Spontaneous ∂erivation

The third Psmith book, Psmith, Journalist, spends most of its time answering the question:

How much flak could a Psmith flak, if a Psmith could flak flak?

We have at the very least the following answers:

• Psmith can usurp a paper entitled Cosy Moments and turn it into a campaign against the landlords of the early 20th century New York tenement slums;

• Psmith can defuse the temper of six self-entitled writers he let go upon becoming sub-editor of Cosy Moments;

• Psmith can fuel the new audience for Cosy Moments by opportunities that others miss by way of being more sensible, i.e., find a young boxing prospect and turn him into a daily feature by allowing him to commit violence upon the art that is writing and publish it every day.

• Psmith will not stand down when an emissary of the most unscrupulous and hidden financiers of “Pleasant Street” (where said slums are) visits him and attempts to bribe him into shutting down the slum lord articles;

• Psmith will not flee like a sensible Cambridge student should when said financier starts paying underworld crime gangs to shut down the paper and its staff by any means possible;

• Psmith runs into schemes more violent and deadly to any he’s ever been exposed to before, and still does not flee, in the end managing to (barely) not die.

A note: Psmith, Journalist has a little casual racist terminology mentioned in a few remarks in the opening chapter, as well as a scene in one of the last chapters, which dates it as a work from the first decades of the 20th century, and particularly that of a British man writing about a multi-cultural American city. Then again, it’s not like most of the American authors at the time did much better, and many much worse.

In his previous two books, Psmith was a force of nature, and here Wodehouse gives the spotlight fully unto him—this time, while Psmith tags along with Mike on his cricket team’s tour of America, Psmith stays behind in New York while Mike’s cricket team visits Philadelphia. Bored and lonely, Psmith decides to amuse himself with the challenge of turning a family paper into a real news sheet with a booming circulation number, taking temporary editor Billy Windsor (standing in for Cosy Moments‘ real editor, off taking some 10 weeks vacation of complete rest in the Appalachians) under his wing. Think Mike, but more cowboy-ish.

Sadistically, because Psmith is so resourceful, cunning, arguably insane, and brave, Wodehouse decides to throw him into the deep end with the sharks of the New York underworld. The result is an unsettling hybrid of American violence, yellow journalism, upper crust corruption, lower class hell, and the understated British stiff upper lip—with Psmith’s distinct and unique touch.

In the test to destruction that is Psmith, Journalist, one suspects as the violence escalates that Psmith, of England’s upper class, cosseted and unexposed to the darker underside of crime, will give it all up and head back to the safety of England. However, we find that apparently Psmith is made of sterner stuff.

In his previous encounters with those with whom fate had brought him in contact there had been little at stake. The prize of victory had been merely a comfortable feeling of having had the best of a battle of wits; the penalty of defeat nothing worse than the discomfort of having failed to score. But this tenement business was different. Here he had touched the realities. There was something worth fighting for. His lot had been cast in pleasant places, and the sight of actual raw misery had come home to him with an added force from that circumstance. He was fully aware of the risks that he must run. The words of the man at the Astor, and still more the episodes of the family friend from Missouri and the taximeter cab, had shown him that this thing was on a different plane from anything that had happened to him before. It was a fight without gloves, and to a finish at that. But he meant to see it through.

Things get worse, and worse, and worse. But in the end, Psmith, of course, manages to see it through, and not too much worse for the wear.

Psmith, Journalist is an unusual work in the Wodehousian canon, an odd bit of grittiness in American reality tales sandwiched between his early school stories and his later, more familiar Edwardian-age romantic comedies.

Will you be poorer for not reading it? I don’t think so. But it is an interesting contrast in the history of Wodehouse, and very nearly the last Psmith tale.

Thankfully, someone near and dear to Wodehouse wanted another Psmith story, and thus some years later the world was presented with Leave it to Psmith, a much better last curtain for the incomparable and incorrigible Psmith. Next time, we’ll explore the benefits of a more seasoned Wodehouse on the character of Psmith in one of the best comedic novels ever written.

