In case you weren’t aware, I’m honored to be one of the authors in a shared world anthology known as Walk the Fire. It’s a Kickstarter funded project by John Mierau and David Sobkowiak, and as of right now, it is 84% funded with three days to go. Before I jump up on my soapbox and have at it, I’d like to ask you to head on over to the Kickstarter page and kick in a few dollars to get the project funded.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1325849873/walk-the-fire-a-shared-world-sf-anthology-series

If that mighty example of left-handed salesmanship didn’t do it for you, I have a few more things to say.

First off, I wouldn’t be involved if I didn’t like the concept. The “shared world” part means that John and David have created a grand sandbox in which to play. They have a world concept and a list of authors. Each author writes within the concept to come up with a tapestry of narrative within the universe of Walk the Fire. If the first anthology is any indication, this is a very cool way to build a story with many voices and interpretations on a theme. I personally have about four Walk the Fire story ideas competing to be written. I suspect the many of my co-authors are way ahead of me, and I’m excited to see the results.

Next, I’m a big fan of Kickstarter. It’s brilliant. We live in tight times. The traditional methods of getting things done are no longer working to drive us forward. Corporations tend to work in tried and true pipelines. The government can’t innovate its way out of a paper bag. Finding the money to try new things is harder than ever before. Along comes Kickstarter to create an engine to finance good (and sometimes not-so-good) ideas based on the actual demand for the idea. It’s a direct line of communication between the makers and those who want the products. If you spend any time there, I can almost guarantee that you will find something you always wanted but didn’t know it, something you realize is a perfect solution to an insolvable problem, and in concert, a better vision for our future.

More broadly, I’m one of those wingnuts who believes that the core of greatness comes from innovation, not in the bland platitudes of a Presidential radio address, but in the greasy, dirt-and-sawdust-covered hands of those who actually try to make something, to fix something, to grow something from bare earth and a handful of seeds.

We swim in raging rivers of information every day. People make entire fortunes with nothing more than data and a clever algorithm to mine revenue from the stream, and that’s fine, but there will never be a replacement for actually creating something tangible, from nothing, with our own hands, with our own minds.

Make something new, and support those who do. It helps us all improve the world, and sometimes, it just feels good. I think we’re built that way.

I’m not ready to go into details of what the actual business is intended to do, but suffice it to say that it is both technical and intended to do some good in the world. On the other hand, it may be subject to some legal and regulatory difficulties. Progress is always subject to that sort of thing. I have a lot of work to do on all fronts.

In the meantime, if anyone needs something cut with an industrial CNC laser, please let me know.

On the writing side, I haven’t been blogging, as you can see. I haven’t been on Facebook. It’s all been about Decay, which is long overdue on my internal schedule, and on yours as well from the comments. Now that I’ve bitten off the steepest part of the business curve, I’ll see if I can wrap that up. Decay has existed in unfinished form for far too long. Definition is the second priority. I’d say the story is a little underdeveloped as it stands, but I can assure you that it is much bigger than it appears.

I wrote about John Scalzi’s serial release a while back, and I’ve read eight of the parts. Saying this as a huge fan of his is hard, but I’m disappointed with the result. It almost feels like he polished up his notes for ideas in the Old Man’s War universe and kicked them out as a serial. The upside of the experience is that it gave me a first person view on some of the negative comments I received for my own serial release of Renewal. The downside is that I apparently wanted another polished novel in 13 parts. As I wrestle with my own ideas about form and structure, Scalzi’s work teaches me a great deal.

And finally, I’ve noticed a steady stream of new users. I hope that most are actual readers and not waiting for a chance to sell us some blue pills and the ultimate web search optimization. Real people, please take the opportunity to speak up. I’m happy to answer questions in overly wordy fashion about almost anything.

As always, thanks for reading.

What’s really interesting is that I released my first story in serial format, mostly by accident, I’ll admit, and it has done far better than I ever hoped. Hugh Howey (another excellent choice) was right behind me with his Wool series. For all I know, he was way ahead of me. I’m just going by release dates. I know it has gone even better for him.

