Latest review at Black Gate

My latest review is up at Black Gate. This month, I'm reviewing E. Catherine Tobler's Gold and Glass. Here's a sample:

The Egypt of Gold and Glass has a mystic resonance, especially as we see it from Eleanor’s perspective, to whom Egypt is more home than the Ireland where she was born. The power of Egypt’s ancient history and mythology provide a strong foundation on which the author builds her own mythos, of gods and magic lingering in a world of airships and mechanical horses. One in which Eleanor’s own connections, to the Lady, and to the ancient Egyptian gods, are sure to play a pivotal role.

I hope you enjoy it.

New card

So I've created a new writing/blogging business card, just in time for the World Fantasy Convention:

New business card.

The picture is one I took when Kristin and I visited Italy for our honeymoon.  That's the Second Temple of Hera at Paestum. I felt it appropriate for my frequently Roman-themed stories.

The reason for the new card is that I also had a new role to advertise, that of a book reviewer at Black Gate. Since I'm reviewing self-published books, I thought it might be good if my card had that information to hand out.

Black Gate post

My latest Black Gate post is online.  No review this month, but I do talk about reviewing.  I'll let you decide whether that's a cop out or an improvement.

Self-published Book Review

My latest review, of The Brightest Light by Scott J. Robinson, is now up at Black Gate.

New Review

My latest review at Black Gate, of Dalya Moon's Broken Shell Island, is now up.  I thought the plot could have been a little more logical, but I liked the story overall.

Copy

A friend of mine, and a contributor to the now defunct Storyblogging Carnival, is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a television pilot.  Here's the plug:

COPY is a TV show about the student media at an evangelical Christian college: An editor trying to whip his staff into shape, a blogger more TMZ than T.S. Eliot, and a university president obsessed with being “culturally relevant” - negative press be damned. How far will editor-in-chief Meshach Kilbourne and his staff go to secure the paper's independence - and glory - against the machinations of President Constantine Ward?

It's an embellished memoir of our college years. And the pilot script for COPY - which, for reasons beyond us, has been called "Sorkinesque" - reached the semifinals of the Scriptapalooza competition last year.

If you're interested, consider pledging.

Latest Black Gate Review

My latest review is up at Black Gate.  This month, it's Robert Sier's Chains of Loss, but I've been calling it Cyborgs vs. Orcs.

Ninth blogiversary

Today marks the ninth anniversary  this blog. I  know, it's Valentine's day.  Why did  I start a blog on Valentine's day?  Well, at the time I had nothing better to do.  Being a married man now, that's no longer the case.  Still, nine years is a long time. Hopefully it'll be around for another nine years.

Year in Review -- Sort of

I've been letting this blog sit idle over the holidays, while I've been enjoying time with my wife and friends, and a few days off of work.  I'm almost reluctant to break that, but I have a tradition of doing a year in review, and I'm reluctant to break that as well.  So, instead of not doing it entirely, I'm just going to do a lazy and sloppy job of it, and that way I can have it both ways.

The most relevant news for this blog is that I've begun blogging regularly again.  At least twice a week, which is not exactly phenomenal, and I've kind of slacked off during the holidays, but it's better than I've been doing.  In honor of the new blogging, I redesigned the blog.  On the other hand, maybe it was the other way around.

Kristin and I went to a lot of conventions this year: Boskone, Readercon, WorldCon, and World Fantasy.  We also went to visit her brother and his family, her parents and sister, and my family.  All this traveling used up most of my vacation time, so I didn't have enough to travel for the holidays, so it's just been some relaxing  in Boston for us this holiday season.

Also a big story is that my short novel, A Phoenix in Darkness, was finally published at Black Gate.  I'm fond of that story, and I'm glad that John O'Neill wanted it for his magazine, as one of the first stories published in the new online format.  It is an older story, though, and I like to think that I'm a better writer now than when I first wrote it, so there are some places where I wish the prose was more polished and the plotting cleaner and the pace smoother.  But I'm sure that five years from now I'll look at the stories I'm writing now and wish I could revise them, and if I waited for stories to be perfect before they were published, I'd never publish anything.

In other news, I now have a book under contract, meaning that it will be published someday.  Unfortunately, I don't know the release date yet, and the publisher hasn't yet announced it, so I'm keeping details under wraps for now.

I've also begun blogging occasionally at Black Gate.  I'll be doing monthly reviews of self-published books, the first of which should be out soon.

So it's been a busy year for me, and I've had a lot of fun.  I'll be back in a couple of days with my New Year's Resolutions, such as they are.

First books to review

If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you probably know that I'm reviewing self-published books for Black Gate. To that end, I've set up a submission system via which authors can ask me to review their books. This weekend, I selected the first two books to review, and asked their authors to send me review copies.

