Filed under: Art, Augmented Reality, Civil Rights, Connections, Constitution, Gardening, General Musings, Government, Habanero, Italy, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Religion, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction, Society, Violence, Writing stuff | Tags: art, augmented reality, Beccaria, Communion of Dreams, Constitution, dreams, gardening, Habaneros, Italy, jim downey, law, legal, literature, Marc Hermann, photography, predictions, Prometheus, Roman, Science Fiction, sculpture, St. Cybi's Well, travel, Voltaire, writing
Remember these?
Well, yesterday afternoon I got around to prepping about half of them to dry:
Overnight I dried the peppers.
* * * * * * *
An interesting take on incorporating an additional dimension into photography:
Photographer and historian Marc Hermann has done a beautiful job pulling historic crime scene photos from the New York Daily News archive to blend them with photographs of the same locations today. For those who live in New York now, it may be easy to forget just how rough the city was in the not-too-distant past.
Grisly violence is an undeniable part of New York’s DNA and the juxtaposition of the old, black and white images with the modern “Times Square” version of what most people expect today is incredibly fascinating – truly making ghosts walk amongst us.
* * * * * * *
Remember this?
What has also been my plan, but which I hadn’t quite been able to sort out how to accomplish, was that in St. Cybi’s Well much of the story will revolve around *how* this character came to have those dream-visions in the first place. This is further complicated by the fact that I don’t necessarily want the character to realize the full import of what he experiences within the context of the story – the reader should be able to draw out conclusions which the character wouldn’t, especially if the reader had already read Communion of Dreams.
OK, got all that? So, here’s what I experienced at Baia Castle: the revelation that the classical sculptures of Greek and Roman mythology could themselves be the conduit for the dream-visions. I got this by walking through the collection – not just walking through it, but by seeing the juxtaposition of different sculptures within the somewhat under-lit and under-stated layout of the museum.
See, like in most of the museums we had visited, the climate control there was non-existent. And whether in order to keep down temps a bit, or just to save money on electricity, the only lighting throughout the space was from windows along one side of the building. And the layout of the building was a series of almost cave-like ‘bunkers’ – rooms which were kinda long & narrow with a relatively low ceiling, and done up in neutral grey tones.
It was perfect. And in a moment my mind made the leap to imagery for St. Cybi’s Well. Because, like many of the different ‘holy wells’ in Wales, it dates back to the middle of the 6th century – not that long after the fall of Rome. And, in fact, the spread of Christianity to the Celtic lands was part of the cultural transference which took place. It’d be easy to tweak the history just a bit to include ‘lost’ sculpture & myth.
I felt in that moment the same way I feel now: like laughing maniacally.
And an appropriate (and somewhat telling) image from that same blog post:
Prometheus. Not Ridly Scott’s version. The original.
* * * * * * *
A passage from an excellent essay on the roots of Enlightenment thought about justice.
Rarely in the history of thought do I have a chance to say the outcome was so simply good, but it worked. Within their lifetimes, Voltaire and Beccaria saw real reform, a sincere and solid transformation of the legal codes of most of Europe, the spread of deterrence-based justicial thought. Within decades, judicial torture virtually vanished from European law. The laws of America, and of the other new constitutions drafted in the latter 18th century, all show the touch of Beccaria’s call. It worked. The change was not absolute, of course. Torture, the primary target, retreated, as did the notions of retributive justice, avenging dignity, and purging sin. But prisons were still squalid, punishments severe, and other things Beccaria had campaigned against remained, capital punishment primary among them. But even here there was what Beccaria would call progress. The guillotine lives in infamy, but it too was a consequence of this call for enlightened justice: a quick, egalitarian execution, death with the least possible suffering, and equal for all, giving no advantage to the noble, who had long been able to hire an expert and humane headsman while the poor man suffered the clumsy hackings of an amateur who might take many blows to sever a writhing neck. Most states judged death still necessary, but agreed that law and punishment should bind all men equally, and that unnecessary pain did not serve the public good. It is strange to call the guillotine a happy ending, but it was in a small way, and even more victorious was the dialog it that birthed it.
