Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 94

Malignant artifact disposal

It’s a haunted mirror.

Tried smashing it?

It made me think I smashed it, but I killed my sister instead.

Ouch, man. Should have come to us first. So this things psychic powers, do they work on film?

Yeah, I was watching through a webcam. Then her body looked at me…

Okay okay. So nix on the bomb disposal robot then.

Is it hopeless?

We’re still here ain’t we? What would you say is this evil mirror’s SOI?

What?

Sphere of Influence. How far do its powers extend? I mean when you don’t have a camera trained on it.

I don’t know.

Obviously it let you come to me.

The house, I guess. I didn’t let my sister leave the house.

All right then. Wrecking ball it is.

Creolization

Maggie’s Bulgarian English

“Leet the ball” from ritam “to kick”

“I’ll get the sapoon” from supon “soap”

“He’s a maister” from maistar “repair-man, contractor”

“I’ll boov the shoes” from ubuvam “to put on shoes.”

Note I don’t coach her to use the words. In fact, when she does, I correct her with the standard English words. I want Maggie to be able to communicate intelligibly with English speakers. But since it’s been shown that children don’t listen to their parents, I don’t think I’m in any danger of killing this English-Bulgarian Creole.

The Ballad of Prince Marko and Maid Magdalena

Research a great thing, especially when it involves your wife’s grandmothers.

My historical fantasy, Charming Lies, needed a Bulgarian folk-song for an important scene, and what better song than the one sung by Pavlina’s great grandmother during the wheat harvest? This harvest song is supposed to be sung by two groups of women as they cut the wheat with their sickles. The rhythm of the song matches the bending-and-straightening rhythm of cutting wheat, and the groups can keep track of each other as they call-and-respond.

The story of the song is part of the much longer cycle of Prince Marko (Krali Marko). Marko was a historical person: a local lord over parts of what is now Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia when the area became part of the Ottoman Empire. He is remembered as an intermediary between the independent Slavic states (his father was co-ruler of the Serbian empire before its collapse) and the new Turkish overlords. He also, apparently, was popular with the ladies.

The song begins thusly:

Hark, Magda

Hark, Magdalena

Marko comes

Magda to carry off

He sent her roses

She sent him yellow weeds

This Magda took as a joke

But Marko, for truth.

A fun word here is otnosi (carry off). Bulgarian village tradition, as in many places on the Balkans and in Turkey, is for men to “steal” women. A man gathers together his male relatives and friends (svatvoni, or “marriage-party,” or perhaps “posse” would be a better translation) and assaults the home of his bride-to-be, whose own relatives defend her. These days the tradition lives on in a ritual where the groom has to pass a gauntlet of psychological and financial tasks set forth by the bride’s family, such as promising how much of the housework he will do, and putting money in her shoes.

Early pokes Magda, her mother

Early on holy Sunday.

Takes her to the high balcony

So she can see from above.

The word I translated as balcony (chardak) is more like an outdoor room or second-story porch.

“What is that in the field…stars?

And around the stars a bright moon rises?”

Spake, spake Magda the Beauty:

“lele male, lele stara male!

“Those are not true stars,

“That is Marko’s wedding party.

“That is not the bright moon, there.

“That is Marko, the groom.”

~The next part my grandmas-in-law couldn’t remember exactly, but anyway Magda pretends to be dead when Marko comes to carry her away~

Spake, spake the best man:

“Soon, quickly, you two speedy brothers-of-the-groom

“Give us the Fire Life-Burning

“To put down the shirt of Magda

“So we know does not fool us.”

They put the Fire Life-Burning there, but Magna did not move so much as a hand.

In order to determine whether she was really dead, Marko’s wedding-councilor (kum, or “best man” in my translation) asks the close male relatives of Marko (devera, or “brothers-of-the-groom”) to get painful magical crap to stick down Magda’s shirt, into her pazva, the place where she keeps things safe. I mean where she keeps her money.

Hm. Still creepy. Let’s back up. A pazva (related to “pazya,” to keep or save) is the place where you keep your important stuff, like money. A man’s pazva was in the sash around his waist, but a woman kept her stuff tucked between the collar of her woolen outer dress (sukman) and her cotton shirt.

So what Marko and his kum are doing is something like putting a snake into someone’s pocket. There’s a lot of important stuff in the general…area? But they aren’t stealing from or sexually harassing her…exactly.

Spake, spake the best man:

“Soon, quickly, you two speedy brothers-of-the-groom

“Give us the Snake Three-Headed

“To put down the shirt of Magda

“So we know she does not fool us.”

