tobias_buckell

New Short Story Published At Subterranean Online: The Seafarer

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:08:21 GMT

I have a new short story (well, a novelette to be more precise) up at Subterranean in the Spring 2013 issue, The Seafarer. It’s a new story set in The Alchemist and The Executioness universe. You can read the whole thing for free at the link.

Along with The Executioness, there is also The Fall of Alacan here, which makes for a triptych of stories set in that world.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Interview with me about Kickstarter

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:07:18 GMT

Writer Emma Larkin, in prep for doing a Kickstarter of her own, interviewed me for her blog about Kickstarter and my own experiences:

I think a successful Kickstarter is a mixture of three factors: the cool factor (the intrinsic description of what the project is going to be), your audience factor (how many people ‘follow’ you, both as consumers of what you put out and your various online networks) and the can-this-person-deliver factor. You really need to have strength in two of those three, I think, to do well. Lacking two is a killer. I’ve seen single strength Kickstarters of all of the above fail, though occasionally a cool factor will overcome all. So for a first-time author, who normally doesn’t have a large audience (being a first timer) and hasn’t proven that they can deliver, they’re almost entirely banking on a single leg (is this cool?). That’s a large river to cross.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Music Player App

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:32:18 GMT

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Integer adipiscing orci sed nisi pretium et congue orci fermentum. Praesent id ante urna, eget adipiscing elit. Cras in urna eros, quis interdum velit.

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Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Youtube Video

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:32:17 GMT

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Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Slideshow Post

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:32:17 GMT

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Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Vimeo Video Post

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:32:16 GMT

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Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Limpidus Theme Launched

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:32:15 GMT

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Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Single Image Post

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:32:12 GMT

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Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Yummy look at what HS could be…

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:06:33 GMT

Dan Geiser, and Jacki Wyse-Rhodes both pointed out this link to me of a vision for high speed rail in the US:

Created by Alfred Twu, the map compiles visions of possible American rail systems from a long list of places and mashes them together to show what a national rail network might look like.

Interesting in that, were you to develop a real high speed rail system in the US, Chicago sort of becomes the center of it all…

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

What I’m working on right now: Hurricane Fever

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:40:45 GMT

As a result of the news announced over the last two days, people are asking what I’m working on right now and what is coming out when.

The YA novel I just sold to Tor is The Island in the Sky, and it is already written. Of course, I imagine Patrick Nielsen Hayden will have edit notes for me, so those will arrive at some point. The tentative pub date for The Island in the Sky is late 2014.

Right now I’m writing a novel called Hurricane Fever.

In some interviews (and according to Wikipedia), I’d said my next novel was The Infringement. I have a large block of that written, but Year Zero came out and covered a great deal of the same material I wanted to cover in The Infringement. Alien overlords arrive and enforce a form of copyright that is even more radical than the current WTO system. After seeing Year Zero both get (well deserved) attention, and the fact that it was widely read, and is good, the energy for trying to write The Infringement just wasn’t there.

If I were a more stable individual, I would have just pushed through and been done with the book. But… as silly as this might be to some, I think I have to believe in a project to write it. If I wasn’t doing this to explore things that excited me, I could be pushing paper and making a lot more money doing something else I didn’t love.

Some I’m working on a sequel to Arctic Rising called Hurricane Fever.

For all of you who wrote fan mail asking to see more of Roo, this book is about Roo. I liked Roo while writing Arctic Rising, so he gets Hurricane Fever.

The book is set in the US Virgin Islands, then moves through a small portion of the Caribbean, set during a future where super storms and hurricanes constantly batter at the islands and the US’s East Coast.

I’m about 25% of the way through and hoping to have a solid first draft in two to three months. It’s a fast one, for me, but I’ve been writing faster for the past year after doing some intense self-analysis and habit retraining. I also spent two months outlining the novel and researching it to prep everything as much as possible so I didn’t slow myself down. My goal is to finish a solid draft of the book in March.

If all goes well, it should be out sometime in early 2014.

What happens after I write Hurricane Fever? That’s up in the air. With the successful sale of The Island in the Sky, I now owe a sequel; Against the Fall of Stars. However, I’ve been planning a Kickstarter for the final Xenowealth book in the event that sales of The Apocalypse Ocean continue to hold as good as they are.

The question is, do I write Against the Fall of Night over the middle part of the year after Hurricane Fever, and then try to Kickstart and write the final Xenowealth book in the later part of the year? There are benefits to that, as I would get turn-in money for Fall that’s better than a Kickstarter. And I would secure that book’s place in the cycle of Tor’s publishing line up.

Or do I Kickstart and write the Xenowealth book, and get it out there so that the whole series is wrapped up for readers and I move on to some other projects.

If I wait a bit on the last Xenowealth book, I can give The Apocalypse Ocean time to find more readers, and build demand. I can also see how much better sales are by giving it time. I can also spend more time building up plans for rewards, and even commissioning and paying for some slowly over the months ahead. That way I won’t be working on the fly as much.

Either of these two plans are fraught with complications, as they involve me writing almost three books in a year. I more or less did that last year, but I’m a little bit more constrained this year with an extra freelance gig.

It’s hard to say what I’ll do, but the sure thing is… I’m working on Hurricane Fever to make it the best book I can and that is mostly all I’m thinking about. I can’t really make a decision until I’m finished there. That book that matters most is the one currently in production.

So now you know what I’m focused on for the next twelve months…

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Lunar rover image stabilized video

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:01:52 GMT

I don’t know why I keep re-watching this, but the image stabilized LRV bouncing around the moon is just entrancing, and gives you a much better look at what the astronauts were seeing there:

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Boeing has ideas on how to get to Mars

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:54:36 GMT

Nasa Spaceflight has a very in depth look at all the various options Boeing is providing NASA for possible Mars missions. It’s a good look at the technology on the table and in the near future around space access.

Taking into consideration the already-acknowledge difficulties of mounting a crewed mission to Mars – not the least of which being the distance involved, the time to get a crew to Mars and back, and the harsh environment of the inner solar beyond Earth’s protective geomagnetic field – there is another ‘given’ for crewed missions to Mars.

The vehicle that will take us to the Red Planet will have to be constructed on Earth and then assembled in space.

