Huh. It finally happened, a week after I turned 50. Over 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams.
That was after having the .pdf of the novel available for approximately 19 months. Well, in the subsequent 17 months, there have been *another* 10,000 downloads of the novel. Yup, we just broke 20,000 total downloads. And all of that basically due to word of mouth.
It’s a pretty cool feeling, actually. And made even better by the fact that earlier this week I sent off the revised manuscript to a publisher, after working on it for the last three months (as also noted here on the blog). It’ll be a matter of a few weeks before the publisher and his in-house readers have a chance to review the book and make their decision about whether to publish it, but the preliminary response has been positive. You can now find the .pdf of the revised manuscript on the CoD homepage, if you would like to give that a try.
But regardless whether this particular publisher decides to go with it, I take a great deal of satisfaction knowing that some 20,000 people have at least downloaded the book. Something is happening there. And the best thing that an author can hope for is that people read his work. Yeah, fame and fortune would have some nice aspects, but *being read* is much more important. At least to me.
That this happens just before the BBTI project crosses 1,500,000 hits – in less than a year – is just gravy.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here – there really isn’t much to say, day to day. But checking the numbers, I thought I would post a brief update which may be of interest.
October had over 140,000 hits to the BBTI site, which puts our total to date to 1,477,315. At present trends (we get between 4 and 5 thousand hits a day), we should cross 1.5 million sometime in the next week – less than one year since our initial launch! That’s pretty cool.
One of the more recent referrers that I found to be amusing was this one: http://feulibre.forumactif.com/ But we have had links from sites in Russian, Korean, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Portugese, Chinese, . . . you get the idea. Ballistics By The Inch is a decidedly global resource. Which I also think is pretty cool.
And update info for Communion of Dreams: October had over 875 downloads of the novel, putting the total downloads to date to something in excess of 19,500. Even better news – this morning I will finish up editing work on the novel which a publisher requested, and we should get a supplemental .pdf posted to the site with that manuscript in the next couple of days. With a little luck, the publisher will like the revisions, and before the end of the year I’ll have a deal to conventionally publish the book. Keep you fingers crossed for me.
Happy November, everyone!
Jim Downey
PS: I have now finished the editing – having eliminated 23,620 words in total from the manuscript. We’ll get a .pdf of the revised version posted to the CoD site later today.
I know I’ve been fairly quiet, but that’s mostly due to spending my mornings working on editing. I keep plugging along, and just finished work on Chapter 16 (only three more to go!). Altogether I have trimmed over 22,000 words from the text.
And one thing I want to say – I still really like this book. When you’ve lived with something for years, and been through the guts of it time and again doing editing, it is easy to not give it a lot of consideration. But I’m still pleased with it, still enjoy reading the thing. I hope that others will enjoy the revisions I’ve made, and will give the new version a go once I am done.
I had occasion to be poking around on YouTube this morning, looking at some vids of William Shatner. And I came across this odd little item:
OK, now think – how would you explain what this was, and why it was funny/interesting/artistic, to someone in the 1960s when Star Trek was first being broadcast? Hell, I’ve grown up with the culture and I can barely understand it myself.
This is why it is so incredibly difficult to make any intelligent predictions about what sorts of art/music will evolve in the future, and why just about every time I have seen someone attempt to do so in SF it either seems entirely contrived or just absurd.
And if we can’t do this with something as relatively self-contained as art over 40 years, what does that say about making predictions about larger aspects of society over even longer time frames?
I had business over on the MU campus early in the week – needed to check something out at the bookstore.
So, of course, the next day I started coming down with some viral infection.
Yesterday I had a previously scheduled appointment with my doctor, just a follow-up for my blood pressure treatment. When she came into the exam room, she asked how I was doing. I told her I had to go over to campus, so of course I now had whatever hideous plague was making the rounds. She nodded knowingly, said “oh, yeah, and there’s a *lot* of stuff going around over there.”
Anyway, the bp remains under control. And I likely have some mild variation of H1N1. But I did share it with my good lady wife. Not exactly the 22nd anniversary present I had in mind. Oh well.
Things, however, continue. Now through Chapter 10 of Communion of Dreams on the revisions, and have trimmed over 16,000 words from the text. Also about 3/4 of the way through my editing of my content for the care-giving book. Downloads of CoD continue, and we’re now past 18,500 of those. And of course the BBTI project keeps plugging along, with again more than 100k hits in September, bringing us to over one & a third million hits total since we launched the site 10 months ago. I am behind a bit on my conservation work, but not horribly so.
So, I suppose a mild case of flu isn’t much to complain about. But still . . .
Ah, yes, xkcd gets the point across perfectly, once again:
Editing continues to go well with CoD, though this week has been slow due to other demands. Now done with Chapter 7, have trimmed a total of 11,086 words.
I first noticed the change on the way to Pittsburgh almost two weeks ago. Here and there, a blush of color amongst the green. A slight touch of yellow, a bit of red creeping in on the edges. Just accents.
