S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 98

Driving . . . Faster

I heard a rumor that Montana might raise it's rural speed limit to 85 mph. My first thought: How can I find an excuse to drive in Montana? I might not even do my usual 5 mph over the speed limit. Although 90 mph on some of those long, lonely stretches of highway in Montana might not be so bad. Come to think of it, back when Montana didn't have a speed limit, I was doing over 100 mph on some of those roads.

Utah and Idaho (at least) have raised some interstate speed limits to 80 mph. Unfortunately, they did that since I was last in Idaho.

I've often thought the speed limit on I-90 between Ellensburg and Sprague here in Washington State should be 80 mph (it's now 70).

But (except maybe in Montana) speed limits are not set for convenience and safety, but to maximize revenue. Michigan did a study and found that raising speed limits from 55 to 70 increased safety. Why? Because with a 55 mph speed limit, the speed differences between cars was as much as 20 mph (some were going 55 or slower, some were going 75 or faster). Raising the speed limit to 70 meant fewer cars were going slow so the speed difference between cars (a large factor in automobile crashes) decreased. And the average speed on the road with the 55 mph speed limit was 74 mph. With a 70 mph speed limit, it was 72.

A study also found that it's safer to drive faster than traffic then slower than traffic. You're more likely to be in an accident at 10 mph under the speed limit that at 10 mph over the speed limit. But who gets tickets?

Now, admittedly, I like to drive fast. But I try to drive fast responsibly. I used to drive on a racetrack but the costs got to be too much. Not so much the fees, but the replacement costs of tires and brakes which you wear out very fast on a racetrack. So if I do drive fast I pick empty roads. Luckily, where I live, there's a few of those. Unfortunately, they tend to be straight and taking curves fast is so much more fun.

And now maybe I'll have to find an excuse to go to Montana. There's this curvy part of I-90 between the Idaho border and Missoula . . .

The Speculative Fiction Cantina with Paul Clayton and Adam Dreece

Today on the Speculative Fiction Cantina we are proud to welcome Paul Clayton and Adam Dreece

Paul Clayton

Paul ClaytonPaul Clayton is the author of a three-book historical series on the Spanish Conquest of the Floridas-- Calling Crow, Flight of the Crow, and Calling Crow Nation (Putnam/Berkley), and a novel, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam (St. Martin's Press), based on his own experiences in that war. Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam was a finalist at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards, along with works by Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless) and David McCullough (John Adams). Clayton's last historical book-- White Seed: The Untold Story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke-- is a work of fiction. Strange Worlds is a well-received collection of Paul’s sci-fi and fantasy works over the years. His mainstream novel, In the Shape of a Man, has elements of horror. Paul currently lives and works in California.

Paul's Books:


White Seed
Strange Worlds
In the Shape of a Man

Paul's Links:

Blog in the "open range" section of  https://www.libertyislandmag.com/
Twitter


Adam Dreece

2014 was the year that I stopped my 25 years of writing short stories that I only shared with friends, and started writing and publishing novels. In April 2014 I released Along Came a Wolf, the first in my Amazon Best Selling series The Yellow Hoods. In September, I released the second in the series, Breadcrumb Trail.

While my daughter was the motivation to start this in earnest last year, my life started changing a few years ago when an appendix surgery went sideways and left me in horrific pain for 15 months. Coming out of a surgery that reduced that to a gradually improving chronic pain, I was hit with severe adult asthma. Everything I wrote was contaminated with those events, and so I spent 3 years writing a memoir that once done, I put on the shelf to move on with my life. That life was different now, and my love of writing was no longer satisfied to being a part time element of my life. With a nudge from my daughter, the dam burst.

On January 19th, 2015, I made the move from being a full time software architect and part time author, to being a full time author.

Adam's Books:


Along Came a Wolf
Breadcrumb Trail

Adam's Links:

Website
Blog
Facebook
Twitter

From today's show: New wide-view telescope.

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How Small Can They Go?