* * * * * * *
Overnight I dried the peppers. Here they are this morning:
Why, yes, all of these things are connected. 😉
Jim Downey
Filed under: ACLU, Brave New World, Civil Rights, Connections, Constitution, Government, Society, Terrorism, Travel, Writing stuff | Tags: civil liberties, Constitution, government, jim downey, NSA, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, travel, TSA, writing
I’m not sure which is more depressing: that this happened, or that I find it completely unsurprising that it happened. What’s that? This:
…a harrowing story from Aditya Mukerjee about his recent attempt to fly from New York to Los Angeles. After being pulled aside in the security line, he faced hours of interrogation by uncommunicative officials from several different agencies. When he was finally cleared, his airline, Jet Blue, wouldn’t let him on the plane anyway. When he got home, he found evidence that it had been searched.
The entire sickening story, told by the man it happened to, can be found here: Don’t Fly During Ramadan.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve almost given up even mentioning the absurdity of the TSA’s latest actions. Like the revelations about what the NSA has been doing, it seems like there is really little point in it. I just keep filing away the latest news items and go back to adjust what is included in St. Cybi’s Well. Because no matter how egregious the violations of our civil liberties, there’s always someone to come along and say that they’re happy to have the “security” which is being provided.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Babylon 5, Book Conservation, Connections, Emergency, Feedback, Health, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Kindle, Marketing, NASA, NPR, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, appendicitis, art, Babylon5, blogging, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, feedback, free, G'Kar, health, heliosphere, J. Michael Straczynski, jim downey, JMS, Kindle, leather, NASA, NPR, predictions, promotion, revelations, reviews, science, Science Fiction, space, St. Cybi's Well, Voyager, writing, Z'ha'dum
“All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation.”
-G’Kar, Z’ha’dum
Sometimes you don’t recognize when things change — the moments of transition — except in hindsight. That could be because the change is incremental enough that you don’t notice it for a while, or it might be that you’re so completely involved in the moment that the realization of what just happened doesn’t sink in immediately.
* * *
This morning there was a news item on NPR which caught my attention: that perhaps the Voyager 1 spacecraft has already left our solar system.
Scientists have known for a while that it was approaching the limits of the heliosphere. The expectation was that there would be a fairly clear change in orientation of the magnetic field when the craft crossed the boundary of the Sun’s influence into true interstellar space. But perhaps that boundary was less defined than we thought. From the story:
How did we miss that? As it turns out, it wasn’t entirely our fault. Researchers thought the solar system was surrounded by a clearly marked magnetic field bubble.
“There’s one at the Earth, there’s one at Jupiter, Saturn, many planets have them. And so just by analogy we were expecting there to be something like that for the solar system,” Swisdak says.
Scientists were waiting for Voyager to cross over the magnetic edge of our solar system and into the magnetic field of interstellar space. But in in the September issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, Swisdak and his colleagues say the magnetic fields may blend together. And so in July 2012, when Voyager crossed from the solar system into deep space, “Voyager just kept cruising along,” Swisdak says. All they saw was a change in the field’s direction.
* * *
Last Thursday my wife had a follow-up with her surgeon to see how she was doing in recovering from her emergency appendectomy. She had been released from the hospital the previous Saturday, but there was some concern over the risk of secondary infection within her abdomen.
Well, without getting too much into the details, tests indicated that she might be developing exactly that sort of infection. The surgeon ordered a procedure called a needle aspiration and scheduled it for the following day.
We dutifully reported to the hospital for the procedure. It didn’t go smoothly, and the upshot was that it didn’t help her condition at all. A couple hours later we left the hospital, and she’s been mostly resting since. We’re now waiting to hear from the surgeon about what happens next. And what it means.
* * *
Some six years ago I wrote what could be considered a companion piece to this blog post. In it I quoted a friend, talking about Communion of Dreams:
“Yeah, but it’s like the way that the people involved in your book – the characters – are all struggling to understand this new thing, this new artifact, this unexpected visitor. And I like the way that they don’t just figure it out instantly – the way each one of them tries to fit it into their own expectations about the world, and what it means. They struggle with it, they have to keep learning and investigating and working at it, before they finally come to an understanding.” He looked at me as we got back in the car. “Transitions.”
* * *
Where Communion of Dreams was largely about transitions, in many ways St. Cybi’s Well is about revelations. How we experience them. How we understand them. How we do or don’t recognize them when they happen.
The Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams is free today. And you have less than two weeks to enter into the drawing for a hand-bound, full-leather copy of the book. So far only two people have entered. Don’t miss the moment.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Connections, Feedback, Health, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, movies, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, tech | Tags: Amazon, art, blood, blood magic, Blood Tea and Red String, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, economics, feedback, free, health, humor, jim downey, Kindle, movies, printing, promotion, reviews, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology, writing
While on my morning walk, I was enjoying the beautiful day, the glint of sun on the dewdrops, the company of my dog.
And thinking about blood.
Specifically, about the old notion of a “contract signed in blood.”
Well, what if you had a culture which took books so seriously, that they were always made using blood as the ink?
Just off the top of my head, I could come up with all kinds of justifications for how such a culture might arise, from fantasy (‘blood magic’) to Science Fiction (books could always be traced back to their source through the DNA in the blood) to the plain creepy (“we do honor to our ancestors/enemies/icons by using their blood to write history”).
Yeah, it’s a little scary how my brain works sometimes.
* * *
And after I come up with something like that, usually within just a few seconds, my mind races off to consider what the practical ramifications would be to such a thing.
Economically, there’s some fun stuff you could do with it. Books could be purchased with the buyer’s own blood: “Price – just 750ml – get yours today!” Which also implies blood as the basic economic unit, but that wouldn’t necessarily be the case.
Mechanically, blood itself wouldn’t be a great printing ink without some other elements. So you could have the whole printing revolution based not on the development of a printing press, but on the discovery of how to make blood suitable for mass printing.
As a book conservator, dealing with books printed in blood would present some additional challenges. Depending on what else was added to it to make it suitable for printing could make it damage the paper it was printed on (this is actually a big problem with some printing inks used in history). And if I needed to do restoration work, would I need to find blood of the same type, in order to match the original ink?
* * *
Usually about this point in such speculation, I start to wonder just what in the hell got me thinking about these things in the first place. What was my subconscious chewing on?
I could perhaps tie it to the odd little movie we watched last night.
Or that my wife had a close call last week. There wasn’t a lot of blood per se, but the symbolism is kinda hard to ignore.
Both good candidates. Both likely elements.
But in the end I decided that it was just that I’ve been thinking a lot about writing. About printing. About bookbinding.
All those things are measures of my life. In some very real sense, they *are* small, tangible pieces of my life.
Not unlike blood, I suppose.
The Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams will be free all day tomorrow. And remember, if you would like a chance to win a full-leather, hand-bound copy of the special edition, you need to write a review on Amazon and post a link in the original blog entry about the drawing. That’s a $250 – $350 value.
Even more, it’s part of my life.
Maybe it will be a part of yours.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Civil Rights, Connections, Constitution, Emergency, Feedback, Government, Health, John Lennon, Kindle, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Amazon, appendicitis, art, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, Constitution, direct publishing, Edward Snowden, free, government, health, intracostal, jim downey, John Lennon, Kindle, music, NSA, predictions, privacy, promotion, reviews, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, statins, writing
Last week my wife was at a professional convention. She got home late Friday night, understandably tired. She was dragging a bit Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon said that her joints were aching and she felt a bit feverish. We figured that she had likely picked up a virus at the convention, since that’s not uncommon.
Sunday she wasn’t feeling any better, and had lost her appetite with a bit of a stomach ache. Mild headache. She elected to just try and sleep it off, taking OTC analgesics.
But come Monday morning …
* * * * * * *
Two weeks ago I had my annual physical. Routine stuff for the most part. My doc and I discussed some alternative pain-management strategies (I have chronic pain from a torn intracostal muscle – basically, it feels like I have a broken rib all the time. On good days it feels like a broken rib about four weeks into the healing process – mostly just a dull ache – and on bad days it feels like I just broke it, with intense and sharp pain). I have prescription meds for the pain, but even though they’re fairly mild as such things go, they dull my mind enough that I can’t really write very well when taking them.
But we also discussed dealing with another issue, for which I needed to start taking something else. A statin for cholesterol management. Which was fine by me, since diet only goes so far. I started taking the meds last week, and experienced the sort of side effect which is annoying but not really hateful as my body adjusted. Not wanting to get too graphic, let’s just say that I made sure to stay near a bathroom for a few days.
Anyway, I lost most of last week in terms of work, both in the bindery and on the novel. Neither one is easy to do when you have to keep running off to the bathroom at frequent intervals.
