Zombies are on the move, and Kevin and Mara face some rather unusual “couple stuff” in this installment of ‘Someone Liche You’.

If I were to invest more time in getting this novel into shape for a book being published in the conventional way, I’d probably re-write the story to start from Chapter 1.9. This is where the action rises. Yeah, there was some scary stuff in the park, but it’s in Chapter 1.9 and 1.10 that we are treated to the start of the end of days for the New City.

He shook his head, feeling a hard stone of disappointment feeling in his gut, let down in himself for allowing the data walls to trick him. They were clearly the same as the local media and of the intranets– the information they displayed was capable of deception– just like anything else. He should have known better.

If our windows can lie to us, what can you trust, he wondered, stepping over the shells of the dead scupperers, still lifeless on the floor where they’d been smashed.

Poor Sugar Island. It was too good to last.

A few notes: Sugar Island Wisconsin is a real, unincorporated community in Wisconsin. But in this story’s timeline, it’s the largest, biggest and most technologically advanced megapolis on the North Continent.

The North Continent is what they call North America in this novel. Because America has given way to a hogemenistic planet-wide government controlled mostly by the secret world order. I can’t remember if this fact is included in the story or not. Consider this a DVD Bonus.

As always, the whole novel is being posted at indy book publisher Red Lemona.de and will eventually be packaged up as a single downloadable. But even now, you can start from the beginning of the novel, if you’re just catching up.

Today’s Chapters:

1.9

1.10

I have posted Chapter 1.8 of Someone Liche You.

Something is amiss in Sugar Island. All the details of last night's brown out have gone unreported. And exhaustion overwhelms our heroes as they finally get tucked in for a night's sleep. It's not a sleepover if it begins with the rising sun, is it?

That was before he’d been even curious about whether she’d been “listed.” Now that he was reasonably sure she was, Kevin wondered if she had been trying to warn him, or maybe hide from him. He felt the warm, freshly replicated alert fob in his hands now in his kitchen. He turned it over, bent the clip over backwards and snapped it off so that it would lay flat in his pocket, just like Mara had showed him. “I’m only paranoid if I’m wrong,” he said out loud to himself with an exhausted sigh. Sleep. Time for sleep.

When he went back to the living room, Mara was out of the shower and had helped herself to some of his clothing.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “This is a great shirt, though.” She’d pulled on his “I blogged your mom” shirt, which was a throwback that an old girlfriend had purchased for him. It fit her nicely, as opposed to how it fit him, which was about a half-a-size too small.

“No. It’s a good fit. You can keep it.” Kevin found himself silently amused that, after all these years, the clothing that he hung on to for no good reason other than that he couldn’t bring himself to take it for reprocessing had finally found a use.

As always, full manuscript at Alternative Publisher Red Lemona.de.

Three more chapters up on Red Lemonade of Somenoe Liche You.. This part of the story gets us through the Kevin's first brown-out, the terror of the unseen, and subsequent clean up.

Also, Kevin lies in the mud and cries while his girlfriend takes care of him.

Kevin pulled his Padd out of his pocket and poked at it a few times. On the third punch, the screen lit up, and the Padd went into boot recovery mode. Without speaking, he pointed the Pad’s newfound life out to Mara, who rolled her eyes and kept walking toward the tubes.

Kevin watched the boot data roll across the Padd’s surface and felt the lighting flow into his eyes like a warm, comfortable bath. As he and Mara approached Home Plate Station, he felt the same warm comfort from the data screens on the tube station, which flicked back on as they approached.

Today's Chapters:

• 1.5
• 1.6
• 1.7

This story makes me sad.

During yesterday’s executive session of the Jobs, Economy and Small Business Committee, AB426, the horrific new ferrous mining bill was brought up for amendments. Most now believe the bill was written by and for the protection and profit of the mining company for the specific purpose of gaining control of the iron ore and fresh water resources in the northern part of the State. Despite huge outcry from residents of the area, environmental groups and Assembly Democrats, and the fact that AB426 has been overwhelming rejected nearly two-to-one at both public hearings

This is sad. Very sad. And yet another example of how the Wisconsin’s executive and legislative branches are colluding to turn our government over to corporate interests. These are troubling times, indeed.

