Somebody bemoaned the fact that, twenty years ago, people were reading The Big Three without necessarily wanting to be published in them. Nowadays it seems everybody wants to be a writer.

Twenty years ago I was reading SF magazines and anthologies without any ambition to become a writer as well, but that was because it wasn't exactly encouraged—certainly not where I come from.

The internet with its many writing sites and forums has changed all that. I for one think that is to be welcomed. I don't like authors who jealously try to elbow newcomers out of the playground.

If your stuff is good enough you shouldn't have to.

Keep up or shut up.

Thanks Dog (and Dave!) for the printer. If I send out hard copies, at least I know where I'm at with the formatting.

Saying that, Abiword is as excruciating as ever. I thought in the 3 years or so since I last tried it they may have improved it, but no. Behold what happens if you select all and try to format paragraphs (no worry, the text reappears—eventually. Phew!), but do not under any circumstances attempt a print preview of any document longer than a standard cover letter.

No wonder that governments dropped the SugarXO (with Abiword) and ran screaming back to Microsoft. You truly get what you pay for.

Let's see whether I've managed to recover my machine after a few three-finger-salutes. Ah, no, look—it's started the GIMP. Must've taken the preview command literally.

But at least the printout is OK.

I may have mentioned before that the Shine anthology presents a challenge which many have tried and failed at: telling an optimistic story about the near-future without going all starry-eyed and Polyanna-ish (and no Deus ex Machina, which may yet prove my downfall as I need one for now, as a crutch).

At long last I may finally have the right idea for my story background. It's not the one I wanted to write of course—about marine biology and seafaring—but maybe that can be woven in somehow.

One of the likely changes to occur in the near future is a move towards a zero-growth economy. That sounds radical, and I'm wondering how innovation can occur in such a setting, but then innovation never stands still and it isn't driven by greed—quite the opposite. Getting the means to put it into practice is another matter (hence my scepticism about open source biology. Lab work is expensive, and don't get me started about medical research). But there's the challenge ;)

Right now, I'm investigating Riba, the concept that interest is un-islamic. Strictly speaking, it is un-christianic (sp?) too, and that has never stopped the Western banks, but it seems they take these matters rather more serious in Islamic countries. And not only does that seem workable, but Islamic finance is setting new trends.

There you go. No sooner do I think of something and it turns into Science Fact ;)

Anyway, it may be something to work with. Something which goes right back to the first SF story I ever tried to write once I figured that I could.

Of course you're welcome to 'steal the idea' ;) I think that you could base a whole anthology on that concept alone. Let's see what comes of it.

And what I wanted to say (but was too chicken to put into words) goes five-fold for the Righteous Open Source Geek.

Here is a standard reply to a thread about OOo's lacking rtf support:

People are not expecting MS to be compatible with OpenOffice, so why expect OpenOffice to be compatible with MS? It would be great if the recipient would use OpenOffice an accept OpenOffice documents ...and why not? But if they don't then don't use OpenOffice and expect it to serve the purpose. OpenOffice, as far as I'm concerned, is simply a really, REALLY good free office suite that serves my purpose. When it doesn't, I'll get what does. It's the purpose that matters. Complaining does nothing. Use whatever works. Get the job done. Stop complaining, and enjoy what you are doing instead. Life's too short. If your recipient demands Doc, or RTF, then buy and use the MS suite.

So help me, even a member of my writing group has suggested that I go and compile the source code myself. Not the one who's pointed out that "you get what you pay for", but they should both know when to duck.

I'm seething.

I'm not complaining because it turns out that OOo suckware doesn't work, but because I never knew about it. Because it has caused me considerable embarrassment. Because it has mislead me and others by its implied professionalism, its audacity to offer formats that it doesn't support—nor intends to support—because they look pretty and lure in stupid and naive users.

I'm seething because OOo has made a tit of myself and other writers who are probably sitting at their desks at this very moment, ogling their perfectly formatted documents and pressing 'send'.

Open Office should come with a health warning. I wish to fuck I could sue them.

Abiword for windows doesn't support odt—and to get it to work at all you have to upload an unstable version (2.7.5. Talk about overkill).

