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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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Computer stuffGeekeryOnline life

We’re off to see the server

One of the annoying things about being a (midlist) writer in this world we live in is that you have to take care of (or have to have taken care of for you) your “shop window” — the various forms of publicity that let people know you’re alive and writing. In my case, this means, among many other things, the various Young Wizards websites.

The main Young Wizards site has been running on Drupal for a good while — in fact, since I stopped hand-coding it in HTML — and the theme it’s been using has, also for a while now, struck me as kind of static and in need of an update. This issue has been on my mind more or less constantly for the past six months or so. But you know how it is — things get put, as they put it over here, “on the long finger”. You get busy with work, or with the administrivia surrounding work, and it doesn’t get handled for a good while. Finally in August I got started on it, but it wasn’t going to be anything but a pre-production site for a while.

Then (as so often happens) something comes along and forces your hand. While I was at the Discworld convention in the UK a couple of weeks ago, out of the blue I got a mail from Google telling me that they thought my site had been hacked. And Google searches for “Young Wizards” now say as much. Needless to say, this isn’t a situation that can be left to fester.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last two weeks, more or less, tearing the installation apart and putting it back together again, as well as hastily working to bring online the makeover version of the main web installation that I’ve long been planning — based on WordPress this time instead of Drupal. (This is at least partly because, though I love Drupal dearly, I just don’t have enough time to spare these days to indulge my inner geek wrestling with the PHP and the modules and all the rest of it. I find I’m preferring a platform that updates its own damn core rather than having to have it done manually once a month. And there are a bunch of other reasons, but never mind those right now.)

None of this activity has shown on the surface. Among other things, it takes a while to first of all figure out what was giving Google the idea that we had been hacked (their own diagnostics surprisingly being a bit vague on this), then trying to work out whether the problem could be cured while leaving the patient in situ or whether more radical surgery was required.

In the case of the Young Wizards domain, the culprit appeared to be the wiki installation in which for some years I’ve been storing general notes about the YW universe that were well-developed enough or general enough to make public. The spammers had been at the wiki, creating thousands of spurious user accounts and messing with their User:Talk pages — not that this is something they haven’t done before, and something we’ve blocked or deleted insofar as Mediawiki’s basic structure makes that possible. But this time for some reason or another the situation seems to have grabbed the Googlebot’s attention when it passed through.

There is unfortunately no quick and easy way to fix this problem in Mediawiki by bulk-deleting all the spammer-users (yes there are workarounds for this problem [oh, excuse me, “feature”],  and no I don’t have time to mess with them as I have only so much tech-love in my system to last me through any given day, and anyhow, when the hell am I supposed to find time to write?). The simplest way to handle the problem for the moment has been simply to pull the wiki up by the roots, stash it elsewhere for later more radical surgery — if it can indeed be saved at all — and export the page data to be imported into a less spammable and more encyclopedia-like format (via yet another WordPress installation) at a later date. So this has been done.

But now comes the exciting stuff. Tarballing and gzipping-up the entire installation, just in case anything goes horribly wrong. Tarballing-and-gzipping-up the separate parts of it (because when unpacking it somewhere else later, why get all tangled up in command-line subcommands when you can just say “tar -xvf thiswholedamnthing.tar.gz”?). Taking final backups of both the Drupal install and the WP install. And then — deep breath — pulling the Drupal install out of the root. And (another deep one) moving the WordPress install into the root. (Which is a little bit dicey, but not too much so if you move slowly and carefully and don’t do things in the wrong order.)

And then… more work. Fixing broken links. Fixing crawl errors. Installing 301 redirects for pages that are obsolete or otherwise no longer needed in the new install. Generating a new sitemap. Installing security plugins on all the other WP installs in the domain in the right order. And on and on… And then, when it’s all sorted out, when everything seems to be working, asking Google to please take a look at the domain and see if everything’s okay now.

(sigh) Right now I don’t feel so much like the Wizard heading off in that balloon as I feel like the guy leaving that little wooden hut in Antarctica and saying to his colleagues, “I may be gone for some time…”

See you all on the other side.

We’re off to see the server was last modified: September 11th, 2016 by Diane Duane
September 11, 2016
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Computer stuffHome lifeLifeOnline life

At YoungWizards.com: a brief interruption of service on all our sites

So it’s been one of those weeks in a lot of ways (got the annual Autumn Cold a bit early: annoyingly delayed getting home from the Discworld Convention in the UK: the stove died). But the most annoying thing happened while we were still at Discworld. I got an email from the Google Webmaster end of things announcing that YoungWizards.com had been hacked — or so it seemed — and I was going to have to Do Something About It.

This situation becomes interesting in that Google’s own diagnostics were unable to tell me exactly what the hacking consisted of (except “spammy content”, but they weren’t able to show me so much as a snippet of it: just pointed at the root of the domain and suggested that the whole thing was compromised). Ah well. Doesn’t matter: to get rid of the dreaded “This site may have been hacked” notification, I’m going to have to get busy ripping things apart and putting them back together again. While running on tea and toast and antihistamines… but there’s not much I can do about that.

So. This gets interesting, because we have a number of different installations there — the main YW.com site (which was about to be changed from a Drupal install to a WordPress install, but that’s going to happen a whole lot faster now), the YW Discussion Forums, the Errantry Concordance’s wiki, and individual WP installs for Games Wizards Play and the interstitial works being branded together under the “Interim Errantry” label. All of these are going to have to have their database passwords changed and have other security measures taken. Whoopee. (In particular this is an annoyance because, while I was in the process of hand-porting the old Drupal site’s content into the new WP install, it wasn’t quite ready as yet. Well, never mind that: it’s going live today or tomorrow, and I’ll finish rejigging the URLs and so forth next week.

Anyway, this is just a warning to those of you who visit YoungWizards.com or its associated sites on occasion that for the next couple of days, any part of the domain may appear to be down or missing entirely. Don’t panic: everything will be back (and in some cases much nicer and shinier: the main YW.com site has been needing a makeover, and the new WP theme suits it very nicely as a sort of portal site for all things YW-ish).

Meanwhile, thanks for your patience while I get this sorted out. Normal service, as they say, will resume shortly.

(Or at least as soon as I get finished looking at this page featuring historic test patterns…)

At YoungWizards.com: a brief interruption of service on all our sites was last modified: September 4th, 2016 by Diane Duane
September 4, 2016
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Home lifemetaOnline life

When I’m Sixty-Four

That’s today! (As Himself has reminded me.) And theoretically this is the day I get to take off from work to celebrate… but normally when I make such declarations I wind up blocking out a novel with Peter over dinner. So I’m not getting my hopes up.

I want to thank everybody for all the good wishes on Facebook and Tumblr and elsewhere*. It’s nice to be thought of. For those who were inquiring about my health here and there: It’s not too bad, thanks! (A brief veer here into what my mom used to call “the Organ Recital”.) The cartilage in my knees crackles a bit every now and then, but not in any serious way. I have a weird retinal slightly-blurred-vision thing going on in my left eye, but it’s not major and there’s nothing that can be done about it right now, so mostly I ignore it. I’ve been working on some gentle weight loss, and that’s coming along nicely. So, generally speaking: physically, things are good… and specifically, nothing physical is interfering with the Work. Which is what counts.

(I’m working on Young Wizards #11 right now. Yes, still no title, don’t ask me, I don’t understand it. And yes, dammit, I’m working on The Door Into Starlight. Give me a break here, yeah?)

Meanwhile, some nice folks have inquired privately what they could get for me to celebrate (as we say in Ireland) The Day That’s In It. Well, if they feel driven to do something, let them go over to Ebooks Direct and buy something. That way I get to tell them a story and get given something**! So we all win. (Especially since some of our bigger-ticket items are on sale at the moment.)

Those boots...(ETA: **Something like these. I was looking at these Ecco sneaker/boots the other day and thinking, “Hey, those are cool… but are they €130 worth of cool?…” And then this morning I was looking at them and saw the price had dropped by 40%. (W00t!) So go on, buy an ebook if you like, and help me rationalize getting these for myself for my birthday.) (I mean, I don’t normally get all that excited about shoes. But for one reason or another these spoke to me.)

…Or sure, if you’re a fan of Amazon wish lists, I’ve got one, though mostly it’s just a place I stuff things that I don’t want in the shopping cart right that minute. If the mood moves you in that direction, feel free.

