David Lee Summers's Blog, page 66

Last Call for Summer/Winter Sale

The Smashwords Summer/Winter ebook sale ends tomorrow. After that, all of the Hadrosaur Productions books return to regular price. What I like about buying books from Smashwords is that you can download them for your your favorite device, whether it be a Kindle, a Nook, a Sony ereader, or your tablet or phone. What’s more, they’re DRM free, so you can copy them to multiple devices without worrying about whether or not it’s an “approved” device.

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Our weird westerns are on sale for 50% off this...

Fan Fiction?

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I’ve often heard the Japanese word doujinshi translated as “fan fiction.” So, I found it interesting to discover that Seven Seas Entertainment licensed two collections of Dance in the Vampire Bund doujinshi and translated them into English. Perhaps a better translation of the word doujinshi is “stories from a specific interest group published for that group.” As it turns out, the Vampire Bund doujinshi consist of manga drawn by Nozumu Tamaki, creator of Dance in the Vampire Bund along with s...

Celebrating Kepler’s Success

Over the course of nine years, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope helped astronomers discover more than 2700 planets. What’s more, the telescope collected so much data that almost a year after the mission’s completion, astronomers are still discovering planets. As each new planet was unveiled, we’d see an artist’s rendering, especially if the planet was deemed of general interest. In 2012, Dr. Steve Howell took the job of Kepler Project Scientist. Soon after, he came to me with an idea for visuali...

One Small Step

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I was just a little too young to remember watching Neil Armstrong’s famous first step on the moon and his famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” However, watching later Apollo landings on television were among my earliest memories. From a young age, I was proud to be part of a species that had flown beyond the Earth and explored another world. Star Trek was on TV and I saw a direction humans might pursue. The space program was important in my house. My dad...

Adventures Through Time and Space

Books are one of the great ways to explore realities that might have been or could yet happen. These stories tell us about ourselves. By looking at the past and seeing what might have been different if certain conditions were changed, we understand a little more how we reached the present day. By looking to the future, we can explore worlds we’d like to visit as well as ones we’d like to avoid in the wrong set of circumstances. In all cases, we learn a little bit more about our spiritual selv...

The Stories They Tell

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I recently had a chance to see the movie The Kid which was directed by Vincent D’Onofrio and stars stars Ethan Hawke as Pat Garrett and Dane DeHaan as Billy the Kid. The movie is actually focused on a boy, Rio (played by Jake Schur), and his sister, Sara (played by D’Onofrio’s daughter, Leila George) who have an abusive father. One night, the father goes into a rage and starts beating their mother. Unable to stand it any longer, Rio shoots his father, but it’s too late. Rio and Sara’s mother...

Hadrosaur’s Weird Westerns on Sale

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I have long been a fan of weird westerns. My love of the genre started in middle school when I discovered the television series The Wild Wild West. Later, when I started writing, I wished I could write stories with a similar flavor. My dream came true when I discovered David B. Riley’s magazine Trails: Intriguing Stories of the Old West. I started submitting stories to him and he started publishing them. Later, he would publish my story “The Persian Witch” in an anthology titled Trails: Intr...

The Pointing Dance

This week, I have been engaged in an important, albeit tedious activity at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope. I have been building pointing maps. Telescopes are large, bulky machines that have to point with extreme precision and track the almost literal clockwork motion of the sky. They are engineered carefully, but like any machine they are subject to wear and tear. What’s more, to keep getting the best science, telescopes have to be upgraded from time to time. This changes the telescope’s behavi...

Celebrating the Future

Early in the morning of June 25, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 mission launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Actual deployment of the sail is set for today. These are great accomplishments to celebrate. On a more personal note, my novel Firebrandt’s Legacy received a wonderful review from Midwest Book Review. The reviewer says Firebrandt’s Legacy is “A rip-roaring space adventure!”

Also underway is the annual Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale. It gets its name because where I live i...

Holmes, Pirates, and Cthulhu. Oh my!

Back in March, I had the honor of meeting Kazumitsu Akamatsu at Wild Wild West Con in Tucson, Arizona. Akamatsu is not only a steampunk fanatic, he’s also written for anime and Japanese cinema, he’s an artist, and he’s a SOFUBI master. SOFUBI are Japanese soft vinyl figures, often depicting monsters. Here I am with Akamatsu and one of the other vendors, posing with steampunk guns he made. I’m the one with the red hair in a costume inspired by my Captain Firebrandt character.

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I have been watc...