18 Jul 2012

Moonlight: Playlist Killer

posted in: animal friends, personal news | 0
Moonlight: Killer App, or App-Killer Cat?

See this whitish Egyptian Desert Sand Cat? Looks innocent, doesn’t she? She spends most of her time sleeping, or making good her latest escape from the irrepressible Captain Jack (“I am border collie! Run when I say run!”). But beneath that seeming innocence lurks the heart of a computer-wrecker.

Sometimes, when I’m writing late at night, Moonlight likes to saunter up to my office  and get in my way by being affectionate. Usually she starts by hopping into my lap and purring, forcing me to reach around her to type. But sometimes she ensconces herself in the space between my keyboard and my monitor. It’s got a slidey stack of papers on it, and she makes them slide even more. Often, her hind paws stick down toward the keyboard. Last night, they were on the keyboard—actually, I think, on the Delete key.

I was just getting ready to quit for the night, when iTunes (always open when I’m working) suddenly began to flicker and blink. Finally it stopped. I inspected it. What’s this? To my disbelief and dismay, my entire set of playlists was gone. All of them. My carefully selected Writing Music, my eMusic downloads, my Kitchen Get Your Mojo Working lists, everything. I glared at Moonlight.

She shot a bored glance my way. (“You lookin’ at me?”) Yes, I was looking at her. And then evicting her.

Instead of going off to bed, I went off to Googleland in search of cures for accidentally deleted playlists. I was not the first to seek help with this problem. (A lot of people must have cats too close to their keyboards.) There is no “undelete” for itunes playlists. In the end, fortunately, I located a backup of my itunes library that was only six months old, and it had most of the lists reasonably intact.

Cat, you got lucky this time. But next time… well, there just better not be a next time, you hear? Stop purring and listen to me.

17 Jul 2012

Is a Phone Line Only for Spam Calls Now?

posted in: personal news, public affairs | 0

Is anyone else noticing this? At least 90% of the calls that come to our house phone these days are spam. At least. It’s gotten so bad that when we do get a real call from a friend, relative, or legitimate business caller, we often miss it because there seems so little point in rushing to get to the phone before it stops ringing. Most of the calls we care about come to our cell phones.

It seems like it’s gotten a lot worse in the last year or so. And yet, I’m reluctant to give up our land line, partly because many of our legitimate contacts know that number but not our cell numbers, and partly because… I don’t know, I just don’t hold with being driven from the use of the phone number I’ve owned and loved for decades, just on account of some lowlifes who are determined to prey on the vulnerable. Plus, just the other day, I used our land line to send a fax. So it still has relevance, right? Right?

You want to make a billion dollars? Invent a device that will send an electric shock back up the phone line to anyone who makes, records, or otherwise causes to exist spam. (Not counting that ham in a can stuff. That’s okay, as long as I don’t have to eat it.) I probably shouldn’t say things like that. Bad dog. 

15 Jul 2012

Ohio, a Wedding, the Indians, and Vernors

posted in: personal news | 0

We had a great week in Ohio. My sister Nancy got married to a terrific guy named Chuck. They might have planned the names better, though, since our brother is also named Chuck. (But maybe it’s just continuing a trend. I have two sisters named Nancy, one a half and one a step. Families can be complicated.) This all happened at and around Hiram College, in eastern Ohio. It was blazingly hot, though we were treated to a couple of flash thunderstorms.

Close your eyes and imagine some nice pictures here. No, I don’t have any right now. I’ll get some.

Chuck is a huge sports fan (and former sports publicist), and he got us all tickets to a Cleveland Indians game. I hadn’t been to a major league ballgame in decades, and it was great fun. Hot, though. We rooted for the home team, and they won. Afterward, as we stood outside waiting for our ride, I enjoyed seeing the “Fatty Wagon” go by, a shuttle bus operated by the Great Lakes Brewing Company, running on used frying oil, “saving the planet, one French fry at a time.” They make great beer, by the way. Loved their Burning River Ale, and their Commodore Perry IPA. My sister-in-law Youngmee enjoyed their Lake Erie Monster Imperial IPA, but it was too over-the-top hoppy for me.

I am a great lover of Vernors Ginger Ale, which we can’t buy in New England. I took the opportunity of being in Ohio to box up a bunch of 12-packs of Diet Vernors and bring them back as checked luggage. I’m sipping one right now, as I write this. Vernors company, won’t you please ship your ginger ale to Boston?

19 Jun 2012

Reality and Other Fictions

posted in: ebooks, personal news, publishing, science fiction, short stories, writing | 0

All these years, I’ve been telling you wonderful people about my novels, with scarcely a mention of my short stories. That’s because my short stories have been few and far between. Nevertheless, I’ve published eleven shorter pieces over the years, in publications as varied as Science Fiction Age, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the Boston Sunday Herald. And now I’ve collected them.

The first of two collections is Reality and Other Fictions, now on sale at Book View Café, for the low, low price of $2.99! Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s the blurb:

Explore an Earth being devoured by entropy, in the ultimate runaway environmental crisis. Dive the depths of the sea to prevent the mother of all oil spills. Rocket into space as a tourist. Mine the asteroids with your enhanced border collie, in the can-do spirit of classic science fiction. They include Carver’s first published short fiction, and his most recent. With new introductions, all from the author of The Chaos Chronicles and Eternity’s End.

