Writing

The Magic Battery: Now on Smashwords!

This entry was posted in My writing Personal Writing and tagged fantasy fiction magic battery writing on by

My novel The Magic Battery is now available as an e-book on Smashwords. As an expression of thanks for reading my blog, I’m offering it for $1.99, instead of the usual $2.99, with the coupon code RW83R through the end of June.

This is a novel for fans of thoughtful historical fantasy. It presents an alternate Germany where magic works, and where the authorities allow only Christian men to practice it. Thomas Lorenz discovers a way to store magic spells in gadgets that people can buy or rent, putting magic in the hands of anyone with a little money. The conflict that develops parallels the effects of the real-life innovations of Luther, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and others.

In sixteenth-century Saxony, magic is a trade. Mages draw power from the World Behind, but they don’t understand it. Thomas knows that magic needs to be scientific, that it follows mathematical laws. He draws inspiration from his master Albrecht Ritter, who knows nothing is ever “good enough,” his teacher Johan Brandt, who is hiding an infamous past, and later his wife Frieda, who sees the prospect of a more enlightened future. He faces the persistent opposition of Heinrich Gottesmann, a fanatical lawyer and witch hunter. He learns that there is more at stake than just a new way of making lamps.

I’ve been to some of the places used in the book: Heidelberg, Wernigerode, Quedlinburg, Hildesheim. I’ve engaged in considerable historical research to get the period right. Apart from the magical elements, the setting is as close to the historical Germany of the 1540s as I could make it. None of the characters hold 21st-century ideas; that would be absurd. However, Thomas and especially Frieda see beyond their time.

Links, reviews, and shares will help to get the word out. You can link to the Smashwords page or to my page on this site.

What writers can do 1

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing on by

These are dire times. Police have killed George Floyd and David McAtee. Donald Trump had people tear-gassed so he could take a walk. He is threatening illegal military deployments and shooting in the United States. Rioters are destroying property and assaulting people. Journalists have been the target of both police and mobs.

I’ve felt helpless, even though I’m not close to the locations of violence and am relatively safe personally. But we’re seeing the country tear itself apart by a thug president and thugs (both with and without badges) in the streets. One thing I can do, for whoever may notice, is remind the people in my profession that we can make a difference. We can speak out, forcefully and responsibly.

We should speak out for principles, not factions. Telling some group of people how horrible they are may feel great, but it accomplishes nothing. Talk about what is right and wrong. Call attention to wrongdoing — brutality, bigotry, abuse of power. Name names. But don’t attack people for being black or white, male or female, registered to vote as Republican or Democratic.
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HTTP and HTTPS: A quick guide for Web writers

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged HTTP HTTPS SSL TLS on by

Every URL starts with a protocol, a name which identifies how it should be processed. The name is followed by “://”. On the Web, it’s almost always either HTTP or HTTPS. The protocol name is followed by the character sequence “://”, to the annoyance of people entering it on a phone or tablet. The browser may let you leave it out when typing, but it has to guess it for you. When you create a link in an HTML page, you always have to include the protocol, e.g., https://www.example.com.

The difference between the two is that HTTPS provides security and HTTP doesn’t. An HTTPS link uses the TLS (transport layer security) communication protocol, which often goes under the obsolete name of SSL. In common usage, SSL and TLS mean the same thing. It gives you three advantages over plain HTTP:

  1. It encrypts the data in transit in both directions. Anyone intercepting the data will find it effectively impossible to tell what information is being sent back and forth. They can, however, tell what domain you’re communicating with.
  2. It verifies the identity of the domain you’re getting data from. With an HTTP connection, someone in the middle (e.g., a public Wi-Fi hotspot) can impersonate the domain.
  3. It prevents alteration of data in transit. Only the holder of the TLS certificate can encrypt the data correctly. Any attempt to alter it will only turn it into gibberish.

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Podcasts vs. text blogs

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged podcasts writing on by

It probably won’t surprise you that I’m a fan of text blogs. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of you are too, since my target audience here is writers. There are some podcasts with excellent content, but I rarely have the patience for them. Music podcasts are an exception. If an essential part of the content is musical, words don’t do the job. A podcast that interviews interesting people has a justification, though transcripts mostly work fine. But if the podcaster is just going to talk about something, it’s rarely worth my time.

The top podcasts (at least according to this list, which mercifully starts with #1 instead of starting with #100 and making me scroll to the bottom) are a mix of news, interviews, and commentary. No doubt they include a lot of interesting material, but it’s so time-consuming!

Let’s look at a few of the reasons why text blogs are better than podcasts:
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How reporting goes wrong

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing and tagged science writing on by

When you read the news, too often you find distorted and misleading accounts of the facts. It’s not “fake news” in the sense of deliberate fabrication, but the result of writers not understanding the issue, wanting to make it more exciting, or repeating errors which others have made for the first two reasons. I’ve been guilty of repeating erroneous reporting myself,

A video by Aron Ra shows how this works in reporting on paleobiology. He talks about an article that claims 800,000 year old DNA from Homo antecessor has been found.

