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<title>Stephen West&#x27;s Blog</title><link>http://stephenwest.net/index.php</link><description>News from the writing world of Stephen West</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2011-2013 Stephen West</dc:rights><dc:date>2014-11-23T11:42:22+00:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Mon, 4 May 2015 11:47:08 +0100</lastBuildDate><item><title>Writing fiction is just elaborate lying</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Writing</category><dc:date>2014-11-23T11:42:22+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/writing-is-lying.php#unique-entry-id-50</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/writing-is-lying.php#unique-entry-id-50</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[You might have heard this before: writing a work of fiction is simply constructing an elaborate lie.   Usually meant as a denigration, as in, why waste your time lying, when you could be writing non-fiction?   You know, the truth?   Not lies?   In this view, fiction is a pointless game, and those who practise it are shallow and vapid, unlike the serious purveyors of non-fiction, who are engaged with the real world and its real problems.


This is wrong on so many levels.   In the first place, on a purely technical standpoint, the primary intention of the liar is to deceive, but the reader of a work of fiction knows very well that what she is reading is a creation, and not a representation of actual events.   In fact, many works that are nominally non-fiction are constructed to deceive.   A liar doesn&rsquo;t start off by telling you he is lying; therefore only non-fiction can be a lie!


Secondly, written fiction, like all art, tries to tell us a deeper truth about the world and ourselves.   If it is well done, if the artist succeeds, we will recognise that deeper truth, conveyed to us by means of artifice.   This, again, is the opposite of lying, where the aim is to convey a deep falsehood by means of superficial verisimilitude.   The techniques might appear similar; both writer and liar will carefully observe reality so as to convey a plausible narrative; but then, to the untrained eye, the techniques of the surgeon and the butcher might appear similar.   As with the writer and the liar, however, the surgeon is aiming for a very different outcome than that of the butcher.


And finally, the writer of what is nominally non-fiction is still engaged in a process of artifice; she does not aim to produce an emotionless recounting of facts as if she were a robot (and even if she did, there would still be the matter of choosing which facts to recount!).   Most non-fiction writing is designed to be read (in the sense of needing to compete for the attention of readers) and therefore strives to entertain and sometimes to persuade, and these goals are at least somewhat antithetical to pure objective truth.


Our love of stories is perhaps one of the defining characteristics of our species.   Every culture ever known since the dawn of time has told its stories.   There seems to be some structure of the brain where if we are given a series of events, we naturally try to construct a narrative that ties the events together and explains them&ndash; even if the events are entirely random.   This instinct to create structure out of chaos may be the legacy of a successful evolutionary strategy, and thus entirely practical&ndash; if our ancestors created a fanciful story about a natural phenomenon that enabled them to correctly predict when that phenomenon would occur, then they would be more likely to survive.   And perhaps the compelling story made it easier for an unlettered culture to remember it and pass it on to future generations.


We no longer need to create myths and legends to pass on our knowledge, and so the anti-fiction brigade would have you believe that fiction&rsquo;s time has passed.   But our culture is more than just scientific facts.   Our thirst for stories remains undimmed.   The stories which resonate with us are passed on by word of mouth until millions share the myths of Hogwarts, the Discworld, and Westeros.   And that is no bad thing.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>More on Airship City and Wattpad</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Wattpad</category><dc:date>2014-11-05T21:14:35+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/fab72203bb28374c70d470f88d28428d-49.php#unique-entry-id-49</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/fab72203bb28374c70d470f88d28428d-49.php#unique-entry-id-49</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[So a couple of months since Airship City was featured on Wattpad, and it&rsquo;s received an astonishing 55,000 reads and nearly 2,000 votes.   There have been over 100 comments, almost all positive.   The attention seems to have spilled over to my short story Airship Stowaway, which is set in the same Aeropolis universe, and has nearly 4,000 reads and nearly 200 votes, which interestingly is far more than my other stories, and shows, I suppose, why writers like a series!


I am truly heartened by the positive attention that Airship City has received on Wattpad.   I think it shows that people do like and respond to what I have written, if they get the chance to see it.   Being featured has enabled it to get noticed, which is half the battle.   (Obviously the other half is to write something worth reading in the first place.)   Now if only there were some way to get featured on Amazon...]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The introduction of paper</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Apple</category><category>iPad</category><dc:date>2014-09-21T11:10:07+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/0d99c88d180a0f05b9cf5f3719963050-48.php#unique-entry-id-48</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/0d99c88d180a0f05b9cf5f3719963050-48.php#unique-entry-id-48</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A CAVEMAN and a CAVEWOMAN are sitting on stones, huddled around a fire.   They are dressed in animal fur clothing.   The Caveman is reading a stone slab propped up in front of him.


...I'm worried about this new thing that Junior's been using recently.


...Well, he's been spending a lot of time using it, instead of working on his stone letter carving and his cave painting.


...What is this new thing?


...It's made by a bunch of weirdos in the next valley.


...It's not made by that fruity tribe, is it?


...Yes, that's the one. 

...Why can't people just respect tradition?


Just then Junior walks into the cave.   He's wearing a fur hat that flops over behind his head, and elaborate leather sandals.   A leather messenger bag is over his shoulder.


...Well, your mother was telling me about this new "paper" stuff you've been using.


...(He strides over to his parents, pulling a few sheets of paper from his messenger bag)


...Here's something I've been working on.


The Caveman takes the sheets from his son's hand, a dubious look on his face. 

...So this is it, is it? 

...No, it's light as a feather!   It's just brilliant, Dad, I could carry sheets and sheets of it to school, and they would still weigh much less than a slab.


...Oh, you don't use it at school, do you? 

...Well, they don't really know what to make of it, to be honest.   Some of them seem to like it.


The Cavewoman shakes her head and rolls her eyes.   Junior looks at her in confusion.


...How do you expect to grow up big and strong if you don't carry slabs of stone around?   I have to say I don't like this at all.


...That's the least of your worries. 

...Show your father what you use to write on the paper.


Junior frowns, and takes a thin stick of charcoal out of his messenger bag.   He hands it silently to his father.


...You don't use a hammer and chisel?   How on earth do you expect to develop big strong fingers?   Why, if you used this to write all the time, I'd be surprised if your fingers didn't wither away and fall off!


...And another thing, staring at that whiteness can't be good for your eyes.   At least stone has a soothing greyness.


...And because it's so light and easy to handle, he can switch from one piece of paper to another as easily as you can imagine.   Without the discipline of having to move heavy stone slabs around, he can just flit from reading one thing to another in seconds.   What it could be doing to his brain I can't imagine.


...But&ndash; but what you're saying makes no sense!


...Don't you talk to your mother like that!


(he gesticulates with the paper in his hand.   Unfortunately the paper touches the fire, and promptly bursts into flame)


...(he throws the paper on the floor of the cave)


...Slabs would never do that! 

...His father grabs him roughly and drags him off the burning paper.


...What are you doing? 

...I think you're right, this awful stuff has driven him insane. ...  From now on, paper is banned in this cave.


Junior sits weeping on the floor.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Airship City is a Featured Story on Wattpad</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Wattpad</category><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2014-08-26T12:23:35+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-city-featured-story-wattpad.php#unique-entry-id-47</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-city-featured-story-wattpad.php#unique-entry-id-47</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[So a little while ago Wattpad wrote to let me know that Airship City would become a Featured Story on Wattpad.   A few days ago it went live on the Featured Stories page, and since then reads and follows have simply exploded.   It took ages to get to 1,000 reads before it was Featured, but since then it has clocked up more than 17,000 reads, and will probably have even more by the time you read this.   I&rsquo;ve massively increased my follower count as well.


All of which is immensely gratifying, of course, not just because Airship City is being read and enjoyed, but also because of the lovely comments that some kind readers have left.   So I&rsquo;m quite pleased that I took the time to get involved at Wattpad!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Airship Stowaway</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Wattpad</category><category>Aeropolis</category><dc:date>2014-05-28T12:59:36+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-stowaway-on-wattpad.php#unique-entry-id-46</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-stowaway-on-wattpad.php#unique-entry-id-46</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve been steadily adding to my short story set in the Aeropolis universe.   It&rsquo;s called Airship Stowaway and I&rsquo;ve been posting it up on Wattpad.   Some of it is repurposed stuff from an early draft of Airship City, then called Aeropolis, and if you have read Airship City and want to read some more, here is your chance!   When it&rsquo;s done I will publish it properly on Kindle, but for now you can read along on Wattpad.


<iframe width="500" height="280" src="http://embed.wattpad.com/story/12447005" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A few updates</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Wattpad</category><category>Goodreads</category><category>Kindle</category><category>Airships</category><dc:date>2014-04-26T18:27:05+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/1d2daba3cba86513fe84deb581854417-45.php#unique-entry-id-45</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/1d2daba3cba86513fe84deb581854417-45.php#unique-entry-id-45</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A few quick updates:


1.   I&rsquo;ve uploaded a full ePub file of Airship City to Goodreads.   So if you&rsquo;re on Goodreads, you can read the entire book online, or even download it.    If you have read and enjoyed it, please consider rating or reviewing it!   Airship City on Goodreads.


2.   I&rsquo;m also posting the entire novel up onto Wattpad, a chapter per day.   So if you&rsquo;re on Wattpad, you might find it more convenient to read there. <iframe width="500" height="280" src="http://embed.wattpad.com/story/13878874" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


3.   If you can&rsquo;t be bothered with all this and just want the convenience of the Kindle edition, it&rsquo;s currently on promotion for a lot less than you might think!   Airship City on Amazon


4.   Finally, just wanted to let you know about a great online resource for airship information&mdash; a real treasure trove.   Airships.net]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Update on the Wattpad thing</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Wattpad</category><dc:date>2014-03-22T17:18:51+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/wattpad-update.php#unique-entry-id-43</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/wattpad-update.php#unique-entry-id-43</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Thought I&rsquo;d give a quick update on the Wattpad experiment.   As you might remember, I decided to put some stuff up on Wattpad, the free online reading community... thing.   This is my page.


Now Wattpad isn&rsquo;t the easiest thing to work out.   It has a very &ldquo;young&rdquo; feel to it&mdash; lots of One Direction fan fiction.   And some of the stuff with the most &ldquo;reads&rdquo; and &ldquo;votes&rdquo; seems not all that well-written, if I&rsquo;m honest.   And the inevitable system of followers and votes seems like yet another social network mountain to climb. 


But on the other hand, there are some genuinely good writers on there, and you also have the potential to get instant feedback on your work and see whether something has the ability to capture the imagination of readers&mdash; or not.


I started out by posting up a short story set in the Aeropolis universe, called Airship Stowaway.   I posted it up in 600-word chunks, at first a day at a time, but subsequently one part every week.   So far there are 10 parts totalling 14 pages, and I have received 337 reads and two votes.


