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I am about to compile all the questions people have sent in for the reader-interview to be published in the back of the Desert Spear mass-market paperback and sort them for ones I can use. There were a lot of great questions, but I am looking for ones that I haven already answered a million times in other interviews, and there were more than a few questions that can only be answered by giving away story spoilers.

For instance, a valid question would be something like:

Did you reference real-world cultures when creating the fictional cultures in your stories?

An invalid question would be:

Who will Arlen end up with, Leesha or Renna?

or:

Who is the real Deliverer? Arlen or Jardir?

Obviously I am not going to answer those sorts of questions, as they defeat the purpose of reading the ongoing story. The point of the journey is wondering what you’ll find at the other end.

There is a gray area, of course, particularly with regards to the magic system. If you have questions about that, by all means ask and I’ll decide if it’s spoilery or not. There have already been a couple of good ones I may well answer.

The final interview is due at the end of the week, so if you have a question you’d like included, be it about me, writing in general, or the Demon Cycle, please add it, along with your first name and the town/city you’re from to the comments section of this entry. Make it thoughtful generally spoiler-free, and you have a good chance of making the final cut.

Final note: I reserve the right to rewrite questions for clarity/concision. I will try my best to keep these true to the original query.

Thanks!

Posted on September 26, 2010 at 5:58 pm by PeatB
Filed under Desert Spear, Interviews
14 Comments »

I really should, but I am blogging instead, which doesn’t really count.

I am going to do a write-up of Worldcon one of these days. I keep meaning to, but IRL has been getting in the way since I got back from Australia, and most of my non-family time has been spent catching up on my overflowing inbox and dealing with a vicious cluster headache cycle.

One of the best parts of Worldcon for me was hanging out with Mur Lafferty and her family. Mur is awesome. The trip had a lot of ups and downs. Careerwise it was amazing, with several successful signings, panels, and the like, along with the chance to just hang out with some of my readers and other folks in the industry. But I was also on the opposite side of the planet from my friends and family, and two weeks was by far the longest time I’d ever spent away from my wife, much less the baby. I didn’t even really have a wingman for the trip, so I would shift from feeling like a rockstar at a signing to having no one to get dinner with an hour later.

Enter Mur, who was at the con with her husband and their young daughter (the Pink Tornado) and another couple. They absorbed me into their group easily, and really made me feel like part of the family. I had dinner with them most nights, and did some sightseeing with them as well. The Pink Tornado and I had a blast at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney.

I also got to nag Mur to put up the interview we recorded back in June for her fantastic podcast for wannabe writers, I Should Be Writing. You can live-stream or download the podcast with my interview here, or subscribe to it for free on iTunes.

Check it out. I recommend going through the archives, as well. There are 155 podcast episodes so far, and Mur has interviewed some amazing writers, editors, and other publishing pros.

Plus John Anelio’s theme song is awesome.

Posted on September 24, 2010 at 6:52 pm by PeatB
Filed under Australia, Craft, Interviews, Tech, World Traveler, Writing
1 Comment »

As someone just commented on my last post, I am going to the Dark Side. It’s not enough that Cassie’s snores sound like Vader, but now I am converting quickly to Apple products after a lifetime as a PC. I may even get an iMac or something when my 5 year old HP desktop finally dies.

I guess this makes Microsoft the Old Republic. I know it’s hard to look at Bill Gates as Luke Skywalker, but Steve Jobs has clearly appropriated the Empire’s sense of clean black and white aesthetics, and is slowly taking over the world. Soon he will pull up the hood like Palpatine.

But so what? Everyone complains about the whole “murdering the Jedi” thing, and all the fascism, but I bet the Empire did some good stuff, too. Safe trade routes. Good public school systems. Clean aesthetics. Disposable soldiers that didn’t ask citizens to sacrifice their children. I’m not saying I didn’t cheer along with everyone else when the rebels blew up the Death Star (along with all the civilian contractors), but I wonder how the Empire affected the everyday life of citizens. Probably not as much or as negatively as you might think.

But I digress…

Did my first walk on Tuesday using only the iPhone. No iPod. No smartphone clipped to my belt. No iPad in my bag next to the snacks. No bag at all, really, just a little water bottle on a strap with an apple in the pouch. I walked about 5 miles, and used the device constantly, listening to disc 21 of The Desert Spear US audiobook (almost done!), texting, twittering, checking e-mail taking pictures, writing notes on The Daylight War, etc. I made a point of doing all the stuff I would normally do with all those other devices.

