A.C. Flory's Blog, page 63

Covid-19 – a possible strategy [updated]

At the end of this post you’ll find a video about gentle exercises to improve posture. BUT, they also ‘open’ the lungs and may help.

I don’t normally repeat anecdotal evidence because I truly believe in the scientific method, but we’re all in uncharted territory here, and this first hand report by Chris Cuomo makes sense to me:

Forcing yourself to move around, doing gentle exercise, forcing yourself to breathe deep, these are all things my Dad did in his sixties, just days after a surgery on his nose. He did it again after a kidney operation to remove kidney stones. He did it despite best practice back then, and he recovered faster than those patients who stayed immobile.

Things have changed a lot since Dad drove the medical staff insane with his crazy notions. These days we’re encouraged to get up and move around as soon as possible because movement improves our breathing and blood flow, both of which are critical to recovery. Yet with Covid-19, we’re told to stay at home until we’re so sick, hospital, and possibly intensive care, are all that’s left.

But maybe curling up in a ball at home is not the right thing to do.

If the results from ICNARC [Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre] are correct, people on ventilators have only a 50/50 chance of surviving. Those are not good odds:

Maybe Chris Cuomo and my Dad are right – if you get sick, push past the pain and keep moving.

I hope none of us ever have to put this anecdotal evidence to the test, but if the worst happens, this advice may just make a difference.

Stay well. Stay safe. #StayHome

Updated: gentle exercises that happen to also open up the lungs:

Meeks

Doing a runna

Guess what! I went out today!

To be honest, it wasn’t by choice; we’d run out of toilet paper so I had to go. Wearing a zipped up jacket and hood, glasses [fogged], a mask, and bright yellow kitchen gloves, I entered Woolworths soon after 7 am.

I had barely pushed my trolley inside when I was stopped by a security guard. What the…?

Apparently today is the day for pension card holders and others receiving special dispensation, so I had to show my pension card before I was allowed to shop. It felt a little creepy at the time, but then I realised how odd I must look. Perhaps the guard thought I was a profiteer attempting to game the system.

I had originally thought to run in, grab a pack of toilet paper and run out again, but when I saw how few people were wandering the aisles, I decided to see what else I could find. At this point I should probably explain that for about 3 weeks now, I’ve been doing all my shopping online and having it home delivered. This is a real boon for people who need to self isolate, but it is also a source of extreme anxiety.

For starters, the online catalogue doesn’t seem to have every product I’m used to buying. Or perhaps I’m not looking properly. Plus a huge number of items are almost always ‘out of stock’, such as gloves, flour, and tissues. Then there’s the added hurdle of delivery times, which can be 3, 4, or even 5 days after the day on which the order was placed. For example, I placed an order early Sunday morning. It included toilet paper, but the earliest delivery date is for this coming Thursday. Today is Tuesday.

And finally, there’s the issue of never knowing what I’ll actually get in that home delivery. You see, when there are perishables included in the order, the person who actually fulfils the order doesn’t do so until it’s ready to go out. Makes sense, right? The trouble is that things that were in stock Sunday morning may not be in stock by Thursday afternoon.

I know that many of my American friends shop online all the time, and enjoy a convenient, efficient delivery service. Sadly, Australia is not there yet, which may explain the whole toilet paper thing. When you don’t know when your next roll will arrive, it’s hard not to be anxious.

Anyway, my shopping adventure was a success, and I returned home safely with my treasures, which I then washed on the front verandah before taking them inside the house. Then I washed the steering wheel, door handles, my clothes and finally me. Now I can sit and enjoy some crusty bread, frankfurts, cracked pepper pate and a fresh cup of coffee. Oh, and the loo paper.

Life really is about the little things.

Innerscape Omnibus for Kobo

As I explained in the post ‘The Omnibus hits a pot hole‘, I can’t make Innerscape directly available on the Kobo ereader because Rakuten won’t allow me to use ‘acflory’ as my name. -rolls eyes- But where there’s a will, and a lot of help from a friend… ta dah, a workaround!

