Zen Master: Blog

One of my readers asked what I was up to (hint, hint). Okay, I guess that's a fair question.
As I've mentioned before, I really enjoyed reading all the stories in The Thinking Horndog's "Swarm Cycle", but it bothered me that it was about an interstellar war and not one of the authors appeared to know anything about ships. The only veterans writing Swarm stories were all clearly ground-pounders. They knew far more than I do about war from the front lines, but they desperately needed someone to inject a little "here's how it would have to work" about the ships they ride around in.
That turned into "Independent Command". My intent was to simply show the other authors how ships would be run, how squadrons and task forces would be organized, how the REMFs (rear-echelon, uh, weenies) would support the fighting forces, etc, etc, etc.
Well, I kept asking questions about what had been previously been decided while I was writing IC, and when the smoke had cleared _I_ was one of the "experts" that the other authors came to, to make sure that their shiny new story fit in with the others. Sure.... I've got a lot of notes.
We still don't have all the answers, though. We needed at least two more stories that explain things. One will be about how the aliens first contacted us humans. I've suggested an outline but that's gonna be a comedy of errors and I don't think I write comedy well. I have suggested to TH over email and even over lunch once that he write that one so that it goes the way he wants, and he suggested that it would get written faster if I handed the monkeys at the Tampa Zoo several typewriters and all the crack they needed.
The other story is going to be how, once the world leaders get over their shock at not being the most important men in the universe, we actually got the Confederacy Navy and Marine Corps started. I can write that one. It's almost done, in fact.
I'm calling it "The First Command", usually written as "TFC" because I'm lazy. All that's left is to argue out a couple of "how do we want this to work" items in the author's group, then write it up however we decide. Some of the items I have strong opinions on, as in it's going my way unless TH emails me and uses his veto. Other items I frankly don't care, just make up your minds and tell me. If no one else on the author's group cares, I'll flip a coin. And rip their heads off and shit down their windpipes next year when they bitch about my high-handed decisions.....

I'm also working on a novel-length expansion of that scene I published named "Ending This Mess". That really wasn't on my to-do list, but it occasionally grows when no one is watching it. And, dammit, my last excuse for not writing the rest of that story went away this fall, when we hammered out how the 4th Battle of Earthat and the subsequent Battle for Earth would go. There were several authors who wanted to write about that, and they were all holding off until we had the big picture agreed to. Well, we came to a consensus, TH blessed it, and now we're supposed to be back writing again. Dammit.

Anyway, TFC should be done by the end of the year, and ETM should come out sometime in 2015. Sorry. I've tried to write short stories. They just don't work. Either it stays small and I kill it as worthless, or it grows enough to fight back, and it becomes a novel. Did I mention that I can't concentrate on one thing long enough to finish it? I have nine other (non-Swarm) stories in work, four of them well over 100 KB and none of them want to end.

-ZM

Back in November I wrote about a new author who had asked me to edit his first story, a "Zombie Apocalypse" tale set in Australia. Now, when we say 'edit' here on SoL we really mean what the outside world calls 'proofreading'. Out in the paid world, the editor is in charge. If he says that paragraph is wasted space it's going away. A proofreader, on the other hand, is just reading the draft to find all the speling and gramer issues. The proofreader is definately not in charge.
Back here in SoL-land, the author retains final authority for his story. All us 'editors' can do is point out that this word is mis-spelled, that sentence fragment needs a verb, and so on. We can point out that Raul's best friend is named Phyllis in Chapter 2, but it has somehow morphed into Phoebe by Chapter 4. And so on. It's the author's decision to make the changes he wants, or retain the original if he wants.
In this case, I think I overwhelmed AgroDavid with all the red ink in the manuscript I sent him, because he stopped emailing me after a month or two. So, any spelling or grammar issues in the first couple of chapters are my fault, but I won't take the blame for the later ones. :)
Still, I said at the time that it was a good fun read, and it made more sense than any other zombie story I'd ever read. It's finally up, titled "Life, Love, and All That." You can find it on his shiny new AgroDavid page or in the "updated serials" list. It's not perfect, but I'm not pointing any issues out here. Read it and find them yourselves. It's a great story and I really enjoyed getting to read it first. I know that, with this experience behind him, his next story will be even better.

So, okay, neither one is exactly short, but compared to most of my other work they are practically flashes. BOGO is about, well, a good BOGO deal I picked up. Shauna, on the other hand, is all about realizing that my neighbor wasn't exactly quite right, and I could benefit from that.
Neither story is what I'm spostabe working on, but I was out in the middle of nowhere for a couple of weeks (actually, working on the family farm described in "Johnny's Girls") with no TV, no cell coverage, and no Internet access, and those were the things my muse insisted on working on so I finished them just so I could get back to what I was spostabe doing....

-ZM

I've had this email address for a long time. I don't want to change it. However, it no longer works for everything. For the last couple of years, several of the biggest email hosts (Yahoo, Gmail, MS, etc) have been working on a solution for spam and phishing. They have developed one named DMARC that they claim can do what they want.
It allows Yahoo, for instance, to tell a receiver if this email from Nez_Retsam@Yahoo.com, for instance, really came from him (well, actually from Yahoo). The receiver can take the answer (yes or no) and make a decision. Further, the host can publish "policies" in the DNS that tell the receiver what the host thinks that the receiver should do with emails that fail, like 'trust' or 'monitor'.
Last weekend, about 10 days ago, Yahoo decided that no one except them mattered, and the published a policy that said "If email claiming to be from Yahoo fails DMARC you should reject it."
Now, that simple policy statement broke EVERY SINGLE FUCKING MAIL LIST SYSTEM IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE. See, if I post an email (using my Yahoo address) to my church's mailing list saying "My iron broke; does anyone have one I can borrow?", the list will turn around and send it to everyone else on the church's email list so that I can hear from people who no longer iron, right? And, it shows up in everyone's in-box as an email from me because that's what email lists do, they redistribute email giving receivers a choice between "reply to sender" and "reply to list".
Now, since April 5th anyone with email hosted by Yahoo, Google/Gmail, MS/Hotmail, LinkedIn, ComCast, and a few other large email providers will check with Yahoo and be told that no, that email did NOT come from me (or Yahoo), and they don't know where it came from. Oh, yeah, you should reject that spam. So 60% of the world's email providers all bouncing emails back to your church's small mail-list will cause it to become blacklisted immediately as a spam-spewer eve if it doesn't crash from all the bounces.
That "innocent protective policy" broke every mailing list in the world. It even broke the IETF's main discussion list, because, you know, some of those engineers use Yahoo for this non-paying volunteer work. When their email managers finally got that figured out, their emergency suggestion to list operators everywhere was to "block anyone with a Yahoo address from posting until Yahoo fixes that".
Now, surely Yahoo will realize this was a mistake, right? I've been waiting for them to rescind that policy, but now Yahoo has finally published a clarifying letter on their own site. It basically says "We're doing this to control spam. Fuck anyone who uses email lists". And, I'm pretty active in a couple of email lists.
So, I'm moving to "ZM@TampaAD.net". I'll keep the Yahoo address for now, but as I get things moved over I'll check it less and less until I forget about it. If you want to contact me and don't want to see how often I check something broken, please use the new one.

Well, the title pretty much says everything I might put here. The proofreaders are done, I have fixed many of the issues they raised, we took a couple to the authors' list and got resolutions. It's time!