The religious scams …

This one is going to be a bit of a circular reference :p Funky Dung posted an entry where he linked to a post made by me and in going back and reading his entry, I came across the Apostates of Islam.

When I first read the site, I was like, "OK, this seems to be by Muslims who’ve gotten tired of all the negativity attached to Islam at the moment". I didn’t agree with their viewpoint but everybody is free to make their own choices, right? 🙂 The reason I didn’t agree with their viewpoint was because if you give up your religion just because people have misconceptions about it and because there are people in your own religion who don’t understand what the religion is all about, then it just means that you didn’t have enough faith or didn’t truly understand your religion either. However, religion is all about faith and you should follow the path that you truly believe in.

But then, I saw the link that the Apostates of Islam posted for Muslims. When I went to this page and read what they had to say, my conception of this site changed rather dramatically – but probably not in the way the site owners intended it to :p This site is certainly not created by "former" Muslims. In fact, I don’t believe any Muslims had any hand in the site at all. If they did, then they are as equally ignorant of Islam as the terrorists whom they claim to abhor. The site is basically religious propaganda :p It starts with a twist on a Quranic verse which is supposed to cleverly reveal to Muslims how wrong Islam is. If the Muslim is uninformed, then perhaps it will have effect. The verse they quote is from Surah At Taubah – verse 5. This verse is supposed to indicate that Muslims are supposed to kill non-believers at every opportunity.

The fact that most people ignore, either conveniently or out of ignorance, is that every Quranic verse was revealed for a specific event or under some context. This particular verse gives some of the context if you read from verse 1 – instead of just taking verse 5. It says that there was a peace treaty between the Muslims and the Mushriks (pagans) of Makkah. This treaty was violated by the Mushriks of Makkah. A period of four months was given to the Mushriks of Makkah to make amends. Then comes verse 5 about killing of disbelievers, which pertains to only a particular period when the disbelievers had rejected a treaty. To draw this particular event out and to say that you are supposed to kill all non-believers for all eternity is just plain ridiculous. But then again, as P. T. Barnum never said, "there is a sucker born every minute" and the Apostates of Islam, amongst others, seems to be simply trying to draw the newborns in :p

The problem is not with Islam, or with any other religion in the world. The problem is with humanity. We find it easier to wallow in ignorance, in prejudice, in hatred and in bigotry than to actual think for ourselves or to understand our fellow human beings. So if anybody ever wants to start an Apostates of Humanity site, then sign me right up … but then again, maybe not … I’d rather try to change humanity than to leave humanity behind :p

The scavenger hunt

It’s always interesting what you find when you go hunting early in the morning :p Today, I was deleting a few spam comment entries in my blog when the Incoming Links section caught my eye. So I took a look at the sites linking to me and one of those sites, came across TagCloud. This particular site only had a tag cloud but no information as to how to get one. However, I knew they were a WordPress site based on the links on their site and so I began doing a Google search for WordPress and TagCloud. So, by way of an entry on the WordPress support forums, I arrived at the TagCloud site that I already linked to :p

This of course, started me off on a whole new tangent. I had to learn what tag clouds were, how to implement them and how I could set one of my own up on my site. I signed up for their service and created my own cloud. I added my own RSS feed and then had to pause to wonder what else I could add. I first added an RSS feed from dictionary.com but didn’t like how that looked. My favourite wordsmith site is of course, wordsmith.org – I’ve been a subscriber to Word-A-Day for longer than I can remember 🙂 So I decided to see if they had an RSS feed, and what do you know, they did! So I added that to my cloud and I was happy for the moment – but not totally happy since my site by itself was still not appearing on the tag cloud. They say that it takes a few minutes to be indexed but nothing was happening even after 10 minutes. Oh well, guess I’ll have to check on that tomorrow :p

In the meantime, going through the stuff at TagCloud, I came across a reference to GreaseMonkey. So over to that page I went and in reading up about GreaseMonkey’s capabilities, I came across a link to the Coral Content Distribution Network. Now a friend of mine, Nige, has been having a lot of trouble lately because his site keeps on getting featured on digg and going down due to heavy load. This seemed like the perfect solution for the issues that he’d been facing. So I dashed off the link to him. Another problem resolved (or at least a potential solution discovered) all within the course of half an hour of aimless web surfing. Ah, the wonders of the Internet :p

When people care …

A few weeks ago, I talked about how people seemed to care only about money sometimes and not about the things that mattered. If you rant about the bad, you must also talk about the good 🙂 During the last few days, I had some very positive experiences with people who cared as well, so let me share.

I had gone to Soft Interface’s site a while back because I was interested in their Diff Doc software which does a great job at comparing two Word documents and letting you merge the changes. There are other such software around but Diff Doc is probably one of the more cheaper solutions and they do a great job. Unfortunately, the price tag of $400 was a bit too much for me since I don’t do any professional work using Word. I simply use Word to write my stories and Diff Doc was great for comparing changes between two versions of my manuscripts. Now if I had a writing contract and making money, I would have had no problems with paying the $400 but since $400 is more than a lot of people make a month here, I just couldn’t afford to. A few days ago, I received an e-mail from Soft Interface’s Allen Segall and he wanted to know if there was anything they could do to interest me in purchasing Diff Doc. I told him the situation and told him that if it had been about $50, I would have bought it immediately. Allen came right back and told me that they could drop the price down by $300 for me! To be honest, I was stunned. Not many people would care enough about a potential customer to do that. Of course, the price was still too high for me and I can’t afford to go for it but I still like how nice they were.

Then there is Eugene over at Add-in Express. I’d written a Word macro recently that would highlight often used (and misused) words and phrases as an aid to writers. The macro was a bit clunky to use since it didn’t have a nice user interface or anything. So I was looking around for a way to turn the macro into a nice user-friendly add-in when I came across the Delphi Add-in Express component. It was just what I was looking for! I wrote to Add-in Express and asked them if there was a possibility of getting a free copy to use in a freeware tool. I heard back from Eugene a couple of days later and he gave me a license, for free! For a piece of software which sells for at least $150!

These are just a few of the good people I’ve run into. There are more. There’s the nice folks at ElevateSoft, Addictive Software and WP Tools who have also been kind enough to donate software. Then there are people like Joana, Mary and Gino Sion who have been kind enough to agree to do covers for my book. These people are doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts, because they are genuinely nice people. So while I might rant about there not being enough care in the world, I do acknowledge that there still *is* care in the world – care for something other than money 🙂

And to summarize ….

This week’s been rather eventful … and it’s only beginning :p Actually, I guess I’m talking about last week. But given the fact that I only have a tenuous concept of time at any given moment, I might actually be talking about Sunday-after-next and still might not really have an inkling about what I’m really talking about :p Incidentally, I’m one of those people who believes that the week begins on Monday and so, I guess this is a new week. The past week had a lot of things going on and so I thought I’d do a recap here.

I finished my latest short story … either yesterday or day before. Strangely enough, it actually was fun writing it after I got going and wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be :p I kind of like how the world I built in that story turned out but not sure if others will think so. I want to try and submit this story to a couple of places but first, it needs a little bit more polishing. Laurie’s going through it first (and I need a bit of a break from it) and then I will go back to working on it.

I also started work on WriteTrack again. This was actually due to something else I finished this week – a new query letter. I submitted my query letter over at Absolute Write Water Cooler – a good forum for writers BTW – and they (or actually one really helpful person :p) tore it apart and re-built it from the ground up. I like how the new query letter turned out and couldn’t wait to get querying again :p So, I sent out a couple of queries using the new query letter and that meant that I had to track the new queries using WriteTrack :p I got to work originally to fix a few minor annoyances but then it turned into more serious work where I actually added in the last of the missing functionality in WriteTrack, fixed a few bugs, added suggested features by beta-testers and so on. I still have a few minor UI issues to sort out but once that’s done, a new build should be ready to go out … maybe today 🙂

Doing it the “right” way …

I’m going through an interesting (perhaps interesting is not the right word :p) debate with somebody on one of the forums I visit. I wouldn’t exactly call it a debate either since I didn’t start out with the intention of debating the point. I had simply posted the first scene from my novel on that forum for comments and critiques and I got one critique (only one mind you :p) from this person who had a few relevant things to say but also in the crit mentioned that I should not use terms such as "credits" or "blaster" in my story because "as any professional would tell me" (he might not have used the exact words, so the quotes are mine :p) that is not the correct way to write science fiction.

I agreed with most of his critiques because they were valid and to the point. However, I found this whole "credits" and "blaster" thing a bit … how shall I put it politely without saying "pig headed"? … irrational? mindless? stupid? I don’t know … one of those or all of those. I just didn’t agree with the way that particular comment was phrased. (There was sense in there – but not the way it was said and not for the reasons expressed by this particular person.)

