Corning Again? (Yes, I’m Cheating.)

Well, if sitting in a hospital bed with unfamiliar wifi, a laptop that seems determined to fight me to the death and half my passwords/logins missing (they’re on my computer at home, some 350 miles north), isn’t an excuse, what is? So since I did download lots of pictures to iPhoto on the new machine before I left Fairbanks,  you’re going to get pictures.

These really struck me. They’re made of colored glass fibers slumped over or into a form. Beautiful, no?

A totally different type of jar, made with a completely different technique

This one has to be just to show it can be done. It’s foamed glass, made to look like styrofoam that’s half melted.

As a ps, I’m happy to say that I’ve been kicked out  released from the hospital, so I’m now back at the motel room but with my keyboard and mouse. And I am trying (cautiously) to get around the room with a cane instead of a walker — one hand is better than none for carrying things.

Quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien

All but the last quotation are from The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

“Any sound from behind seemed ominous and unfriendly.” The hobbits in the wilderness after Frodo’s wounding, hearing Glorfindal’s horse on the road behind them. This is another section that was changed drastically in the movie, which does not even have Glorfindal as a character, but has Arwen take his role at this point.

“We needed you. I did not know what to do without you.” Frodo to Gandalf as they meet again at Rivendell.

“There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil.” Gandalf to Frodo at their first meeting at Rivendell, after saying he was held captive.

“You have seen a thing or two since you last peeped out of a looking-glass.” Frodo to his reflection, as he prepares to join the other for dinner at Rivendell.

“Always a bit more to discover, and no knowing what you’ll find around a corner.” Sam to Frodo, trying to describe Rivendell.

“Tongues run on when speaking of their handiwork.” Specifically, Dwarves’ tongues! Frodo has just asked Gloin how things are going with his people.

“There’s no possibility of keeping it secret anymore.” Derik, speaking of Roi’s true status. Sue Ann Bowling, Tourist Trap.

More Corning Photos

Blogging from a hospital bed is not exactly the greatest, even with a familiar laptop. with a new machine and new form of control, it’s just about impossible, so figure lots of pictures for the near future. These are from the Cornell Glass museum. Enjoy!

A pair of jugs that caught my eye.

Here’s a chess set made of glass.

And so far I’m surviving the removal of the epidural. Time for another walk.

cornell

glass Museum.

Weather in Anchorage and North Pole, Alaska

I’m in Anchorage today, and last Friday I had surgery for what turned out to be an ovarian cancer. Luckily we got it early, though I have to wait for the pathology report to be sure. Anyway, the days here are a little shorter and the sun a little higher in the sky than in Fairbanks. Sunrise 4a:21 am and sunset at 11:41 pm, with temperatures (though I haven’t been out) in the high 70’s and sunny.

Back in Fairbanks, the sun rose at 2:59 this morning, and will set at 12:46 tomorrow morning. Latitude make a big difference his time of year! Fsirbsnks has reached its usual stste starte of warmer than Anchorage this time of year — it’s in the high 80’s.

(On the remote chance you haven’t figured it out, the new laptop has a mouse equivalent that is driving me crazy!)

Weekend Writing Warriors, Horse Power.

Sunday, and time for snippets from a multitude of talented authors. To reach the list at Weekend Writing Warriors click the logo above; for Snippet Sunday, click the one below. I’m afraid I won’t be around for comments this week; I’ll be barely out of surgery by the time you read this and probably won’t  feel much like making the rounds. (this is, by the way, the first ime I have ever been asked  t0 fart.)

I’m breaking away from War’s End for a week to post a snippet from a story, Horse Power, that’s FREE Saturday and Sunday on Amazon. This is from very near the beginning, when Roi has rented a bicycle, the main mode of transportation on Horizon, and is peddling with Amber from the town to the ranch Timi and Amber, colonists on Horizon, are developing. For the reader’s information, Amber is 39 and Roi is 40, and they were first acquainted as children. Please consider reviewing it.

“What kind of business are you here on?” Amber finally asked, her curiosity becoming too strong to resist.

“Rumors have reached the Inner Council that the Horizon Company is illegally exploiting the colonists.  So of course it’s ‘send Roi to check it out.  He needs the experience.’  I’m the youngest on the Council, and they treat me like a nice little boy to be patted on the head and given simple errands to keep me busy.  I do need the experience, but they don’t have to be so damn condescending just because most of them are over a millennium old.”

Amber started to reply, then strained her ears as a sound other than the wind and the sound of their own tires on the dirt road reached her.  Yes, it was the yodeling bleat of silkies, the sound they made when upset and running, with the pounding of hooves becoming more audible as she slowed to a halt.

