Jarrat and Stone are back ... and I'm stunned

Words fail me. I mean ... words ... just ... fail. What can I say? Have a look at these, and be amazed:

Ooof. It's like looking at stills from the movie. These are two "renders" out of a set of 10, all of which are online at Jade's Adventures in 3D -- and they're also uploaded at about twice this size, so go ahead, click the pic to see the larger shot. The Jarrat renders went up first, telling a scene from his POV. The Stone renders went up yesterday, telling the same scene from his POV.

They leave my fingers itching to write NARC. And I can't, because I'm churning my way steadily through Hellgate, and 2010 is about getting that whole series finished. This is sheer, unmitigated torture! I ask myself, could I possibly squeeze in a Jarrat-and-Stone short piece, something "only" around 50,000 words or so? In fact, there *is* a story which has been slated to be the high-action prologue to the next NARC novel -- and you all know what happened last time I did this. STOPOVER was supposed to be the opening "kaboom" for APHELION, and it ended up being taken right out and published on its own, because at 45,000 words it was a) too long to be an opening act, b) would have pushed the overall length of APHELION to 230,000 words, which is monstrous; and c) was quite large enough to be published as a pocket-size thriller.

Hence, I find myself literally, and enthusiastically, adrool ... and asking the question in all seriousness: can I squeeze in a NARC short, if I work, very very hard, fueled by the rush of seeing these pictures?

Stay tuned!

And please do link over to Jade's blog, where pictures like this are commonplace, what's more, she'll tell you how to do it yourself:

Cheers,
Mel

ICE, WIND & FIRE -- five stars at Rainbow Reviews!

Many thanks to Rainbow Reviews for reviewing the twentieth anniversary reissue of ICE, WIND AND FIRE, and it's my pleasure to report ... five stars!

Here's the complete review: http://www.rainbow-reviews.com/?p=4141

Brilliant ... I'm gratified -- delighted!

Now, if the proof copy of the paperback would just be delivered. And I know it's Christmas holding everything up, but it's 10 January already and patience is wearing thin.

While I'm on the subject of thanking people vastly for their input, feedback and assistance, I must thank Jade yet again, for the most amazing NARC visualizations! Have you seen these:

Capt. Kevin Jarrat

Capt. R.J. "Stoney" Stone

Sgt. J.C. "Gil" Cronin: and look at the unit badge!!

Sgt. J.C. "Gil" Cronin displays the descant squad's much vaunted physique!

I'm reliably informed that the next character to be tackled head-on is Harry, and I can't wait to see this. Makes my fingers itch to get back into these books. However, I just picked up the threads of HELLGATE, and am promising myself that I'll go right through both books without letting myself be diverted again. (This should have been the plan for 2009, but GLBT Bookshelf came along, and the rest is history.)

So ... massive thanks to Jade, whose blog/site has developed into one of the most gloriously beautiful sites on the web: http://3d-adventures.blogspot.com/ ... and to Rainbow Reviews for a wonderful review of ICE, WIND AND FIRE!

Cheers,

Mel

Jarrat and Stone on Christmas Eve...

It's Christmas Eve here, but I could swear it was Christmas morning. I just received one of the best presents I ever had, and better yet, it's something I can share with you. It's this:

They came through as attachments on an email about 90 minutes ago ... and I'm floored. I am seriously still on the deck, wondering what hit me. These characters just came to life -- they just walked out of my imagination and onto the screen, as surely as if a movie were being made! Jarrat and Stone have become real, live entities.

You can see the original blog post where they appeared here, and also the excerpt from EQUINOX which they were used to illustrate, here. (I've chosen an excerpt from each of the 27 titles on my backlist, and I'm putting up 2 or 3 a week. I have half a dozen up now -- Jade put up a couple of them for me, in particular those which are ... illustrated. Like this. Jade: "thank you" is too simple a thing to say, but if there's better words, I haven't learned them!

Oof.

Christmas Eve is warm, humid; the overcast is breaking up at last -- it actually rained last night! We were supposed to get a storm, but if it broke, I didn't see it. Christmas is upon us, so...

Merry Christmas to all! May the season be happy, safe, and one to remember!

Cheers,

Mel

ICE WIND AND FIRE: the paperback and the black hole

A swift update on the ICE, WIND AND FIRE situation:

We've passed the "delivery deadline" for the proof, and DreamCraft has officially categorized it as DBU -- Down Black Hole. It's been too long since it was shipped to hold out much, if any, optimism that it'll show up.

The proof has been reordered. Allow 14 days minimum for it to be delivered here, so it can be eyeballed and given the OK, and cleared for sale.

Alas, this puts us right in the middle of the holidays, so it looks like the paperback launch of IWF will have to be put back into January, 2010.

Rats. You can get it as an ebook, but ... what can I tell you? US Mails and/or Australia Post strike again.

In the meantime, here's some eye-candy, guy-candy, to put the smile back on your face:

...and it would be fair to say, in all sincerity, that I am so gobsmacked, my bog has never been so smacked. Want more: you need to be on Jade's Adventures in 3D. There's a new digital fantasy every day -- makes me feel like I'm stuck in reverse! I have GOT to get my creative act in gear in 2010. I'm supposed to be a writer, not a website administrator ... right?!

NARC ... Hellgate, The Swordsman, the Vampyre, all need to be finished. Okay: deep breath. The work starts (I said starts!) in January.

Bear with me...

Cheers,

Mel

Monday morning blues (and greens)

Regular readers couldn't have failed to notice ... no post yesterday. For the first time ever. I just spoiled my perfect record of posting every day since June 20th '08 ... well, rats. I had an extremely narrow "window of opportunity" through which to launch a blog post, and when it came around the wifi connection was jacking around. No Internet connection.

It's not till your connection goes down that you realize the extent to which we have become Internet dependent these days. No connection?? Count three, two, one, and we're ready to spit the dummy. I certainly was. No blog post? [screaming sound issuing from general Adelaide area]

Not that there was actually anything much worth blogging about yesterday -- but it's the principle of the thing.

Today, however, there's something quite nice to report: another title is up at Kindle, and also The Lords of Harbendane has been unstuck. So there are now four Kindle titles:





The next titles in the Kindle Store will be The Swordsman, Aquamarine, Twilight ... and then, the big news.

Next week we'll be having something of a launch, because the whole NARC series will be hitting Amazon, all of a piece. Now ... believe it or not, guys, they're actually there now, but to find them you'd have to go to Amazon and search on Mel Keegan. Next week, we'll be having a full-on launch, including a new webpage, a newsletter, a press release, and so on.

But for regular readers ... well, check this out, folks:



That's pretty cool. Right after we launch the paperback range, we'll organize the Kindle copies -- and Mobipocket, too.

So it's going to be busy in the next week or so.

Legends is coming along nicely, with getting close to 50 "episodes" online, and I have to admit that lately it's been getting some very nice traffic, with about 35-40% of visitors coming back to read the whole thing. The only thing that surprises and confounds me is that financial support in the way of Google patronage (those pesky swatches of text that you can never get away from, where the publisher gets about a dime when someone, somewhere, clicks one), Amazon shopping, and Paypal $1 donations, is ... weak. It takes (get this) 3,000 page impressions to get a single click on a Google ad, or a donation; and then Ma Goog pays in copper coins for said click.