I have to say the iPhone held up pretty well. The walk took about 75 minutes, and in that time I used about 13% of the battery. The iPod app controls are kind of annoying without a clickwheel and proper settings, but it worked well enough. I got a call along the way, which paused the music, resuming when the other party hung up. The camera is great. Check out this tree blown over by the mysterious Brooklyn tornado last week:

I didn’t have a quarter to give the tree scale, but if I stood in the hole it was ripped out of, the roots were several feet above my head. It was a big honkin’ tree.

For writing the iPhone was… meh. Even in landscape, the virtual keyboard is just too small, and with no tactile input to help guide my sausage fingers, I made a lot of typos, which are a pain to fix as there are no arrow keys and touching the screen to move the cursor is awkward and takes your hands out of typing alignment. The screen is also just too small to see any real amount of text because the virtual keyboard takes up most of the space.

But that said, it is fine enough for texting/twittering, and while I could never write prose on it, it was perfectly sufficient to jot down story ideas that I might otherwise have forgotten. With Documents to Go installed on the phone, pad, and my desktop, synching all three devices is easy peasy. So the phone is not a full replacement for the other devices, but it can shoulder their load for short periods of time as necessary, which is all I ask.

Yesterday I tried again using the imapmywalk app to track my mileage/speed/calories burned/etc. I am a nerd, and nothing excites/inspires us to excel like data we can measure and correlate.

But the app was kind of a pain in the ass. It claimed to operate in the background so you could multitask, but every time you open any other app, it pauses your walk route, so if you’re not careful to stop while using the other app and resume the tracking when you start walking again, you can have holes in your workout data. There were also occasional GPS issues, and I had trouble saving the workout and ended up deleting it.

Worst of all, for some reason while the imapmywalk app was running, I could not get the iPod app to stop shuffling, no matter what I did. I had been planning to listen to the 22nd and final disc of The Desert Spear, but it kept shuffling the chapters, which made it impossible. Made me insane until I just ended up putting on music. It’s not like music is so bad, but it pissed me off that I didn’t have the choice. When I got home, my wife told me that there was a built-in Nike app bundled with the iPhone which did essentially the same thing as imapmywalk. I was planning to try it anyway, but a somewhat bizarre occurrence today clinched it. More on that in a bit.

I did get some data from imapmywalk, and used it to extrapolate over the gaps. I walked close to 5 miles, with an average speed of 4.7 mph, which was enough to raise my heart rate. I wasn’t really tired at the end, either. I could easily have done another 5, but I had other things to attend to.

As I said in the last entry, I am thinking of moving up to a slow jog, and for that I needed better shoes than the Payless sneakers I usually wear. I went to Super runners in GCT and had them fit me. The results were… surprising.

Apparently I am a size 12. This in and of itself is not so shocking, but my whole adult life I have worn size 9.5 shoes. No wonder my feet hurt. Anyway, I bought some sleek asics in basic black, so my feet don’t look like little Nascar racers.

You may be wondering why I have time to write this huge blog post about… nothing. Well, like a long-awaited party, the cluster headache that has been cycling like a circling shark ever since I got back from Australia struck last night. I took some Excedrin migraine and did all the usual ritual sacrifices, and thankfully the pain and nausea are light so long as I stay still in dim light. I am useless creatively, so I figured I might as well blog.

Just a few minutes ago, something odd happened. The UPS guy delivered two Amazon packages containing a Nike iPod sensor and a tiny pouch for it that velcroes to your shoelaces. I assumed they were from Dani, but she said they weren’t. Then I looked at the receipt, and saw they were a gift.

From someone I didn’t know (but who apparently reads my blog).

I checked facebook, and I don’t appear to be friends with him there (though fb is acting wonky this afternoon), nor twitter, so WTF?

This is not the first time I have received a wonderful, thoughtful, and unsolicited gift from a reader, but it never ceases to shock me. It’s a reminder that with my new career I touch more lives than I know, and apparently in positive ways that engender good will. More than the gifts, this fact makes me happy beyond words.

Dear Secret Santa,

Thank you for your thoughtful gift. I promise to be very good this year, and to put it to regular use so I am not quite as festively plump by Xmas.

Your Pal,

Peat

Posted on September 23, 2010 at 4:22 pm by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings, Tech, Writing
5 Comments »

I am still using the iPad to write, and it is getting better. As I predicted, Documents to Go updated their app recently, and it fixed a lot of the glitches, including the biggest one, which is the arrow key glitch on the wireless keyboard. Synching is easy, and it has yet to screw up a sync and make me lose work like my old phone used to to (not often, but enough that it was a source of anxiety). I keep waiting for the iPad to fuck up, but so far…

It is by no means a perfect device, but I don’t think I would have made it through my trip to Australia without it. A full laptop would have been too heavy/bulky to carry around everywhere, and my old HP iPaq phone just didn’t have the muscle or the interface to be my only access point to cyberville. The iPad was the perfect temporary computer.

