I'll tumbl For Ya

In celebration of my new work situation in San Francisco, and to stave off the morass of bleakness and political despair on certain other face-twittery social media, I've been taking more digital snapshots lately and posting on Instagram. I'm not entirely sure that those pics are open to the world, though, at least without me doing more work. We're all playing in walled gardens with WiFi these days, and I prefer to lounge in gardens, not work.

Yahoo seems to have buttoned up access to Flickr after their multiple catastrophic password-hack issues, thus breaking my former Instragram-to-flickr backup. Now I've set up a new tumblr, and re-re-posted some of my favorite shots there. The weirdness of one Yahoo property working while another one fails is not lost on me.

If you like looking at square pictures of things, especially abstract forms in urban settings, you could do worse than click over:

https://mpclemens.tumblr.com

So far it's just a visual record. I still like Clickthing as an outlet for verbiage, sporadic as it is.

If you want to hear what I think, pop in here every now and then. If you want to see tiny windows on my part of the world, tumble over to tumblr. No harm or offense taken if you want neither. :-)

EDIT: and just like that, Instagram -> Tumblr is broken, too. What the actual hell, Yahoo? Get your house in order.

Focus

The problem with long-languishing projects left on the shelf is that eventually you need to face them. Lately I've gotten the notion to return to the old Kodak Autographic camera I picked up ages and ages ago, with the grand ambition of resurrecting it somehow. Here it is, sans bellows (see below) and with the lens board retracted.



Refitting it to take modern 120 film, for example, instead of the long-defunct 122 roll film format. Replace the disintegrating bellows. And, like so many of my good intentions, the scope of the work staggered me. The "to do" list looks like:

1. Remove lens and clean shutter
2. Remove and replace bellows
3. Acquire old 122 spools, somehow fit to 120 spools
4. Hope to the spirit of George Eastman that the camera is still light-tight
5. Take photos!

1. Remove lens and clean shutter

Doable enough, thanks to directions from the Net. Hey presto!




And you may remember "clean shutter" from a long-ago post. Here's the insides, if you want to marvel at it like I do:



Progress: COMPLETED

2. Remove and replace bellows

Removal, check:



Not surprisingly, Kodak didn't want you to remove the bellows from these cameras. Think iPhone battery, but in the 1920s.

These are were riveted into a metal plate around the lens, and are were held in place near the film by a set of menacing looking metal tabs. Oh, and they're so old and dry that they are literally crumbling.

Replacement is simple! First, build a time machine...

The collective wisdom of the Net shows DIY bellows made from leather, or light-blocking curtain fabric, or black Bristol board and duct tape. There's a lot of measuring, evidently. And creasing. And folding. And maybe even a bit of math.

Progress: FULL OF GOOD INTENTIONS IF NOT ACTUAL PROGRESS

3. Acquire old 122 spools, somehow fit to 120 spools

One of the Typosphere's own solved this problem years ago, and far more elegantly than I would have. A trip to eBay for spools and the dollar store for some sacrificial screwdrivers would do it.

Progress: SHAMELESSLY COPY, BEING SURE TO CALL IT A "TRIBUTE"

4. Hope to the spirit of George Eastman that the camera is still light-tight

[Cue sound of needle scratching across a record]

Yeah, about that.

So, aside from the century(?) old bellows having seen far better days, some previous owner mishandled this camera and dropped it right on the front corner. Part of the carriage that slides the lens forward and back is simply gone. And the rangefinder mirrors are cracked and bent. And that's only what I can see.

Replacing the bellows properly looks like a project unto itself. And for a camera that's been traumatized already, that will resist my "upgrades"... well, you can see why this got shelved.

Progress: SHIFT TO PLAN "B"

---

Enter Plan B

Two things have me pulling the old Kodak and its part of the shelf again, working the shutter on the lens, looking at Bristol board, and pricing black cloth tape...

First, various people shooting by bodging antique or vintage camera lenses onto the front of their DSLR cameras. The results are rather dreamy and lovely to look at, and although the integrated shutter in this lens makes it far from suitable for re-use that way, it got me thinking about the marriage of old versus new.

Second, there's (no surprise) a very vibrant DIY camera movement out there. Joe Van Cleave's examples are lovely pieces of engineering and camera-making, especially his recent box/pinhole model, which got me thinking about old view cameras, to the point where I checked out a monster coffee table book from the library just to get more inspiration. And the one that's currently giving me the most hope, as in "hey I have all that stuff at home" is this Lego-and-paper-and-tape creation.

All of these examples are helping me attain something I so badly need: focus. Not getting bogged in particulars, and remembering that it doesn't take a ton of engineering to make an image.

So, the lens is off, the bellows are destined for the trash bin, and maybe, just maybe, one project will come off the shelf.

My Daughter is Kicking my Ass

...at games, that is. My youngest child (age seven) is on some kind of massive board game bender right now. We don't have anything Hallmark-y like an actual Family Game Night or anything, but we do have numerous bookshelves, and at least one of those shelves is jam-packed with games. As the kids have aged, the selection has improved. I will be a happy man indeed, for example, if I never have to sit through another round of Candyland ever, ever again, and my eldest's much-loved Toy Story Monopoly Junior is buried in the back of the closet where it will hopefully remain out-of-mind until the heat death of the sun.