They put the Snake Three-Headed there, but Magda did not move so much as a hand.

Spake, Spake Marko, young Marko

“I beg, I beg, best man

“I will put my hand down her shirt

“Never can Magnda fool me then.”

Marko put his hand down her shirt

Then did Magda, below her upper lip, smile.

Spoke, spoke the mother of Magda:

“Alas Madga. Alas my beauty

How could you scorn the Fire Life-Burning

how could you scorn the Serpent, Three-Headed

and you could not scorn the hand of Marko?”

Awww. See what happened? After Marko and his kum put fire and snakes on Magda’s chest , she kept on pretending to be dead. But when he put his HAND down there…well.

Also a point of clarification: “below her upper lip” (mustak) is not a mustache, but the space between the upper lip and the nose (no, it isn’t the philtrum, either). You smile below that.

Keep scrolling for the original Bulgarian. Bonus points if you can spot the fossilized noun cases and Indo-European cognates! You can do it! Come on! Anybody?

Deli Magda

Deli Magdalena

Marko Prosi

Magda se otnosi

On i prashta kitka posilek

Ona nemu ot zhaltoto tsveki

Tova Magda za shega go znae

A Marko za istina.

Rano rani Magdinata maiko

Rano na sveta nedelya

Izkachise na visoki chardak

Ta razgleda nagore

Shto e pole…zvezdi utanalo

Ni stre zvezdi yasen mesets gree

Duma, duma Magda ubavitsa

Lele male, lele stara male!

Tova ne sa tiya sitni zvezdi

Tova sa si markovi svatovni

Tova ne e toya yasen mesets

Tova si e Marko mladozheniya.

Duma, duma kuma gospodina:

Skoro barzo dva barzi devera

Donesete ogan zhivozharets/ zmiya troeglava

Da pusnem Magde u pazvoni

Ne moi Magda umama da pravi.

Pa pusna ogin zhivozharets/zmiya troeglava, a Magda ni s noga ni s raka.

Duma, duma Marko mladi Marko:

Prosi, prosi kume gospodine

Da si braknem u pazvoni

Ne moe Magda umama da prai

Pa si brakna Marko u pazvoni

Pa se Magda pod mustak usmikhna.

Interstellar Empire

“Alexander cried when he heard Anaxarchus talk about the infinite number of worlds in the universe…’There are so many worlds, and I have not yet conquered even one.'”

—Plutarch’s”On Contentment of the Mind”

Happy New Year and welcome back to Wonderful, Awful Ideas!

Let’s try to imagine an interstellar empire. No, not that one. This empire must be based on light-speed travel, and a civilization that is advanced enough to achieve light-speed travel.

~~~

Why would such a civilization want an interstellar empire? Mineral wealth is more easily obtainable from all those rocks between your capitol and subject worlds. Labor might be nice, especially if you have some way to compel obedience, but if you have interstellar travel, surely you have mechanization as well. What can angry slaves do that robots can’t?

I suppose trade in biologicals and pharmeceuticals might work between the stars, especially high-end luxuries that cannot be grown outside their native biomes. Art, entertainment, and other intellectual property will also probably hold onto their value over interstellar differences.

So our empire might evolve as a legal body concerned with the standardization of copywrite law and drug control. Profits from trade in intellectual property will fund a fleet of trading ships for those exquisite pieces of original artwork, rare spices, and industrial secrets that cannot be transmitted and fabricated. Infractions or delinquancy-of-service-payment can usually be punished simply by cutting off the guilty party’s network access, but for hard cases, more direct coercion might be necessary.

Trade Enforcers travel between worlds at the speed of light, which means their time-dilated perspectives are much broader than planet-bound people (this goes double if they simply transmit and fabricate copies of themselves, for whom no time at all passes between stars). Inevitably, these people will end up running things.

Unless some like Captain Lagrange can stop them! Neee-ow! Pew pew pew!

 

Petrolea chapter 1

This is a sample of my novella PETROLEA. For the moment, it’s still open to critiquers, so comment or tell me if you want to read the rough draft.

~~~

Chapter 1

 

It was raining gasoline.

Victor Toledo had his wipers on, but he little squeejee didn’t do much except smear the petrochemicals over the visor of his environment suit.

