Book signings, book fairs, and book clubs take second place for today’s authors.  While those three activities still offer some face-to-face possibilities locally and nationally (if you have the money to travel and the time), the internet has to be number one for any author today, whether indie or traditionally published.  (I’m discounting the Hugh Howeys and Andy Weirs, who started as indie, and all the old stallions and mares in the Big Five’s stables, who probably have a staff to do their social networking.)  This is as it should be.  The internet allows us to reach out to millions of readers and chat with more readers and authors than we would ever meet in the old days.  But social networking in particular and the internet in general have their pros and cons.

Some days ago, I was working on a novel and needed a bit of background.  While I’ve traveled a lot in Europe and South America (probably more than in the U.S., if you discount work-related travel where long trips and long meetings ended in margaritas and exhaustion), I’ve never been to Scotland, which is still part of the U.K.  The closest I’ve been is to Ireland, which is NOT part of the U.K. (in fact, 2016 is the centenary year of the Easter Rising, which led to Irish independence).  But one of my characters had just inherited a castle not far from Edinburgh, basically an old stonewalled house in disrepair (think James Bond’s place, Skyfall, but on a smaller scale).  I needed travel-like info from the internet so I could take my readers and myself there, thanks to the invitation from my character.

What happened was annoying.  Sure, I found the info I was looking for.  After an hour or so, I had more than I needed, in fact, because a Google search will give you opinions from ordinary people like you and me who have been there and can provide personal stories that go far beyond the travel brochures.  Fine and dandy.  I do this a lot.  You’ll have a hard time in a book determining whether I’ve been to a place or not.  I could make an error, but that error could stem from a fallible memory as well as a bad interpretation of internet info.  What happened has happened before: I almost immediately started receiving ads about travel in Scotland!  (I say “almost immediately” because they started coming through before I could close the browser.)

(more…)

People are addicted to their smart phones, so much so that they walk into fountains, kill pedestrians and other drivers, and expose themselves to scam artists, muggers, and perverts.  Beyond that, or bloviating about trivial matters, or being a narcissistic showoff on social media, what can a smart phone do for you?  Depends on who you are, of course.  I’ll turn the question around and discuss what your smart phone CANNOT do.

ID a song.  I heard an oldie the other day.  I could hum the melody.  Loved the piano riffs.  But if I hadn’t been able to remember the name of the performer, I could have never answered the question: Who’s that performer and what became of him?  (It was Richard Marx, by the way.  He’s going on tour and has a new album.)  Song recognition isn’t covered by voice recognition.

Make par in golf, or catch a fish.  It might know what those things are, but it can’t do them.  And it can’t help you do them either.  Smart phones are just limited little computers, apps are just limited little programs, and neither of them are really smart.

Write a novel.  Beyond mentioning the obvious that your smart phone can’t create any of the elements necessary to spin a good yarn, try writing a novel with your thumbs!  Voice recognition technology, you say?  Try it.  You’ll be spending so much time editing that you’ll scream for your laptop.  Or join Jack in the Cuckoo’s Nest.  But maybe all those badly edited ebooks are written this way?

Help you find God or inner peace.  It might hook you up with the latest online quack who calls her- or himself a preacher, but God doesn’t answer a smart phone call and the internet offers no inner peace, just a bunch of random stuff that obeys Sturgeon’s Law, not God’s.  You can obtain more peace by putting your phone on a tile floor and stomping it into pieces.

Make popcorn.  Tres important, mes amis!

Offer a substitute for a loved one’s hug or kiss.  You might find a dating site or attract a pervert on Facebook (is that what the new “love” emoticon on FB is for?), but your smart phone is not much of a companion, in spite of your obsession with it.  Moreover, anyone who kisses her or his iPhone or Galaxy screen is just asking for a major bout with the flu, unless s/he puts hand sanitizer on that screen often enough.  That would have the advantage of making it slippery so thieves couldn’t grab it as easily…or make it drop to that tile floor and shatter into pieces!
(more…)

In his op-ed article on creativity in the NY Times, Prof. Adam Grant, management and psych professor at the Wharton School of UPenn, says step one to creativity is to procrastinate.  “Creativity takes time.  So I’m trying not to make progress toward my goal.”  I think that’s BS, and I’m hoping I’m not alone.  The first part depends on your definition of creativity, of course.  Presumably, this prof, who’s trying to sell his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, is using a business definition.  I don’t see much creativity in the business world.  I see it in the author/composer of Hamilton; I’ve seen it in the works of Alejandro Obregon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and I’ve seen it in scientists and engineers, from researchers to smart phone and car designers.  Grant confuses creativity with business acumen.  Trump has the latter, but he isn’t creative (come to think of it, Trump and his progeny went to Wharton).

