Dropbox invite
about 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 07:17:47 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Almost ready to ship
about 3 years ago – Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 05:21:04 AM

Life on the homestead

Spring is here, and we're buried in work.  Last weekend I took down a dead tree, spread dirt to fill in some huge ruts (converting an old garden patch back into lawn), spread more dirt (filled in some holes left by stump removal in order to create a small area for my wife that we're calling "willow park" because she planted a willow tree next to the catchement pond), stretched some cross fencing in front pasture to improve our pasture rotation schedule with the sheep, etc.

Project status: ebooks

Ebooks have been uploaded to dropbox, and you should have gotten an invite to view the books.

After release the ebooks I got about 20  bug reports and fixed almost all of them, and re-spun the ebooks.  If you downloaded them the first day, check back for more recent versions.

(If you didn't get the invite to Dropbox for the ebooks, DM me with the email address you used to back the project).

The ebooks are also available for preorder, going live on June 1st: volume 1 and volume 2.

Project status: trade paperbacks

Trade paperbacks have been fully formatted and uploaded to Amazon, and I've written a tool that will let me automatically place hundreds or thousands of orders at Amazon to ship products directly to your door.

Yesterday I placed an order for proof copies from Amazon, and those should arrive in 3-7 days.  I will then spend a week or so with the proofs, looking for any errors that are big enough to be annoying, but small enough that I can fix them easily (if I realize that the book really needs a chapter on TIG welding, well, that's not going to happen - it'll be filed as a bug and tagged as "for the second edition" ).

The upshot is that I hope to pull the trigger on shipping trade paperbacks in around 2 weeks.

Project status: hardcovers

In the 9 months between launching the kickstarter and now, the project grew from two 6"x9" books with 450 pages each, to two 8.5" x 11" books with 650 pages each.  I've formatted and uploaded the books to Lulu.

Lulu also raised their prices a fair bit (part of the general inflation we're seeing?).   The upshot is that I was looking at a cost overrun of about $20,000.  If I have to swallow this bitter pill, I will - it's my goal to always deliver what I've promised, and ideally over-deliver ... and if costs climb, well, that has no bearing on the promises I've made to you.

...but then, at the last minute, Amazon reached out to me with an invite to a beta program to print hardcovers at 1/4 of the price of Lulu.  I am looking into this right now.  Amazon tells me that I have been accepted to the beta, and that they will contact me "when it starts".  If that start date is November, obviously I'm not going to wait ... but if it's a few weeks or 2 months out, I will.

Project status: higher reward tiers

Re the Lucifer's Hammer edition: I've done some experiments with my vacuum sealer and it can seal the originally intended 6"x9" trade paperbacks, but can not do a good job on the larger 8.5"x11" trade paperbacks.  Thus I will likely scale down the trades for the LH edition, to make sure that they remain sealed in your septic tank until the comet hits ... but I'm thinking about doing something a little extra for the LH purchasers, so that they feel that, if anything, the end result is more than worth it.  Doing research now.  Expect to be pleasantly surprised.

Re the Future Farmers of Aristillus: my bookbinder John is ready, willing, and able, so once I fire for effect in ordering the hardcovers (see above), I'll take delivery of some of those, pass them on to John, and pick out leather for the bindings and high end paper for the end papers.  These books also come with bookplates, printed on my three ton Kluge letterpress.  I recently replaced the motor and motorcontroller on the press, and need to do some tinkering with it.... which can run in parallel with the leather binding.

Re the Collector's Edition hardcovers: I have not yet begun work on the "shop and farm inventory trade paperback".  Expect that to ship separately, late in this year.

Re the Lothlórien and Beleriand edition hand-made wooden slipcases: I have not begun work on these either.  Expect them to ship late this year or perhaps early next year.  I've got some ideas for integrated hand-work and CNC work, and have been tinkering with my built-from-a-kit CNC machine.  I think I blew an op amp or something in one of the control boards (the second most dangerous thing is an electrical engineer with a script he wrote; the most dangerous thing is a software engineer with a soldering iron).  Luckily I have a friend who is an EE and who is, like Winston Wolf, on the job.  

That's all for now.

Thank you for your support and patience.

TJIC

Formatting is 99% done; printing is very soon
about 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 08:55:54 AM

Life on the farm

I've had an exciting few weeks - five baby lambs were born, we had one breach birth which necessitated wrestling a 150 lb ewe (with the head and one foreleg of her lamb hanging out of her birth canal) into the back seat of the sedan, and racing to the vet (they saved the mom but lost the kid), and after a week of walking around in shorts, we're now in the middle of a late spring snow storm.