 

Visibility: 3 meters

Outside temperature: -180 C

Suit batteries: full

O2 tanks: full

Signal strength: excellent

Handshake gauntlet status: ready

 

Beyond the glowing readouts projected onto the inside of his visor, Victor could just make out the edges of the harvester on either side, mostly defined by the endless churning movement of the caterpillar treads. Ahead, beyond the bumper of the huge forestry machine, he could see nothing but falling fuel.

The access road and the jungle beyond were invisible, but every few minutes, the glassy blade of the low-hanging vane of a Windmill Tree sliced the curtain of rain. Feral mechanoids scurried over those vanes on mechanical legs. The feral robots froze as the harvester passed, tracking the loggers with hungry sensors.

A human figure, clumsy and bulbous, swam out of the rain. Al-Waheed, one of the few biologists who hadn’t joined the strike, planted his feet and stuck up his left hand up to signal Victor. His right arm stuck out in front of him, providing a roost for his Punisher. The eagle-sized, helicopter-winged predator hunched in the rain, a heap of dripping iron pinions and glowing red headlights.

“They’re close,” said Al-Waheed over the comns net. Victor didn’t know whether “they” meant the Tanker trees he was supposed to harvest or the striking scientists and engineers trying to stop him. Both, he supposed.

He slowed the harvester, crunching over whatever metallic weeds had self-assembled there since the last time this road had been used.

“Where are their lights?” he asked. “Are the strikers just waiting for us in the dark?”

“Of course, they are,” said Victor’s other biologist guide, he thought the man’s name was Gallagher.

Why wasn’t he running this mission? Why wasn’t Al-Waheed? Victor was just the manager of this jaunt, a field promotion that had nothing to do with his actual skills as a programmer, and he’d obviously just asked a stupid question. Why would the strikers keep their lights off? Oh. “Because lights would attract mechanoids?” he asked.

“You got it, boss,” said Gallagher. “Even Merchant and her tree-huggers don’t love the critters that much.”

“All right. Switching to global address frequencies.” Victor brought the harvester to a grumbling halt and called up an eye-movement menu in his visor, scrolled through options…

“Maybe,” said Al-Waheed, “switch on sonar?”

“Uh, right.” That was another finicky eye-menu. The software was designed for command by wrist-mounted keyboard, but of course Victor’s left wrist was occupied by his handshake gauntlet.

“Dr. Merchant, if you’re listening,” Victor raised his voice, as if that might give his signal more power. “Stop this nonsense. You can’t stay out here forever.”

“Neither can you.” The voice was crackly and faint with distance and interference from jungle life, but the glossy Mumbai accent was unmistakable. “The limiting factor here is neither our oxygen nor our water, Mr. Toledo, but your profit margins.”

Victor stood, leaning forward, breathing hard as his suit’s software painted his visor with sonar and infrared. “They’re our profit margins. You’re chewing up your own paychecks, here.”

“Better than chewing up a world.”

Ah. There they were. The striking scientists and engineers stood in their ruggedized environment suits, hand in hand in a human chain stretched across the road into the forest. Behind them, outlined in the slick grays of sonar imaging, bulked the domes of the Tanker trees, each one a living store of hydrocarbon energy big enough to keep a space station running for a week.

Titan, with its chemical resources, low gravity and outer-system real estate, would have been a tempting target for exploitation even without the famous photos taken by the Huygens probe. Cryo-volcanoes capped with forests of ceramic pressure towers. Iron trees spreading windmill leaves over plains of methane snow. Robotic creatures wading through petrochemical lakes, mouths full of buzz-saws and welding torches. The impossible bulk of a Leviathan in flight. The fiery battles of mating Dragons. An entire ecosystem built atop an ancient alien mining site. Why shouldn’t humans step in and claim the resources the aliens had abandoned?

Now, not even two years since Xanadu had become the first permanent base on Titan, the whole plan was falling apart.

“Your business is more fragile than you realize,” said Dr. Merchant. “Certainly more fragile than the entire ecosystem of Petrolea.”

Miércoles! Victor had lost focus, given her the chance to make one of her speeches. He knew how she’d look on the cameras she had undoubtedly set up to document her great statement. The shining heroine making her stand in the gasoline rain, surrounded by hostile jungle and vile corporate shills like Victor.

“In our arrogance and greed, we have destroyed the innocence of this world,” said the rogue biologist. “And now it turns against us. Every day, the Petrolean ecosystem becomes hungrier for human machines, and more adept at eating them.”

“Look,” said Victor, “Al-Onazy says he’s going to give you what you want. Caps on harvesting, we can redraw the logging routes so we don’t disturb the local environment. We’re willing to—”

Something flashed through the darkness and Gallagher shouted, “Ifrit!”