In any case: thanks again to everybody who sent wacky messages or just generally expressed the sentiment that they’re glad I’m around. What can I do but smile and thank them? — and add, “Same here.” With luck, the condition will persist for a good while yet. Meanwhile, Peter and I will go out for pizza later. (And probably wind up blocking out another damn novel over the second bottle of wine.)

So please consider yourselves toasted genially as we celebrate. After all, being around here wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without all of you.  For a writer, what counts most of all things is to be read, to be heard: and all of you who do that, and take the time to say so, are the important ones. 🙂

Thanks again!

*And Himself Upstairs, who sent me the fireworks at the top of this. Love you, sweetie, now and always!

Save

When I’m Sixty-Four was last modified: July 31st, 2016 by Diane Duane
May 18, 2016
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Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifethings that piss you offWindows

Do. Not. WANT.

ETA: Thanks to those who set me straight on the non-mandatory side of the upgrade. I’ll take refuge in Rick’s excuse here: “I was misinformed.” As for the rest of it, the “download opportunity” still behaves like malware: you should be able to decline the download. Not allowing your users to make the choice themselves is abysmally bad practice. 

I don’t often get stirred up enough to go into full-blown editorial mode, but today is one of the days when that seems to be happening.

A lot of you who have Windows 7 or Windows 8 machines will have noticed the appearance, earlier in the month, of a little white Windows logo in your system tray. This, when you click on it, munificently offers you a free upgrade to Windows 10. Those of you who have experimented with the thing will probably have noticed there is no way to get rid of the impending update download — or at least, no obvious way. And that it starts rolling out tomorrow, July 29th.

For those of you who do not want the 3-gig download and would like to turn it off, let me point you at this webpage:

How To Remove The Windows 10 GMX upgrade nonsense

This cranky and civic-minded person has laid out, step-by-step, a method by which you can get rid of that pestilent little icon in your tray and stop the unavoidable downloading and implementation of three gigabytes of material you don’t want and have no intention of using.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I understand perfectly well Microsoft’s rationale behind this, or at least their stated rationale; to keep security upgrades consistent across all the installs of their new OS. That said, rolling it out in this particular way is really unsavory. It smacks of the behavior of malware installers, rather than that of any responsible company with any kind of interest in keeping its customers on board.*

(Also, it’s worth noting in this context that many people who have already updated to 10 — particularly users with Nvidia graphics cards — have been reporting horrific driver problems with the new Windows version, secondary to this ill-thought-out policy of “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”. Only just now has the beginnings of a fix for this particular problem begun to propagate, but this strikes me as a sign of more bad things to come, a slow-motion trainwreck better watched from outside it than inside.)

Now who knows, over the course of the next six months or so, when I get ready to build my new desktop machine, I may indeed go for Windows 10 — once I’ve had time to make the choice, the informed decision, as to whether it’s right for me, and whether I can find alternatives to the various programs whose function I like and would like to keep. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll go whole hog and just switch over to Apple. (I know a lot of you who’re Young Wizards fans, considering the frequent appearance of hardware with the Biteless Apple on it in the books, will be surprised that this is an issue for me at all. However, in this as in many other parts of my tech life, I am an amphibian and have for a long time worked happily on more than one side of the divide at the same time. But this present behavior of Microsoft’s is trying my patience way more than usual.)

Anyway, I’ve used the method detailed in the webpage above on my present Win7 desktop, and it seems to work perfectly. I strongly recommend that if you are ambivalent about the prospect of this forced update of your software, you go over there and have a look at it and decide whether it’s an option you’d like to avail of.

*I also understand that in recent online talks, Microsoft upper-level management have let it be known that people who find ways of avoiding this upgrade will eventually be cut off from normal product updates. And you know what? I can think of no quicker way for them to drive me straight into what Euripides called “the apple-laden land.” Yeah, there’s just one of me, and I doubt my loss is going to break Microsoft’s corporate heart. (shrug) No matter.

Do. Not. WANT. was last modified: September 30th, 2016 by Diane Duane
July 28, 2015
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book salesebooksHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifeOnline lifereading

When is a “library” not a library?

This is a library.

This is a library.

From over at the Tumblr:

freyaliesel:

o.o tuebl has all of Young Wizards in the library.

BEST NEWS EVER

It would be if (a) I’d given them permission to have the books, (b) I was getting paid anything for their presence there.

However, (a) I never have, and (b) I’m not.

ETA: To the person who commented on the Tumblr post saying, “writers get paid for libraries carrying their books?” Why, yes, we do. The libraries buy our books to lend out. And we’re glad to have the libraries lend them out as many times as they can after that, because that’s our mutual understanding of what libraries do. Public library sales are traditionally a significant part of any YA writer’s income. Sometimes as much as 10 to 20% of a smallish print run will go to libraries — sometimes more!* — and this can be a significant reason why early print runs of a book “earn out”, thus encouraging your publisher to buy your next book. So libraries, and librarians, are very much our friends. (They would be anyway. But this is an additional reason.)

Also: in some markets, like the UK and Ireland, the author earns additional royalties from the book being lent out by libraries — the more libraries buy and lend your book, the more money you get. This is never a huge sum, but it can be helpful even for the midlist writer. Peter and I just got a payment of this kind from one of our UK agents. It’s hardly a lottery win, but it means that we can replace our suddenly-dying clothes dryer this month instead of sometime in the spring.

Tuebl, however, is not a library in the commonly-understood sense (and certainly not in the public-library sense that Ben Franklin intended when he started the first one in Philly). Tuebl does not pay any writer up front for their books, or for the right to make them available for download. People upload books to Tuebl at will, frequently without any real concern about who owns the copyright. Tuebl then dodges this particular legal bullet by making the assertion that they assume only people who have the rights to upload material are doing so. (It would be really interesting to see how this “assumption” holds up in court when someone eventually gets around to challenging them on it.) Additionally, they offer authors some nebulous possibility of “earn(ing) money by giving your books away for free” — which may or may not work out in the long run: right now my preference is to let other writers do that and tell me how it worked out for them.**

If I’d decided to try this experiment for myself, the results, for good or ill, would be my problem to deal with. However, when people take it upon themselves to give away my work for free without my permission — while implying as hard as they can that it is happening with my permission — that gets up my nose enough for me to make an issue of it in public. In particular, I note that somebody or other (having perhaps mistaken me for a vast multinational publishing conglomerate) bought one of my books from my own store and uploaded it at Tuebl for people to download for free.

I sincerely hope people can understand how the above might make me cranky.

(sigh) Anyway. Onward to the next problem…

As an addeddum: someone else (anonymously) asks:

Regarding authors getting paid when a library houses their book(s), what happens when someone donates the book to them? do they still have to pay you?

In countries where “lending rights” laws obtain, yes they do. (In such countries, the money to pay the writers comes from the government. See, for example, this page at the UK site for this program.)

The basic idea behind these laws is that the book wouldn’t be there in the first place if a writer hadn’t spent the time and effort to write it (and also the money necessary to keep themselves alive while writing it), so the writer therefore deserves some return from the lending process, even if it’s just a small one. (The law establishes this as an intellectual property right: see this page for much more background info about how the Public Lending Right is handled across the 53 countries where it’s been implemented.)

Whether books are purchased by the libraries themselves or donated to them, they report their lending figures to the government body that acts as a clearing-house for the data, and this body sees to it that the legally-determined amount of money comes to the authors directly or through their chosen representatives.

 

*Indications are, from my early royalty statements, that something like 40% of the print run for the original (and now very hard to find) hardcover edition of So You Want To Be A Wizard went to US libraries. This enthusiastic uptake would have been instrumental in Dell agreeing to buy Deep Wizardry.

**Yes, I know about Neil Gaiman. Sadly (or perhaps fortunately, from Amanda Palmer’s point of view) we cannot all be Neil Gaiman.

When is a “library” not a library? was last modified: January 19th, 2015 by Diane Duane
January 19, 2015
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book salesebooksEbooks DirectEuropeIrelandOnline life

The Shadow over Cyber Monday

Cyber_Monday_Shadow

Tomorrow’s one of the big days in the marketing year for anybody who (like us) sells ebooks. But this year, for many of us, there’s a nervous feeling about the event that hasn’t been there before: because this Cyber Monday could very well be our last.

