Electric Well

11 PM Book Review: Vicious Redemption

2012-01-25T23:00:00.005-05:00

Vicious Redemption by Michael Lucas is a collection of 5 deliciously gruesome horror tales.

Wednesday's Seagulls - Is a metaphore for marriage if I ever saw one. Or a zombie version of pop goes the weasle.
Pax Canina - Is the most charming, about dead dogs and no good deed going unpunished.
Opening the Eye - Is a trippy trepanation story.
Breaking the Circle - Is about not letting your daughter grow up... cause, you know, she's a werewolf and shit.
Sticky Notes - Is really an unflinching look at a person who has a chance at getting his heart's desire, which is something he's been spending his whole life avoiding. As a warning for those who would rather not read about the subjects, it touches on suicide and abuse.

Mike writes excellent stories about grim choices. About the choices that lucky people don't have to make. Donner party sorts of choices. The collection title is spot on: all of the redemptions offered here cost at least a pound of flesh.

The stories are vivid in a Grand Guignol style, but thoughtful in a way that puts torture porn to shame. I especially like that he can take really unsympathetic characters, as in Opening the Eye, and make you interested in what they do. In the case of Sticky Notes, he takes a really unsympathetic condition, curses a sympathetic character with it, and does a sort of egg race balancing morality and desire to the end of the story. Mike's fiction is original (there may be another trepanation story around somewhere...), never uses over worked tropes, and manages to stare uncomfortable shit right in the face and make a story out of it. If you like over the top horror, you will find this collection very satisfactory.

There wasn't a single one of these stories I didn't like, so I'll just end with full disclosure: Mike is an old friend of mine, I saw most of these tales before this collection, and I've always been a big fan.

Altar of Eden

2012-01-11T11:42:00.001-05:00

I just finished Altar of Eden by James Rollins. This is not a review, because I didn't like the book much. It was a bog standard thriller, fun as a rip off of The Island of Dr. Moreau, but with a sort of weak ending where the protagonists aren't responsible for much of everything. Not quite Deux Ex Machina, but close. As a thriller, it had the bonus of not including virulently crappy politics, like, say, Clive Cussler, but didn't have the advantage of a real personality, like say, Lincoln and Child. It had all the trade marks of the mass market thriller: poor characterization, improbable, kind of stupid plot twists meant to make you feel a certain way about the characters, lots of foolish coincidences, a smattering of feel good moralizing, and enough malapropisms that I wonder why the Anti-Selfpubbers insist that quality control is an issue with selfpub. Frankly, I'm also reading that Amanda Hocking thing. Which is poorly edited. BUT NOT MORE POORLY EDITED THAN THIS HARPERCOLLINS THRILLER. Caps is how you know I'm for srs.

"She both loved him for this effort and bristled against it, but in the machismo world of the South..."

I picked it up because of the jacket copy. "Polk investigates an abandonded shipwreck... carrying exotic cages animals, parrt of a black market smuggling ring. But... each is an unsettling mutation of the natural order..." dun Dun DUNNNNNN! Great stuff.

It's very affirming, because it means if I edit even a little, nobody can ever accuse me of shitting up the quality of the English Language more than Harper Collins already does.

11 AM book review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2012-01-07T23:00:00.011-05:00

Jacob Portman witnesses his beloved grandfather's death at the hands of an eyeless three tongued monster. Because it's so horrific, he is promptly convinced by everyone around him, including his therapist, that it couldn't have been real. But something's wrong, including the strange pictures his grandfather kept in a cigar box. Jacob keeps scratching at the mystery of his grandfather's life and death until he ends up visiting the orphanage that his father grew up in during world war 2, convincing his father that the birds on the little Welsh island would make a worthwhile ornithological study.

Once on the island, he finds the orphanage, but not in the place he expected. And he certainly didn't expect the pictures in his grandfather's cigar box to be of real people, exhibiting their weird abilities. And he didn't expect to get involved with this grandfather's lovely ex-girlfriend.

I picked this up on the recommendation of a co-worker. I really enjoyed this book for the voice and the world building. The description and cover kind of lead you to believe it will be a sort of steampunk X-Men. The author uses found antique photos throughout to illustrate actual characters, many of which have a cool, spooky quality to it. But as you can tell from the above, it's more dieselpunk. And though the randomness to the Peculiar children's abilities give a sort of superhero vibe, there are hints of deeper order that lead you along a trail to a much more urban fantasy style of milieu, with a fresh supernatural taxonomy. You have to love any series that calls it's creatures "peculiars."

The protagonists voice is cynical but optimistic, and unlike a lot of YA titles, uses language that teens would actually use. Not swearing in the manner of South Park (not that there's anything wrong with that), but swearing in the casually colorful way Holden Caufield might have if he'd actually sworn.

I can't think of anything I disliked without nitpicking, so I won't bother. Miss Peregrine was a short, fresh read with a likable protagonist and fun milieu.

How to get a cover for your ebook for less than $200

2011-12-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

Have a friend do it. Oh wait. You don't know any artists with alot of free time, who do exactly the kind of thing you'd like to see as a cover? Me neither, so I had to improvise.

When I decided I was going to self publish my novel Rock of Aeons on the Kindle, I had no idea how to get a cover made. I knew that my skills with photoshop were probably not up to the job. I didn't know how the pros did it. The closest I'd gotten to that was a friend a friend who commissioned cover art for a dead tree game back in the nineties. From a friend of his.

We keep circling around to the subject of friends, personal contacts. So the first thing I tried was personal recommendations. I remembered that Tim Pratt recommended a design group awhile back, but search as I might on his blog, I couldn't find the link. So I asked a friend who had self published a great novel on Kindle, and done it with a pretty good cover. She kindly passed me the contact information for her guy, and I surfed over to their page only to find that they were no longer taking new clients. Hmmm.

The next logical thing was to try the net. A couple of Google searches later, I found four companies that were advertising their services as creators of ebook covers.

eCover Makers
Author Support
Absolute Covers
99 Designs

The first three sites all had fairly straightforward deals going on: you work with them to develop a cover for a price.

eCover Makers charges $97. After you place your order, they will contact you by email or phone to discuss your design.

Absolute Covers starts at $47 and goes to well over that, depending on the on the number of drafts you order and what additional work you require. For instance, if you wanted a back cover for a possible print edition? That's extra.

They sounded fine, but looking at their sample covers didn't stir me. They looked like grocery store packaging, and skewed towards non-fiction.

Author Support charges a whopping $400 for the bare minimum work, and you supply the art. For what I wanted, a full design where they chose the art, they charge $750. Their covers looked better, but by no means 7 times better.

99 Designs had something else going on. Apparently, there's a whole niche of websites that offer design "competitions." On 99 designs, you offer a fee, ranging from 150 to 600, and designers compete to win a portion of it. They're probably art school students, but when I looked at some of their winning designs, they looked very good, comparable to the cover the propelled Amanda Hocking's Trylle to a million sales. When I was originally looking around the site, it looked like the contest I wanted would run about $200. The contest I ended up running cost $150.

Crowdspring, which is linked to Amazon's create space, looks like it offers a similar service.

That $200 set the ceiling for my expenses, in my head. I decided to look around for other designers, and see if I could find a good one that would do it for less, but if I didn't find one in a couple of days, I would go back and launch a contest.

There are probably other shops than the first three. I'm a very lazy librarian, and didn't search very far. But $200 seemed reasonable, and the other searches I had done hadn't turned up great options. So I decided to try to go local.

I put an ad on Craigslist.

I am looking for an ebook cover for an Urban Fantasy novel. I would like quotes for service. I need price, turnaround time, and links to a website with examples of your designs. I will send more specific details after I receive a quote.

I recieved 13 replies within two weeks, 7 in the first three days, the rest starting about six days after. Of the first 7, I really liked three, would have looked at two, and didn't like two. However, none of them quoted me a price less than the 99designs contest I was looking at.

I gave it three days, and launched my contest on 99 designs. The process was pretty easy, much like joining any other site, with, of course, the $145 fee for the contest required up front. The standard length for a contest is 7 days, so they seemed confident of a quick turnaround.

This was my contest spec:

I need a design for a book cover, titled Rock of Aeons. The book is loosely taglined: "It’s the angels versus genies in the fight to determine who controls the future of mankind, with one apathetic bounty hunter who can’t keep a boyfriend deciding who wins."

The main character is female and a redhead the angels look like angles, the genies do not look like I Dream of Genie or Mr. Clean. I know alot of Urban Fantasies with female protagonists show alot of skin, but I don't think that would be right for this title.

It should be 500 pixels wide by 800 pixels tall, and RGB, and .JPG

I got nothing for a day, and kind of forgot about it. I received email from the 99 designs site on the second day. It told me that I had 10 entries, and when I went to look at them, a couple were suitable. It was very gratifying. I felt like a pretty pretty princess, with everybody courting me.