© cynical-c.com
used with permission

After the unappreciated carefreeness of school days, comes the unending weariness of work, if you’re like most of us. Especially if you live in the U.S. or Japan.

Then there’s Psmith. If he’s a less than ideal student for the school master who wishes to squash his friends, he’s an even less ideal employee for the manager who likes making his underlings’ lives miserable. Which is exactly what happens in Psmith in the City, when a wealthy and vindictive bank manager convinces Psmith’s father to put Psmith under his wing in the working world as opposed to sending him off to Cambridge for a law degree. It says unfortunate things for Mr. Smith’s attention span that he agrees to this proposition so easily.

Mike is along for the ride once more, as his family falls onto hard times, and he has to put in hours at a bank instead of going to University—and falls under the thumb of the same bank manager, who goes by the lovely name of Mr. Bickersdyke. There’s still some amount of Mike and cricket involved, but at the end it serves as a much better plot point than it did in Mike and Psmith.

In large part, however, the story is about Psmith sending up Authority while keeping himself and Mike amused and, later, out of trouble. There’s still a youthfulness in this adventure that recalls Schoolboy Days, as the first year of work invariably feels like. As a result, Psmith in the City is an enjoyable and irreverent romp that gives Authority the bird—and then some. It ranges from Psmith subtly pestering Bickersdyke at the club they share, with the most bang for the least energy from him:

Psmith found him a quarter of an hour later in the card-room. He sat down beside his table, and began to observe the play with silent interest. Mr Bickersdyke, never a great performer at the best of times, was so unsettled by the scrutiny that in the deciding game of the rubber he revoked, thereby presenting his opponents with the rubber by a very handsome majority of points. Psmith clicked his tongue sympathetically.

Dignified reticence is not a leading characteristic of the bridge-player’s manner at the Senior Conservative Club on occasions like this. Mr Bickersdyke’s partner did not bear his calamity with manly resignation. He gave tongue on the instant. “What on earth’s”, and “Why on earth’s” flowed from his mouth like molten lava. Mr Bickersdyke sat and fermented in silence. Psmith clicked his tongue sympathetically throughout.

Mr Bickersdyke lost that control over himself which every member of a club should possess. He turned on Psmith with a snort of frenzy.

“How can I keep my attention fixed on the game when you sit staring at me like a—like a—”

“I am sorry,” said Psmith gravely, “if my stare falls short in any way of your ideal of what a stare should be; but I appeal to these gentlemen. Could I have watched the game more quietly?”

“Of course not,” said the bereaved partner warmly. “nobody could have any earthly objection to your behaviour. It was absolute carelessness. I should have thought that one might have expected one’s partner at a club like this to exercise elementary—”

But Mr Bickersdyke had gone. He had melted silently away like the driven snow.

Psmith took his place at the table.

“A somewhat nervous, excitable man, Mr Bickersdyke, I should say,” he observed.

to… ah, this would spoil some surprises, but let’s just say that things escalate.

Wodehouse’s writing has stretched its humorous wings, touching upon other characters and actions with wry yet efficient descriptions that are at once both colorfully vivid and undeniably funny. I enjoyed, for instance, this description of Bickersdyke after Psmith’s subtle working-overs the night before:

Mr Bickersdyke sat in his private room at the New Asiatic Bank with a pile of newspapers before him. At least, the casual observer would have said that it was Mr Bickersdyke. In reality, however, it was an active volcano in the shape and clothes of the bank-manager.

It’s in Psmith in the City where Wodehouse’s talent for turning a phrase, one vital to the writer of comedy of any stripe, begins to truly bloom. One of my favorites is: “But, then, trouble is such an elastic word. It embraces a hundred degrees of meaning.”