A stampede?

Who Am I? (According to Genographics)

A schematic of a DNA molecule. (Public Domain image from Wikimedia commons.)

I started with the family tree my mother wrote out in my baby book, added research from relatives on both sides of my family, and generally have a pretty good idea of where my ancestors came from. I’ve traced all branches back to before the Civil War, and in some cases to before the Revolutionary War. My baby book lists English, Irish, Scotch, Dutch and French origins, though quite a few generations back. I allegedly have some French-Canadian trapper ancestry though my maternal grandmother, and on that basis and physical appearance we sometimes think the family has a little Native American background. So I was interested in what Genographics would make of me.

Genographics give the percent of your total ancestry matching native groups from 9 different regions. The regios are:
Northeast Asia
Mediterranean
South African
Southwest Asian
Native American
Oceania
Southeast Asia
Northern European
Sub-Saharan Africa

Well, mine showed no Native American. My DNA results for the whole genome are fairly typical European: 45% Northern European, 37% Mediterranean and 16% Southwest Asian. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of a very tiny contribution from Native Americans, but it certainly doesn’t confirm it.

This doesn’t mean my recent ancestors came from these parts of the world! My profile is very similar to that of people who’ve lived for several generations in England, and even closer to those from Germany. The mixing probably took place several thousand years ago.

The Northern European component probably represents the original hunter-gatherer population of Northern Europe. These people may be descended from the Cro-Magnons. Genographics doesn’t say anything about skin or eye color, but I suspect blue eyes and light hair evolved in this component simply because they lived for a long time in a relatively low-sunlight environment where these traits would have had little cost and considerable benefit in production of vitamin D.

The Mediterranean component probably represents the partial replacement (with considerable interbreeding) of the hunter-gatherers by Neolithic farmers moving north and west from the early farming communities of the middle east. This movement is thought to have started around eight thousand years ago.

The Southwest Asian component probably had a similar origin, perhaps coming from father east in the fertile crescent, the origin of western Eurasian agriculture.

So no surprises, just a rather bland typical European background. What I found most interesting was the Neanderthal and Denisovian fractions of my genome – but more of that later.

Jarn’s Journal Year 6

Year 6 Day 329

I’ve been using the waterfall for four years now, but I have only seen it once. I understand enough of the seasons here to know that I saw it in the dry season, and it was more than impressive then. It should be in its rainy season now, and since I am remapping all of the teleport coordinates I found earlier, I thought I would teleport there today both to get the latitude and longitude, and to see what it looks like in the rainy season.

All I can say is magnificent. The river above the falls is now a barrier to animals such as elephants that were formerly able to wade it. The hippos have spread out, and are in much better tempers. The river is alive with birds. The falls themselves?

I knew that the mass of water dropping into the gorge was greatly increased, and that the water actually running through the gorge was far more turbulent – I could feel the change in the energy. But actually seeing it was awe-inspiring. And to think I’d been using this beauty as an energy source!

Jarn’s Journal is the fiction journal of a human-like alien who was stranded in Africa roughly 125,000 years ago. His Journal to date is on my author site.

Publishing with Kindle Direct

(It’s FREE next weekend, June 15-16, at Amazon.)

I put “Horse Power” on Kindle primarily in order to learn how to do it. It turned out to be surprisingly easy, at least for a book which is primarily text.

The first step is to edit your work. Fully. Carefully. This is a sample of your work, and you want it to attract readers.

“Horse Power” had an additional function. It is a bridge, set 20 years after the end of Tourist Trap and relating an important incident in the history of the planet, Horizon, which is central to the trilogy I am now writing. As such, its primary function is to introduce the two books I have published, Homecoming and Tourist Trap, and provide the opening of the trilogy.

Horizon in the trilogy is a planet on which horse and dogs are critical to the stock-rearing economy. The planet has no fossil fuels, and in the wider world of the colonizing company’s owners, horses and dogs were merely luxuries. Stock was to be handled by imported vehicles, powered by fossil fuels imported at high prices. Horse Power was written to explain the transformation.

But it’s only a short story, and one on which I never expected to make any money. I’d give it away happily if it led to interest in Homecoming and Tourist Trap, which explore the earlier relationships among Roi, Amber and Timi. It was a natural to learn how to use Kindle Direct publishing, and the $.99 minimum price and the KDP Select Program, with 5 days free each 3 months, seemed well-suited to my needs. Eventually I want to take it off KDP Select and put it up on Smashwords as well as getting a few hard copies using CreateSpace, but the Kindle Direct program looked like the easiest place to start.