This does not mean that I've rejected all the other submissions. It's not even a sure thing that I'll review the books I've requested, though I most likely will. I expect that I'll be doing one review a month, and it's quite possible that I'll dip into the submissions I've already received when it's time to find a new book to review. In the meantime, I'm still accepting more books to review in the coming months.

Reviewing Self-published Books Continued

Over at the Black Gate blog, I've taken on the task of reviewing self-published fantasy novels. I've received about 20 submissions so far, and I'm still expecting a batch of review copies of books which John O'Neill's received. So I thought I'd talk a bit about how I intend to choose the book I'll ultimately review.

I have two criteria:

First, it has to be a self-published fantasy novel. That means I can answer "yes" to three questions: Is it self-published?  Is it fantasy?  Is it a novel?  The novel question, at least, is easy to answer, as that's a question of hard numbers.  Is it 40,000 words or more?  If so, it's a novel.  The other two can be more complicated.  Is steampunk fantasy?  I suppose it depends on how exactly the technology, and the world, works.  Would a mix of sci-fi and fantasy count as fantasy?  What about alternate history?  In general, I'm trying to apply a broad definition of fantasy, but there are still some that are borderline.  The self-published question is giving me even more headaches.  By definition, a small press is not self-publishing.  Unless the small press is your own imprint.  What if you published with a small press, but it didn't do such a good job with your book, so now you're self-publishing?  What if it's a vanity press?  I'm still considering these questions.

Fortunately, I have a pretty free hand and some options.  While I probably want to stick with something purely self-published for my first review, that doesn't stop me from reviewing other things, either in later months or as a separate review from my self-published books series.  This also allows me to consider books that are borderline non-fantasy.  But before I do any of that, the book has to meet my second criteria.

My second requirement is that the book has to be something I want to read.  This is harder for an author to select for. While strong prose, characters, and world-building will make any book more enjoyable, if I don't like epic fantasies, then it's unlikely I'll want to read your epic fantasy (for the record, I love epic fantasy--I'm just using that as an example).  In order to decide whether I want to read the book, I first read the blurb and see if it sounds interesting.  Then, if it does (and so far, more than half my submissions do--I'm going to have to become more selective), I start to read the sample chapter.  This is where the prose can make or break the book.  If I find the prose style difficult to read--which isn't always bad prose, just difficult--then I'll stop and move on to the next one.  I may also lose interest if I notice numerous grammatical or stylistic errors, or clumsy infodumping, or lifeless description, or clichéd characters, or a plodding plot.  If, however, both the story and the characters are engaging enough to keep me reading, and I reach the end of the sample chapter wanting to know what happens next, then I know I have a book I want to review.

I still have to decide on which book I actually will be reviewing, and that means selecting the one I think looks the best. That's as much guesswork as good judgment.  On the bright side, just because I decide not to review a book this time around doesn't mean I can't come back and review it later.

News

I have a post up at Black Gate asking for submissions of self-published books for me to review.  I discussed this idea here earlier this week, and actually implemented it at Black Gate yesterday.  So far I have a few submissions, and John O'Neill's promising to send me some of the review copies he's received at Black Gate.  The idea is to gather a lot of possible books, sort through them, and select the most promising to review.  Next week, I'll assess whether I'm receiving enough submissions to get a reasonable selection, and if not, announce it in a few different places.

Meanwhile, Kristin has a post up about World Fantasy.  This is much more detailed than my post a few weeks back, with details about each of the panels she went to.  She also has pictures of Niagara Falls and, and reviews of Richmond Hill restaurants, and probably more about crocheting than I was really interested in, but you may have better taste.

Reviewing Self-published Books

A while ago, I talked a little about reviewing people's self-published Kindle novels.  The reason for doing this is pretty obvious.  Self-published novels lack gatekeepers.  There's no editor or agent to say whether it's good or bad.  So when the author puts it out, potential readers have no clue how good it is.  It would be helpful if someone would read some of those novels, and write reviews, to let potential readers know where the good stuff is.

But I only did one review. Part of the problem was that I didn't really know where to begin.  I could just browse through Amazon, but the most usual ways rank either by most popular or best reviewed by Amazon customers.  Frankly, that defeats the purpose.  If I'm looking for undiscovered books, I hardly want to be looking at the books everyone has already discovered.  Granted, the Amazon reviews can be gamed, and there may be some value in seeing whether those well-reviewed books are actually good, or if the author is writing his own reviews (or paying someone else to do it).  But finding false reviews is not my objective.  I'm interested in undiscovered books.

