Filed under: Amazon, Brave New World, Carl Zimmer, Connections, Emergency, Feedback, Flu, General Musings, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, The Loom, Umberto Eco, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, antibiotics, blogging, Carl Zimmer, Communion of Dreams, Darnell Sidwell, direct publishing, fire-flu, flu, influenza, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, literature, norovirus, pandemic, predictions, promotion, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology, Umberto Eco, virus, Wordpress, writing
So, the WordPress Machine informs me that I’ve had a fairly busy year blogging here.
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As I mentioned a while ago, earlier this month I had fallen prey to the nasty bit of cold virus going around. Turned out that the damn thing was even more stubborn for my wife, who is still struggling with a hacking cough and various other annoying symptoms. We’ve been keeping a close eye on it, watching for signs of secondary pneumonia, which would call for antibiotic intervention, but I think she’ll get past this on her own.
Which is good, because there really isn’t much we can do to fight a virus. In this sense, medical science is at about the same place in viral treatments as we were in dealing with bacterial infection 70 years ago:
In 1941, a rose killed a policeman.
Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman in Oxford, England, was pruning his roses one fall day when a thorn scratched him at the corner of his mouth. The slight crevice it opened allowed harmless skin bacteria to slip into his body. At first, the scratch grew pink and tender. Over the course of several weeks, it slowly swelled. The bacteria turned from harmless to vicious, proliferating through his flesh. Alexander eventually had to be admitted to Radcliffe Hospital, the bacteria spreading across his face and into his lungs.
Alexander’s doctors tried treating him with sulfa drugs, the only treatment available at the time. The medicine failed, and as the infection worsened, they had to cut out one of his eyes. The bacteria started to infiltrate his bones. Death seemed inevitable.
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You may not have heard much about it here, but the norovirus is causing all kinds of grief in the UK. Cases are up 83% over last year, and are estimated to have hit over a million people already. In the UK the norovirus is commonly called the “winter vomiting bug” whereas here we tend to call it “stomach flu”. As miserable as it makes people feel, it’s usually not a life-threatening disease for otherwise healthy people, and the best thing to do is just ride it out.
Of course, public health authorities have taken steps to try and limit the spread of the disease into populations where the virus could be life-threatening, and a lot of hospitals have curtailed or eliminated visiting hours. Furthermore, appeals have been made to the public to not to go see their doctors or go to emergency rooms for routine cases of the norovirus, since there is little that can be done to treat the virus and this just contributes to the spread of the disease.
Still, people get scared when they get sick, even when they know that it is a fairly common bug that’s going around — and one that most people have had before and gotten over just fine. So they tend to swamp available medical services, overwhelming the health care system.
Just think about what would happen if it was a disease which wasn’t known. And one which was killing people so quickly that they’d drop over in the street on the way home from work.
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I’ve been thinking about that a lot, since it is an integral plot point to St. Cybi’s Well. This isn’t a spoiler, since the advent of the fire-flu is part of the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams.
But it is something which has had me in a bit of a quandary this fall, as I’ve been working on writing St. Cybi’s Well.
Howso? Well, because I kept going back and forth on making one final decision: where to end the book.
See, I know how the *story* plays out — I’ve had that all sorted since I first worked up the background for Communion of Dreams. But in going to write St. Cybi’s Well, I needed to decide exactly where in the story that book would end. Which is to say, I needed to decide how much, if any, of the onset of the fire-flu would be included. Because I could set everything up and have the book actually finish at the onset of the fire-flu — after all, the reader would know what was about to happen. Why drag the reader through that horror?
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A week or so ago I made my decision, and I’ve been chewing it over since then as I’ve been busy with other things, making sure that I was comfortable with what I have decided, and why. I’m not going to give you the details, but you can safely assume from what I’ve said in this post that at least some of the pandemic will be portrayed.
I decided this not because I have a desire to write about the horror (in spite of what I may have said previously) but rather because it is critical for character development of the main character.
Poor Darnell.
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So, the WordPress Machine informs me that I’ve had a fairly busy year blogging here. 293 posts (this makes 294), which is a faster pace than in some years. Of course, I’ve had a lot of promotional stuff do to with the launch of Communion of Dreams last January and everything to support that through the year, not to mention the Kickstarter for St. Cybi’s Well.
And while I’ve cautioned that I won’t be writing quite as much here on the blog as I’m working on St. Cybi’s Well, well, it does make for a nice change of pace.
So thanks for being along for the ride this year. Together we can see how things go in 2013.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Communion of Dreams, jim downey, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
Interesting. I noticed this morning that a shift has occurred in my thinking about St. Cybi’s Well over the last day or two. Oh, I’m still thinking about plotting and scenes, but now I find myself increasing working through bits of dialogue. *How* one character or another would phrase something, how the pattern of sounds with another would play out.
