Sorry for being so late with the thank you. Usually I’m on it right away after each contest ends. In any case, I appreciate it as much now as ever! You guys are great!
Without readers, there can be no authors. Remember that. Oh, many writers, like myself, would still write, but it wouldn’t be the same. It is pure joy to share. The writing is cathartic, and probably more fun overall, but the sharing is the “icing on the cake.”
And the reviews and ratings. . . well, that lends legitimacy to the author and helps new readers decide whether to take the chance, to spend the money, etc.
I appreciate all of it. Thanks!
Esmirana’s Trunk was the first book I had up for the recent giveaways. It was mainly a book of stories I had written years ago, as you could perhaps tell. Three or four stories were new (so I guess only half of them were old). Let’s see . . . the new ones were “Clackers,” “Myra’s Wedding,” and “Footprints.” “The Early Ones” was kind of new. Originally, I had written it to be the title story for my book of actual early stories, which I ended up naming “The Soft Eloquence of Neon.”
Since “The Early Ones” wasn’t an actual early story I couldn’t bring myself to include it with the ones I had written early on. I’m talking about the very first stories I ever wrote. I believe the first six stories of the book The Soft Eloquence of Neon are in the very order in which I wrote them, “The Soft Eloquence of Neon” being story number one. It warms my heart to read them. And it also drives me crazy. I had to scan all of those stories into the computer and try to edit them as I did so. Very hard work. They had all been written on an old typewriter. And for some reason, scanning pages into the computer can get really wonky. The OCR was acting all kinds of weird. The whole project was exhausting. It might not have been so bad had it just been a few pages. Anyway, I formatted the book, eventually, and published the digital copy. Then I submitted and got a proof of the paperback. I still need to edit and correct a bunch of stuff on that book before I get the paperback out, which also means going back and fixing all the errors in the digital copy. Whew! That was a year or two ago. The stories warm my heart, like I said, and take me back to the early days of writing. I keep telling myself that I’ll sit down and get to work on it . . . and I will, eventually. And if you want to brave the stories as they are, the digital copy is there. You can use the Look Inside feature on Amazon to read the first story or two.
Anyway, “Cobra’s Demise,” from Esmirana’s Trunk (yes, now I’m back to the book of the Giveaway), was in the batch of stories I had to scan in, also. I believe the story is around ten or eleven thousand words. I had sent this story in to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine years ago, so I at least had a clean copy of it to scan in. I received a rejection notice from AHMM–just in case you were wondering.
“Myra’s Wedding” (also in Esmirana’s Trunk) came on me in a flash and grabbed me immediately. I was in the middle of writing one of the other stories (“Clackers,” or “Footprints,” I think) and I had gone up to lie down for a minute, which I’ll sometimes do between writing scenes of a story if the story is going to be long or involved. Sometimes it is just a case of resting my eyes for a few short minutes. Lying there with my eyes closed, I got the image of a young girl holding a music box and staring at the wedding scene, and I couldn’t shake it. I went back down to the computer to type up a few notes on the image so I wouldn’t forget it. I ended up writing out the whole story in forty-five minutes or so. Once I finished it I went back to finishing up the other story I had been working on. Sometimes it’s like that. That’s all part of the process, the fun.
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And the book I had up for the second Goodreads Giveaway?
The Red Kimono. This was my first attempt at writing Science Fiction. It isn’t “Hard Sci Fi,” with spaceships and the like. It is more speculative fiction. Futuristic. The stories are sort of mind-bending, or reality twisting in some ways. I’m a huge fan of Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury. So these are the kinds of stories you will find here. Sort of. The stories are my slant, my style. In other words, I didn’t set out to imitate PKD or Bradbury; but since I like that type of story, that’s sort of what came out. In any case, initially not being sure if I could do Sci-fi, I ended up being pleasantly surprised at how easy it all spilled out onto the page.
Which stories from this book are my favorites? It depends on the day. However, I do sort of lean toward three: “Resonance Shift,” “Club Alhambra,” and “The Red Kimono.” I wasn’t really sure about “The Red Kimono” at first. It was only after a little time had passed after writing it that I went back and read it over again. I was pleasantly surprised at the flow of it. Surreal? Yes, absolutely. I even started a novella relating to the Red Kimono from the story. I wrote maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred words on this before getting sidetracked with writing something else. I think what sidetracked me was writing Pirate Tales. I’ve been thinking about getting back to what I am tentatively calling The Quest for the Red Kimono. It is going to take some thought, research and time, of course. Time is the biggest problem. There never seems to be enough time. And the stories and ideas just keep coming. There are three or four story ideas just in my last post. Hope I didn’t over do it. I was in a playful and creative mood. The torrent of creative thought just kept coming . . . Not sure how that played out in the Goodreads feed. Hope you can forgive me and can pardon my creative indulgence. I do get carried away sometimes. Now back to the book.