The friend in question is Dawn from DawnGillDesigns. You may also know her as the Silversmith. Anyway, I knew Dawn used the Kobo ereader so I contacted her and asked her to see if she could download the epub version of the Omnibus from sync.com, and read it on her Kobo. These are the pics she sent me:

[image error]

This was straight out of the box, so to speak. The next one is after she adjusted both the font and the margins:

[image error]

Proof positive that the epub can be sideloaded onto the Kobo! But how did Dawn do it? And was it hard to do?

When I quizzed Dawn about her method, this is what she wrote back:

‘It was super basic. I clicked on the link you sent me. My virus scanner scanned it, and then I plugged in my kobo. This automatically brought up a pane within file explorer, so I was able to drag the download icon at the footer of my browser window across. Then I ejected my kobo, by right clicking on the USB icon, and let it do it’s thing. Even easier than a library book, because all I had to do was drag and drop.’

So me lovelies, you too can download the Innerscape Omnibus onto your Kobo ereaders, and here’s the link to do it:

https://ln2.sync.com/dl/0dcbc6560/gbe6mitp-g88uxh6b-mxu4rt4g-6yuib2je

The ‘for Kobo’ link on the sidebar to the right will also take you to the same download link.

The Omnibus is free for everyone stuck at home during this global lockdown, and you won’t need to sign up or register or do anything at all. As with the PDF version, simply click the link and follow the onscreen instructions. Then follow Dawn’s instructions to sideload the epub file onto your Kobo ereader.

All I ask is that you don’t try to get some kind of commercial gain out of it. This is my gift to you. Read, share, enjoy, and #StayHome .

-hugs-

Meeks

Portrait of the Writer

I love graphics and design, but I couldn’t do a drawing of a person to save my life. That’s why I am so impressed with this drawing created by my friend, YorgosKC :

[image error]

He worries that it’s not good enough. I say it’s amazing! I see myself in every line.

Thank you my friend. Thank you.

Meeks

Covid-19 – if the worst should happen…

I found this video of Dr John Campbell’s incredibly informative and just had to share:

The info. is focused on how a partner or relative should care for someone with Covid-19, but some of the info. could easily apply to someone at home alone. If you know what to look for and when to call for help, the life you save could be your own.

cheers

Meeks

p.s. I recently found out why it’s recommended that you wash your hands for 20 seconds. Apparently the Covid-19 virus is protected by an outer fatty? membrane, and 20 is how long it takes the soap to destroy that membrane and thus, kill the virus.

The Omnibus hits a pot hole

I uploaded the epub file of the Innerscape Omnibus to Draft-2-Digital last night and expected to be able to provide links to the various e-readers today. Not going to happen, at least not the way I thought it would.

Lost in Spam – a wonderful review of Vokhtah!

I was checking my emails after dinner when something made me open my spam folder. The first few items were genuine spam, but then I found an email from Chris Graham [aka The Story Reading Ape] alerting me to a brilliant review of Vokhtah. If this were fiction, you wouldn’t believe it!

“They were now just two frail iVokh pitting themselves against the might of the wild.”

Vokhtah is a difficult but rewarding book. If you like unusual conceptions of extraterrestrials, this is for you. Once you’ve read about half of it, the complexities begin to clarify themselves, but two readings are needed for complete understanding. For example, it took me quite a while to grasp that the Blue and the Messenger were the same individual, and I also didn’t realize that there were two traders’ caravans wending their way to Needlepoint – I thought the Junior and the Messenger were in the same caravan and I got confused. Part of the problem is that the characters don’t have names, only titles. In her end matter, the author addresses this – it seems there is a taboo in this culture about enunciating your real name.

Vokhtah is a grim and forbidding planet; it has two suns, one a hot white star and the other a red dwarf. Sometimes they both shine at once, creating a climate of extremes. The planet is populated with an assortment of mostly vicious and predatory lifeforms and that includes the intelligent ones, who prefer to consume their food animals live. It’s a tribute to the author that she can take these basically repulsive intelligent lifeforms and make them sympathetic. And I would recommend that any human ship of exploration steer clear of the planet Vokhtah – humans would probably be seen as prey animals!

