Regularly Expressing

Starfarers

sbrandt — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:18:10 +0000

Starfarers is a the story of a group of children with a very specialized deformity: limited mathematical skills, learning challenged, puffy blue skin, and a need for glycerol supplementation.

The protagonist, Brinna Whyte, is the eldest and smartest of the group and one of the few to get a high school diploma and a job outside the institution where they were raised. The book begins when she goes to recover the body of her brother Pauric who was found floating in the North Atlantic in the depths of winter. When she boards the fishing ship that recovered his body, she discovers that Pauric has mysteriously returned to life. From this point Brinna begins to unravel the mystery of her origins.

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Happy Birthday Harry Potter

sbrandt — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:00:59 +0000

Harry Potter was born on July 31, 1980. That makes him 30 today. Wow, he’s really getting old! You know, I always thought we’d get a series of books entitled “Harry Potter, the Aurer.” Maybe it will still happen.

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Neanderthal Romances

sbrandt — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:48:47 +0000

My theory is that this could be the beginning of a whole new line of offbeat romance novels: http://www.genomeweb.com/node/940177?hq_e=el&hq_m=708634&hq_l=1&hq_v=4cb508f503. Imagine the book jacket, “Where can a modern girl of the 50th century BC find a real Caveman, Jill asked herself…”

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True-Type fonts on Fedora 11

sbrandt — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:18:02 +0000

The key insight to getting true-type fonts working was finding this page:
http://www.go2linux.org/msttcorefonts-true-type-fonts-on-linux.

I had to make some minor tweaks to get this to work. Here’s how my session went:

yum -y install rpm-build cabextract xfs ttmkfdir
rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc11.x86_64.rpm
wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
rpm -ivh /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

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Cult of the Red Tears is Finished!

sbrandt — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:50:48 +0000

“Cult of the Red Tears” is finished! This is the sequel to my book “Battle for the Sphere.” I began writing it on Dec 11 2008. Today, Dec 30, 2009 it is ready for reviews.

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Cult of the Red Tears

sbrandt — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:14:49 +0000

I began working on my rough draft of my novel “Cult of the Red Tears” in December. I have been struggling to get to the end, working every spare moment I could find. Yesterday afternoon I began to realize that I have already written way past what should have been the ending. This morning I hunted through the text for the right spot and wrote, “End Book One of the Viztrel Unity War.”

So when I say “rough draft” I mean that it reads like it was translated from the original ancient Islandic by a non-native speaker (that’s a description I heard at Armadillocon of what a rough draft should read like). Many scenes are out of order, many scenes need to be added, but the general shape of the book is there, lurking in the miasma of words.

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Virtual Possessions

sbrandt — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:13:01 +0000

I was thinking about the future of display technology. I imagine that it will become cheap enough, at some point, that we will cover our walls, ceilings, and tables with displays (possibly 3D displays). One consequence of this would be that we’d have practically zero possessions. Most of what we have — decorative items, books, games would all become virtual.

The only things you would need:
1) Items for food preparation: The kitchen might contain just a food printer / heater / cooler — eliminating the need for a variety of appliances, gadgets, and tools.
2) Furniture – All of this would be infinitely customizable, your household 3D printer could make/remake what you needed. You would probably need to supply your own cushions (unless someone figures out how to print those as well).
3) Plumbing.

In this brave new style of dwelling moving would be simple. Just transfer your “desktop” to a new location. Probably many of you will chafe at this idea, finding it too cold and impersonal. In reality, though, it’s just the opposite. Your dwelling/environment will be tuned to you and radically customized. A hotel will feel much more like home.

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ODT to RTF converter

sbrandt — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:01:33 +0000

Recently I discovered that OpenOffice can’t really generate RTF files, so I wrote my own converter. It’s rather basic, just handles italic, double space, paragaraphs, and centering. However, for what I need it for it works a lot better than the built-in OpenOffice export ability.

The program is written in Java and you can get the jar file here: ODT2RTF.jar

It’s completely self contained, and includes the source files. Go and have fun with it!

If there is interest, I will expand its capabilities.

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The Devil Loves Me

sbrandt — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:53:58 +0000

On a business trip to California I had the good fortune to bump into two pretty famous actors in the Baton Rouge airport. On the left is Ray Wise (a.k.a. the Devil from the television show “Reaper”). On the right is Paul Wilson (a.k.a. one of the two Bob’s from “Office Space”). Who else would the Devil be travelling with besides a corporate killer?

I got both their signatures. Ray Wise wrote “The Devil loves you.” But hey, his portrayal of the Devil was one of my favorites — up there with Tom Baker’s Dr. Who.

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Battle for the Sphere is done!

sbrandt — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:46:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a science fiction novel for about 2 years now titled “Battle for the Sphere.” Yesterday’s snow day was the impetus I needed to dig in and finish the second pass at editing. I’m sure there are still things that can be fixed, but I feel that getting the manuscript to this point was a major victory.

The story is about a primitive people called the Kushar, who were once a mighty starfaring race. The book follows their leader, Ketzhura, as she sacrifices, deceives, makes alliances and fights to bring her people back to their former glory.

My goal was to have this revision done by Christmas — that is roughly the time I’m expecting to hear back from Baen about the book I have on submission with them entitled “Lady and the Necromancer.” If, by some miracle, they want to publish it and ask if I have anything else I can now say, “Yes. Yes I do.”

Currently BFTS is 123,000 words — something like 490 pages.

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