In the battle between employee and manager, however, who’s going to win is not a question easily answered, even if one of the parties involved is Psmith, and the tension is tight throughout the book—tighter than it was in Mike and Psmith, not the least because Mike is a little more aware of the doom around him, which Psmith does a fair amount of shielding him from.

In large part, however, despite Psmith in the City starting with Mike, it ends strongly on Psmith’s side. At least the book is appropriately titled. But it’s obvious by now that the Psmith and Mike partnership falls strongly on Psmith’s side in every narrative way. By comparison, the Bertie and Jeeves relationship is much more balanced from a storytelling perspective, because the more powerful character works behind the scenes, while the less brainy character is more active in his own destinies (even if it’s mostly to screw things up).

This inequality did not escape Wodehouse’s notice, so the spotlight is unequivocally given to Psmith in the next book, Psmith, Journalist. And as we’ll see next time, now that Mike is not around anymore to be the author’s punching bag, Psmith meets with almost more trouble than he can handle.

  Psmith in the City: Kindle/Mobipocket (183.3 KiB, 310 hits)

(where single quotes have been summarily dealt with)

Like most other English gentlemen and wizards in literature, Psmith got his start in boarding school.

Or rather, Wodehouse at the time was writing in the YA sub-genre of English boarding school stories. Most share certain characteristics that you’ll also recognize in the early Harry Potter books:

• The protagonist’s head of house is motherly (even if he’s a man), more than a little bit nerdy in some way or other, and all in all a good person. (McGonagall in Harry Potter is rather more assertive, but it boils down to the same thing, though the details are different.)

• There’s a paranoid and arrogant head of another house who believes that the protagonist has done something nasty, even though he’s innocent, and will go to great lengths to prove that this is so, crossing the boundaries of the good head of house.

• A main team sport at school plays a quite important role in the life of the protagonist. In Harry Potter it’s Quidditch; in Wodehouse’s stories it’s cricket. (At least you get an explanation of Quidditch in the Harry Potter stories; cricket leaves this American quite lost.)

• The captain of the team sport at school is extremely passionate about his school winning. Indeed, he dreams about it and lives in constant hope of it, and will attempt to draft the protagonist. He’s usually the equivalent of a goalie.

• Said captain leads the underdog team (whether the school itself is just the underdog, or if it’s a particular house that happens to be the underdog) and it’s the protagonist who makes the difference.

• There’s a pair of boys on the team who just aren’t that serious, though they are good chaps in the end, and encourage sanity on the part of some insane schedule brought on by the team captain.

• About five minutes after he steps onto the school grounds for the first time, the protagonist makes an enemy in the form of an opposing student who has a gang of not-very-intelligent followers. (In Mike and Psmith, eventually the hatchet is buried; in Harry Potter, not so much.)

• The protagonist himself makes close friends with one or two intelligent and/or very loyal students who play an important role in getting him out of sticky wickets.

• The final confrontation tends to involve the headmaster and the evil teacher and the nasty trick that the protagonist is being framed for, but cunning and luck wins the day. (Of course, there are much higher stakes in Harry Potter.)

• And finally… the protagonist is a bit dim but a good, kind-hearted boy.

The above doesn’t seem to fit good old Psmith, does it? Was he perhaps rough in the beginning days?

Why, not at all. In the beginning days he’s just as much of a scheming, insouciant dandy as he is in later books. In fact, in Mike and Psmith, Psmith was not the protagonist at all, but a supporting character who plays at a mix of Ron and a less awkward Hermione—Mike Jackson was the star of the show. Or so Wodehouse wrote it. Or at least attempted to write it.

The problem with crafting fiction is that sometimes a character who’s strong enough will run away with the story. And that’s what happens here, from the first time Mike meets him:

A very long, thin youth, with a solemn face and immaculate clothes, was leaning against the mantelpiece. As Mike entered, he fumbled in his top left waistcoat pocket, produced an eyeglass attached to a cord, and fixed it in his right eye. With the help of this aid to vision he inspected Mike in silence for a while, then, having flicked an invisible speck of dust from the left sleeve of his coat, he spoke.