Anyway -- the experiment continues, but for writers out there who are interested to see how this turns out, here's what we know so far: you'll be lucky to get about $5 in a week from the advertising parked on the site, but (!) the words DOWNLOAD FREE GAY FICTION bring in new readers by the swarms. Significant numbers of them go on to check out your web page, your blog, your landing page, and you'll notice a steep uptick in your sales figures. So ... the advertising is very close to a waste of time, but the volume of potential readers checking you out is quite large, and a number of them, uh, buy books or ebooks. And that is what it's all about.

Legends has been a lot of fun, and it currently maybe 20 posts away from hitting the spot where you're at "Here Ends the First Book of the Fall of the Atlantean Empire." I will be putting it onto hiatus there but the site will stay up perpetually. At that point, I'll properly format the book and put it into all the PDFs and so forth that people need for their gizmos. Also, there'll be artwork -- screensavers, desktops, cards, mugs, mousepads whatever --

And, as I do believe I've mentioned somewhere, my brain is switching gears already. I'm in HELLGATE mode. Seriously. It's Travers, Marin and Vidal going through my gray cells ... and three more delicious dudes never came alive off the page of one of my novels. I'm looking forward very much to finishing out the whole series in one haul -- two books, not three, and each of them about the size of Dangerous Moonlight. Yes, it's going to be a lot of work ... it's also going to be a load of fun.

Then, next year -- back to the Legends project, get that finished. Then ... we'll see.

Right now, I have to run: work. That other four letter word ending in K.

Ciao for now,
MK

Blogging in the rain -- really!

Can't blog ... I'm too busy watching the rain. Not that you guys would call it rain, of course, but hey -- this is the first time WATER has dropped willy-nilly out of the sky, since something like October! So even though it hasn't rained much (most of the time you could count the splashes as they hit the pavers) you just had to stop and stare.

Of course, its all over now. The radar map shows blue skies behind the current overcast, and since the wind just got up these clouds will be gone before long.

But it was nice while it lasted:
There you are ... WET and everything. Water on the sidewalk. Clouds in the sky. Makes a difference, I'll tell you.

The rain is one of a couple of Significant Happenings in the last 24 hours. The second is that the proof copies of Equinox and Scorpio have arrived, and they are superb. CreateSpace has done a marvelous job, as usual. Now, we're waiting on the proofs for Stopover and Aphelion, and then -- the book launch at Amazon for the whole NARC series, all of a piece. For which, expect a newsletter...

Otherwise, it's work as usual. The Kindle situation remains in limbo ... I'm working on the reformatting for Smashwords, but it's going to be slow, due to the fact that I'm converting some very old, eccentric documents --

For example, Fortunes of War. This one was typed in Juniper Computing's Softword program (circa 1985), and SAVED TO TAPE. Much later, the tape-memory files were recalled, it was printed out, scanned in, run through OCR software and fed one page at a time into Lotus AMI Pro; the final edit was done, and hard copies were sent to GMP for publication in the early 1990s. The files were then stored on single density 3.5" floppy disks. These were, much later, read back into Lotus Word Pro and stored on an IEEE Firewire external harddrive that, at 30MB, looked incalculably vast when it was new. The "new" lotus files on the Firewire drive were of the LWF type ... which, thank gods, Serif PagePlus 10 reads extremely well. So, the DreamCraft version is in a Serif DTP format, a PPP document. For Lulu.com, this was published to PDF.

There is no simple .doc file ... nor has there ever been! ... for Fortunes of War. However, you can (!) select-all/copy a Serif PPP file to the clipboard, and dump it into Microsoft Word 2003 (not later versions; the more clever Microsquash gets, the less it shakes hands with other formats). Then, you save back the Word document -- not as a .doc, but as a Web Page Unfiltered. This gets rid of most of the passenger trash. Now, use Word to reopen the HTML file, and you're ready to run it through the process required by Smashwords to get rid of all remaining formatting.

Now, it's true that the new(er) books will be easy by comparison. But I have several golden oldies that are reader favorites from yonks ago. For instance, Fortunes is among my February bestsellers! Would you believe this? A book that's been out for over 15 years and has been through more editions (with more stupid covers designed by moronic artists) than you can shake a stick at, is still out there, selling so well --

Put it like this: if GMP were still handling this book, I'd have had to sell about 115 copies of this oldie in the month of February, to make the income it generated for me at Amazon (paperbacks), Payloadz (ebooks) and Lulu (hardcovers). I'm amazed, and pleased.

So -- yep, we're heading for Smashwords, one step at a time. In fact, after I finish this post I'm going to run one of the very new books through the conversion process, and with any luck, in a couple of days I might be able to run up a flag and tell you, you can get Dangerous Moonlight and The Lords of Harbendane for your iPhone, and as Mobi, readable on your Kindle.

Bear with me.

Speaking of all this stuff -- the Keegan sales figures were just tallied up for February, and I can tell you that we did more than double the business in Feb that we did in January. Nice, that. About 50% was ebooks, 45% paperbacks, 5% hardcovers. Of the ebooks, 75% were the regular PC/Mac version, 25% were specifically for the screenreaders, though I have no idea what kind ... the ones that can read a properly designed PDF, is all I know!

The book launch for The Lords of Harbendane obviously put that title out in front, with decent sales ... not brilliant, but in fact better than I'd secretly hoped for. Don't underestimate 1) the global recession, 2) the length of the unemployment lines, 3) the price of gas, and 4) the idiotic price of importing a Keegan into Aus and New Zealand --

It costs US$38.04 to buy The Lords of Harbendane in paperback and have it shipped via Amazon to Aus or NZ. Run the exchange rate (at .63c, as of this morning) and you get a price of A$60.38, ppd. That's two tanks of gas for a small car, or a week's groceries for a frugal couple.

So, if you drop out the "lost" Aussie and Kiwi readers, and factor in an adjustment percentage for the global recession etc., the fact is, Harbendane is doing very nicely. There was a time (2002/3) when DreamCraft would organize a book launch and we'd ship about 250 copies of the new title in THE FIRST WEEK. That doesn't happen these days, and I don't expect it to; but I have high hopes for the future, when advertising, technology and economic recovery have conspired to change the way things currently are. For the moment, I'm extremely pleased with sales -- and looking forward to seeing how the books' availability for iPhone and Kindle, via Smashwords, will add to the numbers.

Interest in the Legends digital novel project could be higher, I'll admit -- fact: a lot of people just don't have a use for electronic files, or else have no interest in a serial! However, the emerging book has a strong core of about 50 - 75 readers who swing by either every day or once a week ... not bad going for a project that only launched three weeks ago and has had very, very limited promotional exposure.

Right now, I'm looking out for listings, directories, where Legends can be, uh, listed. There are loads of them, but almost all have a downside. Either they're owned and operated by people who have a problem with gay fiction (and that's okay, because where a directory is a personal project, the list-mom/dad has the right to decide what gets into their list) or else the automated systems are so vast, one will vanish into the primordial ooze --

For example, www.blogcatalog.com is an amazing directory, but it's the size of the Death Star. Searchable -- yes; but the tag "gay" pulls up 42,884 items. "Fiction" pulls up 28,272 items. "Books" = 130,260. "Gay fiction" = 1,746 ... getting warmer, but at 10 results per search page, you're still looking at 174 pages -- and if it's anything like Google (and it is) people don't look past Page One.

