Surviving Sandy

Here in Boston, Hurricane Sandy didn't do too much damage that we could see.  The public transportation stopped running during the second half of Monday, and there was a lot of wind and rain that evening.  But in the end, things were more or less back to normal the next day.  Just a few fallen branches.  We never even lost power at our home or work--although not everyone in the Boston area was so lucky, and I'm not sure even now whether all the power outages have been resolved.  It continued to rain on Tuesday--we had a pretty heavy thunderstorm in the evening--but overall we were pretty lucky.

New York, though, is another story.  There were floods, power outages, fires.  Sandy was everything New York feared it would be, and more.  Continue to keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

Barring any further storm impacts, Kristin and I, and our friend Max Gladstone (whose book, Three Parts Dead, has just come out--Go! Buy!), will be carpooling to Toronto for World Fantasy on Thursday.  Let us know if you'll be there.

A Phoenix in Darkness, Part 2

Last week, I announced the beginning of the serial publication of my short novel, "A Phoenix in Darkness."  Today, I'm happy to say that the second part of "A Phoenix in Darkness" is now live at Black Gate's website.  The second part contains some of my favorite scenes from the novel, including two very creepy scenes which I read at World Fantasy two years ago.  Since it's the Sunday before Halloween, I think it's the perfect time for this part of my novel to go up.  And to whet your appetite, here's a taste of one of them:

He couldn’t see the front of the room, where the lecturing voice continued to drone on, but he could see the children. They were young girls, perhaps a dozen of them aged somewhere between eight and ten, and dressed in identical gray dresses which only accentuated the differences between them. Aside from the differences in age, which could be quite noticeable for that range, Seth recognized the dark hair and the broad features of the working class in most of them, the honey-colored hair and tall, willowy body only found in certain noble families, and even one girl whose dark brown skin marked her ancestry as from the Daurens region of the Novar Empire. The girls were the only living people he could see — the others were dead. Corpses lay on low tables around the room, each with two or three of the girls gathered around it. They were all young men, maybe all peasants from what he could tell, but it was hard to notice their faces when their chests were peeled open to reveal their organs. What Seth couldn’t understand at first, or perhaps didn’t want to understand, was what the girls were doing with the bodies. Even seeing the organs lying on the table and the blood on the hands and dresses of the children wasn’t enough to hammer into him what was happening until he watched one girl, with dark, curly hair and a look of intense concentration on her face, use a knife to saw at a corpse’s chest. She set the knife down, wiped back a lock of her hair to leave a smear of blood at her temple, then reached into the chest cavity with both hands to pull out a heart nearly the size of her head. She gave the girl next to her a dimpled smile, which the other girl returned while making some quip that caused the first one to giggle. Swallowing hard to overcome his nausea, Seth pulled back from the door and leaned against the wall with a clink of armor which caused both Aulus and Nathan to whip their heads in his direction. The voices in the room gave no indication that they had heard anything, however, so Seth started breathing again with a soft curse for his own clumsiness. He picked up his sword as quietly as possible, almost losing his grip with his sweat-slick hands. He could still hear them chattering, joking, and laughing, but quietly, all the while giving half their attention to the speaker whose words Seth could now clearly hear: “If you examine the heart, you’ll find that it has four parts, or chambers. The heart is a large muscle, whose job it is to circulate the blood throughout the body. This vein collects the blood and brings it to the heart, while this…”

Perfect for Halloween, I'd say.  I hope you enjoy the story, and I look forward to hearing what people think.

And as a reminder, if you'd like to read about one of Aulus's earlier adventures, you might enjoy A Stranger in the Library.

World Fantasy Convention

Kristin and I will be going to the World Fantasy Convention next weekend, and we will both be on the panel "The Real World  in Fantastic Fiction" at noon on Saturday.  Here's the description:

Just because a story is set in a secondary world doesn’t mean its medical/legal/political/military systems cannot be grounded in some kind of reality. Inaccuracies can abound when authors try to incorporate procedures and systems that exist in the real world into their created worlds without paying proper attention to details. The panel examines why and how reality is all important, even in a fantastic world.