“Hello,” he said.

He spoke in a tired voice.

“Hello,” said Mike.

Psmith presents an unusual picture for a young man in a boarding school (about 17 years of age or so), and his mannerism is quite odd. His sarcasm can be cutting and delivered so deadpan, that you don’t know if he seriously believes what he’s saying, or if he’s mocking something. For instance, when he asks Jackson,

“Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is Led Astray and takes to Drink in Chapter Sixteen?”

“The last, for choice,” said Mike, “but I’ve only just arrived, so I don’t know.”

“The boy—what will he become? Are you new here, too, then?”

“Yes! Why, are you new?”

“Do I look as if I belonged here? I’m the latest import. Sit down on yonder sette, and I will tell you the painful story of my life. By the way, before I start, there’s just one thing. If you ever have occasion to write to me, would you mind sticking a P at the beginning of my name? P-s-m-i-t-h. See? There are too many Smiths, and I don’t care for Smythe. My father’s content to worry along in the old-fashioned way, but I’ve decided to strike out a fresh line. I shall found a new dynasty….”

If you remember Harry Potter’s first meetings with Ron, with Hermione, and even with Draco, you’ll notice that his partner in the scene never dominates in the way Psmith dominates Mike. And Psmith isn’t just limited to Mike in this manner, but tends to plough over all in his path. Maybe an hour after meeting Mike, he steals appropriates another student’s study room for the two of them—an older and burlier student at that.

“What the dickens,” inquired the newcomer, “are you doing here?”

“We are having a little tea,” said Psmith, “to restore our tissues after our journey. Come in and join us. We keep open house, we Psmiths. Let me introduce you to Comrade Jackson. A stout fellow. Homely in appearance, perhaps, but one of us. I am Psmith. Your own name will doubtless come up in the course of general chitchat over the teacups.”

“My name’s Spiller, and this is my study.”

Psmith leaned against the mantelpiece, put up his eyeglass, and harangued Spiller in a philosophical vein.

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” said he, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ Too late! That is the bitter cry. If you had torn yourself from the bosom of the Spiller family by an earlier train, all might have been well. But no. Your father held your hand and said huskily, ‘Edwin, don’t leave us!’ Your mother clung to you weeping, and said, ‘Edwin, stay!’ Your sisters—”

“I want to know what—”

“Your sisters froze on to your knees like little octopuses (or octopi), and screamed, ‘Don’t go Edwin!’ And so,” said Psmith, deeply affected by his recital, “you stayed on till the later train; and, on arrival, you find strange faces in the familiar room, a people that know not Spiller.” Psmith went to the table, and cheered himself with a sip of tea. Spiller’s sad case had moved him greatly.

And yes, Psmith is sending up just about every other Boy’s Boarding School story ever. And it’s more or less the case that whenever he speaks, his dramatic and serious recital, contrasted to its ridiculous content, generates at times an absurd amount of humor.

His tendency to dominate a scene also extends to the adults. Here, Psmith, Mike, and Spiller see their head of house, Mr. Outwood, to settle the matter of the ownership of the study:

“Ah, Spiller,” [Mr. Outwood] said. “And Smith, and Jackson. I am glad to see you have already made friends.”

“Spiller’s, sir,” said Psmith, laying a hand patronizingly on the study-claimer’s shoulder—a proceeding violently resented by Spiller—”is a character one cannot help but respect. His nature expands before one like some beautiful flower.”

Mr. Outwood received this eulogy with rather a startled expression, and gazed at the object of the tribute in a surprised way.

“Er—quite so, Smith, quite so,” he said at last. “I like to see boys in my house friendly toward one another.”

“There is no vice in Spiller,” pursued Psmith earnestly. “His heart is the heart of a little child.”

“Please, sir,” burst out the paragon of all the virtues, “I—”

“But it was not entirely with regard to Spiller that I wished to speak to you, sir, if you were not too busy.”