Legends needs a lot more of a shove to get it properly launched. I had hoped, initially, that "viral marketing" would take over, that people would email people who emailed people ... with the URL. This happened for the first few days, tapered off and stopped. Now, you and I both know the readership is vastly bigger than this! But it seems one can't look for much in the way of user participation -- which is fair enough, too. (It's an experiment, and this is one of the facts that just fell out of the data.)

Statistically? About 500 "unique" visitors checked out Legends in the first week; about 50 of those are still reading; 20 more have come on board in the last couple of weeks. So you had about 10% of the check-out crowd (those who like to read; like fantasy; like Keegan; have the fascination and/or patience to stick around; and like ebooks) who became regulars, plus 10 new readers per week finding the book and becoming followers of this serial.

This is actually pretty good. If the numbers remain stable, it means 250+ regulars by the time the book is finished, and 500 new readers finding it, and grabbing the whole thing, during any one year. That's a reader base which is quite vigorous enough to support the advertising with the occasional shopping spree at Amazon which started out on the Legends page, and so on.

Speaking of Legends -- two posts are up today:
A Bargain by the Jackal Throne (conclusion)
and
The Oracle Speaks

And now, I'm going to spend a fascinating hour or so shoving Dangerous Moonlight headfirst through what Smashwords terms as the "meatgrinder." If everything comes up Keegan, I'll let you know tomorrow!

Cheers,
MK

Gay book - making news for all the wrong reasons

In my rambling explorations of the Internet, I often stumble over curious things -- and here's one that's worth eight or ten ordinary ones: Plot thickens in case of 'censored' author, gay sheikh and a Booker prize-winner ...

It's a long an extraordinary story involving a gay novel (or at least a novel with a gay twist), the Muslim religion, a book festival in the Emirates, a major publisher, a Canadian Booker prize awardee, a torrent of misinformation, a storm of controversy, and a whole lot of people who wondered how the hell they got into this crapola.

Here's the short version -- insofar as there is anything vaguely approximating a short version! English journalist writes novel set in Middle East, featuring gay sheik with Brit boyfriend. Novel is published; novel is entered in the upcoming "first ever literary festival to be held in the Emirates" in Dubai, which kicks off on Friday. Why in the name of anybody's g/God(s) such a book would be entered in a book fair in a Muslim country beats the hell of of me, but it was and (surprise) it was tossed back by the fair organizers. A gay Sheik?! Can't happen legally, people. The whole concept questions the Muslim faith, and --

Bingo, right on cue, the book was kicked back. Now, was it banned? Author Geraldine Bedell maintains that it either is, was, or appeared to be banned at the time she spoke out about the situation ... and Canadian Booker-winner Margaret Atwood -- who whad been engaged to appear at the fair in Dubai, rightly went fairly ballistic. She's "a vice-president of the literary anti-censorship organisation PEN", and she canceled the appearance on principle...

So far, so good. Rumors flew about the book (The Gulf Between Us) having been censored by the authorities (where? in England?), and the whirlwind of misinformation shifted into high gear. The bottom line? The book wasn't banned -- not really, not technically, not in the actual meaning of the verb "to ban." Nor, apparently, was in censored.

In fact, the book was bumped from the festival in Dubai for many and varied reasons. Here's the bottom line: "The Guardian has seen an email from [festival director] Abulhoul, dated 19 September 2008, in which she says the novel was "extremely well written and should sell well" but continues: "However it is definitely not a book that we can launch at EAIFL for the following reasons: one of the Sheikhs is gay and has an English boyfriend; it talks about Islam and queries what is said; it is set in the Gulf and focuses on the Iraq war and could be a minefield for us."

Here's the whole sad story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/21/margaret-atwood-gulf-literary-festival ... and the more you read of it, and into it, the worse it gets.

Who's responsible for the mess? In Keegan's estimation it would have to be the pea-brain who tried to enter a book like The Gulf Between Us in a debut book festival in the Emirates! Good gods, get real, people. Could be a minefield?! Could be a bloody neutron bomb!

This is one of those times when I am so relieved to be able to publish privately and sell via something like Amazon, PayLoads, whatever. The crapola is amputated. People can either buy or not, as suits themselves, and this kind of three-ringed circus doesn't happen.

Speaking of publishing ...

The proof of Death's Head has just arrived from CreateSpace -- and once again they've done a marvelous job. The quality is superb. Equinox and Scorpio are on their way and should be here in a week or so. That leaves Stopover and Aphelion to be proofed.

However, we're going to hang onto the whole package and release the whole thing at Amazon, all of a piece. This should be in about three weeks, I think -- might be four, because ... if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know how long it takes for a book to percolate its way into the Amazon engine.

Incidentally, Amazon sales of the Keegan titles are very good since Christmas, but the Lulu.com sales are dropping off to match, which shows you where people's faith is: for whatever reason (and there is no watertight reason) they trust Amazon a whole lot more than they trust Lulu. That's good to know; unless you work for Lulu.com.

Meanwhile, Legends is rolling with a full head of steam now. I just uploaded a good-sized post, which commences Chapter Ten ... and also some new artwork.

Speaking of the art, the Legends portfolio is incredibly beautiful, and we're trying to get some items up to Zazzle in the neat future. For me, things are very busy with the Amazon Kindle and Smashwords files to be developed.

Kindle is easy -- but Smashwords is going to take a lot more work, so I might have to settle for a whole bunch of projects at Kindle, and work on the Smashwords upload separately.

I'll leave you with an image -- the header shot for Chapter Ten.


Kudos to Jade ... fantastic work. I can see this on a mouse pad...

Cheers,
MK

The future looks squeezy

Got something for you here ... as one science fiction writer to another reader. I talk muchly about the cars of the future, but somehow, I don't think the real future is going to turn out looking like NARC and Hellgate after all! Check this out:

The Future of Parking:



Now, I can just see Jarrat and Stone feeding themselves into and out of this ... I can really see Cronin and Ramos screeching across town in one of these ... not.

Oh, boy. Does the future really have to look like this?!

As a matter of fact, I blogged about this before Christmas. Remember this: The shape, color and texture of things to come ... in which we looked at the cars, clothes and cities you are I are very likely to be subjected to, should the genetic "tweaks" come along by 2050, which will allow us to live to 2150. The meaning of "kewl" appears to be changing. I don't know if it's for the better!

More later in the day. Just wanted to pass this along.

Ciao for now,
MK

More than human ... in fact,Transhuman

As I work on the Legends project, getting it ready to launch (soon!) I can't help thinking about other projects that are waiting not far down the track. Crystal Genesis is a project that's been close to my heart for almost two decades now; and then you have the NARC and Hellgate books, which share quite a bit in common -- as well they should, since they take place in the same space, albeit 200 years apart.

