About "The Farside Chronicles"

 

Book One of "The Farside Chronicles" ("The Door") begins with a short anecdote wherein one voice, the inventor, outlines a way to solve the perennial problem of 'where shall I park the car?' using dimensional distortion.  The second voice, the other, remains skeptical of the feasibility of the method.

I recall being involved in just such a conversation during the year I spent at Manhattan College as a Physics major.  The first voice is that of one John Patrick Celenza, my classmate, and the second voice is mine.  The idea John planted decades ago germinated in my mind as a story-line that became, after voluminous re-work, The Farside Chronicles.

In the late 80s or early 90s, personal computers made it possible — no, made it easier — to write and edit material such as books and other treatises.  That was probably the start of what has become a publishing revolution on a par with Gutenberg.  It became feasible for someone with such an interest to actually write a book and have it published — for a fee, of course.  Since childhood, I had been 'a writer', often scribbling in pencil in one of those black-and-white marble-patterned notebooks my latest opus, none of which ever survived long enough to actually meet a typewriter.  Now in possession of my very own computer, I could write to my heart's content, saving my output onto 3½" floppy disks and revising whenever it seemed necessary or prudent.  My first serious effort beginning soon after I became a PC owner was, naturally, the story that eventually would become "The Door".  As with so many such tasks, it progressed fairly quickly to 95% complete, and remained there permanently.  Every now and then, I would open the file containing 'the book', reread it, and try to compose an ending that satisfied my heart.  Nothing worked.  It felt as though I had painted myself into a corner, and I could not even imagine how I might rewrite myself clear of it.  I put it aside and moved on other things.

About 2006, I observed that the nature of politics was undergoing a sea-change.  Everything about it was becoming much more adversarial and contentious.  Where once Nixon and Kennedy could have engaged in a reasoned debate on the issues, then shook hands when it was over, there was no more hand-shaking going on.  The major political parties weren't shooting at each other, but they were clearly 'at war'.  It seemed to me that we were within a stone's throw of graduating to actual gunfire.  I began to write a story about a gruesome school shooting that prompts a call for the repeal of the 2nd amendment, and leads to a second American civil war.  In 2011, I self-published "Tipping Point" via Author House, a vanity press headquartered in Indiana.

—==+++==—

It might be useful to know how book publication has changed over the past half-century.

As recently as 1985, an aspiring author would laboriously type (double-spaced) 'the book', often rewriting sections or chapters at the urging of amateur or professional editors, and send (the original or a Xerox copy) to Random House or Alfred Knopf or ...

The book would disappear into the bowels of the publisher's workrooms and would result in one of several outcomes:

1. a rejection letter (typically);
2. suggestions for changes (sometimes);
3. an acceptance letter (rarely).

If accepted, the publisher causes the work to be typeset preparatory to printing, delivers the galley proofs to one or more editors/proofreaders, who make sure the final product is ready for prime time.  Then the book is printed, typically in multiples of 10,000 copies, a quite expensive proposition.

If the book sells, royalties will be paid to the successful author and more printing will happen.  If the book doesn't sell, the publisher is on the hook for all those costs.

Successful books wind up at Barnes&Noble for $37.95 and everybody is happy.  Unsuccessful books wind up at Books-A-Million for $5, $2, or $1, and only Books-A-Million is happy, but not very happy.

That doesn't happen (much) anymore.

These days, an aspiring author may approach a well-known publisher, but these typically are no longer interested in unsolicited manuscripts.  Their unspoken rule of business is "Don't call us; we'll call you."

Instead, the author self-publishes by contracting with any of several vanity presses.  The services provided by the vanity press are centered around making a manuscript look like a book.  They do not care how well-written or poorly-written the manuscript is.  They will — for a fee — check spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  They are not taking any risk; the author is.