“Not at all, Smith, not at all. Is there anything…”

“Please, sir—” began Spiller.

“I understand, sir,” said Psmith, “that there is an Archaeological Society in the school.”

Mr. Outwood’s eyes sparkled behind their pince-nez. It was a disappointment to him that so few boys seemed to wish to belong to his chosen band. Cricket and football, games that left him cold, appeared to be the main interest in their lives.

I did mention Psmith was manipulative? And did I mention he has no fear, not even of the token paranoid master of an opposing house who wishes to do his friend, the protagonist, and all who stand in his way, ill? One of the best scenes in Mike and Psmith starts with said master, Mr. Downing, demanding that Psmith show him around Mr. Outwood’s house rooms:

“With acute pleasure, sir,” said Psmith. “Or shall I fetch Mr. Outwood, sir?”

“Do as I tell you, Smith,” snapped Mr. Downing.

Psmith said no more, but went down to the matron’s room. The matron being out, he abstracted the bunch of keys from her table and rejoined the master.

“Shall I lead the way, sir?” he asked.

Mr. Downing nodded.

“Here, sir,” said Psmith, opening the door, “we have Barnes’s dormitory. An airy room, constructed on the soundest hygienic principles. Each boy, I understand, has quite a considerable number of cubic feet of air all to himself. It is Mr. Outwood’s boast that no boy has ever asked for a cubic foot of air in vain. He argues justly—”

He broke off abruptly and began to watch the other’s maneuvers in silence. Mr. Downing was peering rapidly beneath each bed in turn.

“Are you looking for Barnes, sir?” inquired Psmith politely. “I think he’s out in the field.”

Mr. Downing rose, having examined the last bed, crimson in the face with the exercise.

“Show me the next dormitory, Smith,” he said, panting slightly.

“This,” said Psmith, opening the next door and sinking his voice to an awed whisper, “is where I sleep!”

His remarks are not much appreciated by Downing. But they are appreciated by us.

Psmith proceeds to shield Mike in all manners cunning and humorous—though he isn’t perfect, which naturally proceeds to cause more complications. Mike, meanwhile, wanders about in earnest cluelessness as the nets close on him, not even suspecting until about two chapters from the end what, exactly, is afoot. The fallout is bally fun, so to speak, and at the end it’s Psmith who has the cathartic talk with the headmaster—although, this being Psmith, it’s a somewhat unusual one.

When I read Mike and Psmith, I find it easiest to ignore anything from <cricket> to </cricket>, to read Mike’s wanderings because they are the plot, and to fall over laughing over everything involving Psmith.

Still, this is school. Ragging on school masters is different from ragging on, oh… an employer. Not like that stops Psmith in Psmith in the City, which we’ll look at next time.

Up until now, I’d never had a desire to read Wodehouse’s Psmith, much less create eBooks out of them. Then I ran into the double-header of a terrible Jeeves and Blandings rewrite and a dearth of P. G. Wodehouse public domain eBooks. The third out was the lack of even public domain Wodehouse in the Feedbooks library, since such eBooks must of necessity be stored on US servers—anywhere else and said servers can be seized.

There’s nothing like forbidden fruit to inspire desire. Fortunately, I live in the U.S., and so do the servers of my hosting provider.

After spending a full weekend researching, writing, and otherwise hacking some perl scripts together to process Project Gutenberg texts into something approaching nice HTML (and which have since come in handy for the conversion of other formats), I descended from the storm-ringed mountains of righteous anger to the placid green valley of “well, what now?”

So I decided to read some Psmith to convalesce and enjoy, for at least a little while, the fruits of my labors. (You know, up until I found out that a perl script of mine had not managed to root out all the stupid little single-quote-double-quote suckers in Psmith in the City.)

Ah, Wodehouse. Now I read Psmith and miss you all the more. Even when you weren’t perfect, and especially when you are.

