19 Sep 2008

Free Sunborn Audiobook Sample

posted in: ebooks, personal news, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

I’ve been submerged in the recording studio (my office) for the last few days, and have emerged with the first taste of what my audiobook of Sunborn will be like, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise. I’ve put the prologue and first chapter up for free download, pretty much in finished form.

Sunborn cover art by Stephen Martiniere
Check it out and let me know what you think!

http://www.starrigger.net/Audiobooks.htm

“Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do.”
—Anne Lamott

13 Sep 2008

Auction Time — Be a Character in My Next Novel!

posted in: personal news, religion, Sunborn, writing | 0

This comes under the “better late (I hope) than never” heading. Tonight—yes, tonight, Saturday Sept. 13—there will be a fund-raising auction for our church, Park Avenue Congregational (UCC) in Arlington, Mass. If you’re in the area, come by and bid on good stuff. One of the good stuff is a chance to be a character in the novel I’m writing right now! That would be The Reefs of Time, which I just spent the week hammering on while on retreat on Cape Cod. I’m back now, and I’ll be there. (All the details are under that link.)

Last time there was such an auction, a few years ago, the bidding for character-rights was energetic. We finally awarded rights to two bidders, and those characters will be appearing at long last in Sunborn.

*Our other church is the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge. Yeah, we’re part of two congregations. Weird, huh? But we have great friends and community in both. If any of our Vineyard friends are reading this, I hope you stop by!

9 Sep 2008

Back on the Cape

posted in: personal news, writing | 0

Thanks to the generosity of our friends, I am once more ensconced alone in a house on Cape Cod. Time to forget, just for a little while, about making ebooks and fixing the cars and fixing the washer and all the other things that siphon my attention. Time to get a little restored, and get some writing done.

On my way here, I stopped off at the Cape Cod Canal, where a beautiful bike path runs along the water (on both sides, I believe). I’d thrown my rollerblades in the trunk, so I took an hour to skate along the canal and mellow out. It is simply beautiful, and should be added to anyone’s list of places to go in New England. I took some pictures with my cell phone camera—but wouldn’t you know it, I left the connector cable at home, so I have no way to get the pictures onto my computer to post here. (No, my phone doesn’t support emailing the pictures. How dumb is that?)

Okay, I have some serious relaxing and writing to do. Bye, now!

5 Sep 2008

Publishers Weekly Thumbs Up on Sunborn

posted in: blogging, ebooks, personal news, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

Actually, I haven’t seen the full review myself. Didn’t even know there was a Publishers Weekly review until I stumbled across a post about it on Mobileread.com. Here’s the excerpt someone put there:

“The long-anticipated fourth entry in Carver’s Chaos Chronicles (after 1996’s The Infinite Sea) is space opera at its most agreeably and classically science fictional. . . .With such a large cast and a parallel plot involving a threat to Earth itself, character development is necessarily sketched broadly. Some may find the narrative overly stage-managed, but Carver skillfully rotates viewpoints and weaves the choreography directly into the plot. This installment is a cut above the earlier books and will be entirely accessible to any reader who appreciates high-powered stellar and n-dimensional physics blended with old-school space-faring.”

Or maybe that is the full review. I don’t get PW, so I guess I’ll find out when someone tells me. I tried to scope it out online, but couldn’t get to it.

But I can live with what we’ve got right here!

P.S. Over a thousand downloads of Strange Attractors in one day! I think I only posted here and on the above forum, but word virused out with amazing speed. Rob Sawyer posted a very nice notice on his blog. Don’t know where he first saw it, but thanks, Rob!

3 Sep 2008

Ebooks Round Two! Ding! Strange Attractors!

posted in: ebooks, personal news, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

I’ve just released Book Two of The Chaos Chronicles for free download. That’ll be Strange Attractors, now on your cyber newsstand in html, Mobi, PDF, RTF, yadda, yadda, and yadda. With yadda formats soon to come. Seriously, with the help of the good ebook lovers of Mobileread.com, it’ll be in about eight different formats within a few days, more than likely. Most of them are up now.

This, if you’re just joining us, is part of the great windup to Sunborn coming out as a Tor hardcover at the end of October. I can also report here that all signs are Go for Sunborn to also appear as a Tor ebook at around the same time, or soon thereafter. (This represents a change in my arrangement with Tor, a change I agreed to with the understanding that it would appear in a timely fashion, and in a DRM-free form.)

So, I’m psyched.