After talking to one of the designers, who asked a lot of good questions, I added a comment to the contest.

It's an ebook. I use a lot of white and gold when describing things in the book, but I'm not really a designer and am interested in anything. I tend to prefer more rounded font styles. Abstract or contemporary would be fine. The story takes place in an modern, urban environment. I would probably prefer illustration to photos. I don't think genies photograph well. But anything exciting is... exciting.

I'm aware that there are probably limitations to a contest like this, especially at the level I'm participating, so I'm hesitant to ask for specific images. I know Trylle did quite well on Amazon with an abstract cover, so I don't think I'm too anxious about non-representational art. In fact, a really good non-representational cover would probably trump okay illustration.

That said, If I had my pick, I though it would be cool to have an illustration of a baboon in mortal combat with a naked angel holding a laser gun that shoots lightning bolts. :) That's probably too ambitious. I've also thought gold magic circles, the kind you use to summon demons, would look nice on a white background, or spatters of white and gold blood intermixed.

(Also, as a note, I am liking the photos I am seeing very well).

After that, I got a lot of more interesting entries, including the two I ended up choosing between. I ended up with 55 entries from 17 designers. A lot to choose from!

All in all, I found 99 designs very satisfying. There were some drawbacks: I'm not sure how fair it is to force designers to compete for a prize. But, they did. Also, I failed to ask them to show the design at large and thumbnail size, so although I got a great cover design, I am unsure how it will look as a thumbnail on Amazon.

It was a really exciting process, and pretty inexpensive. The cover was the biggest out of pocket expense for the entire process.

I just published a book titled Rock of Aeons

2011-12-05T09:15:00.002-05:00

I just published a book titled Rock of Aeons on Kindle and Smashwords, making an indy-publisher of myself. Ah, the power. For anybody who has read and commented on any of my work before, I am happy to set you up with a coupon code to get a free copy from Smashwords, which should mean you can read it on any device. I have yet to set it up as a print-on-demand.

For everybody else, the tag line is "It's angels versus djinn in a fight to determine who controls the future of mankind, with one apathetic skip tracer deciding who wins." It's about 200 pp long and I put it up for $.99, because it's short and I'm nobody. You can follow the links to buy copies for your Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever electronic device you prefer to read on.

A longer description runs something like:

"Ozzie (Ozma) Jones, licensed bail bondswoman, is following Hank, the oiliest skip she’s ever had, to what she thinks might be a dropoff of stolen goods in a Midwestern junkyard.

Hank and the Seraph begin to fight. Hank turns into a dog to run away, and Ozzie is wounded. When she wakes up in the hospital, Ozzie finds out Hank has ended up in the pound.

She rescues Hank from the pound, but is interrupted when Astaris, a Seraph who was injured in the junkyard fight, appears and attacks her. As they flee, Hank explains that he is a Djinn, and that when Ozzie bled on Astaris he became a fallen Seraph, and is now addicted to her.

Drawn into a secret war between shape shifting Djin and government infiltrating Seraph (both of whom think they know what is best for humanity) Ozzie is compelled to make hard decisions about how far she will extend herself to interfere."

It is rated V minus for teh Violence without gore and P minus for occasional teh Seks

The very lovely cover you see next to these paragraphs is by Prosenjit Bhattacharya (maxpro), contracted through 99designs.com. I should be publishing an article soon that describes my little adventure in design.

This is the acnowledgements page at the end of the manuscript:

This is my book, and self published or not, I need to thank a bunch of people for its being here. First, my Moms, for telling me I could be anything I wanted. She was wrong, and my interpretation of that horrendous lie continues to get me in trouble to this day, but I wouldn't have written or posted this without her benign admonition to try shit. I want to thank Ruby Kapture, always my first reader. I want to thank Margaret Yang and Cathy Srygly, who took the time to read this and offer excellent suggestions to a sad, poor hack without the support of a publishing house. I want to thank Catherine Haluska Shaffer and Jim Hines for running those crit groups at Conclave and showing me what I was missing - the fellowship of writers. Lastly, I want to thank both fellowships who critted sections of Rock of Aeons: Excelsior!, especially Merrie Haskell for being kind and brilliant, and Sarah Zettel for being precise and pushy, and the Kazoo Books Group: John Wenger, Tim Webster, Becky Cooper, Jonathan Rock, William Kuehl, Dave Klecha, and Caroline Miller, who kept my sloppiness in line, put up with me, and are easily some of the best human beings in the universe.

New 52: For Nerds Only

2011-11-13T11:17:00.000-05:00

I buy my comics once every couple of months. I have mostly given up the hobby, but I have a complete run of Hellblazer, so every few months I clean out my pull list. I just love the mutant Archetype that is John Constantine, and title generally has good writers.

But I was in the nerd shop looking at 4e Dungeons and Dragons stuff the weekend before last, and got sucked into looking at DC's new 52, their reboot of all their titles. I wasn't interested in all of the titles. I'd seen the list, and all I was really interested in were the titles I thought of as "non-standard" super hero titles, the supernatural/mythology based ones: Swamp Thing, Frankenstein: Agent of Shade, Justice League Dark. I loved Swamp Thing when I was in college, when Alan Moore was writing it. JLD has Constantine as a character, and Frankenstein has a picture of Frankenstein's Monster carrying a Gatling gun on the cover of one of the issues. Also, the Bride has four arm. It seemed like a calculated risk tilted in the direction of awesome. So I picked up the first two titles of each, and the three issues that led up to the re-launch of Swamp Thing, and with my regular Hellblazer issues, that was 40 bucks of comics.

I must say, I was pretty universally unimpressed. My first major complaint is fan boy haggis: They guys who wrote Constantine's dialog in Search for Swamp Thing and JLD made him sound like a peevish Oliver Twist as played by a sulky Ron Weasly. He was not a convincing John Constantine.

Beyond that, the stories were pretty blase. They all seemed to be reaching for Grant Morrison territory, piling crazy on top of crazy. Frankenstein's secret hideout is a 3 inch sphere designed by The Atom: EVEN KEWLER than the JLA's satelite, right? Eh. When the villain is as urgent and faceless as a venereal disease, the context becomes a little facile. And every villain in the three series I picked up were WORLD THREATENING, with a capital WORLD. Frankenstein was facing an army of elder gods kept at bay by children of the corn hicks. JLD was an insane, disembodied ex-super villain, whose name is the closest you get to a personality or goal. Swamp Thing was facing a knockoff of the end-game boss from Alan Moore's run. Pretty much pure insecty evil.

Meh. Meh. Meh. No personality, straightforward plot, poor writing in general. JLD was full of emo wheezing about how "broken" all the characters were. Swamp Thing was closest to good, but I was put off by the fact that they totally turned Alan Moore's brilliant run inside out: Instead of Alec Holland being the basis for the rather tender character that Swamp Thing became, he really is the necessary component, and the original Swamp Thing was a kind of mistake. That immediately lessened my interest in the story, and actually made me want to go back and re-read Moore's run.

In contrast, the current Hellblazer story-lines are just great, pitting the character of Constantine's niece, psychologically damaged when his lifetime of dabbling in the arcane arts finally bites her in the ass, against Constantine's wife: a much younger alchemist, daughter of a mob boss, who somehow thinks that a Middle Aged, scarred, half talented wizard is the cat's meow because he's tough as nails and has a heart of gold. Well... gold plated anyway. There's gold in there somewheres. Maybe his fillings. Oh, yeah, I think the story has some demons or ghost in there somewhere. But who needs monsters when you got characters?

So, luckily, I was saved from entanglement in an expensive habit by the poor quality of the product. And I still have my first comic book love, John. *sigh* He's so dreamy. I want to be him when I grow up. Except not in JLA Dark.

11 PM Book Review: Fate's Mirror

2011-11-03T23:00:00.006-04:00

Fate’s Mirror by M.H. Mead is about Morris, a mercenary hacker who never leaves his home. Who would want to? If you have all the bounty of the intertubes spread out before you, and crippling agoraphobia. Then his home gets blown up. Morris barely makes it to the home of a client, and possibly his only friend, Adria the detective chick.

As she tries to get him on his feet, avoiding legitimate authorities because of his hacker background, it becomes obvious that his home blowing up is the tip of the iceberg. Morris is being hunted, and he’s not sure by whom: the immensely powerful NSA, or a trio of rogue artificial intelligences that escaped from the NSA, and now pattern themselves after the Greek Goddesses of fate.

I would loosely describe Fate’s Mirror as “Urban Cyberpunk” or maybe “Romantic Cyberpunk.” Action keeps the pace moving forward, the romantic interest between Adria and Morris is delicate and funny, and I was really liking how the authors built tension with Morris’ tendency to have a puking-sick panic attack in a crunch. Morris is funny, sarcastic and defensive, and really vulnerable because of his panic attacks. The plot is full of twists that you wouldn’t expect from either Urban Fantasy or a Romance. And Morris accesses his version of the internet with a virtual pirate ship, which means all his cyberattacks take the form of sea battles, which gives a weight to the intertubes action.