Here's how I want to say it:

AUUUUUGHHHH! FUUUUUCK!!!! SO VERY FUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK!!!!

I spent like half a fucking hour laboriously reformatting a sodding short from standard manuscript format to insane bastard webzine editor format ("Oh, yeah, I'm paying you nought point zero zero zero pee a word, so you won't mind doing my HTML tags for me. And make every other line purple. Different shades of purple. And every instance of the word "rug" has to be in green Comic sans. I'm going to reformat everything anyway, and add lots of typos so you look like a tit, but I have to edit this piece of shit for a living so I want you to suffer."), writing the cover letter, checking the spelling, adding a dash of virgin's blood etc...

...and then my BASTARD TUBESTEAK FUCKER of a wordprocessor has some kind of conniption fit and converts the ENTIRE DOCUMENT to question marks. Like, every single line, from margin to margin: ??????????????????????

Don't worry, there's the back up file.

The back-up file is also question marks.

The back-up of the back-up, likewise, is question marks.

Now I have to reformat the whole fucking thing from scratch and I hate everyone, and I hate words, and writing is evil, and ARRGHH ARRRGH YUCK ARGH.

BTW: Fuck AbiWord. "Freeware" does not have to equal "Suckware." Who wrote this piece of crap anyway, the fucking Riddler?

[EDIT: I pissed away an entire day without arriving at a solution—other than going out and buying a netbook that runs Windows XP :(]

I've just upgraded Oo to version 3.1 (from 2.4.1). I figured maybe it was my bad, for not upgrading for a couple of years.

Of course when it comes to the EeePC, upgrading isn't an option, since the (fiddle-proof) Asus Xandros takes up 90% of my disk space as is, but I digress.

Oo 3.1 took about an hour to upgrade and comes with innumerable bells and whistles, but I'm afraid that rtf formatting isn't one of them. Could be I'm the only writer who uses it to submit in standard manuscript format to editors who request rtf files (rather than doc, odt or whatnot).

I have just spent twenty minutes uninstalling it.

Now I'm going to install Abiword. I have test-driven it (on Ubuntu with both AW and Oo installed, and on Jarte) and it definitely preserves the paragraph indents and line spacing. Alas, the header appears on the title page. But then you can't have everything.

From now on in, I'll preferentially submit to markets who accept doc or odt.

I know I've been more than sceptical about the notion of optimistic near-future SF ("I don't write fairy tales"), but Jetse has swept me up with his enthusiasm. I've just become a fan of the Shine anthology on Facebook and have fired off an email, pleading for a deadline extension.

I don't think that I can write a story that is good enough (although I will try), but I now believe that the shortcoming is entirely my own. It can be done. There are plenty of examples on Futurismic.

We have ten days, unless Jetse grants us an extension ;)

I'm currently in the process of converting the 28-odd chapters of 'Tree of Life' parts I-II from TeX to rtf (again). I'm rendering emph as italics because when it comes to producing a standard manuscript I'll have to make friends with OpenOffice master documents and templates anyway (sigh).

That, I thought, would be the final hurdle for submitting long professionally formatted documents electronically.

Then I received the following nugget in an—otherwise very encouraging— rejection email:

On a formatting note, the ms was a little difficult to read because of its lack of either line breaks or indented paragraphs -- I'm not sure if this was intentional, sometimes it's an artifact of save-as-RTF. But thought I would let you know.

Turns out that Jarte/Wordpad (and presumably other rtf editors) strip out the author/title/page number fields and all the paragraph indents, although I'm not sure what happened to the line breaks. Since Oo only preserves formatting when saved in the—otherwise useless because idiosyncratic—ods format, it looks like a complete non-starter for manuscript layout.

And I've just forwarded 'Wirehead' to Strange Horizons, recipients of my previous space-bar-free EeePC offering.

So much for professionalism :(

Researchers have found tiny bacteria more than 3km down in the Greenland ice sheet, where they had been trapped for over 120,000years.

They incubated them for seven months at 2°C without success. At that point I would probably have given up, but they kept them for a further four-and-a-half months at 5°C. And waddya know: the bugs came back to life.