Skillfully, the world’s prominent spacefaring nations have already gained invaluable information and practice in assembling a large Earth-constructed, space-assembled vehicle with NASA, RSA (Russian federal Space Agency), ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace and eXploration Agency’s) contributions and missions to the International Space Station .

Taking those lessons learned during construction of the ISS and applying them to the eventual Mars Transfer Vehicle (MTV) will allow all nations involved in what is shaping up to most-certainly be an international effort to land humans on Mars to capitalize on past best practices while still employing new technologies and innovations.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Learning to be warm: synthetic undershirts

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:21:19 GMT

I’ve been blogging about my quest to remain warm in the winter. I talked about silk here, and wool here.

Wool has been scratchy, and silk the smoothest (and on a per weight basis, warmer). But yesterday the temperatures dropped down into single digits, negative with wind chill. There were drafts all throughout the house.

A week ago I acquired this Patagonia Capilene undershirt. It is about as thick as the Icebreaker wool shirt, not as smooth as my silk shirts. So it doesn’t slide as much, which is what I liked about the silk (a second skin).

However, the Capilene #2 shirt was, hands down, the warmest base layer I’ve used yet. In fact, it wore well this weekend in multiple environs, from warm room parties to going out in the 30 degree weather under my polo to get something from the car. I was chilled, but not dangerously so.

I pulled it out again on Tuesday due to the single digit temps so I could go outside.

This could be a go-to shirt, though I’m curious to see what will happen come warmer temperatures. I’m looking for something very versatile, so we’ll see. But this is so far my favorite of the shirts.

Next up, everyone has been emailing me that I *must* try Uniqlo’s undershirts. I’ve gotten enough positive recs that I will order one soon, once I get reimbursed for the wool shirts (I’m not made of money).

The other thing people have been encouraging me to do is purchase a mid-weight or heavy silk long sleeved shirt and have it tailored into a short sleeve (and to do the same with Patoginia) to get a killer warm undershirt that breathes well.

This is smart, and I will consider once I’ve moved through the Uniqlo test.

(Oh, and washing instructions for the Capilene are much simpler than silk, which I have to make sure not to harm with my stupidity, so that’s a bonus).

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Learning to be warm: wool undershirts

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:27:11 GMT

I talked about my quest to be warm over here in a last entry about silk undershirts:

Look, I grew up with a light shirt or no shirt at all around beaches. Constrictive clothing is annoying. Adding layers of it literally starts making me twitch.

Some people laugh like I’m making a joke, but I’m fairly straight forward about how just simply pissed off I get about it. By the end of the day when I’ve had a cotton undershirt, a long sleeved shirt, and a jacket on, my blood pressure is up. I’ve been shifting and twitching fabric around to sit nicely all day. It’s annoying.

And long sleeves. They bunch in the weirdest places and I keep noticing them all day long. If I’m not wearing a jacket and out in the cold, I don’t want something cover my entire arm when I’m inside a house.

My general impression of a house is that it’s a piece of technology designed to allow us to be comfortable.

It makes sense to be uncomfortable outside. I understand it. It’s outside.

But now I’m inside.

I found silk to be refreshingly comfortable and light to wear under anything. I can only find heavy silk in a long sleeve variety, however. My dislike of long sleeves limits options somewhat.

So here’s the next part in that series: testing wool.

But moving on, everyone raves about Merino wool, with Icebreaker being the big standout. I ordered 150 weight wool undershirts from Icebreaker and a 200 weight Smartwool short sleeve shirt.

The fit was nice, but I found the shirt to be colder than silk. People flocked religiously to wool’s defense, but walking around it felt like the cold was just cutting through the wool.

It was pointed out to me on twitter the wool I was wearing was too lightweight. But it was roughly comparable to the heft and weight of the silk (actually the silk was lighter and luxurious against the skin, while also being warmer). I needed to get a thicker, mid weight wool.

Fair enough. But I wasn’t going to be ordering a thicker fabric because… the wool I already had tested after a day drove me to itching. Sure, Merino isn’t supposed to itch, but it did.

I was told to wash the shirt to get rid of the initial scratchy. I ran it through the wash twice, and tried it out a second time.

Nope.

While not as scratchy as those horrible old wool sweaters you may have once been forced to wear, it was still noticeable. It built up for me, slowly, throughout the day, until by the end of it I wanted to use pliers to pull the skin off my bones. Which is just not a fun sensation.

A suggestion was made that I wear a silk undershirt, with a wool shirt on top of that. Which is, frankly, getting comedic. Wool just doesn’t work for me. It’s okay, not every solution works for every person. Silk vs wool… for me silk won hands down. Now we know.

The silk is still not leaving me toasty, but it was better than cotton. Maybe not as good as a thicker Merino wool would have been, but hey, it worked great as a base layer in up to 29 degree weather under a simple cotton shirt. It helped regulate my temperature really well in the house under any of my polos or cotton shirts with the house set all the way down to 69 degrees, usually a temperature that left me miserable and shivering.

We’re on our way to finding a solution and way of handling winters. Not all of the items I’m testing will work.

This week I’ll be returning the wool shirts.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Nice review of The Apocalypse Ocean

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:44:53 GMT

Over at BN Review, Paul Di Filippo looks at The Apocalypse Ocean… and likes what he sees:

The Apocalypse Ocean, I’m happy to say, starts off at a gallop, never slows down, and is completely up to the high caliber of its predecessors: a big, thought-provoking entertainment. It conducts a localized adventure with zip and zest, while also opening up the Xenowealth universe to larger consequences. Its appearance is a vindication of all of the faith of Buckell’s fans, and the author’s own determination.

I also liked this bit:

Buckell’s short, punchy chapters conspire with his fluid prose and deftly intruded speculative conceits to create a state-of-the-art SF narrative. He devotes equal amounts of time to the complicated human dynamics among his variously psychically damaged protagonists (the back-story detour for Kay is very well done), and to the kind of near-Singularity events (think Stephen Baxter or Greg Egan) beyond their immediate ken, but so dangerously relevant. Harking back to such illustrious predecessors as Jack Vance (The Dragon Masters) and Karl Schroeder (Ventus), Buckell builds both a microcosmically grounded planetary romance and a macrocosmically lofty galactic milieu.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Back, if a bit wobbly…

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:24:04 GMT

I’ve been down for the count almost all week long with a strain of whatever flu has been running wild. Yes, I did get my flu shots (every year, cardiologist thinks its a good idea as my heart does not like being dehydrated), but still succumbed.

Fortunately today I seem to up and out and looking at my email inbox in horror.

I watched a lot of silly TV while in a state of shivering stupor at the wee hours of the morning. I can’t remember half of it. But I do remember two of them, both on Netflix streaming.

One For The Money was the adaptation of Janet Evanovich’s novel starring Katherine Heigl. Panned by critics and slow at the box office I decided to watch it because I figured I had nothing to lose.

Maybe it was my feverish state, but I was quite charmed. It suffers from following a more novelistic pattern than a summer blockbuster one (two finales and two, or maybe even three, mini-ends) all throughout, which I could see might lead to some finding it meandering. The Jersey characters veered toward stereotypical that might not have been in the book [and Racalicious could probably write a doctoral thesis on the portrayal of the two black prostitutes]. And, the male lead, Jason Mara, while he has a pseudo-mid-career Mel Gibson sort of vibe going, just doesn’t quite match the badass of Daniel Sunjata (perfectly cast) leading to a mis-casting feel. Further, I’m wondering if female audiences who went to see it were hoping for a little more steam than the ads might have promised, it’s all very PG-13.

Nonetheless, Katherine Heigl made for a plucky Stephanie Plum. And unlike most movies with a strong female lead, she has agency and resolves the final threat to her own life, so I enjoyed that. She spent so much time being tutored by Daniel Sunjata I was worried the books would flip to, something that bugs me in too many (but not all) urban fantasy/female gumshoe novels I read where the heroine gets protected by the love interest. This movie avoided that silliness. After spending the whole movie learning the tricks, she uses them. Hurray for that.

This movie cost $40 million to make and didn’t earn out.

Seeing as that District 9 cost $30 million to make, I really don’t understand how it was possible for One for the Money to cost that much, unless it was mostly for the price of Heigl’s acting fee. In which case, she wasn’t acting Jersey all *that* well.

It seems to me they could have done 4 of these at $10 million dollars a pop with a slightly less famous actress and recouped their money on syndication or iTunes rentals. But what do I know? I just struggle to earn a living writing novels.

The other movie was Gunless. A Canadian take on the Old West mythology. Again, panned by critics. I think because it is less a ‘comedy’ than a movie that pokes back at the myth of the Old West from a Canadian perspective, which means it actively clashes with received wisdom from Gun Culture, which tends to rule in Pop Culture. For as much as the NRA is demanding that we not look at the man behind the curtain and instead look at video games and movies, I imagine Gunless is not the response they want, but it’s actually the direction you go if you’re playing with the assumption.

Now, what I found interesting about the movie was that even though I found the theme one I basically agree with (shotguns, rifles are tools, and the Canadians in the film own these kinds for basic self defense and hunting, but other kinds of guns are only for killing and mayhem, and they find them and the gun culture around them, as embodied by the gunslinger who shows up, both repellent in the damage it does [embodied by having their stuff casually shot up and their blacksmith challenged to die for no big reason that they can see] and fascinating at the same time [myth, manliness]) and cutely argued, I found the film ‘preachy’ initially, but as I self-interrogated I realized I found it ‘preachy’ based mainly (not entirely, there are 3 mini-preachy pieces of dialogue in there, to be fair, that I would have cut, audiences are not as stupid as we sometimes believe) on my own immersion in gun culture, which presumes Clint Eastwood’s pro-gun Dirty Harry/Westerns to be the base standard.

But Clint’s world is actually one pole. Just because it’s the pole I am constantly exposed to doesn’t mean anything. Gunless felt preachy mainly because it sat somewhere in the middle of a conversation about guns as tools (as I said, a middle position of one where it had rifles and shotguns as tools for farmers for self defense as hunting, but not for killing over insults, it was not anti-gun, though Clint-steeped gun fetishists would call it anti-gun it clearly isn’t) where a movie about Ghandi or no guns at all is the farther side of the continuum. My ‘meh’ feeling had more to do initially with my own pop culture experience.

That’s not to say Gunless was high art or an amazing movie. I’d pick 3:10 to Yuma or Unforgiven over it anyway, they’re just better pieces of art. Done. But Gunless was a cute, fun film that I’m glad I finally got around to watching after having had it in my queue for a year now. It had a lot of negative reviews, but I wonder if some of them were because it moved against a grain that people couldn’t quite express.

I probably wouldn’t have been able to self-interrogate if I wasn’t on an intellectual journey regarding my own assumptions about gun-fetishm that came from visiting England in November. That began a research quest that challenged many assumptions and wrapped up with Sandy Hook.

So that’s some of what I did while I was sick. Not my favorite way to spend a week. Hope your’s was better.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

ISS to feature inflatable space hab extension by Bigelow

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:43:28 GMT

Bigelow Aerospace designs inflatable modules. They’ve been quiet for about five years now, since the 2007 launch of their last, fairly large inflatable module. Which is why I’m excited to see that they will be now moving forward with putting a test module on the ISS. This will allow them to see how a crewed version will fare:

The space agency said Friday that it has signed a $17.8-million contract with Bigelow to provide the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, to the ISS. Few details about the module’s size, capabilities, or launch date have been announced, although more details are expected to be released at a press conference at Bigelow’s Las Vegas facilities on January 16. NASA said that the module will demonstrate the capabilities of expandable habitat technology for future commercial and government applications.

Again, for all the angst about losing space shuttle capacity, it’s been a fairly cool couple years in terms of moving forward in regards to space activity. I think, realizing that they have to move forward is spurring NASA to invest in and poke at some interesting things.