The Ifrit’s arrowhead shape barely had time to register before the flying mechanoid burst into a cloud of thumbnail-sized wafers. The wafers pattered against the bumper of the harvester and stuck there. When they sprouted antennae and scuttling legs, Victor knew them for what they were: assembler swarm-bots. What the biologists called “factors.”

The little robots decoupled from each other, and Ifrit’s body smeared itself across the front of the harvester. The factors scurried like ants, searching for metals and plastics to carve out and make into more little robots. Surely that chewing noise was in Victor’s imagination, not his earphones.

“That was an attack on company property,” said Victor into whatever feeds back to Earth’s media-sphere the strikers had running. “And dangerous to—are you going to get rid of that Ifrit or what?”

“I’m trying, sir.” Gallagher was frantically wiggling the fingers of his handshake gauntlet, but his Punisher stayed stubbornly on his wrist. Al-Waheed had better luck. His own tame mechanoid spread four wings like helicopter rotors and launched itself into the petroleum downpour.

The Punisher’s body shifted, streamlining as the factors that made up its skin and muscles tightened their grip on each other. A device like a gun-mounted eagle’s talon swung into position.

The Punisher’s helicopter blades sprayed gasoline rain as it fired its claw into the swarm of hungry factors. The little robots scattered, but the talons closed around the behavioral and somatic processors at the swarm’s core. Static swept the comns net as the Punisher hacked into the electronic brains it grasped, and, as if hypnotized, the factors emerged from their hiding places marched into the open mouthparts of the predator.

The Ifirit died, but not before Victor saw another squid-like flash, and another. The harvester rang with the impacts of more Ifrits.

The timing was too good. The field biologists had tamed the Punishers and several other types of mechanoid. Surely they must have set these Ifrits on their own co-workers.

“Stop attacking us!” Victor winced at the shrill register of his voice. There were larger creatures down there now, scuttling up from the mud to gnaw apart his vehicle.

“You’re attracting them,” came Merchant’s voice over the electronic death scream of another Ifrit. “You have to leave the jungle.”

Victor fought to bring his voice back down. “Are you threatening us, Dr. Merchant?”

“No, you ass. The jungle’s more dangerous than it’s ever been, and we’re a crowd of humans with floodlights making a bloody ruckus in it!”

Certainty trickled down Victor’s back, cold and viscous as crude oil fresh from a Tanker tree: someone had screwed up here, and it was probably him. “We just want to harvest the Tanker trees.”

“You are not the only thing harvesting out here, Mr. Toledo.”

Victor’s ears pricked, as if that would do any good in his suit. And anyway the vibration wasn’t in his suit pickups; it tunneled up from his feet. A low rumble, almost like the harvester. Except the harvester wasn’t moving.

They had to get out of here. “The faster you cooperate,” said Victor, “the faster we’re all back safe in Xanadu Base.”

“Safe?” said Merchant, “Were you not listening to me? Have you even looked at my reports? Every week since we’ve been here, the native life has grown steadily more aggressive. Attacks on humans and human artifacts have multiplied exponentially. Give us a week and there will be mechanoids chewing on your executive swivel-chair.”

How stupid was it for Victor to feel hurt? At least he restrained himself from yelling, I don’t have a swivel chair! I’m one of you! Because Victor wasn’t an intrepid field-biologist, he was a programmer, full of theory about how to hack electronic brains, but bereft of practice. He didn’t give a damn about profit margins or the long-term viability of the native ecosystem. He was rated to drive the harvester, and he did what he was told, which in this case was to drive the harvester into the jungle and pick up the protesters. Simple.

The vibration wasn’t subtle any more. The ground shook with the weight of some enormous oncoming mechanoid.

“Leviathan,” said Gallagher. “It’s headed right for us.”

“Mierda!” Victor almost beat his extremely expensive and important hand-shake gauntlet against arm-rest of his seat before he forced himself to calm down. “I’m mean,” he said, “miércoles.” Not that any of these people cared if he swore in Spanish. God, he wished he was back in Lima.

“Okay,” said Victor. “All right. Reverse the engine.” He reversed the engine. “I’m getting us out of here. Strikers, I, um, order you to climb aboard.”

None of the space-suited figures moved.

“We are not afraid to die,” said Dr. Merchant.

“Well, I am. I mean, I won’t let you.” Victor stood in his pilot’s seat, waved his arms. “Arrest those strikers.”