The other panelists are Ian Drury, Geoff Hart, Christopher Kovacs, and Kenneth Schneyer.

There are a number of different ways that this panel could go, and it's not clear yet exactly what we'll be talking about.  Presumably the moderator will ask us questions, and we'll do our best to answer them.  We can talk about they "why" of getting the reality in your fiction right, but I often find the question of "how" to be more interesting.  How do you get the details right?  One of the keys is research, but how do you do the research?  How much do you do?  What can't you learn from research?  If the research isn't helping, do you change the story or just make stuff up?  Those are the sort of questions all writers face to some degree, and I think it'd be fun to talk about.

The work of writing

I've spent the last weekend working on my writing without actually writing. That was frustrating. I had a story coming out in Black Gate on Sunday, so I needed to review the story for typos and formatting errors, and the occasional plot hole. In addition, I needed to promote my story in various ways: emailing my friends, posting announcements in the online forums I frequent, etc. I also has a lot of stories I was prepping for submission (or resubmission), so I spent  time getting those ready. Finally, I ahad to read and critique a fairly long story for my writing group. Overall, it was a long weekend. All of that work was worthwhile, but I missed just having time to write.

A Phoenix in Darkness has begun

Black Gate has published the first part of my short novel in their online fiction series today, and will be publishing the rest over the next two weeks. "A Phoenix in Darkness" is the longest story that Black Gate has ever published.

Those (three) of you who have been following my blog for a while will remember Phoenix. I talked about it incessantly as I was writing it, back in 2004. It forms an important chapter in my War of the Elementals canon, revealing a turning point in the history of Aulus and Kulsin. My original blurb to describe the story went like this:

For centuries, the Ordo Dominorum has defended humanity against threats beyond its comprehension, but the Order’s secretive ways and strange powers have earned the Domini only fear and hatred from those they seek to protect. Aulus and Nathan, two young Domini, believe that the Order’s success in hunting down and destroying magical threats has now made it possible to reform the Order and make it a part of the world. Will the murder of a fellow Dominus by a peasant woman be the impetus to begin this change . . . or proof that the Order has not been as successful as they believed?

I'm a different writer now than I was when I wrote the first draft of this story eight years ago. I'd definitely write it differently if I were writing it now--for one, it would be shorter. My style is terser now. I like to think that I'm a better writer, but looking over this story in preparation of the publication, there's a richness to the descriptions that I'm not sure I'd do justice to today. That's the burden of an author's evolution: constantly wondering if what you're gaining is worth what you're losing. I believe it is in my case, but stories like this make me wonder.

A lot of the War of the Elementals is not yet published, but you can find out what Aulus was up to prior to this in "A Stranger in the Library," previously published in Aoife's Kiss, and now available on Kindle. The rest of my published stories can be found here.

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.

A Stranger in the Library for sale

I recently put my short story, "A Stranger in the Library," up on Amazon as a Kindle e-book.  "A Stranger in the Library" was my first fiction sale, appearing in the December 2008 issue of Aoife's Kiss. Since it only appeared in print, and is now very difficult to get a hold of, I thought it would be worth making it available for sale online.  For those of you familiar with Fire--right now just a few friends and family, though hopefully more people will have a chance to read it in the not-too-distant future--"A Stranger in the Library" takes place in the same world thirty-five years earlier, and involves the characters of Marjori and Aulus. Aulus also appears in "A Phoenix in Darkness," which will be going up on Black Gate later this month.

For everyone still waiting on their chance to read those stories--all five of you, here's the blurb I included with "A Stranger in the Library":

Marjori is a Philosopher of Books, tasked with maintaining the University's Great Library and helping the scholars seeking knowledge within. When one of the secretive Domini seeks her aid, will she risk helping him undermine his corrupted Order?