One option is to ask people who have books they want reviewed to contact me.  I'd probably need a bigger stage than this little blog, both to make it possible for people to find me, and to make it worth their while to do so.  I may be able to do that.  But assuming that I could get such attention, how would I decide what to review?  Obviously, I won't be reading and reviewing a new book every day.  More like once  a month.  And if there's even mild interest in my offer, there are going to have to be some filters.  I figure I could ask potential reviewees to send a submission, with a blurb and a link to a free chapter, and then I'll select my favorite one to review.  This is not quite the same thing as going through all the self-published novels and telling people whether they're good or bad, but that's not my objective: my objective is to find good, undiscovered novels.  Of course, I'm not promising a good review.  Just because I like a submission doesn't mean I'll like the whole novel, just that it's showing enough promise to take the time to read it.

Overall, it sounds like a decent idea.  Maybe I'll look into implementing it.

Blog post at Black Gate

I've been promoted to the status of blogger at the Black Gate blog.  My first post, a review of Vox Day's A Magic Broken, is now up at Black Gate.  I'm not sure how much I'll be posting there, but I suspect that John O'Neill will be inviting me to contribute again.  I won't be cross-posting items, but I'll be sure to point you to the Black Gate posts when they happen.

Spam? Phishing?

For the past week, I've received dozens, if not hundreds, of emails purporting to confirm my registration at one online forum or other. Each of them says I've signed up with a different username, and most of them give me the password. The emails are mostly identical enough that I've been able to filter most of them, but not the foreign language ones or the occasional one with different wording.

My first instinct was to suspect phishing, but I think that I've decided that it's spam. I've done Google searches on the forums, and sometimes that turns up nothing. I've only had the courage to visit one of those that does turn up (through the Google search, not the link in the email). The website for the Ocean Air Brokerage (I won't link for fear of viruses) looks legitimate enough, but the forums I've supposedly been given membership in make no sense. Why would the forums of a supposed shipping brokerage have no forums on shipping or customs or regions, but categories such as Sports, Software, and Phone Service? And every single post I've seen appears to be spam.

This leads me to the conclusion that these are spam forums. The only question is whether the spam forums themselves are sending out false registration emails, or whether some would be spammer is using my email address in his contact info. Either way, I have no idea what to do about it.

Where's the rest of the blog?

You may have noticed that there are no posts on this blog between July of 2004 and December of 2009.  You may be wondering what's up with that--did I just stop blogging, then suddenly decide to take it up again?  Well, no.  In July of 2004 I switched to another blog host, Powerblogs, putting my blog on their site and their software.  Unfortunately, they went out of business in 2009, and I resurrected my old blog on Blogger.  But all my posts in those five years were never transferred to the old blog, and thus there's a long stretch between the two.  The thing is, I still have all those posts, having downloaded the blog before the servers were taken down.  They're just in a format that isn't easily transferred to Blogger in an automated way.  And since many of those posts were on current events, and so are now hopelessly out of date and irrelevant, I haven't been particularly motivated to copy them over by hand.  That said, I still like a lot of what's in the posts, so from time to time, starting on Wednesday, I'll be re-posting some of my favorites.

What's on the back of the envelope?

The name of this blog is "Back of the Envelope".  One of my earliest blog posts was a long explanation about why I named the blog that.  The short version, from that post, can be summed up quickly:

The expression is common enough, but if you're not familiar with it, a back of the envelope calculation is a quick, simple calculation done as an estimate. It's called "back of the envelope" because it can be written out on a small sheet of paper . . . When I first applied for this address on blogspot, the idea was to name the blog after myself . . . Nothing really felt right, though, so I started thinking of other names, a name appropriate for an engineer writing about things he was distinctly unqualified to discuss. It took surprisingly little time to come up with "Back of the Envelope."

I've always used the image of an envelope with something written on the back as the symbol of this site.  In fact, this is the one I had for a long time:

The old back of the envelope symbol.

With the new template, I wanted to change the design while keeping the concept.  The new design is the background of this page.  Unfortunately, since I used the full size of the background that Blogger recommends (1800x1600 pixels, or close to it), you probably can't see the whole thing unless you have a super-high resolution display, even without the blog contents covering it.  So here's the full image, at a reduced resolution:

The new background.

As you can see, the central equation is the same.  This is the bra-ket notation used in quantum physics, and shows the inner product between two quantum computation values, 0 and + (which is a superposition of 0 and 1), so the overlap of 0 and + (technically it's the inner product, but it's the degree to which the two are the same) is one over the square-root of two.

What about the rest of the calculations?  Are they legitimate, or just random doodlings?  They're all legitimate, and equations I've used before, though it's been years.  Hopefully there aren't any mistakes.

The next equation, in red at the top, is just a circle divided into six parts, with one part divided in half.  The equation calculates the area of that section, but it's mainly an excuse for me to estimate pi as three.  That's a common estimate to use for pi when you're just doing a back of the envelope calculation.  Another useful estimate is 5 dB, or the square-root of 10.