Here’s a rendering of the Genesis II, that they launched into orbit in 2007 and has been up there since:

Like many alt-space companies Bigelow has big dreams beyond just the two demo labs they’ve put in space to demonstrate the technology. The ISS module is a big first step toward starting to make money off their technology, and to their eventual near-term dream of offering a second alternative to the ISS.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Corporations don’t like you…

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 23:05:15 GMT

I don’t agree with James Altucher on everything, but man he’s always thought provoking and this latest kinda hit me:

3) Corporations don’t like you. The executive editor of a major news publication took me out to lunch to get advice on how to expand their website traffic. But before I could talk he started complaining to me: “Our top writers keep putting their twitter names in their posts and then when they get more followers they start asking for raises.”

“What’s the problem?” I said. “Don’t you want writers that are popular and well-respected?”

When I say a “major news publication” I am talking MAJOR.

He said, “no, we want to be about the news. We don’t want anyone to be an individual star.”

In other words, his main job was to destroy the career aspirations of his most talented people, the people who swore their loyalty to him, the people who worked 90 hours a week for him. If they only worked 30 hours a week and were slightly more mediocre he would’ve been happy. But he doesn’t like you. He wants you to stay in the hole and he will throw you a meal every once in awhile in exchange for your excrement.

The number of people I run into who’ve been fired for having a personality outside of their job. The recruiters I hear who bemoan the unwillingness of younger workers to want to commit to a job for very long (why commit, we see what happens in every down turn, loyalty goes both ways, son, and the reason my generation and younger doesn’t want to commit is we don’t see commitment)…

…when I left to freelance people asked ‘aren’t you worried about living day to day, what about not knowing what the future holds? The uncertainty?’

The truth was, their lives were just as uncertain as mine, they were just being told day in and day that it wasn’t so.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last couple months. I don’t have certain conclusions, but I’m probably going to circle back on it here and there.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Shani: A Disclaimer for a short story written when I was 14

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:43:19 GMT

A fellow SF writer is on his fourth round of chemo. And a number of us decided to come together to see if we could help him out by holding a fund raiser where we agreed to donate acts of whimsy for certain levels of funds raised. I agreed to give everyone a read of my first ever, full completed short story.

Well, I was thinking I would have the weekend to type this up for everyone helping out, but we blew right past all of our levels of hoped-for funds within a few hours. People watched as authors agreed to sing, read classic literature as if having phone sex, and way, way more. It was, in short, epic. And so I found myself asking for help to quickly prep the files for my piece of whimsy.

The intro/disclaimer I quickly wrote for that piece of juvenilia was this:

When I was asked to donate a piece of whimsy to this project to raise money to punch back against Jay’s cancer I said yes automatically. Yes, because having gone through a medical ordeal of my own I don’t wish that on anyone. Not even my worst enemy. And Jay’s a friend. So I super-extra unwish all of this on him and hate seeing it. Sure he’s all the way over on the West Coast, but we broke in together at roughly the same time and there’s always this ‘cohorts for life’ sort of feel among writers that start publishing around the same time. I couldn’t help but say yes… even though I don’t do whimsy all that well. I’m always in awe of cool stunts and whimsical events that people in this community do (like Jim Hines replicating urban fantasy covers on his blog).

I thought a good part of whimsy is to let yourself be potentially embarrassed. So twenty years ago I was fourteen years old, wearing braces, oversized glasses with a blue tint, unruly curly hair, and I read a lot. And I got it in my head that I would write a short story. Until then I’d mostly scribbled snippets (and there was that everlasting gobstopper of a novel I was always ‘working on’).

So…

Here is a story that I wrote when I was still in middle school. The first one.
I said I would donate it to the cause. And I’m a man of my word. But in a fit of ‘Oh crap, what have I wrought’ panic I thought I would at least put a disclaimer in front of it, and here it is and…

… you know what, I don’t even regret it in the slightest. If it helped bring a few extra people to prime the pump of this amazing fundraiser, it was totally worth it. Fourteen year old me wasn’t embarrassed to try, and fear of being judged by peers and strangers only binds and hobbles us. And fourteen year old me would have been delighted to have helped out a colleague in this way, and been thrilled the story was read at all. Other than including a few hashmarks to properly indicated section breaks, the story is proudly included with all of its original errors.

Please to enjoy. And thank you, thank you again for helping with this fundraiser. You are good people. All of you.

Thank you also to Angie Rush for transcribing this from pictures I took of the original, yellowed paper copy.

Here on the blog, I’d also like to add to the story of how I came to have a paper-only copy of this story.

As I said, I wrote it almost exactly 20 years ago. When I was done with this story I gave a copy to my grandfather on his boat. He didn’t like it, didn’t understand what was going on. But he kept the damn thing.

After the hurricanes that hit in 1995, I lost a lot of my paper print outs, so the other copy of Shani was lost to the storm. I might have had a copy of it on a hard drive, but my hard drive failed in college somewhere my sophomore year. So I figured the story for a lost artifact that I’d always remember fondly… my first complete short story.

Until my grandfather collapsed in the Caribbean from diabetes-related complications. One of my uncles flew down and got him back up to Ohio for a stay here in Ohio with my parents while he mooned about their house recovering (and then being settled permanently as they realized his health was failing). And one of the things he still had when his things were moved off his boat to my parent’s house was his copy of Shani, which he gave back to me.

And so that is why I have, sealed away in a large envelope in the back of my filing cabinet, a 20 year old print out of the first short story I wrote, typed up on a Brother ‘word processor’ that had a four-line LCD screen that let me type a paragraph up before it started printing the words.

So donating this to the cause seemed like a very whimsical thing to do, and I’m so pleased that it is able to be used for a good cause after being lost, found, then hidden away.

If you’ve donated to help Jay Lake sequence his cancer, you can read my first ever short story written here.

If you read the story, and haven’t donated, please… consider going to help Jay here:

Jay Lake is an award-winning American author of ten science fiction novels and over 300 short stories. He is also one of more than a million Americans who have colon cancer. Diagnosed in April, 2008, Jay’s cancer has progressed from a single tumor to metastatic disease affecting the lung and liver, recurring after multiple surgeries and chemotherapy courses, and multiplying from single tumor presentations to multiple tumors presentations. Jay is now in his fourth round of chemotherapy, but it’s not clear that it’s working, and his doctors have little to go on in terms of advising further courses of treatment for him. In short, things are not looking good for Jay. Not at all.