Gradually, gradually, we have been able to replace these games of chance with more strategic and less luck-based fare. Mancala is a great one, because the rules are dead simple, and it contains a good mix of surprise and strategy (sometimes with directed help from dad. "I'm about to take these pieces unless you move them...") I know it gets disparaged for being the token "wacky" card game, but all my kids honed their ruthlessness to a fine edge playing endless two-player hands of Uno during sibling soccer games. We pulled Sharp Shooters out of storage recently, which is basically Yahtzee with more visual scoring and the pleasure of being responsible for sixteen dice. And we've even been playing Sorry! quite a bit, once I learned that it goes from a boring luck-of-the-draw game to a ruthless slapdown simply by dealing out a small hand of cards to every player. It was a revelation. Castle Keep is quick and easy, when the dog doesn't decide to lay down in the middle of the playing space. There's little want for unplugged entertainment at our house.

When any of the kids seem to be having trouble sleeping, my wife and I joke -- not untruthfully -- that they must be in the middle of learning something. We saw this when they were infants, discovering their hands, and rolling, and learning to crawl. We saw it when they were walking, and "talking" with us via baby signs (yes, we are those parents), and we see it now and then when they're mastering the bigger concepts: multiplication, vocabulary for their Spanish class, some new piano piece. You can practically hear the gears turning in their little heads.

With the exception of my 5am NaNoWriMo ritual of me + typewriter + dog + weaponized coffee, I have been sleeping soundly. Not a peep from the kids at all, which is why this sudden turn toward games and gaming has caught me off guard. We've been spending hours lately, moving tokens, dealing cards, or hoping for a six in Catan: Junior (because a six lets you move the ghost pirate, duh.) It's becoming something of a mania with the child, and of course we want to encourage this. It's harmless, is probably honing some skill or the other, and it's good for her to learn how to lose gracefully, because if there's one thing I do not do, it's coddle the kids. Once we've put Plumpy and Mister Mint and Gramma Nut and all the other horrors back in the box, the figurative gloves come off. I may point out weaknesses in the defense... for a little while. I do not play Daddy's Little Princess checkers. You want non-competitive? Do a jigsaw puzzle (though I get the last piece.)

So not only has the youngest been playing ever single game she can get her hands upon, and asking about those she can't (Monopoly, garrrrgh), but she is completely kicking my ass. Either the dice hate me, or she's skimming from the bank when I'm not looking, or she's genuinely, actually good. Is it possible to be a prodigy at Uno? Any scholarship opportunities in this? I'm asking for a friend.

I'm not even talking about video games, where my dwindling reflexes and Lack of Caring render me helpless to all three of my spawn. (Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you.) I'm being outclassed and outgunned by a person still waiting for her permanent molars to come in. She's learned a victory dance from her mother. It's brief, but it stings, oh, how it stings.

I couldn't be more proud.

Hexed

First: NaNoWriMo starts in ten days -- less, actually. So I'm freaking out, because of this year's pledge to Lack a Plan and just to Go With It Come What May.

I'm drowning the panic in tasty snacks...



and getting the Beast in its usual spot...



...and for some reason, this year, I have decided that a board game needs to be designed, allowing the hapless reader to re-live the dramatic point of the plot when [REDACTED], which I'm sure you'll agree might be kind of interesting. And this means that I need to archive a link to this hex graph paper PDF generator. Because, you know, it's not like I'm going to be writing a novel or anything during this time.

So this is how my brain rewards me for joining the "Team Pantsless" crowd this year. Yay brain!

Metamorphic

I may have mentioned once or twice that I'm a little pinball-crazed. Crossing my newsfeed today is this item about a group working to recreate in the physical realm a popular pinball machine that formerly only existed in the digital. There are constraints to the project, not the least of which are budget and the laws of physics. The availability or practicality of parts, for example, are utterly unlimited in a digital realm, and I own some games that simply cannot exist in any physical form. And there are some that lie vaguely in-between the realms of "physically possible" and "batsh*t cukoo" (and get criticized for basically being tables that play themselves.)

The Timeshock! table, though -- and the other virtual tables produced by this studio -- all appear to have just enough grounding in reality to make them practical, and that, in my opinion, is a large part of their charm (I have two of the other titles they list in the article.) They're challenging and yet predictable: simulating reality in a convincing fashion is sufficiently difficult, and I'm sure that goes two ways. I like the idea, though, almost as if the idea of pinball retreated to a digital cocoon during the lean years of the 1990's, only to re-emerge reborn and metamorphosed.

Of course, I'm still rooting for the creation of digital simulations of some of my favorite tables, too. Farsight did a decent recreation of the classic Haunted House table for their Pinball Arcade app, and they're promising a Kickstarter campaign to bring over The Addams Family, the top-selling table of all time, and (not coincidentally) the one that appears to be requested the most. I'd love to have a playable version of this machine around, as it contributed in part to my delinquency in grad school and made me weigh the importance of truly having clean laundry vs. setting aside a few quarters for a game. (Hint: laundry did not win.) As I've pointed out before, pinball machines are in top form as they leave the factory, and then are devoted to a life of being bashed and battered around from the inside-out. Care and upkeep is much easier on a tablet than a table.

All the same, I'm pretty excited. I hope this digital-to-analog port happens, and I hope to give the game a try in person if it does. It's not too often something digital gets to insert itself into the analog realm, and I think it's noteworthy when it does.

Nibswap Knight

Caution: pen nerd-ism ahead...

Tony posted a question in the comments of the previous pencast entry:

I'm curious about the perfect width of what looks like an italic nib.