If you’ve been following my blog recently, you’ll have seen my mention of some new stories going up for sale as singles. Some of those are in this collection. Here’s the contents page:

  • Reality School: In the Entropy Zone
  • Of No Return
  • Seastate Zero
  • Rocket Ride
  • Dog Star

“Seastate Zero” is available only in this collection, as are the insightful introductions I’ve lovingly written for each story and for the book as a whole. At least, I hope you’ll find them insightful, or at least interesting. I do share some memories I’ve never written down before about how these stories came to be, and how they fit into my career.

My second collection, Going Alien, is scheduled for late August. It pulls together all of my short work that involves… can you guess? Aliens.

For both of these books, I am indebted to Gretchen, the high school student (now graduated, and valedictorian!) who typed and formatted a good number of them from old paper copies, while helping me as an intern. And equally to Anna King, who provided extraordinary help in wrestling the final formatting into line. Not to mention Allysen, for catching some embarrassing typos and wordos at the eleventh hour. And finally, Vonda McIntyre, author and BVC founding member, who has been tirelessly helpful in getting this stuff up.

Available exclusively at BVC until July. After that, I’ll release it to the usual suspects.

I hope you’ll give it a try! (Vote for me!)

19 Jun 2012

My Book View Café Launch!

posted in: authors, ebooks, personal news, publishing, science fiction, short stories, writing | 0

Book View Café (BVC) is an authors collective of established writers who have joined forces to help each other publish their own backlists as ebooks. Names you might recognize include Ursula K. LeGuin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Katherine Kerr, Linda Nagata—and many more. As of June 19, I’m part of that list, and honored to be so. Here’s my page at BVC.

To celebrate my launch on BVC, I’m releasing my first-ever short story collection, Reality and Other Fictions. It’s on sale as I type this! For the rest of June, it’s going to be a BVC exclusive. Why? Because BVC is a great store filled with great authors, and it deserves enthusiastic support. If you buy a book from a favorite author at BVC, the author gets the highest percent of the money of any bookstore that’s not actually on an author’s website. Because people help each other so much in the whole process—everyone pitches in with their own particular skills—the production values are high. And the books are, of course, DRM-free, meaning no annoying copy protection to keep you from moving it from one device to another, regardless of type. If you want to convert your book to a different format, do so with our blessing.

Can you use these books on a Kindle or a Nook or a Kobo Reader or a Sony Reader?  Absolutely. (Just make sure you download the right format for your reader.)

By the way, BVC is not the same thing as Backlist eBooks, about which I’ve written in the past. The two groups have similar goals, and somewhat overlapping memberships. But Backlist eBooks primarily gathers writers together under one site for mutual help with marketing and promotion. Book View Café is more like a cooperative ebook small press, with its own store. It’s even beginning to distribute to libraries!

My next post, which I am going to start writing as soon as I’m done with this one, will tell you all about Reality and Other Fictions.

2 Jun 2012

Audiobooks!

posted in: audiobook, personal news, publishing, science fiction | 0

Great news from my agent —nine of my novels are being signed to become audiobooks! I am excited. I’ve been wishing for this ever since I became hooked on listening to audiobooks myself. This package does not include my Chaos Chronicles book, and won’t affect our homebrew full-cast audio production of Neptune Crossing (still in the “we hope to get started again realsoonnow” stage). It does include most of the Star Rigger books and several of my standalone novels. Nothing’s ever final until the contracts are signed, of course, so I should probably hold off on more specific details until things are official.

My own love affair with audiobooks started when I discovered you can download them for free from the public library and listen to them on your favorite MP3 player (a Zune, in my case). I love listening to books while walking the dog, which I do for at least an hour every day. I’ve been listening to a lot of books outside my own genre, books I’d never find time to sit down and read, even as ebooks carried in my pocket. I started with Robert Parker mysteries, and moved on to some thrillers. I’ve learned that the voice of the narrator makes an enormous difference even with a good book. (With a bad book, it just makes it harder to decide when to give up.) In some cases, I’ve stumbled onto some fine listening simply by looking for other books read by a narrator I like. Here are some of my recent favorites:

  • The Jack Reacher series, featuring a retired MP turned wanderer, by Lee Child (read by Dick Hill)
  • Cold Choice, a well-crafted and realistic submarine thriller by Larry Bond (read by Dick Hill)
  • The Myron Bolitar series, featuring a pro sports agent who sidelines as a detective, by Harlan Coben (read by Jonathan Marosz) [The last couple in the series were narrated by other readers, including the author. Not even in the same universe.]
  • Leviathan, Behemoth, and Goliath—a young adult, alternate history, SF series by Scott Westerfeld (read by Alan Cumming) [This one the library only carried on CD.]
  • Ender’s Game, the SF classic, by Orson Scott Card (read by Stefan Rudnicki, with Gabrielle De Cuir and David Birney, Scott Brick, Jason Cole, Harlan Ellison, Christian Noble, Don Schlossman, M.E. Willis and Orson Scott Card) [Ditto, on CD.]