The shearer was here a few days ago, and the we had a near tragedy - the same poor ewe, Brownie, who had a breach birth, contorted herself in the sheep "deck chair" that my wife and I use to invert sheep so we can trim their hooves, thrashed around, got her neck cranked at an extreme angle, cut off oxygen to her brain.

Malcom the shearer and I dumped Brownie from the deck chair onto the ground.  Malcolm, in his New Zealand accent, said it first: "she's not breathing".  ...at which point he started chest compressions!  The ovine CPR worked, and after six or seven compressions Brownie blinked, started breathing, and came back from the dead.

You can see her in the background in the above picture, with her one surviving lamb.

That's one tough old girl.

Also, my electrician friend Bill recently finished up a project on our barn, and I think it looks amazing.

Project Status

Formatting the book has been far more of a hassle than I would have ever expected, but at this point I've got it licked, I think.  The diffs from the proof reader and the diffs from "Future Farmer of Aristillus" Larry have been merged in, all of the issues at github have been addressed, and I've got a huge "run book" and set of scripts that let me convert book.txt into two massive PDF files, one per book.

I'm starting in on the final run of that process right now, and I'm hoping to have two final PDFs next week.  

Given the delays so far, and the intense amount of attention the manuscripts have had so far, I'm leaning towards skipping proof copies and heading right to firing for effect.

So, next week I blow the dust off of the scripts that I used to place orders for books at lulu.com (last used when I shipped my Aristillus novels a few years ago), and start trying to get them work with whatever changes LuLu has made to their shopping cart interface in the intervening years.

...which brings me to what I need from you:

Please Double Check The Credits

A month or so back I sent out Kickstarter surveys asking you to fill in your shipping address, not so that I would know where to ship it to (I'm handling that via backerkit), but so that I'd know how to thank you in the credits.

Here's what the first page of credits looks like

The PDF of the full credits is here:

http://morlockpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/etc_thanks/thanks.pdf

What I need from you (if you backed, via Kickstarter, at the "Trade Paperback" or higher level):

• click the above link
• find your name and verify that it is correct
• if you can't find your name, or if it is incorrect, update the Kickstarter survey (found via your account page here on kickstarter.com)
• only as an absolute last resort, contact me directly (I have scripts and processes that export the survey results as CSV files and then format them for the thank you page ; there are literally hundreds of backers in the thank yous, and if even 10% of them contact me directly, this turns from a hassle into a migraine headache which delays shipping the books by a week or more).
• the deadline for this is 5pm ET Monday 19 April; whatever data I have at that exact moment is what goes to the printing presses.

Other News

The rumors are true; I have in fact taken money from Russians and am colluding with an organization located in Moscow (which is to say that publisher Eksmo.ru has translated my first novel into Russian and has purchased the rights to my second novel as well).

If you want to see what Russian science fiction fans are getting exposed to, you can check out the original English versions of the novels

• The Powers of the Earth
• Causes of Separation

or, if you've already read those, check out my friend Rob Kroese's kickstarter for Mammon: a scifi trilogy about a different sort of apocalypse .  I'll be contributing a short story to it.

Next steps

If all goes according to plan, the next thing you'll hear from me is "the books are in the mail".

With that in mind, if your address has recently changed, please log in to backerkit.com right now and update it.

I have not forgotten that Lothlórien Forest Edition backers and others get hand made wooden slipcases, nor that backers of certain tiers get a small trade paperback on tools.

Those projects will happen later in 2021.

Thank you for your patience, we're almost there!

- Travis

Quick mid-month update, and asking you for a favor
about 3 years ago – Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 10:07:54 PM

I told you you'd get the next update in early April, but I'm jumping the gun a bit and sending it a week or so early.

The last three weeks have gone by quickly, but very very productively.

I've been tackling post-production, which is - broadly speaking - layout.  ...but there's a lot to that.  I'm doing all of the layout programatically, which means that I'm writing scripts to do the work for me.

I'll talk about some of the post production below, and that may bore some people, so feel free to skip ahead - but please do read two topics towards the bottom of the newsletter: a schedule update, and a request for your help (TLDR: I need back-cover reviews).

Images

Part of post production is including hundreds of images.  An example of a two-page spread with images:

QR codes, URLs, and link pages

After polling people on twitter about what to do with URLs in the text, I've decided to (a) create per-chapter resource pages at my website, and to have the URLs in the book reference these pages (so that I can fix broken links long after the physical book goes to print), and (b) link to these pages with both URLs and QR codes in the book text.