* * * * * * * *
Which really wasn’t too much of a problem, as far as it concerned writing St. Cybi’s Well, since for the last few weeks I’ve been somewhat … discombobulated … by recent news reports. Specifically, by the revelations of governmental spying, and the scope of the programs involved in it, all precipitated by the leaks from Edward Snowden.
Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that these topics are ones I have discussed at some length in the past, well before the latest news. Just check the “Constitution“, “Government” or “Privacy” categories or related tags, and you’ll see what I mean.
And the things I have had to say in the past reflect a lot of what informs the background of St. Cybi’s Well. I don’t want to give too much away, but a lot of the book is concerned with what happens when a government uses tools intended to protect its citizens to instead control them. And working off of what was already in the public domain about the different security programs, I made a lot of projections about where such things could lead.
Then came the Snowden revelations and subsequent discussion. As it turned out, I was very accurate in my understanding of the spying technology and how it could be used. Almost too much so.
See, there’s a problem with that: when writing about an ‘alternate time line’, you have to strike a balance between this reality and the fictional one. And, well, some of my fictional spying programs are now shown to be just a little too close to real. So now I have to back up a bit and tweak a number of different elements in the book to get back to the correct (for me) balance. It’s not a huge problem, but one which has had me dancing/juggling a bit.
Not unlike my body trying to find a new equilibrium with the meds.
* * * * * * *
But come this past weekend, things had settled down, at least as far as my body was concerned. So I was able to get back to thinking about the hand-binding of Communion of Dreams, and the promotional stuff related to that. So I went ahead and scheduled some ‘free’ Kindle days, and wrote the blog post announcing that I would also be giving away a leather-bound copy of the book, and outlining how people could enter for a drawing for said book.
My intent was to do a follow-up blog post on Monday, reminding people about that, and the fact that the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams would be free all day. That was the plan, anyway.
* * * * * * *
But come Monday morning, well, things didn’t go as planned. Not by a long shot.
My wife wasn’t feeling any better. And she was poking around online, seeing if she could find out anything which would help. I popped into the bedroom to check on her, and the conversation went something like this:
“Hmm, it says here that appendicitis sometimes starts with pain high in the stomach.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. I thought the classic was when you got a sharp pain in the lower right quadrant.”
“Yeah, it seems like it can start high, then shift down.”
“Huh.”
“You know, the pain I had in my stomach has shifted down …”
“We’re going to the E.R.”
And we did. Pronto. And I am very glad that we live about a mile from an excellent hospital. Again, I’ll spare you all the details, but let’s just say that my wife had surgery that afternoon, and they’re still pushing intravenous antibiotics into her. She’ll be fine, thanks to modern medicine. But it was a close call.
Yeah, so much for plans.
Anyway, about 120 people downloaded Communion of Dreams on Monday. It’ll be available for free next Monday, and the two Mondays after that. The deadline for writing a review and getting your entry in is the end of August. Remember, you have to post a link in the initial blog entry about the contest.
And some advice: don’t plan on doing it later. Take care of it now. You never know what might come up.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Connections, Faith healing, Religion, Science Fiction, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: faith, faith healing, jim downey, Pennant Melangell, religion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, St. Melangell, Wales, writing
This is from the working draft of Chapter One: Pennant Melangell
“C’mon in,” she said, unlocking the door and stepping inside. They passed through the porch, into the church itself. Just inside she stopped, turned on the lights. With a sweep of her arm, she gestured across the interior of the space. “Now, where do you go?”
Darnell furrowed his brow, scanned the interior. “What do you mean?”
“You want to be healed. Where do you go?”
“Well,” he hesitated. “Well, to the Shrine?”
“You know the legend of St. Melangell. What if you didn’t?”
He looked around. “The frieze?”
She nodded. “All these places tell a story. Sometimes it is just in the layout of the building or what is left of it. Sometimes it is represented in paintings, friezes, or stained glass. You have to understand the story of the place before you can hope to use it.”
“An instruction manual.”
“Of a sort. Some of it will be intuitive – these are built spaces, created by other humans. And so in some sense just part of your heritage. But some of it will be based on symbolism which is drawn from a different culture than what we’re used to now. It may take a little while before your brain adjusts, and sees the proper cues.”