Well-spotted: it's actually a hybrid of a Pilot Knight fountain pen with the italic nib pulled out of a Pilot Plumix italic. The Knight was a Staples clearance find (I think it's discontinued?) and the Plumix came from Target. Both are cartridge/converter pens, and of course, Pilot has a proprietary refill (grr) that is at least easy to refill (yay) using nothing more high-tech than an eyedropper or in desperation, a coffee stir-straw liberated from the office break room.

It wasn't until relatively recently that I discovered that both have the same nib and feed, so they could be swapped out with relative ease. I've had enough practice pulling the nibs out of Pilot's Varsity pens that I assumed the process would be much the same: start with an empty pen, wrap the nib and feed in paper towel, grip firmly and pull straight out.

The Plumix is more useful to me now as a carrying-around pen, since the thinner nib sips ink instead of guzzling it. The now-italic Knight stays at my desk, and the nib is good for pencasts, or for notes where I'm never far from an ink bottle. The nib runs a little dry, and tends to skip when the ink gets low in the cartridge, two fact that frustrated me when it lived in the Plumix. Plus, I like how it tarts up my handwriting. I've always had a weakness for calligraphy pens for the same reason.

Now both pens are getting more use, which is a happy day indeed.

Paperlympics: Opening Ceremonies

For best effect, play while reading...

When I saw the post last month on Rhodia Drive about the chance to test-drive a pair of their writing pads -- one with yellow, one with white paper -- I was perhaps a tiny bit interested.  I already have a professed love for the bright orange brand, having been turned on to its magical ink-friendly properties by the enablers at Fountain Pen Network. And I know the generosity of their marketing department with samples, so of course I threw the Clickthing hat in the ring, and then waited (im)patiently for a confirmation email, and ultimately a package from Exaclair. The package arrived yesterday, and I am not disappoint, as the kids say.[1]


Two A4 tablets, 80 pages each... oooh, be still, my paper-lovin' heart

You can go back and read the original post, but the upshot of this trial is: the yellow paper is "toothier" than the white. It's already been confirmed by Stephanie at Rhodia Drive, but this offer is to try it out with other writing instruments, and then report back to Exaclair/Rhodia HQ. As I love me a paper test, I of course set to gathering the competitors in what I'm modestly calling:

The Paperlympic Games of 2014

I agreed to test them out with pens, and test them I shall. And since I'm curious, I also want to try them out with whatever pencils I have here or could scrounge from the office supply room at work. You can see them in their parade formation as they entered the stadium, but we caught them in a more relaxed moment back in the athlete dormitories.

The Athletes

The competitors, in a moment of repose

Like Sochi, there are some small issues of comfort that need to be sorted out, but generally everyone is happy. From left to right, the competitors are:

• Representing the Czech Republic: the Moleskine brand 2B hipster pencil
• Representing probably China: the Sanford Clickster 0.5mm mechanical pencil
• Laying crosswise, another China entrant: the Dixon Ticonderoga 2HB woodcase pencil
• From the United States of America, a late-80s vintage Sheaffer school pen, F nib with period Skrip jet black ink
• Representing Germany, the Lamy Safari, F nib with Lamy blue ink
• Also from Germany, a Pelikan m205, M nib with Waterman Serenity Blue ink from France
• From, um, Levengerland, a True Writer demonstrator, M nib with modern Sheaffer Skrip blue/black from Slovenia
• From Japan, a Pilot Knight with a M italic nib from a Plumix pen, inked with Pilot/Namiki blue/black

Let's have a round of applause for them, everyone!

The Field of Competition

For the qualifying round, athletes will go head-to-head on these carefully-manicured surfaces.


All markings follow IPC guidelines

On the surface -- ha! -- this paper appears to be the same. Both are 80g/m² "High Grade Vellum Paper," both lined with margins. Both feature heavy foldover covers and a stiffish piece of cardboard affixed in the back to provide support for writing. Both are staple-bound with a fine perforation along the top edge to enable easy removal. Both feature Rhodia's purple lines with a red margin, though the lines appear darker on the yellow paper, and a bit brown, likely thanks to the color contrast.

Identical but for paper color, yes? Well, that's what we're here to find out.

For more, let's go over to the field where our on-the-scene reporters are standing by with some insightful color commentary.


This does not bode well

Roo: Too right! It's as pale as a wallaby's bumhole! [2] Crikey! Uluru!

Rhino: O HAI I SEE YELLO

...

Annnnnnnnnd with that, we'll go back to the studio.

The Judging

This one's a little tough, since I'm coming in with a bias; I know that I'm expecting the yellow pad to be a little scratchier with a pencil, so I'm mainly looking for other differences in feel between the two surfaces with the different instruments. It'll be as scientific and impartial as a blog post can be -- that is to say, it'll be chock full of baseless opinions [3] in which accidental facts may unintentionally appear.

I'm going to use each of these for the next week or so, and write up my opinions-carefully-phrased-as-facts, share them with Exaclair, and you lucky readers. Both of you.

But it doesn't stop there! In the interest of true fairness, and to explore the whole notion of blind studies and the scientific method, there is a second, longer portion to the Paperlympics. Just as the real Olympic games feature countless variants on "two people ice skating together" [4] so, too, does the full-blown Paperlympics finals have an excruciating number of nearly-identical events.