So, now we have a top-of-the-line, bestselling science fiction author like John Scalzi taking a crack at the $.99 serial release method. I know I’ll buy it. Thirteen bucks is a lot cheaper than the hardcover books that I purchased with his name on the cover. (Bonus! Only one of those hardcovers has been chewed by a dog) I wonder, with his name, if Mr. Scalzi will get as many people as I did asking him if selling his story in one-dollar chunks is a scheme to rip them off. I certainly hope not.

First off, the entire effort to regulate drug use in sports is a lost cause. That fight has been over for decades. Why? It’s simply not possible. Find a way to test for a substance or process, and everyone has moved on to the next substance and process. Unless we want to live in a world where trophies are retroactively pulled all the time, thus never knowing whether someone should be on the Wheaties box, we are wasting our time. Controlling illicit substances may be one of the most futile efforts humanity has ever made. We are much better at the easy stuff, like fair taxation and thought control.

In the illicit drug race, laws and regulations don’t work. They just don’t. In every case, there is a certain segment of the population, any population, who will find the benefits to outweigh the risks.  Until the government figures out how to watch every last one of us every second of every day – the idea of which I’m sure attracts bureaucrats like crack attracts crackheads – that segment will always find a way to ride the chemical diversion of choice. Feel free to look up prohibition…

Second, for every elite athlete in every professional sport, there are at least a double handful of people who are making significant amounts of money off that athlete, which means that in every case, there is someone working as hard at promoting the sport at large as the athlete is working to reach the top of it. In the case of cycling, which here in the American breadbasket of overpaid athletes has never been particularly popular, there are undoubtedly a large cadre of promoters who have been more than happy to quietly encourage the most spectacular performances from American cyclists, even if meant a little EPO here and there. The surprising part to me is that Lance Armstrong is likely still protecting his sport by failing to talk about the pressure that he and every other pro cyclist is under to win at all cost.

Third, the argument for drug controls in sports is to protect the health of the athletes, right? Or is it to keep reminding ourselves that drugs are bad m’kaaaay? Either way, we have created a false argument that any seven-year-old could spot without too much prompting, and it’s a particularly insidious argument as well. “Total safety is possible.” Uh, no. Try as we might, we cannot escape the fact that everything involves risk. Without ranting off on a tangent, let’s just pause to think about what we have given up for the false elimination of risk. In order to be an elite athlete, one must take risks and one must make sacrifices. There are well paid athletes that sacrifice an entire normal life to reach their peak. Others break bones on a regular basis. Pro football players are running incredible risks with their long term health, with or without banned substances. So, to observe the risks that athletes must take to be any good at what they do, and then to say that the real risk comes from drugs… well, it doesn’t really fly in the face of sacrifices already made.

And if you are worried about  the message to children, guess what? We make such minor deities of our top athletes that our children will ignore the risks altogether. If they somehow manage to be good enough, they may see an opportunity to be the next version of their own heroes. If they reach the point where the winners and losers are only separated by another, slightly illicit, risk… Well, we’re back to the crack and crackhead place. Our athletes are powerful symbols, whether they deserve it – as many absolutely do – or not.

Finally, top athletes are masters of another game altogether. Let’s jump back to Lance Armstrong. How many hours do you think he trained to even reach the jumping off point for competition? How many miles? Let’s say you want to become great at anything. How many hours does it take? I’ve heard it takes a minimum of 10,000. Is it possible to do anything for 10,000 hours without a massive amount of mental discipline? Did Lance Armstrong wake up every day with the immediate desire to train in the rain, in the cold, in the heat. No. He put away his immediate urge to sit on the couch and eat a pizza, and replaced it with a deeper urge, once that demanded the discipline to play a longer mental game. If you wanted to be the world’s best chainsaw carver, would you have the will to wake up every morning, fire up that chainsaw and carve until your artfully crafted log bear was lifelike enough to scare the neighbor’s dog? All high performance endeavors are a mental game after the basic requirements are met. We know this because the best athletes in the world can lose. The underdog can win. How many times has the dominant favorite in, say… Olympic gymnastics, spent his or her entire life getting to the Olympics, only to make a microsecond error in judgment and blow the whole thing? What happened to Michael Phelps at the beginning of the last Olympics? He sucked. Two days later, he was dominant again. Did he suddenly achieve a higher level of physical training? No, he just flipped the switches in his head that allowed him to push harder, unless of course, someone doped him up after the tests were over.

