Forum: Author Hangout

it involves the heavy use of typos

FYI, Those are just a few of the pennames she used on SOL. She also wrote and posted stories to other sites using names that she did not use on SOL.

i can imagine bringing up that you write discriptive gay porn in one of those coffee clatch meetings.

Guilty one one count - 'Man Bitch' - which I actually intended as a political allegory. But a certain non-reader said they wouldn't read 'Gay!' because the title meant the story contained male-male sex. I wonder whether other folks think the same.

AJ

AJ

If a Fairy Godmother were to post my story on Amazon, with that title and the obvious front cover of a pink poodle, I think some of the more extreme gay/lesbian activists might express significant displeasure :(

AJ

But a certain non-reader said they wouldn't read 'Gay!' because the title meant the story contained male-male sex.

The description had turned me off, actually and honestly, but then (since you were posting on here about it), I started reading it today. Damned fine piece of writing, and a very engaging story.

Thank you. How much do I owe you for that endorsement?

Feel free to suggest improvements to the story description, codes etc, although I'd prefer not to give the 'twist' away.

AJ

Pen names is a good way of keeping the writer's differenig types of stories seperate. a dark snuff story, would turn off way too many people from ever reading further an otherwise normal writer's library.

That's pretty much why I was asking. I'm not working on a snuff story, but I'm pretty much taking someone who could be very nice, and is going to end up ... well, not evil in his own mind, but he's not going to do nice things to other people. And yeah, that will include killing people that piss him off.

Remember, we almost always write about the mad genius that ends up getting stopped? What about the mad genius that DOESN'T get stopped?

I wonder what your writer's group would think of your shorter stories. You could give one or two to them to contrast erotic literature with what they write. :)

Of course some of them may think you are the author. :(

I wouldn't want any of my writers' group, where, for example, the f-word always draws a shocked reaction, to read my stories.

Really? Do you belong to a heavily Christian writer's group? Profanity now seems de rigueur, just as it does for most comedians (i.e. your not serious if you don't use it). As such, I typically include select (but not regular) profanity in ALL of my stories.

But yes, I can see why writers would choose a different name for different genres as I tend to have a specific genre that I like to read and I tend to ignore even thinking about reading out-with of that genre.

I knew one author, now deceased, who used pseudonyms when the quality of his writing started slipping, and he didn't want his newer writings to badly flavor his previous works. Just another example of reasons used.

In dead tree publishing I am aware of two authors who used more than one pen name.

Here is a list I found while trying to recall Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. (Sorry it's on Wikipedia (spit!))

AJ

That list misses out KJ Parker, which is a pen name for Tom Holt. Those books are quite brutal with the MC in one making a bow out of his sons body... So you can see why he decided to keep the writing separate...LOL

I have no idea how you would go about making a bow of any significant power from human bones.

I wonder if you are missing the point somewhat. It's not so much the effectiveness of the source material as in who would even consider doing it in the first place. Especially using your son for parts.

The Engineer Trilogy is a good read, brutal in places, but is one of the best character driven plots I have read in years. A story where shit happens, no-one is perfect and life is definitely not a box of chocolates. Disney it is not, and it's all the better for it.

For the record, I was gutted when I found out that Tom Holt was the author, as I don't actually like T Holt books. I don't rate him very highly as an author, and yet Parker is in my top 5. Go figure.

Why do anything?

Yes there are easier options, why have an army when you can use nuclear weapon, why cycle to work when you can take a car, why go to work when you can doss on the doll, why buy a film/music CD when you can pirate it.

For some the journey is more important than the destination. And as for effectiveness, speak to any craftperson in any profession and look at their tools. You will notice that although they have the choice of using a cheap tool (which will do the same job) they always plump for the better quality. It's part of what makes them a a craftperson.

Yes, they could make a bow from a branch and a shoelace, but that wouldn't make for an interesting book and wouldn't make the title "The belly of the bow" as powerful if you didn't know the string was made from his intestine...

because the nuke can't hold/defend territory.