“Learn the language.”
“Close. More like learning the patterns. The rituals.”
“I’m not looking to get religion, sis.”
She considered him. “I know. Think of religion to be just one interpretation of the text. First you need to learn to read. Interpretation can come later, when you’re more fluent.”
Back to work.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Connections, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Publishing, Science Fiction, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, free, India, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, literature, memoir, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Wales, writing
Thanks to everyone for helping make the promotion a success — I think we got an excellent response for a book which has been available for some 18 months, with 1,366 total downloads of Communion of Dreams! That breaks down as 1,193 in the U.S. market, 66 in the U.K., 102 in Germany, two in India, and 3 in Canada. It may be silly, but I think that it’s a real hoot that there are people in India who have downloaded my book.
And it wasn’t just Communion of Dreams — Her Final Year also was downloaded by someone in India with this week’s promotion. And altogether there were 272 total downloads of that memoir.
There is also a new review of Communion of Dreams up on Amazon. Here’s a bit of it:
I’ve been reading science fiction for over 40 years, and it’s my favorite subject, but I’ll be very honest and say that even after reading this entire book, I could not understand what the artifact actually was. I also did not understand what the burl was, nor what the gel was. I think this story could have been a lot more exciting if it was trimmed down by 50%. I applaud the author’s first efforts at writing, but I think he should try again.
Well, gee, I suppose that’s meant to be encouraging, and the reviewer does end with:
“Practice makes perfect — best of luck with your next book!”
So maybe they’ll like St. Cybi’s Well if I don’t spend too much time with characters, setting, or have too many difficult concepts in it. And I probably shouldn’t have it set in Wales, since that’s not science-fictiony enough. I’ll have to keep that in mind.
*Sigh*
If you have some thoughts on the book to share, I’m always happy to have the additional reviews.
Well, maybe make that I’m usually happy to have the additional reviews.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, General Musings, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, movies, Music, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Weather, YouTube | Tags: A Tale of Two Cities, Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, care-giving, Charles Dickens, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, Fred Hoyle, free, Her Final Year, humor, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, Led Zeppelin, literature, movies, music, October The First is Too Late, predictions, promotion, Science Fiction, Sean Carroll, St. Cybi's Well, time travel, travel, video, www youtube
Partially related to stuff which happens in St. Cybi’s Well, but also I suspect because I just turned 55, I’ve been thinking about “time” a lot. The perceptions of it, how it ‘works’, how it is portrayed in books and movies. This topic is hardly new for me, though, since tropes about time travel are so common in Science Fiction.
Anyway, one interesting little side-track I was considering this morning was what you could do with a series of stories/books premised on a slightly different concept of time than what we commonly work with. Specifically, I was thinking of time as a manifestation of other aspects of the universe, analogous to how weather is a manifestation of other physical characteristics on a planet. You could have something like a “time forecast”, wherein changes in the quality of time itself had an impact on the story/characters. Perhaps our little corner of reality has long been in a ‘calm’ period of time weather, with things moving along smoothly and placidly, so that we’ve come to expect that it will always be that way. What happens when there’s a change? Perhaps a new front moves through? A storm? A tornado? Does everything get jumbled, a la October The First is Too Late? Perhaps it could literally be the best of times and the worst of times simultaneously.
Something to play with. But for now, I need to get back to work. And you, if you haven’t already, should take advantage of this last day of the week-long promotion and go download Communion of Dreams and/or Her Final Year.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, BoingBoing, Brave New World, Health, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: augmented reality, BoingBoing, Facebook, health, jim downey, predictions, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology, video, writing, www youtube
Via BoingBoing, this fascinating application of scanning and augmented reality technology:
Access to good dissection models is always problematic, but is absolutely crucial for medical education. Donor cadavers are often in short supply, and they have the problem that they’re, well, dead. Meaning that they died from something. And under even the best of circumstances, that will have an impact on the suitability for the student’s experience in studying a healthy body.
But with this kind of technology, a student can encounter a wide variety of body types: young, in the ‘prime of life’, aged, with any number of different medical issues (or none at all). Male. Female. Pregnant. Potentially, even as the body is “living”.
Amazing.
Jim Downey
(PS – the writing of St. Cybi’s Well continues. Occasionally I post fragments to the FB page, if you’re interested.)
Communion Of Dreams 