My guess would be that the Vokh evolved from bat-like creatures – their ability to echo-locate is mentioned briefly. They have wings (which contain their lungs), so most of them can fly. They have two hearts. And they are telepathic hermaphrodites with seemingly magical inner powers, like mind-healing and also mind-killing (their Healers are also trained as assassins). There are two variant species – the Vokh (large and dominant) and the iVokh (meaning literally “small Vokh”). The Vokh have a serious flaw – breeding is consummated by means of violent rape; nobody wants to bear an offspring because the “female” always dies in childbirth (this doesn’t occur with the iVokh).

However, the people have a strong sense of honor and obligation – if you accept help from someone, you incur an obligation and if you don’t fulfill it, you are ostracized. In the second half of the book, after the episode at the Little Blue River, the main characters – the Messenger and the Apprentice – are shown developing a sense rare in these people – empathy, an ability to relate to and care about others with whom one has a relationship, beyond the obligations of the code of honor.

All this just scratches the surface of the author’s astonishing creation. I should also mention that the book is a cliff hanger, and no second volume has yet appeared.

I must say a few words about the language. Unfortunately, the Kindle version has no Table of Contents and so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the author provided a brief treatment of the language in the end matter. It seems to have no pronouns, and verbs are consistently rendered only with the present participle form, all of which helps to create the alien language effect. Certain words used in the text are self-explanatory, like “ki” for “no” and “s’so” for “yes.”

There is one etymological gaffe that I can’t help commenting on – the explanation of the word “boot” (a foot-covering). The character doesn’t know what the word “boot” means and it’s explained as a contraction of “bucket for foot.” And yet that derivation would be impossible since the iVokh aren’t speaking English. You have to assume that the Vokhtah words reflect a similar construction, which the author could have fabricated.

But that’s only a quibble – don’t be deterred! This really is an amazing book and while the culture may not be palatable to everyone (you need a strong stomach sometimes), I definitely recommend it to any serious reader of science fiction.

The review was written by Lorinda Taylor, also known as The Termite Writer. Some days just get better and better.

-hugs-

Meeks

 

Innerscape Omnibus – free as PDF

During this Covid-19 crisis I want to help in any way I can, so I’ve turned my sci-fi trilogy, Innerscape, into an omnibus edition. In the coming weeks, I’ll be offering the omnibus edition up for free in as many formats as I can manage.

The Innerscape Omnibus includes:

Book 1, Miira
Book 2, The Godsend
Book 3, Nabatea

Just a whisker under 1000 pages so it should keep people going for a while.

Help with testing please!

At some point during the weekend, I suddenly realised that if I published the Innerscape Omnibus to Amazon first, people without Kindles wouldn’t be able to download it at all, for three months. -sigh- I know, I’m fast like that. So this is the revised plan:

I publish the Omnibus as a free PDF first,
Then I publish the epub for free with non Amazon distributors, for 2 weeks?
Then I unpublish both the PDF and the epub so I can offer the Omnibus on Amazon for free.

-rolls eyes-

So here’s where I need some help. I’ve created the PDF, I’ve uploaded it to sync.com, and I have a link for downloading it from sync.com, but I’d kill for some volunteers to test the process. According to sync.com, you don’t need to register or do anything except click on the link and then ‘download’, but the file is over 4 MG, and I’ve grown distrustful in my old age.

So, how about it? Pretty please with sprinkles?

Can you pick the difference?

Back in this post, I asked for your feedback on the cover for the new Innerscape Omnibus. To my huge surprise, almost all of you chose version 3:

[image error]

Of the three, this one was the one I liked least, from a purely aesthetic point of view. Plus it was obvious that the less nerdy amongst you didn’t know that the big square lump in the middle was meant to be the chip on the circuit board. So…

First I came up with this:

[image error]

I really liked the new parts of the new design, but now some of the older parts of the circuit board looked messy. And that lump was still too big. So…

[image error]

The differences are subtle, but to me they make the whole thing more aesthetically pleasing. Yes? No? Maybe?

Would love to get your reaction, and please don’t hesitate to point out things that don’t work. You guys really, really surprised me last time, but I had to admit that you were absolutely right. So… what do you think?

-on tenterhooks-

Meeks