A post elsewhere, in which I say some Banned Books Week things

Over at Renegade Word, which is run by the extremely smart and interesting Julie Rodriguez, you can find a piece by me on censorship and bullying. 

Full disclosure: Julie is my stepdaughter, which just goes to show you that even being smart and interesting cannot protect you from the vagaries of fortune. 

And I'm hoping to start blogging more regularly fairly soon; right now my nose is down in the process of finishing The Last President, and I've also got a new client to do a major project for, but life is creeping back toward normal as I finish the office relocation process.  (All right, when did I pack the dead squirrel?  Or was it dead when I packed it?)

Meanwhile, though, if you're in the Denver area (and even if you're not), One Night Stand Theater, which is a new-works reading group, will be doing their adaptation of a chapter from Tales of the Madman Underground this Sunday, October 7, as part of a bill that also includes work by the ever-frightening* Steve Rasnic Tem.  Details, tickets, all that.

*In a good way.  He writes some terrific horror.  Full disclosure: I'm not related to him.

A mostly commercial announcement that was supposed to be brief

1. Very much commercial: I've closed my eBay store, which is where I was selling my old author copies (as the sole source of mint- or brand-new-condition signed first editions).  Sales had been dwindling and I've had four straight months where the store was wobbling around breaking even, nor did I see much prospect of bringing in vast hordes of new buyers.  I think the collector population is pretty much all Barnesed up, and eBay stores, while wonderful from a convenience standpoint for both buyer and seller, are also somewhat costly.

2. This doesn't mean I'm not still selling signed first editions (and foreign editions and other good things).  I'm putting together a catalog/pricelist, which I will make available to newsletter subscribers as soon as I finish it, and to everyone on request around November 15 (i.e. at the start of holiday shopping, the six weeks during which I've usually made about half my sales for the year).

3. And speaking of the newsletter, another one is imminent, with various news of various Barnesian projects, plus a longish essay (usually 2000-6000 words) that I pledge will never go anywhere other than to newsletter subscribers.  (Permission to quote is however readily granted).  If you've ever bought anything from me via eBay, or the e-Junkie service, or directly, then you're on the list unless you asked not to be.  You can also get on it by emailing me via the link to the right.  I hand manage the list, so all formats are fine -- any way in which you tell me you want your email address added is good.  (And of course you can also drop me a note asking to be taken off).  I have hopes the newsletter will go out tonight or tomorrow morning.  (And if you see this too late, nil desperandum; I always send the previous newsletter to new requests).

4. Cider House Rules, in which I am acting, is getting great reviews and pretty good buzz in Denver, so if you were thinking of seeing it, since the house is small (the back row is the third row!) you may want to get tickets soon (it plays through Sept. 30).

5.   A chapter of Tales of the Madman Underground has been adapted for performance by Denver's own One Night Stand Theater.  Jim O'Leary has done his usual splendid job at converting page prose to stage poetry, and I'm pretty excited that this is going to be performed, on Sunday, October 7.  (Denver area SF writer Steve Raznik Tem also has a story in the performance, so you know this is a class operation all the way).  Details and ticket orders here.

6. More stuff soon.  I'm still having thoughts, it's just the paid gigs are eating up typing time.  See you all soon.

I open the bag again

The Book Doctor's Little Black Bag: Facing up to goodness – Getting to the Good Parts ...: Symptoms and diagnosis: "Mary Sue"  is a term in literary analysis/nitpicking that is something like "paranoia" or "neurotic" ...

As life drifts back into normality, I'm getting back to some longrunning projects, one of which is The Book Doctor's Little Black Bag, in which I share some of the tricks I learned as a book doctor.  Plenty about it over there, including a warning page about the audience: most of this was originally things I explained to people who were almost-publishable.  It may not be applicable to beginning writers (or it might; i'm simply not worrying about them, as heaven knows there are plenty of sites and workshops for them).

 This particular episode is about Mary Sue-ism, and especially about how fixing it can lead you to better things than just a repair and an acceptance.

Where I'm back again from, and what's up

Well, yes, it's been a while, more than three weeks actually, but the chaos is drawing to an uneasy close, like one of those wars that ends in a long miserable drag-out where everyone is just trying not to be the last official casualty. The old office is evacuated, with just a few of the hapless Embassy maids and cooks falling from the helicopter skids, the new office is getting set up at a rate for which "glacial" would be a compliment. Opening night for the play I've been in rehearsal for is tonight, I'm caught up in my paid blogging for various technical and business websites, I've had some sleep and showers, and I'm back at work on The Last President, which is the third Daybreak novel.