“We do not consent to being arrested.”

Victor wished he could strangle the woman. Activate his gauntlet and enslave the native life to knock some sense into her. Because she was right, damn her. The strikers had taken the best and most rugged environment suits and they outnumbered the tiny “security detail” the project manager had cobbled together and placed under Victor’s command.

“Dr. Merchant,” he said on her private channel, “Chinni. It isn’t too late to surrender. Save face. Leave under protest. But leave. Get on the harvester, please.”

An intake of breath over the teeth-rattling groan of approaching treads. “Oh, you bloody idiot. You don’t really think we can ride home on that machine, do you? I thought you brought it here are bait.”

Victor stared stupidly down at the enormous pile of metal he was sitting on. There were already mechanoids chewing on it, and an even bigger one grinding its way toward the feast. It was like he’d driven into the Serengeti in a bus made of pressed meat.

“Get off the harvester,” he told himself, “get off the harvester.”

The rain stopped.

Or, no, Victor realized. The rain was still falling. He could see it at the edges of the light, hear it through his suit’s pickups. It just wasn’t falling on his head.

He looked up.

The giant metal claw gaped wide as it dropped from the dark sky.

The concussion the Leviathan’s proboscis made when it hit the ground rang through Victor’s suit. The harvester jerked under him. Slewed sideways as it was lifted from the mud.

The vehicle Victor piloted was 16 meters long and 5 tall, 20 tonnes of caterpillar treads, loaders, delimbers, grapplers, and a train of cradles to hold the denuded trunks of the Tanker trees. It should have been too damn big to move anywhere Victor didn’t want it to go.

The Leviathan was bigger.

A wall of metal heaved out of the darkness, bristling with sensors and swarming with its own mobile ecology of factors, parasites, and hangers on.

These moved aside as the Leviathan’s maw opened.

Victor’s visor flashed with warning colors. Temperature readouts spiked. Radiation fluxed. The reactive glass dimmed against the light of the monster’s smelter throat.

The proboscis strained and the harvester was hoisted up, forward.

Something swooped through the air toward him. Another predator, or maybe some symbiote of the Leviathan, homing in on Victor’s radio signals, his body heat, ready to peel and devour his suit or just swallow him whole and shit out the indigestible water and bonemeal…

Pincers synched around his torso, tugged him up and away. Victor stared between his swinging legs as the Leviathan’s maw clamped down on the front of the multi-million-dollar vehicle he had been given to drive. Red-hot teeth sank into the chair where he’d just been sitting.

Victor was swung in a circle and dropped to the ground. The creature that had saved him released its grip and Victor stumbled and almost fell at the feet of the woman who was its mistress.

“Dr. Merchant,” he gasped.

Her Punisher seated itself on her shoulder, rotors folded, talons clenched, sensors extended toward Victor as if waiting for him to make a fool of himself.

“Do you,” he gasped, “have a way out?”

He couldn’t see her expression, but the strike leader pointed back into the jungle in the direction the Leviathan had come from.

“Miércoles,” Victor cursed, lips numb. “You want us to walk?”

Her voice crackled in his earphones. “No, you fool, we have to run.”

Ifrits darted through the air and oozed across machinery and space-suited people, alike. Spindly mantis-like mechanoids sliced chunks off the harvester with burning claws. Bloated creatures like giant fleas lapped at spilled blood and fuel. And the Leviathan, with great efficiency, ate the harvester Victor had been so stupid as to drive into the middle of this metal-eating jungle.

Dr. Merchant was right, a thought which probably didn’t give her much comfort as she watched people fall under diamond-serrated limbs and sun-hot mandibles. And a jet of flame in the sky signified something worse was coming.

“Dragons!” Dr. Merchant yelled. “On the ground!”

Victor hit the mud at the same time as the landing gear of one of the giant, flying predators. The closest Dragon flamed as its wings tilted, its jet engines blasting craters into the mud, its narrow head pointed directly at one of the people, striker or scab, Victor didn’t know.

“Punisher, Fetch!” Dr. Merchant commanded, and flung out an arm, pointing.

The tame mechanoid launched itself off her back, churning through the rain toward the stricken man. It buzzed between the Dragon and its prey, grappling claw jabbing like the stinger of a giant wasp. Surely that wasn’t natural behavior. How could Dr. Merchant have trained the creature so well without using a handshake gauntlet? Despite himself, despite everything, Victor was impressed.