I've prepared a number of samples of paper, in which the Rhodia is secretly mixed, for my daughter and I to test out at home. In this way, we'll be putting it not only through the paces of the paper-obsessed office worker, but also the rigors of the typical tweenage homeschooler. And we'll be turning it into something of a science lesson, too, by checking properties, assigning scores, and in the end, looking at the samples under a microscope (because science.) She doesn't know which sample is which, so I'm hoping to eliminate at least a shade of bias. I will attempt to refrain from comments like "this next one is TOTALLY AWESOME AND FREE so score it accordingly, won't you?"

But first, we need to get through the early rounds of this fine, traditional, just-made-it-up-last-week sport. If you're anything like me, you just want to skip ahead to the finals and see if there's any spectacular crashes. Be patient! I'm sure with me at the helm, disaster cannot be too far behind.

So, sports paper fans, stay tuned! We'll be back with results after this commercial break.

---

[1] No kids actually say this.

[2] No Australians actually say this.

[3] Opinions, it is said, are like bumholes. Everyone has one, and you should keep yours private. Especially if you're a wallaby.

[4] All of which are shown on evening TV at the expense of any other events, not that I'm still bitter, NBC-I'm-looking-at-you. Thank goodness for DVRs and/or perfectly legal streaming.

Bit by Bit (by dip)

That color shifting tells me I need to flush out my pen a little better. Inspired by Richard, I pulled out the dip pen, though I skipped the inkwell and went straight for the bottle. Like my life these days, the pen lightens by degrees.

Did anyone else see the mention of ITAM in the Washington Post's Style blog? It crossed my news feed reader this week. I suppose this means we have an even greater air of legitimacy now. Not having a typewriter out and available does seriously impact my hands-on time. I think I need to figure out a way to keep a permanent block of "me time" on the schedule, and rotate through activities by season. Spring is CYO track and field, October and November are NaNo. It's easy for worker-bee types like myself to forget that we need to take some down time, too, even if it's just little sips now and then.

The pedometer I mentioned is a FitBit Zip, by the way. My wife and I each have one, which I recommend, since we're naturally competitive with each other. (Scrabble games on Facebook get ugly fast.) We're trying to outdo each other's daily steps, knowing that each is quite busy either with an office job or homeschooling. On Fridays, for example, I've been making it a point to head to the library. But it is raining, quite hard at times, and I'm feeling particularly Blerchy today as a result. But I know it's a mile each way to the library on foot, and that will put me in the lead of Mrs. Clickthing. And our dog is rain-phobic, so I know she won't be boosting steps by taking the pooch around the block a few times. Fitness domination is mine!

Yellow Fellow

Although this week was pretty rocky, it ended on a high note.



After over-analyzing things on the pen front, I went ahead and picked up a Safari, to use up the stockpile of cartridges I have around. The Pilot carts are impossible to find around here, so they will resurrect my existing steel Pilot pen when I need a businesslike pen at hand.

The Waterman ink is evidently the renaming of their old "Florida Blue" color. Safe for vintage pens like the new green fellow sitting in the pen box, waiting for me to schedule a new sac-and-shellac surgery.

The real treat, though, is in the box. Is anyone else reminded of a comb feed? Those slits are pretty stylish in a contemporary-design way. Plus, it lets you peek inside...



"Sedate" is not a word I'd use to describe the Safari. Having grown up with Lego and still having *cough* a few bins of the stuff in our shed for the kids *cough cough* I actually like the primary colors and the ABS plastic shell. There's no mistaking that this is an inexpensive writing instrument, but that doesn't mean it's cheap. Little touches like the molded grip section and that chunky clip mean this is a pen meant to be used by little hands and big, and taken out in the world, not left on a shelf.

The cutout window is a nice solution to the problem of seeing how much ink is left, and the cartridges are generously sized, to say the least. I opted for the fine-sized nib here, since this will probably be a knocking-around, toss-in-the-pocket pen, and need to be miserly with the ink. A little testing shows it to be a "wet" writer, not scratchy. I'm looking forward to putting it in rotation, and since it's plastic, it can happily live in the flower frog/pen holder on my desk where it's close at hand.

Speaking of yellow, and re-purposed pen storage, this brainstorm hit me at the thrift store:



It's supposed to be a tray for making ice cubes for your water bottles -- narrow, to fit in the neck, you see. The perfect size for pens, though. It's currently modeling my assortment of cheapo Sheaffer calligraphy pens, the steel Pilot, and that red no-name one that decided to take regular ink-poos on my fingers. It's being punished.

Next time: flirting with tetanus!

Alpha Omega?

While littering up the Nano 2013 site with my usual Rhino-based nonsense, I came across something in the AlphaSmart subforum that gave me pause. I checked it out, and the rumors are true:

We have reached the end of our NEO 2 inventory, and we will no longer be producing any additional units—but this isn’t goodbye.

File this under "I knew this day would come and I'm surprised it took this long." Yes, Renaissance Learning née AlphaSmart has ended U.S. production of the Neo 2, which I suppose makes it the final model of the line. For all the mock-rivalry between the Typewriter Brigade and the AlphaSmart Nano groups, I am truly sad about this news. I'm a Neo owner myself, after all, having traded in my pimped-but-battered Pro model last summer. It's become central to our homeschooling with my middle child, and I'm actually concerned about taking it away for the month of November as I attempt a multi-device Nano.

The AlphaSmart was and is a wonderful piece of single-purpose technology: durable, inexpensive, highly portable, and doggedly compatible with thirty years' worth of computing devices through the alchemy of cables and adapters. Their market niche has been eroded, though, through the advent of netbooks and (now) full-featured tablets that can be had at the same price point. Add in a $30 Bluetooth keyboard and you have a passable substitute that's also 'Net connected. What could be finer?

Of course that's just audience-baiting on this blog. I don't believe for a moment that a keyboard-and-tablet solution is an acceptable replacement. AlphaSmarts have always been praised for their insanely long battery life and their utter simplicity and utility. It's the modern typists' portable typewriter, a Lettera for a new age, and now, like its inky mechanical predecessors, it's been obsoleted. At least it's in good company.

NaNoPlanMo

I know I go through this drama every year, when my projects take a breather and I glance over at the calendar and think oh crap it's almost autumn I hear a Rhino stampeding don't you? I feel a little disingenuous whining about lack of preparation, but really, this summer kicked my ass in terms of free time or lack thereof. I've got... a setting, maybe? The tiniest, flimsiest thread of something that might pass for character motivation? Maybe? Anyhow, I'm trying to get my act together, gather up my notes, etc.. The usual.

Trying, mind you. All these Good Intentions have been blasted away by the timesuck that is video pinball, specifically this table:

I've been waiting about thirty years to be able to play this again, no exaggeration, and even in its unpolished form -- currently a pre-beta release -- I'm awash in nostalgia. Also, child neglect ("Daddy, are you going to play that game all night?") and being a terrible husband ("Honey, are you going to play that game all night?") Why not also throw my nascent novel to the wolves? I've got plenty of time, right?



Right?



Ummm...



WRONG

Lordy Lordy

Clearly, free is everyone's favorite four letter word. Smashwords sends me an email every time someone buys a copy of One Last Quest, and I've been watching with great glee as a new message pops into the mailbox about every hour over the last few days, ever since that freebie coupon code took effect. Right now, the magic "copies sold" number is 40 -- three copies actually sold-for-money sold, and another thirty seven downloaded since the coupon took effect.

Does this mean my readership is a bunch of cheap bastards? YES. And I love you all for it.

So to celebrate the midpoint of the week of freeness, here's the promised "lessons learned" post.

Picking a Distributor

Smashwords

I was already familiar with Smashwords, and I liked how their aptly-named "meatgrinder" software churns out multiple electronic files from a single, carefully-formatted upload. Their royalties are generous, even on a cheap book like mine, and frankly, I kind of like the "everybody in all together" attitude of the site. Yes, there's a lot of pr0n-ish vampire novels about, and it's easy to get swallowed up in the noise. Direct-linking to the book is way more effective than trying to chance across it on their site.

Pros:

Free, all the way through. Multiple file formats and distribution channels, including one just-announced channel that can feed into libraries. Once a customer buys a book, they have access to all revisions of that book, so you don't need to feel guilty about fixing up typos (ahem.) ISBN assignment is free and easily done, and you use the same electronic ISBN in all the other places you might want to upload your book.

Cons:

Approval for the distribution process to other retailers like Apple and Sony is slow -- I've been waiting two weeks, which seems to be the minimum, and I'm about to update the file with a new corrected copy. Does this restart the approval process? I don't know. Very little hand-holding in the process: this is a DIY operation, and formatting your manuscript according to their rules is fiddly.

Bonus Pro:

The Smashwords style guide is so particular that the resulting document can serve as the foundation for other distributors with just a few changes to the styles.

Amazon

The 800-pound gorilla in the room: ignore it at your own risk. Amazon's attitude towards traditional book publishing houses seems to always be making news, and I can certainly see how a huge operation with no brick-and-mortar presence wants to shift the world to electronic downloads: it makes great business sense.

It's rather hard to track down, but Amazon has the Kindle Direct Publishing system, which is very Smashwords-esque. You upload a formatted Word document and a cover image, there's a vetting process, you set the price and rights, and after a waiting period, your book shows up as a Kindle download, and is available through Amazon's various international incarnations as well (they handle the currency conversion.)

Amazon is making a big push for their "KDP Select" program, which sounds too good to be true, and thus probably is. The most glaring issue I have with this program is that you sign over exclusive distribution rights to Amazon for your work for 90 days. No selling it anywhere else, at all. This felt like a Bad Deal to me, so I opted out (though it's presented to you each time you log in to check reports.) Mr. Speegle opted to go this route with Pen & Platen and I'm sure that his recent rise to the top of the Anthology chart was helped by the Amazonian marketing muscle that accompanies this program.

Anyhow, the Amazon upload format is practically the same as Smashwords: add page breaks before your chapters, replace "Smashwords edition" with "Amazon edition" and you're about done. Prepping a file for upload is easy.

Amazon has two royalty levels, 35% and 70%. What right-thinking individual wouldn't choose 70%? Me, of course. It's a very confusing page -- possibly by design -- and my natural skepticism tells me that Amazon isn't giving you 70% of the book price without you giving up something else in turn. It seems to hinge around "delivery costs," which baffles me for an ebook in this era of unlimited-bandwidth cell phone plans. Short version: seems scary, and I don't like the scary.

Pros:

Very organized. Upload is a snap after Smashwords. Who hasn't heard of Amazon? "Kindle" is becoming synonymous with "e-reader" (even though the Nook is better!)

Cons:

KDP Select narrows your distribution options, and may involve signing over firstborn or selling soul.

Barnes & Noble

If the KDP program was hard to find, B&N's PubIt! program was nigh impossible. It's referenced in numerous places in their discussion boards, but I had a hard time tracking it down short of a web search to find the signup page. I have a Nook reader from B&N and certainly feel brand loyalty in distributing through them. Also, I'd still be waiting on Smashwords to distribute to B&N, so uploading my own file made the most sense to me.