Meaning that I’m reaching some kind of saturation point, the moment when things, er, “gel”.*
And meaning, based on my previous experience, that I’m about to shift from spending the majority of my energy from making notes/plans/plots to actually constructing sentences and paragraphs, perhaps even chapters.
Interesting.
Jim Downey
(*Those who have read Communion of Dreams will get the joke. If you haven’t — why the hell not?)
Filed under: Civil Rights, Connections, General Musings, Government, Predictions, Privacy, RFID, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Travel, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, cell phone, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, jim downey, predictions, privacy, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology, tracking, travel
So, as I am constantly blathering about, I’m spending a lot of time thinking through various aspects of St. Cybi’s Well. Things like characters, plotting, fitting in the storyline with what is already established in Communion of Dreams (while still making sure that the book can stand on its own, without someone having read Communion). Well, one of those things concerns an instance where someone wants to not be readily located. Which is a little harder in today’s world than most people realize, given two things: general surveillance, and the homing-device you’re probably carrying in your pocket.
Yeah, I’m talking about your cell phone/mobile device/tablet. Anything which can connect to a cell network or GPS is probably also capable of being used to track you. And chances are, it will do so even if it is ostensibly “turned off.” About the only good way to be certain to stop this use is to pull the battery out of the thing.
And that’s a PITA, if you want to be able to actually use it without a delay and hassle of installing the battery then booting the thing up.
So the other day I sent a note to a good buddy of mine who has a lot more physics/technical knowledge than I do:
Second, a thought I had: since privacy is a concern, and your cell phone is a tracking device even when ‘off’ (but it’s a hassle to have to pull out the battery and then reboot the damned thing if you need it), why not go with a simple solution to isolate it? To wit: turn the phone off (or put it into ‘airplane mode’), drop it into a small Faraday cage. Just a simple bag or wallet with the right construction would do it. I know there are such things for use with passports/credit cards (I use a wallet for such when traveling overseas), so why not just extend the design a bit to accommodate a phone/tablet?
I got back a response which indicated that it should work, though you may need to tweak the construction specifics to be sure to block out the proper wavelengths most effectively.
And today, just for grins, I went to look for something like this. Guess what I found, which is just now available (actually, it won’t ship for a couple weeks):
Go Completely Off the GridThis cleverly designed, superslim pouch for your wallet and phone blocks transmissions, as well as cell-tower and GPS tracking, and protects personal information from RFID readers. Ripstop nylon. Imported.
Bingo. Like an invisibility cloak for your phone.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Artificial Intelligence, Connections, Expert systems, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, art, blogging, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, jim downey, Kindle, literature, predictions, promotion, reviews, Science Fiction, Scrivener, St. Cybi's Well, technology, writing
Just a few quick notes to share…
First is a new review up on Amazon. Here’s an excerpt:
The author deftly crafts a tale of a group of humans who endeavor to understand more about this artifact and in the process make some profound discoveries. The characters, both real and virtual, are well crafted and the story is well written with very few (I think I noted one) flaw in the text.
It is a mind-boggling tale with some tie-backs to present time.
As always, I’d ask anyone who has read Communion of Dreams to please consider doing a review, or at least rating/liking the book on Amazon, Good Reads, or elsewhere — honest reviews really do help.
A quick follow-up to Friday’s post: in case you didn’t see the additional note, the printer realized that they’d made an error with the job, and are going to do a complete reprint. It means a bit of a delay, but nothing serious — and I really respect that they’re going to make things right. So many businesses might try to weasel their way out of that responsibility.
I’ve decided that I like the Scrivener software, so am going to be using it for the bulk of the initial writing of St. Cybi’s Well. I’ll probably post further thoughts on it as I get deeper into the actual writing, but I really like that I can use it for collecting research as well as jotting notes/scenes in a way which is fairly intuitive and seamless to use. Not exactly like having my own Seth around to help me, but …
Have a good Monday!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Bipolar, Brave New World, Connections, Feedback, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Wired, Writing stuff | Tags: bipolar, blogging, jim downey, Kevin Dutton, literature, predictions, science, Science Fiction, Scrivener, St. Cybi's Well, technology, writing
As I’ve noted before, writing a long work of fiction is a strange thing, at least for me. I spend a lot of time intensely chewing over ideas, doing research, starting to conceptualize a narrative theory for the book, outlining various relationships between images and characters, sorting out what it is I really want to say more than the actual words to use.
Betwixt & between all of this, some honest to goodness writing gets done, then reorganized and shuffled, with plans and outlines changing. More research, more thinking, more feeling my way through the darkness with the only illumination occasional flashes of lightning.
This morning, after a lot of consideration, I downloaded Scrivener. Over the next week or so I’ll play around with it a bit, see whether it will be a useful tool.