So, let’s get past that first statement in the quote and move on to the second.  Procrastination is the opposite of creativity!  If one procrastinates, s/he’s doing absolutely nothing.  Now Alan Watts might say doing nothing is accomplishing something—that’s part of Buddhist teaching (make your mind blank to achieve enlightenment)—but it sure as hell isn’t being creative.  I’d generally call it wasting time!  At a conference once some Austrian physicists told me that they were in the process of thinking about getting some dinner.  Maybe that’s typically Austrian—I seem to remember Vienna as pretty laid back (but probably not during WWII)—but dinner just isn’t that complicated, and time spent in the process of thinking about it would be better spent doing physics in this case, where a physicist can and should be creative.  Leave the dinner creativity to chefs—culinary art is creative, but only when you do it, not in the process of thinking about it.

(more…)

It’s an ode to biographers instead, and maybe a dirge for the death of an empire.  I just finished Manchester and Reid’s Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 (Last Lion #3).  Phew!  Manchester died before this was finished, and Reid completed the tome.  And tome it is.  Goodreads had it listed as 1237 pages.  That’s a wee bit off because approximately 200 pages are dedicated to notes, bibliography, and index.  Still, with about a 1000 pages of real text, all in a tiny, tiny font, this is a marathon for readers.  But imagine the years spent writing it!  It reminded me of the story of all those Irish monks slaving away and copying the classics while Vikings burned, pillaged, and raped their way through ancient Europe and Eire.  They saved Western civilization.  The two authors I mentioned recorded some of its darkest moments for posterity.

Mind you, old Winston and FDR don’t come across as saints here (but if the pope can canonize a murdering missionary, we can accept these leaders’ sins as blips for two strong personalities who saved the world from the Nazi horrors); on the other hand, we’re allowed to see a lighter side of Papa Joe, the butcher, a man who set the tone for all the mob-style bosses who have since ruled the Soviet Union and Russia, including Putin.  Bottom line: it took those three musketeers and some good generals they commanded, including an aggressive, often self-serving general, Ike, an American of German descent, to beat the Germans.  We gloss over history, often turning it into myths, but this book tells it like it is.

(more…)

Let’s give the old guy credit: he was received in the U.S. like a rock star and showed more resilience and stamina than men half his age.  Moreover, he’s speaking out on progressive issues.  On the plane en route to the U.S. from Cuba, a reporter asked if he was a leftist.  He replied something to the effect that everything he does is commensurate with the gospels.  Translation: Christ was a progressive revolutionary AND a religious man.  The two went hand and hand, no matter what conservative wonks think (some are right-wing Catholics, of course).

He’s painted environmental concerns as a moral issue that transcends all religions.  Climate change is a pressing concern for every human being on this planet, not to mention Gaia’s flora and fauna.  It’s the moral imperative of this generation to protect Gaia and all her creatures, according to the pope.  Of course, I didn’t need his encyclical to realize that.  Many people didn’t.  And a few are either too greedy and/or stupid, that they’ll resist that idea until they die, which might be sooner than later if we don’t deal with the pressing environmental problems.

(more…)

I don’t know about you, but my love for animals, tame or wild, stops with worms in my apple.  Hence the title; it describes two cases where the tech giant Apple was stopped cold.  Both these are wins for indie artists and negative publicity for this monster of the corporate world.

The little company that started in the garage was never one of my favorites.  In the beginning, Apple computers were just toys.  We taught high school teachers from the Colombian provinces about computing using early Apples with mixed results (the course was based on our book, La Revolucion Informatica en la Educacion—not available in the U.S.)—they learned, though, in spite of the machines’ limitations.  If you wanted to do any real computing work back then, you used a DEC, Cray, or CDC machine.  Even the early MS DOS PCs were more powerful.

The old toasters, still toys, had some success because Apple “borrowed” a GUI from Xerox; the little boxes practically created point-and-click and user friendly, albeit limited, computing experience compared to the command line-based interfaces of the other computers I mentioned.  One paid dearly for that ease of use, though, and not until Apple put that GUI on top of UNIX did you get anything close to a powerful computer (the success of the various versions of LINUX with their own GUIs might have had something to do with that change).

(more…)

Part of being nice (Rule #1 from my article “Rogue Waves in Calm Seas”) is being ethical about how you treat readers and other writers.  One of my interests is scientific ethics, but this is a little more general and more complex.  Let’s say you receive a bad review from person X.  Is attacking that person online ethical?  If X is a writer, is it ethical to write a bad review of X’s book in revenge?  I hope you agree with me that it isn’t.

I’ve been on both ends of this little debate.  I received a questionable review and made the mistake of saying something like “I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy Y, but I can offer you a free copy of Z.”  (I won’t go into details here because I have so few reviews you might be able to figure out who it is.)  On the other hand, one person called me to task for a review I wrote, saying that I hadn’t even read the book (exactly what the first person did—he admitted it).  Again, I apologized (I’m human and read a lot, so there’s a small probability I mixed the book with another—that’s about as likely as winning the lottery, though).  But I also stuck by my guns (that’s Rule #2), and added the experience to my list of reasons to stop reviewing on Amazon and return to my mini-reviews for booksI casually read.  (BTW, if I review a book, I’ve read it.  For casual reading, I often only read it once.  For my Bookpleasures reviews, I usually read the book twice, once as a casual reader and again with a critic’s eagle eye.)