I think this is a good pick for most Urban Fantasy readers, possibly romance readers who like a lot action with their romance, and fans of cyberpunk who don’t take themselves too seriously.

Fate's Mirror

11 PM Book Review: Servant of the Underworld

2011-09-12T23:00:00.004-04:00

Servant of the Underworld, by Aliette de Bodard, is a noir murder mystery set in Aztec governed Central America. Acatl, a priest of the god of the dead, is tasked to investigate the abduction of a priestess whom his brother might have been having an affair with. The abduction was performed with bloody magic. So is the investigation: every time Acatl casts a spell, he must fuel it with the blood of whatever or whomever is nearby, often his own. The investigation leads to a plot amongst the priests of out of favor gods, who hope to end the current world and bring a new one into place. Bloodily, of course.

I liked the strong voice of Acatl. He is level headed, an-histrionic in the extreme, yet his personality really comes through in the conflicts with his family, who have problems with his deciding to be a low status priest instead of a high status warrior, and his desire to avoid the politics that are a part of his job. I also liked the fact that Servant of the Underworld used an uncommon set of myths for its background. The competing temples of the Aztec gods, and the various supernatural entities associated with, make for some tasty fantasy. Despite the ancient setting, the noir sensibility gives it a very modern feeling. My one problem is that Aztec names are a mouthful with a capital M, slowing down my already slow reading speed a bunch.

11 PM Book Review: Bob Moore: No Hero

2011-09-05T23:00:00.002-04:00

Good take on a "realistic" superhero world, as seen through the eyes of a depressive detective, a non-superhero, who specializes in cases dealing with superheros. He takes the case when a superhero thinks their sidekick is jailing bad guys with somebody else.

Dark, sarcastic, and funny, though not lighthearted, Bob Moore: No Hero describes a world in which the antics of superheros regularly endanger and impoverish regular citizens. Bob is hired to find out why a superhero doctor's patients are disappearing. This would be almost impossible to review without spoilers, but I will say that I found the resolution satisfying. You will probably get a kick out of this if you like grim and gritty comics, or any dystopian stuff. I picked this novella up for free on Kindle, but there is a paperback edition.

11 PM Book Review: Midnight Riot

2011-05-09T23:00:00.058-04:00

Midnight Riot is by Ben Aaronovitch. It's fun boy crime fiction with an urban fantasy spin.

Peter Grant is a rookie cop who's facing a posting as a paper pusher when he sees a ghost near the scene of a crime. While trying to figure out what's going on, he's recruited to be the other member of the London police who investigates supernatural crime by Inspector Nightengale. In doing so, he also become Nightengale's apprentice. Yes, Nightengale is a wizard cop. The ghost he investigates leads to a series of horrific crimes where seemingly normal people commit outrageously brutal acts. The only common link is that the perpetrator's faces collapse immediately afterwards. The plot take a detour to negotiate a gang war between the water gods of the upper and lower Thames, and ends in psychic surgery on the ghostly archeological strata of London history after Peter learns who is causing the attacks.

The elements and world building of this supernatural London are cool and feel nicely multicultural: London's spirits are immigrants as much as London's inhabitants. Peter is engagingly hapless as a sceptically minded rookie plunged into a supernatural landscape, and the secondary characters, Nightengale, Molly: Nightengale's carnivorous maid, Leslie May: Peter's first crush and fellow rookie, Mama Thames, and Beverly Brook: the sexy river sprite whom he also becomes involved with, are all sharp and well realized and fun to watch. The eventual identity of the ghost-murderer is a weird but entertaining twist on the theme of "elemental evil," but the ending got a little muddled and hard to follow, with a few too many scenes. I will pick up the sequel, Moon Over Soho, just for the characters.

11 PM Book Review: No Doors, No Windows

2011-03-21T23:00:00.003-04:00

No Doors, No Windows is by Joe Schreiber, who writes short, smooth little horror thrillers with a really crawly creep factor.

No Doors, No Windows finds Scott Mast back home in small town America for his father's funeral. His alcoholic brother can barely take care of his precocious nephew, but Scott's about to go back to his succesful job writing greeting cards on the coast when he finds pages from a novel manuscript written by his assumedly unimaginative father. The manuscript leads Scott to a haunted house mentioned in it, which leads to our protagonist renting the haunted house and trying to finish his dad's haunted novel. He's stopped taking his meds, and his research on the house's history seems to indicate that his whole family has a history of mental instability that goes back generations.

I liked how the scenario starts sleightly off, with the funeral and the dysfunctional family. Each detail the author adds: the house in the manuscript turning out to be real, the dead girl in the blue dress, the ex suddenly showing up, the revelation that she dumped him cold without an explanation when they were set to leave town together, the once beautiful town matriarch addicted to plastic surgery... each bit just adds tension and an element of creepy, until the weird is rattling around in the story like a loose bolt in a dune buggy. I also really relished that the house showes up in many generations of his family's art, like a bad thought they are trying to exorcise.

I felt like you couldn't tell if the protagonist was haunted or nuts until close to the end, and I'm not going to tell you which. I do think Joe mines interesting territory, setting a presumably modern illness in the remote past. The ending seemed like it got wrapped up a little too neatly. Perhaps that was because over the course of the story your feelings about the protagonist are muddied: should you be afraid for him, or of him? That's often par for the course in horror, but I wanted a little more emotional certainty about the outcome. Otherwise, it was a creepy, fun, quick read.

11 PM Book Review: White Cat

2011-03-14T23:00:00.001-04:00

White Cat, by Holly Black, opens with a Cassel Sharpe sleep walking onto the roof of his dorm. You find out fairly quickly that he murdered his girlfriend three years ago, which doesn't make him a very sympathetic character. But he doesn't seem like the murdering type.

The setting for White Cat is an alternate world in which "curse workers," people who do magic, are an acknowledged minority in the world. Because curse work is legal in the US, several large crime families regulate the black market. If you are a curse worker, you are almost by definition a criminal. Cassel's whole family are curse workers. His Mom is in Jail for manipulating the emotions of rich men. His Grandfather is missing the fingers of his left hand, the hand that he kills people with. One older brother breaks bones with a touch. The other is a lawyer. As far as he knows, he's the only member of his family who isn't a worker of some kind.

From early in White Cat, you get the feeling that something weird is going on, and as Holly Black lays out the parameters of curse work, you begin to realize that there's lots of reasons why. Workers can control your luck, your emotions, your dreams, your memory, and even, in very rare cases, your shape. When Casse is kicked out of school for being a liability risk (almost walking off roofs will do that), he goes home to his family. Their weird indifference to his plight means he must ferret out what is going on by himself. And those dreams about a white cat.

Cassel isn't an unreliable narrator in that he can't be trusted... it's just that with so many stone cold manipulators around him, he can't trust himself. White Cat builds up into a great plot, smart but no so convoluted you lose track of it. A huge part of the tension comes from the fact that Cassel can't trust anyone, and a large part of the satisfaction is watching him have to take the risk of trusting.

Thought experiment on limiting the lifespan of ebooks

2011-03-10T09:00:00.002-05:00

So HarperCollins, a book publisher, has announced a new policy whereby they will sell ebooks to libraries with a limited number of loans built in. They have fixed the number at 26 loans. This is effectively a pay per circ model, levied only on libraries.

There are two reasons why this is a bad idea. The first is that HarperCollins will sell fewer, not more copies this way.

The second is that it will shorten the shelf life of older titles. This will hurt authors and publishers by removing them from a venue that sells their books for them.

The rational for a pay per circ ebook model is that, because ebooks last forever, a public library that buys an ebook, like a child who buys an Everlasting Gobstopper (TM), will never have to buy another. Therefore, libraries won't buy the theoretically endless copies of tree-books that they might have bought in order to replace worn out books. Publishers are losing sales. Alas.

I believe that HarperCollins thinks that it has a cash cow here. The thinking might go something along the lines of "somebody will always be reading X title by Clive Cussler, ergo, libraries will need to repurchase X title in perpetuity." From long experience building and weeding collections of tree books, here's what I think might actually happen:

I’m going to use as an example The DaVinci Code. I currently have 11 tree-copies. The oldest three have 64, 48, and 47 circs respectively. The first 3 titles, the oldest, were bought in 2003. I would have had to buy 7 e-copies to satisfy those tree-circs. HarperCollins has just magnified my initial costs by 2.3.

The remaining 8 copies are all from 2006 and later. We were still buying copies in 2006, because the DaVinci Code was a freakishly popular book. The remaining titles have circulations of 2, 6, 6, 7, 9, 12, 16, and 19. They have a total of 77 circs between them. Huh. I would only have needed three e-copies to satisfy all those circs. Now, 8 users couldn't simultaneously read 3 copies... but all those uses weren't simultaneous. I obviously didn't need anywhere near all 8 copies later on.