The Dragon was not. As the wrapped its claw around the man it had been ordered to save, the Dragon spread its mouthparts and snatched the smaller mechanoid out of the air. It didn’t bother to cut apart the Punisher’s structural elements, just hacked its processes, stole its factors, and sucked dry its reserves of oil and liquid oxygen. The dry husk splashed into the mud, and the Dragon turned its headlights back to the human.

Even in his restrictive suit, the man should have been able to escape, but the Dragon pulled back its buzzing and steaming mouthparts and extended the long, black tube of its flamethrower. A little pilot light kindled and Victor’s visor lit up with a new danger symbol.

Oxygen.

Fire bloomed again, igniting the gasoline rain.

When he could see again, the oxygen had burned away, and so had the other astronaut. The Dragon rooted through a mass of bubbling plastic, clenching its mandibles in frustration when it found nothing but carbonized meat.

“I’m going to crawl toward the edge of the jungle,” Dr. Toledo said.

“You want to get chewed up and spat out by a bunch of damn feral robots?” snapped Victor. “You may have some stupid martyr fetish—”

“No martyrs on Petrola,” she said, “dying is too easy here.”

Victor ignored that. “—but I didn’t come to Titan to die. Dios! I haven’t even had a chance to do…my job…” The hope was even more painful than the despair. Sharp and hot as the mouthparts of the streamlined head now swinging into position above him.

His body wanted to lie down and roast. Rolling back to his feet was the most difficult thing Victor had ever had to do.

“Oh.” He said. “Oh miércoles.”

“What did you say?” Dr. Merchant’s head swiveled around in her fishbowl helmet. “Doesn’t that mean ‘Wednesday’?”

“It means I didn’t want to say mierda in front of a lady.” Victor stood up.

“What? Get down, you fool,” hissed Dr. Merchant. “Get down,  before—”

The Dragon noticed him. Antennae extended from their housings along the giant predator’s grooved head. Spotlights focused on him. Mouthparts opened and liquid oxygen drooled and evaporated.

Victor held up his arm.

“Handshake,” he said. And his gauntlet went to pieces.

Victor wasn’t a biologist. He didn’t have a single tame mechanic clinging to his wrist. He had about a thousand.

The slaved factors, each the size and shape of a thumbnail, flaked off his suit and scattered. Even as they fell, they synched with each-other and the transponder in Victor’s suit. Fast as army ants, they crawled up the Dragon’s face, wire legs blurring, stumpy antennae waving, broadcasting to the animal’s native factors that they were friends.

They lied.

The Dragon froze as the parasites’ code burrowed into its electric nervous system.

Victor took a tentative step forward, put his hand on the Dragon’s neck. It shivered and bowed as new windows opened on his visor.

“What do you propose we should do now?” she said. “What possible good can it do you to hack a Dragon?”

“Well,” said Toledo, “If my Dragon attacked the others…”

“It would be torn to shreds.” But Dr. Merchant stood beside him, so she must have some confidence in him. Some other plan.

“Yes?” Victor said.

“You fly that thing to Xanadu Base and tell them. Try to mount a rescue if you think it will do any good.”

It wouldn’t. Most of the other Dragons ripped at the harvester, but Victor could see another of the giant predators slither toward them on its caterpillar-tread belly. .

“Um. I don’t think I can actually tell this thing where to go.” Victor scrambled up the Dragon’s flank, over its folded wings. “I’ve never worked with Dragons before, but I’ve worked with Punishers, and the somatic programming is very similar…”

“But the behavioral processor is entirely different.” Dr. Merchant took his hand and scrambled up after him onto the Dragon’s back. “Look for the reward complex connected to its hunting instinct, it should lead to a command line to tell the satiated animal to fly home.”

“Fly home.” Even as he repeated her words, a line of the Dragon’s mind-code flashed in Victor’s visor. “Got it,” he said.

The wings unfolded, angled down for vertical take-off. The jet intakes spun up and the mechanoid’s long neck retracted. Its puffy, feathered outline smoothed out, condensing and stiffening as the factors that made up its body held each other close, preparing for flight.

87 Writing for Games with Lars Doucet and James Cavin

http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/87LarsandJimJan.mp3

Welcome back to the Kingdoms of Evil podcast! This week we’re talking with Lars Doucet and James Cavin, the owner and the head writer of Level Up Labs, creators of Defender’s Quest and Defender’s Quest II. We’re talking about writing for games.

The gun is loaded with story-bullets

Tower Defense games: Protect the MacGuffin!

We want a tower defense game, but with people instead of towers.