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” —Carl Sagan

3 Sep 2008

Killer Asteroids? Moonbase? Hmm…

posted in: public affairs, science, technology | 0

I wrote earlier about an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Gregg Easterbrook, called The Sky Is Falling. In it, Easterbrook laid out some reasons why we should perhaps be more attentive to the possibility of disaster raining down on us from space, in the form of Earth-impacting asteroids. The probability is small that we’ll be smacked by a planet-killer, but the cost if it happens could be civilization itself. Go ahead and read the article; it’ll open in another window. Done? Unfortunately, it suggested arming ourselves for asteroid by abandoning our plans to return to the Moon. Here’s my response. (The Atlantic didn’t publish it, so I’m publishing it here.)

Gregg Easterbrook gets it half right in “The Sky is Falling” (The Atlantic, June 2008). He argues incisively for the need for those in the space community to take seriously the planetary threat of wayward asteroids and comets. NASA isn’t interested, as Easterbrook says, and the Air Force is hardly seizing on it with gusto, either. I spoke recently with a USAF officer whose job is strategic planning, and his unofficial comment was that the Defense Department could be considered criminally negligent in its failure to recognize planetary defense as a crucial part of its job description. If an asteroid-strike occurs (or threatens), are NASA and the Air Force just going to shrug and say “Not my job”? As Easterbrook says, that needs to change.

Where he gets it wrong is his dismissal of the return-to-the-moon program as a waste of money, detracting from other efforts. While balancing funding is always difficult (and the space budget is vastly smaller than most people think, accounting for only about half of one percent of the U.S. budget), a return to the moon could be a promising next step indeed. Learning to homestead other worlds is the next step toward what Captain Kirk famously called “the final frontier.” The point is not that a lunar base will be a launch point for a Mars mission–no one suggests that. It is that living on the moon will give us necessary experience for future exploration (to Mars and elsewhere), in a place where help is three days’ travel time away, not six to twelve months’ travel time. Further, a moon base could be the first place for serious mining of extraterrestrial resources, signaling the beginning of the end of humanity’s sole reliance on Earth-based metal and energy resources. Why mine minerals on the moon? Well, if you want to get metals into space–for example, to build satellite-based solar energy systems to beam nonpolluting energy to Earth–it’s potentially a lot cheaper and easier to lift tonnage from the low-gravity moon than from Earth, especially if you build solar-powered electric launchers for the purpose. This is a good argument for mining asteroids, as well.

This brings us back to the wayward asteroid and comet problem. While Easterbrook mentions several promising technologies, the best long-term solution may be to build an infrastructure for living and working productively in space–not just one low-Earth space station, but a community of space habitations, complete with multiple, varied, and redundant transportation systems. Instead of hoping someone can get off a nuke to deflect one of those wayward asteroids, let’s build a permanent capability to move large objects in orbit. If a deadly ball of rubble comes along, we could nudge it away. If a metal-bearing asteroid comes along, we could move it to a parking orbit. Then, instead of watching it destroy our civilization, we could turn it into a mineral-lode, and put it to work building our new future in space.

That’s what I told The Atlantic, and I still think it’s true. Sometimes you just have to bring your own soapbox.

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” —Leo Tolstoy

29 Aug 2008

Barack, Tor, and Me

posted in: ebooks, personal news, public affairs, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

I mention Barack because I’m watching his acceptance speech as I write this. I can’t tell you how much I hope this guy will be our next president. I really do. I haven’t caught that much of the Democratic convention, but I did hear Bill Clinton and John Kerry, and all I could say was, right on, dudes! Time for a change, indeed. Obama is giving a great speech, as I write.

But this isn’t primarily a political entry, because I’ve actually been thinking about and working on other things. I just came from reading a touching post on Tor.com—my editor Jim Frenkel reminiscing in an entry called Still Waters Run Deep about the many years we’ve worked together, from Dell to Bluejay Books to Tor. It was a treat to see those years through his eyes.

I continue to be amazed by the support and generosity of the ereading community on Mobileread.com. By the time I was done with Neptune Crossing, four different people (none of whom I knew a week ago) were working on format conversions for me, or helpfully tweaking my own files. At the same time, people have been saying thanks with Paypal donations, and/or letting me know they’ve gone to buy my other ebooks. The dollar amount maybe won’t buy us a new washing machine (the damn Calypso died again today) but the feeling of support, encouragement, and community doesn’t have a dollar sign on it. It’s just been great.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report that Strange Attractors draws ever closer to being an ebook available for download. Expect word soon.