More stories by me (okay, one more story by me) can be found at my Amazon Author page.  My wife also has an Amazon Author page, so you could buy some of her stories as well.  We recently compared how many stories she's sold on Amazon vs. the number of stories I've sold, and I was embarrassed to discover that she's outselling me ten to one.  Granted, she's had five stories up while I've only had one until this past week, but still!  Now I'm not going to discourage people from buying Kristin's stories.  By all means, buy one of hers too.  Just buy one of mine first.

Spoiler-full Review of Looper

My wife and I saw Looper the other day.  Unlike Doc Rampage, we were able to suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the movie.  It was fun, although a little bit too bloody for my wife's liking.  She also found the main sex scene completely gratuitous.  Since we saw the movie, though, she's been pointing out a steady stream of plot holes to me, and I've been doing my best to patch them up, though not necessarily successfully.

Everything beyond this point is full of spoilers, so beware.

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The premise is that in the future, time travel has been invented.  However, it's completely illegal, so only criminals use it, and they use it to dispose of bodies.  A victim is kidnapped and sent back in time by about thirty years, where a looper immediately shoots him, disposes of the body, and is paid.  Since the victim's still alive and well at the time when his future self is shot and killed, no one misses him, his body can be incinerated with no one the wiser at the earlier time, and no incriminating body around in the future.  If the premise sounds a little silly, it is, and it mainly exists for the fact that eventually the looper must "close the loop."  Eventually, the person sent back in time is himself, thirty years in the future, and he's required to shoot and kill him (victims always have their faces covered, so the looper doesn't know that he's killed himself until after the fact).  Then he receives a tremendous payday, retires, and has thirty years until the criminal gang picks him up and sends him back in time to be killed by himself.

So what happens when the looper his future self go go?  It's a death sentence for his future self.  For his present self, it's something worse.  And here is where the whole time travel premise has some logical problems.  In one scene, when the future looper escapes, they catch the present looper.  Then they start cutting off pieces.  Those pieces start vanishing off the future looper until he comes back to be properly executed.  They can't just kill the present looper, since that would create a dangerous paradox.  But damaging him is allowed.

Doc had a lot of trouble with this one, as did my wife.  Does it really make sense for pieces to start disappearing in real time?  It does for the audience, but would the looper notice it in real time, as for him, it happened thirty years ago.  And this is where you either accept the premise of how time travel works in the movie or you don't.  The future looper has only a fuzzy memory of the time between the time he's been sent back to and the time when he was sent back.  That's because what happens between those two points isn't set: it's possibilities. Those memories only become clear when they happen in the present.  Thus, the future looper can realize that his current self is being mutilated, because those memories are becoming clear, and realizing what's going on, he has motivation to go back.  Because his entire life is being rewritten, and the past thirty years are becoming worse and worse as his body becomes less and less whole.

So the difference is, I could accept this premise.  At least as a premise of a movie--I'd have a hard time accepting it in a Physics lecture.  Doc, and to a lesser extent, my wife, couldn't.

In this story, the future looper is sent back and escapes, and he sets out to kill the person who sent him back.  And in the present time, that person is a small child.  The present looper is determined to kill the future looper, because he thinks it's the only way he can get his life back.

The main problem I had, and the contradiction I had the biggest trouble with, was that the future looper remembered killing himself the first time around.  How was he able to change that the second time around?  How could anything be different?

The second problem I had is that it was presented that the small boy who was sending all the loopers back in the future was seeking revenge because of what the future looper did when he was sent back.  But if, in the first timeline, he was sent back and killed without incident, then how could the boy have needed to have revenge for anything, in order to send him back in the first place?

The bottom line, of course, is that time travel always causes paradoxes.  Read Doc's post for even more time travel logic puzzles aka plot holes.

New author page

I've put up an author page on Amazon.  It's pretty empty so far, as I wait until it finishes processing the short stories I'm selling on Amazon as e-books.  I expect them to turn up soon.