Here’s the deal, in very broad strokes (because it’s really complicated). Beginning on January 1, 2015, small business people in the European Union who produce and sell digital products directly — downloads of ebooks, music, courses, and so forth — are going to find themselves dealing with a profound change in the way they do business. Once upon a time, if someone in Great Britain bought an ebook from a provider, say, in Germany, they paid the German rate of VAT (that’s Value Added Tax for those of you not familiar with the term: think of it as sales tax) to the seller, and the seller passed that tax payment to their own national revenue service when tax-return time rolled around, and that was it.

Numerous companies, usually large ones, turned this situation to their advantage by setting up shop in countries like Luxembourg (where the VAT was lower than elsewhere in the EU) and selling to other EU countries from there. The law now coming into effect was meant to eliminate that advantage. From January 1st, within the EU, if a UK person buys an ebook from a German ebook producer, the purchaser pays UK-level VAT on it. And the German ebook producer must now remit that collected VAT to the UK tax authorities. The legislation sets up a body in each EU country called MOSS (sometimes VAT MOSS or VATMOSS), short for Mini One Stop Shop. (The link is to the Irish version.)

Rosie Slosek over at One Man Band Accounting has the closest I’ve been able to find to a “master post” on the MOSS / VATMOSS legislation: I recommend you have a look at it, as she lays more of the details of this situation out unusually clearly.

I’m not going to say anything here about whether this change in how things are handled really  makes any sense or not (partly because I haven’t had enough time to look into the history of the legislation as yet). Especially since big companies have the money and resources to get around this new situation as they got around the old one. That said, in the meantime, MOSS is the law: right now it simply has to be dealt with. But here are the major problems that come with it:

Many small businesses — the very businesses that European national governments have been touting as the solution to recent economic woes, the way to drive recovering economies back into growth from the bottom up — will be driven to the wall by this change, especially in countries like the UK where there has been a “VAT registration threshold” for income under which one did not have to register unless one made the choice to do so. Many people already working hard to run little digital businesses out of their dining rooms or garages or sheds won’t be able to handle either the expense of the mandatory VAT registration that ensues the very moment you sell something of even €1.00’s value outside your own country, or the burden of keeping (for ten years) the definitive documentation — “two pieces of non-contradictory commercial evidence” for every single sale — to prove that you haven’t sold anything into a region you shouldn’t (with all the craziness that always attends a negative proof), or the increased costs of bookkeeping that are going to accompany compliance with this law.

Additionally, the law as presently framed is insanely unclear in many important areas — possibly because it was framed before many of the present day’s commonplaces regarding internet sales became widespread.  Here’s an example for you to start with, from an article in City AM:

“On board transport travelling between different countries in the EU (for example, by boat or train), the consumer location will be the place of departure for the consumer’s journey.”

 

This means a French person travelling from London to Paris by train, having passed through the Channel Tunnel, could purchase an online subscription, connecting to the French mobile network, with a French IP address, and using a French credit card, but it would be correct for VAT purposes to show this as a UK customer. Getting this wrong risks an unlimited fine, [Boldface mine. DD] even though the VAT rate in both countries is 20 per cent.

Change this just a little — make the purchaser German, with a German smartphone instead of a French one — and add to this the fact that the  German SIM in the smartphone is liable to be used as evidence that Germany was the country of sale. Now imagine the joys of explaining this — not just to your local tax authority — but to the two other tax authorities involved, each of whom is empowered by the new regulations to come after you demanding their bite of the cherry. You’re supposed to have “two pieces of non-contradictory commercial evidence”. What happens when all the ones you do have contradict one another?

There are numerous other problems. Who holds the confirming data? How? Where, and in what form? How will problems concerning its authentication be resolved? As matters stand, it’s a nightmare. (ETA: see also Rachel Andrews’ blog post on the merry hell that VATMOSS in its prent state is going to play with the customer experience.)

Soozi Baggs’ Huffington Post article sums things up nicely:

1. This only applies to digital products, so it won’t affect businesses delivering physical products or live services. Which means digital businesses get penalised while other types of small businesses are completely unaffected.

 

2. This will make building a business incredibly difficult. The current UK threshold allows businesses to grow to a point where they can make an income and afford to take on specialist financial staff before dealing with things like VAT. Many digital entrepreneurs will tell you that they only made a few quid in the first few months. It takes time and traction to build an audience and get your products out there. If you’re liable for VAT and the administrative activities that go with it from day 1, you’re never going to be able to get past those low earning few months – to be able to smash through that VAT threshold and deal with your taxes accordingly.

 

3. Many low earning digital entrepreneurs are mums who are trying to contribute to the family pot by earning money from sales of digital items, whilst caring full time for their pre-school age children. Or they’re fully intending to build a bigger business, but are doing it slowly – over years rather than months, because they have the childcare responsibility and can only work a few hours a week. Because of this, I firmly feel that this Directive will negatively impact on women who are mothers more than any other type of entrepreneur out there.

 

In short, this new ruling will be devastating for many people already in business who are not yet making the kind of money to be able to afford to register for VAT. And worse still, it sets the barrier to entry to business very high, which is likely to put off a lot of potential entrepreneurs – especially women who want to start a business on maternity leave and grow it slowly while their kids are young.

So. What to do (besides contacting one’s TDs or MPs or MEPs and trying to get them to bring what pressure to bear on this situation that they can, and signing petitions to help get this issue up onto the mainstream radar)?

Obviously Ebooks Direct — which is based in Ireland — is going to be affected by this situation, and there are a number of things that have to happen before Peter and I come to a decision as to whether we can continue running an online business at all. We have to crunch some numbers from the last few years’ sales to determine exactly what percentage of our sales come from inside the EU, to determine whether it makes most sense to simply stop selling into the UK and other EU countries. We have to talk to our accountants to figure out which of the ways to register for MOSS would be most logical for us, should we decide to go that route. (You can either register with your own home country — who collects all the VAT you collect from EU sales and passes them to the other VAT authorities concerned — or register individually with each of the EU countries into which you’ve sold digital items.) We have to have a talk with the people who run our present shop platform, Shopify, to find out exactly what changes they’re getting ready to enable in the platform to help their EU sellers keep doing business. If they won’t have VATMOSS support in place in time, we’ll also have to start investigating other platforms to see if they’ll have measures in place, for time is getting short. And then finally — like many others in our position — we’re going to have to look at whether compliance is going to make sufficient inroads into our creative time, our actual work as writers, for us to be forced to decide it’s simply not worth it to try to keep running a digital business at all.

Meanwhile, like many other digital booksellers, and as in previous years, we’re having a Cyber Monday sale at Ebooks Direct. (In fact, it’s already on.) If you see something in our store that you like the look of, it seems only sensible to say that this would be a good time to buy it. First, well, it’s a sale, and everything’s 50% off. 🙂  But also — depending on the answers we get from our accountants and so forth — after January 1, you may not be able to buy ebooks directly from us any more. Our store’s continuation is not a “given.”

And this goes not just for us, but for our many other colleagues online, both in Europe and elsewhere in the world, who’re involved in digital startups of one kind or another: they too will suffer. So will our fellow authors who’ve been delighted to find a customer base online for books from their backlists — ebooks their publishers haven’t been interested in bringing out — but now may be forced to abandon that very welcome income stream due to an unclear and unnerving regulatory burden. (Unlimited fines? Really??)

I urge you, whether you’re in Europe or not, to find out how the VAT MOSS issue will affect you (because if you buy digital goods from anyone but the biggest European companies, it will) and to take action now to help — among many others — the authors whose work you enjoy. Follow the #VATMOSS or #VATMESS tags on Twitter, and help get the hashtags trending: sign the online petitions to uphold the present small-business-protecting VAT threshold in countries that have them (such as the UK): on platforms like Tumblr, reblog this post and others like it when they come up: and just plain talk to other people online and off about what’s happening.

And for your assistance in this, thanks in advance, from both of us.

The Shadow over Cyber Monday was last modified: November 30th, 2014 by Diane Duane
November 30, 2014
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Phasers
Cool wordsLanguageObscure interestsOnline lifeStar TrekWords and usage

Cripes, I’m cited in the Oxford English Dictionary

That’s my year made.

From the Online OED:

phaser, n.

2. Science Fiction. A weapon producing destructive laser or similar beams (of variable phase); spec. a (usually hand-held) device whose output can be varied to produce different effects on a target (as stunning, annihilation, etc.). Also in extended use and in figurative context.First used in the U.S. television series Star Trek.

