S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 127

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Sunday Six: Emergency

Today's Sunday Six comes from Chapter Nine of Rock Killer :

The rear Masuka drive had failed and the drive techs didn't know when it'd be up again.  Bente ordered the mass driver to full power, which wasn't much more than it normally gave.

The rock was going to miss Earth orbit if she didn't act quickly and correctly.
She yawed the rock, which moved too slowly, and accelerated toward the Earth.  This gave her some breathing space.  She used the computer to project a braking maneuver using the Earth's gravity. 

Manipulating Netflix

I've been on Netflix for going on eleven years.  Yes, I apparently like it.  But over the years I've learned some things.  Netflix will "throttle" you if you send back too many discs in a period of time that is undefined (so is "too many").  What this does is keeps you from getting new releases.  It costs, I've read, Netflix $1 to send out a disc and have it come back (I assume postage both ways, the package, handling).  So they want to minimize that expense and "throttling" (not their term) is the way to do it.

So here's what you do.  You limit how many movies you watch.  When I was on the three-disc at home plan, I never watched more than two movies a week.  When (because of their price hike, mostly) I switched to two discs at home plan, I only sent back three discs every two weeks.  I alternate: one disc one week, two discs the next.

Now, we all want new releases, right?  Unfortunately, Netflix due to a content deal (to get more streaming content) told studios that they won't release new releases until four weeks after they go on sale.  Yes, it sucks.  For instance, I am hoping to get Skyfall on the 12th of March, four weeks after it was available in stores to buy (and probably rent elsewhere).  New releases usually come out on Tuesday.  What you want to do is get a disc to them on Monday before the new release.  For me, that means sending Saturday (until mail stops on Saturday in August, then it'll probably be Friday).

This is very important: if there's only one new release, send only one disc to arrive Monday.  If you need to send a second disc back, send it so it arrives Tuesday at the earliest.  If there's two (or more) new releases, you can send two discs to arrive Monday.  This probably won't get you throttled if you've been judicious in your disc returning.

Now this means my discs sit around a lot.  This is a "two movie week" (as I call them) so we needed to watch two discs to send back this weekend.  But we watched them last Saturday and last Tuesday.  So one is going to sit around for a week after being watched, the other for at least 5 days.  But this keeps you from being throttled.  Yes, I know Netflix is manipulating me.  But I like having a queue with the movies I want to watch and having them delivered to my house.

So, that's all I know about Netflix.  I've heard rumors of streaming throttling (slowing down the download or lowering the quality) but I don't stream enough to notice.

Writing Lessons: Show and Tell

This part three of a continuing series of writing lessons.  Parts one and two were earlier on this blog.

They always tell beginning writers to "show, not tell."  I'm slower than most and it took me a long time to figure out what that meant.  At the risk of sounding stupid, it means: show your reader things don't tell them things.

For example, read the following passage.

A man walked into the bar.  He was tall and slim with broad shoulders, dark wavy hair and intelligent blue eyes.  He was dressed well in a business suit and a red power tie. 
Okay, that's not too bad.  You should have a picture of this man in your head.  But compare and contrast that to the following:
 The man strode on long legs into the bar.  His quick blue eyes surveyed the scene as he looked for his friend.  He carried his tall frame confidently toward the bartender, adjusting his red power tie and pulling on the single cuffs of his starched dress shirt.  His shoulders filled out his expensive dark suit which complimented his dark wavy hair.
See the difference?  This accomplishes two things: one, the story doesn't come to a dead stop to describe the man.  The narration can continue (he walked to the bartender, he looked for his friend) while you are describing him.  (If I were writing a longer passage I would leak out these details more slowly than I did here).  And two, you can add more detail without getting boring (e.g., single cuff, starched shirt, confidently).

Here's an excerpt form a novel I haven't finished (barely started):

"What are you doing home," Marilyn asked Mike as she came in, her backpack over her shoulder making her shirt ride up more, exposing more of her bare, flat tummy over her low rise jeans."How was school?" Mike asked from the couch where he was watching the apartment's T.V.Marilyn fixed him with her green eyes, her long dirty blonde hair hanging down her back to almost the end of her shirt.  "Don't change the subject, mister."
Mike turned off the T.V. with the remote and looked at her.  "I got fired.""What?" . . .  She sat at the end of the couch and curled one long leg underneath her.  Okay, what have we learned about Marilyn while the story was proceeding: she's probably a student (who else carries a backpack?), she's tall (long leg), thin (flat tummy), with green eyes and long dirty blond hair.  And we didn't have to read a paragragh of description to learn it and didn't stop the narrative dead cold with that paragraph.