Right now, I'm only selling stories which I've already published, whose rights have reverted to me, and which aren't available for free online.  So, that's two stories.  Hopefully, there will be more in the future.

Black Gate is publishing fiction online

Black Gate has announced that it will now be publishing fiction online.  Which is exciting, especially since one of the first stories they'll be publishing is mine.  The very first story, Jason Thummel's "The Duelist," appears here.  It's a novelette length story, which generally means between 7,500 and 17,500 words, which is where the novella category starts.  A quick word count tells me it's about 9,500 words long.

Rather than review the story itself, at the moment I'm interested in the format.  How well does Black Gate's new format work for reading stories?  Are they comfortable to read?  Is it easy to keep track of your place? I find these questions particularly interesting, since I have an upcoming story.

The stories are posted not as blog posts, but as separate web pages, each announced by a blog post, such this one.  However, for the most part, the formatting is the same as for blog posts.

For example, the story uses the same unusual color-scheme, light blue letters on a black background, as for Black Gate's blog. Now, I usually read the blog's RSS feed, which reformats the blog to standard black-on-white, so I was a bit wary of reading such a long story in that format.  Surprisingly--or perhaps not so surprisingly, assuming that their web designer knows what he's doing--I found the blue-on-black color scheme to be comfortable to read, and had no trouble with eye strain.

Another thing that surprised me was that the lettering was large enough to read clearly on a mobile device.  Unlike my own blog, that has a separate formatting for mobile devices, Black Gate looks mostly the same whether you're reading it on a desktop or an iPhone.  But the letters don't shrink down to illegibility, like they do on some sites.  It's still more comfortable to read when holding the phone sideways rather than vertically, but either way is readable.

Black Gate's blog posts have in-line commenting on the article page.  This is how I prefer to see comments on blogs, but it can work to the detriment of long stories, partly by making a long page even longer, and partly because spamming and trolling can distract from the story. The solution Black Gate came up with works well.  The story does not contain in-line comments, but a link to the blog post announcing the story, allowing readers to comment there.  It also keeps all the comments in one place, to prevent a proliferation of pages.

I was curious about how well a long story would work on a single webpage (I had some thoughts on this issue, inspired by my insider knowledge of the upcoming online-fiction on Black Gate, a couple of weeks ago).  If you navigate away from a long webpage, it's hard to find your place again.  The same applies if you're reading it on two computers, such as a laptop and an iPhone, as I was.  The iPhone also has the feature that you can tap at the top bar of the browser and it will automatically scroll to the top of the page.  I can count on doing that by accident at least once while reading a story of "The Duelist's" length.  Fortunately, "The Duelist" wasn't too long to find my place again quickly, but I do wonder whether it would be possible with anything longer, such as my story, which is much longer.

If you'll permit me to talk a little bit about my upcoming story, my understanding is that it will be broken into three parts and posted on consecutive weeks. Even so, each part will be much longer than Thummel's story, which has me wondering if it is broken up enough.  One option might be to further split it, so that each part is on two webpages, without affecting the publishing schedule.  Barring that, in-page navigation would be helpful.  But these are thoughts I should take up with the editor.

Overall, I think the formatting that Black Gate used worked well.  My only real concern is how well it will handle even longer stories, and I suppose we'll see that when it happens.

Spinning

I heard once that there are more flintknappers today than there ever were at any other time in history.  In other words, today's population is so big, and people have so much free time, that there are now more people who know how to knap flint, most of them as a hobby, than there were people who had to shape flint to survive at any time in human history.  That's one of those rumors that's too good to check, but there's a grain of truth in it.  Every historical activity and profession, even those least necessary in today's society, has its scholars and enthusiasts.  Today, you can get a sword blacksmithed by hand, in a historical design and made by historical techniques, and you can order it over the Internet.  Which is useful, if you're one of those people working to recreate the martial arts of the Middle Ages.

