9/8/08: MOVIN' OUT!
I just learned (though the announcement was made back in August) that Google is shutting down its "Google Pages" service, on which this site is hosted and maintained. Oops. Google says they're "merging" Google Pages into their Google Sites service, and that (in theory) they will automatically move this site. Uh-huh. Raise your hand if you've had... interesting... experiences with automatic migrations.
In any case, after I looked around Google Sites, I concluded it's not quite the website conceptual model I really wanted to use. And it's a new service, subject to change without notice, and I already went through that adventure with Google Pages, didn't I?
Since this site has come to look a lot like a blog (and in all fairness, Google Pages is only so-so at maintaining a blog-like site), I've decided to move everything over to Blogger. Part of my rationale is that Blogger's an established service with millions of customers, so the chance that it'll go through major changes (or be shut down entirely) is pretty small. I have to figure out how to set up some of the static, hierarchical stuff in a blog format, but it turns out other people have done the same thing, so I don't have to invent a new solution. Hooray!
So, effective immediately, look for my stuff at my new Blogger site:
http://danielcstarr.blogspot.com/
I will be leaving this site up and un-altered, both for your convenience as I move the stuff over to its new home (and update some of it in the process), and because I'm kinda curious to see what the automatic transition from Google Pages to Google Sites does to it. But I won't be posting anything new here.
9/2/08: A RUBBER DONUT PLAGUE?
I've got a simple page-hit counter on this page (it's that little number at the bottom of the page), and I've seen a strange thing the last few days: most of the hits to this page have been coming from the page in which I describe my technique for replacing the rubber engine-mount isolators on my old tube-frame Buell. I have no idea why this is happening, and I don't collect anywhere near enough information to actually figure out who's looking at the page or why, so it might be nothing more than a statistical cluster. Or, perhaps, there's some sort of plague out there, all those bad rubber donuts? If you've got a clue, drop me a line at danielcstarr (at) gmail.com.
8/20/08: ON HUMAN ADAPTABILITY, AND OTHER GREAT MYTHS
I finally got off my duff and wrote up a "war story" article for the ProjectsAtWork website. Look for it to be published in September (I'll add a link at that time). It's partially about the lengths people will go to in order to preserve their comfortable way of working... even if it means falling well short of the project's goals.
Writing this piece got me thinking about the great myth that we humans spread from Africa to occupy the whole planet because we're so adaptable. We must adapt well, the thinking goes, since we live everywhere from tropical jungles to Arctic tundra, from sea level to mountaintops.
But in truth, I don't think we adapt very well at all. We can't grow fur, let alone grow and shed in a cycle matched to the weather (something many dogs can do). We burn in the sun, freeze in the cold, dry out in the desert. Drop a naked human into the Arctic, or the desert, or onto a mountaintop, and he's dead within hours. Physically, we're pretty optimized for 60-90 degrees Fahrenheit, not too dry, not too wet, and we really don't do too well outside that environment.
The real secret of our so-called "adaptability" is our trick of taking little bubbles of our native African savanna environment with us. The igloo in the Arctic, the lean-to in the jungle, the air-conditioned shopping mall in Phoenix--these are all examples of how we take little micro-environments with us. So is an astronaut's space-walk suit, of course--or the Shuttle or Soyuz capsule, and the Space Station both are visiting. Or, more prosaically, the respirator that a farmer wears when heading inside the composting silo (where there is typically too little oxygen to support life) to do a repair.
We're not above stealing from other, better-adapted creatures, of course--one of the first things we did when we headed into the colder regions was to borrow the fur from native animals. Heck, once we ate him, that polar bear didn't need his fur anymore.
The furthest extreme of our adapt-the-environment-to-our-comfort habit is the good old science fiction concept of terraforming. Tinker with the atmosphere of Mars, add a little carbon dioxide to trap heat, and in a few centuries (or so it goes in the stories) you've got an earth-like planet where people can stroll about without those uncomfortable space suits and respirators.
All of which leads me to an alternate formulation of this whole global warming issue. The "Gaia hypothesis," hopelessly oversimplified, says that all life on earth fits together to form a single organism, which adapts itself and the planet to be more conducive to life. Well, what if global warming isn't just an accident or the product of corporate greed? What if it's the human species unconsciously altering the entire planet to expand the range in which we're comfortable? Not to say it's working all that well, given the expansion of deserts and coming submergence of coastlines. Then again, if Siberia were to become a comfortable grassland like the Great Plains of North America, it might represent a significant expansion of our range. Who's to tell? I guess we'll find out if we live long enough. And it might make for an interesting SF story...
7/28/08: OF THINGS THAT WENT AWAY...
My sister-in-law came over yesterday, with a copy of The Last Protector, and asked me to sign it. Of course, I wanted to write an appropriate note above the signature, and since Marj is big into sewing, embroidery and the like I figured I'd put in a reference to a scene on page 56 where Scrornuck (for those of you who have just joined us, he's the hero of the story) gets out needle and thread to patch a rip in his kilt following a battle. But when I looked, I found the mention of sword-swinger-as-garment-worker was gone, apparently snipped out in one of the many passes I made through the manuscript to remove "unnecessary" words. Oh well...
Speaking of deletions, I've put another entry on the deleted scenes page. When I first sold The Last Protector, Scrornuck had a friend in his home land, a guy named Schaughnessy. Somewhere during the edits, Schaughnessy went away, a victim of the need to keep the book down to a reasonable length. But I liked the character, even if there wasn't any good reason to keep him in this book, so I've put his two scenes on the website. Enjoy!
