Rick Cook's Blog, page 4
July 4, 2011
Yet another project: Fiction This Time!
I just started the process of scanning in a story that appeared in Analog in 2000.
My co-author, Earnest Hogan, and I have decided to take the story, titled Obsidian Harvest, and turn it into a separate item for the Kindle store. Unfortunately, I don't have an electronic copy of the story since that was about two computers back. (Note to self: Rewritable DVDs are your friends). So while Ernie does some illustrations in his unique pseudo-glyphic, pseudo-tagger style, I've got to get a copy of the story in machine readable form so we can work with it in preparation for uploading to Kindle.
Fortunately I have worked on this some, although not on this story. Scanning in a magazine story isn't as easy as it should be. One unexpected problem was that the scanner left hard carriage returns at the end of each line. After three or four days of futzing with it, I finally found the secret: A multi-step process that involves the (simple) use of regular expressions. To say it is counter-intuitive as hell is putting it nicely -- a lot nicer than my comments while I was fighting the process.
To add to the fun, the OpenOffice documentation is completely silent on how to do this. LibreOffice, the recent fork of the OpenOffice project, does it exactly the same unobvious way. However LibreOffice's documentation includes an appendix on how to do the trick. Have I mentioned I really like LibreOffice?
Then, of course, I'm expecting the usual hassles in scanning, from paper jams to pages out of order, misread and all kinds of little weirdnesses. But that's okay. It beats retyping the whole thing.
Which reminds me of all the people who will airily tell you that it's no problem to get something in to machine format. All you've got to do is scan it in. Riiiggghhhtt! says I in my best Bill Cosby voice. All I can say is the people who talk like this have either never tried it or they had the devil's own luck.
In my experience scanning is like voice recognition. Which is to say it's a nifty technology and it's getting better and better, but it really isn't here yet for home office use.
Ah, well, I'll keep you up to date on how it works out.
--RC
My co-author, Earnest Hogan, and I have decided to take the story, titled Obsidian Harvest, and turn it into a separate item for the Kindle store. Unfortunately, I don't have an electronic copy of the story since that was about two computers back. (Note to self: Rewritable DVDs are your friends). So while Ernie does some illustrations in his unique pseudo-glyphic, pseudo-tagger style, I've got to get a copy of the story in machine readable form so we can work with it in preparation for uploading to Kindle.
Fortunately I have worked on this some, although not on this story. Scanning in a magazine story isn't as easy as it should be. One unexpected problem was that the scanner left hard carriage returns at the end of each line. After three or four days of futzing with it, I finally found the secret: A multi-step process that involves the (simple) use of regular expressions. To say it is counter-intuitive as hell is putting it nicely -- a lot nicer than my comments while I was fighting the process.
To add to the fun, the OpenOffice documentation is completely silent on how to do this. LibreOffice, the recent fork of the OpenOffice project, does it exactly the same unobvious way. However LibreOffice's documentation includes an appendix on how to do the trick. Have I mentioned I really like LibreOffice?
Then, of course, I'm expecting the usual hassles in scanning, from paper jams to pages out of order, misread and all kinds of little weirdnesses. But that's okay. It beats retyping the whole thing.
Which reminds me of all the people who will airily tell you that it's no problem to get something in to machine format. All you've got to do is scan it in. Riiiggghhhtt! says I in my best Bill Cosby voice. All I can say is the people who talk like this have either never tried it or they had the devil's own luck.
In my experience scanning is like voice recognition. Which is to say it's a nifty technology and it's getting better and better, but it really isn't here yet for home office use.
Ah, well, I'll keep you up to date on how it works out.
--RC
July 3, 2011
Moving Off Dead Center
Since they changed my drugs again, I'm feeling better and I'm able to be more active.
This is a Good Thing.
The most interesting news I've got to share is that I'm getting ready to publish an e book on Kindle. Titled "Shift Happens", it's about the changes in the publishing industry and how they benefit the writers who are willing to take advantage of them. Short form: self-publishing by e book is no longer necessarily a marginal enterprise.
The other thing is a sequel to "Obsidian Harvest", my "dinosaur Aztec detective story noir". Earnest Hogan and I have been working on this off and on (mostly off) over the last couple of years and I think the thing is near enough done to warrant a death march to finish it this week.
The good news about my health is that I'm not in any pain. The bad news is that the clogged arteries severely reduce what I can do. The other problem is that my balance is shot and unless I'm very careful I tend to fall over when doing anything even moderately strenuous. But I can cope with that by being careful and limiting what I try to do.
Meanwhile the weather in Phoenix has turned full-bore ugly. Which is to say that it's been over 110 for most of the last week and Fourth of July looks like it will be nosing 118. I can pretty well stand anything up to 110, but over that, I don't care how dry the heat is, it's HOT!