Compared with the thousands of reads and votes that some works receive this seems less than stunning.   But I don&rsquo;t know what the average or mean is.   So to get some more data, I posted up the first few scenes from an old WIP that I started a few years ago and never finished.   The thinking was that if it seemed popular, it would give me an incentive to finish it.   And if it didn&rsquo;t, well, that would be useful data too.


This story, King of Cards, currently has three parts up totalling seven pages, with 65 reads and no votes.   However, it is ranked 442 on the Action list&mdash; which must have a lot fewer items on it than the Science Fiction and Teen Fiction lists, which is what Airship Stowaway is categorised as.


I&rsquo;ve also posted up the first three chapters of Airship City.   I will post up another three over the next three days, matching the preview chapters on this site.   Although it&rsquo;s only been up for a few days, it has already garnered 59 reads, almost as much as King of Cards on a similar page count.


I will continue to update Airship Stowaway until it is finished, and then take stock again.   The posting deadlines do at least give me an incentive to keep on track, so that plus the instant feedback thing probably mean that I will continue to use Wattpad for new stories and experimental ideas to assess against the baseline I have now established.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>How to write a review</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Amazon</category><dc:date>2014-03-09T12:20:13+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/how-to-write-a-review.php#unique-entry-id-42</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/how-to-write-a-review.php#unique-entry-id-42</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Reviews are the lifeblood of book sales on Amazon.   The more reviews your books have, the more this &ldquo;social proof&rdquo; will persuade potential readers to buy them.   It&rsquo;s a simple psychological fact: when lots of other people like something, you are more likely to consider it than if no-one has shown any interest.


But reviews are hard to get.   You give out free books to people, and they somehow never get around to writing a review like they promised.   You have free promotions on Amazon with hundreds of downloads... and no reviews.   It&rsquo;s frustrating.


And it&rsquo;s due to another simple psychological fact, one which you, as a writer, should know really well: the fear of the blank page.   Expressing yourself in written format is never simple, even if it&rsquo;s &ldquo;just&rdquo; a review.   For a non-writer, trying to lay out their thoughts and feelings about a book can be an intimidating thing.   And things which are hard, and which don&rsquo;t give any reward, tend not to get done.


Is there anything you can do to make it easier?   I think there might be.   As a writer, you probably have some techniques for overcoming the fear of the blank page.   You might have an outline.   Perhaps you do research, or character sketches.   Or maybe you subscribe to the &ldquo;crappy first draft&rdquo; technique where you just write down anything that comes to mind, knowing that any weaknesses can be fixed in the edit.   All of these are ways to get over the inertia of the blank page and start writing.


Now your reviewers are in exactly the same boat when they come to starting their review, so some help in getting started, some kind of outline, would be most welcome.   Exactly what form this outline should take will depend to some extent on the nature of the work to be reviewed, but as a general guide, you could suggest they answer one or more of the following questions:


1.    What did you particularly like about the book?   (Or: what was really good?)


2.    How did the book make you feel when reading it?


3.    Which character did you really like?   Which one did you hate?


4.    Did the book make you smile, laugh, or cry?


5.    Was the story exciting?   Was there a twist which you didn&rsquo;t expect?


6.    Would you like to read more books by the author?


7.    How was the length of the book?   Too short, too long, or just right?


8.    Was the ending satisfying?


9.    Were you sad to finish the book?   Did you wish it went on forever?


10.   Did you race through the story to find out what happened next?   Or did you savour it slowly?


Remember, just by asking your readers to leave a review, you are giving them a somewhat daunting challenge.   Suggesting a few ways in which they could write the review shows understanding and makes it more likely that they will help you out.  
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Mt Gox Bitcoin collapse - what really happened</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Bitcoin</category><dc:date>2014-02-27T21:33:36+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/mt-gox-bitcoin-collapse.php#unique-entry-id-41</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/mt-gox-bitcoin-collapse.php#unique-entry-id-41</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I first learned of Bitcoin a few years ago, so it&rsquo;s been interesting to observe how it has become more widely known in recent months.   At first the coverage focused on the esoteric mathematics behind the algorithm, and the fortunes being made by the early adopters. 

...Mt Gox was the first of the Bitcoin exchanges, where you could buy or sell bitcoins, effectively trading them for more normal, &ldquo;fiat&rdquo; currency, and for a long time it was the largest.   I never had much to do with them initially, because I mined my own bitcoins. ...  When I first began finding out about Bitcoin, it seemed obvious to me that keeping my bitcoins safe was an important consideration.   In fact, while I was at an early stage of research, I came across a harrowing tale of a person who had lost his entire bitcoin wallet to a hacker.   At that stage his bitcoins were worth more than a hundred thousand dollars. ...  So I spent some time researching and deciding on a secure strategy for keeping my coins.


After I had mined my bitcoins, and I needed some money, I did transfer them to Mt Gox so as to convert them into fiat currency. ...  If someone had suggested to me that I leave substantial holdings of Bitcoin on Mt Gox&rsquo;s servers, I would have thought them mad.   I wanted to control my own coins, not leave them to the care of someone else.


But it now seems that many, many people were of the opposite opinion.   Mt Gox apparently had some 600,000 bitcoins in its &ldquo;cold wallet&rdquo; - the offline storage facility that was supposed to keep customer deposits safe. 

...It may be that when you come to bitcoin from the mining side, like I did, you either have a technical bent, or you get one.   And when you have this technical understanding, you are more aware of the risks.   But if your only experience of Bitcoin is buying coins on an exchange, you might not fully understand the technology and the ways in which it can be misused.   And so you may see nothing wrong with leaving your bitcoins on Mt Gox&rsquo;s servers after buying them.   After all, wallet software is difficult to install and use safely.   And when you log in to Mt Gox you can see your coins in your account. 

...I used Mt Gox to sell my bitcoins on two occasions last year.   The first transaction went off without a hitch, and I received the money in my account a few days later. ...  I cancelled the withdrawal, bought bitcoins with the money, and transferred those out (which happened almost instantly).


It now seems obvious that Mt Gox was already facing problems at that stage.   While they now blame something called &ldquo;transactional malleability&rdquo; for the loss, many in the Bitcoin community are skeptical of the story.   It just doesn&rsquo;t seem possible for 600,000 bitcoins to simply vanish, especially from &ldquo;cold storage&rdquo; which is not connected to the electronic servers of the trading system.   In any event, transactional malleability has been known about for some time, and all the other exchanges have long since improved their software to protect against this.   So it&rsquo;s strange to blame an old problem now.   Unless the problem has been going on for much longer than Mt Gox are implying.


Some theorise that the losses caused by transactional malleability were in actual fact much smaller, but that they did get Mt Gox to the point where it had to take some coins out of the &ldquo;cold wallet&rdquo; in order to meet customer withdrawal requests. 

...All wallet mechanisms use a system of public and private encryption keys to protect the currency that they hold.   This makes them very secure; but if you lose the key, they are impossible to open.   Also, Mt Gox is known for using software that was custom written by its founder Mark Karpeles, so another possibility is that a failure of the software has rendered the wallet inaccessible.   Karpeles does not exactly enjoy a stellar reputation among coders, with many disparaging comments made on his technical writing, so this is a distinct possibility.


If this theory is correct, then the bitcoins have not been stolen.   Mt Gox knows exactly where they are and can even look at them on the blockchain, the complete record of transactions on Bitcoin that is stored in every coin mined; but they are inaccessible unless and until the encryption keys can be recovered or the failure of the software is rectified.


Under this scenario, then, Mt Gox and Karpeles have been engaged in an exercise to buy time and conserve their store of bitcoins while they try to solve the problem of the inaccessible wallet.   By slowing down cash withdrawals they engineered a situation where it was easier to put bitcoins into the system than to get them out, a sort of bitcoin honeytrap.   Those, like me, who transferred coins in and then sold them faced waiting for a long time to get the money, and many, like me, must have given up and bought bitcoins just to get them out of Mt Gox.   This worked as a bitcoin-conservation strategy while prices were rising.   For example, I sold five bitcoins at a price of about &pound;90 per coin, netting me &pound;450, which I then tried to withdraw.   By the time I gave up and cancelled the withdrawal, that &pound;450 bought me only one coin, as the price had shot up in the months that I sat waiting.   So Mt Gox saved having to find four bitcoins when I eventually managed to fight free of their clutches.


...When they stopped, the missing bitcoins became a crisis.   And with no solution to the cold wallet problem in sight, Karpeles may have made a last, desperate gamble.   It&rsquo;s possible he deliberately leaked a &ldquo;crisis strategy document&rdquo; that was meant to panic the other bitcoin exchanges and individuals owning large amounts of bitcoins into bailing out Mt Gox, making good the missing bitcoins to prevent a crisis of confidence in the crypto currency.


...All of the major players closed ranks against Mt Gox, distancing themselves from what they described as a poorly run (and even criminally negligent) operation that was not representative of the general state of the bitcoin industry.


I don&rsquo;t think that the collapse of Mt Gox will deal a fatal blow to Bitcoin, but it does teach some valuable lessons: if you let someone else look after your property, you may lose it.   And if anyone makes you wait an unreasonable amount of time to give you what belongs to you, assume the worst, cut your losses, and end the relationship as quickly as you can.   By the time it had sunk in that Mt Gox was behaving in a suspicious manner, I had lost four-fifths of the value of what I had sold them.   At least I got something though, which is likely more than those who had coins in their accounts at Mt Gox a few days ago will get.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Lifting Gas in Airships</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2014-02-17T12:35:33+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/hydrogen-helium-vacuum.php#unique-entry-id-40</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/hydrogen-helium-vacuum.php#unique-entry-id-40</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Most people know that zeppelins like the Hindenburg were filled with a flammable gas known as hydrogen, and that the Hindenburg disaster was caused by this gas igniting.   Some also know that American airships were filled with the inert gas helium, but that the Zeppelin company was not allowed to purchase helium from the Americans.   But what are the other characteristics of these gases, and are there any other alternatives for providing lift to airships?


Hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe (and the most abundant).   It occupies the first position on the periodic table, consisting of a single proton orbited by a single electron.   Most of the hydrogen found on Earth is bound up with oxygen to create water (H20), but it is relatively easy to split the water molecules using electrolysis into their constituent elemental hydrogen and oxygen.


Because hydrogen has only a single proton in its nucleus it is extremely reactive, and liable to form bonds with other atoms to create compounds like water; its volatility is the reason why it is so flammable.   In contrast, helium, which occupies the next position on the periodic table, has two protons in its nucleus and is therefore a stable element.   It doesn&rsquo;t try to connect with other atoms, and is thus stable and inert, and not flammable.