On the left side is a charged particle over a ground plane.  This results in an image in the ground plane.  The charge in the ground plane responds in such a way that it's equivalent to an equal and opposite charge reflecting the placement of the first charge.  This results in the equation below, which is also the equation for the potential for a charge dipole.  Charge dipoles consist of equal and opposite charges close together, so that they minimize each other's effects.  A ground plane effectively converts a charge into a charge dipole, which is why ground planes help reduce noise coming from the circuits they're placed under (they also tend to minimize noise coupling into the circuit).

Below that, at the bottom of the page, is the time-invariant form of Schrodinger's Equation, since I figured I needed that on the back of the envelope.

On the right side is a 3-bit Gray code.  This is a binary sequence where only a single bit changes for each step of the sequence.  This was originally used as a method of binary counting for mechanical switches. Since mechanical switches don't change instantaneously, switching from 011 to 100 (3 to 4 in binary), could result in spurious outputs as each switch changes at a different time.  By making it equal the change from 010 to 110 instead, there are no spurious values between them.  In modern digital computers, this particular reason is not as relevant, but it is still useful for error correction.  A Gray code can be visualized as a cube, shown above, where each step travels along the edge of the cube.  I included the cube, with convenient arrows, mainly to give people a clue that I was doing a Gray code, rather than let them think I was trying to count in binary and getting it wrong.  I'm not sure whether it worked or not.

So that's everything.  I hope you enjoyed this boring math post.  I also hope I didn't mess up any of these equations.

Long webpages

This is an issue I've been thinking about some, especially in the context of stories on the web.  How long of a webpage is too long?  When you see a wall of text, do your eyes glaze over?  Do you hit the back button and find something else to read? What if you want to post a long article or story on the web?  How do you go about doing it?

One issue is that long webpages are intimidating.  You watch the little scrollbar shrink to invisibility, and think that maybe it's not worth it.  Then again, if you decide you do want to read a long story, can you do it in one sitting?  Probably not.  But if you go away and come back, how do you find your place again?

One option is to split it up into a number of pages.  More than one blogpost, or an article that spans multiple pages.  This may work, but a lot depends on the software you're using, and how easily you can do it.  Once you have multiple pages, you need to put some effort into making it easy to get from page to page.  How many pages are there?  If there are three, it should be relatively easy to find your way and come back to where you left off.  If there are 20 or so, you might become lost, and forget where you left off.

If instead you keep it all on one long page, you run into the issue of losing your place, especially if you navigate away and then come back.  You can simplify that with headings, but it's still a pain to scroll down to the correct heading, and you may miss it and scroll right past.  Fortunately, webpages can include anchors, which allow you to hyperlink to certain parts of a webpage, including from in the same page, such as I did in my Brief History page.  Unfortunately, the blogging software doesn't always handle anchors that well.  It took some effort to get that page working right (including modifying the html and not switching to the WYSIWYG view, which allows Blogger to mess it up).

In either case, navigation is key.  If you're using multiple pages, then you need to link to both the previous and the next page at both the top and the bottom of the page (you need to be able to go back from the top and forward from the bottom, but it also helps to be able to go forward or backward a page at a time to find your place without needing to scroll to the top or bottom each time).  You should also have links either to all of the pages, or to a table of contents.  If you're using one long page, you need to have periodic links to the table of contents on the same page.  This could alternatively be done with a separate frame that displays the table of contents at all times, but that requires you to muck around with the html of the page.  Blogging software generally can't handle that for you.

So, you see, there are a lot of issues involved in getting really long posts to work. I'd be happy to take suggestions for any other tricks.

Update to blog

I've been ignoring all the little improvements that Google has been making to Blogger for a while now. But recently I decided that it was time to finally update to a more recent template. It was a pain, because I'd already done a good bit of customization, and converting it to the new version killed a lot of that customization, and I had to redo it. That took several hours. The end result of all that work looks pretty good, I think, with a custom background, and a standard template that I've updated with some blocks of text.

Overall, I'm happy with how it's turned out.

And I'm back

It's been a while since I've blogged anything.  I've been very busy writing, but that's really more of an excuse than anything else.  I found time to play Mass Effect 3, after all.  By the way, ME3 is a good game, so far, but I hear that the ending is really disappointing. Fortunately, Bioware will be producing a free Extended Cut DLC with an improved ending (although word is they're not backing down on the "artistic vision").  I figure they're calling it a free DLC because they don't want to call it a "patch to fix the sucky ending."

Anyway, I figured that since my wife started blogging again, I ought to do the same.  She has had some stories come out recently, so be sure to read them.  As for myself, I expect to have something coming out later this summer.  I'll post more about it when we're closer.

Meanwhile, I'll try to keep up more of a regular presence on this blog.