Thanksgiving Weekend in Provincetown

This year we packed up the whole extended family (local branch) and headed to Provincetown at the very tip of Cape Cod, for the Thanksgiving Weekend, splurging on a nice guest inn. In some ways, this was a lunatic mission, since we decided to fix our entire turkey dinner the day before, and pack it all up in coolers and take it with us for Thanksgiving dinner. But it turned out well, and we spent much of the weekend hanging out in front of a fire, and in the hot tub, and walking along the streets and waterfront of Provincetown, and doing our best not to have any consumables left to carry home at the end of the weekend. A fine time.

In the course of our walking, we came across Carver Street, and so of course had to get some pictures. Here are a couple of them.

 

There’s a big tower called the Pilgrim Monument, which—after climbing a lot of stairs—gives a fabulous view of the surrounding town and the end of the Cape.

 

Or it would have  been a fabulous view, if it hadn’t  been raining. Ah well. By the way, the reason there's a Pilgrim's Monument in Provincetown is that that's where the Mayflower Pilgrims landed first. After finding it too inhospitable, they moved on to Plymouth, where they stepped off the boat onto a rock conveniently named Plymouth Rock. Or so the story goes.

Hope you all had a great weekend!

Star Wars Coming! Print Books Coming!

Did I say that I was preparing to launch a new website? Yes, I did. And I am.

But I am also launching new print editions! That’s on paper! Tree-books. Can you believe?  It’s true!

First to appear will be Neptune Crossing, in a nice trade paperback. Perfect, now that I think about it, for giving to a loved one for Christmas! Or Hanukah! Or Solstice! Really, now that I think about it, the recipient doesn’t even have to be a loved one. It can be a liked one. Or a tolerated one. Or even someone you’d like to get rid of—someone you hope will turn back from the dark side. How about that? What better way to celebrate the new Star Wars movie?

Why else put “Star Wars” in the title of this post?

And yes, more titles will follow. Watch this space for an announcement. Soon!

Organic Farming? Or Alien Produce?

Here at the Star Rigger Ranch, we believe strongly in organic farming, especially if someone else is doing the work. In that spirit, Allysen signed us up for a weekly allotment of organic produce through CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Every week she brings home twice as much produce as we can eat, which encourages us to give. And some of that produce is some kind of weird.

In keeping with the Thanksgiving Feast theme of today, I present to you:

The alien carrot (organic)

The face-sucking alien chard (organic)

Bra-a-a-i-i-ns (organic celeriac)

Alien fractal cauliflower (organic)

And some regular veggies (organic), just to keep us off balance.
But we know what they're up to.

Enjoy your meal!

Happy Thanksgiving!

To everyone in the United States: Happy Thanksgiving! To everyone outside the United States: Happy Thanksgiving, even if you don't know what our holiday is about! Eat! Give thanks! Be merry!

About That Last Bookbub Promotion

I feel that I need to thank you all. My recent five-day Bookbub promotion on Dragons in the Stars shattered all previous records. In a typical promo, I might sell between 1500 and 3000 copies of an ebook at a temporarily discounted price. And that’s pretty cool. Bookbub is a great promotion platform for authors and publishers and a boon to book buyers, but an ad there is not cheap. Even so, those kinds of numbers cover the cost and make some nice profit besides. It also connects my work with a lot of new readers, which is even cooler.

Last winter, I had one promo that sold 4200 copies in a week, and we were shooting off fireworks at that one.

Well, last week, in just five days, more than 4600 of you wonderful people bought ebook copies of Dragons in the Stars! Are you guys great, or what? I hope you enjoy the book, and obviously I hope you will want to come back for the sequel, Dragon Rigger.

So, thank you. All of you, whoever you are. Thank you.

New Web Site Coming!

Over the last few months, I’ve been working away in odd moments on a new project. That project is a complete revamp of my website! Oh yes, this has been a long time coming. My current site (www.starrigger.net) has existed in essentially the same form since 1996. That’s a long time in dog years and people years, and in web years, it’s practically geologic.

Time for a change, you think?

