Author interview with NFReads

I recently did an author interview with NFReads.  Check it out:

https://www.nfreads.com/interview-with-author-jeff-tanyard/

Before there was a Red Wedding

There was The Transformers: The Movie, an animated feature from 1986.

Think I'm exaggerating by comparing it to Game of Thrones's Red Wedding?  Consider:

The Transformers tv show had run for two seasons prior to the movie.  The kids who watched it had grown attached to the protagonists.  The characters were animated robots, but they still had personalities, and that made them essentially human.  The kids all had their favorites.  None of the transformers ever died.  It was a "safe" show, right?

Then the toy company decided to promote a new line of transformers, and that apparently meant killing off the old ones.  That's what happens in the movie.  The Decepticons slaughter the first-generation Autobots.  They even kill the medic, man.  The medic!

Basically, the whole cast is turned over and shaken out, and what's left at the end is a bunch of strange robots the kids didn't know anything about.

Here's the shuttle attack where several Autobots are killed.

Later in the movie, more Autobots are killed in an attack on Autobot City.  Even Optimus Prime, that most beloved of transformers, would get killed off.

It was a brutal movie, especially considering the age of the target audience.

So tired

I'm coming off a migraine, and it's left me weak and drained.  It wasn't a bad headache as far as the intensity of the pain goes, but it lasted nearly twenty-four hours.

I'd like to get some outlining done tonight.  I may need a catnap first, though.

Migraines suck.

Plumbers earn every penny

I just got done unclogging my bathtub drain.  I used a marvelous invention called a Zip-It.  It's a plastic thing with little barbs on it that grab the hair on the way back out.  It absolutely works on hair clogs, though if your clog is sludge only, with little or no hair mixed in, then this probably isn't the right tool for your clog.  The Zip-It is a one-time-use tool, because the little barbs tend to break off as you use it.  They're cheap, so get a few and store them away for when you need them.

The good news is that, thanks to the Zip-It, I succeeded at the task.  The drain is unclogged now, or at least it's a lot less clogged than before, because the water is moving through it noticeably better.  The bad news is that it's still plumbing-related stuff, a disgusting job, and I hate doing it.

I could never be a plumber.  I admire those guys; I really do.  They spend their days up to their necks in other people's effluvia.  They tolerate the most vile stuff imaginable, and they do it day in and day out.

Plumbers are the unsung heroes of civilization.  Without them, we'd be back to carrying water up from the creek and using outhouses.  They make first-world living possible.

Thanks, plumbers of the world, for doing a dirty but eminently valuable job.

Trying new markets

All right... after the Google Play/PublishDrive thing back in April, I took my books down from GP and basically didn't use PD at all until I decided what to do.  Well, I've decided.  I just republished my books via PublishDrive.  I'm sending them to the following retailers, all of which are new to me:

Bookmate
Gardners
Odilo
Ciando
Esentral

Thanks to Joe Malik for helping me decide on these.

I have no idea what to expect from these stores.  Perhaps I'll make some sales there.  Perhaps not.  Only time will tell.  I've priced everything the same as on Amazon.  Clouds of Venus will be free.

The folks at PublishDrive are currently on vacation, so they just have a skeleton crew running the place for the next couple of weeks.  I uploaded and republished my books, but PD won't actually send them to the stores until the full workforce gets back.  So it will be several weeks before my books appear at any of the aforementioned retailers.  That's assuming, of course, that there aren't any snags along the way.

Anyway, that's that.  One more item off the to-do checklist.

Wise Blood

I recently read Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.  I have mixed feelings about it.

The good:

O'Connor writes easy-to-read sentences that pack a punch.  She employs bizarre adjective/noun combinations, things like "rat-colored car" and "cat-faced baby" that create instant and striking visuals, what some might call Eyeball Kicks.  I like these things because they're different and weird and give the prose distinction.

The characters are creative to say the least.  No cardboard cutouts here.

O'Connor dips into the human psyche in a way few authors do.  She makes it seem real.  She arguably had a better handle on the dark side of humanity than today's popular horror authors do.

The book was riveting from beginning to end.



Okay, now the bad:

The characters are all horrible people.  They're lunatics and psychos and criminals.  There's no one for the reader to empathize with.

There's not really a plot.  It's all just "people doing things."  I know this is typical for literary fiction, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

There's not a satisfying conclusion.  Again, typical for lit-fic, but I still don't like it.



Conclusion: This is one of those books that I'm glad to have read but won't be reading again.  I'm a native southerner, but the South of this book isn't the South I know at all.  It's familiar in color but alien in texture.  Of course, I don't hang out with criminals and psychopaths, so there you go.  Either way, O'Connor's talent is obvious, and she is rightfully lauded.

First draft is done

The first draft of book 4 of Wheel of Fire is complete.  Word count is just over 78,000.

As I've said before, I add material during revision, so expect the final product to exceed 100,000 words.

Anyway, I'm glad it's done.

Next on the agenda is some author chores.  I have no idea when I'll get to the second draft.

Tension, apprehension, and dissension

I was curious about something.  I have a print copy of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man.  That book is famous, in part, for its use of weird typography.  I wanted to know if the digital copy had faithfully reproduced those quirks or not.

The answer is "yes and no."  Some of the quirks were scanned and cut-and-pasted into the digital file as images rather than text.  They have non-white backgrounds setting them apart from the rest of the page.  So they're there, but they're obviously not typed, and it makes the book look, in my opinion, a little clunky.  This is what it looks like in the Kindle previewer:

 And this is what the print version looks like in the preview:

Another example:

The print version:

Also, at least one of the instances was goofed.  Consider this selection from the Kindle previewer:

The "S.O.S." part is accurately reproduced.  The "SNOW" is copied and pasted from the print version.  But the "Blessings!" part is wrong.  It's correctly in bold type, but it's not the correct font.  In the print version, it looks like this:

So what conclusions can we draw from all this?  I don't know, other than "use standard type."  Yeah, these quirks are fun and all, but this is the digital age, and reproducing that stuff in an ebook file is going to present some challenges.  I suspect the digital version of The Demolished Man used the cut-and-paste method so that the words would actually render across a wide array of devices.  Not everyone has the same fonts installed, you know.  Images are universal.  But they're still images, not text, and they look out of place.

And, of course, the person doing the file conversion might miss something, as was the case with "Blessings!"  Or maybe it was intentional; maybe that person figured the unusual font was more trouble than it was worth and edited it accordingly.  I hope that's not the case--Bester was a subtle writer, and even seemingly insignificant things were meant to have underlying meanings--but you never know.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting comparison.

If you like science fiction, you should definitely read The Demolished Man.  It's a police procedural with telepathy.  It was the inspiration for the Psi-Cops in the tv show Babylon 5.  The character of Mr. Bester in that show was named after the author of the book.  And the story's got a neat jingle:

"Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun."