My parents are visiting this weekend, and earlier today we went out for a delightful brunch at Hotel Akersloot. We were talking about societal and technological progress, and I was struck by an interesting date calculation. We moved to the Netherlands (for the first time) in 1978, which is half-way between the end of the Second World War and Right Now. 33 years from the autumn of 1945 to the autumn of 1978, and another 33 (and a bit) years from 1978 to January 2012.
Which is kind of, wow. Huge changes in both of those periods, but it feels to me that the years from 1945 – 1978 were more significant. Perhaps that’s because I wasn’t around to experience the changes first-hand; things I have seen and events I have watched myself seem more ordinary than events I’ve only read about in historical records.
But I suppose that when Alex and Fiona are my age, and compare the period 1978 – 2012 to the decades they will have lived through, they will think that those years were more significant: the fall of the Soviet Union, the unification of Europe, the dawn of the internet and instant, universal access to information.
Many sites are going to go dark tomorrow (18 January 2012) in protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills currently before US congress. I’m helping Making Light do this, and I thought I’d make a quick note of how we’re going about it.
Google recommends using HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” status codes. The 503 code indicates that the service (or page, or site) is temporarily unavailable, but that it is expected back again soon. This is better than using the 404 (not found), 302 (
moved temporarily), or 301 (moved permanently) codes, because it tells web crawlers that they should just come back and try again later.
If your site is running on Apache, and is allowed to use mod_rewrite, you can set up a site-wide 503 page with the following steps:
Create an HTML page called 503.html, and upload it in the root of your site. This is just a normal HTML page – no special code needed. Here’s an example: 503_sopa.html
If you don’t already have an .htaccess file for your site, create one (it also goes in the root of your site). If you do already have one, add the following code to the top of the file, but read the notes before you do so:
# =====================
# SOPA Blackout
# =====================
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# Set a custom error document for 503 errors
ErrorDocument 503 /503_sopa.html
# Cause all requests (except images) to generate a 503 error,
# which will produce the custom 503 error document
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^111\.111\.111\.111$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g?|png|gif) [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !robots\.txt$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [L,R=503]
</IfModule>
Important notes on this snippet:
The “REMOTE_HOST” line contains an IP address that will be excluded from the blackout rules. Change the IP address listed (111.111.111.111) to your own. This will allow you to keep using your site (and its back-end features, like Movable Type or WordPress), but everyone else will just see the 503 page. If you want to preserve access to your site from multiple IP addresses, you can add multiple REMOTE_HOST lines.
The first “REQUEST_URI” line contains exceptions for image files. If you want to serve up an image as part of your 503 file, you need this line, otherwise images will return 503 errors as well. If you don’t need an image, or if you are using images hosted elsewhere, you can remove this line.
The second “REQUEST_URI” line ensures that the file robots.txt on your site will be served up normally, without a 503 error.
When you want to restore access to your site, simply remove the code from your .htaccess file, and you’ll be back to normal again.
I have two modes of listening to music: whole-album, and best-of. Sometimes I like to listen to a whole album, all the way through, again and again. And sometimes I like to listen to a random selection of my favourite tunes on shuffle.
My iTunes library is organized accordingly. When I download a new album, I create a new playlist for it, using the year in which I bought it, the band name, and album title (e.g. “2011 Aberfeldy
Somewhere To Jump From”). I add metadata to the comments to keep track of where I got it from, and the exact date on which I added it (e.g. “sunpig:acquired=20110206;sunpig:source=emusic.com”). Finally, I use iTunes’ star ratings to rate individual tracks. Slightly obsessive, but I like the way it gives me a view of what I was listening to in a given year. (iTunes doesn’t track listens by date–I wish it did–but I’m guessing that at least 80% of my listens happen in a 6-month period after initial acquisition.)
According to my library, I bought 76 albums in 2011. (For comparison: 2005 = 87, 2006 = 71, 2007 = 81, 2008 = 73, 2009 = 59, 2010 = 57.) Of those 76, there were 20 that I had played all the way through at last 10 times at the end of the year. (Technically: I have listened to each individual track on the album at least 10 times, but that’s a good enough metric for me.) Here’s the list, sorted alphabetically by artist.
Another delightful album from Aberfeldy. Light melodic pop drifting from humorous to melancholy with practiced ease. I’ve never come across an album with closing credits before. They’re quirky and uniquely fitting. Don’t you go changing.
More accessible, and more consistent than their first album Mirrored. A fantastic mix of experimental rhythms and furious driving beats. Video: “My Machines” feat. Gary Numan.
I was disappointed at first that there wasn’t anything on the album quite as catchy as the lead single “Make Some Noise,” but it definitely grew on me. Fun and funky.
One of my favourite tracks of the whole year is “Anything New”, which is distilled summer in a crystal goblet. A couple of other up-tempo moments punctuate a chilled-out ambient soundscape.
My favourite band discovery of the year. Big Moves are an indie band from Los Angeles. This album has a playful yet very precise sound that reminds me a lot of the Long Blondes – especially singer Jess Imme’s vocals on “Brontosaurus” – but with a generous helping of jazzy meanderings (“Blue Rose”). Video: “Stegosaurus”.
One bored afternoon in October I was browsing Last.fm for some new music recommendations. Big Moves came up, I followed the link to Youtube, and watched the video for “Groundbreaking Studies“. Then I watched it again. And again. And again. How can a song this good still only have less than 2000 views on it? The song is lush, energetic, and exuberant. The band takes the jazzy indie rock style they displayed on In The Beginning and turns it up to 11. It’s awesome. The rest of the EP is fantastic as well.
Cee Lo Green – The Lady Killer
Of all the albums in this list, this is the only one I don’t listen to any more. I loved it at the start of the year, but now it bores me.
I loved Friendly Fires’ first album, and Pala is a great follow-up. Steamy and smooth tropical dance sounds. After seeing their performance at T In The Park on the BBC, I was really looking forward to catching them live at Melkweg in December, but they had to cancel. Sad Panda. Weird video: “Hurting”
I somehow missed out on Frightened Rabbit’s second album The Midnight Organ Fight, so my baseline was their debut, Sings The Greys, which is a fairly subdued, moody affair. They have taken that moody, slightly folky feel, and turned up the power. This album is exultantly alive with anthems like “The Loneliness And The Scream” and “Living In Colour“. These guys are now on my “must-see-live” list.
I went through a bit of a Steve Reich phase in the spring, after noticing the World Minimal Music Festivaljust after it was over. Must not make that mistake again next year. The GSVU version of Music for 18 Musicians is crisp and clear and glorious. Trailer video.
Last.fm recommended Sky Larkin to me based on similarity to Dananananaykroyd. I didn’t see at at first, because their vocal styles are so radically different, but the rest of their music shares a lot of common themes: heavy rock-infused pop, with unorthodox song structures. Kaleide is a rich and complex album, and my favourite tracks have shifted around a lot since I started listening to it. For now, I’ve settled on liking “ATM” most of all.
Unlike the myth-tinged unity of their previous album The Hazards of Love, The King is Dead is “just” a collection of songs. A great collection of beautiful songs, from the peppy REM-ish “Calamity Song” to the sparse, haunting simplicity of “June Hymn.” I caught them live in Paradiso in March, and they were fantastic. Take any opportunity you get to see them.
The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar
I wasn’t sure if this album should count for 2011, because it includes most of the same songs as their EP A Balloon Called Moaning, which I listened to a lot in 2010. But it’s too good to leave out. Muscular yet dreamy rock, somewhat reminiscent of Ladytron, but all guitars and no synths. Surprise moment: when I came across their anthem “Cradle” backing a trailer for the new Ratchet & Clank game.
Attaching the word “mature” to techno feels wrong, but that’s what Barking is: practiced, polished, and highly accomplished. Underworld are mainstream now. I still love the album, but it occasionally makes me feel old. Video: “Bird 1”.
I grabbed this because United Fruit were playing support for Dananananaykroyd on their Glasgow gig in October, and it turns out to be an effective hard rock album. They’re good live, too.
Interesting that this list starts with Aberfeldy, and ends with Zoey van Goey, because their musical styles are quite similar. Sweet, airy, and melodic pop with excursions into the hauntingly melancholic. Video: “We Don’t Have That Kind Of Bread”.
Notable omission: Aidan Moffat + The Best Ofs – How To Get To Heaven From Scotland. I love this album, and it would have had a higher play count if I’d bought it earlier in the year.
One of the most interesting (and entertaining) things I’ve read about the publishing industry is Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Slushkiller. It deals with the manuscript submission stage, where authors send their work to a publisher, and an editor decides whether they should publish it. Teresa gives a blunt yet whimsical list of reasons a manuscript is typically rejected:
Author is functionally illiterate.