Sales here are on par with Amazon, honestly. I'm going to experiment with the coupon systems on each and see what happens. There are a number of price-harvesting services that scan the major sellers and look for price drops/coupons: I wouldn't be sad to be picked up by those.

Pros:

Equally organized. Upload is also trivial after Smashwords. Maybe the only domestic competition left for Amazon.

Cons:

Is not Amazon.

A Word About DRM

That's "digital rights management" to you, or "the reason you can't share an ebook with a buddy, or read that file you already bought for your Kindle/Nook/Kobo on your computer." In other words: the way your file is encrypted to ensure that it is read only by the paying customer. All distributors will ask you what approach to DRM you want to take, and once you've chosen it for a book, there's no going back short of scrapping the old one and uploading a new one.

To soapbox for a moment, I think DRM is a very, very, very bad idea. It's as secure as any encryption scheme meant to protect paying customers from their own base instincts, which is to say, not at all. DRM makes no distinction between sharing a copy with yourself on another reader and sharing a thousand copies with your friends. I think DRM primarily serves the companies that make the reading devices and the encryption software. Why assume your customers are thieves?

I just started reading Twain's Roughing It on el Nook the other day, and am enjoying it immensely. I can do this because 1) the title is in the public domain, and is thus available from Project Gutenberg and 2) it's available in a variety of DRM-free formats, including one that my Nook reads (the common .epub format.) If my descendents 100 years from now are reading -- and they damn well better be -- I'd like them to be able to look up great-great-great-great grandpa's silly little adventure book and not suffer the same puzzlement that my kids do when I show them an 8-track tape at the thrift store. "Dead format kids, sorry. Your introduction to Herb Alpert will have to wait for another day."

As an writer -- and I think I can call myself that now -- I'm sure that I'm robbing myself of... something. Money? Eh, I'm not going to get rich on a $1.49 piece of amateur fiction. Credibility? Any hope I had of that was gone a long time ago. Honestly, I don't see how anyone's needs are met by DRM here. I want a broad audience, and I want them to read, dammit. If one of them happens to pass my book along to 150 friends, that would be 150 more potential readers.

DRM BAAAAD. READERS GOOOOD.

OK, off the soapbox.

Getting In Print

Thanks to their affiliation with NaNoWriMo, I'm pretty solidly in the CreateSpace camp for making a print-on-demand copy of my book. They usually offer a coupon or special code to NaNo winners which, being cheap, I'm happy to exploit. (Last year was a free proof copy. This year is five free "real" copies.) CreateSpace is also an Amazon company, so you get to leverage that connection or feel icky about it, depending again on your opinion of Amazon. If you're overcome by the ickies, I'd check out Lulu, which seems to be the other big player in this arena within the United States. Both seem to be free, until you start ordering things (proof copies, a copy for mom) or want to take advantage of their professional services (cover design, editing, interior layout, etc..)

One Last Quest is very much a labor of love as well as a grand DIY learning experience: it's a "firsts" book for me. First book worth reading (IMHO.) First book transcribed and edited. First book I let other people read. First book sold. Might as well get another "first" under my belt, right? Besides, there is nothing, nothing so electrifying as holding a physical copy of a book with your name on the outside and your words on the inside. (OK, maybe holding your newborn children wins out there. But they don't come with your own ISBN number, either.)

Print is a different beast, but again I started with my Smashwords digital file, and tweaked a copy for Createspace. Intra-document links went away, obviously, and I added some art to the interior that I omitted from the digital editions. Measurements are critical here, and it took a while to get my word processing program to format the PDF exactly right; wide margins on the inside, and narrow ones elsewhere; page numbers in the outside corners; and getting the front- and back-matter (title page, copyright, about the author) to look correct.

Still: oh, that electrifying proof copy. And oh! The typos. Lesson for next time: don't be so cheap, and get a pre-proof version run off at the copy center. I'm finding far more mistakes on the printed page than I am on-screen.

Preparing for print is a lot more fiddly than ebook preparation. Upload the file, and then wait 24-48 hours for approval (and reports of issues.) Upload or design a cover, and then wait another 24-48 hours for approval. Order a proof (recommended), wait for delivery. If there are fixes, start over. It's a game for the patient, and I'm not a patient person.

One last tidbit: hyphenation and justification. You'd think that a typewriter person would have been aware of this, but no. This is something I honestly don't pay attention to in books that I own, but the right edge of my proof copy seems very ragged to me. I need to review some of my commercial print books at home and see if they are set in a justified width, and have hyphenation. I suspect that they do.

Pros:

If you come in prepared, it's easy, but it's still like air travel: lots of hurry-up-and-wait. The "cover calculator" tool gives you a handy template that shows exactly where to place your art -- and where not to -- based on the page count and size of your book. I tried to do this by hand: never again.

Cons:

What-you-see isn't necessarily what-you-get. I cycled through about four cover designs, with layers and textures and so on, and after approval, discovered that the layers didn't, and the textures weren't, and so forth. Simple, flattened designs like the one Rob Bowker made for Pen & Platen are going to give you the fewest surprises. The default covers look default, like PowerPoint slides. Lulu's defaults appear no different.

Pay extra attention to options in your PDF-generating software that talk about "true registration." I spent a couple of days wondering how my text could bleed into margins that I'd clearly set up. This is buried in the paragraph style section in LibreOffice, and it magically fixed the problem.