If you use a nuke, you wouldn't need to, as there wouldn't BE an enemy...

If you use a nuke, you wouldn't need to, as there wouldn't BE an enemy...

That depends a LOT upon what kind of nuke and where the enemy troops were located. It sounds weird to talk about tactical nuclear weapons, but they exist - as opposed to the strategic nuclear weapons that are designed to destroy fairly decent sized areas.

Two things to keep in mind are weapon size and blast radius. Nukes are really great things for terrorizing civilian populations. Let's pick on St. Louis, Missouri, today. 1 MT airburst right on the arch. (Sorry, Defiance!) There's now a very nice 8 miles in diameter area where pretty much almost everything from a building perspective is destroyed, and everyone in that area is dead or dying. Mostly, however, NOT due to the bomb or radiation, but due to the other effects, such buildings collapsing. (And a couple of happy guys that drowned in the beer vats at the Anheuser-Busch brewery.)

Wow, horrendous! Terrible! Oh, and Six Flags over Mid-America, which is 20 miles away, is completely unaffected. The EMP would seriously mess up anything at Lambert Airport, but the runways themselves are going to be fine.

Here's where the OTHER issue with nukes comes into play. That which you do not kill immediately is only incredibly pissed off, because they ARE going to die. And they may as well take you with them. What does that mean? Simple. Congratulations, you destroyed a bunch of buildings and gave a lot of people a dosage of 1000 rem. That's an effectively 100% fatal dose ... in a few days. Not today, though. Think of the war movies, where the second and third waves of troops were sent in unarmed, because they'd pick up the weapons of someone that was killed. You now have half a million pissed off people that are GOING to die - but not today. (And not even Arya Stark can save them.)

On the old electronic organ I used to play, it'd be 5 8 10 12 10 12 - CHARGE! (The numbers represented the musical notes. La da Da DA, DA!) That was actually both the Soviet AND American military philosophy of triage. Shit, this soldier is going to die. Here, son, take your rifle and go make a suicide charge on the enemy. In the meantime, your buddy here only got a 100 rem dose, so he's going to be puking his guts out in a couple of hours, but he'll probably live. You won't.

Side note - I know WAY too much about this stuff, because this is what I used to do when I was in the Army.

You forgot about secondary damage. Mainly fire. History has shown repeatedly in both nuclear and non-nuclear bombardment that the biggest damage is fire. Think London/Dresden/Nagasaki etc. The resultant firestorm in those cities did more damage and killed more than the actual initial bombardment.

Cities are now so heavily populated that the death toll would be incredible. Data is (thankfully) sparse, but you can use other cases to extrapolate likely outcomes. For instance you can use 9/11 and the data from it, to work out the likely scenario of having 20+ sky-scapers collapsing all at once and the effect the resultant concrete dust cloud -that would be heavily radiated- would have over the surrounding area. And then multiply that by several cities.

No-one knows how a nuclear reactor will react to a nuclear strike, as no-one has really wanted to try it to see what happens. It's going to be messy, that's for sure.

If you hit hard and fast in the early morning (say about 3am) you could reduce a country to rubble in the space of ten minutes with not a great deal of missiles. All you have to target are the majour population centres, water supply and power supply. You can leave the countryside alone as without the support from cities (manufacturing, financial) they're screwed anyway.

With no power, it's almost impossible to communicate effectively, with no water, you can't fight the fires and treat the injured. The country side will be aflame as well as the cities (think of the problems America and Australia are having with forest fires at the moment). Communication would be limited to battery, so pretty short range. No cell phone, or internet, so organising aid/relief would be a nightmare. The banks and all their data would most likely be gone. The national currency would collapse along with the stock market so those abroad would find themselves with no access to their bank accounts and their national currency effectively junk. The central bank would cease to exist, so there would be nothing to back up the currency (hence why it would effectively be junk). The gold reserves would be a target, so even if it did survive a strike, it's probably an irradiated molten pile.