The cover art, the book's body text and illustrations, are sent as computer files to any of several on-demand-publishers, but mostly to Ingram in Tennessee, the world's largest.  Ingram is able to produce a book by separately producing the body text and the cover, and assembling the components in the right order.  Ingram can produce one book; they can produce 100 books; they can produce 10,000 books, on demand.

So, a prospective book buyer sees a book advertised on Amazon and adds it to their cart.  Amazon sends the order to Ingram and pays Ingram the agreed price.  Ingram produces a book as ordered, plus a mailing label, the book is boxed and handed over to USPS, FedEx, UPS, or equivalent, and Ingram pays the publisher the agreed price.  The publisher keeps their share and pays the author the agreed royalty.  It is possible that, for a given book, this never happens.

The cost to get to ink-on-paper is borne entirely by the author.  In rare cases, the author's phone will ring and someone from Random House will invite her to come to New York to talk about her next book.

—==+++==—

"Tipping Point" enjoys a small but steady popularity and provides a stream of royalties that is thin enough that it may never pay me back for what it cost to see the book in print.  I am, unsurprisingly, reluctant to do it again.

However, seeing "Tipping Point" finally launched took a weight off my shoulders such that I began to entertain the notion of finishing that mothballed book.  I re-read it and began to try alternative endings, finally settling on one that completely satisfied me.  Unwilling to press on toward publishing it, however, it went back on the shelf, finished at last, but only enough to satisfy my desire to have it done.

It was some time before it occurred to me that I had left that story in such a state that a sequel was possible.  I sometimes describe it as 'the book itself whining to me that it was lonely and needed company'.  Besides, I was, at that point, semi-retired and a stay-at-home pensioner, Nielsen Media having flushed me with my first-ever layoff.  With nothing better to do, I started writing 'book two'.  It was as if I could not prevent the words flowing onto the page.  Once you have opened the floodgates, as Thomas Sowell once observed, you cannot tell the water where to go.  Four months after starting it, "The Town" had taken its final shape.  I wrapped a metaphorical ribbon around the two volumes and stowed them both back onto their virtual shelf.

"No, no," they now called to me in chorus.  "Not done!  Not done!  You can't leave the story there!"

I began book three, then contract work interfered with progress as I found myself back in Texas living on 'bachelor status' and working long hours for Bank of America.  Eventually, "Farside Colony" joined its sisters on that virtual shelf, whereupon the first two taught the newcomer the theory and practice of wheedling.  Thus there is now a fourth book, "Farside Legacy", that effectively ends the chronicles.

The four are available via Kindle Direct Publishing.

 

On The Epilogue of "Tipping Point"

 

Several people have remarked to me regarding the ending of "Tipping Point" that they didn't understand what happened (or what was happening) in the Epilogue, chapter 28, specifically with reference to the interactions between Lulu Pleasance and Bobbie Farquhar and between Florence Persky and Steven Miller.  This is as I intended.  You have to write your own ending for this tale.  That's not simply 'fair', it's necessary — for no one can predict the outcome of a civil war in all its ramifications.

As of that point in the story, the U.S. Constitution has been amended to make clear that secession is within the powers of the states, and several states have taken advantage of that power to separate themselves from what was once the United States of America.  Deliberately left unsaid is whether or not any of the naturally expected changes (the contraction of the federal government chief among them) have acted to draw any of those states back into the "united States" (as the Declaration of Independence itself identifies them), or whether or not there now exists two (or more) independent polities within that territory.  What do you think?  That is the most important question left unanswered as Tipping Point closes:  how do you think this has all worked out — if it has worked out.

What is the significance of the crossbow pins and emblems?  Have the erstwhile "freedom fighters" been able to come out into the open or are those pins the equivalent of "a secret handshake" among people whose involvement can only be known among others in the same situation?  What do you think?

Those pins are all of a single design it seems, yet are differentiated by small, perhaps barely noticeable decorations.  What's the significance of a diamond chip as opposed to an amethyst chip?  Those who can read the language of flags may sometimes be able to say something on the order of "that cruiser is Brazilian and is commanded by a Rear Admiral; the crew is on shore leave, and there's no smoking allowed just now because they're transferring ammunition".  The decorations on the pins are of such a nature, but to catalog the meaning of each is not relevant to the story.  If you really need an explanation, you could just as easily make one up yourself.

