The new iPad's Name

Now, I know I'm not a tech blogger, but I was following the blogs covering the recent event where Apple revealed the newest version of the iPad.  What I found interesting was the reactions of the reporters.  They were panicking because Apple wasn't giving the device a new name, like iPad 3, or iPad HD.  If they are still on-line take a look at this one. They were actually ignoring the reporting task, frantic for a new label.

And today, as more reporting comes out about the device in all the tech and Mac-centric sites, the name is being debated, almost more than the new features of the device.

It occurred to me that what I was seeing was an observer effect.  Those reporters had copy to write, deadlines to meet.  They were probably writing their articles even as they added their comments to the live blog.  I'd bet some of them even had the article all pre-written, ready to add or delete a paragraph or so before posting.  And they were stuck on the name.  If they posted their as-it-happens article and Apple later on called it the 'iPad Super' or something, they would have to go back and correct everything.  And considering just how many typo's show up every day in the articles, even in the titles of the articles, I know they just hate to go back to fix anything.

The lack of a new name threw the reporters for a loop, and some of them haven't quite gotten over it yet.

The customers?  I doubt many will care.  The new iPad is what they would have called it no matter what the official name.  "I want a new iPad."  That's how we'll say it.  At least that's how I say it.

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Henry's Stories Anthology

Just out in Amazon, and shortly in B&N, Kobo, iBookstore, Google Editions, etc, and of course available from Ingram, is my first attempt at a book-sized anthology of short fiction.  Notice the qualifications.  I still have a few chapbooks left that I produced in 2006 that contained three short stories, and an e-book only collection of four time-travel themed stories that I made in 2009 at the same time as my Golden Girl time travel novel.

But this one, Henry's Stories: Volume 1 is much fatter, containing ten stories at about 73,000 words -- about the size of a smaller novel.  As far as the publishing side, I'm treating it like I do the novels, simultaneous publication in trader paperback and ebook versions.  I call it "Volume 1" because I already have all the stories of "Volume 2" picked out and ready.  I just need to wait until the right moment in time to publish it (Probably six to nine months from now).

As many of you know Henry's Stories is my on-line magazine, where I publish stories in chapter-sized chunks every MWF.  The magazine is targeted to people who tend to read only on the web, and not books and paper magazines.  I know there are a lot of people who fit that classification.

It was a welcome home for some of my earlier stories that had been published in magazines now long gone.  Maybe I had a wrinkled and worn copy, but the stories weren't available to the general public.  Luckily, I had made it a long habit of keeping my copyrights in order and had all the rights to republish them myself.

So I did.  Here, at last, is a more permanent home for some of my favorites.

Catacomb
First published in 1985, in Dragon magazine.  This story of a teenage girl trying to make some cash playing in the computer game Catacomb was nothing out of the order when I wrote it.  I had friends playing D&D at my house and got the taste of it, although I was never a player myself.  I wrote the story and sent it off to various science fiction and fantasy magazines. George Scithers of Amazing didn't take it himself, but routed it over to Dragon, which I would never have thought to contact myself.  It was a lucky move.  They bought it and made it available for just the right people.

Over the years, I have collected more fan mail from this one story than all my other works to date.  Some of them told me that this story got them into the gaming industry.  Some of them are significant people in that industry -- so I'm told.  It's amazing to me, the impact this story seems to have caused.  And I'm grateful for every one of those letters and emails.  Sometimes that's all that keeps a writer going.

Everybody Knows Bob
First published in Henry's Stories.  As I was preparing this collection, there were a number of scientific papers being published about new techniques for altering or removing memories.  While this story is clearly a fantasy, the concept of the impermanence of memory is a significant thread, and something worth thinking about.

Litterbug
First published in my ebook collection Time Quadrants in 2009.  This story always brings a smile.  Back when superconductors were just invented that could be active at liquid nitrogen temperatures, I had friends who knew the inventors, so I managed to see a demonstration of a magnet floating over a frosty bed of superconductor.  That's what sparked this story, and since the train derailment between Hutto and Round Rock Texas was recent history, all the pieces came together nicely.  It was first written before I realized that I could write YA science fiction, but clearly, this story is in that category.