Once more to Mr. Armstrong. He’s in a sport which is about as doped up as any we can name. He specializes in an event with a “No Dope, No Hope” motto, and he wanted to win. In all likelihood, everyone who could pose a serious challenge was doing the same thing, and in all likelihood, the governing body of the sport was tacitly in on it, because they wanted the sport to grow, and the best way to grow it was to make it as exciting as possible. So, yeah. He doped up. The thing is, he still won. He still turned every pedal stroke. He pushed harder, from the inside, suffered more pain than a whole field of other elite dopers, and he dominated for years. The dope was the entry level. The mental game was the win.

So here we are, trying to destroy the man, and granted, he’s looking like a world class jerk. Unfortunately, he’s also a world class target, and he makes the best example, but of what? In a sea of pain and sacrifice along the road to victory, who are we to say that any risk, doping included, is more than an athlete should make. Who wins? Armstrong loses, cycling loses, but the odds of a clean sport in the future don’t seem promising. It seems to me that the only control for illicit substances for any purpose is to let them go and see what happens. The only real lesson is the one that is taught when our heroic athletes develop a tendency to drop dead at age 40. Life and death are great teachers, with great motivation. When a high school kid drops dead on the basketball court thanks to an ignorant round of juicing, you can bet he teaches a valuable lesson to the kids around him. Artificial limits, laws, and regulations do not. The more we enact, the better we ignore them. Why bother at all? I’m fairly sure that the athletes can discover their own tolerance for risk, even if a few of them need to die in the process.

What do we want? Greatness or safety? And yes, that goes far beyond sports and worlds beyond doping for the win.

Jenny the cat was suffering, failing. Of that there was no doubt. She was having trouble moving. She had lost a lot of weight in the past few weeks. She was eating much less and throwing up much more. Her front legs had collapsed to the second joint, and she was peeing over the edge of the litter box. We took her in to see our vet, and discovered that her body temperature was well below normal.  The evidence mounted.

We had known that she was suffering from kidney disease for several years, and we knew that made her days finite. The vet was good. In all honesty, I came away from the experience understanding what a fine line a veterinarian must walk in that kind of case.  He knows us well enough to know that we generally opt for aggressive treatment. In fact, with our weighty pack of animals, he probably has a hot tub named after us. Over the course of a lengthy philosophical conversation, he understood that we may not opt for treatment this time, and managed to walk deftly between the two extremes. In each case, he kept it as scientific as he could manage. In a nutshell, he told us that treatment would involve a lengthy unraveling of problems, and could kill Jenny at any point.

Sharon and I have different approaches. She calculates and analyzes. I fly on instinct. My instincts told me the cat was suffering badly and was ready to depart. I had no doubt. Sharon needed to cover all the contingencies, and we are thankful that our vet handled it so well. In the end, we decided to euthanize Miss Jenny. She had nearly 18 years of the most conscientious pet ownership a critter could hope for.

The end was incredibly peaceful. Of course, we’ll never know what the cat experienced, but while I was in the midst of my sadness, Sharon’s sadness, and the hollowed out professionalism of the two caring techs, I watched her little blue-green eyes go out. I felt a sudden strange sense of relief and happiness. The incongruous mix of emotions was strange, but I was left with the understanding that she was indeed done with this life, and that we did the right thing.