And over lunch, some research & reading. It might be interesting, or even telling, what it was that I found. Here’s an excerpt:
The effects aren’t entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s—, anyway?
There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That’s the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it’s on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel’s. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it’s been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher.
So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.
Interesting, indeed.
And not unlike the high which comes with creating. Or entering a manic phase in my mild bipolar cycle.
Yes, interesting. Quite.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Connections, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, art, blogging, book art, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, feedback, free, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, literature, predictions, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
So, yesterday’s promotion was a moderate success. Nothing stunning, but certainly not disappointing. We had a total of right at 700 downloads, all told, including 49 from Britain and one each in France & Germany. I’m still waiting for the first download in Japan …
Anyway. Those downloads pushed Communion of Dreams to #3 in the “High Tech SF” subcategory, to #13 in overall Science Fiction, and to #327 on the entire free Kindle store rankings. It may have even done a bit better, since there were another 100 downloads after I crashed last night.
Not bad. Not bad, at all. Thanks everyone!
Last month also saw a decent uptick in overall visits to the Communion of Dreams site, to some 1,200. That’s about a 30% increase over what is typical.
This afternoon I’m mailing off the bulk of the signed paperback copies of CoD from the Kickstarter rewards, and we’re waiting to hear back from the printer about the final tally on the Limited Edition copies. I haven’t made too big a deal out of that special edition here yet, because right now we’ve just got generic examples of my book arts work on the page — but once we have the actual pages, I’ll make up some examples of what the finished book will look like, so people will have a better idea of what they’ll be getting. However, it is not too early if you want to reserve your copy — there are at present only 44 copies remaining available.
And yes, I am now shifting the bulk of my creative energy over to thinking about St. Cybi’s Well, to exactly how I want to lay out the plot and all the characters/scenes/themes. As I noted last week, this is all really exciting.
Cheers!
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
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, art, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, jim downey, Kickstarter, literature, Paypal, predictions, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
OK, the site updates are now live — you can now order a limited edition copy of Communion of Dreams, and place your advance order to reserve a limited edition copy of St. Cybi’s Well.
I’d like to make several notes about these pages …
First is that currently the images of the different bindings are just representative, to give you some idea of what the types of cover materials look like. We’ll soon be ordering the special print run of Communion of Dreams, and once those pages are done and back to me, I’ll make up some actual copies of the books to show what the finished products will actually look like.
Second is that these edition numbers are “hard”: once all the books are claimed, that’s it — there will be no more. The edition for Communion of Dreams is just 53 copies (plus two Author’s/Artist’s Proof copies). 8 of the copies have already been reserved. The edition for St. Cybi’s Well is just 101 copies (plus two Author’s/Artist’s Proof copies). 11 of those copies have already been reserved.
Lastly, because of logistics using Paypal, there are some limitations in how we set up payments. Downpayments can be taken directly through Paypal for each selection, but you can also just email me to arrange different amounts or payments on account. If you want to send a personal check to order a copy of either limited edition (or both of them), that’s perfectly fine. For help with any of this, just contact me via email: jim@communionofdreams.com
As I’ve noted before, I’m really jazzed about writing St. Cybi’s Well. But even beyond that, I’m excited about combining two of my creative skills: my writing and my bookbinding. Being an accomplished craftsman and artist doesn’t usually blend with also being a writer. This is probably the single best thing to come out of the Kickstarter project for me: thinking in these terms.
Thanks, everyone!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Connections, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, art, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, literature, predictions, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
I’ve mentioned it in passing, but I just wanted to drop a brief note and make it explicit: I’m really jazzed about St. Cybi’s Well.
With the unexpected success of the Kickstarter, it took me most of last week to recover from the shock and start to work through all the details of what happened. I’m mostly past that stuff, and have been in contact with all the people who had claimed as a reward one of the hand-bound books in order to allow them to choose their edition # (and if you were one such backer, please check your messages on Kickstarter and get back to me soon). In the next day or two we’ll be ready to open up advance orders to the general public.
But while it is important to deal with all that administrative stuff, what is really cool is that soon I’ll be able to concentrate on getting the book written, edited, and published. Something which I have been thinking about, working through, and giving deep consideration for years. And frankly, that is really exciting!
Now, it will mean that I won’t be posting quite as much here. And I’ll apologize now for that. But concentrating on writing a full-length novel takes a huge amount of creative energy and focus. I’m not going to disappear completely, however, and I will try and keep a schedule of posting a couple of times a week — to let you know how the writing is going, if nothing else. If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, you might want to do so, to get notice of new posts when they’re up.
Thanks again, everyone. For your support of the Kickstarter. For your purchases and downloads of my books. For your feedback and reviews. For just reading this blog over the last five years. It all makes a difference, and I value each and every bit of it.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 