Author: Laurel L. Russwurm

is a self publishing novelist and photographer.

Comment on Finding a Digital Public Domain Book by Indi

Oh, I totally forgot to mention – if you’re looking for a quality EPUB reader, one of the better options is one built into a browser. Everybody has a browser, after all, and the quality of HTML5/CSS3/SVG1.1 support is usually top-notch… *MUCH* better than in your average standalone EPUB reader. In fact, even the better standalone EPUB readers basically use browsers internally. (Calibre, for example, doesn’t use FBReader, it uses its own EPUB viewer that’s based on WebKit (ie, basically Chromium/Chrome)).

Firefox has Lucifox, and Chromium/Chrome has Readium. Both are plenty good enough for reading, and both even offer limited library management if you want it (if you want full library management, there’s always Calibre). Both are free software – Lucifox is GPL3, Readium is BSD-licenced. The interesting thing about Readium is that it’s actually the reference implementation used by the IDPF (the people who write the EPUB specification) to show full EPUB 3 support.

Comment on Finding a Digital Public Domain Book by Indi

I’m so pleased to see Gutenberg Canada getting a mention. It’s way smaller than Gutenberg Project actual, and in *DIRE* need of cleanup and organization (and it’s ugly as sin to look at), but it has things that are simply not available on Gutenberg actual because that site uses US copyright law… which is much nastier than Canadian copyright law. Gutenberg Canada actually has stuff that wouldn’t be allowed on Gutenberg actual, plus a lot of specifically Canadian stuff.

The biggest complaint I have about most public domain ebooks is that they’re of such poor quality. Both the Gutenberg Project and Gutenberg Canada insist on plain text versions… which is fine for simple books, but pretty much pointless for texts with tables, diagrams, figures, or equations. And both focus on simply reproducing the text, with no concern whatsoever for the semantics (for example, they mark all italics up with [i] (or worse, just uppercase), whether they’re just italics for display purposes or for actual emphasis), which makes them hard to use for people who have accessibility issues (people who need to use a screen reader, for example).

For years, one of my hobbies has been taking public domain works and making *quality* ebooks out of them – and by quality I don’t just mean they look good (I try to make them look as much like the originals as practical), I mean they are coded with semantic markup technologies, so they are accessible even to readers who can’t read plain text without assistance. I actually have *dozens* of books done, but the vast majority are still under copyright. (Originally I just did this for myself, to create nice digital editions for physical books I own that are falling apart.) One of my resolutions this year was to get a little more organized about that, to focus on public domain texts, and to actually publish them online for others to use too, so I actually put together a simple site listing them at http://indi.frih.net/books/ – there are only three books there so far (though I’ll probably finish Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” this week), but as I go through all my old stuff, pick out the public domain works, and update them, it should expand quite a bit.

Of course, every ebook I make is released back into the public domain – DRM-free – even including anything I added (like cover images, for example).

The focus is on philosophical and scientific texts, and maybe I’ll do some science fiction and mystery works, too… basically anything that catches my fancy, I suppose (it is a hobby after all). I suppose they’re rather niche interests, but they’re my interests, so, so it goes. But if there’s anything you’re really hankering for – or anything you know someone else is really hankering for – feel free to mention it to me; I might put it on the list. (I would suppose the easiest way for you to get in touch with me is via Status.Net/GNU Social – I’m @indi on quitter.se – but there’s also a contact page on the site that I’m probably going to add a contact/request form to… someday.)

Je Suis Charlie – Intolerence

I Understand Kaveh Mousavi is being as fair as anyone in his situation can be when he writes: Muslim reformists should not deceive themselves into thinking that this extremism is only a tiny minority of “fake” Muslims that is being exaggerated by the hostile colonialists media. While extremists such as these shooters indeed are a […]

Happy Birthday Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov by Rowena Morrill

Isaac Asimov
born  Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
(circa January 2, 1920 — April 6, 1992)
painting by Rowena Morrill

[reblogged from   visual laurel:
Happy Birthday Isaac Asimov]

I may be a little late here, but if memory serves, although January 2nd would have been  Isaac Asimov’s birth date of record, it seems to me he told some tale about the actual records being confused due to his family’s emigration from Russia.  Whatever else, Asimov was always interesting.

