On being oddly dressed (by alaric)

Last Friday, I stood up in front of a hundred or so people and gave a five-minute talk on some software I've spent two years of my life writing. However, I wasn't particularly self-conscious about the fact that I was oddly dressed.

For me, clothes are about:

1. Keeping me warm
2. Carrying my stuff

It's not that their appearance doesn't matter to me - I don't want to be wearing shabby or tatty clothes. I don't want to wear garish bright colours. I like my clothes to more or less match, so I tend to choose solid dark colours when I buy myself clothes, as they're easy to look smart in.

But every now and then I get a comment from somebody that I must be a bit weird to go around wearing a podbelt and an assault vest... and when the weather's bad, I got outside in a full-length heavy cloak. Luckily, saying that sort of thing disqualifies people from me being too interested in their opinions, so it doesn't particularly bother me.

I like carrying lots of stuff with me. I'm equipped for every eventuality. When people get things in their eyes, I'm there with a mirror and tweezers. I have the obligatory geek multi-tool, of course. My first-aid kit has brought comfort to many a cut finger. My little lengths of string have jerry-rigged many a repair. I always have a torch, a compass, a pen, a notepad, a monocular, and a laser pointer to hand; so I can navigate, find things in the dark, read small text on a projector from the back of the room (and then point to the thing I'm asking about with the laser). If a button comes off of something, I sit down, take out my sewing kit, and fix it. In my laptop bag is a pouch full of cables and adapters, which has saved the day on many a late-night data-centre emergency. When it's raining so hard that people are cowering in shop doorways, my cloak keeps me dry; at the conference on Friday, when there were no seats left, it folded up tightly and became a low stool so I could sit comfortably. A week or so ago, when I was driving home from London very late one night and became too tired to continue, I pulled into a dark lay-by and slept underneath it, warm and comfortable even when the temperature plummeted before dawn.

I'm not just hoarding gadgets for the sake of it - I do assess the trade-offs of every extra bit of weight to carry around. Weight in the podbelt isn't an issue as it carries very nicely on my hips, I barely notice the weight of it, but space there is at a premium. Weight in the assault vest is more of an issue, since it pulls at my shoulders. I've tried having just a podbelt, but it's not good to wear while sitting down, so I tended to take it off and sling it over the back of the chair, which makes things harder to get at; and I've tried just having an assault vest, but weight was a problem. The current combination means I can keep lightweight things I often need while sitting down (mobile phone, pens, pads, business cards, laser pointer, etc) on me all the time, while weightier things I tend to need more on the move (keys, wallet, tools, first aid gear) in the podbelt. I have optional extra things I add for specific "missions" that I wouldn't want to carry all the time, too - I have a special tool jacket with loops for screwdrivers and the like which I wear if I'm doing DIY in awkward locations, an extra assault vest with more specialist stuff for when I'm busy being a Cub leader, a black lightweight mesh one with large pockets for hiking (the large pockets accept good quantities of food, GPSes, and the like), a water flask that goes on the podbelt, and a spare podbelt pouch that I'm going to assemble a survival kit in: emergency rations, a survival blanket, that sort of thing.

When I've explained this to people who question the amount of stuff I carry, they say "But what are the odds of all these things happening?". But they happen all the time! So I'm happy being prepared for anything... it makes life a lot less stressful. My clothes and their pockets become an extension of my body; we are, after all, all cyborgs.

A new laptop (by alaric)

To my great displeasure, my shiny MacBook Pro was stolen from the office in London!

So, I grabbed our finance guy and we went down to the nearest laptop shop and picked up the cheapest thing they had in the shop that would meet my needs: a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv7.

The first step was replacing Windows 7 with something. As I knew I might have some teething troubles with getting NetBSD installed, so might need to return to Windows to get online, I shrank the Win7 partition down so I could run it dual-boot rather than nuking the whole thing. However, it was worse than I feared - the NetBSD install CD wouldn't even boot - the boot loader came up, then complained it couldn't read the kernel.