They wouldn't be half as badly screwed as surviving cities would be if food production was the priority target.

Food production AND distribution. The really large cities are completely dependent upon shipping adequate food into them every single day. You interrupt the distribution and most cities will be down to the sole remaining source of food - long pig - within a week.

I'm especially reminded of this as Classy Conversions came up on my main page as a story suggestion. If you haven't read it before - well, it's not for everyone, that's for damned sure.

You forgot about secondary damage.

No, I really didn't. That's particularly why I picked St. Louis for that example. It's down in a hole. That's why Six-Flags will be completely unharmed, it's down in ANOTHER hole, with a big mountain in between.

Secondary thermal effects (that's the military way of saying fires caused by the bombs) are going to be an issue, but not the issue you think.

While the firestorm that hit Dresden was bad, you can't really use it, because there was no single point source. We bombed the crap out of the whole town, with sources everywhere. While Nagasaki and Hiroshima are the only two examples of cities nuked in anger, the U.S. Army did lots of tests after the war, making whole mock towns out in the deserts and blowing them up with nukes to see the effects.

Net result - the bombings in Japan were effective due to the use of wood construction (think Tokyo firebombing). A building that DID survive in Hiroshima - within a few hundred yards of ground zero - was about the only building made with truly modern construction techniques.

Note that I'm not arguing that there won't be massive casualties if you bomb the cities of a nation. There will be. The data isn't sparse, you just have to have had the appropriate clearances to see it. (Again, what did I do in the military?)

You still don't conquer a nation that way - you only really, really piss them off, so they want revenge. You still have to have an Army come in afterwards to occupy the land.

Oh, and if you're referring to the National Gold Reserves at Fort Knox, that building is hardened to resist an airburst. Other banks gold reserves are in their own vaults, and those vaults are also typically hardened to resist literally everything except a direct hit (and I mean within 100 yards - anything further away and the vault survives).

You could tell us, but then you'd have to kill us? :)

Sorry, I thought I'd mentioned it in my previous post. I was a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Warfare guy. So if you have any questions about anthrax, VX or GB, and nukes ... I probably can't answer them specifically (security issues), but I know way too much about them. :)

Maybe we should start a separate topic for this discussion? Since not a lot of this is about pen-names....LOL

I to was briefly involved in NBC warfare preparation. I had the choice/chance of going further in depth, but to be honest, eating and shitting drills in NBC kit were not (still aren't) my thing. I went on to do better things.

I wouldn't bomb farmland, from a technical point it's a waste of time an resources. Look at farming kit these days it's full of computers that control the engines and all the sowing and harvesting tech and none of it is EMP shielded. Speak to a farmer of this 'wonderful' hi tech kit and they will complain about how their very expensive bit of kit can be buggered by one PCB not working. Most of these parts are made (and stored) in urban areas (along with the mechanics), which hypothetically have just been bombed.

If you have the clearances you say you have, you will have seen the same reports I have, and will understand when I say they are not pretty. They are not.

Whilst I can't speak for the USA, the UK needs just 11 missile strikes to effectively bring it to it's knees and put England back to the Victorian era. Just one in London would take out both the government and financial centre which would affect not just the UK but the whole of Europe. it's supposed to be 'stress tested' but that is just a fallacy. look at the damage Leman Brothers did to global financial markets and that is but a drop in the ocean compared to the damage the complete removal of one stock market would have.

In fact, the stock markets are probably the biggest anti-nuclear deterrent going. They are so inter-meshed with central banks that the digital fallout would be pretty catastrophic to every nation going. Most of the reports I read were politically downplayed, glossing over the reality with fancy projections and computer models that failed to model the human element. Banks and power stations are heavily reliant on the internet, which would be one of the first casualties of a nuclear strike. No information, no banks, no power, no working fuel pumps or water supplies, every person for themselves. Chaos.

That's the whole joke about the people in charge being in bunkers and controlling the recovery. It doesn't work. It doesn't take much to make a society riot. In the US it just takes one white cop to shoot an un-armed black kid, and people will use it as an excuse to riot and dapple in some five fingered (cash free) shopping.