Now, if I needed 7 copies to start and only 3 copies later on, I should just buy 10 copies and be done with it, right? Very tidy. This is, I will point out, one less than the tree copies I actually bought. What I know, from weeding my own libraries' collections, is that books have a kind of life cycle. We needed way more than 10 copies of The DaVinci Code in 2003. We need way less now. Use plummets so that, over time, you need far fewer copies to satisfy the same number of circs.

Obviously, ebooks and tree-books are not the same animal. They don't act the same way in the wild. Ebooks spines don't break, so libraries don't have to worry about their usefulness being cut off early. But print books don't cost 3 times as much to get 3 times the circ.

In fact ebooks are still supplementary to my collection. Where the library market is concerned, they are gravy to the publisher. But let's assume HarperCollins is looking forward to a brave new world where libraries circulate ebooks alone. Are they preserving a portion of the market they would lose by attempting to build obsolescence into an otherwise obsolescence proof format?

Here’s what I ask myself: If I know that the number of uses of a book will go down over time, does it matter if some of my patrons wait an extra 2 weeks to read that popular title because I bought 8 copies instead of 10? Because fewer copies will eventually satisfy the same number of circs, I am dis-incentivized to buy more copies.

It looks to me that what Harper Collins has done is inflated the value of the circ, and deflated the value of the copy. This might have lots of consequences. How many books do even as well as The DaVinci Code? Less popular books don't even get 26 circs. Should I even bother to buy them? I certainly won't get my full use out of them. That question kind of deflates the value of HarperCollins’ midlist.

Then at the end of a book’s life cycle, instead of keeping one copy on the shelf to satisfy newer fans of an author, I am faced with the decision of whether or not to buy another 26 circs of an older title (where a gently used book or an unlimited use ebook would have stayed on the shelf forever) or an extra 26 circs of the next passing literary fad. That kind of forced choice is unsustainable for libraries. HarperCollins is asking for libraries to pay for ebooks in perpetuity. How would that serve the needs of our patrons? In reality, it's an active limit to a book's shelf life.

HarperCollins is trying to create an artificial scarcity or obsolescence, inflating operating costs for libraries and forcing libraries to buy more copies of books than they ultimately need. But I think it will backfire. Librarians are conservative buyers. In reality, we have limited budgets. In the end, a library would buy fewer copies of ebooks than tree-books as replacements for worn out copies... but they will be buying fewer copies over all, and many will not be renewed after they become less popular.

Which brings us to our second point. By moving to a pay per circ model, HarperCollins is devaluing their own role as a publisher of books.

One thing the pay per circ model points up is that HarperCollins is in the business of selling widgets in the form of units of use. Libraries are not in the business of selling units of use. We are in the business of selling access to stuff that the tax paying public wouldn’t normally get access to.

Unfortunately, we have limits. In the case of tree books, our hard limit is shelf space, which forces us to remove books that aren’t getting used heavily.* We don't have the same kind of issue with e-books, but as I pointed out above, we have limited budgets. That means in a pay per circ model we can't buy unlimited circs for a given title.

This is where I may sound cranky. In "business land" libraries have been characterized as leeches that take the efforts of publishers and devalue them by spreading those efforts around too far. What 12 people should have bought, one person bought and 11 read for free. That's like socialism. Icky, Icky, literary socialism.

But libraries don’t work the same way as the open market. We sell access, not units. For books, access is often better. Libraries introduce readers to new authors, encouraging them to buy copies of books they loved just to keep one. Those books would not have been bought if the library hadn't lent them in the first place.

Libraries also extend the life of an author’s career. We not only sell copies of an author's current book, we sell copies of a author's next book by keeping out-of-print titles on the shelf for readers to find by browsing. We do this long past the efforts of a publisher to market the author or book. Libraries allow readers more chances for exposure to an author than a publisher ever does.**

If a pay per circ model succeeds, libraries will be forced to choose between buying another 26 circs of a once popular title, or 26 circs of a currently hot title. Which doesn’t do authors any favors.

Ebook or tree books, each time a consumer buys a book they take a risk. Will I like it? Won't I? I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't risk it right now. Libraries socialize that risk, exposing readers to new authors and creating new customers. HarperCollins will effectively kill an author’s visibility by actively limiting their lifespan on the shelf. Libraries offer greater word of mouth advertising than publishers, over time. Taking authors out of libraries just penalizes them further, and really just steps on the author's and publishers's bottom line.

It's harder for ebooks to generate word of mouth than tree-books. Ebooks aren't easy to browse. You can't loan them effectively, or resell them. None of these things will prevent the adoption of ebooks, though, because in the end the consumer doesn't care about other people's uses of the item they pay for. And it's just going to get worse over time. The durability, portability, and ease of use of ebooks mean that each title is competing with more and more titles on the electronic shelf over time.

And, of course, selling books by circ may also eliminate the number of venue an author’s book can be found in. Selling by circ vastly inflates the cost for libraries, and is going to cause libraries to struggle harder to provide good service, making them less useful to taxpayers. If libraries close, they leave people without service. That, by the way, leaves authors without readers.

*In fact, you could say that HarperCollins is doing libraries a favor by selling us self=weeding books: we won't raise the ire of Nicholson Baker for throwing away copies that we don't have room for any more. They will just disappear…

**There is another problem in that many publishers don't allow their ebooks to be lent by libraries, cutting off a venue for that title by disallowing access to the format. It more of a problem for ebook only publications. But I digress.

11 PM Book Review: Hold me Closer Necromancer

2011-03-07T23:00:00.020-05:00

Hold me Closer Necromancer is about Sam LaCroix, slacker extrordinaire, who is confronted at the Burger Joint where he works by a seemingly mild but terrifying man who calmly threatens him with bodily harm. In rapid succesion, Sam is attacked by a werewolf in the parking lot and his best friend's head is sent to him in a box, to verbally deliver an ultimatum. Sam finds out he's a necromancer, which his witch mother tried to hide from him. But really, there's only supposed to be one necromancer in Seattle. Sam is not it.

When Douglas, who is it, finds out about Sam, he begins to stalk him. Laura, my Bro-Worker, who is the Greatest Living Young Adult Librarian Alive (TM), was talking to me over lunch. She's all, "Like, I'm reading this great book, about this kid who finds out he's a Necromancer (Meh, I think), and who's being hunted by this crazy, more powerful necromancer (Meh, I think), so, GET THIS, the older Necromancer sends the kid his best friend's head in a box, still talking to him, as a warning." And I was like, "HOLY CRAP! DUDE, you had me a talking head in a box."

I did not hurt that the title is a play on an Elton John song title.

A big part of the fun of Hold Me Closer, Necromancer is not that there'a crazy bad guy (TM). It's that he's so brutally, practically dismissive of other people's right to remain intact and alive. His only option is the nuclear option, but he does it so calmly. I really liked Sam's voice. He's casual, sharp, and self effacing, very Gen X, as filtered through Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I also liked that the setting is kitchen sink urban fantasy world, with vampires, faeries, and satyrs living under the noses of their irritating human neighbors. Anubis makes an appearance. It's always good to see Anubis. I personally like kitchen sink urban fantasy. Vampire urban fantasy always feels a little like the whole world is populated by loafer wearing Emo supermodels.

I felt that the story moved pretty well despite having an oddly static plot. Sam spends the first half of the book trying to find out what the hell is going on, asking his mom, his absentee dad's new family (necromancy is passed down in families, you see, like hair color or liking Paul Anka), really anyone he can reach who might have any kind of handle on what's going on. Then he gets kidnapped and spends the rest of the novel in a cage with a sexy werewolf chick.

There were a bunch of plot elements that didn't make a ton of sense, and some lazy plotting: after dealing with the Necromancer, by supernatural law Sam get's all the old Necromancer's Stuff. That was kind of Mary Sue. However, the personalities carried the book: His Mom, a witch afraid of her son's power to control the dead, enough to stick his power in a magical straight jacket. The sexy half werewolf half fey, born to lead her pack and now a crazy Necromaner's guinea pig, who needs to get Sam to butch up and find his Necromancer in time to save both of them. And Sam's loyal slacker buddies. Or the various parts of them. The cast of Hold Me Closer, Necromancer rocked the plot like a small press publisher rocks an orange zoot suit, which is to say, with more panache and heart than any vampire. Those loafer wearing bastards.

Just saw Skyline

2010-11-20T21:41:00.002-05:00

I don't think I've ever seen a movie that benefited less from being a "talkie."

****

I could just leave it there, but why?

You can't fault the special effects guys. The monsters were cool as hell, and the movie was just as visually interesting as the previews promised.

Skyline is kind of a cross between Cloverfield and War of the Worlds, with none of the intensity of the former and none of the brains of the latter.