Not good.

So I burnt an ISO of Arch Linux, which is the closest to BSD in the Linux world. No good, either - GRUB loaded, and couldn't load the Linux kernel. I downloaded the boot.kernel.org nano-ISO (which then boots over HTTP from a central server) and that booted OK; but many of the Linux installers I tried died of kernel panics during booting. I wondered if the difference was that boot.kernel.org had an ISOLINUIX-based installer rather than GRUB; googling for this, I found out that GRUB sometimes has trouble with some CD drives, and as such, Arch Linux came with the option of an ISOLINUX-based installer CD. So I burnt a copy of that, and pow, it worked!

I installed Arch Linux, but only in a small partition, still intending to try and install NetBSD via non-CDROM means at some point. I soon had X up, and all was quite well, apart from the fact that my wireless Ethernet module (a Broadcom 4315) didn't work. I found a driver and installed it, and then it was recognised, but it still refused to actually do any wifi. Bah humbug.

On a hunch, I re-downloaded the NetBSD installer ISO and burnt a new CD of it... and it worked, this time! Having wasted most of a week trying to get the first one booting then messing with Linux distros. So I left my Arch partition in place (in case I needed it for anything), and set up NetBSD. Got X working again, copied across the home directory I'd made under Arch rather than redoing my dotfiles, and was happy. Except that NetBSD also didn't like my wireless interface, and it had trouble with the ACPI too, so I can't read my battery status or do a suspend properly. I've found a NetBSD driver for Broadcom devices but I've yet to get it to compile (I think it was developed mainly for the macppc port, or I've just not applied the patch properly). When I get my kernel source tree compiling again I'll have a new kernel that also has verbose ACPI debug messages, which will probably help.

I get Xen working, though; it was painless now that NetBSD's boot loader can do multiboot kernels, meaning I didn't need to mess with GRUB; I just installed the xen tools, and a xen kernel, and a NetBSD/xen kernel, then added the following line to /boot.cfg:

  menu=Xen with 1GiB for dom0:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0 console=pc;multiboot /xen.gz dom0_mem=1024M

...and rebooted into a Xen dom0. Setting up some Linux domUs for my work has been more exciting: I downloaded Debian filesystem images and a kernel from stacklet.com, but when I bring it up, Debian complains it can't bring up the Xen virtual network interface - and that it's getting lots of disk errors on the Xen virtual block device (although it can actually read the filesystem without any trouble whatsoever). This may not be helped by the fact that the kernel I downloaded doesn't seem to match the /lib/modules directory in the filesystem image, alas. More work is required.

Still, I'm happy to be back on an X workstation. I liked my Mac, but I was feeling hankerings for open source software, and minimalism. I'm running dwm, dmenu, and remind, joined together with awesome shell scripts. I do miss the intergrated personal-information-management tools in Mac OS X; I want to brew up my own database of people/todos/events/etc in some Prolog dialect (eventually replacing remind), so I can express all the relationships between things that I want ("There is an all-day event on date X called 'Y's birthday' if there is a person P with name Y whose birthday has the same day and month as X", sort of thing) - it'd be nice if it could integrate with Thunderbird's address book, so I may have a look at the format of that (or look into a script to sync it to/from an LDAP directory).

Turquoise and Orange (by sarah)

Ok this is a follow on from why I've decided to not worry about my first publishing rights. I have expanded this to my poetry first off - this is now going up on Turquoise Monster this renders the poems I post useless for most anthologies and competitions but I'm sick of sending off all the poems wasting all that paper and enverlopes to get like £20 $6 etc... of course I still have a few poems that can't go up yet due to them being published in newspapers and stuff.

I decided it would be better to produce a book of my own - of poetry - I'll still send stuff off to the charity anthologies as I feel thats important but I feel that this sending off to have the poem appear once in something read by like 150 people is really starting to stunt my growth as a poet.