Isaac Asimov was a hugely important influence for me.   I loved his books when I first stumbled on “Foundation” in my high school library; Ike took me by the hand and helped me find my way through the worlds of science fiction.

As a reader I loved his bare bones accessible writing style.  Devoid of superfluous descriptive padding, his plots were crisp and he wrote just what he needed to bring the story to life.

The good Dr. Asimov’s exploration of robotics throughout his powerful stories was breathtaking, but his non-fiction was excellent, too, because he was brilliant at explaining things so that anyone could understand.  (I rather think Malcolm Gladwell is like Asimov without the fiction.)  And I have to say, between Asimov’s stories and non-fiction alike, I learned more science from him than I did from any teacher I ever had in school.   My grade nine physics teacher was a dead loss at getting through to me; and I’m certain the only reason I passed was because he didn’t want to have to try again.

Much as I loved science fiction, as a writer, I’ve never dared write in this genre because I’ve always felt I lacked the requisite grounding in science,  and always thought the only SF I’d want to write would be hard science fiction.  (That may change in future.)  When I and my friend, Canadian Trekkies Association co-founder Susan Schmidt, published our very first Star Trek and science fiction Fanzine Canektion in the 1970’s, she tackled the science fiction writing while I handled reviews, art and design.  I actually mailed a copy off to the good doctor, and was gobsmacked to receive a personal thank you note on a postcard (with a wonderful “Very impressive looking” quote).  One of my greatest regrets was losing that postcard at my very first science fiction convention.

I was quite taken with the glimpses of Isaac Asimov the person through the humour in his Hugo Winners introductions.  Yet the only book he wrote that was pretty nearly unreadable was the first volume of his autobiography, “In Memory Yet Green,”   I paid big bucks for the hardcover version, but after the agony of struggling through it, I knew nothing would ever entice me to read it again so I gave it away.  Fortunately he took a better crack at it in later life with “I, Asimov”

One of the best things about Asimov’s writing is that he wrote characters who were human beings.  Better yet, it didn’t matter whether they were men, women or robots. The strong and interesting women characters that Asimov wrote — women like Dr. Susan Calvin, Edith Fellowes and Bayta Darell — certainly made a positive impression on me as a young woman.   This was pretty radical for his time, especially when you consider that even today some male authors have difficulty writing plausible female characters.   Asimov wrote women who existed in their own right; they weren’t just tossed in to be a damsel in distress, a femme fatale or love interest. They were real people.  I’ve often been told my own characters live and breathe, and I think this is in no small part due to his example; he showed me how.

I never tire of Asimov’s stories, having read some over and over again, which is why I am saddened by the absence of his work on the shelves of public libraries today.  This state of affairs means most of today’s young people will not have the opportunity to stumble across his books the way I did, simply because they aren’t there.

I expect this probably has as much to do with copyright as much as anything.  Keep his work locked down tight so as to create an artificial scarcity that will drive the retail price up… a strategy I suspect the great man would not himself have approved.   Such market fiddling tends to result in dissipation of a hard won reputation.

The movie version of “I, Robot” was quite a disappointment because the only thing the film makers used of his brilliant book was Asimov’s distinctive title.  All I can say is that I am happy Hollywood has kept its fingers off most of his other works.  “I, Robot” wasn’t a terrible film, Will Smith is always a joy; it did have a reasonable story, nice special effects and all… actually I might even have liked it if they hadn’t squandered Asimov’s iconic title on a story that bore no resemblance to his seminal collection of robot short stories.  And of course the worst thing is that it means that there is now little or no chance of making a proper movie from the book.   It would actually have been best as a series of films (or perhaps a mini series) to do the work justice.  And that is just too bad.