"Show, don't tell" works with things other than descriptions of people.  For example, you can tell your reader "Joe died" or you can show your reader: "Joe slowly crumpled to the ground, a questioning look on his visage with his eyes going dark as he dies." 

The Future of Books

For 500 years the book reigned supreme as the way to store, keep, move, and learn stuff.  Books did two things: they made memory permanent and information democratic.  You could find a book and learn.  You didn't have to find an old person whose memory might be faulty.  And it made knowledge democratic, not the sole domain of the cabal of the lucky few (call them the knowledge 1%) who could afford manuscripts.  Books became cheap and plentiful thanks to Gutenberg.  And people became knowledgeable.  It broke the back of feudalism and the Catholic Church's monopoly on God, both of which ended the dark ages and led to the Renaissance.  This led to the Enlightenment and finally to the liberties those of us in the West enjoy.  It is telling that one of the first thing tyrants want to control is books.

Gutenberg invented his movable-type press around 1439.  Yes, there continued to be plays, dances, singing minstrels (although the news-carrying minstrel was put out of business by the book and newspapers; good thing they didn't exist to day or some government would subsidize them).  But the book was the key to learning and entertainment for five centuries.  Around 1900, movies began to be made for the purpose of entertainment.  In the 1950s television emerged.  Both of these "visual arts" competed with books.  But still books, paper books, were read by millions.

Now we live in interesting times (sort of like the old Chinese curse).  Two technologies are colliding: the ebook and print-on-demand.  Also, I can turn on my television and "stream" many movies and televisions shows on demand.  This will only get more comprehensive (I am convinced that in the future people won't buy DVDs or Blu-Rays or whatever, they will simply stream what they want to see for a subscription price or a few bucks per stream).

Print on demand technology has made it very cheap to publish a book.  Rather than having to do a full offset print run of, oh, 5,000 books at $5 a book (you do the math), you can set up a book electronically, and print one to a million copies.  This has cause a surge in "independent" authors publishing their own work (I plead guilty, I did that before I found a publisher).

And then there's ebooks.  You can "publish" your book on the Kindle for free if you do all the formatting work.  And places will do that for you for the pittance of $50 to $100.  Again, this has caused a huge surge in ebooks.

So now the problem is, how do you get noticed in the crowd.  But that's not what this post is about.

As with movies and other visual content, I think in the future people will own very few books.  Amazon already does this with Amazon Prime.  Prime members can "borrow" some Kindle books (including two of mine) for free and have them on their Kindle for a period of time.  Amazon pays the author or publisher (who is often the same person) a small amount for each book "borrowed."

Who knows where books are going (some of my thoughts here)?  The Kindle/ereader may be obsolete in 10 or 20 years.  Maybe the direct download into your brain.  But then it won't be a book, it will be a memory.  But two phenomena I think are going to happen: the virtual extinction of the printed book, and no one will own any content, they will just rent it.

It's gonna be interesting.  There's going to be a "shake out" in technology where some things will survive and some will go the way of Betamax.  And VHS.  And there might be a shake out of content providers, those who can supply the content the people will demand.

Doing Research

When I write my Adept Series novels (such as Hammer of Thor ) that are set in the past, I do a lot of research in order to get them as historically accurate as possible (and then I make Pearl Harbor Day December 6th just to tell the reader "this is not our world").  I enjoy the research, usually.  I love learning new things.  I encourage all writers to do as much research as they can.  Unless you lived it, you can't do too much research.

But . . . what you can do is show off how much research you did by throwing in extraneous details not germane to the story.

Movie makers will make this mistake with sets or special effects.  They want to show off how much work they put into their elaborate sets or special effects they will spend a lot of time (or so it seems) showing them off (see Star Trek: The Motion Picture ).  This has become less of a problem with CGI since they are easier and cheaper to do than traditional miniatures/matte SFX.

To give you an example in my own writing.  There's a scene in Hammer of Thor (this scene, in fact) where I did many hours of research.  It is set in 1943 San Francisco on a foggy day.  I wanted the fog to be at a level where buildings would peek out of the top and being the writer, I could set the fog at pretty much any elevation I choose (maybe I should have researched how high and low fog gets in San Francisco, but I didn't).  But, what buildings would poke out of the fog, which ones would be just under it, and what else would protrude into clear sky?

