Filed under: Babylon 5, Connections, Failure, General Musings, Government, Health, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Science Fiction, Society, Terrorism, Violence, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: politics, jim downey, writing, blogging, Science Fiction, www youtube, health, predictions, Babylon 5, Syria, CWC
As we were on our morning walk, I rolled my right hand over a bit and looked at the blade of it. My wife looked down at it as well.
“How is it doing?”
I flexed the hand back and forth a bit. The pale yellow-green of a late-stage bruise was still very evident.
* * * * * * *
U.S. Warns Syria on Chemical Weapons
WASHINGTON — President Obama warned Syria on Monday not to use chemical weapons against its own people, vowing to hold accountable anyone who did, even as American intelligence officials picked up signs that such arms might be deployed in the fighting there.
The White House said it had an “increased concern” that the government of President Bashar al-Assad was preparing to use such weapons, effectively confirming earlier reports of activity at chemical weapons sites. The administration said it would take action if they were used, suggesting even the possibility of military force.
“Today I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command: The world is watching,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. “The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”
* * * * * * *
From The Long, Twilight Struggle:
Londo Mollari: Refa, any force attempting to invade Narn would be up to its neck in blood–its own!
Lord Refa: We have no intention of invading Narn. Flattening it, yes–but invading it? We will be using mass drivers. By the time we are done their cities will be in ruins, we can move in at our leisure!
Londo Mollari: Mass drivers? They have been outlawed by every civilized planet!
Lord Refa: These are uncivilized times.
Londo Mollari: We have treaties!
Lord Refa: Ink on a page!
* * * * * * *
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is an arms control agreement which outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons. Its full name is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction. The agreement is administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is an independent organization based in The Hague, Netherlands.
The main obligation under the convention is the prohibition of use and production of chemical weapons, as well as the destruction of all chemical weapons. The destruction activities are verified by the OPCW. As of January 2013, around 78% of the (declared) stockpile of chemical weapons has thus been destroyed.[5][6] The convention also has provisions for systematic evaluation of chemical and military plants, as well as for investigations of allegations of use and production of chemical weapons based on intelligence of other state parties.
Currently 188 states are party to the CWC, and another two countries (Israel and Myanmar) have signed but not yet ratified the convention.[1]
Syria is one of six UN member states who are not signatories to the Convention.
* * * * * * *
Shortly after the conversation above:
* * * * * * *
Syria crisis: ‘Strong evidence’ of chemical attacks, in Saraqeb
The BBC has been shown evidence which appears to corroborate reports of a chemical attack in the northern Syrian town of Saraqeb last month. Eyewitnesses and victims say that government helicopters dropped at least two devices containing poisonous gas on the town.
The Syrian government says it did not and will not use chemical weapons.
Shortly after midday on 29 April, the town of Saraqeb came under attack from government military positions about five miles (8km) away. A local activist we met filmed as the shells landed.
* * * * * * *
As we were on our morning walk, I rolled my right hand over a bit and looked at the blade of it. My wife looked down at it as well.
“How is it doing?”
I flexed the hand back and forth a bit. The pale yellow-green of a late-stage bruise was still very evident.
“It’s healing. The pain has gone from being that bright, intense flash you get from a broken bone to a dull but substantial ache. That tells me that it’s knitting back together properly. A few more days of not stressing the hand, and it’ll be OK.”
We paused, watched the dog take care of his business. As I reached down with a plastic bag to remove the results from the neighbor’s lawn, I thought about how lucky I was.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, Blade Runner, Connections, Depression, Failure, Flu, General Musings, Health, Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Science, Science Fiction, Scientific American, Society, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: Alzheimer's, art, bipolar, Blade Runner, blogging, care-giving, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, health, Her Final Year, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kickstarter, memoir, memory, New York Review of Books, Oliver Sacks, parainfluenza, Philip K. Dick, reality, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, video, writing, www youtube
Of late, as I have been slowly getting over the rather nasty bout of parainfluenza I mentioned previously, shedding the more annoying and disgusting symptoms, I’ve also come to realize that just now I am pulling out of the depressive trough of one of my long-term bipolar cycles. It wasn’t a particularly bad trough, and was somewhat mitigated by the success of the Kickstarter back in the fall. Nonetheless, it was there, as I can see in hindsight.
I am frequently struck just how much of our life doesn’t make sense until seen from a distance. Just recently I was surprised at the revelation of *why* the failure of Her Final Year to be more successful bothered me as much as it did: it was because I had seen the book as being a way to create something positive (for the world) out of the experience of being a long-term care provider. To have the book only reach a limited audience was, in my mind, saying that our roles as care-givers didn’t matter.
