Spontaneous ∂erivation

DVD extra #10, “Tactics” is now up on the official Shadow Unit site, and has been added to the Season 2 DVD Extras pack.

Further new extras will be added to existing files as they come along (I’ll always blog to let you know).

  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Kindle/Mobipocket) (171.4 KiB, 542 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (EPub) (367.3 KiB, 397 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Sony Reader) (254.3 KiB, 338 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Microsoft Reader) (365.4 KiB, 321 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (PDF) (201.6 KiB, 371 hits)

Link for iPhone Stanza Users

Many people really don’t know me.

In fact, considering what my closest friends assume about me, I’d be pressed to put it at 100% of people really don’t know me.

The problem, I think, is that they tend to know me either only in real life or only online. The shocker is when they finally meet the other persona they don’t know.

In real life, I’m the girl laughing out loud, smiling, hugging people; giggles unstoppably, bordering on flirtatious. Ditzy in all senses of the word. ¹

Online, I’m a bit more… composed. My best friends (who are IRL friends) would say, “Coherent! With an attention span!”

Logically I must be, since I hash out code for a living, but I am almost entirely illogical in social situations.²

In real life, people think I’m stupid.³

Online, people think I’m erudite.

Man, people really don’t know me.

But it is ever so amusing to watch them be surprised. I think it’s probably why I keep up the stupid/smart insane/sane offline/online act: because watching the cognitive dissonance is full of awe, and then some, and that makes awesome.

So now you know.

(Inspired by John Scalzi’s Portrait of a Closet Introvert musings.)

1. I’ve said before, either here or on Twitter, that I learned a lot of social tics from the television shows. Seriously, y’all, your prime time TV is kinda scary. [↩]
2. May I repeat: your sitcoms are scary. [↩]
3. Or, at least, smart in an extremely narrow band. [↩]

Previously I made Journey of the West available in nicely formatting Mobipocket and ePub formats. Kate Nepveu, who also runs the illuminating Lord of the Rings Re-Read columns over at Tor.com, has converted the HTML to eReader format. Thanks, Kate!

Journey to the West, now available in:

Link for iPhone Stanza Users

To boldly go where none have gone before.

To explore new worlds and encounter new civilizations.

To war, love, hate, seek justice and make peace in the depths of space and on the fringes of time.

Also, there is a hamster.

These are the stories of Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams and written by 23 writers.

Continue reading…

The two most recent DVD extras, #8 (“Truth”) and #9 (“Misadventure”) are now available in the Season 2 Extras pack.

UPDATE: The Kindle/Mobipocket link has been fixed.

If you’re on an iPhone, you’ll want to use the link provided in the Stanza Library page instead.

  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Kindle/Mobipocket) (171.4 KiB, 542 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (EPub) (367.3 KiB, 397 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Sony Reader) (254.3 KiB, 338 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Microsoft Reader) (365.4 KiB, 321 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (PDF) (201.6 KiB, 371 hits)

Warning: Personal pain here.

Note: Written on an iPhone really, really late at night.

And your champagne, and your cocaine
And your hot stocks, and your Botox
Won’t make you happier than me

Click here to read more »

Let me get this out of the way first: I don’t like the entire Star Trek franchise much. I’ll count the ways:

• Starfleet and similar institutions are infallibly good.

• The cost of winning is either cheap or mostly refundable.

• Technobabble at the wrong times.

• Mini-skirts but no muscle shirts. (If you get your candy I damn well want mine.)

• Time travel eventually made me want to slit my wrists.

I was not expecting much from the new Trek movie. Plus it’s a prequel. Like that worked out so well for Star Wars.

And like we don’t know what’s going to happen next. We’ve had thirty years of Star Trek canon to tell us. Sometimes in excruciating detail, sometimes things we’d like to forget ever happened. (Like Nemesis, possibly all of Enterprise and most of Voyager, which makes me depressed. The first female captain of a Star Trek series and we got this.)

It would take a lot to get me to like this movie.

As it turns out…

I love this movie. Unabashedly so. I probably haven’t really loved a movie this much since Peter Jackson’s rendering of The Fellowship of the Ring.

It’s not just because of the very nice effects (which manage not to be overblown) or the enormous amounts of things exploding (I can imagine Bad Astronomer Phil Plait gearing up to pontificate on the kind of destruction that happens in this film). If it were only these, Star Trek would be just another Iron Man to me.

But I love it because J. J. Abrahms has managed to reboot a franchise waterlogged by a couple decades of story bloat. He even does it with time travel, a mechanism that so often results in tripe and deux ex machinas, and which is rarely handled well. Abrahms manages to do it better even than Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which is the least excreble example I can come up with in the Star Trek canon.

What I now think of as “Trek Classic” ended just a few seconds into the movie, when a monstrous ship, which looks like a twisted melding of the Vorlons and the Shadows from Babylon 5, shows up.

Now we have “New Trek”, or, as I like to call it, Bad Ass Trek.

There’s a fair amount of meta-enjoyment in all this, of course. If you’re an old fan, or someone who happened to be a victim of old fans when it came to control of the TV remote, you can see hints of what’s to come later. I would expect it of any prequel, and in Star Trek it varies from the serious (the Kobayashi Maru test incident, which is played vividly between Chris Pine [Kirk] and Zachary Quinto [Spock]) to the wink-wink-nudge (Sulu’s sword fighting comes in handy, and it’s still not a katana, thank gods it’s actually a fold-out sword that people are yelling katana at, but didn’t look very much like one to me) to the, well, best red shirt death ever. There’s no missing that reference.