I have observed that most sales come from doing slams and talks and conferences and even those poets published the traditional way have ended up having to wave their books around saying 'please buy'.

I am also a 'niche' poet so finding someone willing to publish a poetry collection would be difficult. I plan to illustrate the poems for the actual 'books' and have infact been producing a visual poetry journal for sale in Ammerica.

I origonally decided I had to have a poetry website as people have been asking me where they can get my poems to read - and [A Picture of Words}(http://turquoise.monsters.wigglypets.co.uk/?p=12) has been taken by two seperate teachers to use as a classroom aid which made me very happy - they did ask first 🙂

I think obsqurity is more of a danger to my poetry career than piracy to be quiet honest - plus poetry really isn't a big earner - the top poetry books still sell minute numbers compared to say fiction books.

So that is why I am doing this with the poetry - [Orange Monster}(http://orange.monsters.wigglypets.co.uk/) on the other hand is where I am putting out my Children's books ideas.

There is a slightly different reasoning behind this one and it has nothing to do with the publishing industry and everything to do with Jean.

I came across a picture book alternative to NaNoWriMo called Picture Book Idea Month or PiBoIdMo the idea is you produce 30 picture book ideas in 30 days - I thought why not.

And I thought this becuase I've got lots of picture book ideas rattling about and none of them have been brought to completion and Jean is actually starting to get a bit old - at least for the board book ideas. After having made her the Little Book of Spoogy Poetry I thought I can use PiBoIdMo to give her all these stories - most of which she has inspired.

This way they might actually get written and enjoyed by her before she's too old. Weather I will go on to publish any of these I do not know but I plan to make the little books like I did at Halloween and one of the ideas you might all be getting for a christmas presant so you have been warned!

Right I suppose I should actually get on and do some work now!

First Publishing Rights (by sarah)

As some of you know I am taking part in NaNoWriMo this year (or National Novel Writing Month) and I am writing a long complicated historical cyberpunk type novel that is part of a larger story. I am putting all the plans and notes for both the full series and the specific novel on Purple Monster.

But I am also doing something which is a bit more controversial, and I've had quiet a few people being either angry or concerned about it. Firstly thankyou to the people who have endevoured to protect me from something that I may not have known about - First Publishing Rights.

What I have been doing, and what I plan to keep doing is placing novel excerpts on the blog - I am writing the whole novel straight onto the blog unless there is no internet in which case I am writing it in Text Edit. Obviously it is not a locked blog and the story is basically going out in chronological order (though only cause I have not hit a stumbling point yet where I have to jump over something I'll go back to later on!) in chunks of roughly 2000 words.

It is unedited and raw and I invite feed back and ideas as I write but what I am doing is giving away the First Publishing Rights - in me putting it out there on the blog in this way I am 'Publishing' it meaning that traditional publishers and many small Independents will not even consider publishing it when it is all finished and made smooth and shiny by editing.

So why am I doing this? Why am I apparently hobbling myself in this way?

The factors are I suppose three fold.

Firstly after having my work sat on by traditional publishing and the disheartening affect this had on me I decided I wanted control over the process and yes I know this means everything will be slower and there is no back up for marketing, but I have discovered that even in the traditional publishing arena you are now expected to do all or a lot of this yourself.

I'm not saying I'm guarenteed to become a huge success or anything like that, but this approach will give me some sort of control on how quickly I grow as well - and hopefully people will read my books not because I've been hyped in some media circus but because people like them and have told their friends.

This is a slow way to grow a fan base and I am aware that I may be damaging it by having unedited stuff out there as some people can't see past spelling mistakes, but that is the version that will be there for free so I don't see they have any room to complain. I know there's already eight people who are waiting each day for the next bit of the novel and I hope I don't disappoint them.