7/15/08: FREE, AND WORTH EVERY CENT
We Struggling Authors are always looking for a free, or at least cheap, way to push the product. One of the most obvious and simple is to stick a plug for the book into the signature line of your email messages. Seemed an obvious thing, several people recommended I do it. And so, a few weeks back, all my emails started sporting this line at the end:
Action! Adventure! Romance! And the World's Most Perfect Beer Container!
All this and more in Daniel C. Starr's Debut Novel, "The Last Protector"
NOW AVAILABLE from Twilight Times Books
Visit http://danielcstarr.googlepages.com to find out more
Now, I can't say I've seen a huge increase in website traffic since putting this ad into my email. More interestingly, since adding the signature-line ad, I've had three different people reply to my messages by asking, "by the way, can you send me a link to your web site?"
So much for advertising. Or, maybe I've just learned something about the engineering mind, as all three of these people were engineers...
7/7/08: ON RESEARCH, SF, AND BEER
I was doing more research for the Beers of Grand Taupeaquaah page, trying to resolve the question of whether the "Heavy Red Lager" consumed in the book is more closely approximated by the Irish Red from Carlyle Brewing or the McCarthy Red from Emmett's Ale House (don't you wish you could drink beer and call it "research"?). And this led me to revise the entry for "Batatat's Stout," naming two different beers--one to describe Batatat's on tap, and another to describe it when served up in the World's Most Perfect Beer Container. This in turn led me to research how the "widget" cans used by Guinness and others work (you can find it on Wikipedia), and to ask myself just how the Batatat's container manages to chill and churn the beer, and then automatically dispose of itself when emptied.
This is a problem about writing "science fiction," or what I sometimes call "technological fantasy," versus "pure" fantasy--if I were writing pure fantasy, I could just explain it away as magic. But if it's SF, there has to be a mechanism, and preferably one that doesn't violate too many laws of nature too blatantly. It's OK to have a little BS, like the "hyperspace" or "warp drive" of space-travel stories, because you can always say that while we haven't discovered them yet, nobody's proven they're impossible. On the other hand, you don't want to set your story on a helium-filled balloon floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter, because what we already know about Jupiter (its atmosphere is 80 percent hydrogen and 20 percent helium) tells us the blimp would sink like a rock. Oops.
So, back to the Batatat's container. Is the thing even possible? Well, let's see... the stirring-up thing is obviously not too hard, since it's a product already. As for cooling the beer, decompressing a gas (or better yet, letting a gas that's been compressed to a liquid state flash back) generates a lot of coldness, so that might be part of the system. Cornstarch-based "biodegradable" plastics which just sort of crumble away to dust already exist, as do "smart" materials which can change their properties on command. Stir in a little nano-technology... yeah, I think I can make this work.
But first I'm gonna have another beer. Research, you know.
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6/26/08: FROM THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
Movies play them over the credits. DVD's don't make it to the store without 'em. What are they? Deleted scenes! Believe it or not, I wrote a fair number of words that didn't make it into the final book. Some didn't make it because they just plain stunk, but others were pretty good (or at least I think so) but got the ol' heave-ho for such practical reasons as keeping the book from being too heavy to fit in your carry-on bag or too long to read in a lifetime.
Well, if it's good for a DVD, it's good for a book (besides, I spent a lot of time and effort writing 'em, maybe you'll enjoy reading 'em). Click HERE to go straight to my collection of deleted scenes... and don't worry if you haven't yet read The Last Protector. The deleted scenes collection is 100% spoiler-free (though they might not make a whole lot of sense if you haven't read the book yet). Enjoy!
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6/9/08: MORE MOMENTS OF FAME
First, a review and interview in the May 18 edition of the St. Charles East High School student newspaper, the Xray. I was pleased that my book got more space than the review of Grand Theft Auto IV (though I admit GTA probably sold more copies in the first five minutes than The Last Protector will in the next year). CLICK HERE to read the review. Thanks to Wade Chimerofsky for reviewing the book (at a time when it was 153 loose sheets of paper inside a cover).
And the Daily Herald, one of the big Chicago/Suburban papers, published a nice little article about me and the book in its Tri-Cities/Kaneland edition on Sunday, June 8. The article also appeared in the on-line edition, and you can read it by clicking HERE. Thanks to Dave Huen of the Herald for mentioning me in his column, and thanks to Joan Arterberry-Zavitz for letting Dave know I exist and am interesting enough to justify a few hundred words.
OK, neither of these publications is exactly the New York Times, but at my place in the publishing food chain, I'll take what I can get.
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5/29/08: WHAT BEER WAS THAT?
If you've read The Last Protector (or the excerpt that appears on the Twilight Times Books website), you've probably noticed that Scrornuck Saughblade is something of a beer lover. Takes after his creator, he does...
So I got to thinking, just what beers from this world might have inspired the fictional Batatat's Stout, or Black Sunday Lager? There wasn't an easy answer, as there are a lot of candidates--and I haven't come close to visiting all the microbreweries in the country! But, for a first shot, pay a visit to the Beer Tent, and see what I've found so far...
BUY THIS BOOK--IT'S PATRIOTIC!
(In honor of April 15)
If you've just gotten that Economic Stimulation Package check from the government, and you want it to do the absolute most it can to help the US Economy, consider spending part of it on a copy of The Last Protector. It's printed right here in the good ol' USA, and the royalty checks will come to me, right here in the Heartland of Illinois. And, as a special bonus, I promise to spend at least some of the money I make from this book on parts and supplies for my old Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
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