Patterns
First published for Henry's Stories.  This story of a boy genius hiding his capabilities was the first story in the online magazine, and I have every intention of writing more episodes.  Some of the events in Ted's life such as being held upside down in the school yard by the class bully and fighting back with silence were straight out of my own experience, although Ted is certainly much smarter than I ever was.

The One
First published for Henry's Stories.  This is one of the longer stories in the collection, and if things had gone another way, I could have made this into one of my YA novels.  Instead, I wrote a little tale of destiny and the girl who haunted his dreams.  When I finished and typed the final period, I had to firmly put the next chapter off on the to-do list rather than dive into an entirely different stage of their lives.

Bad Blood
First published in 1990 in New Pathways.  This short little idea story actually belongs in the events of The Project Saga, the new series of novels that are currently coming out.  In fact quite a few of my short stories belong to that time line.  One little side note; about a decade after I wrote this, I came down with diabetes myself.  In fact, I just stuck my finger for a blood test as I was writing this.

Coldseeker
First published for Henry's Stories.  For decades, I lived in the Austin area and made regular trips to Amarillo to visit my folks.  On my favorite route, I passed through the canyon where this story takes place, and while the editors who saw this story thought the desertificiation of the Texas Panhandle was unbelievable, they all lived in NY and had no clue. You should see the sand dunes that are already there.  As far as the hydrogen collector in the story goes, if I had just the slightest ability to build it myself, I'd do it.

Forget It!
First published in 1977 for the short-lived computer magazine ROM. After I published a little article about computers and science fiction in BYTE magazine, the editor of ROM called me up and asked for a story on the theme of 'memory'.  Being young and unknown at the time, I wrote this story in about a day and sent it off.  It's been popular.  Now, while I got so much of the future technology wrong, I still have a fondness for the wristwatch.  Imagine something the size of an iPod Nano 6 with the capabilities of an enhanced iPhone.  Since the day I wrote it, I've been on the look out for the perfect 'personal' computer.  It's not here yet.  But, as an added bonus.  I've never forgotten my wife's birthday.

Far Exile
First published in my ebook collection Time Quadrants in 2009. This was written to try out new techniques of writing, after I had been exposed to Dashiell Hammett's style.  Of course, I can't write hard-boiled detective, I do science fiction.  But since this was an exercise, I ended up with a 1950's plot in a 1930's style.  Still, after it was written, I was pleased with how it had turned out.

Making It Fit
First published in my ebook collection Time Quadrants in 2009. Ah, time travel.  It's an addictive storytelling method, but there are so many options.  Do you change the past and deal with the paradoxes?  Do you struggle, and fail, to change a past that has been written and cannot change?  I concentrated on a different theme -- if the past cannot be changed, what is time travel good for?  If I had to rank my favorite short stories, this one would certainly be high on that list.

In all, I think these are a fine start for the series.  All of the stories can be read for free on the magazine site, if you like to click through links.  Paper and ebook now gives other people access, and probably within a few days, you can even get an autographed copy from me.  I'll post a link when they're here.

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Confession: I Love My Own Stories.

In case you don't know, I have a second blogspot site called Henry's Stories. For over a year now, I've been putting my stories out on that site, serialized in chunks.  There are short stories, middle-sized ones, and novels.  I'm currently in the middle of the second novel, Extreme Makeover which starts at this page. Of course, you could buy it on Amazon like all my other books, but here it's free, if you don't mind reading it a chapter at a time.

The thing is...I'm getting engrossed in the story myself.  I wrote it.  I've been through the text over a dozen times, or more.  Preparing it for the serialization, I read through it again twice. And yet, each MWF as the next chapter comes out and it shows up in my RSS reader, I pause and read the chapter, getting caught up in the story all over again.

Now, marketing is supposed to be telling everyone how great your own stuff is, but I've never been able to do that properly.  I was raised to be modest and avoid bragging.  It's a hard process to get around.  I'll just say it.  I've got some great stories here.  I'd prefer you go buy them all, but if you want free, I can handle that too.

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Things I Never Would of Thought: Septic Tank Lids

Out of sight, out of mind.  We bought this house when it was about two years old, nearly twenty-five years ago.  For the most part, the septic system works, so I don't pay any attention to it.  But in December, there was an occasional whiff in the air.  Indoors.  So being promptly on the spot, a month later I called in the specialist, thinking it might need to be pumped, like we had done many years before.