However, a new technology is becoming available—one that may offer his doctors a better option for treating the cancer. We’re trying to raise funds to allow Jay to have whole genome sequencing. There is a small possibility that the results of such a test, which is more comprehensive than conventional genetic testing of tumors, may suggest a treatment path that Jay’s doctor’s may not have considered, and that could be life saving. It’s a really small chance, and Jay knows that.

The unlocked reward goals are a lot of fun. Right now we’re moving towards getting a 3-d scan of Cory Doctorow’s head making a funny face.

The possibilities are endless.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

I told my intern… (thoughts about being a writer)

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:49:42 GMT

I have a new intern, joining the team with another intern I already have been working with from the local college. They do cool things for me that help with some outreach, PR, admin tasks that I struggle to keep up with.

New intern came with a notebook and lots of questions for her first meeting, and for some reason I was quite willing to talk on and on. And I wrote on twitter that I’d wished I’d recorded the little monologues. I then began to tweet what I remembered. Here’s a pseudo reconstruction of all the tweets I made:

I told my intern, it’s so hard to predict who’ll sell enough books to make a living, or make a splash. Or which books will react…

So you need to focus on doing what Neil Gaiman said, the art. The book. The story. Not whether you’re owed a living or success…

The success may come. It may not. But if you did work you love are proud of and don’t come at [the job of being a writer] with entitlement, you’ll always be proud of it…

I’ve seen a lot of writers get twisted up and bitter about that entitlement. They’ve worked so hard (and they have) and didn’t sell X… [I let expectations and bitterness sabotage me on my second novel, a hard but valuable lesson among many I learned on that book]

But in art, sometimes the hard work on a specific project doesn’t translate to success…

And that is hard [it really is] to take. But if you focus on the love of the work, then you have that. It can’t be taken away…

And if you work really hard for a very long time, you increase the chances of breaking out. Almost all overnight success is after long work… [if you look hard enough, you almost always find years of prep. I can only think of a small number of true overnight successes I've met. Many of them often faded away because they didn't understand what they'd just done, or got frustrated by the next level of hard work ahead of them]

I told my intern refuse debt. Live as simply as you can b/c if you want to be an artist there are no regular paychecks…

…if single, consider exploring another country where exchange rate helps you, or do the tiny apartment thing. Minimalism. [is your ally]

I told my intern there’s nothing wrong with not making a full living off art. Amazing art comes from long time part timers…

If you part time your art, don’t resent it’s inability to make your living. Remember it’s importance, maybe even over job. But don’t resent…

I told my intern everyone around you is not an artist. They will pressure you, out of good will and love, to make bad decisions for an artist [it's not their fault, they mean well, but they're not doing what you're doing]

I told my intern if you want art to be your job, it needs to be your job now. You need to spend time on it like it’s your second job.

I told my intern once you write the work, and loved it, and created it, then you become mercenary. Put on small biz cap.

…once you’ve lovingly crafted widget, you try to sell it. But don’t assume your first widget will work, entrepreneur. Maybe next…

I told my intern go out and start trying to make art, and make money off it right now. There’s no certificate, no formal hiring process.

I told my intern you will hear no a lot. It doesn’t mean anything other than ‘not right now with this.’ I still hear no all the time.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

For those that want it: stuff I published in 2012

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:35:43 GMT

In case you are inclined to wonder what work of mine is eligible for awards this season if you’re a voter (like say for the Hugos), here is a list of everything I published in 2012 that is eligible:

Novels:

The Apocalypse Ocean – Kickstarter (July 2012)
Arctic Rising – Tor (Feb. 2012)

A few people have asked if Arctic Rising was a 2011 or 2012 book. It is a 2012 book. The Apocalypse Ocean was first published to backers in eBook form in July 2012, officially. I imagine more people have encountered Arctic Rising, but since it did come out very early in the year it is up against an amazing year of great books… incidentally, I’ve been remiss in promoting the fact that Arctic Rising is now out in paperback, which means both it and the paperback are now price at $7.99.

Novelettes: (links take you to online copy of story)

Jungle Walkers (w/ David Klecha) – Armored (March, 2012)

Short Stories: (links take you to online copy of story)

The Found Girl (w/ David Klecha) – Clarkesworld Magazine (September, 2012)

The Rainy Season – Mitigated Futures (August, 2012)

A Game of Rats and Dragon – Mitigated Futures (June, 2012)
–reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine (the most visited story on LS for 2012, John tells me)

Press Enter to Execute – Fireside Magazine #1 (Spring, 2012)

A Tinker of Warhoon – Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom (Spring, 2012)

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Learning to be warm: silk undershirts

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 03:35:43 GMT

Last winter I decided that I would take some active steps towards figuring out how to cope with winter. I grew up in the Caribbean, there are things that people take for granted that they have learned over a number of years that I never did. Or I resist.

For example, I hate being chilly in my own home, and I hate wearing layers. These are two things that put me at odds with most people in colder climes.

I hate being chilly in my home, but most people (at least here in Ohio), seem to keep their houses in the mid to high sixties. People get uncomfortable in my home, where it’s set so I can wear a light t-shirt, and then when I go to other homes I’m usually always leaving my jacket on.

“Can I take your jacket?”

“No, I’d rather leave it on?”

“Huh…”

If I take it off I start experiencing the first levels of hypothermia in houses set in the mid sixties.

According to informal polls I’ve taken, that may be a sort of puritanical midwest thing, others say their social circles have their houses in the low 70s. But for me at least in non-urban Ohio, it seems mid or high 60s dominates, and there are still drafts that hit me that leave me shivering.

It stacks up and adds as the winter keeps going, until I began to actively loathe winter, the geographic location, and get very miserable about it all.

So the advice is to layer up.

Look, I grew up with a light shirt or no shirt at all around beaches. Constrictive clothing is annoying. Adding layers of it literally starts making me twitch.

Some people laugh like I’m making a joke, but I’m fairly straight forward about how just simply pissed off I get about it. By the end of the day when I’ve had a cotton undershirt, a long sleeved shirt, and a jacket on, my blood pressure is up. I’ve been shifting and twitching fabric around to sit nicely all day. It’s annoying.