Some have scoffed at the notion that states ought to be able to secede at will, yet the 10th amendment seems to leave such powers with the states, and the notion of secession vs. permanence of the union is nowhere else addressed; the 10th amendment would seem to be the controlling law.  Viewed from a strictly rational vantage, one has to wonder what benefit is gained by forcing some region or people to remain united after changes to their worldview have separated them (philosophically) from their former neighbors.  If we are to treat each other as comrades, does that not require us to wish each other the best of futures?  And, if our neighbor thinks their best future is attained by independence, should we not wish them well and let them go?

As well, to think that such questions can be adequately answered by civil war has proven to be wishful thinking of the highest order.  The first U.S. Civil (sic) War is still being fought — it did not end at Appomattox; only the shooting and the killing ended there.  Would any sane person suggest that we could finally get a definitive answer by doing it all again, but this time bigger and better?  I don't believe that, and I hope no one else does, either.

"But, wait..."  I hear someone say,  "that implies that regions could secede from nations, counties secede from states, neighborhoods secede from cities, and neighbors secede from neighborhoods!  That's madness!"

That is, in fact, what such an attitude implies.  It's the ultimate "freedom of association" that we are free to associate or to disassociate down to the individual person.  That is, after all, what marriage and divorce are, is it not?  We call it 'independence' as if it is something different when practiced by nations, but it is precisely the same thing.  Why can we not go to court and get a decree separating ourselves?  Why, in fact, might we need a court?  The answer is that, in a rational society, political dissociation ought to be as simple as "I'm done here!"  Imagine how much bloodshed might have been prevented over the eons by simply understanding that keeping a polity — or a person — captive harms both sides?

Forced unity is, in fact, a way to maintain one’s power — nothing more.  The king, the duke, the earl always has the wherewithal to force the peasants to stay where they are.  There’s no need to negotiate when armed soldiers are ready to enforce the will of those at the top of the food chain, yet... if the duke can get the peasants to do the work voluntarily — because they see it as a win-win situation — the duke no longer needs to maintain so large an army and so needs less revenue, making the peasants better off.  ‘Coercion’ always has a cost associated even if we can’t see it.  So it is with nations.  So it is with all of us. 

Some have specifically asked about 'Steven Miller', the man who rents a car from Hertz rental agent Florence Persky in the very last paragraph of Chapter 28, and as in several other cases, I have declined to further identify him.

Like the character 'V' from "V For Vendetta", Steven Miller is 'Everyman'.  He is you and me and your cousin Bob and the neighbor you don't particularly like.  In the grand scheme of things, he is nobody, and therefore he is everybody, and he made the events of "Tipping Point" possible.

 

 

Stop+Space+Space

 

In ages past when adolescent women took a 'business track' in high school, they studied stenography (Gr.: short writing) usually referred to as "sten and transcription".  'Stenography' is the art of quickly writing dictated words by recording their sound patterns.  'Transcription' was the process of re-converting all those mysterious cryptic squiggles back into something legible.  In general, that meant typing it onto paper.  Naturally, one also had to become proficient at typing.  One of the first lessons in typing class would have been 'double space between sentences', or 'double space after a full stop'.

The reason for the double-space was to give a visually-clear indication that one sentence was ending and another beginning. In the age of word processors, the habit of 'double space after a full stop' has become deprecated. That is, it is no longer taught, and is now considered improper. We live in a world of 'single space between sentences'. Most word processing software will actually remove what it considers 'extraneous blanks' between sentences. Even if you deliberately period-space-space as you type, MSWord may just erase all those 'errors' the first chance it gets. Well, really, does it make any difference? Let's see. To illustrate the change in visual clarity engendered by that change in policy, this paragraph has been keyed as 'single space between sentences'. All the others are keyed 'double space between sentences'. Can you detect the difference?