On the way back almost a week later, there was more. Oh, it was still summer. But there was just a hint of the fall to come.
* * * * * * *
On my walk with the dog this morning, I ran into some old friends who were visiting family a block over. She’s now an L-2, made Law Review this year. Made the Dean’s List both semesters last year. A former employee, who decided on going to law school after being out of school for some years.
“We should get together.”
“Well, you’re busy with school right now.”
“Yeah, but I’m trying not to lose contact with all my friends. My personal life has to have some priority.”
I smiled. “It’s OK. Your friends understand the whole delayed-gratification thing. Do what’s important now, secure your future – there’ll be time for us to socialize later.”
* * * * * * *
It’s an old argument. I remember having it some 35 years ago – and it had been going on for almost 20 years then: “Wouldn’t it be better to address the problems we have here on Earth like poverty, war, and pollution rather than wasting money on sending people into space?”
I find it depressing that the moment anyone brings up the space program, someone (or several someones) out there trot out the old “we have other problems to solve” canard.As though the Department of Defense doesn’t spend the entire NASA annual budget approximately every three days. As though the economic payoff for the manned AND unmanned space program has not been many times its cost in investment.
As though there isn’t a space telescope out there right now that will tell us in less than 5 years just how frequent Earth-like planets are in the galaxy.
As though the entire 20th Century is insufficient proof that science, engineering, and technology can achieve things that were not only previously considered impossible, but were previously never imagined.
“Oh we’ll never get a toehold outside of Earth because the stars are too far away and the solar system is too inhospitable” sounds an awful lot like “Heavier than air powered flight? you’re loony.”
The failure of imagination I find even at a highly educated and imaginative place like Metafilter depresses and distresses me. Because it means even here, where I’ve found the most rational, creative and intelligent people as you can probably find on the entire internet, the possibilities are just too many or too hard to grasp for some very influential members.
posted by chimaera at 11:43 AM on September 12 [32 favorites]
* * * * * * *
It was a wet and cool spring and summer. Good for the air conditioning bills. Not a good year for growing my favored hot peppers. At most, I’ll have a few dozen – enough to last me through the year as dried flakes/powder, but not enough to replenish the hot sauces I made during that great harvest two years ago.
And until mid-to-late August, it had looked like a poor year for tomatoes. That changed, of course, and this past week I’ve harvested about 200 pounds – enough to make sauce and canned diced tomatoes to last until next summer, as well as share fresh tomatoes with all my friends who don’t garden.
My wife was teasing me about the excess amount of tomatoes, saying that it was my own fault for planting so much. Yeah, true enough. But last year I planted almost as many plants, and the weather was even worse, meaning we didn’t have enough to last us through the year. You just can’t tell, sometimes.
“Yeah, I’ve been working to trim it down. Should be done in another month or so.”
“So they’ll publish it?”
“There’s no contract. But the publisher is very interested, and is waiting to see how the revisions go. We’ll see.”
* * * * * * *
JMS had a good bit about the “why go into space?” question in the first season of Babylon 5:
Sinclair: “Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics – and you’ll get ten different answers. But there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us, it’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, Maruputo, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes – all of this. All of this was for nothing, unless we go to the stars.”
* * * * * * *
And now I see the evidence of fall here, about a month earlier than usual: a number of the trees around town have started to change, there are leaves raining down whenever there’s a gust of wind. The temperature is about normal for mid September, but it somehow feels cooler.
Remember that? It’s from the first page of Communion of Dreams, the sound that indicates that the main character has an incoming phone call on his embedded bone-conduction phone. Well, guess what:
A bone anchored hearing system is a type of hearing aid that is anchored by the bones in the ear rather than a hearing aid which is worn behind the ear. There are three types of hearing loss. A bone anchored system is used for conductive hearing loss and mixed hearing loss. Oticon Medical has received FDA clearance to market their Ponto bone anchored hearing system. The Ponto system features a computer fitting platform which facilitates a better match between the patient and the sound processor.
Oh, and there’s this, in a related development pertaining to the book:
A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight
* * *
These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, “A Twinkle in the Eye“]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.
Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.
That should also sound familiar – it’s the exact tech that I stipulate as ‘normal’ for the book. As usual, it looks like if anything I was a bit pessimistic about how quickly the technology would advance, even allowing for the delays caused by the advent of a pandemic flu that kills off about 2/3 of the world’s population.
OK, so I’m back from my wanderings. Just spent the morning harvesting about 100 pounds of tomatoes from my garden. While I planned to do other things today, it looks like I am going to be preoccupied with dealing with those.
But because a number of people have asked, the editing work on CoD was going very well before I went on vacation: I’ve trimmed 9,903 words from the first six chapters, putting me right on target for what I was wanting to accomplish.
More in a day or two – I have some fun things to share from our trip.
Jim Downey
Links to the AR stuff via MeFi. The tomatoes are my own damn fault.
Communion Of Dreams 