And long sleeves. They bunch in the weirdest places and I keep noticing them all day long. If I’m not wearing a jacket and out in the cold, I don’t want something cover my entire arm when I’m inside a house.

My general impression of a house is that it’s a piece of technology designed to allow us to be comfortable.

It makes sense to be uncomfortable outside. I understand it. It’s outside.

But now I’m inside.

When I’m inside I’m not supposed to be uncomfortable.

See, that’s why we went through all the trouble of building the fucking structure in the first place. So that it’s NOT like the outside.

But when I’m inside a building and shivering, and I can’t think straight, I basically am left wondering what the entire fucking point of us even being inside the building is? If we’re going to be cold, let’s just sit outside and hold this social event.

This is where I’m coming from.

I usually try to shut up about it because I’m not going to go around to other people’s houses bugging them about how low the heat is (even though people give me a hard time about how high I keep the heat in my own house). It’s not polite. And how cold other people’s houses are; that’s none of my damn business. Could be because they’re saving money. Could be because they don’t mind layering. Could be tradition. Could just be they’re more able to handle the cold than me.

A couple of years ago I decided to do something about my dislike of layering. I purchased the warmest jacket an outfitters had. 800 fill, down, puffy. I walked in and asked ‘I want a jacket that will keep me warm when I walk out of my door wearing a light t-shirt’ and lo, this is what I acquired.

But it still leaves me unable to cope when I lose that jacket.

I have warmer long sleeved shirts. Those have been… somewhat tolerable.

Sweaters. I can’t.

Put a sweater on me, over something else, I’m likely to spend the next few hours shrugging constantly. I look like I have some sort of tourettes.

So I finally broke down and asked twitter: how do you handle this?

A lot of really interesting articles on base layers, how to layer, and so forth came back. Most of it required me to do things I didn’t want to do.

But a few people directed me towards a promising nugget of information: thin, light undershirts that trapped body-heat, wicked away moisture, and were really comfortable. And like most of the perfect solutions in life, they cost.

Three avenues existed: artificial fabrics, wool, or silk. Each of these would be light, and so not bunch up underneath the shirt of my choice (ah, choice). And they existed in short sleeve versions.

The idea of warmth, short sleeves, and no bunching had me interested.

With some gift cards in hand, and some left over money in an Amazon gift account, I’ve done some purchasing and am testing base layer shirts to see if I can get away with the dream of getting a short sleeved warm solution to drafty, cold houses. The first was a medium silk base layer, short sleeve, from Land’s End. At $50 not something I’d ever get myself on a whim, but I used the gift card.

A medium silk base layer arrived this week. It sat out in the 30 degree cold for a couple hours before coming in. I was impressed by the fact that it warmed up to my hand’s touch in a split second. Of course, silk feels luxurious to the touch, if… somewhat sheer. I’m worried about the durability of this thing.

But experiments get knowledge.

The medium is a bit small for me (I need to lose about 15 pounds for it to be comfortable fully) to wear by itself, but as a base layer works pretty well. I have a large neck and shoulders, so it’s a bit close to the neck, something I hate in shirts normally. But the silk is so soft that when it presses against my neck I don’t gag (which is what happens with 90% of crew neck material that pushes close to my neck). So it’s a bit tight, but still comfortable.

Inside the house, with a simple polo or normal t-shirt over it, I felt cool and comfortable. Not toasty warm, but always cool. Drafts didn’t hit me in the core, though I noticed them on my arms.

In 29 degree weather I pulled on a polo and my leather jacket and went out for a walk. Normally a polo and my leather jacket is too chilly for me, I opt for the down ski jacket.

But again, I felt cooled instead of frozen (my face and arms were able to let me know that there was a huge difference, as they were biting cold). With some gloves added to the mix and a fleece balaclava I was actually comfortable. Also, no sweatiness building up like in the heavy down full jacket with a shirt where I would overheat. The silk seemed to regulate.

It also didn’t need washed as soon. As a test (TMI?) I wore it three days straight, and after my morning shower found it passed the sniff test just from airing out over night. Day four did not pass that test. I normally wear out an undershirt in just one day. So 3X the usability despite being used for hiking around town. Good to know.

It let me feel quite unencumbered to just toss a leather jacket over a polo. And with a silk shirt under the polo, it didn’t feel like I was wearing anything but the polo. The polo slides right over the silk. No bunching. No shifting around.

I’ve ordered a large silk shirt, instead of medium, with another gift card, to see what a difference that makes (more room around the neck would be welcome). I’m tentatively impressed, but still testing. It’s early days, but I’m cautiously optimistic I’ve found an ally in my fight against shivering.

One thing I won’t be able to do is wear just the silk shirt. Can’t really pull that off. But man, it packs so light, if I ever do lose that 15 pounds, I can see a way toward packing light with a bunch of these shirts that could reduce travel stress.

What also intrigues me about these base layers (silk, wool, synthetics) is that they offer summer comfort as well! By wicking sweat away in the summer, they keep one dry and less stinky, as well as cool and comfortable. If this is true, then I may have a new tool in my step toward simplifying my wardrobe, being comfortable in a wide range of temperatures, and finding a basic uniform that I can save up for, buy similar versions of, and deploy (instead of the years of cobbled together random outfits I own). If these base layers allow me to overheat more gracefully, they will also allow me to wear a sport coat or leather jacket as a style item during variable weather.

The next test: I’ve ordered a couple of Merino Wool shirts using an Amazon gift balance from affiliate link clicks I’ve been keeping around with an eye toward a birthday treat. Wool is supposed to be even warmer than silk, and Icebreaker has something of a cult following. I’m going to test them.

I do have a wool driver’s cap (gray) that I’ve come to find surprisingly helpful in cold air, and yet doesn’t cause my scalp to sweat when I continued wearing it in the winter, so I’m, again, optimistic.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Launching Mitigated Futures for general sale, and much more!

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:50:59 GMT

It’s my birthday! And today, the eBook edition of Mitigated Futures goes on sale!

You can buy it:

-Directly from me using Gumroad
-For the Amazon Kindle
-For the Barnes & Noble Nook

It is being processed at B&N, Kobo, and iBooks right now, but still not quite yet live. I’ll updated the links here, and at the book’s page when I see them go live.