Additionally, Abrahms has managed to reboot the world while keeping the rest of history in place, more or less. The way he does this is nothing less than brilliant (you might even, like young Spock, think of this as mere cheating), and extends beyond getting Leonard Nimoy back as Old Spock. He’s added an extra nostalgic element that actually has to do with the story itself rather than the fandom around the story. You don’t have to be a fan to understand or feel this.

Things I loved about this movie:

• Starfleet and the Vulcan Science Academy both have pricks. And good guys, yes, but also pricks.

• The cost of winning is not refundable. There are permanent changes that fans might hate, but they are necessary changes.

• The technobabble is kept to a minimum, and when it shows up, it’s an integrated part of the plot, rather than tacked on.

• Time travel used well, in an interesting way, and leaves scars.

• Bones. Karl Urban hits every note right, and the result is a stable point for fans to hang onto, because the stories of Kirk and Spock have been severely altered.

• Uhura’s linguistics knowledge and capabilities are front and center; she’s not just a phone girl.

• Watching the friendship between Kirk and Spock develop; heck, watching them develop.

Things I didn’t like about this movie:

• Mini-skirts. They are still there. Thank gods the hideous beehives are gone, although I may have to phaser myself if they come back in Star Trek I’ve Lost Count.

• No muscle shirts. Give me something, dammit.

• Yes, New Kirk is hotter, but he’s a bit young, almost adorable.

This movie was an excellent first date. I can’t wait for the sequels and possible TV shows, although I think it may be the case that Trek is stuck with just being movies now (ironic, considering that for a long time it was stuck being an early cancelled TV series).

Also, if you read my review on Matter and how it devastated my gradually developing taste for Science Fiction, well, Bad Ass Trek has managed to restore my faith.

Things can get dire and hopeless. The seemingly permanent can be vaporized forever. People you love die in seconds, disappearing into nothing.

But we don’t believe in no-win scenarios.

The Cart Before the Horse

Or, why I’m writing this:

• a Tor.com interview with Gordon van Gelder, wherein he discussed print versus the Internets;

• the discussion in the comments of said interview, including Ellen Datlow, Nick Mamatas, Jason Stoddard, and more;

• and John Scalzi’s response.

Yes, it’s a bit of a stew.

One of the topics touched upon by van Gelder and Scalzi involve what it takes to make providing free online fiction work, and how marketing at various publishing houses have been a bit clueless about it with respect to new authors, in that they think this will garner instant accolades and eyes.

The problem is that this doesn’t work when said author has no audience. Even before Agent to the Stars and Old Man’s War were put online for free, Scalzi was already building up an audience of readers—and a large body of non-fiction work as well. I’d say the same for Stross and very much for Doctorow. But conversely, that’s when it does work.

Something I Don’t Talk About Anymore

Dirty secret time.

I used to study blogging. Not so much about the art of blogging, but the art of blogging that sells; in other words, online marketing and brand-building. This used to get me some serious amount of hits, a lot of Stumbles, and so on. (Moving to SF/F really tanked that, which should tell you something depressing.)

But this is not something I want to talk about in writer circles ever again, because people suddenly get these weird ideas about online marketing.

Rather than bore you with a summary of some of the discussions I’ve had about this, here are some posts I’ve written in the past, that may be of interest to you, dear writer who wishes to speed your fame through teh Intertubes.

Back to the Past

• 6 Myths about Blogging, Glory, and Fame.

  Know what blogging doesn’t get you. If you read nothing else at my site ever again, read this one.

• Where Seth Godin is Coming From: Re: Free Content and Publishing.

  If you’re going to and/or put free content up there anyways, you need to think about the philosophy of free in relation to brand-building. This is not simple at all.

  I never thought about it until recently because I had a day job. These days I do get paid for some of my writing, and this definitely has caused me to think more about this kind of thing.

• 4 Principles for Packing a Punch with Unique Content.

  If you’re going to try to go down this path, you need some kind of methodology to hit big numbers; this is one simplified template, and likely needs serious tweaking before being applied to fiction. This is the skeleton of Internet marketing and, frankly, is what a lot of traditional publishing marketing guys are missing, much less the heart and other important internal organs of Internet marketing.

  Success stories using this method:

  • The article itself. Over 15,000 hits.
  • Looking for Love in All the Wrong Bounce Rates. Over 8,000 hits.
  • Getting the Most Out of Entrecard. Over 5,000 hits, 59 comments.
  • HTML for Dummies, Part 3: Effects with Borders, Padding, and Replacing Tables with Divs. Due to the last part, over 20,000 hits.

  My failures are all sub-2000 hits, sometimes embarrassingly so, but always because they don’t hit the 4 principles, one of which is more or less out of my control.

In Four Little Words

Build an audience first.

The new DVD Extra, The Scene, has been added to the Season 2 Extras compilation, available for most mobile readers.

Remember, Kindle users and iPhone Stanza users can use the Kindle Library and Stanza Library pages.

  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Kindle/Mobipocket) (171.4 KiB, 542 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (EPub) (367.3 KiB, 397 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Sony Reader) (254.3 KiB, 338 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (Microsoft Reader) (365.4 KiB, 321 hits)
  Shadow Unit Season 2 - Extras 1-15 (PDF) (201.6 KiB, 371 hits)

(I luv http://icanhascheezburger.com/.)