The problem, for me, is that powerful events are something to understand as fully as possible. I understand Sharon’s relationship with Jenny. They were together for Jenny’s entire life. Sharon was the only safe place in the world for a prickly little feral cat. Only when everything was settled and safe did Jenny venture out of the bedroom closet, and only to go straight to Sharon. My relationship, my presence, was a minor threat to Jenny. Only in the last year or so did she learn to ignore me, and then only if I made sure to move slowly and keep my distance. If I sat still long enough, I could pet Jenny without witnessing a rapid kitty escape over the side of the bed.

Not being a cat person, I’d realized that the only way I could really frame Jenny was with our other feline. Donner was a happy accident in my life, and the exact polar opposite of Jenny. Donner was adopted for a step daughter in a former life, and as I’ve heard said happens with cats, he picked the least cat oriented person in the house – namely me. I have no idea why that cat thinks I’m so great, but he finds a hundred ways to show it during the course of any day. He’s not exclusive, though. He’ll greet anyone in his almost dog-like fashion, he’ll come when I call, and we can negotiate the terms of his cushy imprisonment without any trouble.

Before our close friend and neighbor passed away, Donner spent a good portion of his day across the street, hanging out with Bill. I can’t count the number of times Bill would come to watch me work in the garage with Donner in tow. Bill would say, “Hey, Jim,” and Donner would say, “Squeak!” Bill would always say, “I call him Squeaker. You know why?” I would think, “Because he squeaks?” And Bill would say, “Because he squeaks,” and laugh like he had discovered a particularly ironic secret. It was a ritual, until Bill was gone, and Donner lamented his passing for weeks.

Right now, Donner is coming to grips with the disappearance of his grouchy old girlfriend, and Elke the OCD dog is still staring at the closet door, waiting for Miss Jenny to make one of her rare appearances. I’m left wondering about how long it will take before two animals give up on their friend, and what it says about the way that animals feel about such things.

I’ll be the first to remind Sharon that our pets are here for us, and that there is a limit to what we can and should do for them. We can feed them, love them, buy them fun toys and fluffy beds. We can train them and play with them until they drop into contented sleep. But in the end, at the ultimate and hardest point of decision, the best thing we can do for them is to save them from pointless suffering, and hope that the next hard decision doesn’t rear its head for a very long time.

(Apologies for the title. I couldn’t resist) Thanks for reading!

Anyway, I’d like to point out a couple of news blog links to your right. One is a link to Trinity Mountain Homestead, a blog I should have linked long ago. I’ve been in touch with the author long enough to know it’s good stuff. The other is for Preserving Abundance, which is from a new internet acquaintance. I checked it out today, and it’s also chock full of good thought, good information.

Now for the elephant in the room: Decay. Where the heck is it? First let me point out that it actually pains me that it hasn’t been released yet. As I’ve hinted, but haven’t really explained, some significant obstacles dropped into my path last year. I still can’t explain, but if they happened to you, you would understand. Second, I’m painfully aware of the strengths and weaknesses in the Renewal series, and I’ve not only tried to address them in my writing, I’ve worked hard on creating a system that allows me to keep improving over the long haul. I’ve got a long list of check boxes that need to be filled in the Breakdown universe, and an even longer list of other stories to write. I’ve got stuff to say. It seems reasonable to learn how to make the system work in the near term, so that I can work more efficiently in the long term. The good news there is that I think I’ve found an editor who can call me to task on the larger structural issues in my books. That’s something I need. Let’s not forget that I’m still new to all this. I’d rather be realistic about the fact that I’ll be learning to write for the rest of my life than to blunder headlong into a huge pile of idiocy.

In any case, I feel like I’m on track again and rapid progress is being made. I’ll not make any promises about dates until I know more, but I’m quite sure that we won’t be having these kinds of chats for much longer. In the meantime, I appreciate all of your feedback, all the reviews, all of your patience, and all of your support. Thanks for reading!

I think the whole race is about what we could lose, and more importantly, what we hope not to lose. I hate to break it to either set of proponents of the two-party system, but we’re in a lesser of two evils situation. I can make a case either way, but that’s not for me, since there are a million pundits working both sides right now – and for the past 800 million weeks. Given my baseline opinion of the only viable candidates, viable because the two-party system has an iron stranglehold that prevents any other parties from joining the race in a realistic way. Not that it matters; every one of the secondary party candidates can disqualify themselves quite handily, which leaves those of us who would otherwise cast a protest vote without a meaningful target.