The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes by Rudyard Kipling

Zombie spiritualism

Swedish people have +15% Frost Fortitude!

Malaria resistance

Immersion is a contract between the developer and the audience

Shadow of the Colossus

Following up

Well that was one quickly resolved New Year’s resolution! Thanks to Melissa Walshe, author and publicist, I figured out a little more about how I’m doing on google analytics.

First I go to (as Melissa told me) “the top right corner (in line with the main headings like Audience Over view, etc., is a box with the dates you’re looking at the data for.” I set my calendar to display results since May (when I installed google analytics) and looked for the most popular individual pages, which were: (1) the main page, (2) the Kingdoms of Evil pages, and (3) the individual pages for my books. I’m not surprised about (1) and (3), since I usually tell other people either about my website as a whole or about one of my book projects. It is interesting to see that a lot of people are still reading my old first novel. Keep the evil love, coming, guys!

The highlights were Wheel in the Sky, Lake Vostok, and Creating Cultures with Tex Thompson, as well as spikes of activity centered around days on which I posted podcasts about manga,  historical research, alternate history, and my announcement that I was done with my novella, Petrolea (that warms my heart, you guys). Lake Vostok, I think is probably due to people stumbling onto my site by accident and then leaving, could Wheel in the Sky be the same way?  Certainly, it seems podcasts are my major draw. That and my actual, you know, writing.

Looks like I should give my podcast some more credit, and my wonderful, awful ideas…less. Sniff. I like those ideas.

It would be nice if I could get a more concrete number for the podcast‘s listenership. Some quick math based on the most popular podcast in November (Being Professional) (28 pageviews, 5 minutes average time spent on page for the 33 minute podcast) translates to about 3 people who I can assume listened all the way through. I can compare that with the most- and second-most-visited podcast in December (Spanish SFF and Technological Frontiers) to get 7 people and 5. So I can assume an average audience of about 5 people in the last couple of months. Clearly, I need to do something to increase my listenership.

Next, I set my calendar to take me all the way back to May 2014, when I installed google analytics.

Long story short, what the hell happened in November? Did people stop listening to the podcast? I admit, I had some trouble with the podcasts I recorded in the spring and (because of how long my queue was) posted in the fall. Due to a bad weather, bad internet, bad computer, and bad software all working together in a glorious circle of crap, the audio quality on some of my podcasts was really poor. I think the lesson there is that I need to know when I’m likely to have bad reception or once I’ve got a bad audio file, swallow my pride and ask the guest to reschedule or re-record.

In terms of where people are coming from, oh my God, how misguided I have been. Most of my traffic has come through the Kingdoms of Evil page on TVtropes, which I haven’t touched in years. Next comes deviantart, which I also ignore cruelly, followed by twitter, disqus (my comments system), and facebook. No sign of tumblr anywhere in there. Clearly, I need to get off tumblr and go back to my real friends on TVtropes and deviantart.

To sum up, it looks like I was right about meaningful, helpful interactions among like-minded people. I don’t need likes or even shares, I need conversation.

And don’t worry, this is the last of my self-indulgent navel-gazing for a while. Next week we go back into our regularly scheduled programs, with a podcast on Monday.

 

Taking Stock

Za mnogo godini, everyone.

The Kingdoms of Evil Podcast, Language is Great!, and Wonderful Awful Ideas will be back starting January 12th.

Until then, let’s make some resolutions for the coming year.

I already talked about what worked and what didn’t last year (to summarize: more alpha-readers, more medium- and short-length work, more collaboration, but no more serialized stories on the website), but today I want to cast a more critical eye on what I’m doing and in the spirit of the season, make some resolutions.

With charts! (uh, if you don’t like the charts, just scroll down to the end)

I pulled these numbers out of the air, but you can see that Wonderful Awful Ideas is a huge success. At least for me. It’s a fun, easy way for me to either get an annoying idea out of my head or see that it could use more development. I thought I would be the only reader of the language blog, but it seems to interest people on Tumblr and Facebook (is that a good thing? See below). The podcast alternates being the MOST FUN EVER (the actual conversations) and THE BIGGEST DRAG EVER (the audio editing) and it takes an enormous amount of time, but it is the biggest draw to the website (uh, I think. More on that below).