So this entry is just sort of a catch-up, and herewith a few links:

I've sent out email notices and changed account addresses to everyone I knew I had to, but those of you who regularly deal with me via streetmail (especially the couple times a year collectors who prefer streetmail, and any of you lovely people who mail out checks) might want to drop me an email if I've overlooked you.

The CiderHouse Rules, in which I am an actor, opens tonight, at the VintageTheatre, 1468 Dayton Street, in Aurora. It's a long play -- there's a Part I and a Part II -- and this weekend we're just opening Part I; next week we'll go on the schedule of Part I in the matinee and Part II in the evening, so Friday and Saturday, today and tomorrow, are your chances to see Part I at night. First time I've walked onto a stage (except to build a set, check a light, or throw rehearsal furniture at actors) in 19 years. Details about the show and ticketshere; I can feel two to four 3000-Word Ramblers impending about it, but since I don't know how soon they'll swim up from the unconscious, or really what they'll be about (I usually don't know till halfway through the first draft) meanwhile, go see the show.

For those of you who still wonder what a statistical semiotician does and how it differs from the semiotics or semiology that your English or art history professor might have talked about, recently one of my editors at UBM was foolish enough to ask me that same question, and published my answer.  Contains no numbers or graphs.

Over at Metafilter, cgc373 noticed my I Hate Snark post from December, and provoked a very interesting discussion of it, of exactly the type that I can enjoy reading because I'm not the least bit responsible for maintaining or policing it, and therefore feel fairly little desire to comment, defend, expand, etc. myself. But if you've been wanting to say something about it, a bunch of civil and smart people (some of whom I agree with more than others, obviously) are talking about it there. Also, in his blog, Joshua Miller posted something so interesting that in a week or a month or whenever I know what I think about it, I'll probably say something in this blog, so go read his piece and watch this space.

The RNC is now history, which means that Raise the Gipper! (still available free by clicking on the link off to your right) is now alternate history. Interestingly, sales hit their highest spike just before the convention, which I think was a case of people preferring an imaginary world where the Republican nominee was a decaying brain-destroying corpse to a real world where it's Mitt Romney, and, on balance, who can blame them?*

I now plunge back into the mountains of boxes and furniture; there's an office in here, I'm pretty sure, if I just keep moving things to where they belong. More much sooner than lately.***

§

*Stray observation: before the convention I thought of old Mitt as an amiable doofus pathetically trying to reach above his doofushood, so that's how I depicted him in Raise the Gipper!. Nowadays, to me, he looks more like a doofus who is willing to be vicious, but to remain mired in his doofushood, as long as he gets to stand up front and look important. Doesn't it seem like the Republicans revere Reagan so much that ever since he retired they've been nominating people who make him look somewhat better in retrospect? I mean, at least once a month during both Bushes, I found myself beginning a sentence with, "You know, even Reagan didn't ..."**

**there has now been a footnote, and a metafootnote. This entry is therefore complete, though short by my odd standards.

***the more I look at that phrase the better I like it. I must have bumped my head sometime this morning.  Hope I bump it again.

Stuff that dropped off a full plate

For those of you who arise in the morning hoping that today there will be another 3000-word Rambler, well, not yet.  I'm in process of moving my office and I'm in the last weeks of rehearsing a play I'm in (first time on stage in 19 years.  Shocked to find out I've missed it so much).  So it'll be a while.

Meanwhile, though, I continue to write at several blogs in that other side of my life, marketing intelligence analysis.  Most of you are usually not interested, I have found, in subjects like the Kia Hamstas, Hiscox's quietly brilliant use of a mobile app in B2B insurance, the Zipf distribution of market share, or new statistics for estimating virality.  At least I think that's why you flee me at parties.  But as it happens, today's piece at All Analytics  has something to do with politics, in which some of you are interested, and specifically in structural graphs (pictures that show you how an election works rather than who's winning or predicting who will). So for those of you who just can't get enough of the election, get thee to the link, and you will see a nifty picture and some discussion of it.

For those of you who've already gotten too much, there's always the link to Raise the Gipper! at right.  See you all again, soon,  but probably not very soon.

A numeric approach to the seamy side of life: a very fast and esoteric follow-on for people who sew

Two people dropped me a note asking where I found out how thick a No. 5 sharp was, which they've been wanting to know, apparently, for years.   I had to look  that one up too, and searched for a while before finding the basic info at Prym's catalog website.  And then digging through half a dozen crafting websites.  The note from my crafty friends brought me to the blinding realization that this wasn't actually available anywhere easily in any place I could quickly find on line.