This may be a new record for dormancy.

The funding shortfall for the NHS is headline news on the BBC today. Apparently it runs to 10 billion pounds, or enough to pay for GP services across the country.

The Axiascope could save a big chunk of this. This is because nobody who participates needs to overspend on essentials ever again—from the most humble front-room surgery to the biggest hospital trust—and the numbers are there for all who need to see. It automates a laborious and inefficient process: spend analysis.

And what was the clients' response after hubby put in hundred-hour-weeks for months on end to make it possible?

They had him fired.

The savings will extent to redundancies in bloated purchasing departments. Since the clients' raison d'être is to increase efficiency in NHS procurement, here's hoping that they are among the first casualties.

I think I've said it before, but then I'm not listening to my own advice.

In the story that bounced from Strange Horizons, not only had all the em-dashes been replaced by little squares but most of the spacings had gone, as if I'd written the whole damn thing on the EeePC with its sticky space bar.

OK, so I had written the umpteenth re-draft on the EeePC. But this story has been in circulation for three years, so where do all the new words come from?

No matter how old a story is, always spell-check before submitting.

When I'm through with cringeing, I'll submit the corrected and printed version to Analog.

Then I start thinking about pseudonyms.

In one respect writing is exactly like working in science: until you have published, you're a nobody. What I hadn't expected was that publishing lies can take as long as the real thing!

Actually it depends: it's a complete lottery out there. Some stories are accepted on first submission, others bounce a hundred times, and some multiple rejections even win awards. As my latest rejection note has it:

'It could be that your piece needs more polish. But honestly, it could be fine as-is. Taste in fiction is subjective, so try not to let it get you down.'

The only problem is that the more rejections I accumulate, the harder it gets to write something new. They're literally dragging me down. If I had an acceptance, I'd go on writing on a little pink cloud and wouldn't need the access to the venerable workshops (such as Milford) which a publishing credit affords. I'd have already cracked it :(

Like just about everybody else who dabbles in scribbles I have a virtual desk drawer full of unfinished stories, and with time they've built up to cause me mental constipation.

I can't think of anything fresh until I have cleared up at least some of the back-log and can put those stories away, even though they will never be submitted. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the stories that are in submission keep bouncing back and have to be sent out again.

I have almost two weeks left when I should be writing short stories before diving back into the novel for a final push during June-August. And so far I haven't come up with anything that I may even want to show to my closest friends, let alone to strangers.

Actually,you don't have to make life difficult. WA was supposed to be like a 'personal scientist', so I thought I'd ask it a question which any half-arsed marine biologist ought to know the answer to, but I have forgotten.

I even spelled it out in plain English after not getting very far with short search terms (as you might with Google—not that Google yielded the answer, although at least it threw up explanations and examples):

"What is the term for a fish that migrates between saltwater and fresh water?"

Quotation marks or not didn't matter. The outcome was always:


" />

(when it comes online on May 18th)

Just ask it when the next Basingstoke Farmers' Market is. Nobody seems to know. The only official site returns a 'provider error' and goes on to remove Basingstoke from all its subsequent listings.

So unless WA can phone the city council and get the relevant person on the line it's not going to know, is it? It's an unanswerable question. And it can't state that it doesn't understand my input because the question is entirely reasonable and has been answered in the past.

Easy.

The cons should be obvious: if my little machine had run Windows XP, then the Brontok Worm would have bricked it. Regular virus scans on the road are a pipe dream. Plus I have no room for bloatware on its tiny drive.

But XP is a stable and mature operating system which does not require constant tweaking such as Linux with its countless many flavours, and now that M$ has hijacked the OLPC project and is muscling in on the netbook market, perhaps it will be streamlined and lose some of that bloatedness.

By contrast, the native Xandros distro on my EeePC includes no end of educational software which I can't uninstall without hacking into it and if I want to get rid of it in favour of Debian, I'd have to use a specially trimmed version because the standard distro takes more than the 3GB of diskspace which is the most I can spare. So who is bloated now?