I have to say that I do love the cover for The Red Kimono. At the time I created it, it seemed that all I saw on the bookshelves were covers showing women turned away, with their backs facing the viewer. I had to give it a try. I found the perfect photo for the book and worked the cover I wanted. I had spent so much time working on the cover that I fell in love with it. I was then terrified that Kim + Ono wouldn’t let me use the photo for the cover. After days of kicking myself for going so far before checking, I broke down and contacted them. They were extremely gracious and I am forever grateful that they were generous enough to allow me the use of the photo. The original photo had the Kimono colored green. It was a very beautiful kimono. I’d recommend anyone looking for a kimono to check out Kim + Ono’s site. How can I not promote them?
Just a couple of side notes regarding the cover:
- I couldn’t decide which arrangement of butterflies looked best, so the paperback and digital covers are slightly different.
- I would love to have done the title of the book in the twisty line of ones and zeroes on the cover. There would have been no way of fitting it in without stretching it all around the cover in some absurd fashion. So the ones and zeros on the cover are just junk. Here’s what I mean:
The cover as it looks:
For Goodreads:
Would it be too “nerdy” of me to suddenly have the idea of translating the story into binary? Well, I wouldn’t do it. A tiny program of probably less than five lines of code would do the trick. But who would want to read it that way? A computer, of course.
As I state awkwardly (I really need to fix that) on the back cover of the book that all information, everything, is nothing more than ones and zeros (or can at least be stripped down to that–Claude Shannon, of course, stated it much more brilliantly in his paper on information theory . . . Am I getting too geeky here? And not to say that I could ever truly understand the work in anything more than a basic or rudimentary sense, especially the math part.), So information can be anything, What the information is is nonessential. It can all be transmitted, stored, manipulated. And with the advances in AI, we are on the threshold of something new and all powerful. Perhaps on a parallel track, though much further ahead in AI than Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity (where humans transcend their human bodies and merge with computers). Perhaps computers have to become smart enough to show us how to achieve the singularity.
I would posit the suggestion that AlphaGo won the game of Go by “thinking” of a move that was beyond the scope of any move any human had ever thought of before, What I mean to say is that AlphaGo didn’t simply extract that move from any database. One could suggest, or assert, as I am, that the computer actually “thought” of it. The computer got creative, in other words; much as a human would if that human were intelligent enough to come up with that move. The future of intelligent machines is upon us. Computers will become exponentially “smarter” as time progresses.
What does it all mean for our future as humans? This, I guess, is the question implicit in “The Red Kimono.” I didn’t set out to ask the question. I just, as always happens, let the words flow to create a story, Though I did have the vague question in mind of how the AI would interface with us whenever it needed to do so. And would each person perceive the AI, the interface presented, in the same way? My guess is that the AI will eventually present itself in a way that is pleasing to the individual (and that this interface might be pleasing to itself, should AI progress to the point of “feeling.”). Not only would/will this interface be pleasing to the individual, it will also be overwhelming, ever-changing, and keeping us off balance as the AI extracts whatever it is seeking. See, my view is that not only will this interface be excruciatingly beautiful and powerful, it will be something more. The AI will be so advanced that it will, to my mind at least, be searching or reaching out for any new information that it can find, anything new that it can ponder and turn over in its “mind.” In other words, having gobbled up everything that exists, the AI will be thirsting for any scrap of information it can extract from us as humans. The system was built to learn, to think and solve problems. Perhaps there is a lingering thought or two that might spring up from the dredges of humanity, like tiny sprouts of plant emerging from a parched and cracked earth. Would this thought be interesting enough to pique the AI’s curiosity? That is the only reason (again, as I see it) for this future AI to let us, what is left of us, survive.
“The Red Kimono” is my idea of a possible interface. A beautiful, but scary future awaits . . . The only question that lingers is will we survive? And if so, for how long? I guess that will be up to the AI.
And now, to end this post I’ll once again say Thank You for entering both of these Giveaways! And to those who won–Happy Reading!