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it printed in cuneiform.

Posted on by Marko

brother_wp1b

That monstrosity is a Brother WP-1 word processor. I recently found this picture online, and boy, did it trigger some memories.

I got one of those babies in the late 1980s, when I was just out of high school. I kept it throughout my four years of military service, and it got dragged to every duty station where I spent more than a few weeks. And “dragged” is the right word here–it was an all-in-one unit with an amber-and-black CRT, a floppy drive, and a daisy wheel printer, and it weighed probably close to forty pounds. (It did have a convenient carry handle, so it was somewhat portable, but let me tell you that this thing was no MacBook Air. It tested your commitment. You really had to want to write if you chose to take your word processor the weight of a car battery with you.)

I filled up many a 3.5″ disk with my early attempts at Fictional Noveling, let me tell you. And I only got rid of the trusty Brother when I got my first PC, a 486 DX2-50, which had Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Word on it.

Man, I’ve been at this writing thing for a while. I already had dreams of making this writing thing a profession when I was still in high school. And it only took 25 years of pounding away at the keyboard!

walls and fences.

Posted on by Marko

25 years….don’t they go by in a blink.

A quarter-century ago, the Wall between East and West Berlin finally came down, and a divided city and country began growing back together after 45 years of enforced separation.

I was in the military at the time. When the Iron Curtain became porous, and the flow of refugees went from a trickle to a steady flow and then a tidal wave, I was a young private, barely 18. It felt momentous at the time, but it was mostly a punch-drunk rush, so many things of such magnitude happening so quickly that you lost your sense of being firmly anchored in history. We didn’t know what was going to happen in the following years when those first Trabis came across the border, but we knew that things would never go back to the way they had been.

Whenever some starry-eyed campus Marxist waxes on about the failures of capitalism and the free market, I know that they never got to cross from West Germany into the East, and have their world turn from color to gray. And I tell them that the truth of the matter is this: no capitalist free market society has ever had to use walls and guns and barbed wire to keep their population from leaving, but every socialist or communist country does.

The East German legal system had a term for the felony committed when trying to leave the country without (almost impossible to get) permission: Republikflucht, “flight from the Republic”.  Tens of thousands were arrested and imprisoned for the offense, and many hundreds were killed attempting to cross.

And that’s why I flinch whenever someone runs their mouth about putting a similar border fence up along our southern border. When you advocate that sort of thing—when you call for armed guards on that wall—you have to be aware what “closing the border” would entail. Who is going to machine-gun unarmed men, women, and children trying to cross that river and climb those fences? Will it be the people who wanted that wall there? Will it be their children? Or will they just pay some barely-out-of-high-school kid twenty grand a year to do that unpleasant work for them? And to what end?

Free people and free markets don’t require fences and armed guards, whether it’s to keep people in or out. I’ll never be a fan of walls and fences, no matter which way the barbed wire on top is pointed.

bow & arrow.

Posted on by Marko

Back when I went to community college in Tennessee, I took archery as one of my P.E. classes, and found that I really enjoyed it. Ever since then, I had plans to get a bow of my own and shoot it regularly, but we didn’t have the space in Tennessee, and other priorities got in the way after we moved to New Hampshire.

Last year I finally bought a decent bow and ancillary equipment, and started flinging arrows again. It’s a recurve bow with no added equipment–no sights, fancy arrow rest, or bow-mounted quiver. I like the low-tech aspect of it, and it’s more of a challenge to get good with what’s essentially just a length of springy wood and a string.

I often take it out when I’m waiting for the school bus, and shoot at the orange bag at various distances. I try to empty the twelve-arrow quiver three or four times before the bus drops the kids off at the bottom of our driveway. It’s interesting just how precisely you can shoot an arrow off a fairly simple bow with a little bit of practice. And archery is one of the sports where you can see rapid improvement with frequent practice. I’ll notice when I haven’t shot a bow for a few weeks–the arrows tend to go a little wider than usual–but get back to it for a day or three, and you can pop that bag eleven out of twelve times at 30 yards and feel like some bad-ass middle-aged Robin Hood again.

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First session after a month and a half without any practice. Half an hour later, they were all reliably in the bag again.

“lines of departure”, the goodreads choice awards, and you.

Posted on by Marko

Last year, TERMS OF ENLISTMENT made the SF shortlist in the 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards. This year, LINES OF DEPARTURE has managed the same trick in the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards, which is nice.

If you read the book and liked it enough (if you in fact LIKED IT BETTER THAN THE OTHERS), then by all means please head over to Goodreads and vote for it. But even if you vote for someone else on the shortlist, that’s quite all right, because I am in pretty good company this year.

It’s nice to be recognized, but it’s nicer still when the recognition comes from reader-driven awards. Let’s hope I can keep the streak going with ANGLES OF ATTACK.

elections, schmelections.