The source was a respectable one, and its claims weren’t obviously impossible. He found multiple articles on the Web making similar claims, but only one of them provided a link to the original article in Nature. That article makes no claims about finding DNA; what was found was dental enamel containing identifiable proteins. That’s newsworthy enough to scientists, but not the same thing. Nonetheless, the report of hominid DNA four-fifths of a million years old even made it into the New York Times. (I hope I’ve got it right on whether that species is a hominid or a hominin. I think any member of the genus Homo is both.)

Ra says, “They were comparing dental enamel proteomes. What reporter is even going to know what that means?” He checked with some experts to confirm that proteomes aren’t genetic material. “They’re more like a genetic by-product.” Aside from the esoteric nature of the discovery, why did so many sources get it wrong in the same way? One reason is that “editors want to embellish everything to make it sound more interesting. Don’t ever do that.”

It’s good advice, but sometimes we get it wrong anyway. Reporting involves writing about things you aren’t an expert on. Sometimes you have to rely one another person’s explanation. But we should try to avoid making errors just to juice up our stories, and we should let our readers know when we discover our errors.

Accents and dialects in writing

This entry was posted in Techniques Writing and tagged accent dialect writing on by

A lot of would-be authors don’t understand the difference between an accent and a dialect. An accent is a way of pronouncing words. A dialect is a way of choosing and arranging words which characterizes a subgroup of a language’s speakers. Writing in a dialect is legitimate in fiction or when quoting real people. Trying to write an accent is usually a mistake.
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WriterAccess blindsides writers

This entry was posted in Writing on by

Today I found out that WriterAccess has a new dashboard for its writers and has eliminated its forums. The only way I learned about it was by reading a message on a forum for another service I write for. Some people got an email about it. I didn’t, probably because I asked to be taken off their mailing list. The mail I had been getting consisted of promotions for webinars and such which were directed at clients, not writers. WriterAccess’s Byron White must have concluded that if writers weren’t interested in those, we couldn’t possibly want to be notified about a total redesign of the platform we use.

Update, July 14, 2020: Things haven’t turned out as badly as I feared. Either WA backed off from the 24-hour deadline for Solo orders, or they expressed themselves in a confusing way. I’ve been getting paid for my articles. There are still Casting Calls. Solo and Love List items have returned to the dashboard. On the negative side, the forums are truly gone, and I can’t disable Love List emails from clients I’m not interested in (i.e., low-paying ones). More than half of the problem was, ironically, bad writing and communication.

If there had been a link on the new dashboard to an explanation of the changes, it wouldn’t be so bad. But there’s no explanation beyond “Welcome to new talent portal! Please use the Feedback orange button to report any bugs, requests, or feedback for betterment. Thanks!” (And I don’t see an orange Feedback button.)
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Inaccurate headlines

This entry was posted in Commentary Writer ethics and tagged fake news New Hampshire news on by

Update:The Union Leader corrected the headline, possibly in response to my complaint. Kudos!

News websites want clicks to their articles. They’re what bring in advertising revenue. Too many of them mislead the reader or sensationalize the story for the sake of clicks. Sometimes they engage in outright falsehood. An example is an article on the website of the Manchester, NH Union Leader, which carries the false headline “Free staters continue to meet despite ban.”

The article is actually about the Free Keene organization, which has no connection with the Free State Project beyond being based in the same state. Most libertarians in New Hampshire regard Free Keene as a little crazy. Putting their health at risk to make a point isn’t very smart.
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COVID-19 and curve flattening for writers 1

This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing and tagged coronavirus COVID-19 mathematics pandemic statistics on by

When we write about issues related to COVID-19 and other major health risks, we carry a serious responsibility. Most of us aren’t medical professionals or specialists in biological sciences, but we have to get as much right as we can. Giving false reassurances and spreading panic are both harmful. Advising ineffective or dangerous preventive methods is still worse.

When we write for hire, we present our clients’ opinions, not necessarily our own, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. A pandemic is too serious to spin and make excuses about it. If a client wants you to give out inaccurate information, please decline the assignment.

But anyone can give that advice. I’d like to talk here about a couple of technical issues that writers need to understand. The projected spread of the disease is a matter of statistics. You’ve seen a lot of advice urging us to “flatten the curve.” What does this mean, and why do we want to flatten it? You’ve also seen that the number of cases is growing exponentially. That’s true, but most people don’t clearly understand what it means.
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The target=_blank security issue

This entry was posted in Tools Writing and tagged HTML Internet technology writing on by

There’s a little-known security risk built into the design of HTML. It concerns links that open in a new tab or window. You make it happen by specifying target="blank" in an anchor (a) element. For example:

<a href="something.example.com" target="_blank">

The trouble is that when you do it, you put the page containing that link at risk. For some bizarre reason, the designers of HTML decided that the destination page should gain access to the window.opener property of the source page. This gives the target page — the one run by someone else considerable control over your page. For instance, it can redirect your page to another URL.
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