One of the interesting things about helium is that it was discovered in space before any was found on Earth.   Spectrometry is the process by which the presence of elements can be detected using their spectral signatures in light; so a particular element will produce a particular frequency of light in the visible spectrum.   Helium&rsquo;s spectral signature was first detected in the light coming from our Sun, and thus the element was named for the Greek god of the Sun, Helios.   This was in 1868, but helium was not discovered on Earth itself until 1903, in natural gas fields in the US.


Helium is quite rare, being found in natural gas at concentrations of up to 7%, from which it is separated using fractional distillation.   Helium possesses escape velocity; any helium released into the atmosphere escapes the earth&rsquo;s gravitational pull and is lost into space.


Both hydrogen and helium produce lift in airships by their property of being lighter than air.   The relative buoyancy of both gases means that any enclosed envelope which is filled with the gas will exert an upward force if placed within the atmosphere.   Hydrogen is slightly more buoyant as it has one less proton and is therefore lighter than helium.   The density of air at standard temperature and pressure is 1.28 grams per litre, so 1 litre of displaced air has sufficient buoyant force to lift 1.28 grams.   But since the airbag of an airship uses hydrogen or helium to displace the air, the weight of the gas must be subtracted from that.   The mass of one litre of helium is 0.18 grams, so the lifting force is thus reduced to 1.1 grams when helium is used.


What if, instead of using a gas to displace the air, one used only vacuum?   Then there would be no weight from the gas, and the maximum lifting force would be obtained.   This would seem to be the most efficient option &mdash; except for the problem posed by the fact that the pressure of the air would tend to collapse the vacuum container, unless it was very strong.   A strong container would not be very light, so any weight advantage would be lost, at least with the current state of material science.   (In Gene Wolfe&rsquo;s Book of the New Sun series, the flyers do seem to make use of vacuum chambers to stay aloft, presumably by using some novel super&ndash;strong, super&ndash;light material.)


But what is truly amazing to me is how little advantage the vacuum setup would achieve over using even helium, the less efficient of the two commonly used lifting gases.   Helium is only 14% less efficient than vacuum.   The molecules of helium gas are so negligible that they add very little to the weight of the airship, yet they exert sufficient force on the bag to counteract the pressure of the air that they are displacing.   Remove that tiny amount of matter, and now you need a very strong vessel to fight back against the crushing pressure of the air on the enclosed vacuum.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>An Experiment</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Wattpad</category><dc:date>2014-02-11T12:45:12+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/an-experiment-wattpad.php#unique-entry-id-39</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/an-experiment-wattpad.php#unique-entry-id-39</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;m always looking for new ways to connect with readers, and I&rsquo;d heard about the online community known as Wattpad some time ago.   Since I&rsquo;ve written a fair chunk of the Aeropolis short, I decided to experiment with releasing it on Wattpad in serial form (something which Wattpad specialises in).


The first two parts are already up, and I&rsquo;ll be adding steadily to the story over the next couple of weeks.   I&rsquo;d be interested in your comments.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New year&#x2c; new stuff</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><dc:date>2014-01-05T17:31:40+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/new-year-new-stuff.php#unique-entry-id-38</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/new-year-new-stuff.php#unique-entry-id-38</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As I&rsquo;ve mentioned before, I wrote the first few drafts of Airship City (then known as Aeropolis) on my iPhone.   This was because I wanted to write on the Tube on my way into work, and I didn&rsquo;t have a laptop then.   It actually worked pretty well.   It wasn&rsquo;t much good for editing and rewriting, because the small screen area and touch screen controls makes it difficult to move around in the documents and make changes.   But for banging out the first draft, it was near-perfect.


Since I changed jobs and have been driving to work, I&rsquo;ve struggled to find the time to write.   I&rsquo;ve also found that actually writing on the laptop can be distracting.   It has all my other stuff on it, so sometimes when I&rsquo;ve sat down to write, I will decide to do a bit of budgeting or some other busywork, and before I know it, the allotted time for writing is gone, and I&rsquo;ve done nothing.


Other times my laptop will be upstairs, and I won&rsquo;t want to get it to avoid waking people up... the excuses are all too easy, because the laptop isn&rsquo;t with me all the time.


While considering this the other day, I suddenly realised that my iPhone is always with me.   And what&rsquo;s more, I couldn&rsquo;t think of a good reason why I had stopped writing on the iPhone, other than that I now had the laptop, and had simply assumed I didn&rsquo;t need to write on the iPhone anymore.


Which is true; but there is a difference between need and want.   I pulled out the iPhone and started tapping out a short story, a prequel of sorts, that takes place in the Aeropolis universe.   Because I can write whenever I have a spare moment, I&rsquo;ve already written close to 4,000 words. 


There is something that just works well for me in writing on the iPhone.   I use the amazing Elements app, and autocomplete means that I don&rsquo;t even have to completely type many words, the software knows me so well by now. 


Obviously for editing and rewriting I will go back to Scrivener, but for just getting the words out, Elements seems to be working out.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Behind the cover</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2013-12-18T20:51:39+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/behind-the-cover.php#unique-entry-id-37</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/behind-the-cover.php#unique-entry-id-37</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Doing a new cover for Airship City was something that I wanted to do anyway; I was never entirely happy with either of the first two covers, and spent a fair bit of time thinking of how I could do better.   But another really strong reason was that I wanted to do a print edition with CreateSpace, and I knew that my first cover, which was also the one I liked better, was too low-res to work in print.


On our relatively low-res computer screens, images don&rsquo;t have to be too pixel-dense to look OK.   About 75 dpi (dots per inch) looks fine.   But when you get into printing, it&rsquo;s a completely different story.   Print is much higher resolution. 300 dpi is the norm.   If you take your 75 dpi web image and print it at 300 dpi, it comes out tiny.


No problem, you say, just blow it up!   This doesn&rsquo;t work unfortunately; the picture looks grainy at best, and pixelated at worst.   The image I had created looked OK on the web but would look crude and amateurish on the cover of an actual book.


So I had to create a new image, from scratch, at some pretty high resolutions.   Because I wanted an image that would wrap around the entire book (one image for the whole cover, front, spine and back) I needed something really large that I could crop down.   I decided I needed something at least 8,000 pixels across.


If you have a good digital camera you can of course take images with this sort of resolution.   And for a while I toyed with the idea of finding a model, getting steampunk props on Amazon, and taking some images that I could marry up with suitable backgrounds in Photoshop. 


But then I decided to do it all with the computer.   I&rsquo;ve been experimenting with free 3D software such as POV-Ray and Blender for a while, but unfortunately, building scenes and models from scratch takes an enormous amount of skill and artistry.   I&rsquo;m not there yet and may never be.


The alternative is to use commercial 3D software which can be expensive.   But then I discovered DAZ Studio.   DAZ&rsquo;s approach is different.   Instead of paying a fortune for a 3D app that includes thousands of professionally designed models and scenes, you can download DAZ Studio for free.   It comes with only a few simple models, but it&rsquo;s enough to learn the basics and make some serviceable scenes.


If you then want something more sophisticated, you can buy individual models on the DAZ marketplace.   So for my cover image I bought a nice airship, some different clothes for my Joseph figure, and a sky sphere that gives the cloud background.   Instead of paying hundreds of pounds for loads of models I would probably never use, I paid only a few pounds for the ones that were exactly what I wanted for my project.


And of course the brilliant thing about 3D software is that you can render the image to whatever resolution you want.   Higher resolutions take longer to render but on my MacBook Air, the large images never took more than an hour to render.   A quick pass through Pixelmator to add the titles and blurb, and I was ready to upload to CreateSpace.


The great thing about 3D apps like DAZ Studio is that you can try out different ideas, camera angles, figure poses, etc, as if you were in a completely controllable and infinitely scalable photo studio.   I tried out quite a few concepts before settling on the final image.


At first I thought I would show Joseph trying to hitch a ride on a passing airship:


But I felt it wasn&rsquo;t that clear what was going on, and lacked excitement.   So I decided to do a more extreme angle, with the camera looking up as Joseph stretched to grasp the rope:


Although better, I was now concerned about how the image would wrap around the book.   Most of the airship would now be on the back cover, and I wanted it on the cover.


This is the final image in full width.   Centering the airship on the cover put the one side of it and the left engine nacelle on the back cover.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New cover - and a new chapter</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2013-12-14T18:08:08+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/New-cover-new-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-36</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/New-cover-new-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-36</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Some exciting news: as promised, I&rsquo;ve added a new chapter to Airship City.   Amazon should push the revised file out to your Kindles if you&rsquo;ve already bought the book.   If you haven&rsquo;t yet bought it, you&rsquo;ll get the new edition right away if you buy it now.


And to go with the new edition, a smart new cover!   I&rsquo;ve been working hard on this cover for the last couple of months, learning the software and refining my vision, and I&rsquo;m quite pleased with how it&rsquo;s turned out.   Someone on Twitter said it was reminiscent of Doctor Who, and while that wasn&rsquo;t what I was going for, I can see it now, and I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s a bad thing at all.


Here it is:
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Airship City on Kindle Countdown</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2013-11-14T12:30:30+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-city-kindle-countdown.php#unique-entry-id-35</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-city-kindle-countdown.php#unique-entry-id-35</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Amazon have launched a new thing called Kindle Countdown, which lets you reduce the price of your book for a pre-determined time.   A countdown timer tells you how long you have to get the reduced price.   So I&rsquo;ve put Airship City up on Kindle Countdown for the next six days!   Grab it for more than 50% off.   (UPDATE: the deal is now over, sorry.)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Cover change&#x2c; and a new chapter</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2013-10-27T12:06:09+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/cover-change-new-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-34</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/cover-change-new-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-34</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve decided to go back to the original cover.   I finally realised that I had chosen the yellow-danger-sign cover mostly for visual impact, but it didn&rsquo;t feel very original and it certainly didn&rsquo;t seem to be in keeping with the book, being quite modern and simple.   I just like the old cover more.


I&rsquo;m using some 3D software to design a new cover, which will include an image of Joseph (something I&rsquo;ve always wanted) and once that is done, I&rsquo;ll then do the print edition, and also relaunch Airship City with some new content!


Yes, the beauty of self-publishing via the Kindle is the ability to upload a new version whenever you like.   Based on some feedback from one of my reviewers, I&rsquo;ve realised that there is an exciting chapter missing from the book, and I&rsquo;m in the process of writing that chapter and adding it in.   Everyone who has already bought Airship City will get the opportunity to download the new file as well.   My aim is to get it done in the next month or so.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The missing iPhone 5</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Apple</category><dc:date>2013-10-20T22:08:31+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/missing-iphone-5.php#unique-entry-id-33</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/missing-iphone-5.php#unique-entry-id-33</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I love my iPhone  (I wrote my book on it!)   and I&rsquo;ve been following the launch of the iPhone 5s and 5c with some interest.   As you may know the 5s is the new flagship version of the iPhone, while the 5c is the new kid on the block, a colourful version of the old 5 with a new case and a slightly lower price.