Ah, the social networks. A waste of time, or a complete waste of time? Tumblr is a bit whacky, but I’ve had a few really interesting conversations there, it’s a convenient place to develop bits and pieces of ideas, and it’s fun. Twitter doesn’t take up much time, but is usually pretty barren, unless I manage to be online at the same time as North America (in other words, talk to me, Europe!). Facebook surprised me with how useful it is. It’s not as much flash-bang fun as Tumblr and takes more time than Twitter, but there are days when the bulk of my site traffic comes from the Big Face.

  And then there’s the time I spend, you know, actually trying to write novels. Research takes forever but makes me a blast at parties (assuming you want someone to lecture you about Ottoman history), and if I didn’t do it I’d be ashamed of myself. No, sorry, research only takes 75% of forever. Illustrations take FOREVER and I’m always disappointed with them but I the website looks like crap without them and I promised my friends I would draw pictures of dinosaurs for them! I’m sorry! I’m sorry I haven’t drawn a dinosaur for you! Please don’t leave me because, notice that huge blue triangle for “correspondence?” That isn’t just alpha- and beta-readers (without whom I literally would not be able to write), it’s the fun conversations I’ve struck up and continued with awesome people with awesome ideas. love you guys!

There’s one problem with all this stuff, though:

Buh?

When I calculate how “useful” something is, I barely know what I’m talking about. I can tell how many people visit the site on a given day (not many) how long they stay (not long) and how many leave immediately and never come back (lots). But I can’t figure out which posts get the most views, how long the average person stays once you discount the people who leave immediately, and what kind of material people want to see more of.

So I guess my first resolution is going to have to be: (1) learn how to use Google Analytics.

~~~

As for my other resolutions? Well…

2) shift from many, meaningless interactions to a few meaninful ones

3) figure out ways to pay it forward and help other people

4) set aside time for some god-damn art

5) research more (sigh)

And as for projects, well I don’t want to jinx myself or set anything in stone, but I’m thinking about:

1) making a comic with someone

2) expanding one of the Wonderful, Awful Ideas into a medium-length story (but which one?)

3) the next novel? Maybe sci-fi? Maybe on the theme of exploration?

4) Figure out how to get more feedback from YOU, my readers.

So what do you want to see me do this year?

 

Petrolea is DONE!

Petrolea is done! 56 pages and 25K words. A lot still needs to be done, but it will be ready for beta-readers very soon. Send me a message if you want to read this fun little novella about environmentalism and feral robot Dragons.

What I learned this Year

The holidays are upon us and I’m on vacation. The Kingdoms of Evil Podcast, Language is Great!, and Wonderful Awful Ideas will be back starting January 12th.

To tide you over in the mean time, here’s What I Learned in 2014

This year was about experimenting with a lot of new things, including short-form work, social networking, and collaboration. Turns out I am most productive when working on a middle- and short-length project in addition to my novel project. So expect more small projects, but not serialized stories. The serialized stories I posted on the website stressed me out, didn’t attract many readers, and disqualified themselves for most professional markets. But I did learn that I love collaboration! That and alpha-readers!

So if you want to collaborate with me or be an alpha-reader, let me know!

~~~

And now for the bibliography.

All in all, I got a lot accomplished in 2014, including:

New Frontiers: science fiction novel about sex and aliens. (looking for publishers)

Charming Lies: historical fantasy novel about mind control and the Ottoman Empire. (finished draft 1)

Petrolea: science fiction novella about environmentalism and robot dragons with Simon Roy. (finished draft 1)

Lords of the Earth: short story set a century after H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.(submitted to Abaddon)

The New Age: 3-page comic about the invasion of the Astral Plane with Turbofanatic. (submitted to Iron Circus’s New World Anthology)

Wheel in the Sky: serialized fantasy short story with Turbofanatic and Michael Silva (read the 1st draft here)

Route to Mecca: serialized alternate history story (read the first chapter here)

Also, lots of web content:

My blog about linguistics.

Wonderful, Awful Ideas: a new SFF concept every Friday.

The Kingdoms of Evil Podcast: lots of great conversations:

E.C. Ambrose (Historical Fantasy), Beth Cato (Murder and Mystery), Steve Bein (Buddhist Philosophy), Tex Thompson (Creating Cultures), Jaime Wyman (Self-Publishing), Steve LeCouiliard (Historical Accuracy), Matt Mitrovich (Alternate History), and many more.

I also visited LonConIII in the summer. My first con ever was a great experience, mostly because it allowed me to finally meet some long-term correspondence buddies face to face, but also because it made me feel like I was a real writer who actually might get published some day.

And ah those epic restaurant-crawls. May we stuff ourselves even fuller at Sasquan!

Chestita Nova Godina, everyone.