Once I had the edited story, the next step was to write the front matter, the short summaries of Homecoming and Tourist Trap explaining the background of the story, a short teaser for the trilogy, and create a table of contents which would link to each section. This was all done in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac, using standard Word features such as bookmarks and hyperlinking. When I was sure everything worked, I “printed” the file as a PDF.

I then made the following metadata file, so that I could cut and paste into the Amazon metadata page:

Title: Horse Power

Description: Rumors have reached the Inner Council of the Jarnian Confederation that the Horizon Company is illegally exploiting the colonists. Roi has been sent to find out what’s happening, and he asks his old friends, colonists Timi and Amber, for help. But the Company’s behavior is legal, if immoral. Can the three find a solution to the problem?

Contributors: Sue Ann Bowling

Language: English

Publication date: leave blank

Publisher: Sue Ann Bowling

ISBN none

Categories: science fiction, animals?

Keywords:

Horses, Dogs, Science Fiction, Jarnian Confederation, Fiction, Colonization, Space travel, Debt slavery

DRM no

Cover? I’d seen some work I liked on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Saturday blog hop, and I contacted the artist (Tomomi.ink.) She worked with me to create the cover for Horse Power at a very reasonable price.

With all complete, I filled out the metadata page and uploaded the PDF and the cover. Somewhat to my surprise the book, including the linked table of contents, worked fine on all of the viewers on the testing page, with one exception. I had bookmarked the centered section heads and table of contents title (which must be given the name toc.) As a result, whenever I used the “go to table of contents” or linked to a section from the table of contents, the centering of the title disappeared. I know enough HTML to suspect that the way I bookmarked did not nest the tags correctly. When I next do a revision I will put the bookmarks on the line before the centered titles. It would help I I could figure out how to remove an existing bookmark in Word; I may have to remove and retype part of the text.

I’ll be taking it off KDP Select once I learn other publishing options, but for the moment I still have five free days for this three-month period, and two of them are scheduled for the coming weekend: June 15 and 16. Download a free copy and play with the index and go to index functions, and watch how the centering of the section heads changes as you jump to them as opposed to scrolling to them. Minor, but something I will correct eventually.

Quotes from Jane Austin #IAN1 #blog2013

The first six passages quoted on Twitter from @sueannbowling from June 6 through June 12, 2013 were from Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Spellings are from the Oxford University Press edition.

“I am not afraid, for though I am the youngest, I am the tallest.” Lydia, after her mother says that she thinks Bingley will dance with her at the next ball. (This is before anyone but Mr. Bennett has even seen Bingley.)

“Affectation of candour is common enough;–one meets it everywhere.” Elizabeth speaking to Jane after the first ball, commenting on her sister’s ability to see everyone in the best light.

“In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better shew more affection that she feels.” Charlotte Lucas to Elizabeth as they are discussing Jane’s liking for Bingley, which is well concealed.

“Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility.” Darcy, commenting on Bingley’s writing so rapidly that his handwriting is unreadable.

“The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor.” Darcy to Bingley, later in the same conversation.

“We can all plague and punish one another.” Elizabeth to Caroline Bingley, after Darcy makes a remark about their walking about the room together.

“They’ll be more than happy to take good Confederation credits.” Sue Ann Bowling, “Horse Power.” Roi has been wondering where he could rent a bicycle, and Amber is pointing him to the mechanic’s shop across the street.

Shipping from the Corning Glass Museum

Shipping box and bubble wrap. When I put the bubble wrap back in the box,, I could barely close it.

When I got home from a week each in Ithaca and at the Harvard reunion, there was a box on the living room floor. A large box, big enough to make a playhouse for a small child. I couldn’t remember ordering anything that huge. But then I saw the “glass” stickers on all sides, remembered I’d done some shopping at the Cornell Glass Museums store, and had the store send my purchases to me. Surely I hadn’t bought that much!

All that box and bubble wrap to ship these.

When I opened the box, all I could see was Styrofoam pellets. Even after I scooped out half a trash bag full, I could see nothing but Styrofoam. Digging through the pellets, I finally felt bubble wrap and pulled out a book – heavily cushioned in bubble wrap. Then another, the Corelle dishes I’d bought (they aren’t in the stores in Fairbanks), the jigsaw puzzle of one of Chihuly’s chandeliers, and finally two small glass paperweights. Everything was cocooned in bubble wrap.

Close-up of the two small paperweights.

Obviously the store clerks were used to packing fragile items to withstand the tender handling of FedEx! At any rate, they beat me to Alaska and arrived in beautiful condition.