The biggest difference between the NARC and Hellgate "worlds" is the Transhuman element, which is the pivot point around which Crystal Genesis revolves. In the NARC stories (set a little under four centuries in our own future) people are ... well, they're still just people. There hasn't been much tinkering with the human genome to make humans over into "more" or "different." Then, along came the starship engines which pushed the frontier back so far that untold opportunities for colonization, industry ... empire ... came along. But a lot of these worlds were not quite earthlike. They were close enough to be terraformed to a degree, but the humans relocating there had to meet the new environment halfway.



And this meant the eventual acceptance of Transhuman engineering. It's a great term -- and not one I invented! It's already in use, and the ethics, protocols, politics, philosophies of Transhumanism are already being thrashed out, even here, even now, in 2009.

For a smattering of background on this, have a look at the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

While you're there, take a moment to notice that there's a new magazine on the subject. The first issue of H+ magazine came out for fall 2008, and is downloadable as a PDF from the website:
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/

I've just read quite a lot of the PDF and the whole thing interests me strangely. The world of NARC and Hellgate just came a step closer. One of the feature articles in H+ #1 is entitled, "Science Fiction gets funding."

If I could, I'd give you a little taste, to inspire you to get over to H+ and take a proper look; but the magazine is in PDF form, and -- quite understandably! -- the copy/paste feature is locked out. God knows, I lock it out on my own PDFs ... to make people get the whole thing, not just take a sniff or a bite in passing. So go here, and get the magazine:
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/hplusmag_fall_2008.pdf

Interesting, isn't it? Also controversial. As the technologies become realistic and the decision to be modified or not becomes exactly that -- an individual's own decision -- then, well, you can just bet your pension that the controversy will balloon. And it won't soon be over. You'll have religious bods who want everyone to grow old and die because they believe this is what god or God or gods intended; there'll be the moralists, who may be atheists, but who firmly believe that the warts-'n-all human is the right way to be ... diabetes and arthritis and heart disease being our birthright, and we'll stamp our collective foot if we get cheated outta them!

Nostrakeeganus going to stick neck way out and make big prophecy: the technology will come along within the next half century, though the arguments will still be in session. However, when the technology is a reality, sooner or later someone, somewhere will notice that rich people have stopped being 60. They're all 35. And they're slim, and muscular, and healthy, goddamn it. In other words, the therapies will be expensive and administered by rogue physicians in underground clinics frequented by the wealthy. Transhumanism will sneak in the back door, and when the Hollywood A-list of 2050 is, on average, 75 years old and looking forty years younger ... the tide of public pressure will sweep away the nay-sayers.

People want to look younger and slimmer; they want muscles; few actually want to be bald or have gray hair. We all desire perfect piano-key teeth, great eyesight, freedom from arthritis, deafness, cancer. If there's something amoral or weird about these desires, then the cosmetics industry ought to take another look at itself right now. Also modern dentistry, let alone the legions of plastic surgeons and research medicine gurus.

We slather our faces with anti-wrinkle cream, diet and exercise, put on our toupees and wigs, dye our hair, get our teeth capped, get fitted for contact lenses, do yoga, take fish oils and see chiropractors, invest in near-to-invisible hearing aids, and get screened for cancer every six months. This is normal and desirable, but transhumanism is amoral and weird?

Good question, isn't it? You have to know I'm solidly behind any harmless, side-effect-free, affordable, ecologically sound, financially supportable therapy that will "put paid" to disease and disability. Ever tried to have a sensible conversation with someone who's almost stone deaf? Ever helped a near-blind old aunt get groceries? Ever visited a near-the-end terminal cancer patient in the hospital? Have you experienced the first pains of unavoidable, normal "wear and tear" on your joints? Your doctor will patiently explain that everyone over about 35 has some degree of osteo arthritis. It's your body starting to wear out. And it hurts. The wear and tear is gradual, like the way your glasses keep getting thicker, and there's more gold and porcelaine in your mouth, and your face is, uh, spreading sideways and heading south!

You can take the moral high ground (as a lot of people do), and say it's all normal, and we should be glad to be mortal, go through this and go to that great typing pool in the sky --

But if you notice, the people perched on this moral high ground -- saying things that you might respond to with a smile and a nod while inwardly you wince -- are usually the ones with the beautifully dyed hair, the expensive spectacles, the perfectly capped teeth. And I'll bet they get screened for cancer and take the most expensive vitamins and antioxidants on the shelf. Fundamentally, they're breaking their own rules, because everything we do that aims to change what we are, what we were born, falls neatly into the Transhuman zone.

It's interesting, and it's going to be fascinating to watch this drama unfold between now, and, say, 2058 ... at which date, Keegan will be 100 years old. And driving a souped up, turbo-charged wheelchair up the line to get the newly-legalized therapies! Like a lot of other people, I'd like to live to be 120, which they say is the maximum normal human lifespan. But who the heck wants to live that long if you can't be mobile, active, creative, productive --

Good grief! It's just occurred to you that you'll have to read this bloody blog for another fifty years!

Ciao for now,
MK

The Vanishing Website Affair

To answer today's most-asked question, "Why the sweet, flying f**k am I getting some weird website when I try to logon to Mel Keegan Online" --


Well, it's complicated. DreamCraft is sorting the whole thing out even as I type this -- on the phone, long distance. Apparently, when you forget to update your credit card information, (see yesterday's post), and your domain actually expires ... things get seriously screwed up in terms of domain registration. This is not iPower.com at work -- if it were, it would have been easy to fix it online. It has something to do with another "registry" agency, with which iPower dovetails.

Anyway: Dave has the phone in his hand RIGHT NOW and is talking to an extraordinarily cool young man at iPower, who is fixing the whole thing. It's only a minor cardiac arrest; all will be remedied shortly.

Other things which came my way yesterday: you have GOT to see this:
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/12/astounding-japanese-highways-bridges.html

It's one page on an amusing and astonishing blog/site, and when you see this, you're just hit between the eyeballs with the solid impression that the worlds of Hellgate and NARC are already upon us. I'm going to borrow one image from the above page, to show you what I mean, and as an incentive to get to you GO OVER THERE and see the whole page! There are swags of images like this, and every one of them looks like something right out of NARC and Hellgate:


(Credit on the picture goes to Ken Ohyama, who has a link through to a website, but if you can't read Japanese, you'll have all kinds of fun trying to navigate the site! Give it a shot: http://blog.livedoor.jp/sohsai/)

Update on the dream-craft.com situation: iPower has remedied the whole thing and we're now just waiting for the server to update, which it will do in about 45 minutes or so, according to our tech support guru, who is certain to be beatified.

If you're looking for website hosting, iPower would have to be the one I recommend. You can stuff things up royally, pick up the phone, and it's just ... fixed. In fact (I might have mentioned this before), it's the only ISP DreamCraft has been recommending for eons -- in fact, they actually "re-sell" iPower services. Excuse the commercial, but if you're a similar bind, wondering who in the heck you can trust to babysit your brainchildren, this is worth a look:


My apologies to one and all about the "Disappearing Website Affair." This is the reason I blog as well as having a major website! Belt and suspenders. Double-indemnity.

Bear with us just a little longer...

