S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 122

There and Back Again . . . to Seattle

For a late birthday present, I went to Seattle on Friday.  I wanted a summer/tropical hat and the only good hat stores I could find online were in Seattle.  Luckily, there were all in walking distance of each other and Pike Place Market.  The drive over was beautiful until we got over Snoqualmie Pass then the low clouds dominated.  They were so low I joked that they were almost more like high fog.

The low clouds got less low as we got to Seattle.  I missed an off-ramp on I-90 and so ended up going down by the football and baseball stadium and through Pioneer Square where I got a taste of Seattle gridlocked traffic.  Finally we got to the parking garage behind Pike Place Market.  It wasn't very crowded so I figured the market would not be very crowded.

Boy was I wrong.  Living in a small town these past 14 years I was almost taken aback at the throng of people.  And there were people of many colors, sizes, shapes.  I smiled because I realized how much I missed having a diversity of people around.  We walked to the hat store I decided from internet research was most likely to have what I
wanted (and walked past another and a quick glance inside told me it wasn't going to be good).  I found a hat I really liked.  I thought about going to the third hat store on my list by the woman at this hat store said they probably wouldn't carry my size (I have a rather large head).  I'd read on the internet that someone else said they didn't carry large sizes so I decided she was probably telling the truth and bought the hat.  I really like my new hat and wore it most of the day.

Eventfully, about 11:30 A.M., the clouds burned off and we had blue sky.  And I really enjoyed people watching in Seattle.  There were just about everything you could imagine.  We saw one young man in a business suit with a purple tie.  But his hair color matched the tie.

After lunch overlooking the bay (with really slow service) and exploring the catacombs of the Pike Place Market a bit, we decided to go to Bellevue Square to have dinner.  We could go to Bellevue Square (an upscale shopping mall), goof around, and then go to dinner.  Which is pretty much what we did.  But getting there was a pain.  I thought traffic was bad getting to Pike Place.  Getting out was horrible.  Traffic was gridlocked and gridlocked on Seattle's steep hills.  I was so thankful for an automatic transmission.  At the I-5 and I-90 interchange an Tesla Roadster coming up behind me (impressed myself by recognizing it in my rearview mirror; I'd never seen one in the wild before).  Now as much as I disdain electric cars for their miniscule range, exorbitant price, and dubious benefits to the environment, I have to admit that Tesla could squirt through traffic.  Electric motors have a lot of torque whenever you need it and if the driver saw a gap, he would shoot into it.  And it was a prettier car than I expected.  Still wouldn't buy one.

Dinner in Bellevue was great, and we drove home, getting there late and tired.  But it was a fun day.

Cold Calls

[image error] One reason I would never be a good salesman is I hate cold-calling.  (I understand politicians do this a lot, too, to raise money.)  But it's all part of the freelancing life.  Since I'm going to be on vacation the first part of August and I do most of my story writing in the first weeks of the month, the magazine publisher I do a lot of work for has given me both stories for July and August to do this month.  That has required me to cold call eight people.  I have so far, called six (and one won't return my calls).  I much prefer email.

I really like freelance writing. I get to talk to (usually) interesting people, I learn things, and I then get to write about them.  I love that.  But having to call a stranger and ask for their time and help is just annoying to me.

There's a philosophy of business that some people make a lot of money selling to entrepreneurs, that you should concentrate on what you love to do because that's where you'll be the most productive and the happiest.  Then hire someone to do the stuff you don't like to do such as paperwork, accounting, etc.  And try to find someone who loves doing that stuff so they're happy and productive (yes, there are people who love accounting).  But I really can't afford to hire an assistant to set up interviews for me.

There are parts I hate about writing fiction, too.  I don't like trying to market my work to publishers/agent.  I hate trying to sell my books to people.  But again, I pretty much have to do those things.  I guess if I become a best-selling author and make oodles of money, I can hire someone to do that, but in that case, I wouldn't need to do either and I'd probably stop freelancing, too.

So you people need to by more of my books!

No Ghosts Here

I try to be a scientific thinker.  Yet, I know there are phenomena that are not readily explained by pure science.  As Steve Martin once said (jokingly), "Science is pure empiricism and by virtue of its method eliminates metaphysics."  It could be the reason science can't show that there's ESP is because there's no way to get repeatable results with such a stochastic system.  But, until science comes up with a way to prove or disprove ESP and other paranormal phenomena, I'll doubt their existence.

So I don't believe in, for instance, ghosts.

So I was getting my haircut last week and the woman who cuts my hair asked me if I believe in ghosts and I said, "No."  So she pulls out her cell phone and shows me a picture she took with what she thinks is a ghost I and I think looks a lot like jpg compression artifacts that sort of form a face.  And she found another picture she didn't take that appears to have a ghostly image a child in it.  But I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Maybe."

