Tim C. Taylor's Blog, page 22

Greyhart Press – we're up and running!

My e-publishing venture, www.greyhartpress.com , which features cracking short speculative fiction, is up and running, a couple of weeks earlier than planned. I've been keeping this fairly quiet while I learn how to do the formatting, contracts, artwork, advertising and a host of other things. I've published a few stories without fanfare in order to learn the gotcha's.

Well, we've had 300 book downloads so far and the first reviews have started coming in, so I decided not to wait any longer. Last night I designed my first advert and today, in the full glare of a sixty-cents-a-day advertising campaign, I declare Greyhart Press open! Hurrah!

Tomorrow I go on holiday until after Easter. Double hurrah!

If any authors are reading this from inside the Greyhart pipeline, then not to worry. I shan't get cracking properly with promotion until the start of May, so you're not missing out. I'm hoping to have a few more authors by then, or shortly after.

If anyone wants to help us out, then leaving reviews on sites like amazon and Smashwords is extremely helpful. While I prefer top ratings all the time, I prefer honest reviews even more. No need to be a professional critic. If you can simply tell us what you liked and what you didn't like about a story you've read, then that helps us to improve. Best of all, you can read some of our stories for free at Smashwords.  All the details you need are at the Greyhart Press site.

Tim

Progress at Greyhart Press

I've been very busy readying everything for the official launch, which will be straight after Easter. Part of what I'm doing in advance is to try out some of the mechanics of publishing on the semi-quiet, so that I can make and correct mistakes before letting out the throttle.

I started out with publishing a few stories from myself. However, proud though I am of my stories, Greyhart Press is an indie publisher, not a self-publisher. So I am chuffed that today I published someone else for the first time: Paul Melhuish. So I guess you can say that this morning I was an author, and this afternoon an author and a publisher. Now that I live in a constant state of self-promotion, I had better change my email signature.

In fact, I have been doing more publishery-type work recently. More on that story later… 

Back to Paul, if everything comes right in time, Paul will be joined by another four authors before the end of May.

Click on the link to see the page for Paul's excellent and ghoulish story: Necroforms.

Did I mention links? Here's an article-cum-interview for my story Speak, Vaccine! Speak! on Indie eBooks. In it I go into some of the philosophy behind Greyhart Press.

Tim

Competition: Spot the silly references in the star map

This morning I did a 'spot the 10 things wrong with this picture' with my little boy. We found this on the back page of the latest LEGO Jr. Magazine. To my surprise, we managed to spot them all, something we've never achieved before (despite the magazine being aimed at children aged 4-7).

I did a star map as part of some cover art this morning, and couldn't resist putting in a few deliberately 'wrong' names myself. Mostly these are Sci Fi TV and book references, though not all. I challenge anyone to spot all of them. I'll even offer a free book (once it's published) for the first one right, but really this is for the geekiness of playing.

Tell you what, I'll get you started with 'Bass' as that one is obscured by the path of Thogron's ship. There is one more beer reference, which might handicap anyone who doesn't realise that Burton-on-Trent is the spiritual home of good beer. Oh, did I just give away some clues?

Eight more to go.

'Sol' isn't a wrong name, by the way; it's part of the story.

You should be able to click on the image and zoom into the names.

Tim

Cover art: The Sixty Arts of Andy Bigwood

I mentioned in an earlier post that my flash fiction was included in Andy Bigwood's art book that's coming out at Easter. Here's the cover artwork.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the rest of Andy's work inside the covers.

(Click on the image for a bigger version)

Tim

How to get your pen tablet to work with Gimp

I realize that yesterday's post was not very helpful for those who have problems getting their pen tablet to work with Gimp. So if you're Googling for help with your tablet, here's what I found:

1. Try Gimp preferences first. Go to Edit – Preferences – Input Devices – Configure Extended Input Devices… In the dialog that opens up, select the drop down button on the list box at the top then click on the device name there. Even if the name looks like it is already selected, drop down the values and click on it again. Then save, come out, and open a new design and try drawing with your pen using the ink tool.

2. If the pen moves the cursor and clicks buttons, but will not draw, follow these steps in you are running Gimp on Microsoft Windows.

2.1 Download the latest DirectX drivers from Microsoft.

2.2 Go to the website for the manufacturer of your tablet and download the latest drivers. Don't install yet! Ignore the datestamp and version number; assume the download section has the latest.

2.3 Uninstall your pen/tablet driver software. You should find in your Programs (for Windows XP, for example, Start – Programs) an entry for the manufacturer of the tablet and this should provide an uninstall step. Don't miss out this step! If the uninstaller asks you to reboot, do so.

2.4 Install the drivers you downloaded in step 2.2 If the installer asks you to reboot, do so.

2.5 Start up Gimp using your pen. Your pen is rather like an old cat: it wants to go to sleep all the time. Click it to wake up and then Gimp will register it properly when it starts. Test that it works by drawing on a blank layer with the ink tool. If this doesn't work straight away, try following the steps in step 1. If that doesn't work, you could try Edit – Preferences – Input Controllers, moving the DirectX DirectInput to the list of active controllers and restarting Gimp (using your pen). And if that doesn't work, try cursing me for wasting your time and then contact the service department for your graphics tablet.

I hope this helps because I find the pen tablet not only superb for drawing but as a replacement in general for a mouse for people (like me) with RSI strain problems.