1966   G. Roddenberry Memo 26 Apr. in S. E. Whitfield & G. Roddenberry Making of ‘Star Trek’ iii. i. 272   Reference the mating of various components of the phaser weapons..when the hand phaser is mated to the pistol, they should appear as one weapon.

 

1967   Pop. Sci. Dec. 73/2   The main weaponry of the Enterprise is its banks of ‘ship’s phasers’,—artillery-size versions of the hand phasers and phaser pistols carried by the crew. These weapons are, of course, refinements of today’s familiar lasers.

 

1978   D. Bloodworth Crosstalk xxxiii. 256   The USAAF had brought down the first unmanned plane with a laser, and..had..been thinking in terms of light, chemically-operated versions that could be phased together… ‘Phasers?’ ‘Phasers. Right.’

 

1984   D. Duane My Enemy, my Ally vi. 85   Mr. Chekov, arm photon torpedoes, prepare to lock phasers on for firing.

 

1995   THIS Mag. July 21/2   His oddly reserved nature stands out… Whyte sets his phaser on stun, not kill. In print and in person, he usually gives a nod to his opponents before letting fly.

 

2000   Personal Computer World Dec. 481/2   The phaser rifle..easily vaporises most opponents in a spectacular orange echoey screaming fashion with a single shot.
…I get quoted often enough. (Normally in connection with potato chips.) But to be cited in the single reference that I use more than any other?*
Yeah. 🙂
*And to find out about it on International Literacy Day? There’s a certain pleasure in that too.
Cripes, I’m cited in the Oxford English Dictionary was last modified: August 4th, 2016 by Diane Duane
September 9, 2014
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"Disk boot failure..."
Computer stuffHome lifeIrelandOnline lifethings that piss you offUncategorized

Hardware issues

image

Those of you who may remember the above image from a week and a half or so ago might be curious about how things have been progressing.

Briefly, not real well.

(Inserting a cut here (on the Tumblr side) to shield the eyes of innocent onlookers from the discussion of painful technical issues. The tl;dr version: My big work computer is screwed, I’m going to be fixing it for days, I will be cranky while this happens, my apologies in advance for an anticipated decrease in cheerful posts. (sigh))

Having tried everything one normally tries inside the case when a drive has non-noisily failed — swapping power and data cables around, checking everywhere for loose or dirty connections, fiddling with the BIOS (insofar as I dare to… I don’t like messing with the BIOS: there is nothing more pathetic and annoying than a motherboard you fried yourself), I then turned to out-of-case remedies and ordered in a SATA drive enclosure (we needed one anyway…) so that I could test the drive using a USB connection and find out whether any data could be reclaimed from it at all.

So yesterday the enclosure arrived. (Along with a Seagate 3-Tb external drive for backing things up from now on.) Very nice, too: sleek design, pretty. With due care the failed drive was put into it and powered up.

Nada. (Or as I originally just typed, Dana, which as Irish people will tell you is another thing entirely. )

So the situation is as follows:

(a) I now have a failed boot drive that will have to be sent off for data recovery in a clean room. What diagnosis I can perform at this end suggests that the failure was very likely electronic (drive board chipset failure, a short, etc etc) rather than mechanical, which is about as good as the news gets at this end: probably the disk platters will not have been damaged. Nonetheless this is going to be annoying and expensive to recover from.I haven’t actively started soliciting quotes yet, but my best guess suggests that if I get away with paying as little as €500 for recovery, I should count myself lucky. It could be double or triple that. (sigh) I will also have to spend a while wondering whether it’s worth sending the thing off for recovery at all, as I have no definitive list of What Used To Be There to compare against What’s there Now in the files restored from backups. (See  (b).) I think I know. But then I thought the backups were complete and that most important program installs had been done to the 1Tb F: drive.

Gaaaah.

(b) While there are fairly recent backups of C: drive material (the most recent was May 18th, [heavyirony] whoopee, happy birthday to me [/heavyirony]), they are not as complete as I wish they were: some directories in the C: drive that should have been tagged for backup were not. (Mea culpa, mea bloody maxima culpa.) Some of them are/were quite important, like my installation of Dragon Naturally Speaking, Scrivener and so forth. Now, these can be reconstructed: in almost all cases I still have, or can quickly recover, the original installation media / files. But doing so, weary piece by piece — including in some cases having to install original files and then their upgrades, one after another — is going to take days of time that I really wish I didn’t have to spend right now. (While I am also busy finishing a writing project.) Ah well.

(c) The backups that did restore haven’t quite settled in at the W7 system end. In particular, user profiles from the old installation, though their files are all there, have not re-manifested themselves in W7 as yet… so that desktops are MIA/unavailable, and everything has to be searched for before it can be used or worked on. (And if the profiles don’t come back after a few reboots, I’m going to have to start working out how to make them come back. Oh joy. The Descent Into The Registry: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” Gaaaaaaah x2.)

…So. Those of you who follow me may find me a little less forthcoming with posts than usual for the next 3-5 days, and if my tone sounds a little strained when I do post, you’ll know why Please bear with me until I get this mess as sorted as as it can get in the short term.

Thank you. 🙂

This was crossposted from DD’s tumblr http://ift.tt/1pHE23c, where it was published on June 05, 2014 at 11:18AM

Hardware issues was last modified: June 5th, 2014 by Diane Duane
June 5, 2014
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ebooksEbooks DirectIrelandKindleOnline lifeShopping

Cyber Monday? Yeah, we’re doing this too (till Friday!)

For Cyber Monday at Ebooks Direct, everything in the store, everything in our catalog, is 50% off from now until 1 minute before midnight Hawaiian Standard Time on Monday Friday night, December 6th.

Just use the discount code CYBERMONDAY at checkout.

“Everything” includes our newest offering, the complete 9-volume set of the revised and updated New Millennium Editions of the Young Wizards series — an amazing bargain at the one-time sale price of USD $27.50, just a shade over $3 per ebook!

There are all kinds of goodies on offer — from Diane Duane’s standalone fantasy novels like the urban fantasy / police procedural Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses and the historical fantasy Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South, to Peter Morwood’s “Clan Wars” prequels Greylady and Widowmaker (out of print for a time from their UK publisher, but now available exclusively here in updated versions) and his classic “Tales of Old Russia” series, both in individual volumes and the new 3-volume omnibus ebook.

All our books are available in the major ebook formats, all are DRM-free, and many are available in multi-format bundles at no extra cost (because why should you have to pay extra just because you have more than once device?) All you have to do is use the discount code / coupon code CYBERMONDAY at checkout. (A walkthrough showing how to use our discount codes when checking out is here.)

So relax and explore what our store has to offer! You don’t even have to move from wherever your computer or mobile device is (that’s got to be a relief…). And you can also sign up for our general mailing list in the footer at the bottom of the page if you’d like to be kept informed of new releases across the bookstore.

Whatever interests you, thanks for dropping by, and have a super Cyber Monday! (And all week until post-Cyber Friday. Or indeed, as it was called earlier, the Feast of St. Nicholas.)

Cyber Monday? Yeah, we’re doing this too (till Friday!) was last modified: December 3rd, 2013 by Diane Duane
December 2, 2013
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ebooksEbooks DirectOnline life

Black Friday sale? Yeah, we’ve got one.

Black Friday graphic

For Black Friday 2013 at Ebooks Direct, everything in the store, everything in our catalog, is 50% off from now until 1 minute before midnight Hawaiian Standard Time on Friday night.

Just use the discount code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout.

“Everything” includes our newest offering, the complete 9-volume set of the revised and updated New Millennium Editions of the Young Wizards series. — an amazing bargain at the one-time sale price of $USD 27.50, just a shade over $3 per ebook!

There are all kinds of goodies on offer — from DD’s standalone fantasy novels like the urban fantasy / police procedural Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses and the historical fantasy Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South, to Peter Morwood’s “Clan Wars” prequels Greylady and Widowmaker (out of print for a time from their UK publisher, but now available exclusively here in updated versions) and his classic “Tales of Old Russia” series, both in individual volumes and the new 3-volume omnibus ebook.

Also on sale in our store for the first time this year are Gift Cards… and your 50% discount is good for those too. Spend $25 and give a friend $50.00’s worth of holiday reading to enjoy at their leisure!