Actually, what drove me to it, beyond a nagging feeling for the last ten years that it really was time, was the relatively new importance of making websites mobile-friendly. Google made it crystal clear: If your site isn’t mobile-friendly (meaning, easy to read on a smartphone), you can expect to see your search rankings suffer.

And so, my lovingly homebrewed-html website that has served me for so long, prepare to be put out to pasture. Or into the Wayback Machine, if you will. It’s not too late to take a final look—the new site isn’t live yet for public viewing—but it will be soon. The new one will be at the same URL, but will be on the Wordpress platform, and will be way easier to browse on a phone, and for that matter, on a computer.

This blog will move to the new platform and will be at the same address as the website: www.starrigger.net. (The existing blog content will appear there, as well.)

Here’s a sneak preview:

Look for an announcement soon!

Paris

So, having my big sale come out right after the horrific events in Paris feels crass, at best. (It was all set in motion, of course, long before those events.) I feel a bit weird about promoting books in the face of all that pain.

Truthfully, all I can think of to say about Paris is: People of Paris and France, my thoughts and prayers are with you. We’re all in this together, as you were with us after 9/11. 

Perhaps I’ll just point you to this piece, which offers some good thoughts about constructive ways not to respond to tragedies like this. Please read it.

And now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn’t feel too bad about offering redemptive entertainment in the face of real-life hatred.

Get Your Red-Hot Dragons! And Supernovas! Hot Hot Hot!

I’ve got two specials going at once, starting today! Am I crazy or what? (Yeah, I know.)

For dragon lovers, or anyone wanting to dive more deeply into the Star Rigger Universe, I offer Dragons in the Stars! How much? Ninety-nine coppers, or a single George Washington, keep the change! That’s way less than a good cup of coffee. For a very limited time, this is, so don’t delay.

$.99 @ Kindle | Nook | Smashwords | Kobo | iTunes | Google

For lovers of hard SF, with layers of big cosmic stuff interwoven with nanotech and AI, not to mention interesting characters, I offer From a Changeling Star! How much? This one’s a single George Washington plus ninety-nine coppers. Still less than a cup of coffee! Think of this: the more copies you buy, the more you save!

$1.99 @ Kindle | Nook | Smashwords | Kobo | iTunes | Google

I didn’t set out intending to do two at once, but that’s how my Bookbub and Fussy Librarian promos, respectively, shook out. So I’m riding the tiger.

Just for a few days, on this one.

Hitting a Wall Writing?

Writing can be so frustrating. You start out with a brilliant idea, and you fling yourself into it with abandon. And you write up a storm. And after a while...

Jim C. Hines says exactly what I feel. Happens to me every damn time. Here's what he wrote:

I decided to talk about that part in my process where the novelty and shininess has worn off, and I realize my outline is broken, and suddenly it feels like the story is crumbling in my hands, and what was I even thinking???

It happens with pretty much every book I write, usually around 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through the first draft.

Here’s an excerpt from the pep talk:

This is the time in Jim’s writing process where, like Charlie Brown kicking at that elusive football, I lose my footing and end up flat on my back, staring into the sky and wondering what the heck just happened.

My shiny new idea isn’t quite so shiny anymore. I’ve gotten lots of words down, but they don’t exactly match what I was imagining. And this next part of the outline doesn’t make any sense at all, now that I think about it more closely. Good grief, the Jim who was outlining this thing last month is an idiot. And now I have to fix his mess.

Everyone’s writing process is different, of course. You might zip through the entire month with never a doubt, never a stumble. (In which case I hate you a little bit.) But most of the writers I know, beginners and pros, hit a point at least once in every project, sometimes more, where everything feels like it’s falling apart.

[Read the rest on Jim’s blog. Or the longer version here.]

All I can say is, Amen to that. And to everyone doing this year's NaNoWriMo, good luck, and write on!

Do the Funky Conch Hop

A conch is a kind of snail, right? And snails don’t jump; they ooze, right? Well, not always, it turns out. Here, from Science News, is a story about the motion of Gibberulus gibberulus gibbosus, aka hunchbacked conch.