Now, if you were to look around, you will find a lot of rules to writing and even ones which are specifically aimed at writing science fiction. The Turkey City Lexicon is one really good example of rules and advice on how to (and how not to) write science fiction. Incidentally, if the Lexicon helps you, you might also want to take a gander at the annotated version – it leaves out some of the stuff but it also, I believe, adds a bit to it. So yes, there are a lot of rules on how to write good science fiction. But the trick is not to get bogged down by these rules and not to follow all (or any) of these rules slavishly because "that’s the way it is supposed to be done". You have to take every rule and see if it applies to what you want to do. Sometimes you might even want to break a rule for effect or because it actually makes your story better. But in essence, you should be able to determine what works (and what does not work) for you personally and not be bound by all these rules.

I (or rather Laurie :p) posted the question about "credits" and "blasters" to a different forum – one composed of both writers and science fiction fans. The responses we got were completely different. Not one talked about doing it the "professional" way. They actually came up with arguments both for and against using the terms and in each context, I agreed with what they said. I’ve taken the best of what they’ve said and am incorporating those suggestions into my story because they actually made sense. But do something just because that’s how everybody has been doing it and by golly that’s the way it should continue to be done? Phooie, I say :p

Mosey on up to the bar

Since I was considering self-publishing and I still had no clear idea how good the story was, I decided to get the opinions of some people who enjoyed the type of story I wanted to tell. So, a couple of days ago, I went over the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup and posted there asking if there were any volunteers to read the first few chapters of my story 🙂 Of course, this is something that I should have done a long time ago. It’s just that I’ve never had much luck getting most of my friends to read a word and so I decided not to bother and go straight to submitting to agents. I had hoped that they’d tell me if the story was no good but that was before I learnt the sad truth – most agents rejected my novel without even reading it :p The few who did read it (three) said nothing bad about the novel itself but rather that they weren’t the right person to represent it.

Laurie says that agents are going to be honest with you and so will not try to be considerate about your feelings or about dashing your hopes and dreams :p So, I was kind of thinking that perhaps my writing wasn’t utterly awful but I still had no idea if it would sell. Now, I’m not out to make a million bucks (wouldn’t say if I did mind you :p) but I do want to have enough people interested in the novel if I’m going to write a second one. Otherwise, why bother? The story is in my head already and I could do infinite variations on it for ever enjoying how it all unfolds :p But I digress ..

I posted to alt.fan.pratchett (AFP) and the people over there were very kind 🙂 Some wanted to read the novel and some pointed out that perhaps I should be trying publishers instead of agents. I had not tried publishers mostly because I didn’t think anybody wanted submissions via e-mail. Sending out three chapters (which comes to about 50 pages in my case) via the post comes to a pretty hefty fee over here and I didn’t actually want to go to all that expense on mere speculation :p But kind person in AFP told me that I should submit to Baen Books and pointed me in the direction of their website. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only did Baen Books accept electronics submissions, they actually encouraged it! Then I discovered Baen’s Bar and my happiness was complete 🙂 Here was a web forum where a lot of my favourite authors appeared to hang out and they also had a nice and friendly atmosphere where you could discuss books, what more could you want? So, looks as if I’ll be hanging out at the bar a bit and if you are of a mind, you should come on over too – it’s a friendly place and they don’t bite .. except for the bears at the bar :p

The aunt/uncle factor – Part Trois

Yes, I know. Who is the mystery Print on Demand (PoD) company that I was talking about yesterday? :p Should I keep you in suspense? Should I drag this all out till the end of the entry? Nah, guess not :p They are Diggory Press Publishers and so far, they are the cheapest that I know of for certain, overall, to do a PoD book. Their prices actually let you have a reasonable cover price which is close to standard mass market retail prices and still make a profit.

I’ve been doing some digging on Diggory Press since I wrote my entry yesterday. There isn’t much online about Diggory Press but whatever I could find was always positive. There were a couple of people on a writing forum that I visit who were Diggory Press authors and they couldn’t praise Diggory enough – they say that they are first, efficient and do a very good job at printing. Of course, this is all hearsay. However, I did have the opportunity to experience their customer service/support firsthand when I sent in a query about cover sizes. My initial query went out on Sunday and on Monday morning, I had a response. I had a few further questions and I sent those out on Monday morning and again by business hours in the UK, I got a response and further inquiries were followed up within minutes or at least within the hour. They were very courteous and helpful and were willing to help me save money.