All our books are available in the major ebook formats, all are DRM-free, and many are available in multi-format bundles at no extra cost (because why should you have to pay extra just because you have more than once device?) All you have to do is use the discount code / coupon code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout. (A walkthrough showing how to use our discount codes when checking out is here.)

So relax and explore what our store has to offer! You don’t even have to move from wherever your computer or mobile device is (that’s got to be a relief…). And you can also sign up for our general mailing list in the footer at the bottom of any bookstore page if you’d like to be kept informed of new releases across the store.

In any case, whatever you do, have a super Black Friday!

image image image image image image

Black Friday sale? Yeah, we’ve got one. was last modified: November 29th, 2013 by Diane Duane
November 29, 2013
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Computer stuffOnline lifethings that piss you off

Blocking China

It’s nothing personal, not at all. But since yesterday both Out of Ambit and the new WordPress writing-stuff blog at Eating Paper (which I haven’t even put up a link to as yet, must fix that…) have been getting a blizzard of incoming trackback spam from Chinese sources. (Indian too, but way fewer of those.) As a result, for the immediate future I’m blocking everything from the .cn and .tw top-level domains. (And also Guatemala. Seriously, why? Well, I don’t care.) Doubtless this too will pass. In the meantime it’s just an annoyance.

The only good thing about this has been that some of the earnest-sounding, I-want-you-to-approve-this-comment text that comes with these things is so hilarious. Get this:

I would like to comprehend when you write this article is what kind of mood, why would you write this article, also written so good, is that I can emulate.

Wow, by all means. Or:

I am fond of your article.Your article is like a big tree, so that we can be seated in your tree, feel yourself a real.

No, I’m flattered but I wouldn’t presume to attempt the latter: certainly only Benedict  Cumberbatch may properly inhabit that lofty eminence.

And then… this:

This article made me effulge.

(deep breath)

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

…Bye bye China… gonna miss you for a while…

(effulge…)

 

Blocking China was last modified: April 25th, 2013 by Diane Duane
April 25, 2013
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AppleComputer stuffebooksEuropeHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeNewsOnline lifeTechnogeekeryTravel

A rant: iOS6 and Maps

If you’ve already heard enough about this, or just don’t care to hear a couple pages’ worth of venting right now, please avert your eyes now. Thank you.

…I’ve had a soft spot for Apple products for a long time, to the point where versions of them have for years appeared in my Young Wizards series as “the preferred devices of the Powers that Be”. (So everything that follows this should be read as “more in sorrow than in anger”, though there’s certainly some anger, make no mistake.) I worked with Apple computers myself in the ancient day (while not owning them) and recommended them wholeheartedly to friends. So it sometimes surprises my readership to find that until recently I’d never myself owned anything Apple-ish but an iPod.

A couple/few months ago this changed when the first serious Apple computing device came into the household, in the form of an iPad. We haven’t had it for very long (I say “we”, but the hard truth is that Peter hasn’t had much of a chance to get his hands on it) but I’ve been enjoying gradually learning its ways, and it makes my work a lot easier. It is peerless for e-reading purposes (especially using BlueFire Reader) and there’s nothing like it for proofreading prose: errors just seem to jump out for the catching.

And one of the great satisfactions of using the iPad, quite early on, was hitting “Maps” and having the house come up instantly, for we’re out in the middle of nowhere. And the pleasure hasn’t just been about finding my own place, but other places, in close detail. For both the working writer and the busy traveler, the Maps icon was a gateway to the most functional of joys. You could find your way in a strange place: you could work out where the nearest post office or cab rank was: you could read a map in the streets of a foreign city without instantly making yourself look like a tourist ready to be relieved of his or her valuables. (Easiest on the iPhone, of course, but there are ways to use the Pad less obviously for this too. Deep purses have their uses, and you could be looking for anything in there.) You could sit in a restaurant over a meal and scout around for interesting places to check out afterwards. Or you could just sit home and do research about the things your characters needed to be doing and seeing in a place you’d never been, moving easily between map view and street view as required.

…But not any more. If you’re alert to computing issues at all, you’ll surely have heard the noise over the last couple of days as regards what’s happened to Maps in the iPhone and iPad. There are explanations all over the place (here, for example) as to why Apple chose to make the change and so forth.

I don’t think this is a minor issue. Accurate and dependable GPS-friendly mapping to handheld and portable devices has become one of the most important reasons to have such a device in the first place. Jeez, if even Sherlock bloody Holmes needs such a thing to save his bacon sometimes, it should be an indicator of how vital such usage is for the rest of us mere mortals.

And what does iOS6 for the iPad and iPhone do with so vital a commodity? It throws out the best online mapping available, that of Google, and goes with a homebrew mapping application.

Baby. Bathwater. Especially since the Apple Maps facility is so not ready for prime time yet.

Once upon a time I knew that if I had both amnesia and the iPad, then Maps on the iPad could get me home. (Best memory of this: using Maps on the iPad in conjunction with the wonderful DB (German Rail) app, (yes, there’s an Android version too, we both have it on our HTC phones) which was given a start point somewhere in the middle of Germany and told “Get me home!” All by itself it got us as far as Dun Laoghaire Ferry Port and then threw its figurative hands in the air and said “All right, not even we can do anything with Irish Rail if they won’t run a rail link to a main ferry port, and they’ve made their bus schedule inaccessible to us, so  you’re on your own now.” But the Google Maps implementation in the Pad did the rest and found the best route back to the right spot on Unnamed Road Number 876,543. And all praise to Deutsche Bahn for whoever they got to build that app for them.) Anyway, once upon a time, the imagery was all clear, right down to a very close zoom, so close you could see not just our driveway but our backyard clothesline.

No chance of any more such happy homecomings, however. I don’t have a comparison shot of the previous view – I never thought I’d need it – but this is what our area looks like now:

The road in front of our house is gone. So are other minor roads in the area (and this is exactly the kind of help a traveler in these parts would seriously need). So is the house, as half the image (as you see) now renders it impossible to find due to poor quality. And what happened over to the left there? And why is the definition sharp again just half a mile away??

Now, yes, granted, this is rural Ireland, not exactly the most populated corner of the planet. But if you check the blog here, you’ll see that great cities have been affected the same way. The Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge has big problems. Freiburg in Breisgau, a vibrant and beautiful modern/medieval city in southwestern Germany, is now represented in places by postwar aerial imagery (take a look, you can see the bomb craters). Berlin has relocated itself to Antarctica.  Something really strange has happened to the Schuylkill Expressway in Philly near the Art Museum (which doesn’t look too well either) right next to it. Gothenburg, Sweden, is missing. Closer to home, Dublin Zoo has somehow relocated itself into the south city center, right on top of a hotel where we routinely stay: I’m half concerned that the next time we check in I should bring a whip and a chair in case of lions.  (Also, an area near Dundrum in County Dublin [now mostly famous for a high-end shopping center] has been labeled “Airfield” and the Irish Minister in Charge of Yelling at Apple has had to contact them to get it removed urgently before some iOS6-using pilot [of whom there are many] mistakes it for the military airport at Baldonnell and tries to land there. …Is it gone yet, BTW? I’m afraid to look.)

Apple. How did you let this application leave the house in such a state? What on Earth possessed you?!

Yes, I know about the bad blood between you and Google, about the Apple / Android divide, about your desire to put some distance between you. I understand that perfectly. But here, in this one spot, you should have just sucked it up and said All right, fine, we can cope with this until we have something not just better, but breathtakingly so.

…Too late now.

So many actions in life have unexpected results. Here’s my list of the local ones resulting from this whole business:

(a) I now bitterly regret ever having punched the Upgrade button. I will never regard an Apple OS upgrade the same way again. I should have been more suspicious to start with. Lesson learned.

(b)    The minute there’s a Google Maps app in the App Store? I’ll be all over that like a cheap suit and I will never touch the native Maps icon again. I won’t even look at it. (Probably I won’t be allowed to delete it, which is a shame, because for a long time, every time I see it, I’m going to growl.)

