The Blue Candle Society

I’m as concerned as anyone about Google’s new privacy policy changes, but I notice that when I use gmail, the context-sensitive advertisements I get when I hop over to my spam folder are for things like “Spicy Spam Kebab Recipe” , or “Spicy Spam Fajitas, serves 8 – add extra salsa if desired”, which raises a question (well, two questions, really, the first being is anyone really making enough money off of Spam recipes that it is worth advertising them?  Okay, three questions, the second being does the originator of this recipe really think I need their friggin permission to add as much salsa to my fajitas as I damn well please?).  Anyway, the main question is, if the best that Google can do, with all its data mining and crawling through my personal information, is to give me ads based on the folder name I’m looking at (which they came up with, by the way), are they really the threat we all fear? Or perhaps they are acting deliberately dumb to throw people off the scent.  Hmmmm.

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There was a massive man in the center of the room, a huge muscular fellow who at first appeared to be wearing armor of leather and steel. Then I took in the glassy look in his eye, his lack of hair, and the puffs of steam that were darting from various points at his body, and realized what I was seeing–a steam-golem. I should have recognized it at once, of course, given my training. Elias Black had researched them thoroughly, and had passed the knowledge on to me. Black himself had made various automata, and of course I had made the Automated Armsman myself, only to lose it on that tragic traintop battle.

But normal automata are distinct from steam-golems in that they are driven not by an artificial intelligence, but by a real intelligence, dragged from some hapless soul through the most vile of magic. This is, of course, a terrible thing, but I had always been interested in them in theory, and the specimen before me was a remarkable example. It was an amalgam of flesh, leather, and metal, and it was clearly, based on the exhaust that burst from it from little vents as it moved, powered by a small internal steam engine. The engine was clearly cunningly-designed, to drive such a large body while being relatively small. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Nightmare Engine of Doom Part 21 – A Crime Against Nature’

Posted in Serials

As I focus on a long run of editing, I found Patton Oswalt’s commentary on writing and the creative process in general very compelling. I suspect most writers would find something familiar in this.

It is, of course, Patton Oswalt, so don’t click through if you’re likely to be offended by language.

Patton Oswalt, “Death Bed”

Posted in General writing things

So my little post about spam has attracted an absolute deluge of comment spam.  Was it the word “spam” in it that caused that?  (If so, whoops).  The odd thing is, these comments are all of the form “gvhk ehgg  hghghgdfehgh!” and the like, rather than the more usual “I enjoyed the way you explained a difficult topic for those who like to read this kind of like topic!  I will tell my frineds!”

That seems kind of weird, though.  If this is some sort of revenge spamming, why not bring your A game?

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For several moments, I dashed around my hotel room, first rushing for the door, then running back to my bag to snatch up my clockwork pistol and running back for the door, hearing muffled shouts and thumps the whole time. Just before hurling open the door, I recalled that I’d left the water running, and I decided that since I had no idea how long it might take to come to Enzo’s aid, I had better turn it off.

It was fortunate I did, because the delay gave me time to recall that I was not wearing a stitch of clothing. This led to a bit more rushing around since I didn’t want to wear the same scuffed and grubby trousers I’d walked into town with, so I needed to find a clean pair in my luggage. I further decided that it would be unwise to rush through the hotel without a shirt, but such was my haste that I did a poor job of buttoning it up. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Nightmare Engine of Doom Part 20 – Trouble in the Hotel’

Posted in Serials

So today is the start of National Novel Editing Month, and I’m trying to work up some enthusiasm for it.  NaNoEdMo is not as famous as good old NaNoWriMo, of course, for obvious reasons.  Not only is it a lot easier to get excited about generating fresh, new, golden words than it is about slogging through fixing old ones, but it strikes me that tracking one’s wordcount is a lot easier than tracking editing time.  The NaNoEdMo rules state that one has to put in 50 hours of editing during March to win, but how do you track that hour?  Does time spent staring off into space thinking of the right word count?  How about time doing a little online research on the behavior of honeybees?  (and does it matter if there are any honeybees in the book?)  How about breaks for email?