An example of one of the links pages is  https://morlockpublishing.com/etc04.html#39  

And example of a two-page spread that has QR codes is

Cross references and subscripts

One of the joys of a hyper text document like Wikipedia, TV Tropes, or ESR's Hacker Dictionary is all of the cross references that can lead you across topics.  I've made to to instrument the text with thousands of cross references, and wrote a script to pluck the page numbers out of the XML document and then splice them back in to make the cross references work.

I've also written code to make sure that chemical formulae are subscripted properly.  You can see both in this example:

Table of contents

A large 2 volume book needs a large table of contents ...and at 40 pages (of JUST the table of contents), this book has one.

Index

There's also a massive index:

Schedule Update

I am now 99% done with formatting.  (All that's left is the other 70%.)  Joking aside, though, the formatting is really almost done.  My 20 item to-do list is down to just 2 items, each about 15 minutes long.  I've got a few outsourced tasks: 

First: the CAD guy who drew up 4 great plans (which are already in the book) is going to draw up 4 more plans, plus a map.  I hope to have those from him in a week or so.

Second: my graphic designer (i.e. my long suffering wife) is starting work on the covers ... which is more complicated than it sounds.  Even if the task was "merely" getting the cover images positioned just right, picking the perfect font, and all of that magic, it would be a big task ... but it's even bigger because I'm asking her to deliver three different versions (a 1 panel version for the ebook, a 3 panel version for the trade paperback, and a 5 panel version for the hardcover dust jacket) of two different covers (volume 1 and volume 2).  I hope to have those from her in three weeks or so.

The final outsourced task is the one with the catch: proofreading.  My proofreader has been caught up in a horrible bureaucratic snafu (picture a bad day at the DMV which gets worse when the school board loses your permanent record and then the IRS gets you confused with your cousin who hasn't filed in 12 years), and he's going to be delayed in getting the book proofed.  The firm that employs him (and which I'm contracting with) did a wonderful job of proactively reaching out to me, and going above-and-beyond what was required by not only telling me that they'd release me from the contract, but that I could keep all of my money, despite them having already proofed 1/3 of the book.

I appreciate the offer, but I also hate incompetent bureaucracy, and wanted to stand by someone who was getting shafted by it, so I replied that I'd like to stick with them.

I anticipate that this delays the production cycle by weeks, but not by a month.

Within the next week I expect to send out a Kickstarter survey asking people at certain pledge levels how they want to have their names spelled in the "thank you" section at the front of the book (and, yes, "anonymous" is a fine answer).

I need your help

My wife has asked me for text for the back cover, and pull quotes from reviews traditionally go there.

If any of you have been reading my work-in-progress, like it, and want to write a brief quote (a sentence or two), I'd love to slap a half dozen of these on the back cover.  Please DM via kickstarter, or via other series-of-internet-tubes process.

Backerkit

The Backerkit store where friends of yours can get their own copies of Escape the City remains open - but not for much longer.

Github

If you're not yet following the work-in-progress via github, give me a shout with your github username or email address, and I'll hook you up.

What comes next

We're getting close - darned close.  I may send another light-weight newsletter a few weeks from now, just to touch base, but as long as the external dependencies all work out, we are - fingers crossed - not that far from the absolute last update when I tell you "the books are in the mail".

Spring is almost here - plan your garden!

Travis 

Draft 2 done, proofreading underway, formatting underway
about 3 years ago – Tue, Mar 02, 2021 at 11:07:00 PM

Draft 2 is done!

Twenty eight days ago I said in the last update:

I now project, with some decent degree of confidence, that that draft 2 will be finished at the end of February.

I'm happy to report that I hit that schedule; draft 2 is done.  It's an absolute monster, weighing in at 520,000 words.  By way of comparison, Google tells me that all three volumes of the Lord of the Rings together come in at 481,103 words. The table of contents of Escape the City alone runs to over 40 pages.

Github access

This is a reminder: all of the work-in-progress is available online, TODAY, to backers.  It's in github.  If you don't already have access, email me, message me, or send some smoke signals.  I'll get your access ASAP.

Table of contents, index, and cross references

I have begun formatting  the book, using OpenOffice (a tool I've successfully used before when I released my novels).  There are three important things I want for Escape the City, as it's intended as a reference book:

• a GREAT table of content
• a GREAT index
• a GREAT set of cross references

The first two are self explanatory (and if you don't agree that the following is the sign of a great index, then check your priors)

...but what do I mean about cross references?