Riots generally subside because society as a whole quashes them; people need to go to work, need to get food, mortgages need paying etc etc. In a nuclear war, there would be no job, no banks, no mortgages. It would be a country wide free for all. You can't stop that, only wait it out. No one will care about some politician in his/her bunker in the ground telling them to stop.

Nuclear war won't happen between the USA, Russia, China, France or the UK,as all five are too financially inter-meshed. The real threat is from those that aren't financially inter-meshed. Mainly North Korea and possibly Pakistan and India (however Pakistan and India are only interested in killing each other than the rest of the world), but mainly North Korea and any rogue state, especially those with extreme religious views that finds themselves in possession of a nuclear warhead.

Anyway, this topic is depressing me now...LOL

Maybe we should start a separate topic for this discussion?

Thread creep - it happens on here a lot. Not an issue.

In the US it just takes one white cop to shoot an un-armed black kid, and people will use it as an excuse to riot and dapple in some five fingered (cash free) shopping.

Or armed - it really doesn't matter a whole lot. Going that way leads to political discussions, which aren't allowed on here for good reason.

Whilst I can't speak for the USA, the UK needs just 11 missile strikes to effectively bring it to it's knees and put England back to the Victorian era.

Technically, you MIGHT be able to do it 3 - 4 EMP devices. We've had THAT discussion in a different thread, beat that horse to death, resurrected him, then beat it to death again. The 'One Second After' series by William Fortschen is a good read.

I'm going to have to creep a little bit of politics in here, but this also goes in line with a series of books by John Ringo, the 'Troy Rising' series. One of the biggest differences between England and the United States is size. I live in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I could drive from here, to Corpus Christi, Texas, and it'd be about the same as driving from Inverness, Scotland, to Plymouth, England. The size of Oklahoma ALONE is 13,000 square miles larger than England, and Oklahoma City is larger than London, with not even a tenth of the population. (Seriously, 620 vs 607 square miles, 700,000 versus 8.9 million.)

I'm not saying that a dozen nukes along the east and west coasts wouldn't cause a lot of turmoil and chaos in this country. It certainly would. It wouldn't destroy the country, though. Heck, even back in 1983, when the movie 'The Day After' came out, and they hit the U.S. with 300 nukes, it didn't destroy us. Fucked us up a lot. We're just too damned spread out, though, is the problem.

You'll note that this whole thread spread comes from your comment here:

If you use a nuke, you wouldn't need to, as there wouldn't BE an enemy...

Oh, and there's nothing much more fun that full MOPP 4 in Alabama in the spring and summer. (When I was in, the US Army Chemical School was at Ft. McClellan, now it's at Ft Lost in the Woods (Leonard Wood).)

why have an army when you can use nuclear weapon

For the same reason you don't use a flamethrower to kill a fly, you use a flyswatter. If you want to simply destroy the enemy, sure, you can drop a nuke. If you want to defeat him, then you send in an army. There is a difference.

You will notice that although they have the choice of using a cheap tool (which will do the same job) they always plump for the better quality.

Actually, it depends upon the specific job, as well as your budget. My lathe is simply a fairly inexpensive JET. Half of my tools are Sorby, and honestly the other half come from Harbor Freight. My drill press came from Harbor Freight. It's not the tools themselves that make me capable of creating literally artwork out of wood, it's the skill and knowledge behind the hands that USE the tools.

Sorry, when you are talking about making a weapon, in my opinion, effectiveness is necessarily a large part of why anyone would consider doing it.

That would come into play only after you had other options to consider.

I don't rate him very highly as an author, and yet Parker is in my top 5.

It sounds as if T Holt handles certain types of plots better than others. In this case, use of a penname is a plus.

It also misses out Iain Banks and Iain M Banks ;)

AJ

And don't forget Penncil, the Russian version of Penn that works in zero gravity ;)

AJ