Nevil Shute's On the Beach is a strange story. It's horrifying, depressing, but also fascinating. Taking place a few months after a catastrophic nuclear war that spread a lethal quantity of radioactive cobalt dust through the atmosphere, the book follows the last year or so of five characters living in the south end of Australia, as the deadly cloud slowly makes its way to them.

Boldly Strange Pulp Sci-Fi! Review of "First Lensman"

Another dose of E.E. "Doc" Smith's fun (if a bit dated) pulp science fiction epic! First Lensman was published in 1950, after all of the other Lensman books, yet it sits as number two in chronological order of the story.

The book is about the first contact of mankind (and aliens allied with mankind) with the Arisians, and their receipt of the first Lenses.

Nerding Out over Book Dimensions!

Just some silliness for today. I've been trying to put up one video per day on YouTube, and only some of them are related to writing and fiction.

I'm a little bit behind, but I've got a couple of video book reviews that will soon be posted here. I've gone through First Lensman and On the Beach.

Anyway, today's video about "writing" is actually about the effect that (I think) Amazon print-on-demand is having on the book industry. The old-school 4" x 7" book size seems to be getting less popular, and newer, larger sizes are popping in.

I just did a paperback version of The Chasm of Color, and 5" x 8" was the smallest size they allowed!

At first, I thought maybe it was the market adjusting to people being more used to reading on screens, with their 9x16 aspect ratio (in portrait orientation), but maybe not, after looking at it more closely.

Also worth noting that this video was partly inspired by this episode of The Wordy Pair Podcast.

Okay, This Time It's Actually Released! (The Chasm of Color)

Stupid me, I made a post on Monday that said (New Release!) in the title but I ended up looking over my final draft one more time on Tuesday and found a couple more tiny things to change.

Now, finally, The Chasm of Color is out in e-book form!

I'm trying to figure out Amazon's print on demand stuff, so I'll add posts for the paperback and hardcover versions when they come out.

For updates, join my mailing list! You can choose whether to get only emails for Chasm stuff or hop on the general list:

The Plague of Bad "Localizers!"

Trying to create a little topical content each day over on YouTube, and today's rant was relevant.

Talkin' about bad "localizers" and how they use a few difficult issues in Japanese to gaslight people... I'm a mediocre reader of Japanese, but I go through and cover the things that make Japanese a little tricky to translate and provide some references for you (if you want to get into the language yourself).

The Scientific Setting of The Chasm of Color (New Release Imminent!)

The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash.

The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.

The Chasm of Color, a sample

Part of my cover photo, edited from a picture by Matt Donders, courtesy Unsplash.

My next work is another fun bit of science fiction, with another reference to the luminiferous ether, as in What the Soul Still Fears! However, instead of a story set in the modern day, The Chasm of Color takes place at around the same time as the Michelson-Morley experiment, in the late 1880s.

The protagonist, an assistant professor at the fictional Lexington University, has read the Michelson-Morley paper but is not convinced. However, he is unable to figure out a good reason for his uneasiness, until one morning over a year later...