Now when the iPhone 5 was launched last year, Apple did as they usually do, which is to keep the lowest-spec version of the previous model on as the bargain-basement offering, and so the old 4S lived on in this role.   When the new phones were launched, you might have expected the iPhone 5 to take its place.


But it didn&rsquo;t.   The 4S is still the bargain-basement offering.   The iPhone 5 has simply disappeared. 


Of course, in some sense, it lives on inside the 5c&rsquo;s new colourful plastic case.   And so to maintain the gap between the current models and the budget version, the 4S has had to continue in service.


The interesting question is what will happen next year.   Will there be two new versions of the iPhone 6, a 6s and a 6c, or will there only be a 6 flagship, with the 5c continuing in the role of the bargain phone?   If the former, then the 5 may reappear as the budget phone, but if the latter, then we won&rsquo;t see the 5 again.   It will be the only iPhone that did not suffer the indignity of being relegated to the bargain bin. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Chuck Yeager visits South Africa</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Flying</category><dc:date>2013-10-20T18:41:14+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/chuck-yeager-visits-sa.php#unique-entry-id-32</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/chuck-yeager-visits-sa.php#unique-entry-id-32</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Chuck Yeager posted a link to this article on Twitter, and as a service to those of his fans who don&rsquo;t read Afrikaans, I decided to translate as follows:


World-renowned pilot in SA - Saturday 19 October 2013


Surely the world&rsquo;s best-known test pilot and veteran of the Second World War and the American-Vietnamese conflict was in South Africa, where he and his wife Victoria took a holiday in the Kruger National Park.


Chuck Yeager (90), a retired brigadier-general of the American airforce, became the first person to burst through the sound barrier on 14 October 1947.   This was with an experimental rocket-propelled Bell X-1 at a height of 13,700 metres.


Yeager visited the South African Airforce Museum yesterday at Zwartkop in Pretoria on his way back from the Kruger Park where he had been on holiday.


He is an honorary member of the museum, as is Tokyo Sexwale, who is an honorary colonel of the museum.


Sexwale hosted a lunch for Yeager.


Col.   Mike O&rsquo;Connor, the officer commanding the museum, said that the function was a private one and various friends of the museum as well as air force officers had been invited.


He said that Yeager and his wife had left the park at 5:00 that morning in order to be on time for the visit and meal.   &ldquo;They had to leave shortly thereafter to catch their flight back to America.   It was an exceptional opportunity to have them here.&rdquo;


Yeager saw the Saber and Mustang aircraft among others, and spoke of his own flight experiences over more than 60 years to the audience.


In 2012 he broke the sound barrier again to celebrate the 65th anniversary of his record- this time in an American fighter plane.


&ldquo;He was 89 when he did it, unbelievable,&rdquo; said O&rsquo;Connor.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Self-publishing and editing</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Airship City</category><category>Self-publishing</category><dc:date>2013-09-28T18:48:43+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/self-pub-editing.php#unique-entry-id-30</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/self-pub-editing.php#unique-entry-id-30</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[One of the challenges faced by those going the self-publishing route is that of editing.   The traditionally published have the advantage of editing built into the package, but if you&rsquo;re publishing yourself, you need to think about whether to hire an editor to look over your masterpiece.


Now this is something I chose not to do with Airship City, mostly due to the expense involved.   So I took a lot of time over the editing process, re-reading the book multiple times in multiple formats (on-screen, on Kindle, printed out on A4, even printed as a Lulu paperback) as well as getting friends and family to read it and asking them to tell me about typos, errors, inconsistencies, and things they felt were confusing or not well expressed.


It all seems to have paid off: my first reviewer on Goodreads, Gunnar Grey (who is herself a published author) was impressed by the editing and proofreading, which she describes as &ldquo;professional&rdquo;.   And yet I can&rsquo;t help thinking that an editor would have picked up on the point she mentions, which I do think is a valid one.   (I was a bit squeamish about depicting some violence directly, and while I convinced myself at the time that the indirect way I dealt with it was more powerful, I definitely didn&rsquo;t want to leave anyone feeling cheated.)


So I will consider hiring an editor if I choose to self-publish again.   (I am pursuing a dual strategy here; with some interest from a New York agency in my second (non-Aeropolis) novel, I don&rsquo;t consider the traditional route closed by any means.)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Prador Moon by Neal Asher</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>SF</category><category>reviews</category><category>Books</category><dc:date>2013-09-08T11:31:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/Prador-Moon-Neal-Asher.php#unique-entry-id-29</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/Prador-Moon-Neal-Asher.php#unique-entry-id-29</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve been on holiday for the last couple of weeks, in Bath, Winchester, and the Isle of Wight, so not much in the way of writing was achieved.   But I did do some reading.   One of the books I devoured was Neal Asher&rsquo;s Prador Moon. 


As I&rsquo;m also currently reading Ian M Banks&rsquo; Surface Detail, I couldn&rsquo;t really help comparing and contrasting the two.   Both are space operas featuring a human spacefaring civilisation (Asher&rsquo;s Culture equivalent is called the Polity) and both authors are known for their gritty and somewhat dark depictions of violence and brutality.   But when I was plowing through another of Banks&rsquo; breezy discursions on the wonders of the Culture, the power of Asher&rsquo;s economical exposition really became apparent.   Prador Moon is a non-stop thrill ride, and yet the fact that I knew nothing about the Polity before I began reading it never seemed to slow down the action for an instant.   The book&rsquo;s construction is almost cinematic in the way that each scene begins as late as possible, and ends as soon as possible.   Nothing is wasted.   The plotting is tight and satisfying. 


The level of invention and originality on display in the creation and description of all the various bits of technology and battlecraft is impressive enough, but where Asher really shines (although perhaps that is the wrong word!)   is in the creation of the Prador themselves, surely among the most horrifyingly repulsive creatures to inhabit a fictional universe, and yet utterly compelling for all that.


I&rsquo;ve already bought the next book (I&rsquo;m going to read them in internal chronological order) and I can&rsquo;t wait to get the next dose of fast-paced and gripping action.   You can get it on Amazon here.


<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0330528467/ref=as_li_ss_tl?  ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0330528467&linkCode=as2&tag=batflattery-21">Prador Moon (Polity 1)</a><img src="http://ir-uk.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?  t=batflattery-21&l=as2&o=2&a=0330528467" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !  important; margin:0px !  important;" />
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Airship City goes free&#x21;</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2013-08-10T18:46:03+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/b351a30138a73681e44f90400e4717e2-28.php#unique-entry-id-28</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/b351a30138a73681e44f90400e4717e2-28.php#unique-entry-id-28</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Exciting news if you&rsquo;ve been sitting on the fence about buying Airship City, or just like free books: it will be FREE to download on Amazon, starting tomorrow, the 11th of August, for three days.   The starting time is midnight, Amazon time, which translates to early morning in the UK, but most people in the US will see it a lot earlier (and in Australia you&rsquo;ll probably not see the price cut until Monday, I&rsquo;m afraid.   Although it will obviously go on until Wednesday instead of Tuesday.)   To get your free download, just click on the link .]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Airship City update</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Airship City</category><dc:date>2013-08-03T17:35:10+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/changing-covers-update.php#unique-entry-id-27</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/changing-covers-update.php#unique-entry-id-27</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Changing the cover doesn&rsquo;t seem to have had much of an impact on the Goodreads campaign, although, as August is a strange month, it&rsquo;s hard to tell.   Sales overall are slow, which is probably normal for a first book by an unknown, independent author, and I should probably just put my head down, finish the sequel, and build up my offering.   But then again, I do still have three free days of promotion left on my KDP Select account for the enrolment period, which is up at the beginning of September.   Watch this space&hellip;]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Why I decided to change covers</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Airship City</category><category>Kindle</category><dc:date>2013-07-22T21:26:55+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/changing-covers.php#unique-entry-id-26</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/changing-covers.php#unique-entry-id-26</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Since publishing Airship City I&rsquo;ve been experimenting with different forms of promotion.   I paid for some Facebook advertising, which seemed to do very little.   I then took an ad on Goodreads.   I&rsquo;ve had some response from that, in the form of people adding the book to their &ldquo;want-to-read&rdquo; lists, but the click-through rate seemed awfully low.   I had also been looking into making a printed copy of the book through Createspace, but had run into a problem with my cover: I had designed it at web resolution, and there was no way it would work in print.   Graphics for display on computer screens look fine at about 75 dpi (dots per inch), whereas anything under 300 dpi doesn&rsquo;t look very good when printed.   I couldn&rsquo;t use my existing cover on the print copy.


Since I was going to re-do the cover anyway, I thought that maybe I should try to redesign it as well.   The only visual element in a Goodreads ad is the cover, and I had begun to wonder whether the cover wasn&rsquo;t the reason for the low click-through rate.   I liked the cover but it was fairly dark and low-key, not very eye-catching.   I decided that I would try and come up with a new cover idea when I went on holiday.


While flying to Spain, I was seated near the wing, and as I looked out of the window, I saw a bright yellow and black hatched sign, painted on the wing surface, with the warning NO STEP stencilled in.   I hit on the idea of making the cover look like such a warning sign, and sketched up a few ideas.


Once back in the UK, I fired up the MacBook Air, and went through a few iterations of the design.   I had a closeup picture of riveted, polished aircraft skin, that I had taken at an aircraft museum, but it was quite curved, and had some unwelcome reflections in the polished surface.   While searching for Ink Factory tutorials, I stumbled across a very nice brushed-metal background, that was both large enough, and seemed free to use.   I then downloaded a suitable warning sign in Ink Factory SVG format, which I disassembled, modified, and made much larger (through the magic of vector graphics).   I then exported it as a bitmap and combined it with the background in Pixelmator.   After adding text for my name (using the amazing Dirty Ego font) the cover was ready to go.


And here it is!   The revised Goodreads campaign has only been live for a few hours so it&rsquo;s too early to tell if it&rsquo;s had any effect, but time will tell.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Free preview of AIRSHIP CITY</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Airship City</category><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Previews</category><dc:date>2013-06-24T13:02:14+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-city-free-preview.php#unique-entry-id-25</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/airship-city-free-preview.php#unique-entry-id-25</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve posted the first five chapters of AIRSHIP CITY on the site, so you can &ldquo;try before you buy&rdquo;!   The extract is a bit longer than the free preview available on Amazon, and you don&rsquo;t have to download anything, just click through and enjoy the preview. 