Aliens suck all the people in L.A. up into their spaceships with tractor beans. Then, they drop giant monsters and flying octopuses with blue laser eyes all over the place to mop up the survivors. I know, cool, right? Despite this, nothing really happens. When stuff is happening, Skyline is not a bad flick. But this is the plot: a handful of survivors hole up in a rich dude's Penthouse watching the invasion through a telescope, and then that scene from War of the Worlds where the protagonist and his comrade hide from an alien tentacle in a collapsed building is enacted. Several times. The first ten minutes of dudes getting ready for a party, and their party hijinks could have been removed entirely.

Spoilers come next.

There is some crap drama thrown in that has to do with infidelity (no shit, aliens are here to steal your brains, but take the time to get pissed at your boyfriend for shagging his secretary), but to make sure the drama does not impact the script in any way, two of the three characters involved are killed almost immediately (which is actually a great scene, and all too short).

Oh, and if aliens that can instantly reconstruct their spaceship after it is hit by a nuclear bomb come from a bajillion miles away to take your brains (Really. That is a spoiler.), grab a steak knife or a fire ax. Cause that shit will just slice the fuck out of them.

So, towards the end, I was thinking: The theme of this movie is "sometimes you just have to let go." But then, big surprise, in the most phantasmagorically gruesome way the theme gets translated back to "LOVE CONQUERS ALL" when the alien that has taken the bohunk's brain to power itself retains enough Love Power to protect its still human girl friend from the other, zombie aliens.

I love love. I love being in love (song lyrics, anybody? anybody? Bueller?). But is this really all we can write a movie about in America? Isn't that a little juvenile?

PS - They really came all this way to take our brains?

PPS - Also, after you kill the flying laser octopus that was blocking the stairwell down from the roof... you can use that to get back down, instead of the window cleaning scaffolding.

The Great Party Week

2010-10-31T17:17:00.001-04:00

So I spent most of the last week at World Fantasy in Columbus, hanging with old and new friends, and had a great time. My impressions:

1) The Columbus convention center is a little dingy.

2) That said, the Hyatt was great, and Columbus is a cute town with lots of great restaurants. I would go back in a second.

3) Writers are hugely fun, if oddly conservative. Writers and their wild ways? A myth. Librarians are totally wilder.

4) Small press publishers are the stone coolest. I want to be them when I grow up. The Chizine staff was all about the savior faire. Another dude was rocking an orange zoot suit.

5) I love my new crit group, but I miss my old one.

6) I hope my writing vacation next year is Viable Paradise.

7) I'm not good at talking like a writer, but I love listening to other people do it.

8) Although I believe stone honest critique is the only way to benefit from a crit group, I don't believe critique should be an endurance test. Really, what's with all the completely macho noise about crit?

9) I must submit more.

10) I need to renegotiate my relationship to Warcraft.

11) I love having an ipod jack in the car.

12) Podcasts are THE BOMB. Capital the, capital bomb.

13) Coming home, I took back roads to Fort Wayne and then caught I-69 up. It was a beautiful drive, good weather early on a Sunday morning, plenty of cows and ramshackle farms. Good background for thinking. Totally meditative.

14) Merrie, Dave, Christian, Kelly, Mike, Sharon, and Kate are all my writing BFF's. Really.

Got home a little after noon, carved pumpkins (FOR THE HORDE!), ate pumpkin seeds, waiting to take Poppy around for Tricks or Treats. Between our party and the con, it's been a really nice month, largely due to the company of old and new friends. I feel very energized, which is not usual this far from the summer solstice... it's either the Vitamin D or an October party/writing vacation. Or a nifty combination. Worth retrying next year.

Merrie from my last writing group, and Dave whom I met through Merrie coupla years ago. They ROCK.

Christian is in the foreground. New friend, another Michigan writer. He also ROCKS.

Mike and Gene Wolf.

Mike and Kate and Sharon, members of his online Crit Group. They all ROCK.

2010-09-30T19:00:00.002-04:00

Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan, has created a website for the purposes of harassing the student body president at University of Michigan because he is gay.

I first heard of this here. Be careful. It is an atheist website. If you are uncomfortable with atheists and their baby gobbling, death sentencing, pushing their godless agenda in your face ways, you may find their defense of homosexuality to be disquieting.

The blog that Andrew Shirvell uses to harass Chris Armstrong is here. It is, in the manner of blogs written by the truly knowledgeable or very disturbed, long and windy and dull. Skimming it for even a short time, however, reveals it to be full of over the top hyperbole, bigoted and unconfirmable generalization, and invasive comments. There are also multiple violations of Godwin's Law and a weird tone-deafness to humor. If there are any virtues to his blog, they are so well hidden amongst angry hyberbole and raw bullshit that it is someone else's job to find them. Andrew Shirvell's blog is very unpleasant to read.

Andrew Shirvell's interview with Anderson Cooper is a less unpleasant and garbled formulation of Mr. Shirvell's views. It is less unpleasant because it takes less time to get through, and less garbled because Anderson Cooper asks him to clarify his views, which boil down to an objection to gender neutral housing couched in a lot of bile and loathing.

I'm for freedom of speech (Yay, Andy). I'm against Frat Boys (Boo, Chris), though not in any legalistic fashion. Just, you know, personally. I'm for gay sex, rarely in any personal fashion any more, but in a generalized legalistic sense. Debauchery is also fine if it's all consensual. I believe that 20 is old enough to know how to conduct yourself in public, and if you don't know how to set your Facebook profile settings... well, you get what you ask for. It would be nice if everybody could just let it all hang out like they did on the commune... but really, grow up.

That said, from Shirvell's report, Chris Armstrong isn't doing anything more damaging than any other asshole Frat Boy. In fact, Shirvell's blog histrionics quickly become laughable and cartoonish. A prime example is his howling about the Ann Arbor police having to shut down a noisy gay frat party. In my day, U of M students rioted in the streets over basketball games. My last class in library school was held in a pub because the tear gas from the night before hadn't dispersed from the Library School building yet.

Shirvell interpretation of Facebook exchanges are also laughably simplistic. My favorite is the one where a couple of the kids are ironically ragging on how pushy religion can be.

Student 1: "Ugh, looks like someone was eavesdropping on my phonecall with God last week."
Student 2: "What!? He was gchatting me at the same time, Kaitlin. I feel two-timed."
Student 3: "Hahah, he never talked to me. I feel left out : ("

Shirvell says that this exchange is "indicative of his LONG-HELD viciously anti-Christian and pro-Culture of Death worldview." Yikes. That's severe.

So it's pretty clear, from the context and the dashes of far right radical Christian agenda he throws in (Isn't it fun the demonize your opponents? Those fucking RADICAL CHRISTIANS!), that Andrew Shirvell has a religiously based hatred of gay people.

Christians don't hate, however. Our culture is conflict adverse, and having some trouble, still, traversing the path from a monoculture to a pluralistic society. We don't like to admit our petty prejudices, and if they influence public policy, or if we go off the handle about them in public, we tend to defend them with fucked up rationalizations. Like the Bell Curve. If you are an Evangelical Christian, your rational is to "hate the sinner, not the sin" and fall back on "god's standards." According to Mr. Shirvell, god's standard is apparently ad hominem, hyperbolic bigotry.

There are calls for Shirvelle to be fired. Which is hard for me. Free speech is an important part of how our society works. I agree that people are allowed to have personal opinions.

But if you are in charge of persecuting crimes for the state, can you be trusted to do so in a rational fashion if your sensibilities are dominated by such a narrow view of what is culturally appropriate?

What is your legal competence if you tread so merrily on the line between free speech or libel and slander? Isn't accusing someone of trying to "seduce your children" pretty much an accusation of rape? Is the conflation of gay rights with Nazism and the Klan at the least paranoid? It would be nice, if for once in history, right wing nutjobs were held to some standard of proof. By an authority, like the State or Federal Government, rather than the blogosphere. Even fortune tellers need a license.

Regardless of Armstrong's ability to take care of himself, what kind of judgment does it show on Shirvelle's part to start a major, very public campaign harassing a student body president? There is no evidence that Armstrong is a danger. There have got to be more efficacious methods for Shirvelle to address the gender-neutral housing issue. Maybe a polite letter to the President of the University? Sue me if I don't know how U of M's policy making infrastructure works.

Mike Cox, the Michigan Attorney General and Shirvelle's boss, says he won't fire him. “The reality is, I’m out of office in three months. I have a duty to defend the Michigan Constitution. I have a duty to defend the Michigan civil service rules, even at those times when I don’t like it.”

I'd like to believe that's a principled stand, but it sounds like lame duck lethargy or passing the buck. Cox points out Shirvel's lack of judgement and calls him a bully elsewhere. Is bullying a good skill set for law enforcement? I'd like to think not.

"Here in America, we have this thing called the First Amendment, which allows people to express what they think and engage in political and social speech," says Cox. I don't know that the first amendment guarantees protection from all consequences. An atheist couldn't get into the White House. Why should a homophobe be guaranteed a position as a prosecutor of public morals?