(c)    We will be buying a Samsung tablet at the earliest opportunity. Admittedly, we were already inclined this way for several reasons: (1) for ebook production, because nothing works to test an ebook version like the actual device it’s intended to run on: (b) Peter likes the Android OS better than he does Apple’s (“And now you see why,” says the annoyed voice from the next room):  and (3) the constant and sleazy-looking litigation over whether or not the Samsung looks too much like an iPad has put a bad taste in both our mouths. But this has pushed me right over the edge. Apple, your implementation of Google Maps may not work any more, but I know someone whose implementation will. If my experience is anything to go by, you are driving your customers straight into the arms of your competition. And the ripples from this are going to spread: the longer it goes on and the louder the ruckus gets, the more potential Apple customers are going to say “Nuh uh, don’t want one of those.”

(sigh) Okay, done ranting. But I wish I knew how they were going to fix this, because a function of the iPad that was important and useful to me (and apparently to a whole lot of other people) has been reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. It would be lovely if Apple would amend iOS6 to allow a user to opt in to Google Maps (or out of the Apple mapping application). But bearing in mind the rather controlling nature of Apple, this seems… at best unlikely.

Meanwhile… can anyone recommend a reliable way to roll back to iOS5? (Though I already have a horrible feeling about what the answer’s going to be.)

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

A rant: iOS6 and Maps was last modified: September 21st, 2012 by Diane Duane
September 21, 2012
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Film and TVMediaOnline lifeTV in general

A guestblog about Sherlock: "After The Fall"

ATTENTION ALL: please read the spoiler warning below before clicking on anything in this post. Thanks! 🙂

The Fall begins

There it is: right now, possibly one of the most familiar images in the TV-fannish regions of the Intarwebz, one which is routinely greeted by many of those who recognize it with miserable sighs, in some cases with weeping and wailing, and (in many forums and online havens) with the gnashing of teeth and anguished cries of “MOFFAAAAAT!!” …

…For a decade or so now, Peter and I have had the privilege and constant delight of being friends with a very gifted German screenwriter by the name of Torsten Dewi. Torsten worked closely with us on the miniseries Die Niebelungen (which aired in the US on SyFy under the title Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King), and was the source of endless good advice and encouragement all through what turned into kind of a crazed process.

In more recent years, besides his continuing TV and film work (he was, in particular, the man who introduced the telenovela concept to Germany with Lotta in Love), Torsten has become a most popular and prolific blogger on TV, film, and media in general. Some weeks ago he let us know that he and his Very Significant Other, the beautiful Britta, were going to be taking a holiday this month; and rather than let his blog at Wortvogel.de go quiet, or do a bunch of canned postings, he asked me (among various others) whether I’d like to do a guest piece for him. I immediately said yes, and almost as immediately knew what I wanted to do for him: for “The Reichenbach Fall” had just aired.

Here, then, is a link to what I wrote for Torsten —  a general overview of Sherlock (for those in Germany who might not have seen it yet) and some notes about issues that have developed over the past two seasons, and particularly in the wake of the most recent episode. Please note that this blog is absolutely overrun with spoilers for everything in series 1 & 2 up to and including specifics of events in “The Reichenbach Fall.”

Otherwise: enjoy!

A guestblog about Sherlock: "After The Fall" was last modified: February 23rd, 2012 by Diane Duane
February 23, 2012
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EuropeFilm and TVOnline lifeTV in generalWriting

The Affair of the Black Armbands (or, The Death of Sherlock Holmes and How The World Took It)

Sherlock and John

I’ve been a fan of Sherlock Holmes for many, many years. I don’t even really remember when I first started reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal tales of the world’s first and greatest consulting detective, though it has to have been fairly early – probably when I was eight or nine.

There is nothing unusual about loving Holmes. Millions of others have done so before me, with good reason. What’s come up for consideration for me at the moment are the closely associated issues of what Doyle did to his most famous creation, and the fans’ reactions to what he did:  with an eye to what’s going on at the moment at the BBC.*

SPOILER WARNING: though this blog is going to be fairly general, you should be warned: if you have NOT read the Sherlock Holmes stories up until now, and are also watching the BBC’s Sherlock simply as serial drama and have not seen The Reichenbach Fall as yet, then you’d better read no further until you’ve seen it and have come to terms with the result.

Anyway, I spotted this posting on tumblr this morning, and it started me musing.

you know I wonder if back in the day when The Final Problem came out Victorians were sending out letters with “Dear sir, have you read the latest Holmes story yet? I simply cannot handle it. I have cried an unseemly amount of tears. I cannot. Oh God.” and then there’s just a big ink scribble because keysmashing wasn’t an option
little drawings of crying people in the margins

When you write, naturally you hope that what you’ve written will have an emotional impact on the reader or viewer: the more profound, the better. But sometimes the profundity of the response can get scary — and this was as true in the pre-online world as in the hyper-interconnected literary world of today. Arthur Conan Doyle ran into the sharp end of this problem as his career was trending upward toward what would be seen by some as its peak.

Readers these days who’re more familiar with the written than the writer are often surprised to discover that Doyle didn’t think much of his Sherlock Holmes stories as compared to the historical novels that were his passion.** As so often happens in the writers’ world, Doyle had ideas about what his best works were — but the general readership and the critics had completely different thoughts on the matter.  People went crazy for the Holmes stories, whereas Doyle’s historical novels tended to get fairly lukewarm reviews. (And today they are largely forgotten. If you can name even one, you’re either a Doyle expert or an unusually thorough reader.) This situation drove Doyle up the wall, though he didn’t routinely share that info with the reading public. With other writers – and he was friendly with lots of them — he was a lot more forthcoming about the disappointment. Otherwise he kept it quiet.

More annoying for him in the short term, though, was the fact that quite soon after the stories started making their initial splash, Doyle started receiving mail intended for Sherlock Holmes. Hundreds of letters came in containing praise, presents (though fortunately no cocaine), pleas for help, requests for interviews or autographs. Of course Doyle was here the recipient, many times over, of a backhanded compliment. Happy the writer (so other writers would say) who can create a character so compelling and rounded that people start corresponding with him, her or it as if he/she/it were real.  Doyle was aware of the irony, and tried not to overreact; when he was in the mood, he’d sometimes get playful when answering Holmes’s mail “for him”, signing it “John Watson”.

But increasingly this confusion of identities became an annoyance, as not only readers but sometimes even critics seemed increasingly unclear on the difference between the writer and the written. One critic, the American poet Arthur Guiterman, wrote Doyle a bit of doggerel suggesting that Holmes’s opinions about literary detectives were actually Doyle’s:


Illustrator Sydney Paget’s Holmes

Sherlock your sleuthhound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe’s ‘Dupin’ as ‘very inferior’!
Labels Gaboriau’s clever ‘Lecoq’, indeed,
Merely ‘A bungler’, a creature to mock indeed!

This when your plots and your methods in story owe
Clearly a trifle to Poe and Gaboriau,
Sets all the Muses of Helicon sorrowing.
Borrow, Sir Knight, but be candid in borrowing!

Doyle’s response in kind was polite but (to my ear) none too amused:

But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation’s crude vanity:
He the created, the puppet of fiction,
Would not brook rivals nor stand contradiction.
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.

(When I read this I immediately heard BBCSherlock!John Watson’s voice saying, “He’ll outlive God to get the last word.”  Doyle would have agreed that the line was right on the money as regards Holmes. But from the writer side, I also wonder if Doyle wasn’t a little annoyed here at Guiterman “not getting the meta”. A fictional detective twitting other fictional detectives for their failings as if he was a real person? That takes a special sense of humor, and a certain level of auctorial cojones. )

…Over time this kind of error, by itself, would have become irritating enough. But there were other stresses in place. Doyle was under increasing personal pressure as Holmes’s ascent into the position of one of literature’s great characters began gathering speed.  Doyle’s father – with whom his relationship had always been problematic – was institutionalized and close to death from chronic alcoholism. Doyle’s wife’s health, always delicate, had become much more so since the birth of her first child. And the periodical publishers who’d been bringing his work out were terrified of anything happening that might slow down the output of their cash cow. After all, the appearance of Doyle’s name on a copy of the Strand Magazine would routinely boost its circulation by 100,000 copies. Once when Doyle returned to London from France on the cross-Channel ferry, he found every fellow British passenger he saw “clutching a copy” of the Strand… and he knew why. Just imagine yourself into his position for a moment. You’re famous. You’re rich, and getting richer. And you hate what’s getting you that way…

Trying to relieve a little of the pressure as gracefully as he could so that he’d have time to do the writing he did want to do while coping with the trouble at home, Doyle tried scaring off the Strand’s editors by setting truly insane prices for his Holmes work. But this tactic backfired: his publisher just whipped out the checkbook and paid Doyle his asking price. With his wife’s medical expenses to think of, and halfway through the building of a new house, Doyle gave in to the pressure… but with rather ill grace. He was feeling increasingly trapped by the necessity of servicing a character who was rapidly becoming perceived as more real than his creator. In 1891 Doyle wrote to his mother and said, in passing, “I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”


He never liked that hat anyway.