Which isn’t true, of course, but that was the emotional reality which I had been dealing with. The “narrative truth”, if you will. A term I borrow from a very interesting meditation by Oliver Sacks at the New York Review of Books website titled Speak, Memory. From the article:
There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. (The neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman often speaks of perceiving as “creating,” and remembering as “recreating” or “recategorizing.”) Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.
Let me repeat one bit of that: “Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves.”
I think this is at the very heart of why fiction has such power, and appeal. I also think that it explains the well-documented phenomenon of people believing things which are clearly and demonstratively false, if their facts come from a trusted source.
Little surprise that writers of fiction are aware of this very human trait, and have explored it in all manner of ways. I have a note here on my desk, a scrawl written on a scrap of paper some months ago as I was thinking through character motivations in St. Cybi’s Well, which says simply: “We take our truths from the people we trust.”
And here’s another example, from one of my favorite movies, exploring a favorite theme of Philip K. Dick’s:
That theme? The nature of reality. And this is how the Sacks essay closes:
Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
In other words, that reality is a shared construct. A Communion of Dreams, if you will.
Time for me to get back to work.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, free, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, promotion, reviews, Science Fiction
Well, we had a grand total of 340 downloads/sales of Communion of Dreams this week. Not impressive. Part of me is tempted to say that I can’t even *give* the book away.
But that’s not true, and to be honest I can’t say that I am terribly upset that we didn’t break the 25,000 mark. Yeah, sure, it would have been neat, but in the end it was just an arbitrary ‘big round number’, and I am still very happy with the overall performance of the book this past year.
So — thanks, everyone! For your support. For your reviews. For your kind words and comments. For telling your friends about the book. For helping to back my Kickstarter. For everything. It’s been a good year.
I’m going to leave the $2.00 discount code for my CreateSpace store in place for a while, perhaps indefinitely. I can’t really drop the overall price for the paperback sold through Amazon by very much, since the actual costs of printing and selling the book are high enough that I would lose money on each sale. But there’s more room on the pricing in my CreateSpace store, so I can offer the discount there: 99K4TNJZ
And I’ve dropped the retail price of the Kindle edition to $3.95. Such a bargain!
Thanks again.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Failure, Feedback, Flu, Health, Kindle, Marketing, NPR, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Amazon, blogging, Christmas, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, free, health, jim downey, Kindle, literature, NPR, promotion, publishing, Science Fiction, self-publishing, Simon & Schuster, technology
I’ve been sick with the current nasty version of cold/flu going around, so I missed writing about this:
They used to call it the “vanity press,” and the phrase itself spoke volumes. Self-published authors were considered not good enough to get a real publishing contract. They had to pay to see their book in print. But with the advent of e-books, self-publishing has exploded, and a handful of writers have had huge best-sellers.
True, of course, but the piece is also about how the ‘traditional’ publishing houses are now trying to get in on the self-publishing market:
There have been more and more self-publishing successes recently, and the audiences are growing by leaps and bounds, says Carolyn Reidy. She’s the CEO of Simon & Schuster, which recently announced that it’s launching a new self-publishing service. If traditional publishers want to survive, Reidy says, they have to keep up with the rapid changes taking place in the industry. The growth of self-publishing is one of them.
“We actually understand that it is a different world than what we do,” she says. “We want to understand it, and if it is going to … be a threat to our business, we definitely want to understand it and also see how we can turn that to our advantage. And one of the advantages is, it is a great way to find authors, also new genres and new audiences.”
Because I’ve been sick, perhaps, my attitude is “screw ‘em.” Yes, I would like to have my books readily available in brick & mortar stores. And realistically, that’s only practical through a traditional publishing house.
But as I have said and documented here for almost six years now, traditional publishing is broken. The major publishers were too inflexible in the face of changing technology, and entirely too insular & inbred in how they sought out new authors. If you were famous or had a connection inside the industry, you had a chance of getting noticed, otherwise it was nothing but a lottery with little or no regard for quality.
I certainly haven’t hit the big time with self-publishing. And I have had to work a lot harder at promotion. But I am *very* happy with how it has gone, and I really appreciate all the help I have gotten from my readers. Thanks, everyone!
And to that end, let’s do a “free download” day for Christmas: The Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams will be free to download all day. So if you don’t have the book, get it! And if you know someone who you think might enjoy it, tell them about the promotion!
Merry Christmas!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Brave New World, Failure, General Musings, Government, Man Conquers Space, NASA, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Violence | Tags: Apollo, blogging, Golden Spike, jim downey, Moon, NASA, Pearl Harbor, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, technology
“Pearl Harbor” was 71 years ago today.