New York magazine brings it home best, I think. "Shirvell might be within his legal rights to hate-blog and peaceful protest. But shouldn't a legal representative for the state of Michigan, especially one associated with public prosecutions, have a vested interest in fairness and justice even for people unlike himself? Or did Shirvell bring his legal training to bear to make sure his actions appear impeachable?"

I would have added the word "just" to the last sentence. "Just to make sure his actions appear impeachable." Because there's the abuse of power.

Done with high fantasy

2010-07-06T16:50:00.000-04:00

I'm done with high fantasy.

I've never been much of a reader of high fantasy. All the big guys, Tolkein, Eddings, kind of put me to sleep. I read stuff that has elements of modernity in it... largely because I feel I can relate to the ethical choices better. But I like myth and magic, which I look at as recombinant whimsy, taking pieces of biology and physics and fantasy and smooshing them all together into something cool. So, I'm always reading fantasy of some kind.

On the other hand, I've always run and played high fantasy games, via Dugeons and Dragons. Oh, yeah, I dabbled in Vampire and Superhero games. I ran some Gamma World and played some Boot Hill. But they were always hard for me to get ahold of for some reason. Went back to DND. A couple of years ago, though, I picked up DND 4e and tried to run a couple of sessions, and it just left me cold. So I left the running to the very capable hands of one of the players at my table. And I played. Just, done with it.

There's a lot of other things mixed in to that "event". DND 3.0 was a very high maintenance game. Between career and trying to write and family andandandandand, it's just become hard to sit down for the blocks of time I need to make a story out some numbers and strategy. The story is never a problem. That practically comes vomiting out of my head in a fuge state... but the numbers and strategies to make it feel a little real, make the other players at the table feel like there was a little resistance in the world, that was harder.

Sometimes, I think part of my disconnect with high fantasy novels is how narrowly they view the genre. It's all dwarves and orcs and Mary Sue humans with no compunction about killing at all. Then again, add some guns and cool pets to that recipie, as per WOW, and I'm all over it. How shallow am I?

But games, man... it didn't matter how limited the sourcebooks were, there was another one around the corner. And a good GM was willing to let you make that sorcerer chick in a chainmail bikini YOURs. "Yeah, my wizard rides around in a giant metal dragon...'cause I'm that kind of badass." You could add a colorful skin to the goofy mechanics. My first DND character ever was a centaur wizard, badassery incarnate.

And it's not that I don't like the 4.0 game, it's just that I feel alienated from it. Part of the disconnect there is training. Monster stats don't look like a stat block to me. I've never really read game books. The prose is atrocious, and I'd rather play in my own mental gardens anyway. But now, I scan the rulebooks and don't really see the tools that I habitually looked at all my life. The exciting parts of the game. The bits of rules that made the fantastic graspable for me.

4.0 just doesn't feel skinnable.

I like the whimsy of fantasy. The speculative ecosystems and cultures. But I like to tell stories that are personal and consequential. Unepic fantasy. Fairy tales about personal choice.

I'd like to say I'm not done with gaming. Certainly not playing, but not running, either. But I only have so much more apetite for DND. I'd like to pursue the 4.0 Gamma World. I'm thinking of reskinning GW as a Singularity Apocalypse game, with nanotechnology mutations and shit. I've even thought about picking up...gasp... World of Darkness.

But probably not high fantasy again, unless Pathfinder really impresses me at Gen Con. Even then, I might rather wait for Pathfinder Modern.

Chaositech - a review

2010-07-04T09:00:00.002-04:00

Chaositech, a review.
Chaositech by Monte Cook (d20 Supplement)

Disclaimer A: If you aren't a role playing gamer or biiiig geek, the following review will probably mean nothing to you.

Disclaimer B: This is for an old, old product. It was on my old website, it probably still has applicability to them what still plays 3e, and I thought it was a nice piece of writing. But it is so totally marginal to your understanding of anything.

After reading various pieces of Monte Cooks's game writing and prose (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, The Book of Vile Darkness, Ghostwalk, Of Aged Angels, Requiem for a God, and Book of Eldritch Might II), I've decided that what I like most about his writing are his set pieces: Like Gary Gygax's classic adventures or a Stephen King novel, he leaves interesting facts and details for you to discover and use or chew over.

I also like to use elements of randomness in my games, especially things like mutation, mostly because the story value of maiming a protagonist can never be underestimated. It adds a sense of risk to the proceedings without actually killing a valued PC. One game that I ran had characters running around using demon ichor to create random mutations in themselves and others. We had a giant blue elf, a six foot jackelope, and a headless angel by the end of it. It was grandly phantasmagorical, and gave interesting back story for the characters to chew on as they tried to reverse their transformations or learn to use them to the fullest.

I figured Chaositech would address both of those interests nicely, and wasn't disappointed.

Chaositech is rewarding to anyone who wants to add a layer of the outrageous to their campaign.
What is Chaositech? It's the title of a 112 page sourcebook describing an eponymous suite of FX. According to Malhavoc's web site, Chaositech "Introduces chaos-powered items that resemble both technology and magic, but are truly neither."

In a flavor sense, what this translates into is a sort of Cthulhu-Punk. This impression is reinforced by the octopoidal, mi-go and tsotheguish illustrations of the Galchutt, ancient outsiders who wish to destroy the universe. They encourage human cultists to do vile things to their bodies and souls in exchange for chaositech.

In a game sense, what this translates into is an a-magical suite of FX rules. The Galchutt can give you ray guns, or cybernetics, or mutation powers so that you can serve them better. Much like psionics, chaositech is doesn't interact with magic. Dispel magic and anti-magic fields don't work against it.

Although not labeled as such, Chaositech is essentially an event book: it adds a set of rules for gaming in a specific context, that of opposing the technologically enhanced servants of chaos. It's a little different from Malhavoc's other event books in that, unlike Dogs of War or Requiem for a God, it adds a brand new genre element to heroic fantasy: techno-fantasy or Cthulhu-punk.

What this means at it's most shallow level is that you have to decide if your game needs another flavor of FX or another timeless evil. However, I think Chaositech can used in lots of ways: out of the box to add a specific set of elements to your game, by mining it for rules subsets, or by converting what's there to more standard DND fare.

The first chapter gives a framework to fully integrate chaositech and the Galchutt into an ongoing game. I think the product works best in parts as opposed to as a suite. For all of its flavor, I wouldn't dump chaositech whole hog into my DND game.

Why? Well, the law-chaos axis is going to be extremely important in my next campaign. Chaositech is consistently represented as evil of the vile stripe. I prefer chaos to be represented more in its freewheeling aspect of complexity than it's destructive guise. However, the templates for mutants may come in handy.

And I don't want to tie the pseudo-science in my game to chaos. I want it to have a less disposable, more steampunk feel. As if it is a permanent, evolving part of the world. But some of the individual chaositech devices are very inspirational.

I also wouldn't include chaositech in any campaign that already uses psionics, with one caveat which I will mention later. Two non-magic FX sets in a heroic fantasy game seems like kitchen sinking to me, but that's a matter of taste.

Chaositech's greatest strength is in introducing new rules subsets. There are rules for items that have a short lifespan (non-intrinsic chaositech devices, which blow up on a critical miss) damage the user (intrinsic devices, which plug into the user and do ability damage on a critical miss), and items that damage or change the owner or their surroundings (all chaositech items can cause mutations, change alignment, and rot other items through long exposure). What use are these kinds of rules? Who wants a magic weapon that decays after it's been used, or that damages them?

Well, nobody wants them. But they make for good story elements. Taken together, they add a flavor that compliments a very specific type of foe: The Galchutt, fickle abominations who maim or discard their servants on a whim. Taken separately, they emulate concepts common in the fantasy and science fiction genre: unstable devices that fall apart after awhile, magic items that eat a little bit of your soul every time you use them, or change you through long exposure to evil forces. These rules would also be a tidy way to handle the failure of old technology in a gamma world style campaign. Although they are very intertwined with chaositech, it would be easy to untangle them. There's no reason non-intrinsic (extrinsic?) devices have to be unstable. There's no reason a cursed weapon shouldn't eat it's bearer's charisma on a critical miss.

There are also rules sets that could mimic cybernetics fairly well. Called the betrayal of flesh, Chaositech presents organic or non-organic devices that become a part of you. Mutations are represented as a monster template, making it useful for characters by giving them an experience point cost (much like monster classes). And mutation implicitly, if not explicitly, change the character's ECL.

Each of these rulesets seem balanced for play. Mr. Cook's guidelines for pricing chaositech objects uses a formula very similar to magic items: level and caster level of the FX effect (a similar spell) multiplied by 1500, which is midway between the multiplier for command word and use operated devices. Using the devices without chaotic backlash or symbiotic damage essentially means that you need to add 25% to the value of them.

