Darkspace Press

Month: July 2016

  • Mad Cow – a new short story from a drug-induced dream

    Frank and James think they have the perfect scheme — use the magic Frank learned from his grandfather to scam drug dealers out of their money. Who are they going to complain to if they can’t even remember the deal? Just one problem … near the full-moon, there are some drug dealers that magic won’t work on.

    Last month I was taking muscle relaxers for a back injury — along with an over-the-counter sleep aid. The combination … well …

  • What I’m Reading: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

    In the tradition of The Wisdom of Crowds and Predictably Irrational comes Being Wrong, an illuminating exploration of what it means to be in error, and why homo sapiens tend to tacitly assume (or loudly insist) that they are right about most everything. Kathryn Schulz, editor of Grist magazine, argues that error is the fundamental human condition and should be celebrated as such. Guiding the reader through the history and psychology of error, from Socrates to Alan Greenspan, Being Wrong will change the way you perceive screw-ups, both of the mammoth and daily variety, forever.

    Intriguing book, though I think the author herself falls into a trap of defining some things as wrong when they’re really a difference of opinion. It does, though, make one stop and think a bit about why we’re so afraid to be wrong — and some of the implications of that with regard to civil discourse and disagreement.

  • What I’m Reading: The Alchemy of Chaos: A Novel of Maradaine (Maradaine Novels)

    Veranix Calbert is The Thorn—the street vigilante-turned-legend—and a danger to Willem Fenmere, the drug kingpin of Dentonhill. Veranix is determined to stop Fenmere and the effitte drug trade, especially when he discovers that Fenmere is planning on using the Red Rabbits gang in his neighborhood. But Veranix is also a magic student at the University of Maradaine, and it’s exam week. With his academic career riding on his performance, there’s no time to go after Fenmere or the Red Rabbits. But when a series of pranks on campus grow deadly, it’s clear that someone has a vendetta against the university, and Veranix may be the only one who can stop them…

    Not indie, but reasonably priced and a good series. Maresca tells an entertaining story and has an ambitious plan for his world, with three series planned in it. I’ve read the first books in two of those series and now the second in the Thorn series and haven’t been disappointed.

  • A Word About DRM and ebooks

    I hate DRM. I hate it on music, DVDs, and ebooks, and I especially hate the idea of “licensing” things like this instead of purchasing it.

    Look that up, if you think you’re purchasing content in this day and age — you’re not, you’re licensing the use of it and the licencor retains the rights to, well, change the terms whenever they really feel like it.

    I hate that and don’t include DRM on any of my books when I have the choice. If there ever does turn out to be DRM on one of my books, then I didn’t have a choice with that distributor or I clicked the wrong button — let me know, so I can fix that if it ever turns up.

    Yes, this means that some readers might send a copy of the ebook to a friend or even upload it to a pirate site. Well, the way I look at it is that the casual sharing is a nit in the grand scheme of things and the pirate site will get it anyway — because no DRM method is … well, any damn good at all.

    The movie industry spent obscene amounts of money to develop CSS encryption for DVDs.

    The Perl script to DeCSS a DVD is about twenty-four lines of code.

    I know because I had that code on a t-shirt once, along with the words “This shirt is a circumvention device”, and the text of US 1201(C)3, the Digital Millenia Copyright Act on the back. The shirt was technically illegal under the DCMA. When a t-shirt becomes illegal as a copyright circumvention device, your law is rather pointless and absurd.

    Anyway, I believe when you buy my book digitally, you’ve bought it and you should be able to keep it and read it in perpetuity on your preferred device now or in the future. You paid for the story, not the format.

    Why is this at all important? Well, it probably isn’t to the average reader, at least not right now.

    But imagine a day when Amazon goes away (I know, but I’m old enough to remember that K-mart was once the dominant retailer until another letter came along). Barnes and Noble did, just this year, close the Nook store in the UK, and many readers have lost some books in the transition to Sainsbury. iTunes deleted music files it didn’t recognize.

    Bad stuff happens.

    So I encourage my readers to back up their Kindles or other ereaders. It’s not difficult — plug the Kindle into a computer periodically (I do it every six months) and drag the files to a backup directory on the computer.

    I go a step further and backup to Calibre. This is an ebook library manager, which can also convert to other formats. So if you switch from Kindle to some future reader, you can bring your library along with you. It’s also useful if a book is exclusive to Amazon and you’d like to read it in an epub reader — Calibre will do that conversion.

    Obviously, that only works for ebooks without DRM, but there are Calibre plugins to remove DRM and allow you to backup your content.

    I do, though, think there’s a bit of a societal contract between authors (and other creators) and those who purchase it.

    I absolutely support your right to backup and future-proof your purchases of my books and stories, but I do hope to one day write full-time. That means having to replace my day-job income.

    I hope that if you do share a file with a friend, that you encourage them to buy the book if they like it (or page through it in Kindle Unlimited, if applicable). Or send a couple bucks via Paypal to sutherland (at) alexiscarew.com.

    The same applies if you picked up one of my books via a pirate site. If you liked it and want to support me being able to create more works, then throw a couple bucks my way. I know that’s not always practical for some people — maybe buy a burger for a homeless guy once in a while and we’ll call it even?