Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, Gardening, Guns, Publishing, Science Fiction
Sorry I haven’t been posting much. It’s been a long and busy week. Had bookbinding and gardening stuff to do, as well as getting a couple of things written and sent to guns.com. But the most important and time-consuming task has been working on Her Final Year. As I noted on my Facebook page:
97,982. That’s how many words are in the main care-giving book. And it’s now closely edited and all formatted. Whew.
The last couple of chapters are especially emotional and hard to read, even now three and a half years later. But it’s done.
And now I need to wrap up another article (this is a fun one, on guns in Science Fiction) and then get on the road for another weekend of BBTI testing.
Jim Downey
Just thought I’d post a link to the BBTI blog post I just wrote, with a lot of images from last week’s long series of testing.
Cheers!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Brave New World, DARPA, Firefox, movies, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, YouTube
So, the massive ballistics testing is done. Most everything has been cleaned up and put away. My head has stopped throbbing from the repeated low-level concussion of firing over 7,000 rounds of ammo, much of it very powerful and from very short barrels. Now it’s time to see if I can get my attention shifted over to all the other stuff I’ve ignored for the last couple of weeks.
Like this wonderful glimpse of the future here now:
I think it says something – a lot, actually – about the state of the world today that some of the first applications of functional brainwave-controlled mechanisms would show up in this kind of consumer product rather than a military application. It’s not the first such toy, either. Which isn’t to say that DARPA or some similar organization hasn’t been experimenting with such tech, but still.
Again and again, I am surprised at how quickly some of the predictions from fiction (including my own) are coming to be actuality. But that’s just the nature of the beast – what you think is going to happen later happens sooner, what you think is going to happen sooner sometimes doesn’t happen at all.
Related, I’ve just about given up on ever getting a straight answer from Trapdoor about if/when Communion of Dreams is actually going to be published. I’ll worry about it after I see to getting Her Final Year out. Some things I can control with brainwaves (indirectly), some things I cannot.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics
Madness. It was madness to think we could get all of this done.
I’m talking about doing over 6,000 rounds for the gap testing, then chop tests on three other cartridges, along with some associated 30 “real world guns” all in a week. We’ll probably get the gap testing done, but that will likely be all.
Still, we’ve got 2,500 rounds done already, and some interesting information is emerging. More later when I’ve had a chance to catch my breath – been something of a marathon.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted from the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Guns, Health, Publishing, Writing stuff
I usually try to avoid posting things on April 1, since *I* don’t trust hardly anything I see online on April Fools. So I held off, other than the link to my Guns.com article.
Anyway, some interesting things to report. First off, the numbers. March had 768 downloads of my complete novel, which means there’s been over 2,000 downloads so far this year, and some 31,000+ total. No, I have no idea when it will be actually published by Trapdoor, so don’t ask.
Hits to BBTI have slowed a bit – down to only 350,650 for March. That puts us at 5,759,535 total hits. Even with it slowing down, we should break 6 million total hits sometime before the end of this month.
Writing for Guns.com has been fun, and seems to have gone well enough. The articles are being well received from what I can tell. I’ve been asked to start also doing ‘Editor Reviews’ of some handguns, and those will start to show up here any day now, if you are interested in such things.
I had another CAT scan this week, following up on the ongoing health issues. Preliminary report from the scan is that things are clear – no major problems show. Which is good – there’s nothing serious going on. But also somewhat frustrating, since it doesn’t show what is causing the lingering pain I feel in my ribs on my right chest. I see my doc next week to discuss things, but mostly I think it will be a matter of just dealing with the pain and getting on with life. Best guess is that it’s probably some kind of muscle/tendon damage that can’t completely heal because I keep breathing. And I’m not willing to stop doing so in the hope that the pain will go away.
But the real news is that yesterday we filed the paperwork with the Missouri Secretary of State to form “HFY Publishing, LLC.” Yeah, on April Fools Day. Seemed appropriate.
No, seriously, while this is a small and largely symbolic step, it was an important one. An even more important one is that I’ve now heard from all of the beta readers, and gotten some very valuable feedback. We (my co-author and I) need to expand the introductory material of the book, to better explain how and why the book is structured the way it is and how to use it to best advantage. We also need to tweak the layout of the book for clarity. Neither of these are major changes, and we should be able to get them sorted in the next week or so.
Well, that gets everything up to date, I think. Now time to go do some home repairs.
Jim Downey
My latest article is up on Guns.com. Here’s an excerpt:
I picked up the gun. Replaced my original magazine, the one with premium defensive ammunition. Chambered a round, took aim. Pulled the trigger.
Just a “click.”
I felt a cold chill run up my spine. My face felt a bit clammy. I waited, then cleared the magazine and round from the gun. My vision focused into a tight tunnel on the pistol in my hands, as the full implication of what had just happened settled in: my carry gun didn’t work when I expected it to.
Read the whole thing to find out what happened.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
From Communion of Dreams, chapter Six:
Navarr smiled slightly. “Yeah. Here.” He picked up the weapon, passed it over to Jon.
It was large, ugly and very functional looking. He handled it, felt the heft and the balance of the thing. There was a palmkey sensor on either side of the grip.
“Nasty little brute, isn’t it? Uses the new generation of ceramic-lattice rounds.” He handed over a magazine with one of the white bullets showing. “Lots of mass for punch, and on impact the lattice collapses, causing the volatiles to fuse. That creates a mini jet of plasma that’ll cut right through ballistic cloth.”
Jon slid one of the rounds from the clip. Designed to offset advances in body armor, the plasma jet would carve right through ablative material and high-tensile cloth that would stop normal slugs or even high powered lasers. Where the jet came in contact with tissue, part of the tissue was vaporized, creating a steam explosion that caused considerable damage. “Anything stop it?”
As mentioned recently, my next article on guns.com concerns selecting a good self-defense ammunition. Here’s the lede:
You need to choose self-defense ammunition for your gun. Simple, right? Just get the biggest, the baddest, the most powerful ammunition in the correct caliber for your gun, and you’re set, right?
Wrong. Wrong, on so many levels. For a whole bunch of reasons. We’ll get to that.
Check it out, pass it along, let me know what you think with comments here or there.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Just a quick note – my first article for Guns.com has been posted, and you can find it here: Ammo by the Numbers. Here’s the lead paragraph:
One of the most bewildering moments for a relatively novice shooter is selecting ammunition. Go online, or into a big-box store, or even into your local gun shop and you can be confronted with a huge array of choices in any given caliber or cartridge design. Most of the boxes have a sort of ‘code’ on the side; some have little charts or even graphs on the bottom. But which one do you want? What does this stuff even mean? Do claims of a certain velocity or energy tell you anything?
Response so far has been good. And this afternoon I got started on a sequel, on how to choose an appropriate self-defense ammunition.
Onward!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, Babylon 5, Ballistics, Bipolar, Failure, Harry Potter, Hospice, Humor, John Lennon, movies, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society
“Vir, do you believe in fate?”
“Well, actually, I believe there are currents in the universe, eddies and tides that pull us one away or the other. Some we have to fight, and some we have to embrace. Unfortunately, the currents we have to fight look exactly like the currents we have to embrace.”
Recently, I came up with an audacious idea. This is something which happens to me now and again. Most of the time, I chuckle over it, consider the possibilities, then let it slide back into the creative froth. But every now and again I get an idea I take somewhat seriously, and consider practically – not so much on whether I think it will work, but on whether I think I can convince enough other people that it will work.
Through the last couple of decades I’ve done better at this than you might think, batting about .500. Here’s a list of the big ones, along with a synopsis:
- Opening an art gallery. This *almost* worked, but remains my most expensive failure to date. It’s very sobering to lose money that belongs to family and friends who trust your judgment, not to mention all the work of yourself, your partner, spouses and employees.
- Writing a novel, and getting it published. Looks like this one will actually work.
- Paint the Moon. My biggest artistic success to date.
- Glass Canopy. This caught the imagination of a number of people, and generated a lot of discussion locally. Now such structures are used elsewhere for exactly this purpose. A failure, but not a total one.
- Nobel Prize for JK Rowling. A debacle, in that so many people hated the idea. But perhaps I was just premature.
- Ballistics By The Inch. A huge success. This was in no way just my idea, and I only did part of the work, but I think the vision I had for how the project would be received was largely mine.
- Co-authoring a care-giving memoir. Still early in the evaluation period on this, so can’t say whether it is a success or not.
And looking over that list, thinking about it, one of the clear things I see which helps make something a success is the amount of work I (and others) put into it. When presented with a zany idea, most people will be amused, say why they think it is crazy, and then more or less forget about it. But if confronted with the fact of an idea made manifest, a lot of that skepticism disappears (or never occurs to people in the first place.)
This isn’t very profound, of course, and certainly isn’t at all new. But I am still somewhat surprised to see how much it actually operates in the real world. It’s like imagination is so difficult for people that they just can’t get past their initial dismissal. I asked for comments on my latest idea, and so far have only heard from one person, who pointed out potential problems with it (this was actually a very helpful response). I can only guess that most other people consider it too nutty an idea to even bother with – but in my gut I’m pretty certain that if this resource existed it would be hugely popular and widely used.
But who knows? Was the voice a ghost or just hallucination? Do you embrace the current or fight it? Failure is real – both due to risk as well as inaction.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Health, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Yesterday, we had an Open House for our neighborhood.
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It’s a curious thing. The novel has now been available online for four years. You’d think that it would be dropping off a bit in terms of popularity. But using the same criteria I’ve used in the past, total downloads of the book this last year have jumped by almost 50%.
Yeah, it had been very consistent in the first three years, averaging a bit over 6,400 downloads. But for 2010 the total downloads were 9,631. We’re now over 29,000 total copies of the book downloaded altogether.
Huh.
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I hate “spring cleaning”. It seems like an artifact of a different age, perhaps going back to when coal was used as a fuel source for most homes, and following the winter everything needed to be cleaned thoroughly to get rid of the coal dust.
But I like having a clean home. I’m not a neat freak, but doing an in-depth cleaning always feels good. That’s one of the reasons why I like having an Open House on January 1 – it gives impetus to go through everything you might usually let slide, putting things away or getting rid of them, getting into the nooks and crannies you might otherwise ignore.
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Got a note from WordPress this morning, a summation of the last year’s blogging. Here’s a bit:
The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.
In 2010, you wrote 204 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1007 posts. You uploaded 23 pictures, taking up a total of 12mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.
Your busiest day of the year was April 18th with 156 views. The most popular post that day was #2, so I’ll try harder.
Curiously, last year the BBTI blog beat this one for total visits for the first time. But then, BBTI itself had a Monster year.
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Yesterday, we had an Open House for our neighborhood.
It was a relaxed gathering, not as large as some recent years. But quite enjoyable.
After, as I was cleaning up the dishes, I had a chance to think about where I was, what was on the horizon. Little stuff, bills to pay this week, conservation work to be done. But bigger things, too. Communion of Dreams to be published by Trapdoor Press sometime in the next couple of months. Hopefully some progress on finding a publisher for Her Final Year. Getting going on My Father’s Gun.
And I’ve started thinking again about the prequel to Communion of Dreams. What I had written previously needs to be scrapped completely, though the basic idea I had is still there. I’m feeling . . . strong enough . . . to again consider creating a work of fiction.
It’s an interesting place to be. 2010 wasn’t bad, really, though it had some rough patches. But I really feel like I am on the verge of something with 2011. I suppose we’ll see.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 