Isaac Asimov touched my life in many positive ways, and he certainly influenced my decision to become a writer.   I just wish I could have thanked him in person.

Image Credit
“Isaac Asimov on Throne” by Rowena Morrill –en:Image:AsimovOnThrone.png, uploaded to en:Wikipedia by en:user:Xiong 14:06, 2 April 2005. Via Wikimedia Commons under the:

GNU Free Documentation License Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Front-Cover Texts, no Back-Cover Texts and with Invariant Sections as indicated. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.”

Happy 2015

All the planning in the world can’t prevent the unexpected from happening, and sometimes the unexpected throws up a detour. . . or several. While some good things have happened, I’ve had to face some incredibly difficult challenges in 2014. As a result, this past year has felt as though I’ve been running on a treadmill… no matter how fast I ran, I never seemed to get anywhere.

But in the immortal words of Scarlett O’Hara,

“Tomorrow is another day.”

And the beginning of a new year. 🙂

Although I did accomplish some of the things I set out to do, I have not managed to reach many of the goals I set out for myself. Still, it has certainly been a learning experience.

One thing I can promise you is that 2015 will finally see the publication of “The Girl In The Blue Flame Cafe.”   With luck, Libreleft Books will also manage to publish a non-fiction title or two.   Fingers crossed (and nose to the grindstone.)

Wishing you all the best in 2015,

Regards,
Laurel-Sig

happy new year 2015_1024

32 Seconds ~ an indie novel

for your consideration: J.K. Pitcairn’s “32 Seconds”

  .   .   .   To the average onlooker, the city of Los Angeles represents glitz, glamour, and the celebrity lifestyle. But to seventeen-year-old Julie Jones, the city is a vast host of problems she’s longing to get away from. The latest? An unfortunate disagreement with her ex-boyfriend Mark—one that could land her in some serious hot water.

So rather than face the troubles that torment her, Julie decides to run away from her old life and start fresh somewhere new. But her parents aren’t on board with the plan, and she soon finds her bank accounts frozen and her wallet empty.

With just seventy-five dollars and a full tank of gas, the troubled teen is far too stubborn to turn around and head home. So what’s a girl to do?

What Julie doesn’t know is that her travels are about to take her somewhere unexpected—a place where she’ll be forced to come face to face with the ghosts of her past in order to secure her future.

A tale of redemption, hope, and freedom lost and found, 32 Seconds is a thought-provoking exploration into the human spirit and the nature of forgiveness.

Available on Amazon

J.K. Pitcairn’s Random Fun Facts:
1) To trigger my inspiration, I binge on Netflix. I pick shows from any genre, and study the dialog and the plot. I also watch video game walkthroughs on YouTube. It’s a great help to develop my characters.
2) I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a bad case of writer’s block. Plotting helps eliminate that issue. 
3) My biggest pet peeves: misspellings, grammatical errors, and inconsistent formatting. 
4) Julie Jones has named her car “Bubble”, and when she swears, she says things like “shizzle”, “shizzle nizzle” or “crapola in a peanut butter jar”.
5) The original title for the first draft of the story, before it became 32 Seconds, was Death by Chocolate. 
6) Julie Jones loves In&Out burgers, and strawberry milkshakes. 
7) Julie is also a surfer. Her favorite beach is the one in Oceanside, CA. 
8) I’m a cat lover. I have four cats, and they all distract me from writing by taking turns and lying on top of my laptop.

About the Author:
Johanna K. Pitcairn has dreamed of becoming a writer since childhood–authoring her first novel at the age of nine, and countless poems, stories, and screenplays by the age of seventeen. Later, rather than pursuing a career as a director and screenwriter, she decided to go to law school, driven by her father’s opinion that “writing does not pay the bills.”
Ten years later, she moved to New York City, which inspired her to go back to the excitement, wonder, and constant change of being a writer. Pitcairn is a huge fan of psychological-thriller novels and movies, and delves into her hopes, fears, friends, enemies, and everything in between in her own writing.
Contact the Author:


So what do you think? This is my first book blast and I must apologize for being late to the party. I was supposed to post this before December 28th but only just managed it now, on December 30th, 2015.