This turned out to be a multiple problem problem.  One: what buildings existed in 1943 San Francisco? Two: how tall were those buildings?  And three: what was the elevation of the ground they were built one?  Because their absolute height would depend on Two and Three.  And San Francisco is a hilly city so the base of buildings could be anything from sea level to 407 feet (the elevation of Castro Hill).

The internet to the rescue! (When I think about how hard this would have been before the internet, I shudder.)  There was a website called skyscrapers.com.  They listed every tall building in most larger cities around the world.  They listed when they were built, their address, and how high they were (and other stuff I didn't care about).  Through that I was able to make a list of tall buildings that existed in San Francisco in 1943 and their height (since then, the website has put all that info behind a pay wall).  Microsoft used to have a map online (still might) that was a terrain map.  Using one online map to figure out the address, I would then use the terrain map to estimate the altitude of the base of the building.  I set up an Excel spreadsheet (I still have it) and I listed each building, the height above ground, the elevation of its base, and added those together to get its absolute height over sea level.  I then subtracted the height of the fog (450 feet) to get how far above or below the fog the building was.  And I used that information in writing the scene.

Go listen to (or read) that scene.  Is it obvious I did that much work?  I hope not. But I wanted that scene accurate as possible.  And that's what, as a writer, you should do. Make sure you do enough research to be accurate, but don't show off how much you did.

Except maybe on your blog.

Sunday Six: Violence

Today's Sunday Six comes from Chapter Eight of Rock Killer :

"The problem with democracy," he said, "is compromise.  There will always be those that oppose what is correct.  In a democracy you have to compromise with those fools.  And there can be no compromise in the protection of the Earth.  We're talking about mankind's survival.  Only in revolution there is no compromise and only in violence there is revolution."

The Future of Novels

I envision in the future novels will not be quite so . . . linear.  Now days you read a novel from beginning to the end.  But with technology and the probably demise of the paper book, this is no longer necessary or even desirable.

For example, novels could contain links to more information.  You read a line such as (from Book of Death ) "Walter Cronkite looked especially serious on the color screen," and if you click the link you get a picture. Or a Wikipedia article on Walter Cronkite.

Or there's a link on a character's name, you click it, and you read their back story or maybe a side adventure they had.  And maybe a list of all the other novels they appear in.  Or reading a science fiction novel set on another planet, you could click the name of the planet and get a (fictional) encyclopedia entry for that planet, star system, etc.  You could have maps of your fantasy world (or the real world) that relate to your novel.  The choices are only limited by the author's imagination (and when I say "click" I probably mean "touch").

The possibilities are endless for text books, I would think.

This will mean the writer will have to come up with a lot more information and be careful what he shares in the links.  In my novel Agent of Artifice , I purposely left the background of the character Maria vague.  If I wrote a whole back story for her, some of the mystery of her as Vaughan's lover would have been missing.  But it would have been interesting.

Diet . . .

If you've been following me on Twitter or Facebook you probably know I'm on a diet.  And today was my first weigh-on and I've lost a good amount of weight.  But I have a lot to go.

The interesting thing is how much mental energy it takes to not eat.  Just last night I was in the kitchen and I opened the fridge (why? habit?) and saw something I would have loved to eat.  But I couldn't so I didn't.  But that took effort.  Or maybe will power.  And all the mental energy I'm expending on NOT EATING is not mental power I have for writing or other tasks.  No wonder I feel exhausted at the end of the day.

This is a special diet done under a doctor's supervision and you don't eat much.  And what you do eat tends to be fruits, vegetables, and bland meats like chicken (although my wife is pretty good at spicing them up).  I've been on this diet for two weeks and other than two days I was out of town for RadCon and had to eat in restaurants, I have followed it nearly to the letter (I cheated a couple of times by eating about 10 calories worth of cherry tomatoes).  I'm drinking between 1/2 and one gallon of water a day (and wearing a trail to the bathroom in the carpet).  That sort of keeps me glued to home or places with public bathrooms.

I know, reading about some one's diet is boring.  So I'll stop now.  But you may get a few more of these.  The doctor projects I'll be on this diet for about 8 months to get to my weight goal.  That's a long time to fight eating.

Hammer of Thor Reading

Here is a video of me reading from Hammer of Thor  at RadCon: