Again, Her Majesty is sleeping on the pink pillow in my office, content in the way that only an old blind cat can be.
* * * * * * *
It was a long week. A surprisingly long week. The bit of a cold I was coming down with last weekend decided to try and find new frontiers in my chest. Given how sick I was with pneumonia last summer (and the lingering pain of the torn intercostal muscles that resulted from that), I decided that taking it *very* easy for a few days was the only smart course of action. Lots of naps, lots of tea, lots of codeine to suppress coughing.
But still, there was progress. The proof copy of Her Final Year arrived. We went over it to make sure everything translated OK for the printing, then ordered in promotional copies for my co-author and I. Uploaded the Kindle files. Built the e-commerce site to go with our website. Made sure the Kindle version translated properly. Got a Facebook page made. And are still working to get the final tweaks and changes to the website before going public with everything.
No, I didn’t do most of this. At best, my contribution has been to do a bit of writing for the website, try and help coordinate things. I know when to stay out of the way and leave others who are more skilled to get the work done. All credit goes to my Good Lady Wife and my co-author.
* * * * * * *
And likewise, I don’t deserve any credit for Her Majesty’s surprising resilience. Yeah, she’s sleeping quietly now, but the last few days have been remarkable. She’s still mostly blind, partially deaf. But she’s started navigating with much more intent, no longer randomly wandering in a lazy figure 8, bouncing off of the same things time and again. Her appetite has returned. Her desire to seek out and use the litterbox is back.
There was a point a week or so ago when I almost called the vet to discuss “that decision”. I held off because even though she seemed due little but pity, she also didn’t seem to be in any pain.
I am, of course, glad that I held off. Sometimes things come together in ways unpredicted.
Jim Downey
‘Her Majesty’ is curled up on a pink pillow here in my office. She doesn’t venture too far now. Just wanders a bit until I pick her up, take her to be tempted with a bit of canned food, or some water, or a litter box.
* * * * * * *
I just finished proof-reading Her Final Year. This is the version formatted for print-on-demand, so it was a painstakingly close look to make sure that not only had we caught all the little typos and whatnot, but that the layout was right. It took me four days of very close reading to do this – but not nearly as much work as my Good Lady Wife put into preparing the text.
This afternoon I’ll take care of setting up everything for publication of both the Kindle version as well as the print-on-demand version. Probably upload the files tomorrow. Also this afternoon, go over the website design with my GLW, so we can get that going and ready for ‘beta testing’.
* * * * * * *
There’s almost a fear being at this point. A trepidation. Did we do everything right? Will people find the finished product of value? Will we be ignored, laughed at?
I don’t know if it makes sense. But we have a solid 30 months of work in this book. Not just me. Not just me and my wife. Not even just me, my wife, my co-author and his wife. No, we also have about a score of people who have done test-readings and provided feedback. And plenty of friends and family who have encouraged us.
It’s that moment, standing on the edge, looking down, wondering just how insane you have to be to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, trusting to so many things going right or at least not horribly wrong.
* * * * * * *
The emotional sense is right. The echoes of the final days of caring for Martha Sr that come from reading about that experience jibe perfectly as I pick up the cat, settle her on her pillow for one of the last times. The clock clicks, wheels turn.
And soon we will see what happens.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
A follow-up to last weekend’s post: Where I’m at…
We’ve moved ahead on all fronts. The ‘interior design’ of the book (both Kindle and print-on-demand versions) has been basically done, and the final decision on the front cover layout pretty much accomplished. We still need to position photos of both Martha Sr and Georgia in the text, tweak a couple of entries, as well as design the back cover. Most of the accounting stuff has been done, and things put in place for the website domain and hosting. Now that the cover design has been resolved, we can be thinking about the website design, but that should go really smoothly.
In other words, we’re closing in on being done, and being ready to “launch” the book. My Good Lady Wife has done an amazing amount of work with all the nuts & bolts of this, and it shows. My co-author and his wife have also put in countless hours reviewing, revising, and responding (graciously) to my incessant pushing to get this project completed. Well, I’m good at being annoying, so I was the logical person to annoy everyone to keep working.
It’s exciting. Stay tuned for official announcements, perhaps even a sneak preview.
Jim Downey
From the first chapter of Communion Of Dreams, describing a terraforming operation:
It was going to take generations to finish, even using mass microbots and fabricating the construction materials from the Martian sands. Tens of thousands of the specially programmed microbots, a few centimeters long and a couple wide, would swarm an area, a carpet of shifting, building insects.
In my novel, the ‘bots are a basic technology, and are a factor in the plot at several points.
And here’s a first step at making them real:
Kilobots Are Cheap Enough to Swarm in the Thousands
These are Kilobots. They’re fairly simple little robots about the size of a quarter that can move around on vibrating legs, blink their lights, and communicate with each other. On an individual basis, this isn’t particularly impressive, but Kilobots aren’t designed to be used on an individual basis. Costing a mere $14 each and buildable in about five minutes, you don’t just get yourself one single Kilobot. Or ten. Or a hundred. They’re designed to swarm in the thousands, although the Harvard group that’s working on them is starting out with a modest 25:
It’s a cool little article, and there are plenty of links to related efforts. But what was particularly fun was this video from the Harvard scientists behind the Kilobots:
That’s one small step for 29 robots, one giant leap for robotkind.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Guns, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
No, this isn’t a “Find Jimbo!” puzzle. Just a reference point for those who wonder about my sparse posting here.
Sent this in a friend a bit ago, in an email exchange:
Have a good weekend,
Yeah, thanks. The latest round of unexpected storms cleared out early enough for me to get in a walk after my PT. Now a shower, and then lock in for a prolonged session of looking for typos and formatting errors on HFY. Following that, due diligence with Amazon’s print-on-demand system so I understand what tweaks we need to make for that formatting.
In other words, the book is coming together pretty quickly, and we’re in the final stages of that. Got the necessary LLC bank account opened this week, next week I’ll set up the stuff with Amazon and Paypal. Tomorrow Alix, I, and John (the co-author) have a Skype session and we’ll probably outline the website design – the FB, LJ, and Twitter accounts will all follow suit, once that is up. We should be able to test drive the whole thing a few days before our scheduled July 1 ‘launch’, but that arbitrary deadline can be moved easily enough if we need to do so.
It’s fun doing this, I admit. Nice to be using a lot of different skills I’ve acquired. Regardless of how the book does, at least I have that.
And then there’s the book conservation & binding backlog, getting articles to guns.com, and general life stuff.
It’s good to be busy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Failure, Jeff Bezos, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Publishing
News item of interest today:
Kindle Books Outsell Print Books on Amazon
* * *
Before the Kindle, Amazon started selling traditional paper books in July 1995. But now, Amazon has announced that Kindle books are outselling paperbacks and hardcovers.Since April 1, Amazon has sold 105 Kindle books for every 100 print books sold. These numbers include books that have no Kindle edition. Also, for all of 2011 so far, Amazon has had the fastest year-over-year growth rate for its books business due to the overwhelming Kindle sales and steady print book sales.
* * *
“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly – we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.
When the Kindle first came out, I was *very* skeptical that it would replace conventionally printed books. Here’s what I said in November 2007:
I think it is still a hard sell. $400 is a chunk for something which only kinda-sorta replaces a real book. And if you drop it in the mud, it isn’t just $7.95 to buy a new copy. But it does seem to be an intelligent application of the relevant tech, and sounds intriguing. There will be those who snap it up, just ’cause – but Amazon has a long way to go before it is mainstream.
That’s my guess.
Well, I was wrong, and Jeff Bezos was right. Well, sorta.
The Kindle 3, which came out last summer, is a lot different than the original Kindle. It’s smaller. Lighter. Works better. And costs less than half what the original did. In fact, just yesterday I ordered one for $189.
Yeah, let me repeat that: I ordered a Kindle yesterday.
I had been doing research into the e-reader in preparation for publishing Her Final Year and part of that preparation was going out and playing with the latest version of the Kindle at a local store. I’ll be honest, I was flat-out impressed with the current machine.
As I’ve noted before, I’m a ‘late adopter’ of technology, always willing to wait for things to mature enough that the bugs are worked out and the price comes down. And I’m also a professional bookbinder & book conservator. When *I* am willing to buy an e-reader, then things have changed. As I said 18 years ago:
For me, the book is a codex, something that you can hold in your hand and read. From the earliest memories of my science fiction saturated youth, I remember books becoming obsolete in the future, replaced by one dream or another of “readers”, “scanners”, or even embedded text files linked directly to the brain. Some say ours is a post-literate culture, with all the books-on-tape, video, and interactive media technology. I think I read somewhere recently that Sony (or Toshiba or Panasonic or someone) had finally come up with a hand-held, book-sized computer screen that can accommodate a large number of books on CD ROM. Maybe the future is here.
Maybe. Lord knows that I would be lost without a computer for all my writing, revisions, and play. The floppy drive that is in this book was taken from my old computer (my first computer) when a friend installed a hard drive. It is, in many ways, part of my history, part of my time at Iowa, and all the changing that I did there.
Yeah, the future is indeed here. Mine should arrive the first of next week.
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
Interesting:
From the FRIDA project page:
Today, the development is at a stage where several prototypes have left the research lab and are being tested in pilot applications, with more work required to reach a fully agile assembly scenario.
This is more of an economic development than it is the advent of our New Robotic Overlords. Having such a robot on a human scale which is fairly modular means that it can be plugged into existing factories and systems with minimal additional investment. Depending on the cost of these things once they’re ready for sale, they could wind up supplanting human labor – likely first in environments where it is too dangerous/costly for humans to work, then increasingly in general repetitive labor.
The Utopian science fiction writers foresaw a society where robotic workers freed humans for a life of ease – allow people to do creative work at their leisure. Cynical bastard that I am, I always figured that such a life of ease would mostly be reserved for the people who *owned* the robotic workers, with everyone else struggling to get by in a society which no longer really needed human labor. Current economic trends have tended to bear this out.
But I suppose we’ll see what the future actually holds.
Jim Downey
Filed under: ISS, Music, NASA, Predictions, Religion, Science Fiction, Space, Violence, YouTube
This is from the end of Chapter Three, set on a space station in Earth orbit:
There was a knot of perhaps 15 people, all facing one another around a bunch of tables shoved together. They finished their song, and clapping was heard throughout the atrium.
Jon smiled at Gates, explained. “Spacers. Crew off those two ships docked outside. Choral music has become something of a tradition the last few years, and each ship usually can field a fairly good ensemble of at least a half-dozen singers.”
“Huh. I had no idea.”
Another song started, this time with more voices. “C’mon, let’s go on down there.”
Why do I post this? Because of this wonderful clip:
Not choral music, but flute as an accompaniment to a song. The provenance of her flutes is impressive in itself. But the fact that we’re seeing a highly-trained, wonderfully intelligent person in orbit doing this just really makes my day . . . and re-affirms my faith in humanity overall.
It is sometimes easy to be cynical and depressed at the things we do.
This makes up for it.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 