To quote: “The sea snails save their jumping for conch emergencies, such as when they detect dissolved body odor from the deadly cone snail Conus marmoreus. Cone snails glide rather than jump. But if a cone snail gets close enough, it harpoons the conch with a long, venom-delivering proboscis that is as agile as an elephant’s trunk. Then it reels in the paralyzed conch like a fish on the line. Such threats favor epic jumping in spite of the conch circulatory system...” [more]

Watch this conch jump. (It’s small in the screen, so click in the lower right corner to maximize.)

Braided Clouds, from Space

This NASA image caught my eye on The Atlantic’s website. (Click the link if this embed code doesn't work. Ah, nope, it doesn't. Click the link.) Cloud vortices off Heard Island, south Indian Ocean, from NASA's Aqua satellite.

Cloud vortices off Heard Island, south Indian Ocean. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image of sea ice off Heard Island on Nov 2, 2015 at 5:02 AM EST (09:20 UTC). A cloud vortex- the circular pattern seen here- is produced by the flow of air in the atmosphere. Heard Island (visible in the lower right portion of the image) is located in the Indian Ocean, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica. The island is uninhabited by humans, although it is home to many birds and seals. Heard Island is rugged and mountainous, and is mostly covered with ice. It is also home to an active volcano, Mawson Peak. The island has been a territory of Australia since 1947. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team #nasagoddard

A photo posted by NASA Goddard (@nasagoddard) on Nov 2, 2015 at 1:31pm PST

Gorilla Watching Cat Video

I can’t figure out how to embed this (short) video, so I’ll just have to give you the link, at TheAtlantic.com:

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/11/even-gorillas-cant-resist-smartphones/413902/

The commenter noted that the girl seemed to be ignoring the magnificent creature beside her. I actually found it rather sweet that she was sharing a video in such an unstudied way—just one friend to another.

Another New Star Trek!

CBS announced today that they’re launching a new Star Trek series in January of 2017, to be aired on their paid subscription channel CBS All Access. The first episode will be on broadcast TV, to get us hooked. Alex Kurtzman, one of the co-writers of the reboot films Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, will be executive producer.

I’m of several minds on this announcement. I’m excited to hear that Star Trek is returning to television! On the other hand, I’m sad to hear that to see it, I’ll have to subscribe to yet another pay service. Granted, this was true of Game of Thrones, which (for that very reason) I came to late. And it’s true of Alpha House (by Garry Trudeau), one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen, though as an Amazon Prime member I got to see that for free. And it’s true of Episodes, another of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen, which I only caught on DVD after the fact. Is this the wave of the future, for quality original programming? I think it is.

But will this be quality programming? Kurtzman has a solid track record, although I admit I (again!) had mixed feelings about the reboot films, with its alternate timeline to the established Star Trek universe. Still, they were good movies, if flawed (especially Into Darkness). But this announcement is all about “franchise”—which is a term I hate when it's applied to creative endeavors—and is short on specifics. It leaves me wondering if they really have a vision for the new series, or if they’re simply reviving a guaranteed money-maker. (Hey, let’s do a new Star Trek show! It’ll be big. What will it be about? Well, I don’t know. Wait, I’ve got it! New characters, folks having adventures in space!) I didn’t really catch much of the vision thing in the announcement. There’s no indication yet of which timeline it will be set in, or whether it comes before, after, or concurrently with any of the existing Star Trek story lines. And if the latter, if it will for God’s sake have some new adversaries, rather than continuing to recycle the old ones.

So, I’m excited. But cautious. I’ve learned caution, when it comes to anticipating new TV shows.

In the meantime, I finally got to the theater and saw The Martian. What a terrific movie! If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t wait for the DVD. Big screen. Go for the big screen. I also watched the first episode of Supergirl and thought it showed real promise. Not brilliant, but good. It has the upbeat tone I was hoping for, a welcome alternative to the ubiquitous “darker, edgier, grittier” mantra that has marked so many shows in recent years. Including, um, Star Trek.