Cheers,
MK

Counting down to 2009

As the year draws rapidly to a close you find us working furiously to complete the upload of the NARC books to CreateSpace, which puts them on the road to Amazon. They won't land there till February or March, for reasons of time (other work to do, folks: work never stops) and investment (when you're publishing a loooong backlist from Aus, getting to Amazon ain't cheap; every proof copy sets you back about fifty bucks, and you're doing how many of these little fellas?).

Slowly but surely, though, we're getting there. Right now, we're watching the mailbox for the proof copy of THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE, and when the paperback makes its appearance in the Amazon engine -- we'll have a book launch!

Right now, we're going over the NARC covers, giving them the nips and tweaks they need to meet the requirements of a different printshop. Fortunately, DreamCraft never ditches old data. The files for the Lulu versions of the covers still exist, so we're able to open them up and rearrange things. With a minimum of fuss (most of it created by the fact some fonts have gone missing, and the Amazon paperback has to have a dead zone to accommodate a barcode), we're getting through quite rapidly.

Scrounging around for fonts is an experience in itself. The long-familiar font which was used for the NARC title logo, has upped and vanished. It was a font called Lynx, and the old version is utterly unusable with Adobe, and even the latest Service pack of Windows. So ...

A quick sprint over to Google and a search on "download font lynx" turned up this: http://simplythebest.net/fonts/ ... and there was the font we wanted: http://simplythebest.net/fonts/fonts/lynx.html. Cheers to the "Simply the Best" website: they made it easy, and the font works like magic. Fixed our problem in three minutes flat.

Working with the old NARC files brought me closer to the DTP software -- DreamCraft is still sailing along on PagePlus 10, even though version X3 (thirteen, one supposes ... they switched to the 'X' numbers after 10) just came out.

Good gods ... have a look at their splash/demo pages:

• http://www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplusx3/examples/
• http://www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplusx3/whats-new/
• http://www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplusx3/overview/professional/
• http://www.serif.com/pageplus/pageplusx3/overview/creative/

I have no doubt DreamCraft will be trading up, but the fact is, version 10 was already so powerful, for anything you see on or in the Keegan paperbacks or webpages, you don't need to look further.

If you're interested in the new one, though, a word to the wise: DO NOT get it via the Serif homepage!!! They have the price set at about 80 pounds, sterling -- which is A$200!! You can get it for US$50 (about A$80) online. Check this out:



More and more often these days, you have to shop around and take care. Phenomenal deals are out there, but you have to hunt for them. (Incidentally ... yes, those are affiliate links. If I'm going to be talking about software or cameras or smartphones or something, I might as well paste in the link and be specific about what I'm blathering about. Saves you the trouble of hunting it down -- and there's a fair chance I'll earn a few bucks on the side, right? And there's no harm in keeping the bills paid.)

So this is where you find me as we slither into New Year. I don't have any specific plans for the night. A good dinner will feature in there somewhere, and fireworks -- either the local ones or the telecast from Sydney. Locally, you can take a quick sprint over to Brighton, walk out on the jetty, and watch the show from there at midnight ... a couple of hundred people do. Keegan is sometimes one of them.

And now -- back to work.

Cheers,
MK

Is good health a right or a privilege?!

Very occasionally, there's a cast-iron reason for having a rant ... and this is one of them.

Personally, I don't smoke. I've never smoked. I watched my father take 18 years to die of lung and brain cancer caused by smoking, so I count myself a specialist in the consequences, while not suffering them myself. Who was it said, 'Only an idiot has to learn by his own mistakes.'

So far, so good: at least I'm qualified to indulge myself in a rant! So, here we go:
It's a bloody outrage when you can't have your cup of tea (or coffee) in your own backyard, without being subjected to the secondhand smoke of the (bleep)ing chainsmokers who live on the other side of the fence, and who smoke like (bleep)ing chimneys all morning. Secondhand smoke is a lot more dangerous than the garbage these morons are dragging into their own lungs, because at least they have benefit of the (bleep)ing filter. So, there's Keegan, sitting in a patch of shade on a glorious summer morning, cup of ooling in the hand, thinking about the day's work to be done, and --

Suddenly I'm coughing on someone else's (bleep)ing smoke. I'm inhaling carcinogenic compounds. My eyes are watering on the toxic fallout that's been EXHALED from the diseased lungs of the geriatric pea-brains who live over the fence. They rent. The rules are clear -- they're central to the Residential Tenancies Act: you do NOT smoke in a rental house. So what do these octogenarian cretins do? They go stand on the back step and force-feed the neighbors with the 4,000 artificial substances which are added to the tobacco to make it smolder for a long time rather than burning straight out.

I have no desire to have 4,000 chemicals force-fed into my lungs, and follow my father down an 18-year path that led to places you don't even want to know about. But apparently I don't have any rights to assert. It's their right to smoke on their doorstep and gas me with their toxic fallout. I have no right to ask them (much less tell them) to bugger off and poison themselves somewhere else, where they're not poisoning me too.

The worst part of all this is that when lifelong smokers get into middle age and older, the vaster majority of them get sick. My dad was one. There are hundreds of thousands like him, and they suck the Medicare system dry ... after having shot themselves deliberately in both feet. It's getting on towards half a century since the Surgeon General's report was published. Everyone has known for that long, that smoking causes cancers all over your body, plus peripheral circulation failure, heart disease, arterial disease --

In fact, the only thing it doesn't seem to cause is broken noses ... because if someone like myself, a non-smoker, were to ask these people to stop or go away, they'd get nasty ... it could turn into a big fight ... the fight could get physically violent ... someone's nose gets punched in the furore ... and it's the non-smoker who started it, by trying to save his own life from cancers and cardiac diseases that will eventually kill him! We call it self-bloody-preservation -- and it'll get us hauled up in front of a magistrate, with a huge fine to pay, or we'll go to jail, thirty or sixty days for aggravated assault. And when the non-smoker gets out of jail, what's to say the situation won't happen again? Because apparently smokers have every right to pollute the airspace of non-smokers with the rancid fallout from their diseased lungs.

There. I feel much better now. So, you want to look at ways to get people to quit?

Frankly, I don't think it's every likely to happen. I'm so certain than a majority of people will always smoke that even the characters in some of my novels -- Jarrat and Stone, Marin and Travers -- smoke the occasional cigarette. But, what are they smoking?! It sure as hell ain't the vile kind of crap people are smoking today. I called it kipgrass: a naturally occuring plant that only smolders, won't burn properly -- like the fibers of the Tasmanian white pine -- is then enhanced with mild euphorics, given a pleasant aroma by being scented with citrus, roses, whatever, and then rolled into a cigarette and sold by the 25 pack.

In other words, the smoke is harmless, smells okay, and isn't addictive. Fat chance of this happening outside a science fiction novel!

In the real world, people will always smoke and the tobacco companies control everything that isn't controlled by the oil companies, the drug companies, and the cosmetics industry.

So what can be done to alleviate the problem? Try this:

Recognize that smoking is a harmful, often lethal activity, that also stinks to high heaven. Make people -- and especially kids just starting -- hyper-aware of this, by making it illegal to buy cigarettes unless you are a licensed smoker. Issue smoker's licences, the same way driver's licenses are issued. You have to be 18 to get one, and it costs $100 per year to keep it current. You produce your license every time you buy a packet of smokes. The license is barcoded ... the machine reads the barcode, tracks you as you puff ... and updates your account. The tax on cigarettes is raised to 100% (ie., a $10 pack is now $20), and this amount is stashed in your account, accruing all the time -- to pay for your hospitalization, surgery, chemo and radiotherapy when you get sick. Because the illness you're giving yourself is self-inflicted, and you acknowledge that when you're 50 or 60 or whatever, you're going to be sucking Medicare dry. You pay in advance for your medical care.

