Author: James Viscosi

Dragon Stones Now On Amazon, B&N

~ James Viscosi ~ 6 Comments

Today, during my semi-monthly auto-Googling, I discovered that Dragon Stones has made its way out to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and the like.  Interestingly enough, Long Before Dawn hasn’t reached those outlets yet, but it is available from online bookstores in the U.K.  Go figure.  Perhaps the British are more amenable than the Americans to proper vampire stories, where the vampires are monsters.

Anyway, for all my legions of fans out there who have just been waiting to be able to purchase my two latest books from somewhere other than Lulu.com (you know who you are), your wish has been granted!  You can get Dragon Stones from Amazon.com or BN.com, and Long Before Dawn from Blackwell Online and WHSmith in the U.K.  Both should be available elsewhere as well.

Thunderbird Ate My RSS

~ James Viscosi ~ 5 Comments

Once I got beyond reading five or six blogs, it became more or less impossible to keep up with checking them online and seeing if there were new posts; so I started subscribing to their RSS feeds using the Thunderbird mail client.  This worked fine and made it much easier to avoid missing posts.  However, today I became aware that a couple of my subscriptions had stopped functioning (sorry, Finicky Penguin and Cinema Gypsy).  The folders were still there, but they looked empty, so I thought, okay, I’ll just add the subscriptions back in.  Wrong!  Thunderbird wouldn’t let me add them because it said I was already subscribed.  I went through every single feed folder looking for the phantom feeds, but they were nowhere to be found.

Hmm.  What to do next?  I decided to try exporting all my feeds and then importing them again.  So I created the export file (under Subscribe –> Export), deleted all my feed folders, and then imported the feed file (under Subscribe –> Import).  Everything came back, except for the two missing feeds.  So I thought, okay, I deleted everything, so I should be able to add the missing feeds back in now.  Wrong!  Thunderbird still insisted I was subscribed to them, even though it hadn’t pulled in any messages from them in over two weeks and they were nowhere to be found in any of the other folders.

Mutter mutter mutter.  Okay, now what?  After briefly flirting with going back to Opera and its wonderful M2 mail & RSS client, I opened the feed export that I created earlier (it’s an OPML file, which can be edited with any text editor), deleted everything out of it except for two entries, and then proceeded to modify them to be for the two missing feeds.  Then I imported the hacked OPML file.  Eureka!  There are my missing feeds!  I dragged them back to the “Blogs” folder under RSS feeds, and here come all the posts that I missed from those two blogs.

Oh no! Information overload! I’ll pick up commenting on the new posts as they arrive …

For those who are interested, here’s the OPML file after I edited it:

<opml version=”1.0″>
<head>
<title>Thunderbird OPML Export</title>
<dateCreated>Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:38:33 GMT</dateCreated>
</head>
<body>
<outline text=”Blogs”>
<outline title=”The Show Must Go On” text=”The Show Must Go On” type=”rss” version=”RSS” xmlUrl=”http://cinemagypsy.wordpress.com/feed/&#8221; htmlUrl=”http://cinemagypsy.wordpress.com/”/&gt;
<outline title=”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Soda” text=”Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Soda” type=”rss” version=”RSS” xmlUrl=”http://finickypenguin.wordpress.com/feed/&#8221; htmlUrl=”http://finickypenguin.wordpress.com/feed/”/&gt;
</outline>
</body>
</opml>

Random Rejection: The Panettieri Agency, “Long Before Dawn”

~ James Viscosi ~ 12 Comments

After our previous “random acceptance” anomaly, we’re back in familiar territory, with a rejection letter from a literary agent I was hoping to get to represent Long Before Dawn:

Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Panettieri Agency, “Long Before Dawn”” →

Random Acceptance: “Suicide Corners”

~ James Viscosi ~ 6 Comments

It had to happen eventually … I reached into my nine-inch-thick folder of responses and pulled out an acceptance letter.  But this one has a twist.

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Recall

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A while back, I sent a copy of Dragon Stones to the artist in Italy.  With his sharp artist’s eye, he noticed that the cover illustration of the dragon was not anti-aliased properly.  This problem has now been fixed, and the cover art looks much better — the lines are smooth rather than pixellated and the details are sharper.

I’m of the mind that anyone who bought Dragon Stones with the pixellated cover art is deserving of a pristine copy that looks the way the artist intended.  If you have a copy of the book and would like to get the updated version, please let me know and I will send you one free of charge.  (Obviously you shouldn’t post your address information in a public comment, so feel free to e-mail me at the listed address.)

Now, some might say that this could be an expensive thing for me to do.  But don’t worry.  I know how many copies of Dragon Stones have been sold, and it won’t be.  (Too bad …)

Dragon Stones: A Lulu Of A Review

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So I found out today that someone wrote a capsule review of Dragon Stones on Lulu.com.  (My father, who keeps closer track of this sort of thing than I do, let me know about it.)  With some trepidation I went to read the review, but I needn’t have worried — this is the best review I’ve gotten since M. Kenyon Charboneaux rated Night Watchman “1,000 on a scale of 1-5”.  Although the review is anonymous, let me assure everyone that I didn’t write it myself; I was busy in the mountains all day today!