She wrote back and said “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!” And for the time being, he didn’t mention the issue to her again. But while visiting Switzerland that year, Doyle was already location-scouting for the solution to what he hoped would be his Final Problem with Holmes. As early as 1892 he went walking among the clifflike ice-towers of the Findelen glacier near Zermatt, and discussed the impending character assassination in the abstract with his fellow walkers, one of whom argued against it earnestly but without making a dent in Doyle’s resolve. In 1893 he visited the Reichenbach Falls for the first time, and there he made his decision. “It was a terrible place, and one I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him.” Doyle headed back to England in August and started work on “The Adventure of the Final Problem”.

If there had been any last-gasp chance that Holmes’s death sentence might have been commuted – any last resurgence of Doyle’s ambivalence toward his troublesome character, for he admired him as much as he resented him —  I think it was destroyed by the traumatic events of the following month. Doyle’s wife developed a severe cough and chest pain. A local physician was disturbed enough by this to refer her to a specialist in Harley Street, and Louise Doyle was quickly diagnosed with the form of tuberculosis of the lungs then known as “galloping consumption” – the worst form, normally quickly fatal. What kind of a blow this was for Doyle, who as a doctor should have recognized the symptoms long before, you can imagine. In any case, he wasn’t the kind to give up easily no matter how bad the diagnosis looked. The preferred treatment – for those who could afford it – was relocation to Switzerland for a prolonged “high altitude cure”. Some time between the last week in September and the beginning of November 1893, when Doyle and his wife arrived at the mountain TB sanatorium near Davos, the Consulting Detective and the Napoleon of Crime plunged down the Falls together, and Arthur Conan Doyle closed the book on Sherlock Holmes.

Or so he thought. The public responded with a massive uproar that amazed everybody, especially Doyle. Twenty thousand people canceled their subscriptions to the Strand. Hate mail arrived at the magazine’s editorial offices by the sackload. Thousands of people wrote Doyle directly, begging him to reverse Holmes’s death. Many people took to wearing black armbands in the street, in mourning for Sherlock Holmes.  The death of the world’s first consulting detective was taken up by the wire services and reported all over the world as front-page news. Obituaries for Holmes appeared everywhere.  Petitions were signed and “Keep Holmes Alive” clubs were formed. Not since the demise of Dickens’ Little Nell had a literary death had such powerful effect right across the whole language area of its readership, and not since then had a fandom made itself so obvious in its grief. The like would not be seen again until the deaths of Spock and Dumbledore.

Doyle resisted the pressure as best he could, thinking it would surely taper off after a while. But it was unrelenting, continuing for years: his creation had already become more powerful than he could possibly have imagined. In 1903, having in between reluctantly written and published “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (as a backstory “untold tale”) to huge acclaim, Doyle finally relented and wrote “The Empty House”, in which the Final Problem was revealed not to be as final as previously thought. Which leaves us looking toward the present day, and the BBC’s Sherlock.


Jeremy Brett as Holmes: Paget could have drawn him

The structure and chemistry of the situation is naturally different here, as the new series is both restatement and celebration of the original, wittily and unflinchingly updated for the 21st century.  Now, in 1893 almost no one knew what Doyle was planning to do to his creation at the Reichenbach Falls (this despite the news having been sneaked in a magazine called Tit-Bits the previous month:  possibly the readers dismissed the news as impossible). Obviously things are different now. Yet over in Tumblr — that great hotbed of unbridled and completely indulged fandoms — there’ve been a lot of messages over the past couple/few weeks either begging DON’T SPOIL ME, or foreshadowing the inescapable results sans spoilers but with a sort of gloomy yet desperate relish.  (In reaction to the DON’T SPOIL MEs I’ve seen a few astonished queries along the lines of “WTF, haven’t you read the stories?!”  — and I keep having to remind myself that yes, it’s entirely possible that lots of people haven’t.  Or haven’t even seen the excellent Jeremy Brett Holmes of the 80’s. Brett has until now been the definitive Holmes for me. Now I find myself strangely torn.)

But there’s no question that the fans are as attached to Sherlock (and to John Watson) as ever the readers of 1893 were to the version in what Holmes fans were the very first to refer to as “the Canon”.  And they have good reason. It certainly helps to have such a strong cast, with such range, and scripts as tough-minded and elegantly constructed  as these have been. But again and again you have to come back to the strength of the actors. Writing the last twenty pages of the “Reichenbach Fall” script must have been a bitch, and probably a bitch again and again, as it got hammered on to make it as perfect as it could be. But even a strong script can be deprived of a lot of its striking power by bad acting. Fortunately “Reichenbach” had no such problems, and if we got down to it, doubtless Peter and I could argue for hours over whether Benedict Cumberbatch’s or Martin Freeman’s performances were more powerful or heartrending in those final scenes. Probably it’s a great timesaver that we don’t roll that way: we’re quite happy to just get on with business while waiting for 2013 – there being a peculiar pleasure in watching another writer do what he does uniquely well. (And that’s as far as I’m going in the analysis direction on this episode or this series. Enough electrons will splatter themselves across the screens of far better or more driven analysts than I in the days and weeks to come.)


Via carororo on Tumblr

Elsewhere in the online world, though, and particularly on Tumblr, the grief is breaking out all over. And it’s wrenching, some of it: despite knowing that Sherlock miraculously (“one more miracle, Sherlock…”) did not take the fall. All you have to do is follow this link to see some of the more recent reactions. Some people are philosophical. Some are incoherent. Some threaten to assault the writing staff. (And this too has its resonances: think of all the hate mail that poor Doyle had to deal with, not to mention the one report of the lady who hunted Doyle down in the public street and clouted him with an umbrella.) Many of the postings are eloquently fraught.  There is a lot of Figuring It Out stuff going on. And what fascinates me most is that, in this  somewhat-alternate Canon, the grief is fairly evenly split between Sherlock and John – and not just among those preoccupied with the slashiness of the pair. (“Bachelor?  Bachelor? Confirmed bachelor??!” …Never let it be said that Moffat and Gatiss are afraid of committing unabashed and wickedly cheerful fanservice when it bloody well suits them.) Friendship and its durability, and sacrifice and its price, are the main themes being discussed. Whatever else can be said about a TV show, any entertainment that gets people to discuss such issues in depth and detail is surely worth watching.

Keep Calm and Believe in Sherlock
At the author’s tumblr

Meanwhile: I’m looking forward to sitting down in a couple of days and reviewing the episode, shot by shot, and doing some Figuring It Out stuff myself: for it’s always a pleasure to watch professionals at work, while trying to second-guess them a bit.

And who knows… maybe my avatar needs a black armband.

ETA: Once again at Tumblr, see also this charming development — not just the fandom speaking, but a new metafandom: Believe in Sherlock (Doyle was friends with J. M. Barrie: the creator of Peter Pan would probably also be charmed.)


*Disclaimer: yes, I’ve written for the BBC.  And I had a great time.

**Most of the biographical material above comes from Martin Booth’s excellent bio The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle. It contains a ton of info that isn’t found elsewhere, and I heartily recommend this biography to other Holmes fans who’re looking for more information about Doyle’s complex and busy life, and the way Sherlock Holmes affected it. In particular, this bio was the source for some background information that turns up in On Her Majesty’s Wizardly Service / To Visit The Queen.

 

 

 

The Affair of the Black Armbands (or, The Death of Sherlock Holmes and How The World Took It) was last modified: July 27th, 2015 by Diane Duane
January 17, 2012
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AdministriviaComputer stuffebooksEuropeHome lifeIrelandKindleNewsOnline life

An interesting couple/few days

As some of you may have heard, this has been an unusual week in this corner of county Wicklow. At some point in the recent past, someone skimmed my bank card — whether during the pre-Christmas period or more recently, we’re still not sure. In the last few days, someone started playing around with a clone of the card, using it tentatively in a few Dublin-area locations. Then, having determined that the clone was workable, they immediately used it to empty the household joint account that Peter and I share.