From the get-go, I wanted this book to have links between its sections, so you could start out reading about bacon, come across a link to the topic of butchering, jump to that page, find another link and jump to the article on tractors, and an hour later find yourself reading about how oxygen concentrators function because of van der Waals force, or how the lack of blockchain technology during the Norman Conquest in 1088 AD has an impact on how we track ownership of tractors.

The first chapter of the book includes this bit:

The third, and - to my mind - most interesting way is to start at one place and follow links to other topics. Younger readers may think of sites like Wikipedia or TVTropes, while those with a bit of grey in their beards may reminiscence about the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I believe that the links between articles form what mathematicians and computer scientists call a "spanning tree" - follow them long enough, and you'll cover every topic, from the breeds of apples good for hard cider, to diesel engine maintenance, to shearing a sheep.

I'm old fashioned.  I think that if a man claims that his book forms a single connected graph, then the onus is on him to write a parser and an implementation of a recursive graph coloring algorithm to make sure that claim is true.  This is not 'Nam; there are rules!

So, I wrote that script, and then kept tweaking the file book.txt until the script gave me the thumbs up.  It is now the case that if you start reading the first page of the book (which includes a recipe for a BLT sandwich), and you follow all of the cross references (recursively), you will eventually visit every single article across both volumes.

OK, but what do cross references look like?

In the print books, they'll look like this

(don't get too hung up on font choices, justification, word wrap around images, etc. - I haven't even started playing with those knobs).

Technical details of cross references

If you're a nerd and curious about how I managed the cross references, read on.  Otherwise, skip this sections.

When I wrote the book in a flat text file (book.txt), I 

• used emacs outline-mode to create sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections, etc.
• I inserted little tags like this (CCC "Vehicles: Tractor: Maintenance") to signify a cross reference

Over the last few days I've written a script that

• turns the .txt file into a markdown .md file
• uses pandoc to convert the .md file into a LibreOffice .odt file
• unzips the .odt file into its constituent parts
• scans in the content.xml file which holds the LibreOffice document
• reads the table of contents (built from my original emacs outline mode outline)
• parses the ToC to find the XML id tags that serve as anchors throughout the entire document (this is how we learn that the chapter "Vehicles: Tractors" is associated with the tag __RefHeading___Toc39049_1763541708 )
• scans the entire document for CCC tags
• edits the document to turn the CCC tags into LibreOffice cross references
• saves the file
• re-zips the bundle of files to create a new .odt file

I'm doing some similar tricks to create a really comprehensive index.

Build your own .odt file

If you want to build a nice .odt file with a table of contents, cross references, an index, and [ a few ] embedded images, you can!

• check out everything from github
• follow the instructions in the file README_formatting.txt

That said, the notes in that file are for my consumption, and there will be no handholding on how to install ruby, rake, pandoc, LibreOffice, etc.  If you happen to be able to build an .odt, then that's gravy, but if you can't, then rest assured that I'm pushing forward as fast as possible to get the finished book in your hands.

Form factor

I had originally intended the book to be two 6" x 9" trade paperbacks.

Unfortunately, the book grew.  If I formatted the current text at that page size, the total document (with no photos) would be around 2,200 pages, or 1,100 pages per volume.  Unfortunately, Lulu and Amazon can only print books up to around 800 pages, so this is a non starter.

I am currently leaning towards printing the books at 8.5" x 11", which shrinks the size to around 1,200 pages between the two volumes (or around 700 pages per volume after pictures are added).

This does create a bit of a conundrum for the "Lucifer's Hammer" edition, as I'm not sure that my industrial chamber vacuum sealing machine can reliably seal 8.5"x11" books.  But...I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Copies Still Available

Copies of the books can still be ordered via Backerkit.

Schedule

TLDR: I hope to wrap up the book and get it into print by the end of this month (March), or by the end of next month (April) at the very latest.  ...and, to be realistic, if I'm printing out proof copies and reading through them, then the latter date is probably safer.

Left to do:

• finish integrating the feedback from the proof reader on the first 1/3 of the book, then get proofreader to do the other 2/3 of the job
• find and add a few hundred pictures from the homestead to illustrate the book
• play with all the dials in layout: font choice, font size, margins, section header formatting, word wrap around images, etc etc ad nauseum
• print out a pair of proof copies and read them with a red pen
• fire for effect and have LuLu or Amazon.com send out a few thousand books to you

At this point I have wrapped up all contracting work, and am no longer limited to putting a mere 40 hours per week into this project; I'm instead working 8-10 hours per day, 7 days per week.

You have been good enough to give me your hard earned money, and I'm working hard to hold up my end of the bargain.

Onward!

I'll talk to you again in 1 month, when I issue the next update.

TJIC