Pause: January Ramblings

Change in the Air

So a few changes to the site this year.

• Link Drag. The plan was to share a little of the traffic love that the internet had granted me. I tried hard to produce a nice summary and a catchy extract for each chosen link, something to encourage readers to click onwards. This took almost as much time as a proper Tuesday post. Still, the stats do not lie. They tell me that Link Drag has never been that popular and the numbers clicking through to elsewhere were even smaller. Like video work, I don't think this is worth the time I've been devoting to it so, for now, I'm suspending Link Drag.
• Dialogue Tree. Eric's interviews have been moved to Thursday to put some more space between the interview and the Tuesday post. It also gives me a little more time to get them ready for posting.
• Counterweight. Eric and I are trying out a new podcast format and we're not sure how well it is all going to work. This will normally fill the Tuesday slot. We hope to do one a month, but no promises. It would also be good if we could argue more, with a sprinkling of violence.
• I rearranged all the links in the sidebar recently - now you'll find a small section for developers. Quality is better than quantity so I'm fairly aggressive in scrubbing out links that have stopped posting regularly. Mind you, sidebar links are more symbolic than consequential. Really, who clicks through a blogroll section these days? Remember, the stats do not lie. I know the truth! You can't handle the truth!
• Eric Brasure has not been elevated to "co-editor" or "backup writer" or anything. His status is still slave.

There are also a handful of readers (less than ten) signed up to e-mail alerts. Is this because no one wants an e-mail subscription or is it because no one knows e-mail subscription exists? Just wondering.

IndieCade East

I've talked about this briefly on Twitter but just to let y'all know, I am heading to IndieCade East next month.

I'll be travelling out to NY on Thursday Feb 14 and will be in town until the following Monday afternoon. I will be staying with Eric Brasure who has generously offered accommodation.

I hope you appreciate the weighty ramifications here. It means I will be missing Valentine's Day with Mrs. HM.

I'm principally going to IndieCade for a celebratory high-five with Richard Hofmeier after the IGF nominations, but I will probably try to shake an article out of this somehow.

Too Late

I can't remember when I wrote the short story Harbinger. Early 90s I think, maybe earlier.

In this story, our protagonist awakes in the dark. And he's drowning in water. Fortunately he escapes and we figure out he's on one of the moons of Mars. He's been sent by the company who discovered teleportation, a secret they kept to themselves. As a result, they have a veritable monopoly on doing stuff in outer space.

Anyway, they made a Martian space station for rich tourists and their own scientists and engineers. But there's been no contact for a week and transport to the station isn't working. They send the protagonist to an emergency backdoor transport on Deimos. It was secretly built to handle just this kind of scenario.

Our little secret agent uses a shuttle to get to the space station and finds it deserted and somewhat looted. The people? Aside from a couple of corpses... everyone is missing. There's only one place all of the people could have gone. The Harbinger.

The company's teleportation technology only works on people so the company uses a massive freighter, called Harbinger, to shuttle physical materials back and forth between Earth and Mars. Now, the freighter left Mars on schedule, after contact with the space station went dead. Our agent jumps on his shuttle and catches up with the Harbinger before it gets too far away.

And there, indeed, he discovers all of the missing people, alive. At first, they beat the crap out of him and then they tell him the truth. They explain why they've chosen to stowaway on Harbinger. And the awful truth, the goddamned awful truth...

...and last week I watched Moon starring Sam Rockwell. Bollocks. THERE GOES THAT EXCITING LAST PAGE TWIST.

The moral of the story is to publish your fiction today not twenty years later.