Just for the record, I could write a huge honking volume about problems and solutions in the America of 2012. My poor wife gets the brunt of it. But in order to do that, I would have to use footnotes and sources and crap, and honestly, I just prefer to collect ideas and stuff them in corners of my head until they leak out as fiction, which is blessedly free of footnotes.

I suspect that a large number of my readers would happily argue the same side as I would, and that is the sad idea that we are rapidly turning into tiny, ineffectual cogs in a machine that is running out of control. I think the power elite tends to look at us regular citizens as vote batteries for attaining office, money batteries for our fantasy-based economy, and when we can’t be used in those ways, they simply hope to keep us from noticing what they are really doing.

Over the long term, these and many other tendencies coalesce into patterns. Just like the predicted course of a hurricane, the end result of the patterns can end up diverging wildly from where we expected. (I would note at this point how incredibly accurate the Sandy predictions turned out to be. Kudos to our Hurricane Forecast Center) I happen to believe that the balance point of the crossing patterns is relatively fragile, and our metaphorical storm can turn hard with a little push from chaos theory. To borrow another metaphor, our economic engine is way out on the limb, and gets bounced at will by forces that appear to have our best interests in mind only to the extent that we can go back to being fully charged money batteries for those same forces. As a bonus, if we remain happily engaged in the system, we make nice stable vote batteries as well.

As I write, nobody knows how this election will turn out. It’s that close. What does the sheer “dead-heatedness” of our political process say about where we are in this country? Some would talk about political polarization, and that is certainly true. Just looking at my friends on Facebook is enough to build a model for the extreme range of views of our people. I would argue that the statistics say more about the extreme poorness of our choices. It’s far easier to agree “on” something than “against” something. And that’s what we are doing as a nation. We are not able to see something that is clearly favorable to enough people to build a consensus, using good honest information, and so we fall back on the next best thing.

What is the next best thing? Well, that depends. For some of you, it’s easiest just to pick a single issue and decide on that. Anti-abortion says you’re buying Romney. Pro-choice and the stats say you’ll go Democratic more often than not. On the economy, it gets much more complicated to pick the wheat from the chaff. Now you’re forced to pick an economic model, and whichever one you choose means you get a whole truckload of other issues that go with it. What if, for example, you believe in a minimal regulation, free market economy, and you believe in a woman’s right to choose? Well, then you are stuck with deciding which part is the most important. And the list goes on until we have the near perfect polarization of opinion.

What if the belief is just not there? Obama generated a staggering amount of belief in his message four years ago, and we jumped in with both feet. Many of Obama’s believers have experienced bitter disappointed at the startling revelation that, OMG, he’s just another politician speaking from the most expedient side of his mouth. I’m not saying Captain Etch-a-Sketch is any better. He flip flops so often that the only way we will discover what he’s really about is to give him four years to show us. Until we elect our next President, we are stuck with nothing but belief to help us make the call. Obama has his sackful of vague promises, and so does Romney.

What if the party line is good enough? If you happen to believe that Republicans generally do a better job than Democrats, it’s not so hard to convince yourself that any candidate they toss will stick to the fridge like a well-cooked noodle. If you swing the other way, that’s fine too, because if you care to dig, you can easily find that neither party represents any kind of solution for the mess in which we find ourselves, and historically, both sides can  lay claim to an endless stream of abuses.