Shameless Promotion

Ah, I bet you think this section is going to be chock-a-block full of self-deprecating wisdom, don't you?

Bad news.

Honestly, this is the part I'm struggling with the most. Within minutes of getting the "all clear" email from Smashwords, my first inclination was "I need to tell everyone about this" followed immediately by "I wonder if it would be a bad thing to send this everyone on my contact list?" It's a dark day when you suddenly find yourself sympathizing with pill spammers and secret-shopper fraud mailers.

The great thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it. The bad thing about self-publishing is it appears that everyone is doing it, and except for a few wild outliers (who we hate in public and envy in private) there's not a lot of immediate gratification for the indie author. Forty sales! Well, forty downloads, in the guise of a sale. So what do you do?

I'm blogging about it here, obviously, and I set up a new "books" page here on the blog just to point to the available work, and to start teasing about the next one in the pipeline. I've been known to drop non-subtle hints on the various social media outlets (free book! free book!), and would encourage any readers to pop in to the site where they got the book and leave a review.

In the meantime I keep reloading my "dashboard" page and checking email for that magic message...

*doink*

41 copies! I could get used to this feeling.

An Author is Me

"Kyras-Camera-High-Dive 061" by flickr user JoshSchulz


I spent the holiday weekend making a mess on our dining room table, and after much tweaking and pixel-pushing and fishing around for compliments, I pulled the trigger: One Last Quest is purchasable, at least electronically. That's one small step for (a) man, one more leap for the Typosphere. (Just following in Mr. Speegle's footsteps, here.) Now I sit back and recoil in horror at all the typos that slid by undetected.


Click me for a more humorous tomorrow

Can't sit for long, though. I'm already reading through the formatting guide to upload directly to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Formatting for Smashwords is very particular, and I hope that I can use the same file -- or a slightly tweaked version -- to handle the other two sites. And then I need to figure out if I'm going to resurrect the print version that I proofed oh-so-long ago.

The only scary part is the jump...

Gary is...

Gary may be a lot of things, but I'll always remember him as the guy that forgot how to put the carbon paper in the typewriter. I found this message peeking out at me this morning from the platen of my Remington Premier, which is currently in rotation on my desk. I was transcribing from one of my notebooks onto a stack of index cards, had the desk lamp to battle the darkness of our Biblical rains, and there on the platen was Gary's self-affirmation, immortalized in ink and rubber. Well done, Gary.

Gary Douglas is a
highly skilled professional

And speaking of affirmations (smooth, that transition), I'm fishing for feedback as I try once again to make some readable sense of my 2009 NaNoWriMo entry. This latest round of motivation came over a weekend dinner with friends, when one of them had the nerve -- the unmitigated nerve! -- to ask if I'd done any writing lately. After I finished mumbling "no" into my napkin and then trying to change the subject, I figured that, once again, I've been neglectful, and unprofessional, and I think a disappointment to even good ol' Gary there. I'm taking this a chapter at a time now, and am slowly posting what I have so far on the Longer Pursuits page. As of this writing, I have all of three pages up, but believe me, it was a rough three. Good Openings, as all advice says, are Really Rather Difficult. Maybe not to Gary, but they are to me, especially when the original and revised openings read like a backstory-dump, which, essentially, they are.

I've made a clean break, and if you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate all feedback. Three pages. That's all. I'm no Gary.

Updates, Links and Sawbuck Restoration

It's time to sweep off the accumulated dust from my little corner of the typosphere. (Yes, I know that spheres don't have corners. Don't be picky.)

• Restoration/recovery continues on Morticia, my snatched-from-the-curb SM3 I wrote about last week. Although I cannot say with certainty what's freezing up the works, I've a pretty good guess that it was a once-benevolent coating of oil that has since gone to the Dark Side thanks to our generally hot, dry climate in these parts. Throw in a few years of disuse, and you've got yourself a recipe for complete machine seizure. I've been picking at it in free moments, though, with my carefully-assembled toolkit (see below) and things are improving. I can move the carriage, for one, though it takes a lot of steady pressure. Many of the keys work, and all work very well when the segment is moistened with isopropyl alcohol first. In my diagnostic zeal, I managed to unfasten the drawband, but have reattached it after a mental lapse on how to tension the drum (hint: turn it the opposite way, dummy.) And I've replaced the infamous "smooshed-flat" washers underneath the body with some roughly same-sized equivalents from the auto parts store. Morticia's lovely, and burgundy, not brown as I had first guessed.
• In one of those you're-joking-me moments, a twin machine has turned up in the hands of another type-blogger. I advise all members of the 'sphere to keep their eyes peeled for that tell-tale silver-swoopy case in their favorite thrift haunts. Two is a coincidence, but three is an invasion force.
• Numerous typewriter-related news items -- though none regarding a vintage Germanic invasion force.
  


• You've surely seen the write-up in Wired by now on Bay Area repair shops. Yes, I know that I have to make the pilgrimage at some point before they disappear. I worry about my resolve in the face of all that want, though. You folks who have made the Hajj to Blue Moon Camera are made of sterner stuff than I.
• A brief tribute to a pretty Smith-Corona, left out to gather stray thoughts of passers-by. Every well-furnished hallway should have one.
• A reminder that typing still holds on in some parts of the world. And yes, I I am very much a Mr. Ek Botte.
• Rowlf the dog types! And other Muppet mayhem. I do miss Jim Henson's lunacy. Who else is playing "name that model" when they watch the video?
  