Also, I&rsquo;m going to be doing a free promotion of the book soon, but it will only be free for a few days.   If you want to be notified when it goes free, just sign up to the mailing list using the link on the top right of the page!   I&rsquo;ll email everyone on the list a day or so before the promotion starts so you can be sure of getting the book absolutely FREE!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Go for launch&#x21;</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Kindle</category><dc:date>2013-06-14T20:49:57+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/go-for-launch-airship-city.php#unique-entry-id-24</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/go-for-launch-airship-city.php#unique-entry-id-24</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The revised upload seems properly formatted (thanks to Elaine and Gary for their assistance on this) so we are go for launch!   It gives me great pleasure to announce that AIRSHIP CITY has taken to the air, and is available worldwide on the Kindle store, to buy (or to borrow if you are an Amazon Prime customer).   If you are in the UK, you can buy from Amazon.co.uk and if in the US or in countries without a dedicated Kindle store, go to Amazon.com where you will be redirected to your own country&rsquo;s Kindle store if available.


If you do decide to buy, and if you enjoy it, I&rsquo;d be obliged if you would take a moment or two to leave a review on Amazon.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Heading down the runway</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Kindle</category><dc:date>2013-06-07T20:04:42+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/down-the-runway.php#unique-entry-id-23</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/down-the-runway.php#unique-entry-id-23</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We&rsquo;re almost there!   A few niggling formatting errors to iron out in the Kindle file (getting the book to open at the first page, not at the table of contents) and we should be ready for rotation and liftoff.   Unfortunately each time you upload changes on Amazon, it takes 12 hours or so before the book is re-published, so I can&rsquo;t check to see if the formatting change has worked until the new file is in place and can be downloaded.   (It looks OK in the previewer but I want to be absolutely certain it&rsquo;s right before launch.)   It would also help if my router didn&rsquo;t fall over every five minutes.   But it&rsquo;s all uploaded and republished now, to be checked tomorrow.   So fingers crossed, we&rsquo;ll be airborne very soon! ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Getting ready for takeoff</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Kindle</category><dc:date>2013-06-06T21:58:52+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/getting-ready-for-takeoff.php#unique-entry-id-22</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/getting-ready-for-takeoff.php#unique-entry-id-22</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;m knee-deep in book-covers and Scrivener and Kindlegen files and front matter and my KDP Bookshelf as I get the formatting right for the big launch of AIRSHIP CITY, the first book in the Aeropolis series.   So in other words, I&rsquo;m taxiing towards the threshold, communicating with the tower, and getting ready to line up for the big take-off run.   More information soon!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Edging towards self-publishing</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Self-publishing</category><dc:date>2013-04-21T10:34:54+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/self-pub-edge.php#unique-entry-id-21</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/self-pub-edge.php#unique-entry-id-21</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[So the rejections from agents continue to pile up.   When I started writing the first Aeropolis novel, I was aware of the self-publishing renaissance that had been enabled by Amazon&rsquo;s Kindle project, but I also knew that people like Amanda Hocking were likely to be the exception rather than the rule.   I read the polemics of Konrath, but again, felt he was a special case.   I was fairly sure that the best way for an unknown author to achieve publication was via the traditional method: find an agent, who finds you a book deal with a publisher.


I nearly achieved a shortcut on this process, quite by chance.   I got the opportunity to send my manuscript directly to the editor of a publisher, which is very unusual.   Of course I didn&rsquo;t rely on that working out, and started submitting to agents as well more than a year ago.   But when I found out last December that the publisher was not able to take the work, that meant relying on an agent, and so far I haven&rsquo;t found one.


I&rsquo;ve submitted to around twenty agents, including three that have yet to respond.   The Children&rsquo;s Writers&rsquo; and Artists&rsquo; Yearbook 2012 lists some fifty agencies, so I&rsquo;ve not by any means exhausted my options.   But I do feel as if I&rsquo;m close to exhausting my patience.   It&rsquo;s a slow process, and the temptation to simply get the book out there is strong.


Of course there is more to it than just uploading a file to Amazon.   Creating the file itself is not that simple.   But I do have strong technical knowledge, and have already made a few Kindle files for proofreading purposes.   Also required is a good cover.   Again, I have some graphic design skills.   It&rsquo;s hard to see the downsides to just getting it out there and seeing what happens.   The feedback I&rsquo;m getting from agents is that the writing is good, but it&rsquo;s just something that doesn&rsquo;t &ldquo;click&rdquo; with them, which means it may be a fairly niche work.   In that case it&rsquo;ll do better as an e-book anyway, if it doesn&rsquo;t have to jostle for space with more broadly appealing titles.   Or it may be one of those works whose appeal is not immediately obvious, but which does find a following.


I have designed a cover, which I do like a lot, although it&rsquo;s based on a photograph which has forced certain design decisions on to me.   I may have a go at creating one completely from scratch using a Blender render.   In the meantime, feast your eyes!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Aeropolis in physical form</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><dc:date>2013-02-14T10:10:57+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/aeropolis-pod-book.php#unique-entry-id-20</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/aeropolis-pod-book.php#unique-entry-id-20</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I had some requests for the book in physical form - obviously not everyone has a Kindle!   So I had a look at print-on-demand (POD) possibilities, and the one that made the most sense was Lulu.   I managed to upload a file from Scrivener with minimal problems, designed a quick-and-dirty cover, and had a few copies printed at a very reasonable price.   It&rsquo;s quite a thrill to finally see my work in the flesh, as it were, even if I&rsquo;ve already spotted a few typos- I&rsquo;m going to have to do a detailed proof read.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The stories behind Apple and Amazon</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Apple</category><category>Amazon</category><category>investing</category><dc:date>2013-02-14T13:33:04+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/apple-amazon-investment-story.php#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/apple-amazon-investment-story.php#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[If you&rsquo;re not into Apple or investing, you may not have known this, but Apple shares fell in price recently, from an all-time high of over $700, to under $450, following the company&rsquo;s quarterly earnings report.   Another well-known company, Amazon, saw the opposite happen, when its shares rose following its earnings report.


...Companies produce a bad earnings report, their shares go down.   Or they do well, and their shares go up. 

...And Amazon&rsquo;s earnings report wasn&rsquo;t very good. 

...Ask a dozen share analysts and you&rsquo;ll get more than a dozen answers, most of them very technical, and every one demonstrating that 20:20 hindsight that analysts are so famous for.   The fact is that no-one really knows what moves markets, apart from the collective actions of millions of investors, and those investors are not the rational actors of traditional economic theory.   Investors are first and foremost people like you and me and are therefore subject to all the quirks and foibles, irrationalities and emotional responses of humans everywhere.


And one of the most enduring, most basic, and most powerful human response is the story response. ...  We need stories, we hunger for stories, and we look for and find them almost everywhere, regardless of logic and evidence and all that other left-brain stuff. 

...This, to my story-obsessed brain, is the reason why Amazon shares continue to defy gravity, and why Apple shares continue to struggle, despite the company&rsquo;s mind-blowing financial success.


...One of the few dot-com era survivors, Amazon at first glance seems to be doing very well.   It&rsquo;s constantly expanding into new markets, it dominates the ebook market with its Kindle e-reader, and its online offering is almost the default choice for millions of people when they are looking to buy something.


Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, has an almost instinctive feel for story, particularly the story that plays well on Wall Street. ...  When he founded Amazon at the beginning of the dot-com boom, he was very careful to craft the Amazon founding myth.   He drove across country to Seattle because he knew his dot-com had to have a West Coast location.   When he was looking for a house to rent, there was one particular requirement - a garage.   This was so that he could say that Amazon was started in a garage.


...In the early days Amazon used doors mounted on wooden four-by-four posts as desks, supposedly as a cost-cutting, down-to-brass-tacks symbol of the start-up culture. ...  But that didn&rsquo;t matter as long as the myth was built.


As Bezos built the company, he carefully and continuously added to the myth, building up the perception of Amazon as a relentless and invincible force that grinds down all its competitors in true, gritty, underdog style. ...  For example, while Samsung announces the number of smartphones it sells from time to time, and Apple breaks down its sales of all of its products by quantity for every quarter, Amazon has never released sales figures for its Kindle devices.


Instead Bezos relentlessly pursues the market-share ideology, accepting low or no profitability in a continuing pursuit of more and more revenue, more and more market share.   The theory is that once Amazon has driven all of its competitors out of business, by endlessly undercutting them on price, it will be able to raise prices at will and rake in the profits.   The problem is that Amazon seems to be constantly expanding its universe of competitors.   Starting out in books, Bezos moved into more general consumer goods long before Amazon had a chance to dominate the book industry.   And each time a new market starts to fall under Amazon&rsquo;s sway, Bezos shifts the goalposts again, and stakes out a claim on a new territory.


So despite the fact that Amazon&rsquo;s profitability is pitiful for its size, Bezos is constantly luring investors on with the promise of outsize profits in the future, a future which is always delayed with the next new market, but of course each new market expands on the theoretical size of the eventual payoff, so the promise gets ever-larger even as it recedes further off into the future.


Apple once had a compelling story as well, a very familiar one.   The perennial underdog against Microsoft despite being the company that created the computer revolution, Apple seemed destined to fail.   Then the prodigal son, founder Steve Jobs, who had been pushed out by the managerial caste that had taken over Apple, returned as interim CEO, and set about rebuilding his company.   In the process he would revolutionise four industries (music, movies, mobile phones, and of course computers- again-  with the release of the iPad) and at the time of his death leave Apple as the largest and most profitable company in the history of the world, and his movie company Pixar having just effectively taken over the venerable Walt Disney Company.


But the untimely death of Steve left Apple vulnerable to another story, one not as favourable.   We can summarise this story as &ldquo;what goes up, must come down&rdquo;, and it is the seemingly inevitable narrative of the fall from grace, the imperative decline following a peak, the idea that Apple has achieved all that it can, and must thus face a future of fading glory, now bereft of its guiding spirit.


The power of this narrative can be seen in the obsessive focus on essentially irrelevant details, such as Apple&rsquo;s teething problems with its map application.   While Steve was alive, such problems, like the so-called Antennagate issue with the iPhone 4, were easily brushed aside; but now every hiccup is a portent of doom.   This despite Apple&rsquo;s continuing growth in sales, profit, and cash mountain.   Nobody seems willing to let the facts get in the way of a good story.   (There is a good article in Time about this: Apple&rsquo;s Reality Distortion Field)


...Having invented the touch-screen smartphone and &ldquo;tablet&rdquo; markets, it dominated both for years.   But Samsung, using Android, has recently begun to experience some market success, meaning a falling market share for Apple (but not falling sales, as the market continues to grow overall).   This again, becomes the story of how Android, the underdog, will dethrone Apple.


...Apple has never had a large share of mobile phone market in general (i.e. including non-smart phones).   And while it once had close to 100% of the &ldquo;tablet&rdquo; market (which was really just the iPad market at that stage), this was due to there being no other &ldquo;tablets&rdquo; in existence.   Despite never selling more than a small percentage of all mobile phones, Apple has consistently captured a majority of the profit of the mobile phone market.   There is no reason to suppose that Apple will not continue to make the most profit out of the &ldquo;tablet&rdquo; market even when it doesn&rsquo;t have most of the market, especially considering that Amazon&rsquo;s tablets are reckoned to be sold at or even below cost.