It's not a bad idea, surely. A license, and a medicare levy. What's wrong with that? The added expense of puffing away might even cause some of the more intelligent people to quit. For the rest of us, the so-called "fresh air fascists," the fewer smokers there are in the community, the better we like it. Also, since these cretins are now paying for their own medical treatment in advance, the hospital systems will improve vastly for the rest of us.

It's a win-win situation. Licensed, legal smokers who are determined get to keep on puffing, the hospital system benefits, the government gets extra revenue, underage kids find it harder to get supply, more people quit to save money so the air quality improves, and in our old age, the rest of us non-smokers get better medical care, because the people who're inflicting their own terminal disease have prepaid for their care, rather than being utterly self-indulgent for decades and then hogging the lion's share of Medicare as well. The government would have to love this: it's political manna. The technology is easily available to manage this system. And it'd be difficult for the tobacco companies to find an argument...

Uh ... just a thought, guys.

Ciao for now,
MK

If you found this post interesting or useful, please email the url to your friends! Google still has my page rankings zeroed out, so I can't win a Google search or blog search, no matter how well my posts are crafted. I'm in contact with the company, but it's a long, slow process to find a resolution. How can you help?! By email the urls of useful posts! Thank you kindly.

As the world churns

The Mel-o-Sphere is in a holding pattern today ... which means nothing of any note is happening, and I don't have any particular bee in my bonnet to rattle on about. So I'll take the opportunity to answer a couple of readers' questions here.

From a reader on the east coast of England who has just recently moved there from points much closer to the equator (India or Pakistan -- I'm not sure): how much of the history which appears in THE DECEIVERS is real? For example, in the book, do I give a real, genuine, accurate portrayal of Scarborough and Whitby in 1862?

Yes. Absolutely. I researched the period and the locations to death, and wove the information into the novel so that, though you're not reading a text book, you are certainly reading a 100% credible depiction of the era and place. So, if you're looking for background on Scarborough and Whitby, you could do a lot worse than read THE DECEIVERS ... with this single disclaimer: it's a gay novel! Duh. Be sure your dear Auntie Flo will enjoy the frank exploration of a romantic entanglement between two beautiful young men, before you hand her this book as a research work for her project. Auntie Flo could easily surprise the heck out of you and say, "Oh, my dear, I've read it many times, it's one of my favorite Keegans!"

Uh, yeah.

Next question, from the same reader: why did we change the cover on the book?

We've been leaning toward wraparound covers lately -- covers where the artwork carries right on around to the back, with the text (blurb) overlaid. The cover to the first edition was beautiful, but it's definitely a vignette. Doesn't lend itself to a wraparound. The new artwork was done specifically to fit, using a seascape which was captured offshore here (Brighton or maybe Noarlunga; I forget), and a schooner which was borrowed from a small, nasty, grainy old photo, and completely repainted. The faces from the original cover were saved, and dovetailed into the back cover.

The original cover looked like this, and you see what I mean. It's a vignette, pure and simple. The whole design doesn't lend itself to a wraparound, whereas, if you've been keeping an eye on the new editions, you'll have noticed that many of them are in the new design.

Speaking of book cover designs --

We're thinking of a new (2009) edition for the NARC covers. It's still in the suggestion phase, but a new 2009 edition is out there...

The cover for THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE has been designed but not yet painted. It's going to be an absolute beauty. I'm loving it even as a design sketch. You'll see the HARBENDANE cover here, on the blog, much earlier than it'll appear on the website.

And yes, when the HELLGATE series is complete next year, new covers will be designed for the hardcovers -- we'll be combining the six books into three big hardbacks, and the project deserved new jacketing. You'll also be able to get them as six paperbacks, of course; and you'll be able to get either six individual ebooks, or a "Pack" of all six in the same zip archive.

Next reader's question (probably the last item for today) is photographic. This, from a nice gent in Toronto: do you recommend Micrografx, because I'm looking for an alternative to Photoshop, which is way beyond my budget. (I talked about using this software to cure the scanner measles on the Alaska pics uploaded a couple of posts ago, so this is a very astute question. See? People do actually read this stuff.)

Oh, yes. I've always used Micrografx Picture Publisher for retouching photos -- right back as far as 1995. I've used Photoshop, but the few features it has over Picture Publisher 7 don't warrant the incredible pricetag. PP7 will do 80% of anything Photoshop will do for you ... in an interface which is so simple and friendly, a chimpanzee could figure it out ... and the pricetag is (!) about $10 on Amazon right now. Highly recommended, and then some. For a start, look at the difference in price; and I promise you, PP7 will give you the vast majority of all you'll get out of Photoshop, and an interface you can actually comprehend, and a learning curve you can scramble up in a week or so.

One word of warning: I have no real idea how it performs under Vista. I still use XP pro, and have no plans to change, because what I've seen of Vista looks pretty bad. Under anything from 2000 and ME right through to XP, you don't have a worry with PP7, but Vista could cause all kinds of nasties. perfectly good programs fall apart under Vista. So ... keep your fingers crossed, or ask around before you buy. Can't help you here: I'm not touching Vista with the proverbial 10-foot pole.

Re: this program, I can also give you the 100% recommendation from our cover artist, Jade, who uses the same software for very different purposes. Keegan might been retouching photos, like the scans of my old Alaska prints, which predate digital photography, but Jade uses the painting tools in PP7 to actually PAINT. Proof of this particular pudding? THE SWORDSMAN cover was painted in Micrografx -- from scratch, I might add ... from sketches.

Incidentally, Picture Publisher 8 is out ... for about $150. You probably don't need it. You'd have to be a top-line pro, the Syd Mead of your neck of the woods, to want this. It *is* the font runner, right along with Photoshop (and again, far easier to use), but why pay $150 for version 8, when 7 will do, for less than ten dollars at Amazon?

That's all I have time for today, questions-wise. There's a couple more to answer, and you have my promise, I'll get to them soon. This week. Seriously. But right now, I have these two guys waiting for me in a fantasy realm called Harbendane ... where the fair city of Althea is girding its loins for war, and the barbarians are gathering in the north, and there's a hot gay romp happening on silk sheets, so --

'Scuse me, while I get some work done. (Ha! Work, they call it...)

Cheers,
MK

Sundry Sunday miscellany

Sunday finds me working on LORDS OF HARBENDANE, and taking half hour out right here to answer some readers' questions.