But there is a change on the wind folks. Why do you think that those who would sell out this state’s precious resources to their corporate puppeteers have upped their game so desperately? Because the writing is on the wall. Their time in power is ending.

My gut reaction to this: Are you really ready to go to war with your own country? Isn’t that what they want? The answer is, forever, peace. We must win this out with peace.

See these crimes being committed by our state government for what they are: Aggressive bullying aimed at getting you to fight them at their level. Once you lash out they can crack down. Don’t lash out. Stand strong. Love thy enemy. Crush them with your love. Let them know that even though you don’t agree with them, you do respect their right to feel that way. The fact is, fascists exist because in life, there is two of everything. If we did not have fascists, we could not have democrats.

If my time under the sky above has taught me anything, it is that you cannot defeat the shadow by banishing it. The light can only cover it up. The only way to beat the shadow is to integrate it. To meet it, embrace it, and turn it’s powers of dark toward good works.

And it is for that reason, I will not go to war. I will fight, but I will not war.

I do not give up. In fact, I am more motivated than ever to face down these fascists and show them the error of their ways. No, I will not go on quietly, but I will not stoop to their level. We are all better than that.

On Jan. 24th, I started the Year of the Dragon by publishing the first four chapters of my long-promised, but oft-delayed and ignored novel Someone Liche You.

Here’s the TV-Guide synopsis. “Hot-shot technical writer Kevin Adderly discovers that the utopian sci-fi future he’s living in is a lie. And the only way he can escape alive is to become his dead girlfriend’s mother. Sort of.”

Someone Liche You is story of the the future fall of a totalitarian government built on technological break troughs brought about by biotronic revolution, where living organisms have become our machines and tools. It is about a young man who falls in love with a woman form the wrong side of the tracks and the extent of the things he has to go through to save her from becoming a mindless drone. There are zombies in it. There are strange cricket-like cleaning robots. There is a subway made of the digestive tract of huge worms. But all is not as it seems. Its like Freaky Friday meets the Matrix meets My Boyfriend’s Back. It’s terrific.

And you can make it better.

Let me explain: I had considered scrapping the novel, pushing it under a drawer and letting it sit forever unread by anyone. It’s not that I’m not proud of it, or that I think it’s bad. It’s just not, you know, perfect.

And the more I sat on it, thinking about how when I finish up Someone Liche You I’d finally be in a place to get serious about the two other novels I’ve been kicking around for the past 2 years, the more I realized that no novels were getting written, and even fewer were getting read.

The reading part, I think, is the important part. For me, the act of writing ideas and telling stories is part of celebrating life. Part of the great thing that makes our people better and smarter and all the more wonderful. Everybody contributes to this, I think. Creative works create better people when the writer is writing those writings, the dancer is dancing those dances, the singer is singing those songs, and the painter is painting those paintings. Whether the fruits of such are published or not, acting on a creative impulse adds fuel to the magic that is this life on earth.

I want you to read my story. Whether you slog through or delight in each new chapter. Enjoy it. Or hate it. Or steal a few good ideas and make them your own. I want you to see something about yourself in my characters. I want you to learn something about me when you read my stories. I want you to learn something about yourself when you react to the plot, or the tricksy grammar. Or whatever.

But none of that can happen until the work is published. And so here we are.

On Jan. 24th, I put up the first four chapters of Someone Liche You on Red Lemonade, the alternative publisher. It has a great commenting system, a fantastic community, and a really nice and modern approach to publishing.

But what’s really great about Red Lemonade is the commenting and annotation system. It lets you add comments, flag areas of text and suggest copy revisions right on the page. Just like you were holding a manuscript in your hands. I want you to read it. While you’re reading it, if you spot something you love, share! If you spot something you hate! Share! If you spot something misspelled (you will) share!

Over the coming weeks, I’m planning on posting the chapters in chronological order until the whole story is up. Head over the Red Lemonade and enjoy Someone Liche You. And thank you.

I have absolutely no reservation about changing your anchor links, SEM/SEO Guys. You have been warned.