That brings us to the money itself. How much does it cost? I had done a costing for a 190 page 6" x 9" book with Lulu and it came to $8.34 for just the production cost. With Diggory the production cost for a 190 page 6" x 9" page came to $5.88 and I was actually able to prune down the number of pages by about 10 pages due to the way Diggory asks for books to be formatted/laid out for publishing as opposed to the way Lulu wants it done.

However, there are a few catches with Diggory, if you are a Lulu aficionado :p The first is that with Diggory you have to pay $50 up front as a setup fee. You also have to purchase your first proof copy at $20 (you have to tack on about $7 more if you are not in the US or UK for international postage). You can get an ISBN from them for about $80 and they throw in listings with online bookstores and some of the major wholesalers for that price and add the ISBN to your cover as well. You can of course, go with your own ISBN if you have one but you won’t get the free listings then. (The difference here is that if you use Diggory’s ISBN, they become the publisher for your book but if you use your own, you are the publisher). If you do decide to go with the ISBN option be aware that Diggory has to send out 6 copies of your book (at your cost, including postage) to the British libraries. This apparently is the law and not something that Diggory has control over.

The overwhelming advantage that I see with Diggory is that if you go through them and use them as your distributor/fulfilment agent, you can provide as low a discount as 25% to Amazon.com and you can list your books with them. At that price, I can still afford to have a cover price of $10 and hope to make a small profit … if anybody buys my book that is (and that’s a completely different story :p)

The uncle and aunt factor – Part Deux

Everything, as I said yesterday, is relative :p I had investigated a few Print on Demand (PoD) publishers a week or two ago and had settled on Lulu as the best of the lot. My decision was based on the cost per book since I wanted to set a reasonable cover price for the book and not be priced out of the market even before I began putting my books up for sale. Of all the PoD companies that I looked at, Lulu appeared to be the only one who could produce my book at a reasonable cost so that I could set a cover price of around $10 and be still able to make some sort of profit. But that was before I looked closer at Lulu’s Global Distribution Service.

If you publish with Lulu the normal way, your books are simply listed on Lulu’s own website or you can get a bunch of copies printed out and then take them around to booksellers yourself. However, your book will not be listed with any online booksellers or with the major book wholesalers and that’s where I expect most sales (if any would come in). After all, most of the people visiting Lulu are trying to sell their own books – would they actually want to buy more books?

In order to list your books with an online bookseller or the wholesalers, you need an ISBN number. You can get an ISBN from Lulu for $45 but it doesn’t get you much beyond that. If you go with Lulu’s Global Distribution Service for $150, then you get listed with the major wholesalers and with the major online bookstores as well as having Lulu act as your book distributor. I was all set to to with the Global Distribution Service before I read their FAQ and realized that if I used their Globabl Distribution Service (GDS), my cover price would have to change. According to Lulu, there are two prices when you go into their GDS channel – retail price and wholesale price. The wholesale price would be the one I originally had in mind for the book, the new retail price would be twice that! So suddenly, my book would jump from an affordable $10 to a rather high $20! Of course, according to Lulu, Amazon for instance would list the $20 retail price but also give a secondary discounted price which would be a few dollars lower but according to a friend, this doesn’t always happen and besides, even at $18 – $15 it would still be pretty expensive.

This was when I began looking around for other alternatives to Lulu and I did find one that I think is the best PoD publisher that I’ve discovered so far – they do charge an up-front fee unlike Lulu but their overall costs are reasonable and they do produce books for even less than Lulu’s production cost. Besides, they will place your books with Amazon (and other online booksellers) as well as with a lot more wholesalers than Lulu and they will act as your distributor but you would (or at least I would) still end up with a cover price around $10! So who is this mystery publisher? I will reveal all tomorrow in the third part in the It’s All Relative series after I’ve done some more investigation of this particular publisher to make certain that they are as good as they seem :p

Images of the imagination

As I’ve mentioned so many times over here in the past couple of weeks, I am obsessed with art at the moment :p It’s not that I believe I can do a better job than a professional artist when it comes to a cover. In fact, I prefer the professional artist who does my covers to work on their own and come up with their own vision because I like to see what images (or imagery :p) people get from reading my writing.

