The First Review Of FIX Is In!

As y’all know, the third and final book in my ‘Mancer series, FIX, is coming out in September.  The review copies went out on Friday (and are still available if you’re a book reviewer).
Today is my birthday, so it’s really nice to get the first good review through Twitter:


Full disclosure: Cassandra’s been a huge fan of the series since the beginning, so much so that I Tuckerized her in Fix. (In many ways, she has the most tragic death.)  But if you’re a fan of the ‘Mancer series, this is a superfan saying that I managed to cobble together a good ending for what was never intended to be a trilogy, but sorta turned out that way.
So if you want to buy it, you know, preorders make a publisher happy.
And also, after having spent literally a week trying to figure out how to start my next novel, I finally cracked the opening 583 words in the first half hour of my birthday.  This is after experimenting with twenty-five different attempts, four serious, all of which sucked on some level or another.  But now I feel nothing but a strange giddiness, because the other attempts weren’t bad, they just weren’t as good as the novel I wanted to write.
So that’s there.  I’ll be making a post for the Clarion Echo soon, detailing what I did and how I did it, and if you want to walk through the novel-writing process with me, remember, all you have to do is donate $10 to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop.  It’s a bargain!
And now I’m off to eat too much cake, drink too much bourbon, and operate power tools.  Just as I beat not one, but two videogames yesterday and ate too much cake.
IT ARE MAH BIRFDAI YAYYYYY

Posted by on Jul 3, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments

Almost Forgot: If You're A Book Reviewer, FIX Is Up On NetGalley!

The third book in The ‘Mancer series, FIX, is finally available on NetGalley if you’d like to read and review.  Alas, this only applies to book reviews approved by NetGalley; the rest of you will have to wait until September.  But you can order it now!  (And please do!  My birthday’s this weekend!  Pre-orders help authors out, every time!)
I have to admit, though… seeing NetGalley tout my book as “THE THIRD TITLE IN FERRETT STEINMETZ’S CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED ‘MANCER SERIES” is a little weird.  Actually, a lot weird.  I was like, “It wasn’t critically… okay, it got a lot of nice reviews… maybe a lot of them… but okay, it’s a marketing thing, I can turn off my ego-dampener just this one.”
Anyway.  If you review books, go request it from NetGalley.  If you simply want to find out what happens to Paul and Aliyah next – and major, major changes happen to everyone in this book, as I raze the potential of future books to the ground – then purchase it in advance.  Call it a birthday present, from you to me to you again!

Posted by on Jul 1, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments

Was Finding Dory Localized To Each City It Was Shown In?

So I saw Finding Dory last night, which was an interesting experience if you live in Cleveland.  Because a major plot point is that the fish are going to be hauled away to an aquarium in Cleveland, and many zany rescue attempts are made.
I kept wondering whether that was actually Cleveland.
I mean, a truck had “Cleveland” prominently written on it, and that truck showed up several times.  Characters mentioned Cleveland, but I kept watching closely to see whether their mouths were moving when they said it, or whether their mouths were obscured.
Because, being in Cleveland, seeing a major reference to Cleveland, I wondered whether Pixar had localized the movie.  Could it be that the fish were only going to Cleveland because I lived in Cleveland, and if you lived in Boston the fish would be going to Boston, and if you lived in Thailand the fish were going to Thailand?
It’s been done before.  Captain America had a list of things he needed to catch up on after his return to modern society, and that was localized – every country showed a different list, tailored to historical and musical events that happened in their country.  That was one shot with one notepad, but…
They’re already changing ads shown in live baseball games.  It’s called Virtual Advertising, and that Taco Bell advertisement behind the batter might be a Mutual Insurance ad for someone in another city.  We’re already tailoring ads.
Why not tailor movies? Why not give the kids a thrill by thinking that Dory might be coming to your city?
If anyone could do it, Pixar could.  It would take some doing – a lot of recording and timing issues, and you wouldn’t want to re-render every frame entirely.  But with some tweaking, I’m sure you could reserve a box area on the side of the truck and swap out city names with only a bit of overhead.  Make sure the characters never faced the camera when they spoke {$CITY_NAME}, so you don’t have to animate their mouths.  Then make a list of major cities with aquariums, have Ellen Degeneres speak all their names, and map out a distribution network.
As it turned out, Cleveland was hard-coded into Finding Dory.  (I was a little relieved.)  But I got a glimpse into the future, because I’m sure someone in Hollywood is thinking about this, and maybe it didn’t happen this time, but as the costs of digital distribution and animation fall, it will.
Some day, animation costs may fall to the point where you see a global destruction movie, with asteroids falling across the world, and you’ll see your home town destroyed by a meteor.  And it will be your home town annihilated no matter where you see it, because it’ll be trivial to take a helicopter shot and overlay it with personalized mayhem.
Not today.
Probably not tomorrow.
But it’s coming.