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This has been empirically true (pretty much) since Moore stated this in 1965.
This means computers are getting smaller and more powerful. For instance, according to this website, your iPhone 5S is 1,000 times more power that 1975's "supercomputer" the Cray-1.
Think about that. You hold in your hand a computer more powerful than 1,000 former "supercomputers" that probably cost millions of dollars, each.
Ain't technology grand. What used to take up a room is outpaced many times over by something that fits in your pocket.
However, as computers shrink, I think there's a practical limit on how small they can become. Let's call it the "biology barrier."
At some point, you have to have input and output on a computer. Unless you're going to wire the computer directly to the brain (which is a little scary, what if you get an email with a virus attached?) you're going to have to deal with fat human fingers and human eyes/ears. Maybe they can perfect the voice interface (Apple's Siri is amazing sometimes, sometimes as dumb as a Cray-1) but voice interface is slow (slower than I type on a full-sized keyboard) and accords no privacy. Can you imagine standing in line at Starbucks sexting your girlfriend with a voice interface?
So, I'm thinking the device can be small (but not too small, don't want to easily lose it) and have a holographic screen that projects out of it and input is by "touching" that screen. If it were a watch-sized device, worn on the wrist, that might work but then you only have one hand for input.
And I don't want to give up my full-sized mechanical keyboard unless your holographic keyboard had "feel" to it.
I don't think, even as they get more powerful, computers for direct human use will not get much smaller than what we have right now. Below that, input is too hard and output is too small.
But you never know. My grandchildren might be using something that's a button on their shirt with holographic input and output and laughing at me with my "huge" smartphone.

How I got 10,000 More Twitter Followers (without spending a dime)

I have over 12,000 twitter followers. How? Did I "buy" followers?

Nope, I didn't spend a cent on getting followers. What I spent was time.

On December 28, 2013 I had 2,341 followers. On December 27, 2014 I had 11,780 for an increase of 9,439 followers or nearly 10,000 more. That's an average of 26 new followers per day. Which doesn't sound like a lot but it adds up.

Here's how you can get 10,000 more Twitter followers the way I did.

Go to justunfollow.com and sign in with Twitter. Turn off all automatic tweets it wants to send on your behalf (including auto-DMs). It was seeing these automatic tweets and DMs that kept me away from that site for months, but when I found out I could turn them off, I started using the site.

I'm not endorsing justunfollowme.com, there may be better sites out there. It's just what I used.

The first thing you'll see when you get there is a list of tweeters who you follow who don't follow you back. You can, with a free account, unfollow 25 once every 24 hours. If you allow the website to tweet that you are doing that, it's 50. I did that once and got 50 from then on. I don't know if I got lucky or if that's how it's supposed to work. You simply push the blue "Tweet" button to tweet it:



But you don't want to unfollow, not just yet. First you want to follow as many tweeters as the site allows (again, default is 25, if you tweet, 50).

Click on "Keyword Follow (Grow)" in the left had menu. Now, put in a hashtag that fits your genre(s). I used #urbanfantasy, #scifi, and #sciencefiction. Follow most everyone who uses those hastags. You can also use #amwritng and #amreading. Don't follow people with a huge mount of followers but hardly following anyone else because they are very unlikely to follow you.

(I tried #UF for urban fantasy but got a lot of people talking about the University of Florida. I tried #fantasy but got all sorts of things, including people looking for casual sex.)

Follow 25 or 50 tweeters (as many as the site will let you).

Then, sorting by "oldest first" (the default) unfollow 25 or 50 tweeters who don't follow you.

Do this every day (you can do 25 or 50 once every 24 hours) or at least every day you can.

Eventually you'll get down to 100 people who aren't following you back that you follow. When that happened I changed tactics slightly. I still followed 50 people but I only unfollowed until I had 100 (exactly) non-followers. I didn't unfollow anyone who hadn't tweeted since I last had done a batch of following (usually a day) unless they hadn't tweeted for 12 weeks figuring they were inactive at that point. This way, the people I just followed wouldn't be unfollowed because there were at the bottom of the list. Don't update the list or you it'll add in the 50 (or 25) you just followed.

Do this every day or nearly everyday for a year and you should gain around 10,000 followers. After I hit 10,000 I stopped doing this because I apparently hit some critical mass and I get quite a few followers every day (over 25, usually). I follow back the ones that have to do with writing/editing etc. I don't follow ones who are obviously bots.

Was it worth it? I don't know. I do get a heck of a lot of re-tweets (but how many of those are automatic, I don't know but I bet a lot).

But that's how I got 10,000 Twitter followers in just over a year.

The Speculative Fiction Cantina with Logan L. Masterson and Megan McCall

Today on the Speculative Fiction Cantina we are proud to welcome Logan L. Masterson and Megan McCall
Logan I. Masterson


Logan L. MastersonBorn in southern Missouri, and traveling the American southwest throughout his early life, Logan L. Masterson rooted himself in ideas rather than places. His world is a place of wonders, where words are magic and anything is possible. It’s also a place of darkness: good things happen to bad people and the best intentions can go terribly awry.