He walked around, poking a metal probe into the ground, locating the dimensions of the tank that had long been completely buried.  His face showed increasing unease as he puzzled it out.  In one place, the probe had gone through deeper than it should have.  He pulled out the shovel and exposed the two access ports on the top.  One side was 'rotting' away.  The concrete was easily a third thinner on the outflow side of the tank than the intake side.  The concrete crumbled in his hand.

What had been a simple pumping job now became ten times more expensive.  First off, I was warned most strenuously not to drive my tractor over the area.  He had seen these situations before and even riding mowers were too heavy in many cases, and you do not want to have to fish your tractor out of the septic tank.

It was clear to me that the lid had to be replaced, although he was struggling to come up with cheaper solutions.  Unfortunately all of those just were just delays, not fixes.  As he dug more and exposed the surface of the lid, it was clear that the formerly flat slab was bowing down in the middle.  The concrete's strength was fading away and it was only held in shape by the internal rebar steel rods.

Decades old septic tank lids aren't an off the shelf item.  He took dimensions and some company somewhere poured and cast a new one.  Wait two weeks.  Don't walk on the septic tank.

Then came the day.  It had to be Monday because rain was in the forecast Tuesday and the heavy trucks couldn't get across the yard without bogging down if the ground was wet.  Carefully tensioning the chains, the crane operator lifted the old lid off and transferred it to the trailer.  Everybody was holding their breath, hoping it wouldn't crumble and fall into the tank.  Nobody wanted that clean-up job.  Up in the air, the distorted, sagging of the concrete was plain to see.

Then, they put a gasket down around the edge and lowered the new, flat, and thicker septic tank lid in place.  Now, a couple of days later, there's just a slight mound that needs reseeding and some ruts in the grass where the trucks passed.  But its fixed, at least for a few more decades.

I asked why the concrete decayed like that.  The guy with the experience wasn't sure.  Perhaps water softening.  Perhaps the chemicals given off in the air gap.  All he knew was that the corrosion always happened on the outflow side of the tank. I'm just happy to forget about it.  Out of sight, out of mind.

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Beta Reader Copies

Not too long ago, I wrote about the process of creating comb-bound copies of an early draft of a novel to allow beta-test readers the chance to find errors and mark it up.  Well, this book, I'm trying something a little different.  It's a gamble and I don't know how it will play out.

Instead of buying a few reams of paper and a new toner cartridge, and then queuing up multiple copies of the full book to print, I uploaded the book to Lulu and printed out private-access copies.  Now, these aren't what the final copy will look like.  For one thing, I just slapped a handy snapshot there as a fake cover image.  For another, this is 8.5 x 11 inches.  Inside, the pages are regular 6 x 9 inch pages with great big margins around them so people can make notes.  These will never be sold.  Once this beta-reader review is complete, I'll go back to Lulu and delete the project.

Why Lulu?  Well, for one thing, this process has been a whole lot easier than filling my office with the smell of ozone for hours or days as I print out all the copies.  No aching back from bending over the comb binder as I assemble them.  And finally, no fretting over the binding coming loose and people scrambling the pages as they are shipped back and forth through the mail.

This may have cost me slightly more.  I'm not sure.  I've never done a detailed print cost analysis for when I print them myself.  But given that I always have to buy a new toner cartridge in the middle of the process, the costs are probably equivalent.  Besides, the printing cost isn't the most expensive part of the process.  The mailing cost is.  Given that I'm sending these to people all across the country, I send them in flat rate priority mail envelopes with a self-addressed stamped flat rate envelope included, it costs more than $10 each just for the mailing.  Even with the shipping costs from Lulu added in, that's less than it cost to print them.

Now, I hate to spend the money, but I really need these people looking over my shoulder and pointing out typos and misspellings and really horrible sentences.  A writer can't see his own dumb mistakes.

My biggest fear is that since this is a perfect-bound book, it may inhibit these book-loving people from being as ruthless as they need to be in marking it up.  Like I said, it's a gamble. I'll find out when they come back.

-my books-