Month: November 2020

Back in Action

Sorry I’ve been so quiet of late. I do not have a lot of content at the moment simply because I’ve been busy with other things. I’m in the midst of a time-consuming project, but I hope that, once I’m done with it, I will have some definite updates on the release of both volume 1 and volume 2 of Jake and the Dynamo. Basically, I’m working on the getting these books back to market after my publisher had to close its doors.

I’ve also managed to find a little time to start watching My-HiME again. I planned to make that my next review, but then other things intervened and my watching of it went on hiatus. I should, however, be able to talk about that and a few other titles in the near future.

Writing ..

Spending the evening writng. That is all.

Anime Review: ‘Gosick’

This is another review I originally produced for a different site. At the time I wrote it, I was considerably less familiar with anime and anime subculture, so I have edited it to give (I hope) some better insights and context. At the time I originally watched it, the series was streaming on Crunchyroll. While no longer available on that service, it has found a home at Funimation.

Gosick, directed by Hitoshi Nanda. Starring Aoi Yuki, Takuya Eguchi, and Hidenof Kiuchi. Studio BONES, . 24 episodes 25 minutes (approx. ). Rated TV-MA.

An oddball anime with an oddball name, Gosic is a 24-episode series based on a set of light novels by Kazuki Sakuraba. Kalium at MegaTokyo described it back when it first appeared as more-or-less the best anime series of , and though it has some obvious flaws, it is overall quite good. Gosick is an attempt to blend four genres: Gothic horror, murder mystery, political thriller, and a more-or-less typical high-school romcom likely deriving inspiration from Toradora!

Victorique and Kujo stand in a graveyard.
Trying to be moody.

These four genres jostle each other on stage and frequently fail to get along, and the show’s well-meant attempt at Deep Meaning™ ultimately falls flat, but the visuals are consistently beautiful and Gosick succeeds exactly where it might be first expected to fail: Despite its use of shop-worn tropes, it is a well-crafted love story. Though weak in some ways, it accomplishes its main goal and does it with an unusual amount of class.
Continue reading “Anime Review: ‘Gosick’”

The State of the eBook Exploration

So, I’ve been exploring the subject of how to get into self-publishing and generate my own professional-looking books. General agreement is that the best software for doing this is Vellum, though that has both a prohibitive price ($250 for the full package), and it only runs on a Mac.

Besides that, there is a slew of open-source programs that, altogether, will probably accomplish the same tasks but with considerably more difficulty for the end-user.

Adding to these difficulties, my laptop is now extremely out of date. I’m still running Windows 7 and much of the software I would like to try will only run on Windows 8 or later. This includes Amazon’s free Kindle eBook generator.

When I started exploring this, I naïvely thought at first that I might not have too much difficulty. As it turns out, eBooks are packages of CSS and XHTML files. I saw some authors complaining that most of the software aside from Vellum requires some coding knowledge, and I thought to myself, “Hold on, I can write CSS and HTML.”

So I took an eBook generated in Vellum and pulled it open using an open-source EPUB editor called Sigil, and I didn’t have too much difficulty figuring out how it was built. Not only that, but I thought to myself that, by editing the code directly, I could probably create a much cleaner, more compact file with fewer <div>s and without all the unused CSS rules. I could stick to readable web-safe fonts too. Small file size, after all, is important to sales and royalties since Amazon takes its slice based on file size.

So I started editing the first volume of Jake and the Dynamo in Sigil, and while I could indeed make a slim file with a lot of the same cosmetic features typical of a professionally generated eBook, it was incredibly time-consuming, basically requiring me to insert and edit each paragraph individually (mostly to make sure the italics were in the right places). With a judicious selection of web-safe font stacks, the existing images, and some proper HTML semantics, presto, the result was what you see in the header.

The result looks good in Sigil. But that’s the important part—in Sigil. I opened it with another program and started seeing problems, such as my drop-caps wandering all over the page (and I don’t know why; the CSS for my drop-caps is very similar to how WordPress does it).

