Hi there, folks.

Today I’m going to plug a few websites that I really enjoy. Like anyone else, I surf the internet for research, for business, and sometimes for recreation. Even for a guy who spends a lot of time in worlds that don’t exist (either ones I’ve made up, or in ones other people have) I find myself at loose ends and wind up cruising the Web.

First a big shout out to my friends at the Tate Geological Museum at Casper College in (you guessed it) Casper, WY. The Museum is a fantastic place, one you must stop and see if you find yourself in central Wyoming. Even if you don’t, check them out at www.caspercollege.edu/tate. I’ve been spending a week every summer at the Tate since ’97, watching it grow from a dusty, mostly empty exhibit hall into one of the finest museums of its size in the US. If you run into its Education Coordinator, Mr. Russell Hawley, tell him Waterman sent you.

If you like science fiction webcomics, you’ll really like the adventures of Sergeant Schlock and Tagon’s Toughs as written and drawn by Howard Tayler, featured at www.schlockmercenary.com. While I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Tayler yet, he’s given me hundreds of hours of pure enjoyment. It’s also the longest-running webcomic (non-stop daily since June 2000!) It also has the distinction of having inspired author John Ringo’s Troy Rising series.

Randall Munroe has been writing xkcd for almost as long, appearing thrice weekly at www.xkcd.com. My wife actually turned me on to the sometimes sublime, sometimes zany and always enlightening webcomic by purchasing me a copy of What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, for my birthday a few years ago. What If? is a collection of humorous but incisive and well-researched essays based on the answers to questions his website’s readers write in to him. Mr. Munroe began his professional career as a computer programmer for NASA, but went on to write for, draw and research his webcomic full time, to our gain and NASA’s loss.

I don’t know anything about the people behind www.projectrho.com, other than many of them have technical expertise far and away beyond my own. If you are interested in hard-as-diamond science fiction and some of the technical stuff behind the classic stories from Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Niven and others more recent, Project Rho will prove an invaluable and entertaining resource. I certainly wish I’d found it a lot sooner than I had. Don’t worry; I went back and checked my math. Naturally I got everything right, but it would have gone a lot faster if I’d had the essays and formulae at Project Rho . . .

Last plug; Wolfram Alpha. This is less a website and more a powerful search and calculation engine, located at www.wolframalpha.com. It does mathematical calculations, data analysis, conversions and all that jazz; but also answers ‘natural language’ queries like ‘What was the GDP of Bolivia from 1970 through 2000?’ or ‘What was the oil production of Saudi Arabia in 1986?’ I haven’t been able to stump it yet. It’ll even answer the query, ‘What is the airspeed velocity of a laden swallow?’ Go ahead, check it out . . .

Everything I have talked about here is free to anyone who has a connection to the internet. Enjoy!

Hello, my friends.

I can’t complain too much. I’ve been afforded the free time to write a novel (actually several, but only one is available so far on Kindle) and get it out to the world without the interference of wrecking cellulose and ink and begging space on bookshelves.

However, having found all that much easier now than in previous generations, I still need readers. Finding them is still a matter of exposure and a good deal of word-of-mouth. I don’t have a marketing campaign run by paid workers, nor the advertising muscle of a traditional publishing house.

So I’m asking you, O Reader of this Blog, that if you haven’t already then please get my book from Kindle and give it a read. If you like it–or not–leave a review even if all you’ve read is the sample available for free on Kindle. If you’re honest, you won’t hurt my feelings. I don’t have any feelings, anyway <insert cute smiley here>.

But if you do read it, share it with your friends, or colleagues, or that neighbor or relative who you know likes this stuff–even if you don’t. Storytellers need people who share the stories, just like the stories themselves need readers. If this story deserves to be read, if not by you than by someone you know, get it out there to them. Your reward will be more stories that you can share with those who also enjoy them.

Leave feedback <here>, even if you didn’t think ‘Man From The East’ was the greatest thing you’ve read all year, or all month, or all week, and encourage those in your life who like these sorts of stories to leave their feedback <here> and/or on Kindle after they read it. Doing so will ensure that more interesting fiction gets out there.

I like to joke that my particular ‘superpower’ is turning electrons into cellulose stained with some expensive allotropic carbon. Luckily the Kindle ‘publishing’ process spares cellulose from having to be so tormented. Electrons from my computer become electrons in the Kindle servers, which then go to your media access device and become photons for you to enjoy. I don’t know how ‘green’ this process ends up being, but at least this way some cellulose can remain in tree form for a while longer and then perhaps serve some more noble purpose. Like remaining a tree. It’s all up to you.

It’s still ‘early days’ in this process, and I’m really relying upon you, O Reader, to turn stories that a few people have enjoyed into stories a lot of people will enjoy. I appreciate every one of you who reads this blog, and the book I’ve offered on Kindle, and I’ll read everything you have to say; good, bad or indifferent. Stories don’t exist without people to enjoy them; we storytellers are nearly incidental to the process in the end. I look forwards to hear what you Readers have to say.

Keep striving, and enjoy.

Welcome back, folks.

It’s been a few weeks. I’m quite excited by having a book out on Kindle, though I know it’s the long game here getting people to find and look for Man From The East. I can’t tell you why I write detective novels set in a multiverse of time-travelers, other than I enjoy writing them. My ideas come to me from the place where all ideas come from; maybe my subconscious, along with a lifetime spent reading good science fiction and playing role-playing games.

Man From The East as a concept came from an image I had in my head, of a man and a Khaid in a jungle looking through the trees at a Meso-American temple with Olmec stone heads dotting the clearing before it. It took a while to wrap that around what essentially became a detective story, as well as developing the protagonist’s character in an early part of his career as an Agent of the Hypertemporal Security Agency.

I don’t have a ‘process’ for how I write, other than just writing. I don’t have to operate on a deadline, so it progresses in fits and starts, usually long periods of research and just working on other stuff–and attending to other aspects of my life–followed by shorter periods where I might lay down ten thousand words in a week. There are notes, and I spend time consulting and adding to them as I come up with new concepts for the HSA Universe. Some of those Notes are featured on the website.

Most of my writing is novella to novel length fiction; it took me a long time to ‘learn’ how to write readable short stories. Some of those short stories might end up on this website for people to read free, though I’m now concentrating on getting novellas and novels out on Kindle with the able assistance of my free-lance editrix and all-around facilitator, Suzanne.

I need to pause here to give thanks to all of those folks who have read my stuff over the years (sometimes under silent protest; ‘here, read this, tell me what you think!’) or who just helped me bounce ideas and scenes around until they made sense for what I was trying to add to a story. I won’t mention their names here without their permission, but they all deserve a heartfelt ‘Thanks, guys!’

In closing, I’d like to draw attention to the fact that we all live here in the best time and circumstances the human species has ever had thus far. There are still horrible iniquities, and privation, and injustices. I am neither blind nor ignorant of them. Nevertheless, despite dire and accurate warnings, as a whole we all live at the current pinnacle our species has reached–so far–and though I write about characters who live with technology we can only merely dream about, their worlds are not as free as ours is. It is up to us, wherever we are, to strive.