The launch of Apollo 17 was 40 years ago today.
That means that there was less time between the start of WWII (well, our involvement in it) and the end of humankind’s time on the Moon than there is between now and when Apollo 17 left the Taurus-Littrow valley.
That don’t seem right.
Yeah, sure, there’s a company saying that they want to send commercial flights back to the Moon.
Somehow, I doubt that it’s quite that easy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Failure, Humor, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: art, blogging, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, humor, jim downey, Science Fiction, technology
So, last night I posted about the fiasco with the print job for the special edition of Communion of Dreams. I thought this morning I would explain just exactly what the problem is.
Typically, inexpensive paperbacks are made using a process called “perfect binding” where the stack of individual pages are glued up along the spine and a cover is slapped on. The cover at the spine provides a backing to the adhesive used. It’s a process which can be completely mechanized, and is fast & cheap, providing decent value for the money. It’s how the paperback copies of Communion of Dreams are printed.
However, more expensive machine hardcover books, and most varieties of hand-bound books, are done using sheets which are folded and sewn. A folded sheet is called a folio, and a gathering of such folded sheets is called a signature (or section, or quire). How many folios are in a signature varies greatly, from single sheets up to about a dozen, depending on the thickness of the paper and how the book is designed. To make the book ‘work’ properly, the book designer has to make sure that the individual pages are laid out such that when the signatures are gathered together the sequence of pages is correct.
Chances are, most of the physical books you’ve read conform to what we in the West think of as ‘normal’: they have the spine of the book on the left side, pages are numbered with odd numbers on the right and even numbers on the left. To read the book, you turn pages from right to left.
But if you think about this for a moment, it is not the only way a book could be arranged. You could have the spine at the top, for example, and have the ‘book’ work like a typical calendar, turning the pages from bottom to top.
Or you could have the spine on the right side. This orientation would then have you turn pages from left to right. This, in fact, is how traditional Hebrew Bible books are printed, and the same convention is used with Japanese books.
And it’s the way they printed Communion of Dreams, which we discovered when we started looking at the sheets last night.
Here’s an image of the center folio of the proof they sent us:
Correct.
And here’s an image of the same center folio from the sheets we picked up yesterday:
Incorrect.
Note that even the page numbers are now in the wrong locations, being in the center rather than the outside of the pages. The entire book — the entire print run — is done this way. If I wanted to, I could actually bind the book so as to read ‘backwards’ like a Hebrew Bible, though the page numbers are all in the wrong location for that.
I must admit, I’m tempted, just for giggles.
But we’ll get things sorted out with the printer, and get the proper printing done.
Edited to add on Friday afternoon: Yeah, so I think after the printer saw this blog post, and went back over their own records, they realized where & how they had screwed up. They’re now going to reprint the whole order.
Which is what they should do, but it is nice to have a business who is willing to make good without much of a fuss. I can only compliment them on their business practices, and will be happy to use them again in the future.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Failure, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, jim downey, Science Fiction
Well, *that’s* annoying.
Printer called, said that the job was done and we could pick it up, a bit earlier than we expected. So we decided to pop over to Sedalia (about 75 miles) to get it. First, there was an error on the bill, which took them a while to sort out. We did a quick check of the print run, saw that the paper was correct, the grain running the right way. Then, when we got home we discovered that they managed to screw up the pagination – even though it was correct on the proofs they sent us. So I now have $904.70 worth of scrap paper sitting in the bindery.
We’ll get it sorted out in the morning when they re-open. But it’s damned annoying.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Connections, Constitution, Failure, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society | Tags: Abraham Lincoln, election, jim downey, politics, predictions
This seems timely:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
I fear we have forgotten some hard-earned lessons.
Worse, I fear that an entire industry now exists which is premised on making us forget those lessons.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Failure, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, free, Hallowe'en, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, literature, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that there was a case of ‘Bad Timing‘ in terms of having problems scheduling another promotional day for Communion of Dreams.
Well, in the whirlwind which followed with the success of the Kickstarter, I didn’t get back to this topic. Suffice it to say that Amazon took a few days to resolve the glitch in their system — it wasn’t just me who ran into it; they said that it was a “known problem we are working hard to resolve.” One of the rare occasions when I haven’t been happy with their system.
But now that the glictch is fixed, and I’m past the worst of the Kickstarter changes, time to go ahead and reschedule a give-away. So, it seems right to do it on this coming Wednesday. Yup, Hallowe’en.
No trick — just a treat: please download the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams. You don’t even need to own an actual Kindle, since there are free Kindle emulators for just about every computer/reader/mobile device out there.
Happy All-Hallow’s Eve-eve-eve, everyone!
Jim Downey