Tim

Tablets, Gimps, and configuration management

I'm supposed to be on a break from the software development industry, but it never seems far away. When I started coding for ICI in 1988, computers were something kids played games on; disheveled men in white lab coats used them to run nuclear power plants. When did technology become so pervasive in the real world? (Wait! Hold on, I'm supposed to be a science fiction author and know that sort of thing.)

Many times over the past decade, I have raised the importance with software developers (and pointy-haired bosses) of configuration management (being in control of all the right versions that make up your software or other product). This morning I used very familiar curses with regard to my Trust graphic tablet. I bought this to do cover and banner design for my Greyhart Press business I'm launching next month. Using the pen is a much better idea than drawing with a mouse. My tablet worked brilliantly… in everything except the main graphics tool I use: Gimp.

I could select and click and move menus, tools, and windows using my pen; but draw? No. So for a few hours when I really should have been setting up my new bank account and registering with the tax authorities, I was instead battling with configuration management.

I looked to download the latest drivers for my tablet but they were older than the ones I installed from the CD, so I left that route to last and went though Googling everyone else's posts (time which wasn't: I did learn that you have to launch Gimp using the pen and not the mouse, and not use the mouse while Gimp is loading). As a last resort, I did download the online driver from the Trust website. Not only did the driver have older file-stamps but the installer screen reported that it was installing the same version number as the de-installer screen I'd just run.

All this was merely misdirection to see if I was really worthy of the drivers. They were obviously different: documentation was completely different; tray icon and software different. More to the point, they worked!

This is a new cover I mocked up using the pen. Well worth getting a graphics tablet, but I wish they'd listened about configuration management.

Tim

My flash fiction in 'The Sixty' by Andy Bigwood

I wrote some flash fiction (a very short story) for the upcoming art book The Sixty: Arts of Andy Bigwood (here). For each of the sixty illustrations Andy has in the book, a writer has written some flash fiction inspired by the picture. I found that great fun. As Andy's book nears its launch (April 22nd), all sorts of friends are posting blog entries to say they have contributed flash fiction too. Hi guys!

Andy's a nice bloke who was very forgiving of my inept attempts to display the originals of his artwork at the Newcon 4 convention. (If you know the Only Fools and Horses… scene with the chandelier, you get the idea…)

Andy's also won lots of awards and is currently shortlisted for the BSFA Award for best artwork for his cover for Conflicts. The successor to Conflicts is (strangely) Further Conflicts. I'm in that anthology and Andy did the artwork for that one too. You can see some of his magnificent work at the Andy Bigwood page on deviantART.

The REAL STORY Manifesto

Writing about the stories shortlisted for the BSFA Award got me thinking about what I enjoy most in a story, especially short stories. So I wrote the Real Story Manifesto.

Okay, so partly it's an attempt to write down what Greyhart Press is about (that's a publishing venture I shall be launching presently). But there's more. When I've shared top-rank genre fiction to friends who regard themselves as lovers of Sci Fi and fantasy (through games, TV and film), they are often left scratching their heads in confusion. I suspect that under the constant pressure to avoid repetition and the desire for critical acceptance, the top-flight genre magazines encourage storytelling in a direction that is inaccessible to most 'normal' people.

What do you think?

My e-book cover

Here's some mock-ups of e-book covers. I hope to be publishing these soon. Feedback welcome!

Tim

 

BSFA Award Shorts: vignettes or stories?

Hurrah for the BSFA for mailing the shorts that made it to the BSFA Award shortlist. That's so quick and such a great idea to encourage us to get involved.

Congratulations to the authors for making the shortlist. All their stories were well written. Well done! I hope this proves a fillip to their writing journey. I will review the stories in a later post.

All the same, I was reminded why I cancelled my subscriptions a while back to Interzone and Asimovs'. Two of the four shortlisted stories were what I would call vignettes. That is, they start at the cusp of a key event in the main character's life and end once that event has taken place. Well, isn't that normal for a traditional story? True, but here the event is already anticipated, planned for, and plays out largely as the characters expected it to.

In one of these stories, the event plays out exactly as set out at the beginning of the story. There isn't really any plot or character development, no surprises and no choices, just experiencing the event through the eyes of the characters (which it does well). In the other vignette, the event takes place sooner than planned and so the main character does learns a little humility and the author gets to play with making a parallel between the different early deliveries of the two main characters. So I suppose there was some plot and character development, but very slight given the wordcount and the intense description.

Of the other two shortlisted stories, one felt like it ought to be interesting but the story was told in a deliberately vague way as if the author wanted to transcend clarity of plotting.

That left one. While I found it difficult to follow at times (probably I should get around to watching The Thing), it had originality, plot, and character development. This was based on a film, and the author chooses not to use the events of the film as the focus, rather that is the backdrop and the focus is on how the character of The Thing is experiencing the events —how it learns, grows, and changes.

Don't get me wrong. I am not dismissive of these story styles but I do wish magazines such as Interzone weren't so stuffed full of them (at least there were when I was a subscriber). In fact, I can bring to mind Ian Watson as an example of someone who can thrill me with these kind of vignettes and does so because of the startling and sometimes unsettling originality of the situations the characters find themselves in.

So, in conclusion, I didn't particularly enjoy three-quarters of the stories. They were well written and those sorts of stories dominate the pro-magazines and best-of-year anthologies, so someone rates them. Not for me though, and I am not (quite) alone. So while I wrote this blog post I purchased the latest edition of JupiterSF Magazine because, in my unfashionable way, I often find the stories in the best for-the-love magazines are more satisfying than the content of the most prestigious magazines such as Interzone.

Hate mail in the comments below please!

Tim