I bring this up because my mother has taken up spinning recently.   That includes everything from raising the animals to using an actual, old-fashioned spinning wheel to spin the hair into thread and yarn.  When we were visiting her in Louisiana, she showed us some of what was involved.

My mother's spinning wheel

It starts with the animals.  In this case, angora rabbits:

Angora rabbits in their hutch.

Mr. Bojangles, the patriarch, so to speak, held by my sister Sarah.

She'll spin more than just rabbit fur, but the angoras are the only one she's trying to raise herself.  Unlike sheep, who are sheared, angora fur is removed by brushing the rabbits.  You can use just your fingers when they're really shedding.

Rabbit fur.

The fur needs to be carded, which aligns and cleans the fur, as I understand it.

My mother carding rabbit fur

After that, it can be spun.  I didn't get a picture of my mother using the spinning wheel, although you can see her with a spindle here.

My mother with a spindle.

Conditum paradoxum addendum

Kristin's finally put up her recipe for conditum paradoxum:

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the things my husband Donald and I share is a fascination with the culture of ancient Rome.  Since I also love to cook, this leads inexorably to our attempts to recreate ancient Roman food and beverages.  I say “our” even though it’s usually me doing the cooking.  Donald is there for encouragement.  Such as, “We haven’t had any Roman food in a while.”  Or, “When are you going to cook some more Roman food?”  He does help with the dishes.

One ancient Roman recipe I’ve made twice now is conditum paradoxum, from Apicius, the most famous ancient Roman cookbook.  Depending on the translation, conditum paradoxum means “marvelous seasoned wine”, “novelty spiced wine”, or “spiced wine surprise”.

I just wanted to point out that I'm also there for the math.

Wedding in Louisiana

Last weekend, Kristin and I went down to Louisiana, where my sister, Rebekah, was getting married.  It was a simple, and relatively inexpensive, wedding at my parents' home in St. Francisville.  Here's a picture, so you can get an idea of what it looked like.

The wedding party.  My sister and Vance with the minister in the center.  My other sister, Sarah, on the right, and her daughter, Hope, in the white dress in front of the groom's party (she was a co-ring-bearer, since there were already three flower girls).

The minister and the bride and groom are standing just in front of the in-ground pool, which you can see in the background.  I was kind of worried about what would happen if the minister took a step back.  The wedding was short, and the food afterward was plentiful.

A zoomed out view, so you can see the tables set up.  On the right side are the porch and garage, and you can just see the Master Bedroom extension of the house poking out on the left--well, more specifically, the gutter attached to that extension.  The tables were lined up in between, and the wedding procession walked down the aisle in between.

The hummingbird feeder, and its attendant hummingbirds.  The birds were quite disappointed when it was removed for the wedding.  You could see them wandering around in confusion, looking for their meal.

The next day, Rebekah and her husband went to honeymoon in New Orleans.  My wife and mother drove them down, and spent the day there.  I stayed in St. Francisville and babysat my two nieces.  They're old enough that if you give them an iPad or Kindle Fire, they'll be nice and quiet for a good while.  I think we all had more fun this way.

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.

Review of Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz

I find Dean Koontz's books either hit or miss. Some of them, like Seize the Night and From the Corner of His Eye, are beautiful, well-told stories, with great characters and intriguing premises. Others, such as Breathless, are rambling and inconclusive. It may have an interesting concept, but it never really develops into a story.

Odd Thomas is one of his better series. Odd is a polite young man and sometime fry-cook who sees dead people. The silent, lingering dead come to him for help, and he does his best to do so. He has a few other talents, such as the occasional vision or prophetic dream, and a psychic magnetism that helps him find people that he's looking for, but he'd always say that his best talent is fry cooking.

After the death of his girlfriend, Odd left his hometown of Pico Mundo, where the authorities knew and relied upon his abilities, to find his way in the wider world. He's faced down enemies from the evil to the misguided, from terrorists to the mystic, and he's killed when necessary. Now he's come to the mansion at Roseland, where there are no roses, in the company of Annamarie, a mysterious, pregnant young woman for whom he's the guardian.