Posted by on Jul 1, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments

Why "Anyone With Common Sense Would Know That!" Is Not Common Sense

Occasionally, I write about simple topics and commenters scorn: “This is obvious! Anyone with common sense knows that!”
First off, “common sense” is often “education” in disguise. I have a lot of common sense when it comes to money, but that’s because my parents were good with money and taught me a lot of quiet financial stuff when I was very young about saving cash and being careful about contracts and so forth.
I only realized it wasn’t really “common sense” when I started hanging around folks whose parents didn’t teach them these lessons, and it turns out that my “God, everyone knows that!” turned out to be something that I’d actually been told back when I was seven. I’d simply known it for so long that I’d forgotten someone once had to educate me.
Scorning people for not knowing things that someone didn’t actually tell them is a douche move.
Second, ya do realize that some people have had their common sense purposely broken by abusive families, right? There’s all sorts of folks who don’t have common sense when it comes to love simply because their family needed someone compliant, and so taught them that love looked like “shutting up and never expressing your own needs” or love looks like “tending to someone relentlessly no matter how terrible they are to you” or bullshit like that.
Scorning people for not knowing things that someone purposely misled them away from is a douche move.
And lastly, “common sense” is often “instinct” in disguise. And everyone has different instincts. If you’re the sort of person who’s naturally slow to trust, it’s “common sense” to not fling yourself headfirst into love – but that’s not actually common, it’s an emotion distinct to you.
You know what should be common sense? Understanding that your comfort zone is not a universal thing shared by every other human.
Scorning people for not being born with your inherent preferences is a douche move.
I take the XKCD 10,000 approach. I too try not to make fun of people for admitting they don’t know things. It’s a big world. Someone’s discovering something you thought was blazingly obvious every day – and in some cases, that admittedly-trite advice hits home to someone and helps them.
What people write sometimes may be obvious.
It should also be obvious that that essay was not written for you.

Posted by on Jul 1, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 2 comments

How We Operate

Gini and I, in bed: “Could you scratch my back?”
*Gini scratches.  I purr.*
“Mmm.  The Empire Scratches Back.”
“That’s a much gentler sequel.”
*I pause.*  “Does Darth Vader even have fingernails on his gloves?”
“No.”
“Then he couldn’t scratch anyone’s back.”
“No, no, he could use the Force.”
“I don’t think he has that kind of control.  He can choke you, but that’s blunt trauma.  Being able to rip off a piece of machinery isn’t the same as scratching a back; it’s like saying hitting someone with a baseball bat is the same as scratching your back.”
“Well, okay… no, wait.  The Emperor releases Luke’s handcuffs in Return of the Jedi.  So Vader could…”
“I don’t think that’s fine manipulation.  He’s hitting a button on the handcuffs, not picking the lock.”
“Handcuffs are springing loose!  Are you telling me that the Emperor put Luke in cuffs that he could free himself from by hitting a button?”
“Well… Darth did.”
“Okay, point.  But still.  Hitting a small button is fine manipulation.  The Emperor can scratch someone’s back with the Force, so Darth can.”
*I get up on one elbow.*  “The Emperor also has force lightning!  He’s way better at the Force than Vader.”
“You asked whether Darth Vader could scratch a back!  He’s got the Force!”
“That’s not the way the Force works!”  *We giggle from laughter at referencing the Force Awakens.* “But seriously, we’re debating whether Darth Vader could scratch someone’s back, using the powers he’s known to have.  He’s known to be way worse than the Emperor at the Force. Just because the Emperor can do it doesn’t mean that Vader could scratch someone’s back with the Force.”
“Jesus, you… all right, fine.  What about the prequels?”
“Do we have to go there?”
“There’s that scene in Attack of the Clones where Anakin lifts an apple off the table and carves it.”
“Does he carve it?  I remember him just picking it up.  If he’s tossing it around like a baseball, that doesn’t indicate he can scratch a back.”
“No, I’m pretty sure he carves it.  Hang on, lemme bring up YouTube.  And… oh, man, there’s a lot of videos here.”
“Oh, it’s a pear!  He eats a pear!”
“But all these videos are music videos, and none of them seem to have the scene where he cuts it in mid-air.  Just videos where Padme looks like a total doof as he steals her pear.”
“Okay, goddammit, let’s go downstairs and get Attack of the Clones out.”
*Fifteen minutes later, after we’ve turned on the television and scanned to the scene*
“Well, that settles it, Gini.  You were right.  Anakin slices up a pear in mid-air, so Darth Vader could definitely scratch a man’s back with the Force.”
“…you realize we were supposed to be having sex now, right?”
“Yuuuup.”

Posted by on Jun 30, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 1 comment