Dragon Stones
6 out of 6
1 Jun 2008

by
The story captures the reader right away with interesting characters and descriptive writing. The writer is, in fact, facile with words and the book is an easy read. While it follows the adventure genre of characters moving from situation to situation, one does not wonder, as with some novels, when the string of obstacles will end. I might add that the cast of characters is diverse and interesting. Although it is a lengthy novel, it was not overlong and kept my interest. While the ending ties everything up decently, there are enough strings left for a couple of sequels, and I, for one hope they follow soon.
To the anonymous reviewer:  I don’t have any sequels in the works right now, but I’ve got plans … 😉

Free Software: Stellarium

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So I haven’t done a “free software for writers” post in a while because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve kind of run out of software that I use that I can plausibly label as “for writers”.  If I do think of another writing-related package I will certainly post it, but I didn’t want to stop writing about free software until then, so I’ve decided to branch out and just write about other programs that I’ve used or seen (other than well-known ones like Firefox or Thunderbird) that people might find interesting.  Today’s software is Stellarium.

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Review: “The Illusionist”

~ James Viscosi ~ 5 Comments

So last night we watched The Illusionist, in which the famous magician Tyler Durden (Edward Norton) plays tricks on John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) in an attempt to steal away his putative fiancee, Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel), all the while being investigated by the persistent Inspector Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti).

Okay, so none of those characters are actually the ones that are in this film, but that should give you some idea of how twisty this movie is.  Nothing is what it seems, except for the stuff that’s exactly what it seems; it’s up to the viewer to figure out which is which.  Edward Norton is an illusionist in love with a woman waaaay above his station in life, Jessica Biel is some sort of Hungarian noblewoman, Rufus Sewell is a crown prince who wants to use Biel to line up Hungarian support, and Paul Giamatti is an inspector who owes his position to Sewell but is fascinated by Norton’s magic.  I won’t give away any plot details, except to say that Rollie Tyler has got nothing on Eisenheim the Illusionist.

Despite being called The Illusionist, this film might as well be called The Inspector, because Paul Giamatti’s character is actually the most central figure.  This is a good thing, because he’s easily the most interesting person in the movie.  The actors all do fine jobs, especially (no surprise) Giamatti and Norton.  You could put these two in a movie where all they do is make faces at each other and it would probably be riveting.  (Okay, I will admit that I had a little bit of trouble accepting Jessica Biel as a duchess; but she didn’t embarrass herself at all playing opposite three heavyweights, and she certainly looks good in period garb.)

My wife stayed awake for the entire movie.  In one sitting.  Starting at 8:30pm, which is pretty close to when she falls asleep even when we’re not watching television.  This could well make The Illusionist the top-rated film of all time, or at least, since I started posting reviews …

Review: “The Orphanage”

~ James Viscosi ~ 1 Comment

So this week we watched The Orphanage, which can perhaps best be described as a casserole of The Devil’s Backbone and The Others, with a pinch of The Sixth Sense and a little Poltergeist garnish.  Sadly, though, this casserole was only baked about three-quarters of the way, so it’s still a little runny on the inside.

The Orphanage wasn’t quite as good as most of those other films I just named as ingredients, and it was nowhere near as good as The Devil’s Backbone.  But it was much better than The Others, which my wife and I both found to be a great big predictable snoozefest.  (Even I almost fell asleep watching The Others.)

Anyway, The Orphanage involves, yes, an orphanage, and some orphans, and some treasure hunting, and some weird noises, and a tall, skinny, less funny version of Zelda Rubinstein’s medium, and some ghosts, and the usual crowd of people who don’t believe in ghosts vs. the one person who does.  It has a few jolty moments and an ending that I half saw coming and that half surprised the heck out of me.  I like to be surprised by movies, so I was half satisfied.

My wife had really been wanting to see The Orphanage, mostly on the strength of its good reviews and its association with Guillermo Del Toro, a director she worships, but only when the people in his movies are speaking Spanish.  Unfortunately, The Orphanage put her to sleep in about 30 minutes, and when she woke up, she didn’t bother to ask how it ended.  Not a good sign.

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Seeing as how I like to bash Windows now and then, I thought it would only be fair for me to note a colossal security flaw in the Debian Linux distribution (which is the basis for, among other things, Ubuntu, which I use) affecting the OpenSSL encryption software program.  This isn’t a bug in OpenSSL, but rather, it’s something that a Debian programmer did to it that amounts to, shall we say, an orchiectomy.  Basically, in order to stop some code debugging/profiling tools from complaining, somebody commented out a line of code that was evidently responsible for creating entropy (pseudo-randomness) in order to generate an unguessable encryption key.  Oopsie.  As this is not a technology blog (and I am far from a cryptography expert), I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of what happened; for those who are interested and are of a technical bent, some good articles are here and here (and here, too).

You might’ve heard of SSL.  It’s what’s used to, among other things, broker secure (“https”) connections to web sites.  I’m not sure how bad I made this issue sound, but however bad you think it is, it’s actually worse.  (On the other hand, being open source software, we at least actually know what happened to it.)

And I still don’t have a virus, Google.