Author has submitted some variety of literature we don’t publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
…
Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
It’s a good book, but the house isn’t going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it’ll just get lost in the shuffle.
Stage 14 is not a rejection, but rather “Buy this book” — the point at which the publishing house decides to put the book into production.
The interesting thing about stage 13 books is that they are good enough be published, and importantly: good enough that a certain number of readers would enjoy them, and pay cash money for the privilege. If an author knows that their book is at stage 13, it may make sense for them to self-publish and try to reach that audience directly. Here are some reasons that can stop a book from being published, but that would not stop me from buying it:
Books in a series I enjoy that has not sold as well as the publisher hoped it would. (E.g. Twenty Palaces)
Books of a genre and type that home in on my taste like a guided missile, but where the author hasn’t yet convinced a publisher to take the financial risk of launching the series. (E.g. A Real Piece of Work)
Books that have been published before, but are now out of print, and whose rights have reverted to the author. (What was popular in the 1970s might not be mass-marketable any more.)
As a reader, I like the idea of these stage 13 books being available for purchase, in the same way that I like artists releasing music directly on soundcloud or bandcamp instead of (or as well as) through a major label album publishing deal. (My favourite examples right now: Slimes and Big Moves.) Just looking at it on a purely numerical basis, the fact that authors are willing to put stage 13 books on the market directly means that there are more books available that I might really like.
For the record, I don’t think that all authors should publish this way, and I don’t think that in the future all authors will self-publish. Authors write. They don’t necessarily do editing, artwork, typesetting (yes, ebooks do improve with proper typography), marketing, sales support, or any of the other numerous things that come into play when you start to sell books in volume. Right now, publishers act as a one-stop shop for all these services, and I’m sure they will continue to do so. I don’t know exactly what the future of publishing holds, but I imagine that the shift towards ebooks will create scope for new ventures: smaller-scale niche publishing houses, writer’s collectives, and blue-sky innovative startups.
Of course, if authors can put stage 13 books on the market, then what’s to stop them from sticking any old slush into an ePub and calling it silver? How do I know if a self-published ebook is a 13 that a publisher regretfully declined, or if it’s the laughing-stock of every editor in the business? Amazon doesn’t require you to have purchased an item before you can review it; most people can convince friends and family to drop a couple of 5-star reviews on them. But market distortion like that is hard to keep up in the long run. I think that in the end a little bit of general-purpose bullshit detection will help me steer clear of the worst dross, just as reviews, blogs, and word-of-mouth will steer me towards the best stuff. Which sounds pretty much like how I find most of my books already.
So although self-publishing holds benefits for me as a reader, whether it’s a good thing for authors is an entirely different matter. Self-publishing is going to enable a much deeper long tail of books in print than we have right now. This does not mean that we will all read more lesser-known works, and fewer bestsellers. The “recommendation problem,” described in great depth by Paul Lamere in his article “Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo” applies to books as well as music. I reckon that self-publishing will bring fame and fortune to a lucky few, but only the satisfaction of craftsmanship itself to the vast majority. As with any lottery, one should beware of selection and confirmation bias.
So if writing is a hobby for an author, and a previously rejected novel can be enjoyed by a couple of hundred readers around the world, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Does it sap the author’s ambition to strive for something greater, or does it bring them hard-earned satisfaction? Does it diminish the popularity of a well-loved full-time writer who sells books by the tens of thousands? Does wider availability of “good” reduce the reading public’s appetite for “great”?
Personally, I don’t come to the end of a good book and think, “There! My work here is done.” The end of a good book leaves me hungry for more. That’s really what makes me happy: more of what I like. I’m inclined to think that self-published ebooks work in my favour here.
FF DIN is a fantastic font. It’s clear and authoritative, but with loads of personality. Once you get to know it (thanks Mark!), you start seeing it everywhere. It’s particularly delicious for all-caps titling, but it works equally well as a body text font.
The only problem with DIN is the default at sign (@), which looks like ass.
Fortunately, DIN comes with a set of alternate glyphs built in, which you can access through OpenType‘s stylistic alternates feature. One of those alternate glyphs is a version of the at sign that actually looks like an at sign rather than a half-melted “id” ligature.
You can usually select OpenType stylistic alternates from the advanced font options dialog of your graphics or word processing program. In Pixelmator for OS X, for example, you open up the fonts dialog, click on the tools button, select the “Typography” option, and then choose an alternative stylistic set in the Typography dialog. In Word 2011, you open up the fonts dialog by selecting “Font…” from Format menu; stylistic sets are shown in the “Advanced typography” section of the Advanced tab.