Logan L. Masterson is the author of Ravencroft Springs, a Lovecraftian tale of Appalachia published by Pro Se Press. Look for his stories “Clockwork Demons” in Capes & Clockwork, and “Shadow of the Wolf” in Luna’s Children II, both from Dark Oak Press. His newest project is Wheel of the Year: Samhain, the first in a pagan high-fantasy series of short stories. 
Logan's Books: Ravencroft Springs Wheel of the Year: Samhain
Logan's Links: Website/Blog Facebook Twitter

Megan McCall

I’m a single mother of 7 year old twin girls. I’m a massage therapist for a living but a writer at heart. My tragic flaws are spending too much time in my head and eating food.

Megan's Book:

Fruition

Megan's Links:

Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

From Today's show: Eight new inhabitable planets.

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It's not a Bug, it's a Feature

I recently got an iPhone 6 and found it had a bad habit. If I touched (not pressed) the home button multiple times (like, if I were thinking about what I wanted to do next), it would drop the icons down on the display like this:

Which I found very annoying. I was amazed Apple would ship a product with such an obvious bug in it and assumed an iOS update would fix it at any time.

Tuesday there was an iOS update (to 8.1.3) and I thought finally that would fix the problem. But it didn't. And I was still annoyed.  I texted my friend Sare that that update didn't fix this bug. She also has an iPhone 6.

"It's not a fault," she texted back. It was a feature.

So I Googled and sure enough, it's called "Reachability" and it's designed so that you can reach the top row of icons while holding the phone and using your thumb to touch the screen.

So I again Googled how to turn it off. It's easy. Go to Setting>General>Accessibility and scroll to the bottom where it says "Reachability" and turn it off:
And, as you can see, it says to double-tap the home button to "bring the top of the screen into reach." I must of just been accidentally double-tapping the home button.

So I turned it off. And, yay! it doesn't happen anymore.

I really think Apple should have shipped the phones with this feature turned off. Either that or put "Reachability Mode" at the top of the screen when it was activated so users will know it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Mental Illness is not a Weakness nor a Character Flaw

Depression, Bipolar, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, ADHD/ADD (and many more I didn't name)

These are not character flaws. They are not "all in your head." These are diseases as real as cancer or diabetes.

No, you can't just think your way out of depression. Slight, situational, depression, yes (to a point). Your girlfriend broke up with you, you're sad.  That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about chronic depression where no mater what happens, you feel sad. I called it the "floating cloud syndrome." No matter what, I had a dark cloud hanging over me.  I could fake being happy for short periods. I could function (I was lucky). But every day I felt very sad. And it was worse in winter.

It's not a character flaw. It's brain chemistry.

"But aren't you dependent on a drug?" they ask when they learn you're on anti-depressants or another drug for your mental illness. "Yes," I say, "just like the diabetic is dependent on insulin, or the person with his cholesterol is dependent on a Lipitor." (In my case, it's three drugs since lithium turned me into a zombie so I take a cocktail of drugs to control my bipolar.)

Do I still get depressed? A bit. Technically I'm type-2 bipolar with dysthymia. This means I'm depressed most of the time, with occasional flashes of mania. Sometimes the mania is fun. Most of the times it's not (I'm an angry manic). Without the meds, the swings were wild: low lows, high highs. Now they are muted. Now they are less common. But I still have depressed days and manic moments. They are just not destructive to my life.

So don't tell a depressed person to "get over it." Don't tell someone with bipolar "it's all in your head." (Well, of course it is, where would it be, my kidneys?) The person with a mental illness wants to be treated like everyone else, with perhaps a bit of consideration for their condition when it flairs up and overwhelms the drugs (it happens).

(Yes, I know ADHD and ADD are controversial and yes, I think kids are way over-diagnosed with this because it's easier for schools to put them on drugs than to deal with a bit of rebellion or rambunctiousness. But the ADD drugs I'm on have done wonders for me. I can concentrate on something a lot better and my brain doesn't take off 60 different directions at once. Meetings use to be hell because my brain would run around everywhere and refuse to stay in the meeting. But I'm an adult and I'm not being drugged for the benefit of overwhelmed educators.)

The Speculative Fiction Cantina with Teresa Edgerton and Cris Pasqueralle

Today on the Speculative Fiction Cantina we are proud to welcome Teresa Edgerton and Cris Pasqueralle
Teresa Edgerton
I believe I began telling stories as soon as I learned to talk.  More than sixty years later I am still inventing them.