The loose 4-book series of Psmith books is not a perfect shot, unlike most of the Jeeves run, in large part because Psmith was an earlier creation, around when Wodehouse was still finding himself and growing up (which is why three of the Psmith series are clearly public domain in the US). It’s in reading Psmith that we get to observe the fullness of Wodehouse’s development as a writer, from the beginning into his prime, as the Psmith books spread themselves out over years (which is why the fourth of the Psmith series is clearly not public domain), while multiple Jeeves stories and books occur within months of each other.

Psmith and Jeeves dovetail in an interesting manner; the third of the Psmith books, Psmith, Journalist, was published in 1915. Two years later, the very first Jeeves story, “Extricating Young Gussie”, was published—succeeded by 14 more Jeeves stories into 1923. The final Psmith book, Leave it to Psmith, was published a few months after the Inimitable Jeeves story collection, and is considered by many to be among the best comedic novels ever written. After that, Jeeves takes over.

Not that there is anything wrong with Jeeves taking the helm, since Wodehouse ended things so nicely for Psmith, when all is said and done. Psmith has an arc of sorts, and thus must end; Jeeves does not, and can go on forever (and ever and ever, through to 1974, a year before Wodehouse’s death).

What to say about Psmith himself, as a character? He’s cheeky and dignified; selfish and generous; incorrigible trickster who’s one half Jeeves in his powers of manipulation and coolness, and one half Fred (another popular Wodehouse character) in his sending up of society and comical insouciance. In other words, a powerhouse of a character, and one that the beginning writer may not fully appreciate at first. We’ll see this next time in the first Psmith book, Mike and Psmith¹ , where we learn that Rowling’s Harry Potter is definitely in fine tradition.

  Mike and Psmith: Kindle/Mobipocket (189.0 KiB, 400 hits)

1. Technically, Mike and Psmith is a later joining of a Mike book and Enter Psmith, but we’ll leave that information just between you and me, merry footnote reader. [↩]

Amazon stats as of this writing:

#1 in 	 Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Science Fiction
#5 in 	 Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fiction > Genre Fiction
#8 in 	 Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction

I think John Scalzi has arrived, as the parlance goes.

Kindle-licious review
Buy Zoe’s Tale in Kindle Store

This review is a little different from most. Here I’ll just be talking about the enhancements to the *echo* Special Edition *echo*, as opposed to the actual book content, but they are fascinating all by themselves, too.

I was checking out Tor.com today, and I found Patrick Nielsen Hayden mentioning an article about Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End in the New York Times. Vinge’s name had also came up with praise in Jo Walton’s post, A Deepness in the Sky, the Tragical History of Pham Nuwen. Thus reminded, I decided to fulfill my desires for instant gratification and checked out the Kindle Store.

A Deepness in the Sky is actually a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, but I never let that sort of thing bother me. And it shouldn’t bother you, either, since it was published after A Fire Upon the Deep (just as A Fire Upon the Deep was published after a novella for which it was a prequel itself). Both Deepness and Fire are available in the Kindle store, but I noticed a very interesting thing.

There were two versions of A Fire Upon the Deep in the Kindle Store. One was a “Special Edition” from St. Martin’s Press, while the other was a “regular” edition from Tor. And it wasn’t just a “Special Edition” with extra introductions and retrospectives, but a “Special Edition eBook“.

This intrigued me, so I bought them both. I know. I take this upon myself so you don’t have to.

So what makes a Special Edition eBook so special in this case? Especially since you’re paying, as of this writing, $1.60 more.

It turns out that whoever assembled the special edition of A Fire Upon the Deep is an eBook maker after my own heart. I’ve discussed the interesting aspects of putting the Shadow Unit Season One eBook together here and here, as it’s a hyper-linked work.

Turns out that Vernor Vinge did similar things, except with grep, plain text files, and comments embedded within his draft that started with ^ and had special tags. These comments and annotations expanded over time and developed as the work progressed, even ending up as conversations between Vinge and his consultants.