Well, at any rate, I’ve got some novels in serious need of editing, not least my NaNoWriMo effort, so I’m going to give it a shot.  I’ve found that I seem to do better, in writing, editing, and whatever else, if I make something of a habit out of it, so I think this may work out.  I am a bit concerned by the fact that the registration was called “complementary”, but I think the EdMo people use a third-party registration service, and heck, maybe they mean that their registration complements NaNoWriMo.  From what I could see there seemed to be some writers who did NaNoWriMo seemed to think they had something all set to submit on December 1, which is a horrifying concept.  So hopefully legions of NaNos will be editing along with me.

Posted in General writing things

I suppose if I were an enormous entity, growing all the time and convinced I was poised to transform my industry, I might start thinking I could just roll over anyone I wanted to.  And once I started thinking that I might start thinking the best way to handle any conflict was to just throw my massive weight around and crush anyone who had the gall to oppose me.  But is really wise for Amazon to once again go running around throwing a hissy fit and yanking books because someone who has a disagreement with them?  Sooner or later, everyone else who has dealings with Amazon might just start wondering when it will happen to them.  Amazon is gearing up to be big in doing their own publishing, but do they really want to alienate every other publisher just to simplify things?

Of course, long-time readers will remember when I was griping about Amazon acting all passive-aggressive rather than like Galactus.  But remember, that was really more of a “tsk tsk” kind of post.  I really do prefer that sort of thing to this, only because it isn’t so ridiculously author-hostile.  The problem is, not only is Amazon huge, but books are only a chunk of what they do.  It makes perfect sense for them to burn a little money now to make more later, and it makes perfect sense, from their point of view, to use authors like pawns if gives them a shot at knocking out a publisher or whatnot who might get in their way.  But for obvious reasons I’m less than sympathetic with that view.  I don’t think Amazon is trying to hurt authors.  I don’t think they are even really thinking about authors.  Which is sort of the problem.

Posted in General writing things

I won’t bore the reader with the details of escape from the flaming train as it hurtled toward certain derailment on a sharp bend in the tracks that overlooked the colorfully-named Shrieking Gorge. The particulars of our escape, and of course the details of many of the events directly following it, such as my doomed romance with the daughter of a struggling Québécois oilman, or Enzo’s winning of the all-Saskatchewan lumberjackery competition, simply distract unnecessarily from the main thrust of my tale. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Nightmare Engine of Doom Part 19 – Saskatoon’

Posted in Serials

Got to thinking about comment spam the other day.  I assume that comment spam is like the regular old variety , in that it has a fantastically low success rate, but that it is so cheap that it is still cost-effective, but really–some of the things these people seem to be selling just seem like they wouldn’t work at all, just sitting there in the comments of someone’s blog.  But the market has spoken, I suppose.  The sorts of greedy sociopaths who trade in spam, comment-based or otherwise, wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t make money at it.

It is annoying, though.  On a number of occasions, I’ve gone to someone’s blog, an author I’d just discovered for example, and tried to post a cheery comment, only to find that the comments had been closed on the appropriate post.  The comments on this blog had started out as open forever, but I eventually had to set them to close after a few weeks thanks to the blizzard of spam.  Of course, the more posts one makes, the more spam one gets if they don’t close off after a while.  I had one post, in particular, that was attracting spam like flies to a bloated corpse.  Hmm, that may not be the best metaphor.  Lets go with flies to honey.  Except let’s face it, given the choice, flies will go right past the honey to the bloated corpse every time.  So maybe the spammers are more like fruit flies.

So there you go.  Spammers are like fruit flies, only not quite as well-versed in grammar, and my clever ideas are like delicious gourmet preserves spread on the toast of WordPress.  Glad I cleared that up.

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Busy weekend over here, so rather than post another piece of Nightmare Engine of Doom, I’ll just point out that the Arcane Anthology has posted an excerpt of my story “Legacy”, so head on over and take a look, and think about buying a copy of the book.

Posted in General writing things