I am irritated with Linux for two reasons. With Windows I can generally install whatever software I wish and it behaves. By contrast, the Synaptic Package Manager is a very long way from getting there, even if the install-window would resize to fit the screen. The reason behind this and any other Linux woe is the attitude that Linux geeks have towards users ("It's easy, honestly!").

Which brings me to my second irritation. All the software I run on Windows is free- or shareware with the exception of the pre-installed accessories. And all of it is replaceable with the exception of—of all things—Wordpad, which drives Jarte. And for me (and many other writers), a trimmed-down bare-bones rtf editor is indispensible.

An rtf editor, not a text editor. One that loads fast, deals with novel-length documents and can be used for reading as well as writing purposes (note: the best of these by far has been Blue Nomad's Wordsmith which ran on my tiny Palm and on which I finished my 2005 Nanovel. It has a reading/editing function as well as a write function.)

I'm not the only one with that particular need. I have looked at literally dozens of forum threads where writers have enquired about a lightweight rtf editor for Linux only to be pointed at Abiword (bloatware, crashes, can't handle long documents) or any of the dozen or so text editors kicking around the system that can't read rtf files. Linux geeks don't seem to know the difference.

I have given up. Writing now happens either in longhand or at home. Drafts are produced with Wordpad/Jarte and I only use Oo for the final formatting. If I want to take netbook on my travels I'm afraid that it will have to run Wordpad.

And that means Windows. This is what is meant by 'killer app'.

According to yesterday's news (no link), over 200 people have applied for a single vacancy for a 14k/year 'refuse operator'—including many with banking and engineering backgrounds.

This just after I dug up and re-submitted my story 'The Rubbish Collector', which has executives in a future London work for the Community Labour Program for two hours each day after low-paid workers have been priced out of the city commuter belt.

I guess whichever way the economy goes, the outcome is the same ;)

The time for novel workshops rolls around once again (in fact we seem to have them at regular intervals throughout the year), and while I'm far from ready to submit mine, my thoughts turn to printing.

If people commit to a workshop it's common courtesy to send them a hard copy of the novel—and no, you can't shrink the font down to 7 points and expect them to read it!

Imagine the surprise when one member of our writers' group was presented with a bill of 120 quid for 10 plain print-outs of her novel. But it looks like this is about normal. It makes me pause and re-consider unnecessary wordage before I launch into my final onslaught on 'Tree of Life'. But first of all it makes me re-consider the cost of printing—both from print shops and DIY.

More after the cut, but the gist is that you should consider using a print shop if they keep the cost per page at 1.5p or lower, although one reviewer claims a 'combined cost' of 99p a page for home-printing, which I assume does not include hardware deprecation and applies to double-sided print (the latter is fine, but slow!).
( Read more... )

The message is Keep calm and carry on.

I've nothing to add to that, except to be sure to read the Jim MacDonald links and the one from there to Misia's LJ.

(You could also have a look at the Flu-wiki, which is surprisingly detailed and informative. Usual disclaimers apply when it comes to self-medication.)

Basically: get in some supplies (no, not Tamiflu or similar!), be sure to have them handy even if you feel like shit and stay at home if you have flu-like symptoms, so as not to infect others.

The official advise is to ring NHS Direct and not turn up at your GP/hospital. Certainly not the latter unless you're sure that you're about to die.

I've never liked the idea of bioethanol because once biofuel starts to compete with food production, who do you think will win? Cars or people? It's not like we have resources to spare in a world where food prices are increasing beyond the means of many.

On the other hand, if we had the ability to convert cellulose into fuels, that would be a different matter. Low-grade vegetation and agricultural waste could be used for what would turn out to be a truly green fuel.

It turns out that some free-living bugs can digest cellulose. One of these was discovered on a French garbage dump in the eighties. And with recent advances in synthetic biology, now its time has come.

If I'm getting this right (and I'm more than a little rusty, plus the relevant papers don't seem to be available yet) the bug converts cellulose into acetates which modified yeast cells in turn convert into methyl halides that can be used to produce straight-forward gasoline as well as other useful chemicals (Science Daily article). Looks like I'm going to keep an eye on Chris Voigt's lab.