"The final price takes into account the fact that most chaositech items are effectively use activated, that they have 20 charges or uses before they need refueling, and that they are not subject to things like spell resistance or antimagic." Mr. Cook says in a sidebar about pricing chaositech on pg 21.

The twenty charges before refueling is overshadowed by the fact that they have about the same chance (1 in 20 chance) of self-destructing. That's really twenty charges, but luck could be with a character. I'm guessing pricing also takes into account things like the damage caused by, and the in game time eaten by, surgery.

A shallow comparison of the items's cost looks fairly balanced. Disease mucor, for example, costs 600 gp as opposed 750 GP for a potion of remove disease. It also wipes you out, bestowing a -4 penalty to attack rolls and saving throws. Hence the discount.

Ear and eye serum are the two halves of cure blindness/deafness, and do ability damage (I especially like the description given for ear serum: "For a brief moment during the repair process the creature hears the cacophonous sounds of the music of true chaos, which jars her sanity."). They cost 200 GP, 1/3 the cost of a third level potion for splitting up the effect.
The shock sheath, a new flesh graft, is priced at 18,000 GP Considering 18,000 GP for electricity resistance 10, 2000 GP for adding 1d6 electrical damage to unarmed attacks (probably doubled for being a multiple effect), and then 25% off for being chaositech brings it back to about 18,000 GP all right.

Some items look idiosyncratically priced. The steam ax, for instance, deals an extra 1d6 heat damage. It is otherwise mundane, so it's fair to think of this as a +1 bonus, which would cost 2000 GP and the cost of a masterwork item. Priced at 3000, the steam ax seems like a bad buy, and the fact that it would work against anti-magic doesn't seem to outweigh it's inevitable self destruction.

Muscle lacing seems hella overpriced. This process gives you +4 to strenght and +2 to constitution for 165,000. At a cost of 16,000 for the strength, 4000 for the constitution, even doubled for taking up no slots, this seems too expensive, much less for a benefit that has the drawbacks (and advantages) of chaositech.

The telepathic receiver is spot on for a use operated detect thoughts spell, not higher or lower.

And I have no idea why an infestation bomb, which gives minor negatives to attack and skill rolls, costs more than a nausea bomb, which prohibits most actions.

I know, pricing magic items is an art, not a science. I'm not sure what other assumptions went into pricing those. But most items seem like they're in the ballpark, anyways. Tinkering could be left up to individual GM's.

It seems pretty obvious that if you wanted to add instability or soul eating to a regular magic item: say, for instance, a wand that blows up if the user rolls a 1 on a d20, or scrolls that curse the reader if they roll a critical failure on their attempt to understand it, you could comfortably lower it's value by 25%.

As for the chaositech devices themselves, there are some that are quite interesting and some that are sort of ho-hum. Perhaps there was nothing really original that could be done to make weapon FX original. A flaming axe is a flaming axe whether or not you put a battery in it and call it steaming. A chainsword is a chainsaw is a Texas butter knife. I found the intrinsic devices, where biology and FX meet, uninspiring as well. Most of them are analogs of DND spells exported over to Chaositech.

I thought the malefic haunt devices were interesting. Chaositech items with ghosts attached to them, they essentially imbue items with properties because the ghosts are forced to contemplate these properties. This is not just an interesting idea to me, it's an interesting rules-wise because they have a limited lifespan and increase in value over time.

I thought the disk blades were a fun weapon, a single use random damage buzz saw. I liked thought armor. I like the simple fact that much of this equipment can be used to equip mass numbers of NPCs and still not throw the party's treasure values off, because the PCs can't or won't use it.

There are only a few other gaps in the neatness of the rules: the preservation tank is inspired, keeping a character at -10 alive indefinitely, but it significantly weakens a creature because if the relatively fragile tank is broken, its immobilized occupant dies. The head crawler replaces a perfectly good body with a mediocre construct. Though both a very cool set-pieces, I'm betting they lower the CR of their hosts. And the familiar graft is also rules light, with no physical stats.
A great deal of Chaositech can be exported directly over to DND in various ways (besides just stripping out the chaositech elements of the devices and changing their prices).

The whole feel of the ruleset, with its reference to ability damage and its incompatibility with magical effects, reminds me of psionics. Especially some of the devices, like the new flesh grafts, which are essentially heavy-duty psychoactive skins. I think a great number of the items could be given a psionic origin, maybe powering them with psi points instead of raw chaos, and they would meld very well. Not to mention biocrystal.

Also, this book would work perfectly with a campaign that uses the Book of Vile Darkness. The FX are all very chaosy and evil in flavor, and could be attributed to demons instead of the Galchutt. In fact, Mr. Cook almost seems to be emulating some of his set pieces from the Book of Vile Darkness here, with devices like the arachnid covey implant (a mechanical substitution for a Vermin Lord prestige class), and the deadly carrier (ditto the Cancer Mage).

The spells are negligible. They mostly solidify the chaositech framework by supplying detection, identification, and resistance mechanisms. Chaos knife and bell tolls for thee could easily transfer to a non-chaositech game, and are interesting to boot. Chaositech enslavement and chaotic possession actually give an interesting spell based mechanic for possession that would be just as handy for demons and devils and ghosts. It would be simple to use chaos possession and a lawful alternate as spell-like abilities for any outsider over, say, ten hit dice. As spells, they are much less nebulous than the possession rules provided in the Book of Vile Darkness.

The chaos technician prestige class requires chaositech to work in any campaign, but the machine mage could be ported over to any DND campaign if you wanted a biomechanical or bioarcanical flavor in your game. And the Galchutt are fun monsters that would make wonderful demons on their own, with no alteration. I especially like the direct damage aura that most of them carry around with them. However, very few of them are suitable foes for low or even mid level campaigns.

What else could I see Chaositech being useful for? Well, add some guns and you could use it for a steampunk campaign if you strip out the damaging side-effects. Retool the prestige classes, and I think chaositech has tons of uses in d20 gaming, especially with a pulp flavor. Like maybe an Iron Lords of Jupiter game.

Lets be honest: every ruleset can be used as any kind of genre item. A wand of fireballs, as long as the price is right, can be a bazooka in an SF game. A d20 Modern pistol could serve just as well as a flintlock, all things being equal. A shocking longsword can be an electrified longsword. Rules wise, exposure to raw chaos is pretty identical to exposure to hot lava (except for the chance of a mutation). The Craft: Chaositech skill is simply a variation of craft applied to FX items.

So chaositech could be fantasy technology, or space opera technology, or pulp technology, or psionic devices, or genetic engineering... or whatever the GM wishes. Most of the devices in here are simply analogues for magic items in the DMG.

And it looks good. The cover art by rk post is beautiful enough to put on your wall. The interiors are all very good, my favorites being the prestige class illustrations.

So, if I quibble, I still see a lot of great stuff in here. Though a product for very specific tastes, I found it very inspiring and I think anyone who likes to play a range of genres should pick this up and mine it for everything it's worth.

Versus Cops

2010-06-28T17:00:00.006-04:00

This is an old stub of an opinion about the Henry Gates arrest. I don't think anybody really came right out and said this at the time. Skip it if you don't like my politics. I shouldn't really have strong opinions on this issue, but I do. And I'm a writer, and I'm vain, so I think I get to say them out loud, even when I know I'm going to piss someone off.

In my "hometown" paper's comments on this column about the Henry Gates arrest, a couple of commenters suggested that President Obama helped make the Gates arrest a racial issue.

I have yet to see footage anywhere of President Obama suggesting this. I think the fact that people view him as a source of the racial tension is a real measure of how fraught and polarized people are about race in the U.S. There was a lot of discussion about race around the Henry Gates arrest.

And, I felt, it was a smoke screen for the real issue. Racial issue or not, I have yet to see anything to suggest that the cop who arrested Gates was right. He arrested somebody who was "causing a disturbance" in their home by mouthing off to a cop.

I'm not sure that should be an arrestable offense, ever. Even if you aren't in your own home.

Benjamin Franklin's maxim "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty" gets brought out all the time in political discussion, mostly around gun rights.

However, in the Gates situation, and in similar situations, like the Winkfein arrest, the Peter Watts beating, or the UCLA tasering, there seems to be a vocal minority who supports the rights of the police to use force. "It's what they deserve," seems to be the refrain.

I don't know why I conflate the two issues, gun control and out of control cops. Maybe I chalk both kinds of statements up to the law and order crowd because the NRA is so adamant that private citizens need their semi-automatics to ward off criminals. Because I am uncomfortable with how ready people are to give up their rights to police, I feel that those issues make a good compare and contrast exercise, however.

In the case of guns, the essential liberty we give up is unfettered gun use. The temporary security we gain is protection from some crazy ass bastards having guns. Sure, it's a temporary security. Prohibition doesn't work. It just doesn't. But disincentives to gun ownership allow some crazy bastards to get right in the head before they have access to a lethal weapon.