This first, from a lady in Toronto, Canada: when the [expletive deleted] will the rest of HELLGATE be putting in an appearance?! Good question, with a simple answer: soon, because I'm doing the prep work for the entire rest of the series at this time. Right now, I do believe I'm cutting seven books to six, and just as I wrote CRY LIBERTY and PROBE back to back, I'll be doing the last two the same way. They'll be released singly, a few months apart, and I'm hoping to get them out in 2009. Afterwards, we have a pet project: the six HELLGATE books will be partnered by twos, and you'll be able to buy the whole lot in three big hardcovers which will look amazing on your bookshelf. (Few science fiction novels/series look like that ... and it's an absolute first in gay publishing. Three monstrous hardcovers, being a 2,200 page epic tale of love, war, espionage, death, high technology, survival, freedom and friendship? I'm actually racking my brains to think of any other such project. There's a number of big, huuuuuge fantasy novels ... the Wheel of Time, for one. But nothing similar, in hard SF. And absolutely nothing in gay SF or fantasy. Let me get this done, guys, and we'll make some history here.)

Next, from a gent in the UK: does the NARC riot armor look like the suit in IRON MAN? Actually ... no. Which is not the same as saying I don't really like Tony Stark's design -- I do. However, the NARC armor is very different. To begin with, it doesn't have a "face" on the helmet; the visor is featureless. Floodlights and sensor packs are concealed in a smooth fairing around the helmet. The NARC armor is mirror-black; there's a powerpack mounted between the shoulders, containing a superconductor unit. Those shoulders are big -- think ice hockey pads in mirror black. The joints are "smart seals" so you don't have massive, "swollen" elbow and knee assemblies ... when you put it on, piece by piece, the armor's joints nano-seal themselves, as securely as welds. I would love to be able to tell you I know exactly what the NARC armor looks like, but all I can tell you, really, is ... what it doesn't look like. I had an absolute blast at IRON MAN, and I like the armor a lot. But the NARC armor is very different. We're still working to get a design I, uh, like.

Next, this from a very nice reader who wants to know, would I take on an editing job? In fact (sorry) I have to say no. Editing is an incredibly time-consuming job, and at even minimum-wage rates, it gets very expensive. No writer trying to crack the market can afford to pay so much, and also, if you do shell out and pay a pro to do the work, you don't learn nearly as much as if you did the job yourself. I realize it could take months to learn this job, but at the end of that time you still have your money, and you've assembled a suite of skills which will benefit you the rest of your writing life.

The other downside to editing is that writers (especially new ones) can get very upset during the process, when it often seems there's something wrong with every second word. Someone once said, it takes a million words of creative fiction under the belt before one's work will be "good enough." This is not true; but the gist of it is ... it takes a hell of a lot of very hard work and practise to reach the point where the writing is (and I hate the term) "good enough" to pass muster in the pro arena.

Is there a study course I would recommend? Again, not really. There are hundreds out there; pick the one that suits you best, at a price you can afford. One word of caution: beware of the "we want to read your novel," and "get published fast and easy" type ads. You can be in print by next week, and you don't need to drop five hundred bucks to one of these companies to achieve this result! What none of these schemes guarantee is that anyone will buy your book; or, if you do get buyers, that your work has been polished to the point where it's ready to "fly solo." If it's not ready, this kind of "automatic self-publishing scheme" is a recipe for disaster. Sorry to be a killjoy.

It's much better to work with a smaller group -- a writers' workshop or a circle of friends -- until you're sure of your skills, *then* give the pro market a shot. There's almost certainly a writers' workshop in your area. Your local library would know -- and might even be the meeting place for one. It often happens. Writing for a group gives you the chance to bounce your work of other people before you have to start putting down a lot of money. When you're in Aus or NZ, a submission to a publisher in London or New York will cost upwards of $100. You have to print out, airmail, and pay return shipping on the whole 300-400pp manuscript. This is something that can wait till you're pretty sure of your skills. When you KNOW how good you are -- time enough, then, to start putting money into the project. Even if you're lucky enough to be close to the world's publishing capitals, it can still get expensive, especially if you blunder into an "editing agent" who wants $75 per hour, and more, to edit for you. The bottom line is this: the better you are before you run the gauntlet of these people, the easier it'll be and the less it will cost. By all means take a course. Also, find a writers' workshop or similar, and have some fun along the way.

And now, back to THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE. It's a cold but sunny Sunday, and everything in the world is in bloom, leaving you with fuzzy eyes and sneezes. I'll leave you with these images, which illustrate what I mean:

All part of whose Master Plan?!

Yesterday I mentioned getting The Idea which will not only rescue my haunted house book, but make something special of it. It needs more work, as I said -- which leads me into a little judicious research into the world of parapsychology.

So I got online and started looking at spooky stuff...

There's a lot of weirdness out there, guys.

Not the ghosts. They're perfectly normal. I mean, they're dead, but otherwise they're as normal as you and me. We have it on the best authority of mediums who work hand-in-glove with the FBI and the CIA: they basically hang out in places they either liked or hated while they were alive, and try to make contact with the dense humans, which is virtually impossible to do when you're transdimensional. (It even gave phase-shifted Star Trek characters a challenge, and god knows, if they can't do it, what hope is there for the rest of us, dead or alive? Anyway, the bottom line is that dead people are as normal as the rest of us.)

No, the weird ones are the military scientists. OUR military scientists. As in, the USA and the West, the free world, you and me. We. Us. A shiver runs up my spine as I type this, because I've written a lot of this stuff. I really can say, as can many an SF writer, "Been there, done that. Didn't like it, had my heroes punch out the Bad Guys at The End." But this time around, WE are the bad guys. (Who's going to punch us out? Now, there's a nasty thought.)

A couple of days ago a report was issued, with the offbeat, euphemised title, "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies." What the hell do they mean by that?

Dig a little deeper (which is to say, bother to read the damned thing) and you discover that these bast-charming folks are experimenting in mind reading; mind control; mind-machine interfaces (I coined the term "biocyber," and gave this field of research to Dr. Yvetter McKinnen in the NARC books ... she who was the burr under Jarrat's saddle and the thorn in Stone's foot, until time and necessity made them work together and, hey, they discovered they're on the same team).

Now, you know me. I'd be the last voice on the planet raised against the kind of high-tech you see in IRON MAN ... I love the AI interface depicted there -- Tony's computer. And I have something of a vested interest in empathy (again, NARC), and by extension, telepathy. I have to tell you, I've had a few strange experiences myself, which keep my mind w-i-d-e open on the subject.

But, mind control? That's the 'noir' aspect of SF ... it's never been something the good guys (you know: us) did. Mind control was something foisted on us by THEM, those out there, the Bay Guys, the nasty ones the heroes and sheroes get to flatten in the last reel.

Here's a little outtake from the Wired Science blog I catch up with once a week: "Mind control. Largely pharmaceutical, for the moment, and a natural outgrowth of cognitive enhancement approaches and mind-reading insight: If we can alter the brain, why not control it? One potential use involves making soldiers want to fight. Conversely, "How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight? [...] How can we make people trust us more? What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?"

Sure there is. I'm 99.999% positive we can make our enemies bark like chikens and cluck like dogs. The problem is, this sort of iffy, dodgy technology never stays under wraps for long. Espionage. Bribery. Theft. Super-spies ... 007. Suddenly the technnology is in the hands of THEM, the Bad Guys, and --

It's us who're doing the clucking and barking. Hmmm not so good. It gets worse, too.