Unfortunately, although CSS3 includes a font-variant-alternates property with which you can select alternate glyphs, there aren’t any browsers that support this yet. Bummer. So if you want to use DIN on the web, you’re either stuck with the ass-at, or you have to use a workaround.
One way is to wrap at signs in a <span>, so you can set their style explicitly, as suggested by Dan Cedarholm in his article Use the Best Available Ampersand.
monkey<span class="awesomat">@</span>example.com
But Drew McLellan’s article Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range in this year’s 24 Ways advent calendar suggests an intriguing potential alternative. The concept is that the @font-face rule allows you to select which unicode characters the webfont will be used for by setting the unicode-range property. Single out the ampersand (U+0026) or the at sign (U+0040) for special treatment, and Bob’s your uncle.
The difference is that for awesompersands you are trying to add a font for a single character, whereas for DIN awesomats, I want to remove font styling for a single character. The unicode-range property obliges nicely here, because it accepts multiple ranges:
@font-face {
font-family: 'dinregular';
url('font/DINWeb.woff') format('woff');
unicode-range:U+0-3F,U+41-10FFFF; /* Everything but the @ */
}
Browsers that don’t handle unicode-range will ignore it, and fall back to showing DIN for all characters, even the @. Which is fine.
In terms of typography, however, the drawback of this technique is that the plain font to be used for the U+40 unicode character may have a different x-height than the DIN of the surrounding text, so the at sign may look out of place — too large or too small. And the @font-face rule doesn’t allow a font-size property inside it, so you can’t tweak the font sizes to match each other. Hmm.
On balance, I think I’ll stick to wrapping my DIN at signs in a <span> until font-variant-alternates appears, but it’s a nifty technique to be aware of.
When it comes to fiction, in general, I’m a two-genre kind of guy: mysteries and science fiction. There are exceptions, of course, but as a rule historical and faux-historical settings don’t appeal to me. This takes out a lot of fantasy and nixes steampunk as an SF sub-genre. (Even Sue Grafton’s alphabet series, which remains set in the 1980s, drifts further into historical territory with every new book.) Romance is not my cup of tea, either, and high school destroyed any possibility of me ever taking pleasure from literary fiction.
I used to like the occasional piece of horror and slipstream, but until this summer I had no great desire to read urban fantasy. My probably unfair impression of the field was: vampires, werewolves, and woo. Real life is so full of superstition and pseudo-scientific claptrap that my appetite for the paranormal in fiction is diminished by association.
The notable exceptions to my genre-bound reading habits tend to come about as a result of a personal recommendation, or a favourite author trying something different. For example, I’ll read anything Lois McMaster Bujold writes: her Chalion and Sharing Knife series are fantasy, and I love them. My friend Julian suggested Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift series to me, and I enjoyed the heck out of A Madness of Angels. And I simply adore Charlie Stross’s Laundry series, which are a kind of Lovecraftian tongue-in-cheek (sometimes) spy thriller crossover. Ish.
Me, I write low thrillers. The setting is generally commonplace and localized, most of the characters are regular folks, and the plot is played out through the exercise of personal agency rather than cultural or organizational power. In fact, one of the most persistent criticisms of my books has been that they don’t have a high thriller insider’s view of the Twenty Palace Society.
Charlie’s recommendation that “if you like my Laundry stories there is a good chance you’ll find Harry’s Twenty Palaces yarns agreeable” was good enough for me, and Harry’s first book, Child of Fire found its way into my shopping basket in time for the summer holidays.
Although my reaction upon finishing the book was, “Great! Want more!” my first impressions were mixed, because I came to the book with skewed expectations. Thinking that it was going to be like the Laundry books, I was expecting more humour. Thinking of other hard-boiled low thrillers I like, I was expecting Ray Lilly, the protagonist, to be more confident and self-assured. Both expectations were wrong.
Ray Lilly is tough, but he’s not cocky. He’s one step above hired muscle, but he’s not a thug. At the start of the book, it is very clear that he is not top dog in the situation. He is out of his depth. His boss Annalise Powliss can kick his ass, and he knows it. He doesn’t have the endearing haplessness of Bob Howard in the Laundry. He’s not a private eye who cracks wise to cover up a sensitive nature or a tortured soul. Ray has seen and done things that scare the shit out of him. He doesn’t want to help save the world; he just doesn’t know what else he can do any more.