(Which brings up one question in mind: what did he mean by consultants? Editors? His agent? Writing friends who were thick as thieves with him? No idea, but it’s something special to have a recorded, ongoing dialogue as a writer shapes his or her work.)

As a result, when you go about making a special edition of one of Vernor Vinge’s Hugo Award winning works, you have a lot of material to work with. Maybe a bit too much. If we were talking about a paper book, there’d be so many footnotes scattered about that either they’d need to stack at the end of chapters or, heavens forbid, the end of the book in one big mess. The alternative is to stack the notes up at the bottom of the text, which is disturbing in its own way, though this method preserves locality of reference to a single page.

And that’s what people usually do in these super-annotated works. I’ve seen a footnote in the Annotated Sherlock Holmes stretch across four pages. In the middle of a story. It’s quite informative and usually illustrated, but assumes you’ve already read the stories in question, so you would not mind being disturbed for a fireside chat about Old White Men Holmes/Moriarty Slash.¹ And it’s not just once that you get disturbed, even if you have columns on the left and right to preserve, as much as possible, the flow of the main text. Special annotated editions are not for first-timers.

Ah, but a Special Edition eBook can make use of the hyper-linking idiom. You can jump back and forth between a note and the work, or simply continue reading the work undisturbed if you’re a first-timer. And even a first-timer could even look at the notes without being lifted too much out of place. And being able to jump from note to note easily also solves the otherwise navigation-troubling note-that-refers-to-the-sixth-note-of-chapter-xvii.

Enough of that, though. Time for some real screenshots to illustrate what I mean, under the cut.

Click here to read more »

1. And that’s a post for Holmesian Derivations some day, let me tell you. [↩]

Sandkings by George R.R. Martin

Do you hate bugs, especially if they are ants? I do. Do you hate vicious, cruel bullies? I do. Sandkings, a Hugo-winning and Nebula-winning novelette, will satisfy both hatreds in one pleasingly, creepily wrapped story.

I’m really starting to like novelettes. There’s just enough story for a really satisfying bite.

Sandkings at the Kindle Store for $1.59

After the Coup by John Scalzi

If you’ve ever had the chance to enjoy the Old Man’s War universe, then this bite-sized story is like a wonderful Lindt truffle. If you’ve never read any OMW book, this is a great taste of the humor and down-to-earth character of Scalzi’s series.

A short story; Mobipocket edition available from the link below; just hover over “Download” in the left column of the story page.

After the Coup at Tor.com for FREE

Down on the Farm by Charles Stross

For those of you who only know him from works like Accelerando and Halting State, Stross has a wonderful humorous series about “The Laundry”, where geeks do battle with the forces of evil and bureaucracy. Another Lindt truffle, and if you like this story, you’ll love The Atrocity Archives, available in Kindle edition.

Another short story, Mobipocket edition available at the link down below.

Down on the Farm at Tor.com for FREE

For Solo Cello, op.12 by Mary Robinette Kowal

If you’ve ever been a musician, you know there’s something obsessive about the profession. Nowhere is this more poignantly illustrated, I think, than this story by Mary Robinette Kowal, who won the 2008 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

This and four other stories available in Mobipocket format.

Five stories from Mary Robinette Kowal for FREE

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow

You may know him from Little Brother, and you may not. This is a fun post-apocalyptic tale for nerds, and I say that with all the joy of a former systems administrator who doesn’t like post-apocalyptic tales, but loved this one.

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth from Feedbooks for FREE

My Boyfriend’s Name is Jello by Avram Davidson

This is the first Avram Davidson story I ever read, and also apparently the first Avram Davidson story ever published. It’s a delight of a tale, an amalgam of humorous weirdness that seems to be Davidson’s style. A rather short story, but a great one.

You can read all of this short story, plus some nice introductory material from Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis about the man, from the free sample from the Kindle store.