In the issue of police and rowdy citizens, the essential liberty being given up is freedom of speech. The temporary security being gained is that the gun carrying officer will simply humiliate or harass you. He won't cause you pain instead. Or kill you. Or incarcerate you.

The inequity in that formula is stunning. Although yelling can trigger one's fight or flight response, an armed man really has nothing to fear from a loud citizen who does not also have a gun.

Another maxim attributed to Franklin, probably falsely, is "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." The problem is in the arms race of liberty, a private citizen will never beat the government when it comes to guns. Against the government, you are essentially unarmed, regardless of what you stockpile in you gun cabinet. But in the US, we've beaten the Feds time and time again when we use our voices. Our voices are our protection. And to give that up to the cops, and especially security guards, seems especially frivolous to me.

Free will as a gilded cage 2

2010-06-25T17:00:00.002-04:00

In her blog, The Brazen Careerist, Penelope Trunk wrote a very revealing post about abortions, and her reasons for having them. In conclusion, she says:

"You never know, not really. There is little certainty. But there are some certain truths: It’s very hard to have an abortion. And, there is not a perfect time to have kids."

In Freakanomics, Stephen J. Dubner talks about Steven D. Levitt's research about abortion and the famous correlation between the legalization of abortion and the downturn in crime statistics. Levitt's conclusions were not that abortion is an unambiguous social good, but that the effect of abortion was that mothers who weren't ready to raise children responsibly would make the decision to delay parenthood through abortion, and not raise stressed children.

What really interests me about those pieces of reading is not what they say about abortion, but what they say about choice. How fraught it is to make any choice. School. Career. Family. To be, or not to be.

"Do I have a kid now, and divide my resources between child rearing and career advancement, or later, when the my career advancement has momentum. How sad do I feel about it afterwards?"

"Do I go to school when I have energy, and it's hard to concentrate, or later, when I'm tired and desperate for health care, and how much do I regret either choice later?"

Choices that everybody makes when the opportunity arises, like it or not. As Rush points out over and over again on oldies rock stations.

I believe strongly that adult human beings make choices. I guess some of the research on the human brain suggests that we don't, that we are merely the sum of our influences. And indeed, I think the human body pushes hard on our choices. Emotions, feelings, talents, all combine to make some choices easier for an individual. These are chemicals in the body that, in abundance or scarcity, make up huge tracts of who we are. It's scary to think we are simply the sum of our chemicals.

Practically, though, it seems impossible that human beings are only the sum of their influences. If there were no choice, human males would never settle down. Human societies would look more like a domestic cats, with dominant males visiting loose confederations of females to have children and weaker males looking for holes to fill in the natural order. Women would never do anything but have babies, because that's the best way to pass on their genes and those of their mates. To "be fruitful and multiply." There would be no kindness, just acquisition. We would always give in to our bodies needs.

People have written about things like altruism and culture, and what the biological reasons for them might be. This doesn't reinforce an absence of free will, however. It actually does quite the opposite. It says volumes about our capabilities. It more than suggests that the ability to choose against our bodies is hardwired in. That making those choices is a beneficial behavior in the long run. It suggests that people have different natural appetites and abilities with which to choose because the universe is an uncertain environment, rife with resource disparities, and having the ability to calculate successes and failures based on multiple strategies is a very useful ability for a species to have.

People are a melange of influences and discontents. If we weren't, we would never make any choices at all.

We don't understand this as a species.

We look for the one silver bullet, fact or feeling, that will address all the situations we are unhappy with. Self help books, happiness research, religion, political beliefs, all that stuff is important because it offers strategies to deal with everyday life. But really, none of them work all the time. It's important to give yourself and the people around you the benefit of the doubt. To make peace with uncertainty, so that you can enjoy your life as is.

Free will as a gilded cage 1

2010-06-23T17:00:00.004-04:00

A friend linked this article on Facebook with regards to free will. I had several highly conflicting thoughts on this.

The first is that I think maybe only certain kinds of amateurs, hacks and dilettantes, like me, or people whose professional ethics are constrained by an actual set of ethics, like a neurologist, should be allowed to comment on free will in public. People who get paid for their opinions should be out of the discussion. It's too important a topic to have any economic bias at all inserted into the conversation because it dictates how some people feel about themselves.

The second is that there is a margin of stupidity in the discussion of free will. Free will is self evident. It doesn't matter how or why a decision is made. It's just important that a decision is made. I think the topic of free will should be up for consideration, I just that I think the conversation should be about what it is, not if it is. "If" makes the entire question into a bong conversation.

Like the "question" of existence. If we didn't exist, would we be having a conversation about existence? There is always an appeal to higher reality involved in the question of existence, a la the Matrix. If there was a higher reality, it would be full of gun fights and harrowing escapes and dastardly villains. Of course. Or a sublime understanding of the entirety of the universe. Or maybe not. Maybe that's wish fulfillment, and whatever scale of reality you live in has economics to hold you back. But that makes for lousy pop culture.

The question of free will is really a discussion of consciousness. And not if, but what. Because if this relationship that I have with the universe isn't "consciousness," if I can really only be reduced to some really baroque lichen on the face of the earth, the question becomes "who cares?" What we know about the universe seems to indicate that the only thing consistent is change. Stabilizing your little corner of the universe so that it is more fun is a useful goal. It's probably necessary to existing, because without some sensation of fun now or delayed, there wouldn't be much reason to exist.

The question of whether will is free or not seems Manichean in nature. We want to make decisions totally free from economics or conditioning, as opposed to marginally free. But being as we exist in a universe that consists of inconsistently distributed matter and energy, that is of course, impossible. There will always be a tariff on will, whether it be perspective error or resource needs. The question of "free" will is impractically, mystically Utopian.

So determining the "what" of consciousness is a very useful goal, because at the very least it will allow us to game this corner of eternity to enhance the fun quotient.

The question of free will then becomes effectively irrelevant. And, at the end of the day, any random phenomenon that results in Kim Stanly Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy, or the artwork of Jack Kirby, or the counterculture, has to be appreciated for the... sheer fecundity of it. Consciousness, free or not, is a base condition of humanity that deserves to be admired and cultivated the way color is in flowers.

***

An armchair speculation, inspired by Freakanomics and The Tipping Point, and all the research they stood on first.

I think that there are probably three parts to a personality: Your genetic predispositions, your learned or conditioned behavior, and the part of your personality that does it's best to respond to the world.

None of these parts are subconscious: We use all of them to make conscious decisions. We even use them to rationalize our behavior to ourselves. But humans are monumentally bad at recognizing cause and effect, so it will come as no surprise that we often mistake correlation with causation when we think about ourselves. This means we often attribute decisions made due to the long-standing behavior patterns to spurious emotions.

Depression and Anxiety disorders, I think, are especially relevant to this conversation because they mimic natural emotions but make choice less effective. You can effectively fail to solve a problem because anxiety or depression results in you focusing on a temporary conflict while ignoring another source of stress that is causing ongoing distress.

Crap of Choice

2010-06-21T17:00:00.002-04:00

Why are TV watchers so defensive? It feels like the same reaction you often get as an atheist. Both TV watchers and people of faith are firmly in the cultural majority right now. There's no perceived threat, let alone actual threat, to the hegemony of god or mass produced Hollywood entertainment on cultural consciousness. Fine, naysayers can be hella snotty about your moos. I suppose they should be paid back for their snottyness... if you're an insecure loser who really cares that other people take the effort to dig at your foolishness.

But as per the Techland "vengeance" like above: Is it less snobbish of me to say: I don't watch much TV? How about if I admit that I read a TON of crappy books (though I still think that's a better habit than any TV watching)?

Or is it just more priggish fun to punish someone for their disagreement with your crap of choice? Frankly, Opie's vengeance wouldn't have worked on someone with half a brain. I have exactly half a brain, and I would love hearing about someone's contact with Pynchon, Vonnegut, Gaiman, or Pratt, whatever the venue and however passing. And I love the Simpson's, too. But I still don't watch it. I've got WOW to play, and obtuse fiction to write and not get published.

Five baseless opinions, or I can haz opinion?

2010-06-17T17:00:00.001-04:00

1. Authenticity is bullshit.

2. The New Atheists are harsh but fair. The New Church is fair but harsh.

3. Barbie dolls are the Venus of the twentieth century.

4.Truth shouldn't be "handled". It should be avoided or faced, but not spun.

5. Nickleback is not alt rock. The Beatles still are.

Feed warning:

2010-06-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

I have opinions. Anybody who has been subjected to my Facebook feed for awhile is probably aware of that.

This is by way of saying that a couple of opinion pieces that I wrote a while back and finally decided were good enough to see the light of day have been scheduled to be published on my blog over the next couple of weeks. It's a sort of... philosophical house cleaning?

This exercise could be akin to Noah getting wasted and showing off his junk at the apocalypse. So, you know, look the other way if you don't want to see. I don't think you'll end up as poorly off as the caananites if you look, but you never know. It might be toxic bullshit that I spew. I can never tell.