Admittedly, the change may be hard to detect, but as you read the text with your eyes there's a voice in your head that 'reads the text aloud' to you.  It has a different pacing and you may be able to actually feel the presence or absence of a... pause?... between the sentences.

I am a great fan of that old double-space.  Everything I write uses it.  It's old-style.  Why would anyone be such an old stick-in-the-mud?  (Aside, that is, from enjoying being a curmudgeonly fuddy-duddy.)

When writing fiction (as I often do) control of pacing is something greatly to be desired.  I want my readers to hear, to feel that pause between thoughts that often accompanies dialog between characters.  Similarly, when writing a letter to someone who will personally read it, one may also want to control that pacing.  That might mean eliminating that pause between thoughts to transmit a sense of urgency, or to include the pause to gently nudge the reader into a thoughtful mood.

Thankfully, in recent times it has become possible to customize one's word-processing software settings to prevent it eliminating all those laboriously typed spaces.  For those who (like me, occasionally) write in HTML, there's a way to prevent the HTML processor from compressing the text: the non-breaking space.  A non-breaking space is never eliminated; it is always kept.  Its symbol is ampersand-nbsp-semicolon ( ).  Each place where your eyes detect 'too many spaces' is the probable result of a non-breaking space after a period plus a regular space such that the reader software is forced to insert an empty character after the period and before the single space character that cannot be further compressed.

I hope that your own eyes will urge you to the position that the second paragraph here is the least easy to read, and that you'll come to value an extra space here and there in your own writing.

 

Print-On-Demand

 

In the old days, an author had to rely on traditional publishers to see their book made available to the public.  An author would submit a manuscript to several publishers in hopes that one, at least, would find it attractive enough to spend money editing, proof-reading, typesetting, and printing in order to produce the first edition.  This cost could be several thousand dollars.  The publisher would typically call for a first print run of 10,000 copies as a bare minimum, and it would be the publisher's task to get them sold as a way to recoup the initial cost that sometimes included an advance-on-royalties made to the author.  As a result, publishers were very picky about which books they would publish.  Aspiring authors from that era all had tales of 'papering their walls with rejection letters'.

Within the past half-century or so, 'vanity presses' have appeared on the scene.  These are businesses that will publish your work for a fee — sometimes an exorbitant fee.  As a rule, they care not whether your work is good or bad because you are paying the up-front costs and handling the job of selling your work.  In the early days of vanity presses, a contract might deliver 1,000 copies of the first edition — usually the only edition — and what the author did with them was the author's business — literally.

Since the computer revolution the entire face of publishing has undergone a sea change.  Word processing has made it possible for very many people who would not otherwise have gone to the effort to produce a text and to have it published by either a vanity press or a new arrival on the scene, the independent publisher.

Both 'vanities' and 'indies' are able to print-on-demand (as are the traditional publishing houses), and this has reduced the cost of getting a book to market so substantially that the number of published works has exploded due to the drastic lessening of the financial risk.  The same thing happened when Gutenberg introduced the printing press to Europe in the 1500s.

"Print-on-demand" means that a largely-computerized publisher has the ability to access the formatted text of a book along with its cover, among other things.  When a buyer orders a copy of the book, a transaction is sent electronically to the printer that causes the production of a fully-formed book.  The inside text (usually black-ink-on-white-paper) is printed on one printer, the cover (usually color and on a heavier stock) on another, and the shipping label on a third.  At the end of the production line, automated binding equipment gathers the pages, wraps them in the cover, slips the finished product into a shipping box, and affixes the shipping label.  The completed package is handed over to the local postal service or an overnight shipper and is in the hands of the buyer in a few days.

The era of having 10,000 copies of a book printed and held in storage pending the arrival of orders from retailers or wholesalers has largely ended.  Only ink, paper, and cardboard shipping boxes are kept in inventory and can be reordered as needed.  When a retailer such as Barnes & Noble decides they want 200 copies of a work in stock, the only difference in the processing is that only a single shipping label is printed.