• Love the following quote from this article, concerning a modern fixed-carriage machine to the ones we know and love:

  There is no click to it and I cannot adjust to that [...] You don't hear anything, even when the carriage goes back. That does not entertain me.

  Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?
  
• Big Hurrah to Little Flower Petals for finishing her draft, and Mr. Speegle for losing his mind. We knew you both had it in you. I'm still slogging through my transcription, only about forty pages left to enter! And then the editing really begins. I'm going to pretend I'm working on this by reading a book about editing, instead of actually editing my book. Likely Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, which I see praised highly in various places and which my library has a copy. I'll report back on it if it's any good. (I'm holding another title as well, it just escapes me at the moment.)
• As promised/threatened: the Sawbuck Restoration list:

As I've pointed out repeatedly, I'm cheap, cheap, cheap. Conveniently (?) I work near a dollar store, a thrift store, a craft chain store, a drug store, and an automotive supply store, so I've been compiling a collection of low budget repair-and-cleaning items for your amusement:

• Dental tools: from the dollar store. A pair of menacing looking metal picks, a mirror on a handle, and a pair of toothbrushes: one "normal" and one with a round head. Brushes are always good to clean type faces, the metal picks are handy for digging out ink from the insides of closed letters ("e", "o", "b"), for reattaching springs, and for grabbing the end of a drawband that someone stupidly let go slack and now is wound around the drum grr grr grr.
• Cotton swabs: from the dollar store. These are very cheap and made from bendy plastic. I've since learned that you can make your own from bamboo skewers and a bag of cotton balls. I'm using this setup to swab out the gunk from Morticia's rails. A little bit of cotton wrapped around the pointy end of the skewer will reach just about anywhere.
• Artist's paintbrushes: dollar store, craft store, drug store. Dust's worst nightmare. Less nasty than canned air, but more time-consuming to be complete.
  
• Set of small screwdrivers: dollar store again. Nothing fancy, but handy. Also the screwdrivers on my battered up Swiss army knife.
• 35mm film cans: always save these, as they are godsends for keeping track of small parts, and can hold small amounts of your cleaning fluid of choice, when you don't feel like contaminating a whole bottle with your nasty home-made swabs. My dollar store sells film, which is great -- cheap film, free can!
  
• Rubber washers: plumbing section of the hardware store if you have one handy, but I found some "wire conduit bushings" at the auto store that also did the trick. They're donut-shaped and meant to snap into metal panels to protect wires passing through, but they also make good replacement washers when exact size isn't critical (like SM3 washers near the feet.)
• Oral syringe: free, if you ask at the prescription counter at the drug store. I had hoped for a real syringe for refilling fountain pen ink cartridges, but that was a no-go at my Walgreens, and I didn't feel like pushing the point. ("Do I look like a crackhead? Do I look like I'd do favors for crackheads?") Grab one of those little coffee-stir straws and you've got a way to drip solvents into your machine in a semi-controlled manner. Better lay down some paper towels first, though.
  
• Goo Gone: from just about everywhere. An effective gunk-remover from parts, and good to remove nasty price sticker residue from machines. Also takes off ink from the ribbon vibrator, if you obsess about this like I do.
• Isopropyl Alcohol: from the drug store. Not rubbing alcohol, which contains oils and sometimes colors and other additives. I can find the stuff that's 91% alcohol and the rest water. Very effective de-greaser, and well-behaved to a point. Try to keep it and all other cleaners/degunkers/solvents away from the rubber parts, though. It's very drying.

...and that's about it. It's not anywhere near a "real" typewriter repair kit, but it does the trick for me for the machines I pick up, which tend to be pretty operable to start with.

Oh, who am I kidding: if it's not bolted down, I'll pick it up. But at least I won't go broke trying to clean it, or hauling it in to Berkeley to pay someone else to clean it.

Guys Do It, Too

No time for a full typecast this week, but I thought I'd share another one of those confluence of interest moments with you. (Otherwise known as I just learned a new search term this week.)

First, this Make post started it all, by showing an antique sock-knitting machine connected to a windmill, which is turning out a scarf worthy of Dr. Seuss or your favorite Gallifreyan. Sock machines aren't made anymore, at least not of this quality: they are fairly complex to work and wildly expensive and so of course this wind-powered monstrosity is tickling my want receptors.

Knitting machines come in other forms, too. I passed up a "flat" knitter once, on the basis that it was too freaking big for our house (true) that I didn't know how to work it (also true) and that honestly, we don't need it (yet again true.) I should also mention that I still regret that. (So very, very true.) Of course, it's all the clickety-clack parts that get me worked up. I'm sure I would lose interest after the fifth blanket or so.

Maybe.

Intrigued, I poked around a little more on the Tube of You, and found this former engineer's forays into the world of home-made, computer-driven knitting paraphernalia. (See version one and its successor.) Perhaps not as green as the wind-powered setup, but as a software and computer guy, I've got to give it up for correx37's esprit de knit. And for those without a workshop and the smarts to put together something like this (raises hand) I submit a much humbler -- though no less impressive -- homebrew solution. And if you feel the need to go large-scale, try it with with hard hats and diesel engines and a big hook.

True enough, my own efforts at the blending of the machine and fiber arts are modest by comparison, but I had not considered tapping into my geek as well. Patterns abound for that scarf, for example, and of course there's the world of mathematics to provide inspiration. Now, if only there was a way to rig up needles to typebars...