So there are a few reasons why the stories around Apple have begun to work against it in the minds of investors.   And Amazon&rsquo;s Bezos has skilfully played on the power of stories to maintain Amazon&rsquo;s darling status with investors.   But I think that Bezos&rsquo;s greatest trick is the &ldquo;jam-tomorrow&rdquo;  promise of future glory, which trumps an existing reality, no matter how golden.   Apple&rsquo;s problem, in the end, is that they are hugely profitable now, not promising to be fantastically profitable at some undefined point in the future. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Changes</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Work</category><category>Writing</category><category>Aeropolis</category><dc:date>2013-02-13T10:53:30+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/changes-and-more-changes.php#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/changes-and-more-changes.php#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[There have been some pretty big changes in the last six months of my life: I moved house and started a new job, both of which have impacted on my writing.   Moving house is an incredibly time-consuming exercise, not only in terms of the move itself, but also because of all the work that needs to be done on the new house to make it the way you want it.   I think I&rsquo;ve spent so much time assembling Ikea furniture that I could now do it blindfolded.


The new job has had an arguably greater impact though, as I did a lot of my writing while commuting on the train in my last role.   The new job necessitated driving to work, so no free writing time, and it&rsquo;s been quite a consuming six months which have simply flown by.


Nevertheless I have started writing my next book, working title Heart of Clay, and I&rsquo;ve managed to get Aeropolis (known as Airship City in its second incarnation) in front of a number of agents, most of whom have been complimentary, although none felt it quite right for them.   An agent in New York wants to see my second book, which I think means she felt Aeropolis was almost, but not quite, there, and that I might get there on the next one!   So that&rsquo;s encouraging.   Unfortunately the editor who had requested the rewrite got back to me in December to say the book was much better, but that in the meantime she had bought a couple of similar titles (it seems I&rsquo;ve written a steampunk novel) and so she had no room for Aeropolis.   Frustrating.   Although she encouraged me to submit to agents and even gave me two recommendations, so that was also encouraging.


I had already submitted to one of the agents, who subsequently came back with the dreaded &ldquo;it&rsquo;s good but I didn&rsquo;t love it&rdquo;, and I really should get it submitted to the other agent.   It&rsquo;s a tough thing, rejection.   I remember reading all the advice about not taking rejection personally and about keeping your head down and your confidence up, but the thing is that it&rsquo;s one thing to know what you should be doing and another to actually experience the emotions, and I do find the self-doubt starting to creep in.   There&rsquo;s a stronger resistance to making the next submission after every rejection, an unconscious attempt to protect oneself from the pain.   But it&rsquo;s a resistance that needs to be overcome.   You only need one &ldquo;yes&rdquo; at the end of that very long chain of &ldquo;no&rsquo;s&rdquo;.   If you don&rsquo;t get past them all, you won&rsquo;t get to the &ldquo;yes&rdquo;.   So it&rsquo;s time to plough on!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Discovering the story</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Writing</category><dc:date>2012-06-20T11:03:47+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/discovering-the-story.php#unique-entry-id-13</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/discovering-the-story.php#unique-entry-id-13</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[So this writing thing is a pretty steep learning curve.   I used to think that I planned my stories out in great detail before writing them, because an early experiment in just letting things unfold naturally led to me having to abandon a large chunk of my novel.   I decided then that I needed to sort out plot before writing anything in future, so that when it came to the actual writing, I could just concentrate on character and description and dialogue without worrying about where things were headed&hellip;


And to be fair, I think that I partially achieved my goal.   But the thing is that as you actually write out your carefully planned plot, things start to change.   You realise that character has an impact on plot, because your hero suddenly refuses to do something that you had planned for her.   And you also realise that perhaps you didn&rsquo;t think the plot through as carefully as you might have, because you were anxious to get going with the writing, and here you are with a gaping big plot hole.   And then, worst of all, you suddenly get a new idea, see something that just makes so much sense, that feels so right and lifts your story up a whole level.


What&rsquo;s so awful about that, you ask?   Because it messes up your carefully planned outline, makes you rewrite before you&rsquo;ve even finished the first draft, throws out your fantasy about writing being an orderly and planned process of thinking things up and then writing them down in an efficient fashion. 


I suppose it must be possible to spend so much time planning, and to do so in sufficient detail, that you do see everything before writing a word, and so all of your planning is the process of discovering the story, at the stage when changes are simple and easy to make.   But it&rsquo;s more likely that for most people, there must remain some element of discovery during the actual writing process, and so where you end up on the planning/discovery continuum probably depends on your patience for rewrites.   M Night Shyamalan reportedly did not discover the key to his script for The Sixth Sense - the main character himself being a ghost - until the fifth draft.   If you can&rsquo;t handle doing a rewrite for the nth time, you&rsquo;ll put more effort into the planning stage next time.


And of course with experience the writer becomes, like a chess grandmaster, able to spot problems and dead ends and to unconsciously close them off before they even arise, whether at the planning or the writing stage.   It&rsquo;s the old thing about writing being a journey.   When you start out on a journey you take wrong turnings, you fall down a lot, but all those mistakes teach you to spot the right turning, avoid the pitfalls, and so your progress becomes much faster.   This is why most first novels are never published.   To think of them as a waste of time and effort, however, is a mistake.   The failed first novel paved the way for the second and third and all the rest, in fact was the training ground, the boot camp, that made the writer.   And it&rsquo;s never about just one book, just as the journey is never completed at the first mile marker.   To be a writer you have to be able to use your talent to tell many different stories.   You are not your work, even though it&rsquo;s sometimes hard to see that when all you&rsquo;ve written is the work in progress of your first novel.   If it works, fantastic.   If it has too many flaws to overcome, leave it, move on to the next story.   If the story is compelling enough you can return to it in time and re-tell it with the benefit of your new skills and experience.   But you&rsquo;ll probably find a hundred new stories that you&rsquo;re itching to tell, and that&rsquo;s what being a writer is: having more ideas than you&rsquo;ll ever have the time to tell. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Rewriting Is Not So Easy</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Writing</category><dc:date>2012-04-29T12:03:13+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/a7b009fb7f70cc72683c976cec55de7d-12.php#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/a7b009fb7f70cc72683c976cec55de7d-12.php#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[THE STORY SO FAR: Based on some positive feedback on Aeropolis from an editor, I decided to rewrite it to make it less middle grade and more young adult.   Since the feedback was along the lines of &ldquo;the protagonist comes across as too young in his reactions etc&rdquo; I thought it would be a simple matter to go through the manuscript, rewriting Joseph&rsquo;s thoughts and actions to make him more mature.   So I worked out how his attitude to various characters would change, and started working through it.   At first things went well, but as I got further into the plot, I began to feel more and more that the new Joseph would simply not do the things he was supposed to do in service of the plot.   By the time I got about halfway it was obvious that it just wasn&rsquo;t working anymore.


I started making some small tweaks to the plot, doing a basic outline in Word and trying to move things in a more character-driven direction.   But the more I tried to do this, the more it seemed to me that my plot was a hastily cobbled-together series of somewhat random events, which kind of worked when Joseph was a fairly passive child-like character just reacting to things that happened to him.   But now that I was trying to make the plot more character-driven, this passive reaction dynamic just got in the way.   I managed to force the re-outline to a certain point, but beyond that I had no more ideas.


So I decided to take a break from Aeropolis for a while, using the time to read about plots and plotting.   Very helpful in this regard was Kidlit, and I also took courage from Chuck Wendig&rsquo;s frank account of his journey in writing his debut Blackbirds.   I&rsquo;d been reading David Hewson&rsquo;s Writing: A User Manual, and I also picked up Donald Maass&rsquo;s Writing the Breakout Novel.   I also expanded my research into Howard Hughes, German history, and Zeppelins.   (I even spent some time sketching Aeropolis, working out its actual dimensions, volume of lift gas etc, and even creating Aeropolis using Google Sketchup!)


The result of all this was something akin to brain overload: I went back to the outline, ideas buzzing in my head, and started on an increasingly rapid round of changes, each one more radical than the last.   After a while I felt that things were spinning out of control: it seemed, by the end of this process, that I needed to pitch the entire thing in the bin, and start again from scratch.   A dispiriting thought, when you started the process thinking you had a completed novel that simply required some rewriting.


But the more I thought  about it, the more it made sense.   Most writers do not sell their first novels.   The learning curve on the first one is so steep that many see it as some form of boot camp, a training ground that gets them up to the required standard for the subsequent novels.   I realised that a writing career cannot be based on a single book, that writing is a journey and not a destination, and that all the work I put into Aeropolis would only be wasted if I carried on flogging a dead horse; giving it up might seem like a waste but in reality I would carry all that I had learned into the next project.


Once I came to terms with actually moving on from Aeropolis, and even got some good ideas for my next book, a strange thing happened.   An insight came to me, a fairly small shift in emphasis, just bringing a certain character into the story much earlier, and changing his relationship to Joseph, and things suddenly seemed to fall into place.   The plot started to work, to flow, with a believable character arc for Joseph to follow, and subsequent events fitting in nicely.   Best of all there was now inbuilt tension between Joseph and the other main characters, something I had been striving to create, but which had been feeling false and forced.   It all works very well now, at least in outline.


So now I have an outline of what I believe will be a much better story.   It will still be a substantial rewrite, but at least some of the scenes from earlier drafts can still be included if they are slightly modified.   I need to crack on and get it written so that I can see if finally I can fulfil that flash of inspiration from all those years ago.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Dead Harvest</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>noir </category><category>urban fantasy</category><category>Angry Robot</category><category>Books</category><dc:date>2012-02-18T18:36:03+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/dead-harvest-chris-holm.php#unique-entry-id-11</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/dead-harvest-chris-holm.php#unique-entry-id-11</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[One of the more interesting new publishers around is Angry Robot, responsible for Zoo City and Empire State.   They ran a Twitter competition a little while ago, and I was lucky enough to be one of the winners!   My prize was an advance reading copy (ARC) of the not-yet-published debut novel by Chris F Holm, entitled Dead Harvest.   The ARC came, together with a cool fridge magnet and bookmark, directly from Angry Robot publisher Marc Gascoigne, and it was pretty exciting to get a book that&rsquo;s not yet available in the shops.   I took it with me on my recent trip to Australia to visit my family, and after completing Monsters of Men, the final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, I picked up the shiny new ARC.


I literally had no idea what to expect: no preconceptions whatsoever.   I was quite prepared to give up after a few pages, as I have absolutely no compulsion to finish any book, or to continue reading a book that does not grab me within a few pages.


