot problems twenty or thirty thousand words in.  So I violated that rule of Heinlein’s, not finishing, and have a mess on my hands.  In December I started back on one of the books, and am now up to sixty thousand words.  Now I remember what a rush it is to see the novel starting to take shape.  Two thousand words a day add up, and the increasing page count lends a feeling of accomplishment.  And I know when I am near the end the daily word count will go up, as I rush to finish the book.   In the last week I have thought of three new ideas for books.  Maybe someday, but for now the resolution is to finish what I started, gets these 2011 efforts completed, and then move on.  There will be time enough for new ideas, later.

Read The Deep Dark Well and The Hunger, at the website, Imagination Unlimited (http:dougdandridge,net).

The Deep Dark Well is also available on Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006S3GOKS and other formats at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/118882.

The Hunger is available on Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006RXWEZS and other formats at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/118866.

Check out the Future Headlines at Phuturenews.com.

The Website That Took Over My Life

Posted by dougdandridge on January 8, 2012
Posted in: eBooks, Fantasy, science Fiction, self publishing, Websites, Writing. Tagged: . Leave a comment

Well , maybe not completely.   This weekend it sure has felt like it.  It started out as a platform to publicize my writing.  Then I decided to add links to make it more interesting.   Links led to more pages, more exposition.  Added in links to Youtube vids, to other sites.  It continued to grow, until now it has 18 pages attached to the site.  Linking buttons to Paypal was a challenge.  I tried to figure it out on my own.  I called their customer service to obtain expert advice and aid.  Then I went back and figured it out myself.  Now it works, after I charged my account a dozen times for a penny.  My emails were filled with notices that my account had been charged one cent, and with notices that I had made one cent.  But now I am sure the thing works, at least with my accounts.

So it was back to manipulating images, putting them into the WYSIWYG Web Builder.  Uploading to the site.  Finding mistakes on the site, correcting them in the web builder, uploading them again.  Finding that a Youtube link goes to the wrong vid.  Correct it.  Somehow the page boundary shifted, change it back.  Picture looks good in the builder, but on the site it covers some text.  Move it way the hell over here where it can’t possibly get in the way.  Frustration abounds.  But so does satisfaction when things work the way they’re supposed to.  The site is shaping up.  It will not be finished this weekend as planned.  It may never be finished.  The plan now is to create something grand.  To add links for readers.  For writers.  For the curious.  To draw people to the site.  To promote books, to make sales, but to do more.  To make it a place where people come for information.  Where they come to be entertained.   Eventually I plan to have a forum, where people can come to discuss things.  And not just what I have written.  No, it will have grown beyond that, though there will always be that aspect of the site, the purpose for which it was originally planned.    And it has become fun in its own right.  Now I just have to work in some time for writing.

 

hhtp://dougdandrige.net  The website.

Conan the Librarian

Posted by dougdandridge on January 6, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

Poor Conan.  So misunderstood.  So misdrawn.  So misinterpreted.  What is it about the big guy that makes it so hard for the re-interpreters, the movie makers and comic book artists, to get it right?   Conan was one of my favorite characters growing up.  I found one of the Lancer editions that my oldest brother left on a table, and I was off and running.  He had another half dozen of the twelve volumes of the saga written by Robert E Howard and completed by L Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter.  I was able to find the other volumes mail order (no internet in those days).  Conan appealed to the young boy who was haunted by the small town bullies he shared the town with.  Conan didn’t take crap off of anyone, unless it was to further his own plans.   Sure, he was a violent SOB.  After all, he was a barbarian.  But he also had a code of honor.  He forced no woman to be with him.  He stood by his friends no matter what.  And he was a scholar.  A scholar, you might ask?  Yes.  He picked up languages like some men pick up aluminum cans on the side of the road.  He watched and listened and learned the strategies and tactics of survival in his violent world.  From the individual sword fight to the grand battle, Conan was the master of war.  He used guile and deception against his enemies.  He used terrain to his advantage, and he cared about his men.  In later books Conan was said to haunt the libraries of the Capital City of Tarantia, learning all he could of the good and evil in the world.  He didn’t study magic, because magic in the world of Conan was an evil and slimy art, practicioners calling demon servants of the evil gods to rend and tear at their enemies.  Conan was not evil.  And he preferred to do his own rending and tearing, face to face.