Posted on by Marko

Here’s my (not terribly prescient) prediction for tomorrow’s midterm elections:

The GOP will most likely gain Senate control. They will then promptly assume that they weren’t elected because people are tired of Team Blue’s fuckups, but rather that they now have some sort of mandate to double down on stupid and harp on gay marriage and abortion. I feel comfortable predicting this because it’s what the Stupid Party has been doing every single time they got a workable majority in the last twenty years or so.

I’ll go vote, of course. As usual, I’ll be voting for the candidates that best reflect my personal political beliefs. And as usual, I’ll have to spend the next two years listening to people telling me that I “threw my vote away” or “helped the other guy get elected”, and other such nonsense. The only wasted vote is the one you cast not based on your conscience but on who has a better chance of winning. It’s an election, not a goddamn prom, even if it has all the external trappings of one. And even if your unprincipled windbag loses on account of my single vote, it won’t be my fault because I voted for someone else, it will be his or her fault because he or she failed attract my vote.

Anyway! It’s Monday, and I have a novel to continue and a novella to finish. Let’s not all get negative over who is going to be elected to carry the slop bucket for the next two years. I’m going to make some coffee and fire up Pandora, and get to work. That’s one thing in the world that is entirely in my control.

angles of attack release date.

Posted on by Marko

It appears that Frontlines #3, ANGLES OF ATTACK, has an official release date: April 28. Here is the Amazon product page, where you can pre-order the book if you are so inclined. There’s no cover art yet, but I’m sure 47North will update the product page as soon as there’s an official cover.

In the meantime, I can promise you a new novella in the Frontlines universe before the end of the year. I’m also officially at work on Frontlines novel #4, which doesn’t have a firm title yet. 

It’s a cruel and inconvenient fact that it takes months or years to write what takes days or weeks to read…

my birthday, and also the audible deal of the day.

Posted on by Marko

Hey, kids!

For my 43rd birthday (which is, incidentally, TODAY AND RIGHT NOW), Audible got me a nice surprise:

LINES OF DEPARTURE is the Audible Deal of the Day!

So if you like taking in your fiction through the sound-holes in your skull, you may want to head over there and pick up a copy. It’s cheaper than a latte, will keep you busy longer, and they won’t write the wrong name on the outside. Also, the Frontlines audiobooks are read by Luke Daniels, who does a stellar job.

I’m out running errands today, and there’s a kid birthday party/Halloween bash later this afternoon, so I’ll be occupied most of the day, but I think there’ll be a cocktail or two waiting for me at home this evening.

 

noo yawk city.

Posted on by Marko

I’m in New York City at the moment, attending NY Comic Con, meeting up with friends, and doing a little bit of Big City Stuff. I haven’t been back in the city since maybe 2000, so it’s interesting to see how much has changed around here.

It’s kind of trendy to talk smack about NYC, especially among my conservative and libertarian friends, but I’ll risk being uncool by admitting that I do love this city. It’s the first place I visited when I first came to the United States as a tourist, back in 1990, the days before the Internet or cell phones. I had six weeks of leave saved up and $6,000 worth of AmEx travelers checks in my pocket. For a lot of Europeans, NYC is kind of the epitome of the picture of America they have in their heads. And as far as national business cards go, NYC is a pretty cool one. It’s full of energy and history, cool Art Deco buildings, lots of stuff to do and see, and everything else that comes with being in a place that is one of the world’s cultural and financial hubs. On a global scale, only London, Paris, and Tokyo can lay claim to the same sort of impact and influence. 

Now I’m off to the Javits for some more writerly business, and a slice or two of NY pizza along the way. Because I didn’t come here to sit in a hotel room and dick around on the Internet, even if it is a nice hotel room and a fast Internet connection. In the meantime, have a few snapshots from NYC.

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they can thank “blackboard jungle” for that one.

Posted on by Marko

This excellent and thorough Village Voice article on the outdated, arbitrary, and capricious knife laws in New York City is about “gravity knives”, but those laws share the hallmarks of most weapons-related legislation:

  • They were passed in an emotional atmosphere fanned by perceptions and media coverage
  • They have little to no basis in demonstrable facts or science
  • Their intent at enactment was to disarm specific ethnic or racial groups
  • They are used as a universal legal adapter to arrest primarily people from those ethnic or racial groups at will
  • Their statutory language is intentionally vague and interpreted by law enforcement in the broadest possible definition to make it applicable to as many people as possible
  • They are still used disproportionately against specific ethnic and racial groups
  • They are used to pad arrest and prosecution statistics artificially to make the police and DAs look tough on crime
  • They put thousands or even tens of thousands of nonviolent people in prison who have no proven criminal intent
  • They are enforced inconsistently, arbitrarily, and unequally depending on race, ethnicity, and social status of the accused person

Most weapons laws aren’t about public safety, they are–and always have been–about social control.