Ouch.

I should say that I’m no stranger to identity theft, though it’s been a while since it happened, and that was in the literary mode. That set of events*, though it dragged on over a number of years, was  far less annoying. This… this feels more like discovering that someone’s not only broken into your house, but gone through your underwear drawer. And then you  sit up late into the night, trying to retrace your steps for the last three months, and thinking: That balky cash machine when you last went into Dublin for the six-weekly haircut, the one you had to try to get the card into a few times — was that actually a skimmer, and you weren’t just holding your card upside down, as you thought? If not that, then when? You’re always paranoid about covering up your PIN. When did you slip? Or…surely it can’t be one of the machines down in the shopping town — in places you trust? The local supermarket? The good friendly pub with the free wifi? Argh. ARGH. And how much other stuff were the skimmers  able to find out about me, us, every time they stuck their card in that damn machine? AUUUGH….

In the fifteen minutes or so after I discovered that the account was empty, and had the bank staff cancel my card… well, I was not a happy woman. But miserable turned quickly to the desire to Do Something Useful to solve the problem. So I did this and this.

And folks responded. I had no idea how many folks were going to say “WTF?!” and respond. You people, to be brief, ROCK. You rock very hard. Many of you chose to forego the offered discount (and said as much in the clear). Many others said you didn’t know I had an ebook store and were happy to find out, even if it had to be this way. There were tons of other kindly messages of support, on G+ and Twitter and elsewhere.

Can I just say THANK YOU?

Good. THANK YOU. You folks have made the difference, and the household problem is thoroughly solved. If you were contemplating a purchase, please note that there’s now no urgency about it at all at this end: please feel comfortable about standing down.  But, regardless,  thank you for being concerned. And of course, feel free to stop by the store over the next month or two and see what new things there might be.

I also want to thank — at the risk of starting to sound like a denizen of a runaway awards ceremony —  our online colleagues and friends and fellow writers who didn’t have to boost the signal personally, but did so, through your own blogs, and Tweeting, and even through listservs and such. You guys too rock (and though you should know it, you probably don’t spend your days thinking about it: you’re too busy writing). If you have a moment to update your posts to point back to this one so that people will know the situation’s now under control, please do so.

And to you, and all the others who shared or passed the message on, or stopped in and bought something, however large or small:

Thanks again. Those flowers up there? They’re for you. (And to the Swiss contingent: Merci vielmals: mwah, mwah, mwah.) Peter thanks you (he’ll be blogging about this in his own place shortly), and I thank you, and Mr. Goodman, the White Cat, thanks you. Mostly by demanding fish, but that’s how he rolls.

(…Oh, also: Some of you have let us know about formatting problems in one or another of the files you’ve downloaded, particularly the first chapter of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses. Thanks for that: one thing we’ve been missing has been more comprehensive info about how our conversions have been working on devices besides the plain-vanilla Nooks and Kindles, and codes that produce no-problems text in some readers have been causing others to have conniptions. Our staff are compiling your notes and will be getting to work on the affected files in short order. If you notice a reading problem with a file, please use your download link to pick up another copy of it in four or five days and see if the problem has been solved.)

And well.. thanks again.


*The earlier ID-theft perp was a woman who knew Star Trek really well, and knew my works really well, and started going from convention to convention in the mid-80’s impersonating me, able to do so because up until that point very few of my books had my picture in them. Her impersonations of me stretched literally from sea to shining sea. I first heard about her setting up signing sessions for herself in Hawaii; she then had a flirtation with the East Coast before settling down in Omaha — I kid you not, at the Strategic Air Command base there: a vital part of her modus operandi was impersonating military personnel.

After a few years of her playing stay-one-jump-ahead with the MI people, fans finally caught her — in particular, fellow fanzine fans who knew I wasn’t living in the US any more; though the catching did involve some truly surreal scenes. One was the long phone conversation I had with USAF military intelligence officers while sitting on the stairs at Peter’s Mum’s house outside Belfast (and they were most confused about WhyTF they were calling Belfast). Another was when I heard from my Trek editors that the FBI had called the Pocket Books 1-800 sales number to find out whether I really existed, or was just one more figment of this woman’s imagination — her pseudonym, as she often told those she was scamming. Janet Kagan, God rest her, was also one of her “pseudonyms”.

…Short version of the rest of this story: a fellow fanzine-friend heard from a bookstore’s assistant manager in Omaha (also a fanzine person) who had a brush with the woman. She notified me: I notified the MI people: and though they were dubious about whether she’d still be on site when they arrived, they swooped and (much to their own surprise) caught her, and sent her away to do time in one of the five or six states where she’d been perpetrating identity thefts on both military personnel and civilians. When the MI folks picked her up, they found shopping bags full of fake ID and applications for more, including — the MI people told me later — a passport application on which in the “father’s name” field she had listed “Leonard Nimoy.” …All of which just goes to show you: don’t screw with the fans.

Fortunately this woman’s  antics  cost me nothing but repeated annoyance as I attended conventions where she’d previously passed through, and found people looking at me suspiciously, plainly wondering if this was actually the genuine Diane Duane, or whether another one might be along shortly. However, there are some hints of late that she might have finally gotten out of stir and started up her old game again. So if I do Google myself a lot, it’s mostly to find out if I’ve recently been somewhere that I wasn’t…

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An interesting couple/few days was last modified: August 13th, 2017 by Diane Duane
January 14, 2012
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Computer stuffCurrent eventsNewsOnline lifeYoung Wizards

A farewell: Steve Jobs

I started suspecting some weeks back that we might be close to losing Steve Jobs. I never suspected we were this close, though. This morning’s news comes as a shock, and is a source of great sadness.

From the time I first got my hands on an Apple product some three decades ago — I was lent a IIc by a friend — I realized that these machines were something unusual and special,  especially in terms of being forward-looking and easy to use. And later on, when other friends would come to me for advice on the subject, I would often recommend that they think about getting an Apple. (Bob Greenberger, for example, can vouch for how, in company with a group of  DC Comics folk, I happily cooperated in dragging Len Wein into an Apple dealership on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, the goal being to make him buy a Mac.)

I can’t now remember when the idea came to me that the Powers that Be in the Young Wizards universe might have a favorite brand of computer. But then the issue came up during the outlining of High Wizardry… and knowing a little of the thinking that supposedly lay behind the Apple logo, there was no other possible candidate for the branding on the new computer that would house the version of the Wizard’s Manual offered to Dairine Callahan.

Over subsequent books — and as new devices like the WizPod occasionally added themselves to the series — a few fans here and there have speculated that I must be a very serious Apple geek, or (humorously)  that I was being paid by the company for the product placement. Lest anybody should be having doubts about this, people should know that the only money that’s ever changed hands between me and Apple would have been when I bought my first iPod some years back. All the computers in our household are PCs of one strain or another, and most of our phones are Android-based. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t had my eye on the new iPod Touch for a while… since if it’s good enough for my characters, it’s certainly good enough for me.

I very much doubt Steve Jobs ever knew about this affectionate running gag. If he had known, I don’t think he’d have minded, as I suspect he’d have understood what I was saluting: a certain visionary quality about both the objects he helped create and the thinking behind them. In any case, the trend will be continuing. In the next YW book, the first WizPads will be appearing casually in the background (along with some perhaps predictable interplatform sniping from wizards more firmly in the Android camp). And with today’s events in mind, it wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere along the line there’s a mention that the Powers that Be have recently “reclaimed an out-assigned member of their design team” for important work elsewhere.

…As the wizards would say: Go well, cousin Steve. And thanks for reminding us that it really is possible to change the world for the better if you just keep deciding every day that you’re not going to take “no” for an answer.

A farewell: Steve Jobs was last modified: October 6th, 2011 by Diane Duane
October 6, 2011
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FoodOnline life

Because sometimes you just gotta LOL

Click on the image for the original. (via gatoscastorsepatos at Tumblr)

 

 

 

Because sometimes you just gotta LOL was last modified: July 31st, 2011 by Diane Duane
July 31, 2011
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CatsOnline life

The Owl and the Pussycat

Look at the headbumps, the rubbing, the goofery. These guys enjoy each other.

 

 

 

The Owl and the Pussycat was last modified: July 30th, 2011 by Diane Duane
July 30, 2011
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