Now, I tell people I don't believe in ghosts then I proceed to tell them that three times in my life I saw things I could not explain readily.  Once, when I was a child I was in our dark basement and I saw a floating, white face.  I remember it scared me a lot.  And once a friend and I were sleeping outside in our back yard and we saw an orange fireball shoot into the sky.  I scared us a lot.

My best ghost story is from when I was an adult, about 20 years ago.  I was living in a small house built in the thirties.  One night I got up and went to the bathroom, then I went to the kitchen and got a drink of water.  As I was coming back I could see into the living room and I saw a woman in a long flowing white robe or gown walking toward the dinning room.  In my half-asleep state I wondered why my wife was in the living room and I didn't remember wearing a white nightgown.  As I walked into the bedroom, my wife came out, startling me.

Have I mentioned I don't believe in ghosts?

I think "ghosts" are the result of two phenomena of the human brain: phosphenes and pareidolia.

Phosphenes are the lights you see when you close your eyes and have them open in a dark room.  They are random and are caused by your eyes and brain sort of saying "Hey, I've got no stimulus so I'll make some up."  But we've all seen these and we've all seen shapes in them, like faces, for instance.  Which brings us to pareidolia.  This is the tendency of the human brain to make shapes out of random stimulus.  Like seeing faces or bunnies in clouds.  Or a face in random noise in a picture.  Humans want to see faces.  We are hard-wired to recognize faces with very little detail.  We all see *_* as a face even though it's two asterisk and a line.  So our brains want to take random stimulus and turn it into a recognizable shape, like a face.

And why are ghosts almost always described as whitish and vaguely shaped?  Because phosphenes appear whitish and are random and an brain tries to make them into something they are not.

So as I was walking back to the bedroom, I saw out of the corner of my eye a bunch of phosphenes and my brain, via pareidolia, turned it into the shape of a woman.

So even though I've seen ghosts twice, I don't believe in them.

NaNoWriMo NoNo

It's July and I'm already seeing stuff about NaNoWriMo.  If you're saying "Pardon?" you must not be a writer.  That's "National Novel Write Month" and is usually held in November.  The object is to write a 50,000-word novel (or 50,000 words towards a novel because that's a pretty short novel) in November.  Why they chose November, I don't know, since it only has 30 days and a major holiday.

And, frankly, I refuse to participate.  I write when I can, and don't write when I can't.  Forcing it rarely produces good results (I will note an exception below).  When I have what I can only call "inspiration" I write.  When I don't, I can't write.  Like right now, I have an idea for a novel, but I need to figure out some science stuff and the math is way over my head so I can't plot out the novel until I get help with the math.

Now when I'm inspired, I can easily write 50,000 words in 30 days.  On my current work in progress (and so close to done I can taste it) I did the first draft of 77,000 words in 35 days.  That's 2,200 words per day or 66,000 in the 30 days a NaNoWriMo lasts.  But I was inspired (and wrote the first draft in February/March).  (Man, I need to get that thing finished up.)  But the reason I started that novel was I had these ideas percolating and I was a the local writers' group and they said, "Okay, let's write."  So I sat there, wondering what the heck to write.  And wrote the first scene of that novel.  And it turned out pretty dang good.  And from there the ideas just floooowed.  I've never written a book that fast.

In November of 2010 I tried a NaNoWriMo.  I started a novel.  But then I realized I couldn't finish it until I did a bunch of research on Romania in 1968.  That delayed me for about two months while I looked for a good source.  I finally found one and was able to finish the book in about 6 months.  That became Book of Death .

So maybe forcing works.  Maybe I'm just too lazy (or rebellious) to do a NaNoWriMo.

Adept Series TImeline

I have spent a great deal of time this week doing a timeline from my Adept Series novels (three published, one finished but not published, yet).  I just had the idea Monday morning and started working on it.  It was interesting to see how dates coincided, like Michael Vaughan ( Agent of Artifice ) became an adept the same year that Peter Branton ( Book of Death ) became an adept apprentice (1949).  In most cases I knew exact dates things happened, in other cases I just knew the year or the approximate year.  Sometimes I made up a date.  The timeline has 247 dates in it covering 5,980 years.

The timeline has major spoilers in it so I don't want to post it anywhere and I'm not totally sure why I did it. Perhaps an OCD moment. But they usually don't last a whole week.  Maybe when the Adept Series comes out from a major publisher someday they can put the timeline in the back of the books with the warning that there are spoilers.  For now, like many things, it will rest on my hard drive until and if I find a use for it.

