Zen Master: Blog

It's common to use the asterisk '*' to mean multiplication. If you need to square a number, maybe '50', you say '50*50'.

If there's more, you keep doing that, maybe to multiply what you got by Pi, you would add '*3.14' to your formula to get the area in square units of some circle.

This doesn't work, here on SOL. If you want something in bold you surround it by those same asterisks again....

So, instead of my formula looking like '50 times 50 times Pi' what got shown on the screen was '50503.14' which makes no sense to anyone unless you know what happened. I have re-posted Chapter 16 using 'x' instead of '*'.

Oh, and I fixed a minor continuity error I saw. I think I'm paying my proofreaders too much.

-ZM

This website has recently added an internal email system. It works great for conversations. Feedback to the authors from a story get sent as new emails. Authors can reply, and those get sent back as emails to whoever sent the original comment.
I keep getting emails from 'CoullPert' with issues he (she?) has found in my latest story "Jason's Tale". Many are valid and I fix them in my original 'master' copy. Others I explain in my replies. However, the website's email system shows that CoullPert has not yet read any of my replies. What's the point of replying if he isn't going to read them?

-ZM

A reader just pointed out that Chapter 2 of "The Return Home" seems incomplete. Huh? I checked. Yeah, THAT's not right. The original files from when I posted the story back in 2012, more than six years ago now, well, they are fine, so I have submitted Chapter 2 for re-posting. Hopefully that takes care of it.
For those who are interested, back in the mid-80's I got involved with a married woman. It turned out that she was involved with quite a few men, and when it all came out I ended up with her. I had a wonderful couple of years taking her from sluttery to slavery, and "The Return Home" is a thinly fictionalized autobiography of that time.
I still occasionally do some work on its sequel "Scenes From The Road". If I ever finish it, the teaser will be:
"Much of the Mike & Shirley stuff is autobiographical and mostly true. However, THIS one is pure fantasy. It's completely made up. I never kidnapped anyone, I never drove halfway across the country with a naked woman tied up beside me, and I have no idea how my uncle met his girlfriend."

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. :)

-ZM

I've started releasing "Jason's Tale" on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. It'll be a while, since the two parts have more than 60 chapters. The Prologue and Chapter 1 should show up tomorrow.
The acknowledgements section is gonna be a bit longer than usual for this one. A lot of people need to be thanked for their help.

-ZM

My latest, a novel set in Lazlo Zalezac's shared universe "Damsels in Distress", is beginning to come back from the proofreaders. Apparently it isn't as perfect as I thought. All the fixes are easy, though. Grammar, spelling, etc. I know, I'm tempting the fates by saying that. Still, I will start posting it as soon as I've heard from the last one.
-ZM