What are your favorites?

1 Jun 2012

Book View Café Grand Reopening

posted in: ebooks, personal news, publishing | 0

I’ve just joined Book View Café, which is an authors’ cooperative filled with great authors helping each other to republish their backlists and get excellent books back into print, via ebook. Members include Ursula K. LeGuin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Linda Nagata, Judith Tarr, Pati Nagle, Patricia Rice, and lots more. It’s a little like Backlist eBooks, which I also belong to, but is a lot more hands-on with the actual publishing, with its own bookstore and members actually volunteering cooperative-style, to help build the books, design covers, etc. My own books will start appearing there over the coming months, with my official “launch” on June 19 to feature the first of my forthcoming short story collections.

These hard-working people have just completely redesigned the bookstore, and today marks the official grand opening. Complete with a contest to give away some free books! Here’s the announcement…

Book View Café is celebrating the opening of our new, completely-redesigned bookstore by giving our readers a chance to win the book of their choice free. Just take a look around the store anytime up until midnight, June 8, and choose the book you’d like—all the books that are eligible for the giveaway are marked with a gold star. Then come back here and leave a comment with the name and author of the book and why you want it (we may use that comment for publicity purposes). You can also leave comments on any of the author blogs listed on the promotions page. When the promotion ends, winners will be chosen, and free books passed out! Check out the celebration here!

It’s a great bookstore, so do stop by and browse. All ebooks in the store are DRM-free and available in multiple formats for Kindle, Nook, and pretty much all other ebook devices.

21 May 2012

Guest Post: Gretchen on Interning

posted in: blogging, ebooks, guest posts, personal news, publishing | 0

I invited Gretchen, who’s been helping me as an intern for the last two weeks, to write up a post about what it’s been like for her. Gretchen is a high school student with an interest in publishing. Working for me, she’s gotten a look at a side of publishing she probably never knew existed. Take it, Gretchen…

When I began my internship with Jeff, I didn’t really know what to expect. Completing a three-week internship is a requirement to graduate at my high school, and I just jumped straight from my exam week to my internship without wondering too much what it would be like. I soon found out. The first thing I learned—of which I was very appreciative—was that I didn’t have to get up at way-too-early-o’clock in the morning every day to begin work; I got to start at a much more reasonable hour in the afternoon, unlike most of my classmates.

The next thing I learned was that publishing eBooks really isn’t at all like I thought it was going to be. There is much more of a focus on little, seemingly insignificant formatting details than I had thought there would be (of course, those “tiny details” end up more like “huge problems” if you ignore them). Conversely, the actual conversion of documents into eBook formats and the process of putting them up for sale online seemed much easier than I thought it would be.

Even though some things haven’t been what I’d imagined, working with Jeff and learning more about publishing in general has been extremely interesting. I have a clearer idea of what publishing is about now—which will be helpful for me if I decide to go into the publishing business—but even beyond that, I’ve just had a lot of fun learning from Jeff and reading his stories.

And with Gretchen’s help, I’ve gotten three stories into ebook form (the third going up today), and several more in the pipeline! 
 

18 May 2012

“Of No Return”

posted in: ebooks, personal news, publishing, science fiction, short stories | 0

My first professional sale came in 1974, a short story called “Of No Return,” about a man who works in a sea-floor power station experiencing difficulty in readapting to life on land. It was published In Fiction, a small magazine published at the time in Boston, and was later reprinted in a very small, limited edition anthology called Wet Visions. Aside from that, it’s been out of print—not even available on my web site. That’s changed, as of today.

Credit Gretchen, the high school student who has been working as an intern for me these last two weeks. She retyped the story, proofed it, created the cover and the ebook, and got it uploaded to all the usual suspect places. Here’s what it looks like. It’s free at Smashwords, for now, and $.99 at Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook.

By this time next week, we should be well along in creating a complete short story collection, for eventual ebook (and who knows, maybe paper) publication. 

Available at Smashwords | Kindle | Nook

7 May 2012

The Avengers

posted in: personal news, theater and movies | 0

For once, we got to a movie right after it opened! Four rockets for us, and four for The Avengers! The whole family went to the theater on Saturday afternoon (to the 2D version), and we all came out  grinning. (Despite having to sit in the very front row, on the side.) The movie is absolutely great fun, with lots of good repartee, and you can enjoy it without knowing the Marvel Comics back story. If you liked Ironman, you’ll like The Avengers.

I was never really a Marvel Comics reader. I grew up with Superman and Batman, but by the time the Marvel universe hit its stride, I had stopped following the comics. (Sorry about that. [Says me to my inner geek.]) In fact, my first exposure to Ironman was the movie, and ditto with the Marvel version of Thor, and with Captain America. So I can’t tell you how well the movie fulfilled the promise of the printed word. But I can tell you that it’s a pile of fun, even if you don’t know the characters in depth. Joss Whedon did a bang-up job, as Jon Favreau did with the first Ironman film.

Oh—and sit through the credits. There are two Easter eggs, one midway through the credits, and one at the very end.

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