Drugs and "cognitive enhancers" that make soldiers want to fight. Ooooh, boy. There's an old SF chestnut, but here's the thing: the people who were responsible for creating "heroes" like the poor guys you saw in Kurt Russell's SOLDIER, were the Bad Guys. Mind control, drug-induced jingoism, is what we resent them for ... it's the reason they get their nasty butts kicked.

Robots under thought control. Another SF classic. Automata the size of towns, controled by the minds of the aforementioned drug-modified soldiers. Yep, I've seen this one before; but we were always fighting against the robots, because where's the honor in mashing teeny little civilians under your monstrous treads?

And mind reading -- ditto. Here's a direct quote: "In situations where it is important to win the hearts and minds of the local populace, it would be useful to know if they understand the information being given them."

It certainly would. But what about if they understand oerfectly well, and just don't agree? Let's say they don't want to be commies ... or do want to be gay, or don't want to be Republicans, and do want to be peacefully pagan and go out on a tree-hugging expedition?

If the thoughts in your head aren't secure, you're potentially in deep doodoo. And if "they" decide they don't like what you're thinking, they can use the aforementioned mind control to change you into whatever they want you to be.

I'd love to tell you that this page is a hoax, but it ain't. Get the potted version of the report here: Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain, and chase down the report itself.

While you're on that science blog, take a look at something else: Military AI Could Rule the Internet. The military morons are actually trying to develop the SkyNet computer which SF predicted decades ago --

Thing is, SF predicted it as being an enemy so mean and rotten, Big Arnie couldn't knock it down, and it's gone to a fourth movie rematch! It's going to take Christian Bale to sort it out.

My point is, SF has predicted every last thing the military is currently proposing ... but our side, the Good Guys, were not supposed to be doing this stuff. We were fighting against it, in the novels and movies.

You have to ask, what goes on here? One bunch of our military genii is hard at work, using rat brain cells to drive little robots (same blog -- Wired Science) while the masterminds behind this stuff try to figure out ways to make SF's most bleak and horrifying scenarios into reality.

Like I said, it ain't the ghosts who are weird. The CIA's and FBI's own psychics report our deceased comrades to be entirely normal, albeit dead, life forms, (dead life forms? That's a good one), nothing to get one's underwear into a knot about. But the military scientists??? Chills down the spine.

One can only hope that something can be done about these idiots before we are ALL perfectly normal ghosts, phase-shifted into another dimension by being killed stone dead by a rat-brain-driven robotized jet-fighter controled by a drugged-out soldier using telephathy to target us for our non-conformative thoughts!

Digital daydream

Today, I can't help seeing visions of a movie that was never made -- or hasn't been made yet. I saw BEOWULF last night (for the first time; I'd missed it at the theatres), and was very impressed by the gulf of difference, and development, over the FINAL FANTASY movie which was done about ten years ago. The evolution of digitals is phenomenal. FINAL FANASY: The Spirit Within was amazing back in 2000. I was as impressed, then, as I am with BEOWULF now.

Nostrakeeganus, he going back into the prediction business ... I'll give you five more years, and you won't be able to tell who's real and who's a digitoid, in the movies. They tell me, computer power is doubling or quadrupling every year. We're on the brink, right now, of a line beyond which we'll be in a digital reality from which there is no turning back. ('Digitoid' is a phrase a coined for one of the HELLGATE books. I like it ... it actually respects the digital entity ... and they're getting extremely, uh, respectable. Scroll down.)



Picture Credits: pics on this post are publicity stills, with all interests reverting to the company, no rights contested, no wrongs to be revenged! (Click pick for the larger version.



The character of Beowulf seems to be a composite of several actors. Ray Winstone voiced him, but that ain't Ray Winstone's face, much less his bod. They had a professional athlete model for the body, for sure, and the face is a cross between the young Sean Bean (see him in the SHARPE movie series), and elements of Ray Winstone himself, and a touch of someone else whom I just can't place.

(This is how digital face design goes: DreamCraft's cover artist, Jade, will slog through this every time we create a new face, or faces, for the book covers. I'll say something ridiculous like, mix up Brad Pitt, Charles Bronson, Percy Montgomery (the kicker for the South African Springboks national rugby team) and Gary Bailey (used to keep goal for Manchester United in 1980). Out of this ridiculous mish-mash will appear a face which is something new, yet has elements of all the contributors.)

And now the daydream, the visions I can't help seeing...

Imagine this: THE NARC MOVIE. Seriously. The whole thing is 100% digital, so you can be as outrageous as you like. One bunch of mime artists comes into the studio and does the motion capture ("mocap") work to set the body language for the characters. They go home. Another bunch of people comes in ... voice artists this time. They voice the characters and go home. They're unknowns, and brilliant (most voice artists are; ADR specialists only get into the news when they're celebs ... say, Ian McKellen is dubbing Iorik the polar bear, so it's big news in the media (and incidentally, he did a fantastic job of it). So now you have the athletic body shapes and fine-tuned body language mapped into the computer for Jarrat and Stone, Gable and Cronin and Ramos. Then they're voiced -- probably by artists who look nothing like these guys. Short, rotund, bald, 62, all of the above ... but he's got the Stoney timbre and cadence. Woah. Meanwhile, a team of digital designers has been designing the faces, which are then slapped over the erased-faces of the mocap artists.

Oh, boy. It'd cost upwards of a hundred million bucks ... if you're going to daydream, do it big. The cities would look like Syd Mead designed them. The spacecraft look like something out of one of the ALIEN movies. The riot armor has something in common with the suit Tony builds in IRON MAN. And so on.

Sigh. Hey, you can dream, right? And five years from now, the digital realism is going to be such that you won't tell any difference between the digitoid and the human. Speaking of which: if you missed BEOWULF at the movies, rent it on DVD. It's probably still way over-priced (upwards of thirty bucks in this country), but renting it is always an option. We use Quick Flix, which I believe is the same as Net Flix (spelling??) in the US.

The plot of BEOWULF will remind you of many facets of THIRTREENTH WARRIOR, which shouldn't surprise you, since they're both reworkings of the same legend. (I spotted that instantly, as soon as the Antonio Banderas movie got underway ... I was in Fairbanks, Alaska, at the time.) The opening scenes are rambunctious indeed: digital drama is getting ribald and sexy. The movie violence (and design hideousness) is gruesome to the max that I personally care for. Anything else is wasted on me ... they could save themselves several million bucks on their budget, because I'm not even looking when people's heads get chewed in two and their brains leak out. The musical score is very fine, and the animation is astounding.

Behind the animation are the performances of Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Brendan Gleeson and Angelina Jolie. Of them all, it's Hopkins (as usual) who is the stand-out actor. He has a presence, a voice, a manner about him, which consistently set him apart. He was equally as good, in BEOWULF, as in the first Zorro movie, and THE EDGE, and (my personal favotite) THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN. Brendan Gleeson is one of the most recognizable faces in movies like this: you saw him in TROY, playing Helen's hopeless, hapless husband (forgive the alliteration: it wasn't intentional!) ... in BEOWULF he's a far nicer character than in TROY. In fact, he's more likeable than the central hero, Beowulf himself, whose arrogance is essential to the character, but hardly endearing.

Hats off to all concerned on BEOWULF: I'm impressed. Very.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm about to drift off into some more NARC movie fantasies!