And here is another issue I have - I am finding it alot easier to write this novel than The Drs Wife was as it is going out instantly as blog posts. I am thinking of it in segments - it's such a large project that if I think on it as one whole great big thing I would never write it. But though I find writing for the audience/readers important I also don't want to be driven by their expectations.

And it is the expectation and deadline part of the publishing world that has also lead me to attempt things this way - why? Because, let's face it, my health is all over the place and I can't cope with stuff that has hard deadlines and meeting specific word counts because thats what your contract says is just not going to work - if I could cope with that I would be doing my science again.

And then there's the fact that this is really just an experiment - there are lots of arguments about Self Publishing versus Traditional Publishing and I am taking things a step futhur still by offering the entire novel in one form or another for free to the reader. Now obviously through Alaric's associations the authors I have been following the most have been people like Reynolds whose blog become Sweat, Blood and Tea (ambulance driver, quite funny, does a blinding impression of Holly from Red Dwarf) and Cory Doctorow (though I have to confess the only thing that I really remember about him is that he had a jacket full of zips - though I do now follow both on twitter).

Now obviously they both give stuff away for free and still they get money for their books; but they were before the curve as I term it and now there is a flooded internet and google have mucked about with how they rank blog archives which is a right pain the bum. So I thought about it and I came up with an experiment.

I wonder if self publishing by building yourself a reputation by giving away free stuff will work. I wonder if I'm likely to actually complete a novel if it is being read in serial form like Jules Vern's stuff was written?

Let's bung the whole lot on a blog including the stages of idea building and editing - do it as part of nano as that will jump start it and give me a sense of community and stop me from stalemating myself on research.

Polish it and sell e-book and self published physical books with the free unedited version up and see what happens.

Ok as an experiment it is bad - there are no controls and there is definitely more than one variable - maybe it should be seen as more of a simulation type thing - I am creating a system and seeing how it behaves.

I am also assuming that Cory and Co are not the norm as they were the spark that caused this reaction to occur.

This may seem like a stupid dangerous gamble with my precious novel that I've already put a lot of work in and indeed the whole series but I am an ideas generator - I can at the end of the day always write another of my novel ideas to sell in the traditional way if this fails - it is not designed to bring in money instantly either.

As to what I would decide if a publisher then offered me a contract I can't tell you - it would probably depend on what was in the contract to be honest!

And this leads me to my finial issue - people are very edgy about all this self publishing and the like but with companies like LULU and print on demand machines I just can't see the traditional models or systems holding up - this doesn't mean the end of the book or good quality writing at all but it does mean that perhapse a system based on the concept of needing large warehouses to store tones of books which periodically get pulped if not sold in time is maybe out moded? (not to mention environmentally damaging and wasteful of resources.)

I believe there were similar issues when the printing press was invented and everybody could just make their own newpapers.

My work is free because I stagnate otherwise - I have just crossed the 10 k word barrier and so am a 5th of the way to completing the nanowrimo challenge - I am excited about my experiment and have expanded it to my poetry on Turquoise Monster and a picture book challenge on Orange Monster - I'll cover why I've done this in another post or two 🙂

The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry (by sarah)

I've been quiet sick this week again - as in I've had several days where I couldn't function at all - today I'm a bit better though still having dizzy spells and being very very tired but I decided to create for Jean The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry.

Spoogy is the word she tends to say instead of spooky and she really likes Halloreen stuff and kept asking for stories and rhymes - so this morning I wrote the first half of a story I hope to have finished for Saturday for her it's called Hetty Peglar's Tump after a local earthworks.

Anyway I realised I wasn't going to get a chance to illistrate the story for her before then and I really wanted to do some halloween drawings for her so I thought I'd do a poetry book instead.

No I wrote all the poems today and I junked about 1 and half times what I've put in and they are well... mostly rhyming and Jean specific so I ain't going to win no great prizes with them but Jean seems to like them.

I'll be putting the poems on Turquoise Monster and how I made the book on Salaric Carft. But until then here are a few of the pages with the pictures pre-binding.