So as a little nod to everyone who likes to make stuff, here's what some research, checking needles from my sewing kit (so I got interested, so sue me) with calipers (because Prym and Simplicity both tend to round needle diameters to the nearest .10), and extrapolating led me to. This might be more useful for model-builders and miniature-makers than for seamst(ers)(resses) anyway, since at least it tells you what size hole a given needle will poke.

For the much too interested: Basically American needle sizes and European are arbitrary number sequences. 

An American No. 1 needle is a millimeter thick.  Each successive number is .05 mm thinner.  Having found a couple of Simplicity hand-sewing needle converstion charts, it became immediately clear that the European system is simply the American number plus 19; the advantage of this for Europeans would seem to be that their shoe and sailmaking needles can all be on the same scale.


PLEASE NOTE: FOR HAND SEWING ONLY.  MACHINE NEEDLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
 No warranty implied!  If you end up using the wrong needled to sew your zombie together and the first time he flips a guy off his hand flies backwards over his head, it's your problem (and his) not mine.

A short one for fun, with math

At the moment I'm drowning in half-finished blog posts as I keep having ideas and getting interrupted before I chew them to my satisfaction; one of the glories of Them There Interwebbical Things is that I don't have to chase after the biggest audience I can find, or any audience at all really, and just figure that the people who enjoy 3000-word Ramblers (tip of the hat to Mitch Wagner, who refers to many of my pieces as that) will find them here, and if that's not very many people, well, some of us are having fun and the rest of you will have to go find pictures of cute babies and cats and short punchy posts about whatever you like to be punched shortly about.

Anyway, having digressed, let me just point you to the following Tweet from Peter Aldhous:

We’ve travelled 560 million km. We’re right on target to fly through the eye of a needle. Target 3km * 12 km #MSL press conf @NASAJPL

The question, of course, is just how proportionate that is.

So ... or sew ... 

A No. 5 sharp hand sewing needle (what most of us keep around for sewing on buttons and closing up small tears) is 0.8 mm thick. The eye of  a sharp is usually about 4/5 of its width, so that would be around 0.64 mm.   An average height middle-class American woman* is 1.648 m tall, and women's eye-to-fingertip length averages 46% of height, so proportionately, if we assume for some horrible reason that this poor crazy woman is threading the needle by raising the thread to her eye and then trying to hit the eye of the needle at arm's length, that thread tip is traveling 1184.5 times the width of the aperture that the sewing woman is so awkwardly trying to hit.** 

NASA's Curiosity, neglecting for the moment that it's traveling in an enormous curved orbit to do it, is traveling 560 million km to hit an aperture 3 km by 12 km.  To make the comparison to the needle a little better, a 3X12 rectangle has the same area as a circle with diameter of 6.77.***  So distance/aperture  is 560 million/6.77=82,714,513.  

You could look on that as NASA trying to hit a needle's eye, not at arm's-length, but at 69,830 arm's-lengths (which comes to about 53 kilometers, if the woman's arm length is the 758 mm I was using before).  Add to that that they're hitting it by throwing (rather than hand-guiding) about a quarter-circle of a curve.  Or you could look on it as the woman trying to thread a needle eye  (at arm's length, remember) that is  only about 9 nanometers wide (about the width of 25 calcium atoms laid out in a straight line).  

That's some sewing there, NASA. Maybe your department of metaphors should look for a metaphor that's about six orders of magnitude more incredible, because that's what you're doing.

§

*why a woman? why not? 

why middle class? because that's the point where early nutrition plays a minimal part.  

why American? Because although my country doesn't take particularly good care of its citizens, it keeps excellent, easily accessible records of the consequences of not taking care of them.

** a=aperture.  d=distance. a=0.64; d=46%*1648 (once you put both in millimeters); d/a=1648/0.64=1184.5.

*** Area=3X12=36=pi(r squared).  r=sqrt(Area/pi)=about 3.39 (staying at two digit precision).  diameter= about 6.77 (same precision)=aperture.  Why use the area?  Because that's what matters when you're trying to hit a target at a distance.  Why circularize?  Because that was what I was doing with the eye of the needle; d/a, distance over aperture, was the proportion of  the distance traveled by the thread tip to the diameter of the needle's eye.  If you want another number figured another way, cook it yourself (and I hope you do).