But the biggest mess came from Amazon, which insists on a proprietary filetype, MOBI. I made the conversion to MOBI using Calibre, which I can only use in an older version because the latest doesn’t work on Windows 7, and the result was a complete mess. Most especially, either the MOBI filetype or Calibre (not sure which) doesn’t like a lot of my CSS; the kind of stuff I’d do on the web to make sure images resize while keeping their proportions, or to stylize certain tags, apparently doesn’t work in Amazon’s eBooks.

I’ve been needing for some time to update my computer, and that need has become more apparent over the last few days as I’ve repeatedly tried to run software that simply won’t run on my antiquated system. What I’m thinking at present is that I might go ahead and shell out for a refurbished Macbook and a copy of Vellum, and then continue to plod along with my current system for everything else as long as possible. Meanwhile, I’ll add a laptop-update fund to the monthly budget.

Update on the State of ‘Jake and the Dynamo’

I have all but finally decided to self-publish Jake and the Dynamo, which was my original intention with the series anyway. This is admittedly a self-own, but I’m having a hard time getting a publisher to acknowledge my existence—and I don’t mean accept my manuscript; I really mean acknowledge my existence. I think something serious has happened to the industry in the last decade because I used to be able to collect polite, pre-formatted rejection slips. Now I can’t even get a “you suck so don’t write to us again.”

I’m currently swimming in a bewildering array of advice, much of it obviously bad or exploitative, about how to move forward with this. I will certainly have to commission cover art, for which I have some leads, and also format the manuscript. I’m assuming the latter task will require learning some new software, though I’m unsure of that as of yet. My former publisher used Vellum, I think, but that’s only available on Mac, and I don’t have one. At the very least, I know something about web and document accessibility, which will probably help.

So that’s what I’m up to right now, which is part of why the content here is so slim. I really want to get the first two volumes of Jake and the Dynamo available in the near future; the first needs republished, and the second needs to be published for the first time. I am in the midst of the draft of the third. I don’t want to be too hasty and have a bad roll-out when a little more legwork could produce a better product (and more sales, of course).

Rag & Muffin is currently on an editor’s desk, and the requested wait period has not closed, but considering how things are going, I expect that it will (about three months now) without my existence having been acknowledged. At that point, I will consider self-publishing it as well, though I might attempt more submissions first.

I gotta work tonight …

I’m starting to explore the possibilities of self-publishing, so I’m spending tonight looking into the subject and gathering information on what steps to take. I’ll check in later with some some reviews and stuff.

Why Blood Tastes like Copper

Sorry for the long time away. Life is happening. I got a wife and baby and job and stuff. But anyway, here I am.

While my wife is sleeping off her night shift, I have spent most of the day working on my current novel in progress, which happens to be volume 3 of Jake and the Dynamo, currently under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.

Anyway, as I was working, I happened to find myself asking a trivial question—why do we typically describe blood as tasting like copper?

This question led me to an interesting article on LiveScience. Although some speculation appears to be involved in the article’s conclusion, the apparent answer is that copper and other metals, including iron, don’t actually have the metallic odor we attribute to them. Rather, the smell comes from an oil in our skin, which breaks down in the presence of metal.

So, when you grab a piece of metal, the breakdown of the oil in your hands leaves behind the “metallic” smell. Naturally, since metal coins get a lot of handling, this makes coins smelly. Thus, the distinctive odor of copper pennies.

Similarly (this part appears to be more speculative), the iron in blood can produce the same smell for the same reason, and (this part is conjecture) we may be sensitive to this metallic smell specifically so that we can be alert to the smell of blood.

So, we smell blood because blood reacts to skin oil in the same way coins do, and then we turn around and attribute the smell of coins to blood.

So there you go.

Jake and the Dynamo: The Shadow of His Shadow
Phase:Writing
Due:3 years ago
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