Why you need to know about TOR and why you will probably be using it in the future.

I’ve been pretty quiet about the whole SOPA thing. For your of you who don’t know, SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (and it’s Analog in the Senate (PIPA)) will allow the United States government to block certain websites based on an arbitrary set of criteria. You can find out a lot more online. It’s censorship, basically. In the same sense that China, Siria, Iran and other human-rights unfriendly countries do. Welcome to America in 2012. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

It’s a shame it’s come to this. Write your senator. Tell him you won’t reelect him if he supports the PIPA bill. Write the president. Tell him you care about the freedom of information. Tell your mom. Tell your sister. Sticker your cat. Shout it from the rooftops. Here’s a huge list of cool and easy stuff you can do to make your voice heard.

The bottom line: the world’s greatest library, the collection of the knowledge and culture that makes us a people, the Internet, is about to be shut off from you. You’ll still be able to use it, but you’ll never be able to trust it. The internet is going away in favor of a brand-friendly propaganda-only machine that prevents you from freely using, thinking, or learning things that your government, and the corporation it works for, don’t want you to know. Maybe you think this is a good thing. I don’t know. I hope not. I want us to stay friends, you and I.

If this doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what else will. Someday, the internet you know and love could look like this:

But here’s a sliver of hope for you.

I have, for years, been using something called “Tor.” Tor is “a free and open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as ‘traffic analysis’.”

They actually have a bootable live disk (based on Debian) now that works as a computing environment wherein all the traffic is routed through TOR. This is the same software that internet users in countries with oppressive governments use. It’s slower and clunkier, but it works, it’s (mostly) free and (mostly) safe.

Download the stand-alone browser bundle and give it a try. What can it hurt?

The bottom line is, Tor works. If not only as a proxy, at least as a source of anonymity. And using it, configuring it, and supporting it, I think, is something that is going to be very important to our future as a people.

Sad that it is so. But you would do yourself a real service to familiarize yourself with Tor and the Tor Project.

Finished Neal Stephenson's "Reamde" earlier this week. Here's my review from GoodReads.

I don't think it's possible to get through a less-than-four-star Neal Stephenson book, but this one pushed it.

Which is not to say it's not an excellent thriller. And it does the usual Neal Stephenson tricks of being several stories intertwined into one, employing healthy doses of genere hopping along the way. It's a great read, and like most of Stephenson's books, an even better listen.

That being said, there is a -lot- of suspension of disbelief required to enjoy this book-- like any thriller, I suppose. But the logical leaps and the connections made by the heroes tend to be made if only to support the overall momentum of the plot, and there is a good deal of convenient magical thinking employed to keep the ball rolling in the plot's transitional stages.

Good story. Great characters. Exciting times. Strange intertwined plot lines. Throwaway pop-tech references. Must be Neal Stephenson.

Hay Neal: if ur readin' this: Moar Scifi, plz!

So Gaia and I are watching Mars Needs Moms, and at one point, (spoilers) the stupid kid leads his mom out into the surface on Mars. Mom is wearing only an breathing helmet and a football jersey. Gaia turns to me and asks, “Wouldn’t she be cold?”

“That’s a great question,” I say. “I think she would.”

We quickly looked up the average surface temperatures on Mars.

Turns out, if Mars was in the midst of a heatwave and it was the very hottest part of the day in the middle of summer, Mom would probably have been ok, with a maximum temperature of 20° C (68° F) having been recored on Mars.

However, because Mars has such a thin atmosphere, the temperatures on Mars vary wildly thorughout the day, and the story sets the actors on the surface of Mars just before sunrise. So it’s pretty likely that the temperatures were more likely in the -87° C (-124.6) range.

So, yeah. Mom would have been cold. But that would have been the least of her problems; I mean, who sleeps in a football jersey?

Stay off the ice.

Today, the ice is clear across the lake-- a top-down view into an underwater world.
The cold glass creates a barrier that keeps all but the slightest out and away;
the lake likes it like that.
With nobody so brave to swim or so foolish to walk
things can settle for a bit
before a rowdy spring sure to come.

January 03, 2012 \ Photo attribution