Now Marvel Comics, who I dearly love, were the first to tackle Conan outside of the pulps novels.  While they did a good job of showing the big guy as quick thinking and intelligent, they preferred to show him as a loin cloth wearing berserker.    Very little in the way of armor, I guess so he could show his muscular bod (and the talent of the artist and his knowledge of anatomy).  The Conan of the Howard novels was a quick learner.  As soon as he saw the benefits of armor he strapped everything he could find over his tender skin.  He was always described as wearing a chain hauberk.   He used helmets and shields when they were available.  When he became king of Aquilonia he wore full plate.  And he almost never fought forty fully armed, experience warriors at the same time.

The movies, though, were the worst offenders.  I don’t know what it is about screenwriters and directors.  I know they have to cut the story some from most books, or they would be making a ten hour movies.  But they almost always seem to make changes to a character or storyline that they think improves the great literature they are interpreting.  And almost always they fail.  I have seen movies that were better than the books they came from, a few.  In most cases the movie interpretations are not as good as the books they come from.  We still go and see them, visual beasts that we are.   Now Schwarzenegger’s Conan had promise.  He wore some armor and used a helmet.   But then they destroyed the storyline as completely as possible.    Conan was never a slave, his parents weren’t killed when he was a babe, Thulsa Doom (a wizard from the Kull series) was never his opponent.  And he had blue eyes for Crom’s sake.  Arnold had blue eyes and black hair in some scenes (the racial characteristics of a Cimmerian).   In other scenes he had brown hair and brown eyes.  When I saw the movie I wondered if they had any kind of continuity editor for the film.  Apparently not.  The newest Conan is even worse (Conan the Samoan?)  Except for the muscles the guy doesn’t look like any imagination of Conan.  He grunts, he attacks everything in sight with the brute force tactics of see it, kill it.  And he’s half neked by Mitra.  He eschews the use of any armor.  The movie was Conan in name only.

Now we have John Carter coming to the big screen.  From the trailers I can tell they followed the storyline of the Burroughs’ novel,  A Princess of Mars, to a point.  I can also tell they made some changes, more of that Hollywood arrogance of “I can tell a story better than the author.  Hopefully they will do a better job than has been done on Conan.  And maybe some day someone will do a Conan movie that gets it right.  The big guy deserves it.

Releasing the Children into the Wilds

Posted by dougdandridge on January 2, 2012
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This weekend was planned as book release weekend.  On Saturday night I did it, releasing two novels, The Deep Dark Well (science fiction) and The Hunger (urban fantasy) on Smashwords, Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace.  After several false starts they are all up and running, with the exception of Deep Dark Well on CreateSpace, due to issues with the cover.  Still a lot to do, finishing and publishing the website, editing and finishing the cover on a freebee I hope to have out by next weekend.  Correcting mistakes, linking everything together, making sure the word gets out.  Hopefully when I publish two more novels in February everything will be much easier, if I remember all of my mistakes.  No guarantee of that.  Still, the hardest part was releasing the damned books in the first place.  Even though I knew they had merit, it is still difficult to put the work out there where many eyes can see it, and anyone can write a review.  Soon I think I will join the ranks of many best selling authors in at least one respect.   I will receive a scathing review, one that will make me question why I ever decided to put out a book in the first place.  All part and parcel of putting anything out for public consumption, be it a novel, a poem, a song or a work of art.  Not everyone will like my masterpieces.  That is just another thing I will have to live with, to learn to deal with, to develop a hard skin and move on.

One thing that really consumed a lot of thought was the pricing of the books.  I read recently that one author decided on $0.99, saying that he didn’t think the works of well published authors were really ten times better than his, and he would make his book a bargain.  I decided on $1.99, still low.  The Deep Dark Well is a hell of a book in my opinion, as well as the opinion of several publishers.  The only reason it didn’t sell is publishers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that there was no market for the kind of story that propelled Larry Niven and Poul Anderson to stardom.  I disagree.  I still love that kind of story, setting, characters.  I believe that others do as well.  And while editing the book for submission to epublishing format, which is very different than that used for submission to traditional publishing, I thought that The Hunger, while a very different book, was just as good as Deep Dark Well.

So the books were first offered on Smashwords.  I went to bed on New Year’s Eve and awoke the next morning to find that Deep Dark Well had sold two copies, and I had made a whole $2.50 in royalties.  Whoohoo.  I was able to get a coffee on the promise of that royalty in the near future.  It’s a start.  A small start.  Now I can’t wait to see what my pair of readers think.