However as a friend of mine who moved here from Boston liked to observe: No matter how hot it gets, you never have to shovel heat.
Nor do we have a season called "mud".
More as I know more.
--RC
This is a Good Thing.
The most interesting news I've got to share is that I'm getting ready to publish an e book on Kindle. Titled "Shift Happens", it's about the changes in the publishing industry and how they benefit the writers who are willing to take advantage of them. Short form: self-publishing by e book is no longer necessarily a marginal enterprise.
The other thing is a sequel to "Obsidian Harvest", my "dinosaur Aztec detective story noir". Earnest Hogan and I have been working on this off and on (mostly off) over the last couple of years and I think the thing is near enough done to warrant a death march to finish it this week.
The good news about my health is that I'm not in any pain. The bad news is that the clogged arteries severely reduce what I can do. The other problem is that my balance is shot and unless I'm very careful I tend to fall over when doing anything even moderately strenuous. But I can cope with that by being careful and limiting what I try to do.
Meanwhile the weather in Phoenix has turned full-bore ugly. Which is to say that it's been over 110 for most of the last week and Fourth of July looks like it will be nosing 118. I can pretty well stand anything up to 110, but over that, I don't care how dry the heat is, it's HOT!
However as a friend of mine who moved here from Boston liked to observe: No matter how hot it gets, you never have to shovel heat.
Nor do we have a season called "mud".
More as I know more.
--RC
January 23, 2011
Where Have I Been -- Redux
In the immortal words of Roseanne Rosanna Deanna "There's always something."
The latest "something" was a stay in the hospital to have a stent put into one of my coronary
arteries. This turned out to be a good-news/bad-news situation. The good news is that the stent
has improved my quality of life and I'm no longer having angina attacks. The bad news is that three of the five arterial grafts I received in 1999 are completely and irreparably blocked. The one that was stented was 90+ percent closed. Only one of the five is still clear.
This means a new round of drugs and restrictions. OTOH I'm alive and feel fine and probably will remain that way for a few more years.
The artery problems have been affecting me for about a year, although I didn't really recognize what was happening until about three months ago when I started having regular chest pains.
The moral of the story: Pay attention when you start to feel a persistent listlessness or find that you're losing the ability to tolerate exercise.
Meanwhile, I've got a couple of projects I'm working on, including some e-publishing stuff through Amazon Kindle. I really think that's the future for genre fiction.
--RC
The latest "something" was a stay in the hospital to have a stent put into one of my coronary
arteries. This turned out to be a good-news/bad-news situation. The good news is that the stent
has improved my quality of life and I'm no longer having angina attacks. The bad news is that three of the five arterial grafts I received in 1999 are completely and irreparably blocked. The one that was stented was 90+ percent closed. Only one of the five is still clear.
This means a new round of drugs and restrictions. OTOH I'm alive and feel fine and probably will remain that way for a few more years.
The artery problems have been affecting me for about a year, although I didn't really recognize what was happening until about three months ago when I started having regular chest pains.
The moral of the story: Pay attention when you start to feel a persistent listlessness or find that you're losing the ability to tolerate exercise.
Meanwhile, I've got a couple of projects I'm working on, including some e-publishing stuff through Amazon Kindle. I really think that's the future for genre fiction.
--RC
August 27, 2010
Where have I been?
A reader wrote to ask me what I've been doing for the last 18 months.
That's a good question. The answer is: Nothing spectacular, just trying to keep my head above water. That's proven to be more of a challenge than I anticipated.
My mother's death hit me harder than I expected and I've spent months in a semi-depression. I'm just climbing out of that now, as evidenced by this post.
One positive thing is that I had a short story published in Analog (May issue) which represents the first fiction I've completed and sold since my heart surgery in 1999.
So I guess I'm on the upswing. Watch this space.
--RC
That's a good question. The answer is: Nothing spectacular, just trying to keep my head above water. That's proven to be more of a challenge than I anticipated.
My mother's death hit me harder than I expected and I've spent months in a semi-depression. I'm just climbing out of that now, as evidenced by this post.
One positive thing is that I had a short story published in Analog (May issue) which represents the first fiction I've completed and sold since my heart surgery in 1999.
So I guess I'm on the upswing. Watch this space.
--RC
January 31, 2009
WarBots game
Someone asked if the game Warbots, which is referenced in "The Wizardry Cursed" actually exists.
The answer is "yes and no".
There's no such game as Warbots, but the fictional game is patterned closely on RoboTech, the popular tabletop and computer wargame that a wide variety of robots to fight battles hundredss of years in the future.
--RC
The answer is "yes and no".