And who knows; maybe you’ll like it enough to buy the whole thing. I think it’s worth it.

My Boyfriend’s Name is Jello in the FREE sample from the Kindle store; get a huge book of Avram Davidson stories for $9.99

Please say a small prayer for my car.

See GMail Account Hacking Tool at Hungry-Hackers.com.

Basically, you need to go to your settings page, scroll way down to the bottom, and find this:

Make sure that Always use https is checked, and click on Save Changes.

If you can’t find this page, here’s a visual guide:

Top of GMail home page

Bottom of Settings Page

“Gosh,” you may think, “but I always use Gmail under https!” Well, actually, you didn’t. And this option? Only introduced by Google in the past week. Previous to that, all GMail users were vulnerable to this hack, even if they thought they weren’t, and there was no way to prevent it.

Google, don’t you remember your “we won’t be evil” promise?

Here’s what I track in Mint. Many pictures, all galleried up.

My feed-subscriber folks and LJ readers: you’l likely want to visit this post directly so you can take advantage of the LightBox javascript, which makes looking at the pictures much easier and faster.

Gallery under the cut.

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I have Mint installed on my site, the better to look at all my stats with. Almost everything under the spontaneousderivation.com domain is instrumented through—very easy to do with Mint. Probably the best thing about Mint is its modularity; I can add plugins to add more metrics, which is not a choice I have with Google Analytics—although Google Analytics has everything plus the kitchen sink, so it doesn’t matter too much.

What Mint does provide, and which I use every day, is live statistics. No waiting around for hours for me; I have current data at my fingertips (or reload button). Looking at live user behavior is inherently addictive. Mint can also do trending for the past seven days (or in shorter intervals), so it’s not just short-lived statistics. And it is very useful, sometimes, to know when you’ve just gotten Stumbled, in case you need to take preventative measures for whatever reason.

That said, Mint doesn’t keep data around forever; you get maybe seven weeks of data, though you can configure this to be longer. At the same time, all the Mint data is in your database, so you can cook up all sorts of queries and spreadsheets if you’re good at that kind of thing.

Here’s what I look at every day:

• Total number of visits and unique visits:
  • Each hour for the last 24 hours
  • Each day for the last 7 days
  • Month by month comparison
• Specific pages hit:
  • Most recent
  • Most popular (past hour, past 2 hours, past 8 hours, past 24 hours)
  • A specific set of pages I’m monitoring
  • Page visit trending
• Visitors:
  • Most recent IPs
  • Repeat visits (past hour, past 2 hours, past 8 hours)
  • Individual visitor session tracking and cross-referencing
• Referrers
  • Most recent
  • Most recent unique
  • Repeat referrers
  • Referrer trending
• Outbound links
  • Most recent
  • Most popular (past 24 hours)
• Feedburner (hooks into Google’s Feedburner APIs)
  • Subscribers yesterday (Feedburner is a NOT a live metric service)
  • Item views/clicks yesterday

This is actually only 50% of the metrics and 25% of the total metric views that I have available from the Mint dashboard. I’m not even covering the bits of the dashboard I don’t look at often. (I look at the Feedburner tables often, despite the fact that Feedburner doesn’t give out live metrics, because Feedburner is delayed randomly; sometimes yesterday’s stats won’t appear until 3pm PST, and sometimes sooner, but never before I wake up in the morning.)

Random coolness: panes can refresh their data individually without refreshing the entire page. AJAX rocks.

There are Mint plugins that don’t provide a visible dashboard element (or “pane”), but still serve some other purpose. The Refresh Pepper (Mint plugins are called Pepper) triggers the reload of every pane periodically. But my favorite has to be the Notifications pepper, which emails me when signficant events happen, like a suspicious rise in unique visitors that indicates a Stumble, freeing me from monitoring Mint even more than I do now.

Anyways, enough with the bloggery. Back to my normal SF/F and Kindle-loving coverage.