But it sucks for exercising.

I am a writer. By nature, this means I am generally lazy and out of shape, keeping odd hours, eating junk food, and sitting at a computer for long hours.

In an attempt to make myself feel better and stave off future angina, I have been starting to get off my ass and exercise a bit, walking 4-5 miles around the loop of Prospect Park and through its environs several times a week at a good strong pace that keeps my heart rate up.

The problem is that whenever I go, I take my ipad, ipod, and phone, which forces me to take my murse at least, and often my full backpack, which is a pain in the ass and hinders my exercising. But what if I needed to make/receive a call/text? What if I had a good idea while walking and need to write it down? What if I needed to check my email or facebook or twitter? What if I want to listen to music/podcasts/audiobooks?  These things all happen frequently. I also like to bring snacks. Usually an apple, a sandwich, and a drink. And sometimes a book (or manuscript).

But today, I got my iPhone.

The iPhone has the potential to the be dream device to serve, at least temporarily, as all the above devices, allowing me to leave them for a few hours in the same way I could leave my desktop for a few weeks so long as I had the iPad. Porting my phone number was a breeze, and all my apps transferred, too, so I have Documents to Go on there, allowing me to theoretically write on it, if I want to deal with the tiny screen/keyboard. I have 4500 songs on it, so I’m not going to run out of music. IBooks will even remember what page I’m on in a book I’m reading on the iPad.

So screw you, iPaq 910 not-so-smartphone. I hope you burn in Hell. I may yet desecrate your corpse, but for now, suffer the humiliation of being relegated to my junk drawer for all the angst you have caused me over the years.

Now all I need to carry to the park is my sleek and moderately stylish black mini fridge bag with the water bottle, conveniently slung from a shoulder strap. I think this will work for a while, but 4 miles is starting to feel like nothing, so I will either need to add a second loop, or stop flirting with real exercise and start jogging.

If I do that, I will need some new running shoes (my Payless sneakers and Costco mandles can’t hack that), and  some kind of armband thing like this.

I suck at shopping. Any iRunners out there have advice on shoes or means to secure the iPhone?

Posted on September 21, 2010 at 2:35 am by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings, Tech, Writing
9 Comments »

I’ve been talking to Del Rey books about bonus materials for the mass market paperback (mmpb) version of The Desert Spear, coming out on my birthday next year (Feb. 8, 2011). It is standard practice to include some extra goodies in the mmpb to encourage readers, and it’s something I have always enjoyed as a fan.

Usually these bonus materials come in the form of an excerpt from the next book. The Warded Man mmpb, for example, contains the prologue to The Desert Spear.  We are already including a short Krasian Dictionary in the mmpb, but Del Rey was very keen to include an excerpt from The Daylight War, as well.

But I’m not ready to give one up.

This isn’t because I haven’t written anything. I have a good 200 pages of pretty kickass material (if I do say so myself), but as I mentioned on the blog recently, I did a bit of a hatchet job on the book a month or so ago, and the new POV introduction (Mudboy) that I was going to include as the TDS mmpb excerpt was cut from The Daylight War. Not because it isn’t good (oh man, is it good), but because including the full character arc (which would span a dozen or so years) would have made the book somewhat unwieldy. The main story is meaty enough.

I could also include a taste of the Arlen & Renna chapters I have finished, but they contain a LOT of big reveals I am not yet ready to make public with the new book still some ways off. It was impossible to pick something that wasn’t too spoilery.

So what to do?

After a conversation with my editor, we decided to leave it up to you, the readers. We will be including an Q&A interview with me in the mmpb in addition to the Krasian Dictionary, and would like to include YOUR questions.

All you need to do is comment on this post with a question you would like me to answer. My editor and I will select the best ones, and they will appear in the mmpb, along with my answers.

Rules:

1) Please include your first name and where you’re from (not a specific address, just town and country).

2) Ask as many questions as you like, but I will only pick one per person to answer in the book.

3) Questions may be on any topic (writing craft, magic system details, specifics about events in the stories, etc), but please don’t ask questions the answers to which would be story spoilers, like “Who will Arlen end up with, Renna or Leesha?” Obviously, I am not going to answer those.

4) I may answer some questions immediately in the comments thread, if they are ones I am not planning to include in the mmpb insert.

5) The final interview is due to Del Rey on Oct. 1 (less than two weeks!), which means I need time to pick questions and answer them, so the sooner you ask, the better your chances of getting your questions into the book.

Thanks for your help!

Posted on September 18, 2010 at 5:38 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Desert Spear, Events, Excisions, Fans, Interviews, The Daylight War, Warded Man, Writing
37 Comments »