If I sinned, it isn’t at the level I described in the first paragraph.  But we can go farther.  I once discussed a plot idea with an author who didn’t express any interest in the idea (I was thinking we might become the next Preston and Child).  Later I found he’d written a book using basically that plot idea.  Is that ethical?  Whatever your opinion, it taught me a lesson that I’d better not discuss my plot ideas with other authors.  I’ve worked hard over the years to accumulate what-ifs, story and character ideas, and possible venues for my novels.  I’ve learned now to keep them to myself.  (When you see an excerpt for the next ebook in a series at the end of the present one, be assured that novel’s done and in editing mode at least—it will be released before another writer can release her/his with the same plot idea.)

(more…)

My new epic sci-fi novel, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, is the tale of an invading ET virus and its effects on human society and space exploration.  That’s a strange combo (it’s sci-fi, after all), but the space exploration isn’t interstellar this time like it was in “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  It’s restricted to our solar system, to Mars and beyond.  Being a wee bit more local, many of the events are in the realm of the possible.  Most of the action is current day only because of the virus, though.  I don’t expect to see a Mars colony in my lifetime.  But exploration of our solar system will occur.  Of course, it’s already occurring with robot probes carrying specialized payloads.  That process is speeded up by the virus in the novel.

I’ve always been an avid reader and exhausted all the sci-fi in my public library by the time I entered high school.  I’ve read about Mars colonies since those halcyon days, although I’ve always thought that the space opera adventures were a bit too optimistic.  But I used recent reports as references for my novel, some optimistic and others pessimistic, to complement my imaginative musings.  Among these are: Bruce Bower, “Extreme Teams,” Science News, 11/29/2014; and the NY Times special issue on Mars, 12/9/2014: “On Mars,” by Kenneth Chang; “A One-Way Trip? Many Would Sign Up”; “Looking to a Neighbor for Help,” by Dennis Overbye; “Covering Mars Opened a New World,” by John Noble Wilford; and “Rover Finds Stronger Potential for Life,” by Marc Kaufman.  Other recent findings (about water in the solar system, for example), mostly in Science News, were also used.

(more…)

As a writer, I love words.  Sometimes I love a particular word because it’s mysterious.  “Eldritch” is an example.  You can understand its meaning from context when you combine it with “light”—it just looks spooky and sinister.  Because English is spoken in so many places, an author can give local color to his prose by choosing particular words (often not consciously).  I love the sound of “scarpered”—it just sounds like someone in a hurry to leave town.  When my beta-reader knew what it meant but still objected to its use in one of my books, I went on a search to find out how I’d picked it up.  Turns out it’s very UK-ish—sort of like “forthwith” and other words where I love how they trip off the tongue.  I’d picked it up from Ian Rankin (love his Inspector Rebus books), so my beta-reader was right and made a good catch.  Unless it occurs in dialog associated with a character who’s from the UK, or who’s trying to sound like a person from the UK, it isn’t quite appropriate in American prose.  Still love the sound, though.

“Troglodyte” is a word that looks and sounds good too.  It’s a fun word.  If I remember correctly, it originally means “cave dweller.”  (The origins of English are well mapped out in David Crystal’s The Stories of English—a lot of fun if you’re into that kind of thing.)  The word is more conventionally used to mean “deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.”  Ergo, this long segue is just leading up to my main topic: There are anti-science troglodytes among us who are challenging science with their far-out beliefs and attacking scientific progress at all levels, some even funding campaigns against science.  Ironically, many of these same troglodytes are using science and technology as tools to further their anti-scientific agendas.

(more…)

[I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

While drone surveillance and attacks and Special Ops are a better military solution than “boots on the ground,” there’s no doubt that ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups will only be defeated if the countries affected wage effective war against these militant Islamic groups.  The key word is “effective.”  Remember that ISIS received a big boost when poorly trained Iraqi forces ran for their lives, often in their underwear—equipment left behind, much of it American, is now in ISIS’ hands.  That has to stop.  Western presence is justified there for equipping and training local forces so that these fiascos aren’t repeated.

That said, the West isn’t doing nearly enough to hurt these groups where it’s most effective—financially and personnel-wise.  I’m reminded of World War Two where indifference, peaceniks, and anti-Semitic sentiments conspired to give Hitler a free hand in Europe.  We don’t need another Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand either and hope Islamic nations will destroy the extremists in their midst without our help.  The recent Twitter action, for example, while a good start, is a drop in the bucket.  The West needs a concerted effort to stop all finances flowing into the illegal insurgent groups.  Funds must be frozen and their propaganda machine must be dismantled.  We can be good at that, and it’s the least we can do.

(more…)