Fortunately, Dead Harvest grabbed me.   And how.   It&rsquo;s an urban fantasy, so think angels and demons, but in a modern, realistic framework.   Our hero is Sam Thornton, a collector of souls.   Not technically alive, he has the ability to inhabit the body of any living or recently dead human in order to carry out his grisly task.   Until the day he tries to collect the soul of Kate, a young multiple murderer, and becomes convinced that she is innocent.   He is soon on the run from the forces of both Heaven and Hell, trying to prevent a cosmic calamity.   I found myself racing through the book in a few hours, completely caught up in the relentless drive of the narrative.


What I really liked about the book was the pitch-perfect evocation of Sam through the first-person narration.   Honest and self-deprecating, he wins your trust early on.   But we see things only through his eyes.   Is Kate really innocent?   Is Sam right to go against the angels themselves?   We can&rsquo;t know these things, we have to wait for events to unfold to find out if our fears are realised.   And there is a lot of unfolding.   Events come thick and fast, nothing is predictable, and the ride takes your breath away.


In short, I loved it and I can&rsquo;t wait to read the next one!   Dead Harvest is published March 2012, but you can pre-order it from Amazon now:


<iframe src="http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?  lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=batflattery-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0857662171" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Rewriting Aeropolis Some More</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Writing</category><category>Aeropolis</category><dc:date>2012-01-05T20:25:43+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis-again.php#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis-again.php#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I was lucky enough to be invited to submit Aeropolis to a publisher who doesn&rsquo;t normally accept submissions from un-agented writers, and my initial partial submission resulted in a request for the entire manuscript!   This all happened really quickly, and if that wasn&rsquo;t enough, I heard from their editor in December.


Unfortunately it wasn&rsquo;t an acceptance.   But it was the most positive feedback that you can imagine, short of actual acceptance.   The editor said some very nice things about my writing (I just love it when people do that!)   and is prepared to look at anything I write in the future, including a rewrite of Aeropolis, because&hellip;


Well, here we get to the less positive bit.   She felt that Aeropolis as it stands is not a true young adult (YA) novel, because of the way I had written the lead character Joseph: he comes across as much younger.   (Interestingly one of my beta readers now says she missed the part where I give his age, and simply assumed throughout that he was much younger than a teenager!)   This is not in itself problematic, except that this particular publisher only does YA, not middle grade.


So I have the choice of trying to find a middle-grade publisher, or rewriting to take advantage of the incredibly valuable opportunity that an &ldquo;open door&rdquo; with an editor represents.   Since the manuscript is out there already, being considered (I hope!)   by various agents, in some sense I am already trying to find another publisher.   So how can it harm me to hedge my bets and start the rewrite?   It will be a good experience in any event, responding to editorial feedback, and an exercise in technical skill.


So I thought when I started the process.   But now that I am actually into the nuts and bolts of the rewriting process, I&rsquo;m having a lot of fun doing it as well!   There is something pleasing about going back to a scene and looking at it from a new angle, trying something different, exercising the awesome authorial power to go for something radically different.


Of course there will be difficult points, hard choices, struggles to make it work.   But I&rsquo;m really happy just to be writing again!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>How I Write part II</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Writing</category><dc:date>2011-11-23T19:11:37+00:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/650f9f235c7ca01e568c4eea683294bf-9.php#unique-entry-id-9</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/650f9f235c7ca01e568c4eea683294bf-9.php#unique-entry-id-9</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In the first instalment I covered how I actually generate the text that makes up a book, by bashing it out on my iPhone.   But of course there is much more to writing than just putting words into a document.   I&rsquo;m not one of those writers who can just start typing with no idea of how things are going to turn out: I need to outline the plot in a fair amount of detail, using index cards (one card per scene, usually), so that when I am writing, I can just concentrate on the description and the dialogue and so on, without also needing to generate the plot on the fly as well.


Obviously I don&rsquo;t stick to the index cards slavishly: sometimes things turn out differently from the plan, as I realise that a character would behave in a different way, or if something isn&rsquo;t working.   But it&rsquo;s what I need to get started.   I went through the first couple of drafts of Aeropolis with just index cards and the individual iPhone documents, pasting them all into a big Word document when I wanted to revise, or give them to my beta readers (at that stage, it was only my wife).   This was a huge pain, and it was then that I heard about Scrivener, through a writer friend.


Scrivener is writing software that was developed from the ground up (by a writer) to be a fantastic writing tool, and it succeeds in this task admirably.   It&rsquo;s an incredibly comprehensive offering, with tools that are useful for a wide range of writing, from journalism to academic articles, to screenplays, and of course, novels.   The brilliant thing about Scrivener from my perspective is that it uses a system of individual documents, one per scene usually, that you can split, merge, drag around to put into a different order, et cetera, and then compile into a single complete document at the press of a button.   In one of its views, you can even represent the individual documents as index cards!


So it was fairly straightforward, conceptually, for me to transfer all of my individual iPhone documents into Scrivener, and once this was done I was even able to synchronise Scrivener with the Elements folder in Dropbox, so that any writing or editing which I did on the iPhone was updated to my Scrivener project whenever I did a sync.   Fantastic!


I was greatly aided in this endeavour by David Hewson&rsquo;s Writing a Novel with Scrivener.   David is the author of the popular Nic Costa thrillers, set in Rome, but his informative blog posts on his writing techniques have fascinated and informed me in equal measure.   And this book is just wonderful, setting out in great detail how he uses Scrivener to produce his awesome output, with plenty of invaluable tips and tricks.


Scrivener makes revisions a lot easier, because you can easily see the flow of plot in the novel.   You can even track things like point of view, so that you can compile a single point of view into one document, to check that it makes sense on a standalone basis.   Structural problems become easier to see and to solve.


I use both paper and Kindle to revise, and Scrivener can output a very serviceable Kindle file, or a Word document.   You can choose at the compile stage how the document should flow together, with page breaks and chapter headings (auto numbered if you desire), and of course you can recompile with different settings within seconds if something isn&rsquo;t quite right.


I&rsquo;ve heard it said that whenever two writers get together the conversation almost invariably turns, sooner or later, to a discussion of how great Scrivener is.   I can well believe it. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Aeropolis finally finished</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Aeropolis</category><category>Writing</category><dc:date>2011-10-20T23:50:34+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/Aeropolis-finished.php#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/Aeropolis-finished.php#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Well, I finally got Aeropolis finished and sent off to the competition.   In January I will know if I made the long list.   In the meantime, I&rsquo;ve sent Aeropolis off to a number of agents and even a publisher who expressed interest via Twitter!   Social networking is amazing...


I went to hear Sir Terry Pratchett talk about his latest novel and writing in general at the Theatre Royal on Tuesday night.   It was an inspiring and enjoyable experience, and the love and respect of the audience was palpable.   Long may he continue to delight us all.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Reading A Clash of Kings</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Game of Thrones</category><dc:date>2011-09-17T08:38:11+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/game-of-thrones-bonus-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-7</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/game-of-thrones-bonus-chapter.php#unique-entry-id-7</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I started reading Game of Thrones after watching the Sky Atlantic production of George RR Martin&rsquo;s epic sword and sorcery reinvention.   Despite already knowing what was going to happen, I still enjoyed it immensely.   In fact, knowing the story in advance allowed me to spot and appreciate some of George&rsquo;s foreshadowing, and there was a richness of backstory that inevitably a TV show is not going to be able to do justice to.


I enjoyed it so much that I have immediately moved on to reading the next book, A Clash of Kings, even though production of the second series has barely started, and so I am likely to have finished the book long before it makes it onto our screens.   So I will have the opposite experience with the second book and series: watching something I have already read!


By the way, if you read the Kindle edition of Game of Thrones, and possibly the paper edition too, George has included a chapter from A Clash of Kings at the end of the book, which I read.   It is not the first chapter, though, and when I came to it in the second book, I decided to read it again.   Good thing I did, because George has expanded it somewhat.   So don&rsquo;t skip it!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The iPad and the other tablets: a parable</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Apple</category><category>iPad</category><dc:date>2011-09-15T08:54:50+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/ipad-tablet-parable.php#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/ipad-tablet-parable.php#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As one tablet manufacturer after another spectacularly fails to achieve what they seem to think should be a fairly simple task -- make a competitor for the iPad that takes significant market share -- I am reminded of an old Yiddish folk tale, that goes something like this:


There was once a poor man, who managed to find a job working as a driver for a wealthy merchant.   He spent his days driving the merchant in his fine carriage to his appointments around the town.   In the evenings, after leaving the carriage at the merchant's opulent mansion, he walked home to his hovel, where his wife had a meagre meal of barley gruel waiting for him; they had not the money for meat.

One evening, however, the driver came home to his wife in a state of great excitement.

"I know how he does it!" 

...His wife looked up from the stove. 

..."When I drove him to his last appointment today, with Shlomo the tailor, instead of waiting in the carriage like I usually do, I went to the window and watched what he did!"

..."If he had seen you, Goldstein would have fired you! 

..."Now that I know Goldstein's secret, I don't need to work any more.   Soon we will be as rich as he is!"

..."How does Goldstein make so much money?"

...He has a little book, and I saw him open it, and show it to Shlomo the tailor.   In it were little pieces of cloth, of all different types, each bound into the book.   Shlomo leafed through all the cloth pieces, and then he pointed at a certain one.   Goldstein made a note in his diary, and Shlomo gave him a bag of gold coins!"

..."Are you certain that is what you saw?"

"As certain as I am that my name is Yakov!"

..."Well, I have some scraps of cloth here and there, and we could cut some pieces out of the curtains.   I could make you a little book like Goldstein's," she said.

So she sat up half the night making a little book out of all the scrap pieces of cloth that she could find around the hovel, and the next morning, just after dawn, Yakov ran eagerly with it to the house of the tailor Shlomo.

..."I am Goldstein's driver!" 

...Well, in that case, you had better come in," said Shlomo, thinking that Goldstein had sent him with a message or a parcel.

Once in the parlour, Shlomo turned to Yakov.   "So what do you have for me?"

With trembling hands, Yakov handed over the little book.   Shlomo looked at it, a trifle perplexed, and then started to leaf through the swatches. 

...So what do you want from me?"

..."A bag of gold, like the one you gave Goldstein yesterday."

Shlomo threw back his head and laughed out loud. 

...I want a bag of gold!   For showing you this little book, just like Goldstein did!"

When Shlomo saw that Yakov was serious, he sat him down at the dining room table. ...  Goldstein's little book is his book of samples.   He shows it to me so that I can see the quality of the cloth that he has in his warehouse!   All of it is much finer stuff than the scraps in your little book, but even so, I would not pay him a copper for his samples.   I gave him a bag of gold so that his warehouseman will deliver five hundred bolts of the finest silk to my shop this morning! 