It takes a while for these expectations to settle in, and judging from Harry’s comments, maybe they don’t for everyone:
“The folks who believed that nothing happened in the first third of Child of Fire confused me at first, until I realized that, until Ray and Annalise identify the villain they’ll be chasing, the plot question for the book was “What the hell is going on?” For some reason, a sizeable segment of the readership doesn’t recognize that as legitimate narrative. That’s surprising and interesting to me.”
Ray is low on the totem pole of an organization called the “Twenty Palaces Society”. The Society exists to limit who has access to magic, because magic is really dangerous. People who wield it sometimes mistakenly think that they can control the creatures they summon from the Empty Spaces. The Society calls those creatures predators, because they want little more than to cross over into our world and enslave, eat, or simply kill all life on the planet.
Annalise Powliss is a peer in the Society, and her job is to go around and stomp on magic — hard. She doesn’t use a cute Men In Black neuralizer device to erase people’s memories; she just kills them and takes their spell books. Ray is her Wooden Man, a role he first thinks of as subordinate, but which he later comes to understand is much closer to decoy, or simply bait.
As I mentioned earlier: there is no wise-cracking here, no jocular camaraderie. The job they do and the things they see take a terrible toll on them. This is a dark book, not a buddy movie. But despite the Lovecraftian terrors, disturbing twists, and grisly scenes, I would call it a grim thriller rather than a horror novel. This is perhaps what sets it apart from Charlie Stross’s Laundry books: their sometimes cheerful British attitude towards the end of the world belies a peculiar flavour of despair that does flag them as horror.
At the end of Child of Fire, I was completely drawn in to the world, and wanted to read more. Fortunately the second book in the series, Game of Cages was already in print, and the third, Circle of Enemies was due out at the end of August, so I didn’t have long to wait for my next fix.
Both books are cracking good reads, as much in terms of the self-contained stories they tell as in what they reveal about Ray and Annalise, and the dangerous world they inhabit. The ghost knife that Ray wields turns out to be much more intriguing than just a tool and a weapon. Ray himself turns out to be much more capable than the typical Wooden Man. And the secretive Twenty Palaces Society itself turns out to be more fallible and less powerful than the world perhaps needs it to be. As tantalizing hooks for future plots go, it would be hard to beat the discovery Ray makes at the end of Circle of Enemies. I love finding new series, and this was a winner.
There are no guarantees in writing. You work like crazy on a story that means a lot to you, and when you send it out into the world where it’s met with scorn, or indifference, or casual contempt. There are no guarantees that X will be a great story or that Y number of readers will fall all over it and spread the word. I know as well as anyone that no one owes me anything.
As Harry describes it, he got excellent support from his publisher, but the market just didn’t respond. The books got good reviews, and have gathered a loyal set of followers, but in the end not enough people bought them. I feel a kind of selfish disappointment that there won’t be any more books in the series, but just as George R.R. Martin is not my bitch, neither is Harry Connolly. All I can say is that he has gained an admirer in me, and I’ll be looking forward to anything he writes in the future.
The bright point at the end of this tale is that I do still have one more Ray Lilly story to savour. Just yesterday, Harry self-published Twenty Palaces, a prequel story to the whole series, in which Ray meets Annalise, creates his ghost knife, and sees a predator for the first time:
When Ray Lilly was 13 years old, a handgun accident landed his best friend, Jon Burrows, in a wheelchair and turned Ray into a runaway and petty criminal. Fifteen years later, Ray returns home after a stint in prison; he’s determined to go straight, but he knows he can’t do that without making peace with his old friend.
What Ray doesn’t expect is to discover that Jon has just received a mysterious cure–not only is he out of his wheelchair, he seems stronger and faster than… well, pretty much anyone. Worse, his cure has drawn all sorts of unwanted attention: the media are camped out on his block, the police are investigating him for insurance fraud, and weird shadowy figures have begun to draw closer, figures who clearly do not mean to do Jon any good.
Can Ray atone for the biggest mistake of his life by protecting his oldest and best friend? What’s more, should he?
I bought it ($4.99) as soon as I saw the blog post. What I didn’t realize until I got the PDF is that this “story” runs to a novel-length 268 pages. I’d been expecting something much shorter. As a fan of a cancelled series, that’s not just good value; it’s priceless.