What does it all mean?  This grand, faith based, no-good-choice reality… Well, it means that we had all, as individuals, better think long and hard about how to get our own house in order. This country is our house – yours and mine. How do you want it to work? Do you want your leadership bought and paid for? Do we want to pay for Romney’s <cough> 47%, and if so, how do we really pay for it into the future? Are they the Free Shit Army, or brothers and sisters who deserve our care? Do we want most of our goods to be made in China, or do we want to build the best stuff in the world and worry long and hard about how to distribute it to our global customers? Do we want to play games with foreign dictators through loans and billions of dollars in aid, and if so, who can make a case for what we get for those dollars? (By we, I don’t mean the power brokers who set up the arrangements. I mean us.) Do we want to subsidize the entire world’s medical costs by paying the entire “pride of lion’s” share for every pill and procedure – and to live in place where one health problem can destroy a financial life? Do we want bankers to risk everything we entrust to them and then buy them out of trouble with our own tax dollars while none of them even miss a bonus check, much less go down with the legal ship? Do we want our laws and regulations to grow to even more absurd levels of behavior controlling complexity while we all live in fear of some kind of costly non-compliance? Do we accept our liberty being threatened by sneaky maneuvers that benefit corporations with person level rights while the Supreme Court is deciding whether we actually own what we buy? Finally, how do we feel about people who live in waterfront homes and flood prone areas, screaming for government help when a devastating storm comes through? I could go on and on, but you get the point.

It seems raw and cynical in a country of free people that I feel the need to remind myself that we are supposed to have a voice. We are supposed to have some level of control over our political destiny. Do we still possess our voice, our rights, our own thoughts? Or, are we slowly succumbing to a social assault that over years and generations has led us to point where we forget the basics. This country is ours.

As we line up to cast our ballots, some of us will proudly vote for our candidate. I’m a little jealous of those people, because I would love to be voting “for” someone. If I could find someone like that, I assure you I would be telling you who that person is. As it stands, I’m voting for the lesser of evils in my own personal hierarchy of important issues, and at the top of the list is the most basic, fundamental idea of this country of ours. Freedom.

I feel confident that if you start digging without prejudice, you could easily discover who is the biggest threat to fundamental rights and freedom. Thanks, Google!

For all of you, I pray for your own clarity and wisdom in the voting booth, and no matter the outcome, let’s all remember that the first and last line of defense for America is us –  the strong, independent, thinking individuals who still have the right of destiny for our great nation. I suggest we hold onto it.

Dog are trainable, and agreeable enough to accept that training, but no amount of training buries the personality underneath. No training can completely subvert the drives that make dogs the perfect companions for us poor, wandering two-leggers.

In the case of Hunter, that personality appeared right out of the gate. He’s a chicken-butt, a nervous Nellie, and the captain of the fun police. He cowers every forth of July as the fireworks boom and crackle. He responds to other dogs, runners and bicyclists with fear aggression, and he works semi-aggressively to maintain a respectable level of calm among our other, entirely-too-playful dogs.

Hunter inherited pack leadership from Austin, who wore his own crown with ease as all Australian Shepherds seem to do. Austin’s second in command rose to the top in the natural order, but never wears it in natural style. He worries, he frets, he runs behind his mama’s legs at the first sign of conflict, and perhaps most importantly, he is roundly ignored by his theoretical followers.

But none of that matters.

Hunter displays the highest levels of greatness in the most important ways. He’s a black Labrador – Aussie mix of medium bulk who is entirely, completely devoted to his number one human. He will follow her anywhere, and he will overcome his natural nerves to protect her against all the random dangers in the world, real or imagined. He will unfailingly appear at the front window to greet her upon her return. Though not normally excitable, he will set his stub of a tail wiggling at the sound of her voice, and in his quiet way, he will gaze upon her like the pure goddess he sees before him. To look into his eyes is to see deep into an uncanny well of intelligence and understanding that only old dogs with old souls possess. He sees and he understands. He cares.

Then he ignores commands. You see, his goddess is not the alpha in his eyes. She’s the source. Sometimes she needs a little help to understand what is necessary, and Hunter is there to assist. At the first sign of a leash, he will take command, grab the leash in his mouth and lead her directly out the door. At the correct time each night, he herds her to bed, proceeds to curl up on his own plush accommodations right next to her like an over-sized black bean, issues a couple of room destroying farts, and guards her through the night.

In other words, Hunter is one of a million definitions of the perfect dog, and he turns twelve today. Happy birthday, old man.

JF Perkins