Or, you can buy a ROKU box for $69 today. You can tie into your Netflix streaming. You can rent HD movies via Amazon Video on Demand for $3.99 (if you grab the SD version) and $4.99 for the HD version (and how many people will get HD quality streaming all the time? I’m betting the HD streaming on the iTunes HD will downsample to SD levels on most connections). Now the TV episodes are $1.99 to purchase, you can’t rent them. I’ll be curious to see if Amazon is able to follow suite.

With ROKU you also get more things you can install, like the Pandora app, so you can stream free music tailored to your taste.

Not sure Apple TV hit it out of the park, particularly since a lot of TVs are coming with Netflix streaming and Amazon VOD built into the TV.

In the past customers haven’t flocked to the Apple TV (it puts lie to the frequent claim that anything with an Apple logo on it is purchased by Apple faithful regardless of the quality, Apple customers have been tepid about the TV since it was introduced, leaving Steve to call it his ‘hobby.’). It’s cheaper now, that will help it.

But will it take off like the iPod or iPad.

If it can’t offer something amazingly different than the ROKU box I already have, I wonder. The air streaming that Jobs demoed was pretty neat (send any video you’re watching on your iPod, iPad right over to your Apple TV), but is that enough to junk my ROKU box? Not really.

Now an Apple TV with iOS apps and a marketplace of people selling whatever they can think of, with CBS and HULU apps for sale. MMM, a more compelling story.

Still, it was fun to see the new iPods announced today. The new Nano will be a hit for Christmas season. And I hope 99 cent episode rental hits iTunes in general, not just the Apple TV. I’ll take advantage of that…

PS: also, Amazon VOD lets you buy a movie, and keep it on their servers, which you can use via ROKU and repeatedly access/stream. Surprised Apple TV didn’t add this.

PPS: also, Amazon VOD is doing 99 cent episodes now, plus, it has a bigger selection. Apple TV will only give you episodes for those who jumped on board. If you’re willing to stomach the higher price of $1.99, you can grab more episodes.

Editor of my Xenowealth novels (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose) Paul Stevens is the editor Guest of Honor, which is also cool.

Elizabeth Massie is the other writer Guest of Honor.

This is the second time I’ve been honored by appearing as the Guest of Honor (woo!) at a convention. Emily and the twins are here for this one as well.

I mentioned I might be a bit spacey in my last blog post, but to be honest, it’s been a long enough week I’m actually looking forward to relaxing and being the GOH and meeting people and enjoying the weekend. Looking over my notes, I haven’t taken much time off for a month I’ve been so focused on the book, and the idea of relaxing and enjoying the honor of being a guest like this is not a bad thing.

I told someone on instant messenger that I’ve hit that point in the current novel where the introverted side of me takes over. I’m not interested in other people’s drama, my various responsibilities and administrivia, or anything that isn’t my own mental landscape surrounding the novel I’m working on, Arctic Rising.

My browser tabs are filled with pictures and schematics I’ve dug up of cruise ships, naval vessels, oil rigs, geological surveys of the Arctic, and anything else related to the book. And snippets and flashes of scenes that could be written, or that need to be written, constantly interrupt my daily life.

Usually I get fired up by being around other people. I’m pretty sure this weekend, when I’m at Context, I’ll have a great deal of fun.

But right now, the dominant impulse within me is to find a cabin in the woods, shut the internet off, and just fucking write till my fingers bleed.

It’s an impulse that lets me know the novel is good. I’m enjoying living and breathing it still.

Even though I live a freelancer’s life, and I do so dearly love it, I dream about building my life up in such a way that I could disappear for a week or so and just go full steam with no interruptions or considerations for an outside world…

When I first became aware of it a year ago, my address in Bluffton, OH, got a very high score due to the fact there were restaurants, a bar, and a grocery store, schools all within easy walking distance. It was a 93 Walk Score.

Now Walk Score is getting a bit more nuanced. They added a public transit factor. As Bluffton has no such thing, the score dropped to a 75. Which seems to make sense. It’s a town that’s very walkable, but all you can do is walk inside that little couple mile radius.

Yesterday one of my neighbors, an 83 year old lady by the name of Dorothy, ran into me on my walk home. We walked home together and she told me how there used to be a streetcar that ran up and down downtown Bluffton.

When she grew up, the train stopped right on the edge of town at the Depot. You could take the train to Cleveland, Chicago, and she used to travel to the big midwestern cities with her family to see cultural events or bands. Her father, she said, was a huge fan of trains.

Oh, Walk Score now has a Transit Score website that lets you look at where you might move to, and how to get to your job from that new place using public transit and scoring it as well.

When I mentioned Charlie’s influence on twitter, everyone asked me to blog a post about what I know.