My published work includes eleven fantasy novels, written under her own name and my pseudonym, Madeline Howard, as well as short fiction, reviews, interviews, and articles on writing.  I live with my husband, two adult children, a son-in-law, two grandsons, assorted pets (and more books than you might think would fit in the remaining space) in a house that can only be reached by a perilous path through a forest of rose-bushes.
Teresa's Books:
Goblin Moon (Amazon, Amazon.uk, B&N)
The Queen’s Necklace (Amazon, B&N, Book Depository)
The Hidden Stars The Rune of Unmaking Trilogy Book One (Amazon, Kindle, B&N)
Teresa's Links:
Website Blog #1 Blog #2 Facebook
Cris PasqueralleCris Pasqueralle
I am a retired New York City Police officer, born and raised on Long Island whose life long love of reading lead to my desire to become an author.

Cris' Book

Destiny Revealed, book one of The Destiny Trilogy (Amazon, Kobo)

Cris' Links:

Facebook
Twitter

From Today's Show: No signals from exoplanet

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The Eight Stages of Freelance Writing

I've been working as a freelance writer for about three years now.  And I 've noticed a pattern to all freelance assignments. I call it the "Eight Stages of Freelance Writing."

Stage One Panic: you get the assignment and your first thought is "how do I do this?" I have to call people I don't know and ask for their time and consideration. I have to make a coherent story out of what they tell me (and there may be more than one). I can't do this!

Stage Two Stress: you can't get a hold of the people you need to talk to. Your deadline is looming (even though it might be two weeks away) but every day you can't get a hold of the people you need to adds more and more stress. "Why don't they answer their phone or return my calls?" (This stage doesn't always happen, sometimes they answer on the first call.)

Stage Three Planning: you've got the appointment made to talk, now you plan your questions and plan how to get to them and plan what time to leave so you get there early (always get there early). This is still stressful but not nearly as stressful as Stage Two.

Stage Four Panic: you've done the interview and you're getting ready to write the story. But how do you turn your pages of scribbled notes into a coherent, interesting to read story? What do you use to "hook" the reader? How do you get this past your editor who knows you're a fraud?

Stage Five Work: you write the story, it takes hours and you flip back and forth through your notes to make sure you include every important or interesting point.  You're too busy now for panic or stress, it's just work, but it's work you love.

Stage Six Confidence: It's done, it's proofread, and it's good (you think). You feel good about your accomplishment.

Stage Seven Panic: you send it in to the editor and don't hear anything back. You think they must have hated it and will never hire you again.

Stage Eight Satisfaction: the editor publishes the story and you get a check. You're happy, satisfied, and looking forward to the next assignment so you can return to Stage One (which you've completely forgotten about, now).

You'll notice there are three panic stages. Yes, I spend a lot of time in panic and stress. But when you see your byline it's so satisfying. And the money helps, too.

The Speculative Fiction Cantina with Ashley Chappell and Heather Choate

Today on the Speculative Fiction Cantina we are proud to welcome Ashley Chappell and Heather Choate
Ashley Chappell

Ashley ChappellAshley Chappell is the author of the recently released Of War and Taters, an irreverent paranormal romp set in the fictional deep south. She is also the author of the young adult fantasy Dreams of Chaos series (Alice Will, Tilt and A God of Gods) which has been hailed by readers as “Darker and more entertaining than the Heroes of Olympus Series.” The series is set in the sentient god-universe Chaos where a teenage goddess is forced to contend with the destructive habits of her dysfunctional godly elders.

Upcoming releases include: The Hotting, a Dreams of Chaos spinoff adventure for younger readers; and The Editors, a new adult urban fantasy. Other works in progress also include outlining the script for her first comic The Harrows, a gritty adventure in which Hell is a job.

Ms. Chappell currently resides in Huntsville, AL with the love of her life. During her writing time her cats sometimes share her lap with her computer, should they choose to allow the usurpation at all. When not writing, reviewing, or burying her nose in one of her well-worn Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman novels, she can be found sailing with her husband on their boat Dupracity (Fans of Kurt Vonnegut will want to ask her what that means).

Ashley's Books

Of War and Taters Alice Will Tilt
Ashley's Links
Website Blog Facebook Twitter
Heather Choate
Heather ChoateHeather Choate was born in Littleton, Colorado.  She now lives in a small town in Southern Colorado on a farm with her husband and five children.  She chases chickens, declares war on the weeds in her garden and enjoys quietly people-watching.  Most of her time is spent daydreaming of worlds and people that don’t actually exist but reflect the beauty and complicity of humanity.  She was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2014 while pregnant with her sixth child, spurring her to write about her passion for health and fitness in addition to her fiction novels.  Writing is her escape from diaper changes and runny noses, but motherhood is the greatest journey and joy of her life.
Heather's Books: Swab Frayed Crossing Blackwing Angel
Heather's Links:
Website Blog Facebook Twitter

From Today's Program: Star Trek Technology
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