All is not well at Roseland. Time is inconsistent there, and someone, maybe everyone there, is involved in something very evil. And that's just how the book starts.

Like all the Odd novels, the book's strength lies in its titular character, a gentle, humble soul whose strong belief in the power of good, and the necessity to fight evil, drives him to take on incredible dangers. As I read books primarily for the characters, and as Odd is a very strong one, I imagine that I'd enjoy pretty much any Odd Thomas novel. Odd's certainly been around a while, but that's given him more maturity, coupled with a certain moroseness, that's given him more depth. Unlike some long lived characters, he hasn't yet played out.

The actual adventure is a little more science fiction than most of what he does, although not as much as Brother Odd. But it's more old school, H. G. Wells science fiction, which I think works better with Odd. It leant the book a stronger air of mystery than a standard terrorism plot, and I certainly enjoyed it.

Overall, it was a good Odd Thomas novel, and I certainly enjoyed it, but if you're looking for answers to the mystery of Annamaria, you're still going to have to wait.

Roman Dinner

On Saturday, Kristin and I hosted a Ancient Roman dinner for our friends.  We've done Roman dinners before, as Kristin has discussed in detail on her blog.  Once again, Kristin did most of the cooking, and I did most of the dishes.  Which is not to say I did none of the cooking--I prepared the hydromel (honey water) and sorted lovage seeds, for example.

Ah, lovage seeds.  Roman meals use a number of ingredients which are not easy to get in the New World.  Among them are lovage seeds.  You can buy lovage seeds in the grocery store, but these aren't really lovage seeds--they're either celery seeds or ajwan seeds, which are different plants entirely.  You can't buy food-grade real lovage seeds, but you can buy them for planting.  And if you get organic seeds, they're untreated and edible.  So we ordered some lovage seeds.  However, while they're not treated, the seeds are only 99% pure--you also get a good bit of dirt and twigs in the package.  In addition, you can't be sure that they've been stored properly as a spice should.  So Kristin was kind of reluctant to use the seeds, but I went through them and painstakingly separated a teaspoon-full of seeds from the twigs and dirt, and convinced her to use them in one dish.

Lovage is not the only hard to get Roman spice.  Rue and pennyroyal are, unfortunately, slightly poisonous herbs.  Kristin's eager to try them--after all, if the Romans could eat them, can't we?  But I insisted that we not feed poison to our friends (besides, rue is supposed to be used fresh, not as seeds, and while Kristin has gotten some seeds, she still hasn't planted them), so we substituted dandelion leaves for the rue.  And don't get me started on myrtle berries--our myrtle bush didn't bloom this year.

Still, we managed to produce a very nice three course meal.  For the appetizer, we had flatbread, olives, sheep and goat cheese (the Romans considered cows beasts of burden, not milk or meat animals), and an assortment of olives and salami (which Kristin considers to be pretty close to Roman sausages).

The real work went into this appetizing main course:

Kristin enjoying the main course.

From the bottom to the top, there's squash seasoned with real lovage (the only one we had enough real lovage seed for), pan-seared fish, Indian chapati (a reasonable approximation of Roman flatbread, we understand), highly-seasoned pork belly, and even-more-seasoned parsnips.  Kristin wasn't too happy with the parsnips, thinking they were too salty, but they turned out to be a favorite, and the only thing we ran out of.  There are also two bottles, one containing conditum paradoxum, and the other containing the hydromel which I made.

The dessert course consisted of honeyed fritters, grapes, and figs.

Most of the recipes came from Sally Grainger's Cooking Apicius (shown left), which is our favorite of the various Roman recipe books.  For one, it's the most modern, and has the best understanding of what ingredients are available to a modern kitchen.  For another, there's a lot of scholarship involved, a lot of it based on the work that went into her and her husband's new translation of Apicius (the most extensive of the Ancient Roman cookbooks).  It seems to us to be pretty accurate, and Kristin thinks it agrees very well with her research in the area.