Well, here’s an excerpt from Just A Draft, a few chapters ahead of what I’ve posted online:

“Every novel has a structure to it, and thus, each one needs its own critical approach to figure out how best to make it better. But a novel is usually broken down by chapters.

For me a major take-away point was to get away from thinking of chapters as discrete scenes, with beginnings, middles, and ends. In short stories, there is more completeness to a scene, you trust the reader to keep going. But with a novel, the end of a chapter is an excuse for the reader to put the book down.
So wrapping everything up, and treating a chapter like a scene, leaves you giving the reader a chance to set the book down.

No, what you want to do is leave the reader starting the next chapter thinking ‘I have to know what happens next?’

In cruder form, this is a cliffhanger: a literal break in the plot where a physical event has happened and is left unresolved.

But what I began to learn from my fellow workshoppers was the fact that the cliffhanger could take place in any form. Emotional cliffhangers, idea cliffhangers, these were all valid too. What counted was resolving a part of a presented dilemma, giving a reader satisfaction, while also generating a new question that the reader would be left curious to answer by turning the page to the next chapter. Often the new question you formed was of a different type than the one resolved in order to keep variety.

So you could create a literal cliffhanger, a physical threat to a character that presents itself at the end of chapter one. In chapter two you resolve it, but because another physical threat would be repetitive, you end chapter two with an emotional question. So at the end of chapter one our hero’s parachute failed to open when he jumped out of a plane. In chapter two’s beginning he gets it open, and just barely lands. At the end of chapter two, his girlfriend tells him she can’t put up with our hero’s hobby of parachuting anymore. It’s her, or the jumping. Ah, so what happens at the start of three? What does he decide? Chapter one: physical/plot cliffhanger. Two: emotional life decision.

This flow concept was the most important thing I learned, and something I’m always tinkering with.”

When I outline, I may not ’see’ the chapter structure that is best for the reader for compelling them through a book, however. I might write, in an outline: hero jumps out of plane, lands badly. Breaks up with girlfriend.

That implies a chapter where he makes the jump, and another discrete chapter where he breaks up. But that wouldn’t flow as well as one where the parachuting is part of chapter two as well, and the break up is parts of two and three.

For more on pacing chapters, Scott Westerfeld’s ideas about pace charts were similar enough to my excel cell haikus that I adopted his method of tagging chapters, as they fit into Scrivener’s corkboard feature and I don’t have to duplicate my chapters into excel anymore. Neat hack.

Not exactly surprising.

I’d be more interested in seeing a county-by-county layout of this however, I suspect it would be more dramatic. Something similar to those county voting maps you see around.

“In the New York Times, reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal writes of Portugal’s swift and remarkable energy transformation. In just five years, the nation has cut its dependence on fossil fuels dramatically, with nearly 45% of its grid electricity coming from renewable sources this year, up from 17% in 2005″

45%! Holy crap. Whenever global warming denialists and anti-green grouches talk about the ‘extreme costs’ of catering to hairshirt environmentalism they make it sound as if the entire economy comes to a cratering halt due to efforts like this.

Portugal saw 10-15% increase in electrical costs.

Forget doing the right thing environmentally, wouldn’t 10-15% to reduce your dependence on terrorist-funding oil drilling be well worth it?

So let’s run that out, the worst case scenario of 30% to completely eliminate it?

Conservatives are okay with Enron and energy traders/speculators manipulating the price of energy well past 30% just for shits and giggles in the name of unregulated pro-business circle jerking.

I’d take a 30% hike for energy independence and no money being sent to terrorists in a fucking heart beat.

Philip Brewer modifies my hasty calculations with cold hard, and better, science (it works bitches!) when he points out Portugal uses 2/3 less energy and is already paying 2X what we pay, meaning the price of energy independence would be at least double and then some your electricity cost. And Steve Bucheit points out that most of the US’s electricity is generated by coal, not oil)…

“The laboratory at Southwest Jiaotong University told Beijing-based Legal Evening News that it was working on a prototype with an average speed of 500 to 600kph. A much smaller model train traveling at 600 to 1,000kph in a vacuum tube will be introduced in two or three years, it added. A US proposal was for a highly evacuated tunnel.”

So the idea is, with lower or no air pressure in the tunnel, you save fuel and can go faster. You can ramp a train up to 600 miles an hour.

I’m suddenly wondering, without the need for as much maintenance, and training, what a future with less air travel and more high speed rail in near-reach cities, and a nation-wide partially evacuated tunnel system for longer reach routes, looks like.

I read a scene in an Arthur C. Clarke story that presumed such things. Interesting to see the research going down in China. But then again, over the last few years they’ve decided to really up the ante on trains. America has decided to (and in the case of Republicans, is downright proud of) relinquish rail technology and not even really hedge its bets much. That may end up well, but specialization usually tends to screw you up…