Ingram, headquartered in La Vergne TN, is probably the world's largest printer-on-demand and can have a book printed — right now — in any of several countries on several continents.  They are not alone.

As a result, any aspiring author who wishes to put in the effort can become a published author for what would have been considered 'peanuts' in an earlier age.  Amazon, for instance, will convert your Microsoft Word document or Adobe PDF to a Kindle-formatted version free.  You just have to agree to sell it via Amazon.

 

Are We Headed For Another Civil War?

 

Some years back, I wrote a book, 'Tipping Point', that laid out a possible scenario in which The United States suffered a second civil war.  I deliberately made it very 'not pretty' with atrocities being committed by both sides, because civil wars are like that — recall Sherman's March To The Sea that needlessly destroyed civilian croplands and, in the fullness of time, the civilians who relied upon them.  'Tipping Point' hypothesized an assault on the Second Amendment, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, as the casus belli, but near the end of the book I had one of the characters recall that "...guns were merely a convenient symbol...".  That is, I think, important to keep in mind going forward.  If we are lurching toward a second civil war, it may not be 'guns' that gets us there.

Little more than a year ago, a group of Republican congressmen was ambushed while playing softball — by a disgruntled supporter of Bernie Sanders.  Many of the comments attached to news reports of the incident expressed disappointment that so few deaths resulted.  Within the month, two officials of the Trump administration have been the targets of mobs demanding they not be served at public restaurants.  Within the week, a Democrat congresswoman, Maxine Waters, has publicly issued a call for more of the same.  Whether you call them 'Democrats' or 'the left' or 'progressives' (all of which are marginally inaccurate), there is one segment of society that seems to be actively soliciting our next civil war, and their targets, whether you call them 'Republicans' or 'the right' or 'conservatives' (all of which are marginally inaccurate), are meekly suffering the slings and arrows.

Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly clear that the FBI and the Department of Justice have, together, badly perverted what's left of our system of justice, and Congress seems reluctant to actually throw somebody into prison, perhaps because they fear turnabout should the next election place them in an exposed position.  This is not a good situation to be in.  This is not a safe place from which to watch somebody else get involved in a civil war.

One hundred million (maybe 120 million) Americans own 350 million (or more) guns and 200 billion rounds of ammunition.  If you look at the map showing electoral districts won by Trump and Clinton in the last Presidential election, it's a startling sight: the blue (Clinton) districts are all relatively tiny (high population density; big cities and metro areas; serious electoral clout) while the red (Trump) districts define the vast bulk of the country's land area (low population density; rural areas; thin electoral power).  It goes without saying, I suppose, that almost all of those guns and gun-owners are in red districts.  What in heaven's name are those Democrats thinking?  They're deliberately trying to anger a population that's better-armed than any WW-II maquis unit, possibly under the assumption that they're so law-abiding they would never turn violent.  What if they're wrong?

If there is another civil war, this one between the Reds and the Blues, the outcome is easy to predict:

1. the Reds are going win.  It's not even theoretically possible for small enclaved cities to overwhelm the heartland, but it is possible for the heartland to cut the cities off from food, water, and electricity.  Game over.
2. the heartland is going to want to secede.  They'll cut the blue districts loose because conquering them is counter-productive.
3. Blue America will turn into a third-world country.  Red America will strictly control its border with Blue America.  There will not be an 'illegal immigrant problem'.
4. Within a few years at most, those blue areas will bid to be annexed simply because the government model they use is unsustainable without inexpensive supplies coming in from red areas.  The blue model requires the red model far more than the red requires the blue.

In short, what the Democrats are doing is so severely against their self-interest it's fair to wonder whether they have thought this problem through to its logical conclusion.  This might be an opportune time for them to correct that lest they accidentally turn 'Tipping Point' from 'fiction' to 'documentary'.