We did use a somewhat different recipe for the conditum paradoxum, but I've discussed that in detail before.  The hydromel also came from a different source, namely Mark Grant's Roman Cookery (shown right).  The original recipe comes not from Apicius, but from Bassus's Country Matters.  It mixes one part apple juice, two parts honey, and three parts water.  In Grant's recipe, these are boiled rather than aged the way they were in Ancient Rome.  We used apple cider rather than apple juice, since the cider's closer to what the Romans would have had.  The cookbook recommends chilling and serving as an apertif, but I preferred something that could be drunk with a meal.  It was too sweet to drink straight in quantity, but we mixed the hydromel with three parts water, as we had done with the conditum paradoxum.  Unfortunately, this was still too sweet.  Kristin, who's a much better cook than I am, suggested adding some vinegar.  Adding one-and-a-half teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a serving was just what was needed.  It tastes more of apples that way, and the acid of the vinegar prevents the sweetness from being overwhelming.  Since the Romans usually let the mixture age long enough to ferment, I figure that the result is probably pretty close to what the Romans drank.  According to my calculations, adding one-and-a-half teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a serving results in a ratio of 1 part apple cider vinegar, 2 parts apple cider, 4 parts honey, and 6 parts water, but Kristin prefers 50% more vinegar, for a stronger acidity.  If I make it again, I'll use my proportions.  It's easier to add a little vinegar later than to take it out.

Review of The Hollow City by Dan Wells

I loved Dan Wells's I am not a Serial Killer series, so when I saw that he had a new book out in the same genre, I snapped it up.  The Hollow City is not a sequel, and John Cleaver, the heroic sociopath from the I am not a Serial Killer series, does not make an appearance.  It's not even clear that this takes place in the same mythos as his previous books, although it's quite possible, as all these stories take place in our world, though with something sinister lurking beneath the surface.

The hero of this new novel is one Michael Shipman, and like John Cleaver, he has problems.  Rather than the sociopathy of John, Michael suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.  Not only does he have delusions of persecution, he sees people and things that aren't there.  The problem comes when some of the things he sees really are there, and don't go away with the drugs.

The story starts with Michael waking up in the hospital, missing two weeks of memory, with only vague recollections of a hollow city, though he has no idea what that even means.  He's soon committed to a mental hospital, where he's treated for his condition, and starts to realize that much of what he believes about his life simply is not true, but is a product of his schizophrenia.  Meanwhile, the FBI is questioning him about his activities during that missing part of his life, hoping that he can lead them to the Red Line Killer, the serial killer who has been murdering members of the Children of the Earth cult.  The same cult that kidnapped his mother before he was born.  He must learn whether the Children of the Earth are after him, and who are the mysterious Faceless Men, who only he can see, even when his drugs are effective.

It's a powerful premise, and there's a lot to recommend this book, but I kept stumbling over the primary problem with a story told from Michael's POV: that of the unreliable narrator.  Because Michael cannot distinguish what's real and what isn't, the reader is likewise in the dark.  He can guess at whether someone's real, and he'll find himself playing that game constantly (Is the FBI real, how about Michael's girlfriend?  Or the reporter?).  When Michael's suffering from full-blown paranoia it's more obvious than when he's largely in control.  I realize that this is part of the premise, but I found that I just didn't have that much tolerance for an unreliable narrator.

It also takes a little while for the book to get going.  I didn't find the scenes of Michael in the mental hospital, arguing with his doctor and trying to figure out what's real and not, that entertaining.  But once he was moving, and making his way back to the hollow city, then the story picked up, and moved rapidly to a strong conclusion.  I just wish it didn't take as long to get there.

Ultimately, I liked The Hollow City okay, but it is  nowhere near as strong as Dan Wells's John Cleaver novels.

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.