Listen up, you kumquats, the Web Fiction Guide has posted a link to and review of the Guide to Moral Living in Examples. Go check out the WFG and most importantly, vote for the Guide because I’m your favorite author and I make every other piece of prose written in English look like a gummy bear stuck to a turd drying in the wicked light of an uncaring Sun.

A pineapple gummy bear. Ick.

Upgrading my WordPress install. Please email reports of any odd behavior outside of the author’s.

Pandora’s turned a profit. Awesome. More music is good.

Pandora says that it “play[s] only music that you like.” And through feedback from the listener, it will ostensibly learn what attributes you enjoy in music and make guesses for future songs. I’ve had good luck with it – I’ve managed to craft some narrowly-focused stations that, while crossing genres, manage to capture a specific type of sound.

Pandora includes a skip function to avoid stinkers, but it’s a limited one (and when you invoke a skip beyond the limit the program shrugs and says that their music license “forces” them. A separate issue but one you can guess my feelings on if you go look at the list of stories that I have accessible online). If you upgrade from the free service, you get more skips.

What occurred to me today, though, is that Pandora’s pricing scheme incentivizes playing what the listener hates. But only sometimes; most of the time the songs have to be good. It’s like taking a bag of chocolate chip cookies and replacing a handful with cookies containing dried salami chips. Damn straight you want those skips.

Unless you’re some sort of salami masochist.

To make up for the pun that I made at the end of the Maple Syrup entry in the Guide to Moral Living in Examples, I thought I should attempt to redeem myself by linking to a fascinating visual guide on tapping a maple tree to harvest sap: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Buds_and_Bark/tapping_sugar_maple_index.html

The whole process is alternately ghoulish and delicious, like hot dogs.  Let’s drink the juice that leaks out of this wound and put it on some flapjacks!  But hey, those damn maple trees that I climbed as a kid scraped the hell out of my hands and knees, and who can prove that they don’t thirst for our blood as well?

Scientists, I hear you say?  Pssh, I heard science isn’t even real.

The second Urgoth the Defiler story is now live, “Urgoth the Defiler: Deuce Ex Machina.” What’s a little flower theft among friends?

Having had a frustrating weekend as a result of my apartment, I got to imagining my dream house. It definitely does not take the form of a big-ass timber & drywall mansion. Maybe because I’ve lived in too many geriatric homes, like in the basement of a cockroach-infested Victorian-esque pile or the small farm house with a distinctly bowl-shaped second bedroom, but I don’t see bright, shiny new houses as they are. I always see them as they will be: decrepit, full of rotten wood and with a thousand niches opening up like so many vortices into an insect-filled plane, through which our six-legged enemies seep like water through stone.

Gross, in other words. And insects will always find a way into our homes. Hell, we like to live there, all warm and toasty and jammed with food so it makes perfect sense. But beyond building several thousands of inter dimensional highways into the Lairs of the Insect Lords, what repels me from standard construction is the sharp line between inside and outside. Even back when I struggled with the dynamics of figuring out why not to push on both bicycle pedals at once I felt a deep sense of longing after the day was through and I was hustled inside the house. Just like the toys that I’d pack up into my toybox, so I felt put away and dormant until I set foot out the door first thing in the morning. And unlike those toys, I didn’t even have a plastic, spring-loaded missile launcher molded onto my arm with which to entertain myself, just a whiny voice and an increasingly annoyed older brother.

So in the classic gambit of spending my adult life pursuing everything I ever wanted as a child (Hey Mom, guess what? I cook bacon at 2 in the morning just because I want some bacon.) I’ve been looking into homes that don’t come with the sharp black line of inside and outside so that I don’t have to put myself away at night, so I don’t have to “go inside when the streetlights turn on.” After scouring through architecture websites and magazines, I’ve also come to marry that desire with my emergent enviro-hippie attitude towards home building.

I’ve been researching low-impact homes, the sort so green that certain wavelengths are hurled away from them with such force that they make a tiny crunchy sound when they hit the cornea. I’ve stumbled upon earthbag housing (an article at Mother Earth News and a detailed book on the subject) which, although having some classic architectural elements (i.e. doors and windows) doesn’t make me think of being put away. Earthbag construction is just what it sounds like. The builders (i.e. me and anyone who can be lured with beer and pizza) stuff bags with dirt and build layers of them held together with strands of barbed wire, and put a plaster seal over the whole building, wall, or whatever they’re constructing. You’re living with the earth all around you and it also saves tons of pollutants from being produced. If you’re careful with construction you can even build the structure into a hill or create a living roof over it. Plus, you know, you get to play with dirt and fucking barbed wire.

Sure, it’s labor intensive and not everyone has the time to build them; and yes, there are still plenty of bugs surrounding the dwelling, but hell, at least I didn’t go out of my way to hasten the coming reign of the Insect Lords.

I heard rumbles about Stephen King’s new novella that he’s releasing for the Kindle 2.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/10/stephen-king-kindle-ur

I don’t want to bother with the phrase “ebook” – I was reasonably sure that marketers playing fast and loose with the “e” prefix had died long ago and marketing, as a profession, had moved down the vowel ladder to “i” (the precursor to both vowels being, of course, the indefinite article “a.”  Buy futures in “o” prefixes now because it’s going to be big!).  Is an ebook a novel?  When does “book” need an extra vowel?  Where is the line between medium and message?  “Songs” are called “songs” even on the e-internet.

Although, overall, it is rare for a person to use the term “novel.”  Outside of literary circles, an everyday person usually only uses the word “novel” while attending a party, their glass of spirits rapidly warming in their hands as they keep their ears open for a place to inject a pithy comment about the terribly literate NOVEL that is sitting, ignored but not forgotten, on their bedside table.  Novel and book are interchangeable to them.  But ask the other poor party-goers who find themselves on a forced march towards the land of intellectual braggadocio whether or not it’s a novel or a book that they’re being told about.  They’ll reply, It’s Just A Sodding Book – the sort of thing that you might toss into a bag for a plane ride or skim on the toilet instead of fuming at your choice of restaurant the night before.

Novels (and novellas, and stories) are nothing but abstract ideas and words.  Their medium gives them shape.  And thus ebooks take an ephemeral shape.

Books, though, are physical, tough things.  They’re sometimes sturdier than the ideas that produced them.  They’re small bricks of paper that have been used since their invention to prop things up.  Don’t tell me that a scrap of illuminated manuscript, discarded from official inclusion for an unfortunate, lewd misspelling was never folded up and slid under the leg of a monk’s chair.  Gutenberg himself* kept a brisk side business of selling people “magick shimmies” that were “divine fyxes for househoulde wobbles” made from cast-off proofs (note how we’ve shifted from the -e suffix to the e- prefix?).  I wager that a Kindle owner wouldn’t allow me to prop up a failing table with their widget.

Also, protip: don’t touch anyone else’s Kindle.  You know where it’s been, and that’s even before there’s any e-erotic fiction released for it.  Let alone when the DRM gets opened up and you can enjoy your porn in glorious, 16-shade grayscale.

None of this is to discount novels released as ebooks or as HTML formatted documents or audiobooks.  I’ve stories online, and plan to continue releasing them that way.  But to imagine that a device which costs over three hundred dollars will replace the book, able to be read as well as used as a magick shimmie, is foolish.

Stay tuned for an announcement concerning my upcoming obook! (I told you that you should’ve bought futures!)

*I’m a goddamned liar to whom you ought not listen.