Book Review: Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy

This isn't a book blog and this is, in fact, the first book review I've put on it.  But I am so . . . upset by how bad the book I am about to finish is that I need to rant about it.

I am about 30 pages from the end of Dead of Alive by Tom Clancy and Grant Blackwood.  I don't think this is his latest book, thinking there's at least one more since then (there appears to be two, each one with a different second writer).  This will be the last time I read a Tom Clancy novel (although I see the last one has gotten better reviews on Amazon).

If this were an indie novel (self-published) I would have excoriated the author for bad writing, bad editing, and bad attention to details.  But it's not an indie novel, it's published by a major house, Putnam, and probably sold bunches.

Bad writing: fire fights and car chases are boring.  Everything is described almost clinically as if it's an after-action report for the military.  The writing is dry and devoid of emotion.

Bad editing: The number of editing errors is alarming and occasionally confusing. A car is described as a "Fort Taurus" and a thing was supposed to be described as "now-burned" was actually "non-burned."  There are too many to list here but those were the two that jumped out at me.  And considering what a lousy proofreader I am, there were probably more.

Bad attention to detail: A character picks up a shotgun and (somehow) determines there's 6 round in it.  He fires it twice, and again, has six rounds in it.  On one page it says a bad guy is arrested.  About 10 pages later, it says he committed suicide before he was arrested.  Maybe I missed something, but I swear the characters knew something they couldn't have known.  Oh, and someone says Moose Jaw (a small city in Canada) is above where "North Dakota and South Dakota meet."  No, it's above (sort of) where Montana and North Dakota meet.  The North Dakota and South Dakota border runs east-west (parallel to the US border with Canada) and is 360 miles long.

I see the next two books by Tom Clancy were co-written (and you gotta wonder how much the guy in the little print on the cover does the writing, I suspect a lot of it) by other guys. Maybe the problems with Dead or Alive were Blackwood's.  I don't know.  I just know I won't be wasting money on Tom Clancy books anymore.

Bait

There was a time, about 20 years ago, when I could not fathom eating sushi.  "Raw fish, yuck," I thought.  I didn't (and generally still don't) like cooked fish, I couldn't imagine eating it raw.  Now I love sushi (well, most sushi) and have eaten sashimi.  When sushi is good, it's very good.  When it's acceptable, it's still pretty good.  The only time I've had "bad" sushi was when I didn't like the flavor of the fish (avoid sea urchin and octopus), not because there was something wrong with it.

So how did this progression happen?  Well, when I was in the Army, learning Korean, I was introduced to kimbop, also called "Korean sushi" (by people who don't know better).  But kimbop, which looks like maki sushi, has no raw fish.  It also has a unique flavor that sushi doesn't have.  I still enjoy kimbop when I can get it.

Still, no sushi.  Then I was at a convention in Anaheim and we took some people out to dinner at a Benihana Japanese restaurant.  And one person I was with ordered some sushi (maki or roll style).  And maybe it was the Sapporo beers, maybe it was the desire to go along, I tried it.  And I liked it.

I don't remember when I first tried nigri sushi.  But I found I out I liked it too, even though the raw fish content is much higher than in maki sushi.  Plus I like spicy food so I like wasabi, too.

(In the U.S. I've only seen maki, nigri, gunkanmaki (which I've also eaten) and temaki. Perhaps in larger cities you can get other varieties.  I have a feeling that nare sushi probably isn't available in the U.S.)

And I've even had sashimi which is basically slices of raw fish without any rice, seaweed, or other ingredients.  You have to be careful with sashimi since if it's not perfectly fresh it is not very good.

So, what caused this transition?  I guess the willingness to overcome prejudices and try new things.  That's sort of how I ended up writing my Adept Series books.  Never thought I'd ever write fantasy.  I've now written four (and three are published).  If it's not immoral and doesn't hurt other people or ourselves, we should be open to new things.  Never know where they might lead.

The Supermarket of the Future!

So I was moving my keyboard on my desk and needed to type something to see if I liked the new position (I didn't).  Here's what I typed:

Sometimes you have to go to the market to buy things.  This involves a trip either by foot, car, or bus.  But in the future you may be able to have the store come to you!  How is this possible?  By quantum miniaturization.  The store would be delivered to you in a small box or package by the U.S. Mail.  You would then use your household miniaturizer to shrink yourself to the size of the store. You'd make your selections, pay for them, then get yourself and your items but to regular size. Then you'd mail the store back using the pre-paid box label.  Of course, there are issues to work out such as the power needs to shrink and expand something as big as a store.  And you could only have the store a short time since others would need to shop or the number of stores needed to be stocked and manned would be prohibitive.  But we are confident these problems can be resolved satisfactorily.  This should be an opportunity for venture capitalists and other investors to see a significant return on their investment.