The first print run of the limited edition hardcover had a small error, each page was titled with the first story’s title. I redid the print run, but I have 13 copies of that run still left that I’m putting on sale to try and recoup some of the money. If you’re interested in a hard copy, I’m offering them at a ‘name your price’ sale via this link here.

Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

This great collection, with custom art inside, launched via Kickstarter, has been a great success. I’m grateful to everyone who backed early copies. And the hardcovers are a total favorite. The cover by Jenn Reese was incredible, and really complements the whole collection.

In fact, I was so taken with it, I asked Jenn if we could work to create an all new cover for the previous short story collection of mine, Tides From the New Worlds. She did, and it’s again, fantastic:

I’ve uploaded the new version of the eBook to all the various eBook outlets that Tides is up at. But I’ve decided to have a little fun to celebrate the launch of Mitigated Futures. I’ve lowered the price of Tides to $2.99 over the last month, instead of $4.99.

And today, I’m debuting a little bit of social goosing. It may backfire, it may be a silly move. But I thought I would try it.

There’s a service around that I’ve seen used once or twice and been intrigued by. It’s called Pay With a Tweet.

So if $2.99 isn’t your speed, I’m offering Tides From the New Worlds up for the price of a tweet to celebrate the launch of Mitigated Futures and to showcase and highlight the new, awesome cover it has.

You can log in, and send a tweet or Facebook post about this, and get the collection for free. You can change the suggested text I have put in to say anything you want, by the way.

So… $2.99, or a tweet. Your call! I’m just very excited about both these collections, and am trying to raise their profile again.

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Looking back, looking forward

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 18:45:13 GMT

In some ways, my massive retrospective is the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago called How I Used Kickstarter to Reboot a Book Series, My Career, and Maybe My Life, where I talked about how funding, writing, and delivering The Apocalypse Ocean dominated most of 2012, and in a very good way.

But, it’s New Year’s Eve, and my birthday is January 2nd, so for me this time of year is always very reflective as the year ends and my age officially bumps up a notch. So here is some reflection about the year.

Actual writing of words

The core part of my year, I actually wrote a lot this year. In fact, I sort of dedicated myself to experimenting with ways to achieve more work. Using the ideas explored in the blog entry Productivity in Bursts and Work Habits I was able to train myself to write more words.

Productivity isn’t the most important thing in the world. I could rush myself faster than I was capable. I view writing as training. Some people can keep good form and run faster on the track than I could when I ran, because they’d been practicing. Some would be able to run fast right off the bat. Some trained themselves up. Some were sprinters and some were marathon runners. Some were naturally faster than others, some had taught themselves to be faster. Some were weekenders, some were walkers. I spent this year trying to train myself up faster, but without losing my form or burning myself out.

I wrote two novellas, three short stories, and co-wrote a short story with David Klecha, though he did most of the heavy lifting.

I began the year revising a novel for younger readers called The Star Tree, redrafting the opening third and writing four new chapters, as well as going through the whole book with an eye toward making it stronger.

I wrote The Apocalypse Ocean, the 4th book in my Xenowealth series.

I wrote The Trove, another book for younger readers.

I began work on Hurricane Fever, which follows in the same vein as Arctic Rising. Unusually for me, I decided to spend a whole month (November) outlining the hell out of this, and have a 16,000 word outline, as well as 6,000 words written so far. I’ll be honest, I was hoping to get a very, very rough first draft done by today (or at least a 30,000 word chunk), as I had the outline in hand. But due to not getting some checks I’d hoped for, I had to spend December hustling freelance gigs pretty hard as I ran out of money in November, so I wasn’t able to focus on fiction like I had from January through October. But 22,000 words of work on this book in two months isn’t shabby. And by having an outline in hand, I’m expecting the writing ahead on Hurricane Fever to be quick, as I’ve puzzled through a lot of stuff that usually then hangs me up in the draft process. Plus, I’ve been researching and filing away tidbits for this book for a year and a half now, so I’m ready to be writing it.

All in all, this is the most productive I’ve ever been in my life (just shy of 200,000 words of new fiction), and it’s thanks partially to making more money off fiction and being able to focus on just that, and to the burst methods I was blogging about. I didn’t exhaust myself, and I did this despite a) a month of traveling for the release of Arctic Rising and b) a month of vertigo that made looking at a screen impossible and c) December freelancing.

Were I to maneuver myself into a similar high writing income situation as I did for 2012 down the road, I know I’m capable of blowing previous years out of the water.

Stuff that was published this year

Arctic Rising, my near future eco-thriller, came out. Good reviews, including a very nice one on NPR, rocketed this one up to graze the Bookscan extended bestseller list. The gamble when my editor and I mutually decided to go in a new direction seems to have been a good one. This book sold out two printings and when into a third. It was assigned reading to all incoming freshman at my local university. I did a small book tour to promote it, and promptly got horrifically sick before getting to the East Coast and spent two days on C.C. Finlay and Rae Carson’s couch, which was as close as I got to the airport before fever hit.

As Arctic Rising dropped in February, a lot of people are already thinking of it as a late 2011 book, which saddens me. But the paperback just came out, and I’m hoping this gives it a second round of fresh life, as the first round was pretty awesome.

Arctic Rising is also the first novel of mine to get some interest from Hollywood, though nothing has firmed up to announceable levels yet (publishing, everything is slooowwww, until it’s hyper fast). It was nice to be spending a couple months forwarding inquiries to my agent, though.

I love the book, I’m grateful it’s selling on a new level. It means I smile whenever I get the occasional ‘you’re a libtard hippy who believes in the global conspiracy of global warming’ sort of email rage that the book engenders.

The Apocalypse Ocean launched to backers in the middle of the year, and print copies got mailed out later in the year. At my store, there are still some limited editions available. The eBook is out for all the platforms and selling (as I write this, it’s in the top 100 of Amazon’s Space Opera books, which it has popped onto right when I first pushed it live, and then slowly fell off of, then popped back onto thanks to some linkage and reviews, so thanks!).

