The Black Campbell

I will have a review of DC Adventures, essentially Mutants & Masterminds rebadged for that universe, in the next day or so. After a day of bed rest due to some kind of funky 24 hour bug I’ve been knocking chapters of Perseus out this evening. I should be on track for an August release in the Kindle store.

The last month was a medical one — I finally have insurance again, so I can do more than basic maintenance. (Unlike a lot of whingers, I actually value my health so I pay for it and am glad I can still buy quality. I could just go to the VA and slough it off on the public.) Teeth got cleaned and a root canal is in the offing. New glasses and my eyes are about the same as last time; not bad. However I might have ocular prehypertension. Shoulder strain fixed. Next, my badly deviated septum gets operated on (fun fun!). Blood pressure is fluctuating between normal and slightly high…not bad considering I’m doing nothing but reading and writing. I really need to get out and do more exericse.

Next month, the baby comes, so I’ve got about two weeks to punch out the main body of Perseus before I become sleep deprived and mostly useless. Cawnpore, my novel of the India Mutiny is in proofreading/editing as we speak and should be on track for a June release on the Kindle bookstore. Print on demand to follow, once I find a favorable venue.

Why Kindle? Why not go through the usual hoops of traditional publishing? For much the same reason many musicians are eschewing the big entertainment companies and going right to the market…I want to profit on my work, not lose most of it to middlemen. Additionally, I don’t find the notion of letting a small group of snobs dictate the literary quality. One only has to look at most postmodern tomes to see the wealth of adject crap that the publishing community has been foisting on us.

The stigma of self-publishing, once a common thing for authors in the 18th and 19th Centuries, is starting to collapse. E-publishing is cheaper and this forces the price point down; it’s good for the customers and bad for the big printing houses. It’s also great for the artists, who get the majority of the tuck from their work. Quality is less an issue than one might think: you can troll through the reviews of a work in the Kindle store and quickly make out if the work is good. Even if it’s not, at $1-3 a pop, you’re not getting shafted as bad as laying down $17 on a trade paperback of the latest postmodern crap that the guardians of taste would have us judge “high art.” (Take Steve Martin’s latest dense, shitty opus which is as dense and unedifying as Shopgirl was charming.)

I foresee a new era of “dime novels” coming, where fiction is predominantly electronic (modern pulp, if you will), while non-fiction and reference style materials continue on primarily in print. E-pub will be equated with “low art”, just as pulps and genre fiction have been for 70 years, but it will be the bulk of fiction sales in a matter of years.

Okay…that’s enough rambling: Release Cetus! (The name of the actual monster that threatens Andromeda, not the Kraken — which are Norse/Scandinavian in origin.)

UPDATE: Final word count for the night — 14000+.

…and adorableness ensues.

Here’s some saccharine sweet kittens playing in spaaaaaace!

Mine does this, too…

This was something I whipped together last Thursday as an “oh, crap! I don’t have dinner ready!” meal:

You need: 1 boneless chicken breast, frozen peas and/or green beans, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, oregano, basil, garlic powder, a can of chickpeas.

Mix 1/8 cup olive oil with the same amount of lemon juice, throw in 1/4 teaspoon of salt, pepper, oregano, basil, and garlic powder. Mix.

Poke the chicken with a fork to help the flavoring. Pour about a third of the mix onto the chicken, keep spooning it over the breast while the grill/griddle/whateveryourusing gets hot. Cook for 6-7 minutes.

While that’s cooking, heat about a 1/4 cup of green beans and peas, and add the chickpeas ’til warmish-hot. When done, spoon out half onto a plate or into a bowl and pour half the remaining sauce over it. Cut the chicken into strips and lay over the bed of chickpeas and greens.

Voila. Prep time: maybe 5 minutes, cook time: 6-8. Dinner in under 15 minutes and it’s a light, fresh treat. Adjust amounts for more than two.

Okay….I’m going to rant: I love my iPad, I really do. I do most of my morning computing on it, I use it for gaming (tabletop and on the device itself.) I liked it so much it drew me into a MacBook Air as my other computer. Apple makes great stuff.

But this is a bit much: already lines are forming for the iPad2. It goes on sale Friday evening, and there’s no preordering…however, it’s going to be available at a number of retailers, unlike the original iPad. Your phone companies will have it, Best Buy will have it, the Apple Store will have it, you’ll probably get one in a box of Cracker Jacks (which they do still make!)

In other words, you’re making yourself look like an utter prat if you are queueing up for the device. There will be plenty of them. If you have an iPad already, you probably don’t need to rush out for the new one — iOS 4.3 will give you a lot of benefits on performance. You won’t have a webcam, no; you’ll live.

It’s like queueing up for a movie to be the first to see it: you’re really not going to be extra-cool for more than a day…and like movie queue squatters, it’s the sort of thing that makes non-Apple people look at the Cupertino Cult askance (much as they do sci-fi fans.)

I usually work in strange places — the bar at my favorite coffeeshop (where I still get more done in an hour than all day at home), the kitchen table, sprawled on the couch…even when I had a desk, I rarely used it. The slouching over on the couch or at the kitchen table has contributed to my achy lower back and probably to the pinched nerve in my neck. So I decided to try using a standing desk, figuring it would be similar to using the bar at the coffeeshop. I did make an allowance for my feet by also buying a stool (it swivels!  Woo!)

Here’s the set up.

My tendency is to work with as little clutter around me as possible. Sometimes I need piles of books, and this set-up might prove a bit unwieldy for that, but for most writing and blogging, and other computer tasks, the desk is a good fit. The top shelf works for holding my drink or food, the middle holds the optic drive, cables, and backup drives for the Air, and the lowest has the books I’m using at the time.  The computer platform is adjustable for height, as is the stool.

The whole set-up was about $200.

I love the look on the cat’s face.