“People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.” —William Jefferson Clinton

26 Aug 2008

More, More!

posted in: ebooks, personal news, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

My Neptune Crossing free downloads are up over two thousand now, and over on Mobileread.com, there’s been lively discussion and lots of encouragement and support from the people who truly love ebooks. In fact, on the first day, someone came forward and offered to do a conversion to the Sony reader format. In the process, he caught some errors for me, and he just sent me the file. As soon as I can find the software to view it and vet it, I’ll be putting that up, too.

Meanwhile, I’ve just uploaded a PDF(2) file, which will work on a handheld screen—meaning that the text will reflow to fit the smaller screen. That was a project of many hours, using an old version of Framemaker I have on my computer. (Framemaker has to be about the least intuitive program I have ever used in my life.) So if you really want a PDF on your PDA, go for it! (I still recommend Mobipocket or eReader, though.)

I added a Paypal tip jar to my download page, and yesterday my first donation came in, from Bob of Bloomington. That was interesting also because he learned of my downloads on the Amazon Kindle forum, which I didn’t even know existed. And my work was completely new to him. That was followed by my first international donation, from Joerg of Germany. Many thanks! (Another came in, as I was typing this.) I am extremely gratified that people are responding so generously. Go readers! You rock!

So does my family, who as a special birthday present sat as a tag team and typed in boring copy edits for Strange Attractors. Family, you rock!

So do you blog readers, as a matter of fact.

“Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing … the rest will follow.” —my wise friend Jane Yolen

23 Aug 2008

The Virus Turns, and I Get a Surprise

posted in: ebooks, personal news, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

I couldn’t resist checking the web logs for the last two days to see if people were downloading Neptune Crossing. Sure’n, they are. Seems word’s spreading faster than I’d hoped: I got an email from a reader telling me he’d seen a notice about it at Teleread—a very nice write-up by Chris Meadows. And he’d learned about it on Baen’s Bar, where someone had posted a note. I tried to post a note about it on Tor.com, but couldn’t get past some stupid Fatal Error every time I tried to submit. Despite that, the viral distribution seems to be off to a good start! Keep it up, please!

Oh—and this summary of a kerfuffle on Tor.com is pretty interesting, mainly because of what it says about human nature. Seems some people are pretty peeved with Tor for giving them free ebooks when they didn’t have the sequels ready yet for ebook distribution. (I’d better watch it.)

Meanwhile, I was pretty surprised to see the breakdown of downloads by format. I have fallen in deep like with the MobiPocket format, and the eReader format seems very good, too. On the other hand, I’ve never much liked PDF, which is slower and less clear on a handheld device, and I’m still working on the problem of getting a clean file that also allows the text to reflow to a smaller screen. (Making progress. I have a file that looks good, but is huge.)

So as of midnight tonight, here’s what the comparative stats looked like for the last couple of days, the inaugural days of the download page:

Palm/eReader – 19 downloads
RTF – 26
Mobi – 40
HTML – 62
PDF – 381

What?! Hey, I’m happy for people to take it in any form they want. But if you haven’t tried downloading a free Mobi Reader or eReader, give it a try. They’re good.

“Dude! Writing’s hard, dude!” —Anonymous

22 Aug 2008

Neptune Crossing PDF Added

posted in: ebooks, personal news, Sunborn, writing | 0

After much sweat today, I beat the Mobipocket Creator software into making some final tweaks to the MobiPocket version of Neptune Crossing. Then I lit into the PDF version, which seems to be a popular format, although in my opinion it has little to recommend it for viewing on a PDA or other handheld. That’s especially true here. I have a nice, pretty PDF display for viewing on a computer or for printing. And I hope that’s how most people who choose PDF would do it.

What I didn’t master was getting a file that’ll reflow the text onto a small screen. First my wife was doing the conversions for me on her Mac, and they looked good but were pretty fat files. Then I tried Adobe’s free online conversion, and that gave a much smaller file, same appearance. But neither did the tagging needed for text reflow on a PDA, and I don’t know how to do it. (And if this is all so much gibberish to you, more power to you!)

I think that’s it for Neptune Crossing! On to Strange Attractors!

“I have not yet spoken of the esthetic appeal of strange attractors. These systems of curves, these clouds of points, suggest sometimes fireworks or galaxies… A realm lies here to be explored and harmonies to be discovered.” —David Ruel

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