Behind The Scenes

The best blackened chicken sandwich I have had in Tulsa was at a place which was called The Blue Rose cafe. It was on 34th and Peoria. (It was actually the place my wife and I went on our first date.)

It is closed down, but the current restaurant there seems to have much of the same menu. At least it has the blackened chicken sandwich. So go enjoy one at the Bru House.

While I first had the sandwich there, it is the same as the one served at the Eskimo Joe’s in Stillwater. If I’m passing close to Stillwater, I will go in for the sandwich.

Technorati Tags: Tulsa dining

There was a recent Pearls Before Swine comic (11/28/2007) that touched on blogging in general and how it related to writing. To paraphrase it, Rat thought Goat blogged because he was frustrated that he was not a good enough of a writer to get published.

I’ve struggled with trying to get published, which doesn’t mean I have a stack of rejection letters, just that I haven’t tried to get stuff published.

But, the kicker is that I have plenty of non-fiction publications from my academic career. And peer-review is brutal.

The other problem about research publications is that they invariably lead to trying to put 10 lbs of rice in a 6 lbs sack. I’m pretty sure I learned more about editing and page layout than I did about writing.

My natural writing style could be called rambling. After publishing enough research papers, my writing style is terse. I also tend to let the reader do some mental jumps to get points.

So as I write science fiction stories, I struggle with length. But I’ve come to realize that some of my stories are just right. For example, in Abduction, abduction, whaat’s your function?, I tried to write more, but I realized that for once I was happy with the dialog and adding anything else was fluff.

And I can clearly tell that both Batter Up and The Nanovampire have more to come.

Back to the title of this post, am I trying to get published or am I trying to write things which please me? I enjoy writing as a hobby. I also enjoy coding - most of the activity on Serialized Science Fiction has been writing perl scripts and CCS style sheets to present the stories.

But just as I don’t want to get paid for doing the web programming, I don’t want to get paid for the writing. And I don’t want to subject myself to whether or not some independent body thinks I am an author or not. (Which doesn’t absolve me from editing the stories…)

Technorati Tags: Science Fiction writing

We were out shopping tonight and were going to buy an entertainment center. Well, I was hungry, the store closed at 7:30 and I realized that we had to eat first because the box would be in the back of the truck. We were over at 41st and Sheridan, so my wife suggested we go to Panera Bread. We had just been there, but I knew it was fast.

As we pulled in, I noticed the sign for what I thought was Chinese food -
Desiwok - Indian and Asian Cuisine - Tulsa, Oklahoma. Note that the word ‘Indian’ was nowhere on the sign. I asked The Monster (my son) if he wanted to eat there or at Panera? Well we had just eaten at another Panera a couple of days ago (after an indoor soccer game) and we have a tradition of trying new Chinese places. So in we went.

As we entered, Stacy (my wife), started to wonder if it were Thai or Indian. MMM. Well, it had both Chinese and Indian entries. I wanted to try the Curry Chicken, but I really like the pale yellow one with coconut. They said they had a brown curry. So, I went with the Chicken Vindaloo - and I took it medium hot.

My son went with Sweet and Sour Chicken - my wife had already eaten. We started to wonder when they asked how hot he wanted it. We said mild.

By the way, the sign on the way out said it was Tandoorian style.

The rice ended up being Cumin and not the sticky steamed rice he likes. And the Sweet and Sour chicken looked glazed. Normally a sign that it is bad. He tried the rice, with and without Soy sauce. He didn’t like it.

My wife took him next door to get a bagel. I ended up eating all of mine. I can normally handle spiced food, but if that was medium, I don’t want to try hot without more Nan.

I tried a piece of pineapple from his dish - the sauce was spiced, but good. I didn’t want to try the meat.

When they came back, I got my wife to try the dish and she sat there picking at it until I left. She said it was better than it looked.

Overall, I will be going back at lunch time during the week. My wife said that if we didn’t have The Monster with us, she would be willing to dine with me if I was hungry for it.

The place is very casual - you get your own drinks for example.

Technorati Tags: Tulsa dining

One of the themes I see in vampire fiction is the stalwart hero who has to come to grips with the blood lust once they get infected. I.e., they fight against the cannabalistic prejudice in our society. Did I just imply cannibalism is a good thing? ;>

After all, if the hero enjoys killing and feasting on his fellow humans, well, he isn’t very much of a hero, is he?

Or consider the vampire who struggles to regain his humanity - Nick Night and to a lesser extent Blade. While Blade accepts his state, he still, like Nick, sucks on a blood bag. Consuming donated blood from a bank is so much more elegant.

With The Nanovampire and also Batter Up, I wanted to explore humans who didn’t have the same moralistic views as most of society. Logan, and Vaughn Ryan, have different reasons for not caring about killing, but when they get turned into their versions of vampires, well, they don’t hunger at all.

Logan doesn’t want to change his lifestyle and Vaughn can’t go back to being normal. With Logan, the decision is firm, but with Vaughn, his future is much less certain.

Technorati Tags: Science Fiction vampire

I learned enough about style sheets to update the stories.

I also remembered that my visual layout skills leave a bit to be desired. If I stay with simple schemes, I’m okay. I.e., check out Cached copy of USC. I’m pretty happy with how that came out. It didn’t have a style sheet, which would have really made things easy, but I had some nice perl scripts to keep it simple and readily viewable on most browsers.

Oh yeah, and I learned that what is easy for me to maintain, i.e., flat files and scripts, is a major pain for anyone else. ;>

So I went with a simple terminal look and feel. I’m sure I’ll change it by tonight - I might be better going for the look of paper. I wanted the green on black to invoke the image of reading the stories on usenet and a vt100 terminal.

But I still want to snaze up the page titles, possibly in a separate box. I’d like the page controls to be a little bit more modern and include links to the main story page and this blog. (That last part I can easily tweak with my script and html.)

And I want to add left and right boxes. I want to be able to drop advertising links into these. I don’t know that I ever expect to get advertising, but that is a design goal I’ve had in mind from the start.

PS: A very simple resource for understanding style sheets is at Dave Raggett’s Introduction to CSS.

I wrote a perl script to take a raw text file and convert it to a story with pages which are 66 lines each.

I’d link the script in here, but if it is a .pl, browsers barf. Okay, here it is story.pl. Very scary and needs to be made safe.

You can check out my first effort, which produces a very plain styled web page, at Batter Up. It took a couple of hours to tweak this the way I wanted it, it still needs some factoring and style, but once I got it up and running, I was able to suck in a second story in about 5 minutes. And we have Abduction, abduction, whaat’s your function?

Time for bed, but the cat just jumped up on my lap…

I like to write. I just don’t keep at it.

I tried collecting some of my stuff over at Serialized Science Fiction, which is my work blog. I just didn’t follow up on it.

So, I’m going to try again here.

The intent is to keep a story, the set of changes that go on with it, the behind the scenes narration of the changes, and so on.

I’m going to follow the model that Howard Tayler has over at Schlock Mercenary. I.e., the stories will be static content and the commentary will be dynamic.