Not bad for something I just hammered out.

Wither Cash?

A thought occurred to me today.

I have found this new app for my iPhone called Tabbedout.  With it, at bars and restaurants that use it (and there's two in my small town), you open the app, touch the name of the business you are at (it uses GPS to find near ones), touch "Open tab," show the code to the server/bartender, and order your food/drink.  Everything you order goes on your tab which you can see on your phone.  When you're ready to leave, you pick a tip rate (with a difficult to use slider; only thing I don't like), it calculates the tip, you hit "pay tab" and walk out.  This is very convenient for both the patron and the business.  The patron doesn't have to sit around waiting for a check or a tab tabulation.  The business doesn't need to have an employee spending a lot of time figuring out a tab or delivering a check, then going through the whole credit card or cash pay thing.  I hope more restaurants and bars start using this service.  Also (and I haven't done this yet so I'm not sure how it works) if you want separate checks (and everyone has Tabbedout), you set up one tab then somehow on the phone say who bought what and each person pays their own tab.

You put your credit card information into the app once so that the bill is charged to your card. But here's the thing: we pay our credit card online right out of our bank account.  And money enters our bank account mostly through direct deposit (except for my freelancing and royalty payments come as a check). Neither cash nor check are ever handled in this transaction.  And it's the same for my Starbuck card app that is "re-filled" from my credit card.

So how long until cash and/or check are obsolete and every transaction is handled electronically? And your wealth is just numbers in a computer (it pretty much just is now if you have money in a bank or a brokerage account)?

The downside I see is the government could easily track every bit of money you have coming in, so doing something "under the table" will be impossible.  It might make crime harder but it will make taxing way easier.  Whatever happens, it'll be interesting.

Research (Again)

I found myself thinking today about research for my writing.  Don't ask me why, my pshrink says I'm mildly ADD (or as I call it "ADOS": Attention Deficit--Ooooh, Shiny).  So here's what I've been thinking:

For Hammer of Thor I read all or parts of five books (2 fiction, 3 non-fiction), lots of internet research (planes, weapons, uniforms), plus because my father is a war movie nut I've probably seen every movie made about WWII.  And I watched a documentary about the Korean War.  (I also knew a lot about Korea from my time in the Army even though I was never stationed there.) 

For Agent of Artifice I read all or part of four books (all non-fiction), plus I spent a day in the Chicago library reading newspapers from that era (specifically, when my character was in Chicago).  I watched three movies (fiction) on the Cuban revolution (none of them very good).  I travelled to Seattle to visit the Space Needle and I even traveled to Key West to see what it looked like (I was in Miami on business).  Plus lots of internet research (the CIA, the Bay of Pigs invasion, weapons, Cuba before the revolution, mobsters in Chicago). And on a trip to San Francisco I walked by the Huntington Hotel (which forced me to re-write a few things in Hammer of Thor and re-write a whole scene in Agent of Artifice but it ended up being a great scene).

For Book of Death I read all or parts of two non-fiction books, communicated through email with a Romanian who immigrated to America (she wrote one of the books I read), and lots of internet research (Romania, Vlad the Impaler, and more).  I also watched two documentaries on San Francisco in the late '60s.

However, for Rock Killer I did very little research.  But it was science fiction so I had to do no historical research like on the Adept Series books (the three listed above). I did a little internet research on space life-support systems but most everything else in the book either I knew from college courses or it was science fiction (I tried to make Rock Killer as scientifically accurate as I could).  I found someone who spoke Arabic and they gave me some background on culture and politics of the Middle East.

Then comes my latest almost-finished book, the last book in the Adept Series (unless I write another) called Gods of Strife.  I read zero books and everything was done on the internet.  I watched no movies or documentaries (unless Argo counts but I didn't learn anything from it).  I did travel to Seattle to walk through the Concorde at the Museum of Flight.

And here's the thing: Rock Killer, my least researched novel, is my best-reviewed book (sometimes I think the Adept Series is too unique for a lot of people).  So the amount of research I put into a book does not necessarily correlate at all to how good people think the book is.

Gods of Strife I think is a really good book (but I think all my books are really good) and it has almost no research.  I think I spent more time researching a Lamborghini Countach than anything else.  So how much research I put into a book doesn't seem to make it better or worse.

My thoughts on research are that you can't do too much unless you lived through what you're writing about. But what you can (and shouldn't do) is show off how much research you did by putting in some cool thing you learned that isn't germane to your narrative.