If Johanna K. Pitcairn’s new novel “32 Seconds” appeals to you, or if you know someone who might like it, check it out … you’ll be helping support an Independent Author.

Regards,
Laurel

Credits: all images and text in this guest post were provided by b00kr3vi3w tours. Since they are not mine and I’ve not been told otherwise, I must assume everything defaults to copyright all rights reserved.

…and so it ends

my final NaNoWriMo wordcount

my grandparents weddingI’ve never written anything in the neighborhood of ten thousand words in a single day before.  And yet that was the incredible feat I managed to accomplish on November 30th.

But it still wasn’t enough.

in the beginning
This year I had decided that I was going to finish NaNoWriMo 2014 with 50k. That’s what the folks at NaNoWriMo call a “win.”

And I very nearly did. But it seems the Flying Spaghetti Monster really had it in for me this time.

I knew going in that I wasn’t ready, a disadvantage from the start.  And I didn’t actually decide what it was that I was going to write until the first of November. In the end, I decided that the best course of action would be to revisit last year’s “Unregrettable” project.

This book was inspired by my grandmother, who emigrated to Canada all alone in 1924.  I never knew my grandmother; but I vaguely knew there was a story that she had been sent overseas to get her away her from an unsuitable young man. The idea for the book first came to mind when I was digitally cleaning up a scan of my grandmother’s passport photo. And of course, I’m a novelist, not a historian or a biographer, so one of my earliest decisions was to have my character settle in the city of Kitchener instead of the rural Carlsruhe area to make it crystal clear this would be a work of fiction.

When I began writing it for last year’s NaNoWriMo, I found myself falling into the rabbit hole of research.  I started out with the idea that I knew something about the time period in which this book is set, but the research I began doing last November quickly disabused me of this notion.   The more I found out about the period, the bigger the project got, and I came to the realization that this story really needed to be more than a single novel. The beginning in the Weimar Republic would need at least a whole novel.   And the research just kept getting more and more interesting.

So the plan this year was to turn Margarethe’s backstory — the events leading up to her emigration — into the first novel.   Kind of like a prequel, or perhaps the first book of a trilogy. Of course I didn’t have an outline to start with, just some of the research I’d done last year, so although I knew some of the scenes I could write without one, I did this while working on the outline.  [One things I have learned is that I can write anything, so long as I have an outline.]  But it was slow going.

I can see clearly now
my new glassesI’ve been run off my feet a lot this year, so even though I have needed glasses for quite a while, I had been procrastinating about getting new ones.   Another big part of the problem was a reluctance to go back to my former optometrist.  But the incessant squinting at computer screens at the beginning of NaNoWriMo was driving me mad, so when someone told me about a new optometrist he liked, I sacrificed some valuable writing time to get my eyes tested and pick out some new glasses,.  The time away from writing was well worth it since it’s brilliant being able to see what I’m typing again.

Let It Snowsnow in November
Snow, snow and more snow. In the old days, the era before Climate Change, we might have seen some snow in November. But it would be just a light dusting. A little crunching under your feet, but nothing requiring a shovel. But those days are gone. This year we had snow. We got days where shoveling once a day didn’t cut it. Yay. Of course, *now* it’s all been washed away again, likely to have a green Christmas…

The Leak
One of the big things I’ve had to deal with has been unscheduled renovations. One morning there was water leaking through the plaster ceiling into my front hallway. The first plumber convinced me (because I so wanted to believe him and get back to writing) that the leaking was side splash from the shower curtain not being quite closed. And it stopped– for a while.  *sigh*

But then it started again.  The good plumber said they would have to rip a hole in my ceiling to find the leak. And so they did. And wasn’t that a job! And apparently the leak(s) had been ongoing for a while, since I don’t get along with mold, I enlisted an awesome restoration contractor to handle the clean-up and resultant renovation.  Which meant not just taking down the ceiling, but opening up walls.  I have been happy with the professionalism and skill of my contractors, but it would have been much better for my NaNoWriMo project if it had happened in any other month.