However, I have a vision in my head for what I’d do with the cover if I had the artistic talent and I would like to make that vision a reality just to see how well the reality stands up against the vision 🙂 Besides, I’m a tech-junkie and I just like to tinker with stuff :p So, I’ve been working towards making the cover in my mind a reality. Of course, the first thing was finding the right tools for the job. I had intended to use PhotoShop at first because I’m most familiar with it and use it on and off for various graphic related jobs. However, as I considered what I wanted to do, it became evident that I wasn’t good enough of an artist to do the job in PhotoShop :p So, I turned to Bryce since it allows you to build a scene using 3D building blocks much more easily.

The snag was that I’d never used Bryce before :p But this is where I say that the Net is a wonderful tool once again. I found a set of excellent set of Bryce tutorials online. They are totally free but the quality of the tutorials are worth more than the $20 the author says that they charge for the actual 6 week course! I’ve been working my way through the tutorials bit by bit everyday whenever I have a moment. I do some stuff in the morning and then a bit more in the evening after work. So far, I’m only up to lesson two and have managed to make a toy wagon :p The little image shows how the final output looked though the actual output was honking big 3MB file :p

I’m happy with the progress I’m making though and am hoping that I’d know enough soon to start setting up the basic scene for the cover I have in my mind. Boy, it sure looks much easier when they do it in the movies :p

Much Ado About Narnia

First there was J. K. Rowlings doing a hundred-eighty from loving Narnia so much that she couldn’t put it down even today if she was in a room with the book to saying that she’s never even completed the Narnia series and that there is something about C. S. Lewis’s sentiments that gets on her nerves. Now there is Philip Pullman saying that the Narnia series is everything from "propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in,", misogynistic, racist, sadomasochistically relishing violence and even anti-vegetarian :p (Of course, the last one might not be Pullman – I just read that bit somewhere in reading about all the brouhaha over Narnia and how somebody claimed that the stories were anti-vegetarian or something because Mr. and Mrs. Beaver had sausages for breakfast …but haven’t done the research to see if that was Pullman … yeah, I know, bad journalism :p)

Now, I’ve read Harry Potter (who hasn’t? :p) and I enjoy Rowling’s writing. I haven’t read any of Pullman’s work and I mostly knew of him as the author of the "Northern Lights" series since a friend of mine raved about it and encouraged me to read it. However, Pullman and his "His Dark Materials" is what is touted when anybody talks about Pullman and the Narnia issue. Not having read any of his stuff, I can’t really comment. Quite a few of the commentaries online say that at least in the case of Pullman, this whole Narnia thing is a case of sour grapes. I personally don’t believe so. I think that both Pullman and Rowlings are victims of not being able to perceive something from a different perspective, something written at a time when things were simpler, when everybody didn’t have to conform to what was "politically correct" or have to write within permitted boundaries. In fact, Rowlings and Pullman have done the worst possible thing from both the Narnian children’s perspective and that of Peter Pan – they have grown up :p

See, one of the things that Rowlings has objected to in Narnia is that Susan is condemned to damnation because she was interested in lipstick and being a woman. Of course, she misses the point entirely. What happened with Susan was not that she became interested in being a woman, but that she dismissed all that the wonder they’d experienced as children as "fancies" and wanted to be all adult, grown up and serious. What some people don’t realize is that you don’t have to give up the wonder of childhood to become an adult – you can still have the best of both worlds.

Of course, there is a lot more that people say about Narnia. They say it’s racist. They say that it’s anti-Islamic and that the Calormen, who were the bad guys in "The Last Battle", (well, at least most of them) were patently Muslims. Now I’m a Muslim and I’ve read the Narnia series over and over and over so many times and I’ve never, ever thought of the Calormen as Muslims till all this hullabaloo started in the first place. In fact, even the Christian symbolism passed over me when I first read the books as a child. I understood the goodness in the books and agreed with it – I still do and I wholeheartedly in the principle espoused in "The Last Battle" that it doesn’t matter who you believe in as God, that as long as you do good in the name of God, it means that you always believe in the "right" God. (Yeah, I’m phrasing it badly but hopefully you get the idea :p)

I had this friend of mine, who is the only other Sri Lankan that I’d known till then who’d read Narnia, introduce another friend of his who loved Narnia. Her first question was "How can you like Narnia when it is so heavily Christian?" Fortunately, we were talking online and she couldn’t see my look which said "Are you insane?" :p I’ve never thought of the Narnia books as Christian and I don’t think I ever will. If you want to take everything with Christian symbolism in it, you might as well call "E.T." and "The Matrix" Christian works as well :p I think of the Chronicles of Narnia as a great story with a simple (and true) philosophy behind it. Why can’t we all just leave things at that and go back to our own writing? :p