There's no such game as Warbots, but the fictional game is patterned closely on RoboTech, the popular tabletop and computer wargame that a wide variety of robots to fight battles hundredss of years in the future.
--RC
Next Section Up
After way too long, I'm back to posting the bits of Wiz 6. I hope to post one section a week until I have it all up.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that from here on out you're going to have to work to follow what's going on. What I've been posting so far is the section I completed and sent to Baen as an advance sample. It's all pretty complete, modulo some copy editing and editor's input. What follows is a series of scenes and fragments strung together more or less by subplot. The first part, for example, are the scenes of the children in captivity and the dragon who is guarding them.
All of this stuff is in more-or-less chronologial order within the subplot, but it was meant to be intercut with other plot lines in the finished novel.
As usual, blank lines indicate breaks, either between scenes or bits I hadn't written when I went into the hospital.
Anyway, enjoy
==RC
That's the good news.
The bad news is that from here on out you're going to have to work to follow what's going on. What I've been posting so far is the section I completed and sent to Baen as an advance sample. It's all pretty complete, modulo some copy editing and editor's input. What follows is a series of scenes and fragments strung together more or less by subplot. The first part, for example, are the scenes of the children in captivity and the dragon who is guarding them.
All of this stuff is in more-or-less chronologial order within the subplot, but it was meant to be intercut with other plot lines in the finished novel.
As usual, blank lines indicate breaks, either between scenes or bits I hadn't written when I went into the hospital.
Anyway, enjoy
==RC
November 15, 2008
Problems and copy protection
A little more on my problem.
The hard disk itself is fine. The motherboard is toast. The logical solution is to replace the motherboard and go to work.
Unfortunately that runs square into Microsoft's copy protection fetish. If you replace the motherboard the operating system thinks its been loaded on a new computer, so it won't work until it is reauthorized by Microsoft. To get it reauthorized you need the OS serial number -- which I didn't get with the computer (remanufactured). So I'm stuck.
This has been very frustrating.
The hard disk itself is fine. The motherboard is toast. The logical solution is to replace the motherboard and go to work.
Unfortunately that runs square into Microsoft's copy protection fetish. If you replace the motherboard the operating system thinks its been loaded on a new computer, so it won't work until it is reauthorized by Microsoft. To get it reauthorized you need the OS serial number -- which I didn't get with the computer (remanufactured). So I'm stuck.
This has been very frustrating.
PROBLEMS
Thanks to computer problems posting "The Wizardry Recapitalized" has been serious disrupted.
In the last month I've had not one but two computers turn into expensive doorstops and discovered that my backups weren't recoverable. Wiz 6 is safely sitting on a hard drive on a dead computer.
It's going to take a fairly elaborate recovery process to get the novel back -- essentially I've got to take the hard drive out of the system, connect it temporarily to another box and download the data. One complication is that the drive is IDE and the box is probably going to use SATA. The other complication is Windows copy protection.
My tech says he can do it, but it's going to take time. In part because all this has put me seriously behind on my paying work and I'm just getting caught up on that.
Oh well. If it was easy everyone would do it.
--RC
In the last month I've had not one but two computers turn into expensive doorstops and discovered that my backups weren't recoverable. Wiz 6 is safely sitting on a hard drive on a dead computer.
It's going to take a fairly elaborate recovery process to get the novel back -- essentially I've got to take the hard drive out of the system, connect it temporarily to another box and download the data. One complication is that the drive is IDE and the box is probably going to use SATA. The other complication is Windows copy protection.
My tech says he can do it, but it's going to take time. In part because all this has put me seriously behind on my paying work and I'm just getting caught up on that.
Oh well. If it was easy everyone would do it.
--RC
October 15, 2008
Chapters 10 and 11 are up
Okay, I just posted Chapters 10 and 11 of Wiz 6.
That's the good news. The bad news is that after this you're going to have to work. I had this first part of the novel pretty well done as an excerpt for the Baen Free Library (Note I said "pretty well" it still needs work). The rest of the book is a lot more fragmentary and organized by sub plots rather than in a continious narrative flow.
I'll start getting that up in a day or two.
Meanwhile, thanks for sticking with this.
--RC
That's the good news. The bad news is that after this you're going to have to work. I had this first part of the novel pretty well done as an excerpt for the Baen Free Library (Note I said "pretty well" it still needs work). The rest of the book is a lot more fragmentary and organized by sub plots rather than in a continious narrative flow.
I'll start getting that up in a day or two.
Meanwhile, thanks for sticking with this.
--RC
September 9, 2008
Chapters 3-6 up
As promised, I'm now posting several chapters at a time. I just put up 3-6.
Enjoy.
--RC
Enjoy.
--RC
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