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Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 52

January 28, 2014

January 27, 2014

Superman Visits Earth-Prime

For those of you who don’t know, Earth-Prime is our world…


superman on earth prime(From DC Comics Presents #87, November 1985. Written by Elliot S! Maggin. Art by Curt Swan and Al Williamson.)

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Published on January 27, 2014 12:32

January 24, 2014

23 Years with the Mac

Today, the Macintosh turns thirty. I’ve been a user for 23 of those years.


I can’t say that the Mac was my first computer or that it made it possible for me to be a writer. My very first novel and a whole slew of (terrible) poems and short stories were written on a venerable old Atari 800XL computer (later upgraded to the Atari 130XE). It was typical of the personal computers of the day — user-unfriendly, unintuitive, complicated, and limited.


But it got me through high school and my first couple of years of college. I began a second novel on it, got stalled, started a third.


And then the Atari went to that great scrap-heap in the sky, sometime very early in my junior year at Yale. Still needing to crank out papers, I hied me to the Calhoun College computer lab, located conveniently in the ‘houn’s attic, which lacked any sort of ventilation. It was like a sweat lodge up there, and it’s a friggin’ miracle that the computers worked at all, given the heat and humidity.


This would be in — I’m guessing — early 1991. Yale was a Mac campus and its computer labs reflected this. I had no idea what I was getting into, having never used a Mac before. Fortunately, there were printed instructions posted in the lab.


I say “fortunately,” but they were hardly necessary. The Mac’s legendary ease-of-use reputation was well-earned.


I sat down at one of these:


(courtesy Vectronics Apple World – vectronicsappleworld.com)


The Macintosh SE! Oh, man — my eyes were opened. I was just pounding out a quick little three-page paper for a class, but it was like a whole new world to me. I knew, then and there, that I would not suffer the Calhoun attic for this little slice of heaven. Oh, no — I had to have one of my own.


And I did. In short order, I cashed in some savings bonds my grandmother had given me years ago and made the trek to the campus computer store. And I bought a student bundle that included this:


(courtesy Vectronics Apple World – vectronicsappleworld.com)


My Mac Classic also came with the MacWrite II word processing program and a StyleWriter printer. One of my first actions as a Mac owner, I’m ashamed to say, was to pirate a copy of Microsoft Word from a friend.


I became obsessed with my new machine. I did my schoolwork, yeah, but I also leapt head-first into new stories, poems, and a novel. Now I had fonts! I could use bold and italics and underlining without having to insert memorized codes! I could adjust margins on-the-fly! And I could design flyers and even a t-shirt for the college intramural team. With ease.


I didn’t realize it, but I was spending every free moment with that Mac, figuring out its guts, learning how it worked. I would dash up to the lab in the attic with a stack of floppy disks and use the college internet connection (we didn’t have them in the rooms yet) to log onto the University of Michigan’s Mac shareware archive. I’d fill up disks with cool programs, then go downstairs to try them out. I ran up and down those stairs so many times that it became a joke amongst my suitemates how much time I was spending with the Mac…and how many calories I was burning.


I haven’t looked back since. I’ve gone through that Classic to a Performa 450 (remember the Performas?), then a Performa 460, a UMAX clone (remember the clones?), a G4 tower, an iBook, and two different iMacs (including the one I’m typing this on). With the exception of a few years when I worked in an office, I’ve never used anything but a Mac. And since that ancient Atari computer, I’ve never owned anything but a Mac.


I wish I could say that the Mac empowered me to write…but it didn’t. I was writing long before I ever touched my first Jobs-blessed mouse. I can say, though, that the Mac made writing less of a chore for me. It made it easier to push the mechanics of the process out of the way and move on to the actual work at hand.


We probably take that for granted today, given the incredible ease-of-use, power, and ubiquity of computers. Especially if you were born any time after the introduction of the Mac — in that case, you’ve never lived in a world where you had to confront a command line or memorize formatting codes and cross your fingers that the output would match what you had in your mind. Lucky you.


But it’s probably appropriate for all of us to take just a few seconds today to be grateful that we don’t live in that world any more.


Just a few seconds.


Because then, really, we should all get back to work.

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Published on January 24, 2014 07:17

January 23, 2014

January 21, 2014

January 16, 2014

January 14, 2014

January 13, 2014

Blood of My Blood: The Cover

Nothing to say, but…here it is!lyga_bloodofmyblood_hc


Oh, and this, too: The publisher has pushed up the publication date, so you can now expect Blood of My Blood two weeks earlier, on September 9. Just a little something…


Jazz Dent has been shot and left to die in New York City. His girlfriend Connie is in the clutches of Jazz’s serial killer father, Billy. And his best friend Howie is bleeding to death on the floor of Jazz’s own home in tiny Lobo’s Nod. Somehow, these three must rise above the horrors their lives have become and find a way to come together in pursuit of Billy. But then Jazz crosses a line he’s never crossed before, and soon the entire country is wondering: “Like father, like son?” Who is the true monster?


The chase is on, and this time Jazz is the hunted, not the hunter. And beyond Billy there lurks something much, much worse. Prepare to meet…the Crow King.


And here’s what all three books look like together, just ’cause I like it…



KILLERS_final_front
Game
lyga_bloodofmyblood_hc
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Published on January 13, 2014 07:34

January 9, 2014

A Brief Rant about Goodreads

I'm sorry. I know it's impolite to complain when you're in someone else's "house," but I have to get this off my chest:

It drives me up a freakin' wall that people can rate a book before it even exists!

Right now, BLOOD OF MY BLOOD has a 3.33 star rating. I don't quibble with it only being rated around a 3 -- I quibble with it being rated at all! I haven't even seen a page proof of the book yet. It won't be on shelves for NINE MONTHS! That's baby-gestation time! And yet people have somehow magically discerned its quality and rated it without ever seeing it.

Gah! It drives me nuts.

It shouldn't be all that difficult for the site to have a little flag set deep in its database, which says -- in essence -- "If the book hasn't been published yet, then disable the stars."

Sigh.

In the meantime, if any of you reading this suddenly feel the urge to go give the book five stars, have at it. ;)
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Published on January 09, 2014 06:19 • Tags: a-rant, barry-lyga, blood-of-my-blood, goodreads, i-hunt-killers, ratings

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Barry Lyga
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