Book LaunchBook Launch
Another writer I know was launching his debut novel, so I took a wee break to attend his “Rocky Mountain Locust” book launch at the Jazz Room in the Huether. As it turns out, my hubby was coming down with a cold, so we didn’t stay long enough for the cake. I am pleased to have the book in hardcover, since it seems to be encumbered in DRM for the ebook format.

Anniversary
I tend to ignore our anniversary and my birthday because both happen during NanoWriMo.   This year we went out for a lovely anniversary dinner — which wasn’t.   The restaurant served me an inedible steak and assured me “they were all like that” so we left.  Peanut butter sandwiches… yay!   (Now that November is over I find I am still angry at the venue so I expect I will send out that letter of complaint I wrote during November.)

Research"People on Sunday" paddleboat
Of course pretty nearly everything I wrote was going to need research, because everything in my novel happens well before I was born, in a country I have never myself visited.

This period in Germany was actually a cultural golden age.  Not only is it a fascinating period of history, but there is a wealth of media available.  Many movies– some in the Public Domain! — from the Weimar Republic make it possible to get a real feel for the time and place.

For me as a movie buff, it is doubly interesting, because so many great movies were made there by movie pioneers like Frits Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.

Is “M” perhaps the first example of Film Noir?

Peter Lorre in M

the rabbit hole
with Irmgard KeunI was very much aware of the dangers involved in researching this book.  Because the reference material available isn’t limited to movies and textbooks, but novels, too.

Certainly the books of Irmgard Kuen are invaluable reference material.  Her own story would make a phenomenal book or movie, but for my purposes, I decided it would be a good idea to read some of her novels since she was the voice of the Weimar Republic’s “Neu Frau” generation.

I tried to buy one of her  eBooks, but it turns out the publisher’s DRM made it impossible to actually open it.   So I ended up ordering some of her books through local libraries.

I knew her novel Gilgi had been made into a movie, and so I looked around enough to try and find it, but alas, there don’t seem to be any copies left in existence.  Not surprising since her books were banned by the Nazis, but it’s too bad, particularly for me, because that’s the book that most closely dramatizes the world my Margarethe inhabits in “Unregrettable”

Still, I was careful not to go too far so I’d make it to 50k.

Teeth
Through my life I’ve had some horrific dental experiences, so I am even worse about visiting the dentist than most people.  Having missed a few regular checkups, naturally I got a toothache during November.

And my dentist tells me that if you go to the dentist when you’re in pain it’s already too late.

As it turned out, the diagnosis was even worse… three– count ’em three — teeth in a row with cavities, and one — or maybe all– would need root canals.  As it turned out, the one I thought was the worst and asked to have fixed first wasn’t the one causing the pain, so I had to go back in the afternoon to get an emergency root canal on the one that was causing the agony.  (If you’ve got a good dentist, always take his or her advice.)   In all my tooth woes probably ate up two days with non-writing… and trust me, it’s easier to write brilliant novels without a toothache.

birthday breakfast
oops
Even with all that, I might have made it. And technically I did make it because I did write more than 50,000 words in November. The problem is that I misplaced somewhere between seven and ten thousand of them. backups

The thing is, I knew about making backups.  Boy, did I know, having once lost the only copy of a script that had been green lighted for production and having to reconstruct the whole thing in a weekend.

Apparently I inadvertently deleted a huge chunk of the manuscript and cleverly saved over it (in all three places.) So now I know saving isn’t enough; versioning software is a great idea.  Next time.

So while I might technically have claimed a win, I didn’t have 50k in my manuscript to validate, and fudging that just would not have felt right. So I didn’t “win” NaNoWriMo this year. But I did get a lot accomplished, and I know that life happens, but I gave it my best shot anyway.

And that’s enough of a win for me. 🙂