...But Yakov did not understand.   He became even more angry, shouting, accusing Shlomo of treating him unfairly.   Shlomo tried to reason with him, but eventually he lost patience, and had his servants throw Yakov out onto the street, where Yakov continued to rage about how stupid and irrational Shlomo was to anyone who would listen. 

...The experience of Yakov the driver is similar to that of the other tablet manufacturers.   They see Apple reaping great riches from their little iPad, so they decide to create their own tablet computer.   They cobble it together from bits of technology that they have lying around, and they show it, hopefully, to the buying public. 

..."It has all the same things as the iPad!   A touch screen, an app store, this Android operating system which is just as good as IOS. 

...But unfortunately they do not truly understand the iPad.   They are offering, cargo-cult-like, a set of technical specifications to people who want the finest, most beautifully crafted user experience.   They think that they can simply cobble together something that looks like an iPad, and they will instantly reap the rewards of Apple's years and years of painstaking product design and development.   They really do not have a clue about the true nature of the transactions between Apple and their customers.   And they show no inclination to learn.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Rewriting Aeropolis</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Writing</category><category>Aeropolis</category><dc:date>2011-09-15T08:39:21+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis.php#unique-entry-id-5</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/rewriting-aeropolis.php#unique-entry-id-5</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve spent the last couple of weeks doing what I hope will be a final rewrite for Aeropolis.   I know that all writing is rewriting, that writing is when we make the stuff but rewriting is when we make it good... but still.   Every page of the printout is covered with revisions.   I often think &ldquo;How did I not see that?&rdquo;   I&rsquo;m very glad I followed David Hewson&rsquo;s advice to print it all out and read it through.   As he says, there&rsquo;s something about seeing it in a different format -- paper instead of on-screen -- that helps you to pick up problems.


My aim is to get finished in time to submit Aeropolis to a contest.   I&rsquo;m not certain that contests are a good idea, but even if I don&rsquo;t actually submit it, the deadline is serving as a useful spur to get the darn thing finished.   Once it&rsquo;s done, I&rsquo;ll decide what to do with it!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Kindle screens</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Kindle</category><dc:date>2011-09-07T08:28:30+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/kindle-screens.php#unique-entry-id-4</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/kindle-screens.php#unique-entry-id-4</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I love a lot of things about my Kindle but the random pictures which appear on it when you turn it &ldquo;off&rdquo; aren&rsquo;t among them.   Some are OK but most are awful.   It&rsquo;s quite easy to &ldquo;hack&rdquo; the Kindle to replace these images with something more to your liking.   I found a few nice images on teh interwebs, but thought I&rsquo;d also have a go at converting some of my own pics.


These two look quite nice on the Kindle.   To download one or both for your own Kindle, just click on an image to get a Kindle-sized one.   Then right-click and save!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Zoo City</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Books</category><dc:date>2011-06-15T18:07:34+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/e5ec3c6823faf962d8f471024d880290-3.php#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/e5ec3c6823faf962d8f471024d880290-3.php#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve got a lot of unread books on my Kindle.   It&rsquo;s just too easy to buy them.   Whenever I come across something interesting on the web, and it&rsquo;s on the Kindle and not too expensive, I end up buying it.   So when I finally finished Aegypt (which will be the subject of another post) I decided to read one of the unread ones sitting enticingly in my home screen.


Unfortunately I didn&rsquo;t like many of them.   I started three or four, and just gave up after a few pages.   Some self-published books are that way for a reason, I found.   One book had about three pages of exposition and back-story before anything happened.   And all of this detail seemed to have been lifted straight out of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.   Others just dumped me into an incomprehensible world of weird names and unfathomable things, with no hint that it would be worth making the effort to understand.   So it was a great relief to finally start reading Zoo City.


This is the Arthur C Clarke award-winning novel by Lauren Beukes, a South African writer.   Now if you think great SF can&rsquo;t take place in South Africa, you obviously haven&rsquo;t been paying attention to the District 9s of the world.   And like that movie, Zoo City has the gritty authenticity of life in South Africa.   I can vouch for this, because I lived in Johannesburg for most of my life.   And I felt like I was back there.


The story is told in the first person, hard-boiled noire style, with all of the laconic wit that one could hope for.   Beukes has an outstanding way with similes, absolutely nailing the descriptions with acute observations.   First-person is hard to pull off, but the heroine&rsquo;s voice is utterly believable and compelling.


The conceit is clever: in an alternative reality, some people have developed a psychic connection to a particular animal, something like the familiars in Phillip Pullman&rsquo;s His Dark Materials trilogy.   This endows them with a specific sort of magical power.   Zinzi, the heroine, has a Sloth that gives her the ability to find lost things.   But in using this gift she becomes entangled in a murder...


This book is available in paperback and Kindle versions.   At time of writing it&rsquo;s cheaper on the Kindle.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>How I Write</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Writing</category><dc:date>2011-06-11T09:45:09+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/03b37d528eed4e18536017588b4a24c7-2.php#unique-entry-id-2</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/03b37d528eed4e18536017588b4a24c7-2.php#unique-entry-id-2</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve always wanted to write.   I was one of those kids who loved to read.   I remember when I first learned to read, I would go to the school library at first break, take out a book, read it in the break, and then go back at second break to get another book.   I read everything I could lay my hands on.   So I naturally wanted to be one of those amazing people who wrote the books that I loved.   But for a long time I didn&rsquo;t think I could do it.


Or perhaps it&rsquo;s more accurate to say that I was waiting for someone or something to come along and say, &ldquo;Now you can be a writer.&rdquo;   Or I was waiting for inspiration to strike.   Or for the time to do it.


I dabbled with writing at times, writing a short story, or a screenplay.   But there was always this sense of uncertainty.   It&rsquo;s almost as if I wanted a guarantee of success before I put in what I imagined to be the enormous effort required to write a book.   I was scared by all the stories of rejection after rejection.   I was too focused on the external result.


But finally, late last year, I decided that if I was ever going to write something, I just needed to do it.   There was never going to be a perfect time, I was never going to have the luxury of the perfect writing space, with lots of free time in which to do it.   Now is all I have, but it&rsquo;s enough. 


I decided to write every day, and to use the one, consistent chunk of free time that I had every day, my morning commute on the train.   I have to spend more than an hour commuting each way, every day, time which I usually spend reading, but I realised it would be great to use it for writing too.


...I thought of using my little netbook, and even experimented with it a bit, but its short battery life and tiny keys were frustrating.   Also, typing on a keyboard held in your lap is really uncomfortable. ...  And there aren&rsquo;t any tables on my train.


Balancing the computer on a bag on my knees worked better, but it still wasn&rsquo;t great.   I also didn&rsquo;t like the attention I felt that someone working on a laptop got from the other commuters.


So I decided to try to write on my iPhone.   I&rsquo;ve had an account with the amazing Dropbox service for some time now.   Dropbox lets you back up your files online, and also share them across computers and devices like iPhones, keeping everything synchronised automatically.   I knew there were some apps that use Dropbox to save their files - I needed an easy way to get my stuff off the iPhone, and I&rsquo;m also paranoid about backup.


I tried a few apps before settling on Elements.   It uses a special subfolder of your Dropbox account, and you can create subfolders and text files very easily.   So I started to write Aeropolis.   I already had an outline on index cards, so I simply started with card one, created a new document, and wrote. 


I&rsquo;ve had my iPhone for many years now; in fact my current iPhone 4 is my second one, I had one of the original, first-gen iPhones first.   So I&rsquo;m very used to the soft keyboard.   It does take a couple of days to get used to, but once you are used to it, it&rsquo;s pretty nice.   Obviously I cannot type on it nearly as fast as I could with a &ldquo;proper&rdquo; keyboard, but holding the iPhone in my hands on the train is a comfortable thing to do, and I&rsquo;m not copy-typing anyway; I&rsquo;m thinking up what to write as I do it, so if it takes slightly longer to actually type, it&rsquo;s not a big problem.


I listen to music on the iPhone as I write, to block out anyone who is talking on the train.   Some days I can write to anything but other days I prefer classical or electronic music with no lyrics.


I wrote Aeropolis in a number of small documents, usually starting a new document when I started on a new index card from my outlining.   There were a number of reasons for this: I didn&rsquo;t want to have to scroll down to the bottom of a long document each morning to start writing, and I was also concerned about backup.   When you are editing a document, Elements constantly saves the document up to your Dropbox.   But while travelling on the train, there are long periods, in tunnels, when there is no connectivity, and I worry about Elements losing some of what I have written, or (nightmare scenario) overwriting the entire document with a blank one when connectivity is restored.   So by breaking the writing up into lots of little documents, I would be limiting the damage.


(I&rsquo;ve never actually lost an entire document.   But I did once lose a few paragraphs when I started a new document, and connectivity was lost before I had written anything.)


So that&rsquo;s how most of Aeropolis was written, or at least the first two drafts.   It worked well for me at the writing stage.   But it was a pain to copy and paste those individual docs into a single Word document, and revising is also difficult with such a long doc.   Fortunately, by this time I had heard of the amazing Scrivener!   More on that in the next part. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Coffin Dodgers</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Books</category><dc:date>2011-06-04T12:15:26+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/coffin-dodgers.php#unique-entry-id-1</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/coffin-dodgers.php#unique-entry-id-1</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;ve just finished Coffin Dodgers, a debut e-book by my friend Gary Marshall.   It&rsquo;s a book which is hard to categorise: it&rsquo;s a thriller, because people get killed and there are gangsters and guns and so forth, but it&rsquo;s also very funny.   I frequently laughed out loud, which I&rsquo;m told can be quite irritating, so you&rsquo;d probably be best off reading this on your own...


It&rsquo;s very well-written, with characters that feel like old friends within a few pages.   The plot moves forward at a frenetic pace, keeping you guessing and the pages turning, and it builds to a satisfying climax.


Coffin Dodgers is available at Amazon.


<iframe src="http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?  lt1=_blank&bc1=FFFFFF&IS1=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=batflattery-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=B00538TRQC" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Welcome</title><dc:creator>rss@stephenwest.net</dc:creator><category>Meta</category><dc:date>2011-06-01T08:58:32+01:00</dc:date><link>http://stephenwest.net/files/e4b0a16239a570a7db7082d897ba4521-0.php#unique-entry-id-0</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://stephenwest.net/files/e4b0a16239a570a7db7082d897ba4521-0.php#unique-entry-id-0</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Welcome to my new blog!   I&rsquo;ll be talking about my adventures in writing, discoveries about the publishing business, interesting book news, and also what I&rsquo;m currently reading. 


I am writing my first novel, Aeropolis, about James Samson, a fifteen-year-old airship fanatic who gets the chance to go to Aeropolis, an enormous flying city.   But things don&rsquo;t go entirely according to plan...


I&rsquo;m currently working on the third draft, and I think this could be the final major draft, the one where it all comes together.   I hope!
]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
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