Since it really launched to the general public a couple of weeks ago, reviews and word of mouth is only just now gearing up, so I’m not really sure what the impact of this one was. Hopefully fans of Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose find it a worthy addition to the series. Enough so that I can entertain doing the 5th book to wrap the series up.

I also put together a new short story collection, Mitigated Futures, for Kickstarter backers. It’s going to be available shortly for the general public, but all Kickstarter backers got the collection. I was thrilled with the amazing cover that Jenn Reese did for it, and the physical copy is just amazing to hold. Backers set out to make me write two new stories for it. One, A Game of Rats and Dragon was reprinted at Lightspeed Magazine (where it became my most commented story on evar!), and the other, The Rainy Season, ended up being a fun challenge to write as the concept and idea where dictated by an outside source. A new experience!

I also got to check off something from my bucket list. I’ve always wanted to edit an anthology. Joe Monti and I put together one for Lee and Low Books called Diverse Energies. This YA collection features lots of characters of color, writers of various backgrounds, and hopefully adds some new voices to the conversation. Certainly the reviews have been strong, and I’ve gotten some feedback from teachers who would love to use something like this in the classroom for younger readers who like genre and are starving for diversity. I’m very proud of having put together an anthology that could fill that gap.

Last, but not least, six short stories appeared this year:

-The Found Girl (w/ David Klecha) – Clarkesworld Magazine (September, 2012)
-The Rainy Season – Mitigated Futures (August, 2012)
-A Game of Rats and Dragon – Mitigated Futures (June, 2012)
- – reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine (November, 2012)
-Jungle Walkers (w/ David Klecha) – Armored (March, 2012)
-Press Enter to Execute – Fireside Magazine #1 (Spring, 2012)
-A Tinker of Warhoon – Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom (Spring, 2012)

Also, a short story I wrote with David Klecha, A Militant Peace, appeared in The Year’s Best Science Fiction #29. So that was cool.

Metatropolis: Cascadia, the audio anthology I was a part of with several other writers, won an Audie Award for Original Work.

All in all, a very, very good year.

Looking forward

Right now my plan is to finish writing Hurricane Fever while juggling the new extra freelance gig I have started, and watching how things go with The Apocalypse Ocean and Mitigated Futures, the two direct books I’ve just launched. I’m waiting on some potential news, stuff that I need to know is in hand before making plans going forward. So to be honest, other than writing Hurricane Fever, most of next year is sort of a blank to me.

Due to the fact I agreed to work this freelance job, I know this year won’t be as productive as 2012. But I’ve put enough hard work last year, I’m hoping that it pays off and puts me in a good position to pay off debt. I didn’t incur much in 2012, but I did have to use a credit card a few times here and there, and I wasn’t paying down debt incurred while ill in early 2009 and recovering in 2009/2010 that has been a weight on my shoulders still (I paid off a big chunk in 2010 and a lesser chunk in 2011). Working the extra freelance gig assures some financial stability and a period of building savings.

I’m planning on making sure my existing Xenowealth books get into more people’s hands in non-US territories where I have the rights floating around for them (more on that to come later in January) and I’m planning something pretty cool for the launch of Mitigated Futures (more on that to come in January).

I have a secret, small hope that I can write 200,000 words again. But I’m not going to kick myself if I don’t get it. I’m also hoping to do better at posting at this blog, however it does get sacrificed on the altar of that 200,000 words. I post in between writing, not before. I can see the loss in traffic when I drop off posting regularly, but I have to prioritize the fiction, of course.

And that is what I’m up to, moving forward.

As to what new books will be coming out when, when I know things for sure, I will of course post about it here!

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.

Email of the day: rage quitting me

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:28:13 GMT

You’re a good author, and I enjoy your works. I’m happy to spend money for your books.

But I’m sick to death of your soft-headed, left-liberal politics – especially when you act oh-so-superior to those of us who disagree with your one-government-fits-all, pseudo-scientific, anti-individual rights views.

You don’t understand the U.S. Constitution, you don’t understand much about history, and you certainly don’t understand much about actual science (vs. pseudoscientfic ‘global warming’ religious views).

You should understand that most folks whose views you’ve insulted wouldn’t keep buying your books (though I’ll avoid the ‘global warming’ nonsense); they’d just refuse to spend their money with you. I’m a bit different, in that I try to realize you’re probably a product of the US public school system, and have been brainwashed with left-liberal propaganda all your life, and separate your art (except for the ‘global warming’ nonsense’) from your views.

It’s not smart to insult actual and potential readers, especially when one sings for his supper and has undergone all the trials and tribulations you’ve detailed. Maybe some day you’ll realize this; in the meantime, I am no longer going to subscribe to your syndication feed, and so I might miss out on future works of yours which I’d like to purchase from you.

But that’s how it is – I’m not going to be lectured to by someone with whom I’ve spent my hard-earned money. And it’s all because of your pseudo-intellectual arrogance.

Next time I see a six year old shot in the back eleven times I’ll think of you fondly. Good bye. (for the blog: see, that’s where I actually do ‘act superior.’ I mean, if I’m being typecast, let’s have some fun!).

If you really are a dedicated follower, you’d know I didn’t grow up in the US or attend much school in the US. I’m only liberal because you think I am, I tend to score right of center on all political makeup quizzes (and I’d be considered right of center by most of the European politics).

Also: Please don’t ever email me again, you have been added to my kill filter along with those people who tell me the same thing, only say (let’s cross out say and put in, add for this, as I’m copy editing myself) that they’re unfollowing me because I buy into multiculturalism and have the affront to force black main characters on them because of PC brainwashed liberalism and then go on to explain to me why black people would never make it to space because they’re stupid. (PS, since the day I started publishing I’ve been getting one of those every other month or so from fans of these same common beliefs, so I’m actually really inured to this passive aggressive ‘I’ll never buy your books again style of email, it’s fairly unoriginal).

Good bye, good riddance.

(And this last paragraph is for the blog: those of you who stand on the other side of the debate but still read the links and think I’m at least thought provoking, thank you for your time and know that I don’t assume you’re all like this dude. But he’s representative of a trickle of emails I’ve gotten since posting the article ‘Rice‘ on Friday).

Mirrored from Tobias Buckell Online.