A Short Reading of The Clock Winked

This is a reading of an excerpt from "The Clock Winked." The book is available for sale through Amazon. Click here to get your copy.

Soon after young Auvek Oliphant finds himself the unintentional curator of his uncle’s bookstore, a series of strange events leads him and his new friend Bronwyn towards unraveling an old mystery – the legend of the winking clock.

Meanwhile, Sauvignon Pincer, a local journalist, investigates a series of seemingly normal incidents around the city, which lead him into the middle of a growing altercation between two opposing gangs.

This science fiction tale will pull readers into a brand new world filled with mystery and intrigue, as well as humor and fun.

The Clock Winked

So I published a book.

I highly recommend trying it - for anyone who thinks they can make it all the way through to the other side of the revision stage. But honestly, the most difficult part for me was making the cover.

Now, obviously, you can hire people to do your design for you. And sometimes you can even find people to do it for free - but in that case, you're asking a lot of someone, especially if you want to do it in a specific time frame. So after poking people around a bit, I did it myself.

I went through a wide variety of versions - blue, black, orange, different fonts and font sizes. I stuck with the clock image throughout the whole process, however, because I liked it. I asked different people I know for feedback - which versions they did and didn't like and why and eventually I got bored.

I get bored very easily. So I made one final version that was completely different from the others, and then said, "That's it, it's good enough."

This was due in large part to a piece advice from a coworker, which was not intended to be advice and spoken in relation to something entirely unrelated to my book. The advice (paraphrased into my own words) was this:

There's something to be said for perfection, and there's something to be said for getting it done. Sometimes you need to just get it done.

And for your own enjoyment, I will post the old versions of the cover here, and you can decide which one you like best. Oh, and you can buy my book, too. It's on Amazon: click here.

31 Days of Planets: Discworld!

Day 23

Discworld is awesome! It is one of my favourite places of all time. It goes like this...

"In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...

"See...

"Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.

"In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.

"Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, garnlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.

"Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about..."

-The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett, the man

Terry Pratchett, a brilliantly eccentric gentleman of great writing prowess, created this fascinating and wonderful world - a disc which sits on top of four elephants which sits on a giant sea turtle which swims through space - it's brilliant. Just brilliant.

I hope to meet Terry Pratchett. Sooner than later, preferably. 

In conclusion, go read Terry Pratchett.

Pictures from here and here.

A Closet Full of Teleports

I used to have this closet--just a little bit bigger than a shower. At first it was filled with my parents' stuff. After a fair amount of begging, my parents let me move their stuff into a different closet. In place of their stuff I put two bookshelves--each filled with books (naturally). 

The thing about books is that they're filled with stories--and not just stories, but whole worlds with their own laws of physics, their own gods, and their own fantastic people--and books allow us to enter their worlds, learn their physics, meet their gods, and watch their people.

It's like having a closet full of teleports.

I organized my books by colour. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, then black, grey, white, and brown. I knew every book I owned personally. I knew what colour it was. I knew what characters were in it, who wrote it, what happened in it, the laws specific to its universe. I read them over and over--and not just my favourites--all of them.

That said, my favourite books did get special treatment: I probably read Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) eight times (and the rest of the series almost as much), and I read Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine, don't watch the movie) four times a year for at least six years--and I still read it at least once a year. The first chapter of Emily of New Moon (L. M. Montgomery) always made me feel better when I was irritable (it still does), and just this weekend I finished The Runaway Princess (Kate Coombs) and The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf (Gerald Morris), both for the nth time.

My favourite author of all time is Terry Pratchett, partly because his sarcasm is fantastic and partly because his universe is so huge and likeable. Every book I've read by Neil Gaimon has piqued my interest, and Wordsworth is my favourite poet. Or maybe it's Coleridge... ("I fear thee ancient mariner! I fear thy skinny hand!")

Then I went to college. And you know what? I took my books with me

But there are so many--J. R. R. Tolkien, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Dickens, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Lobel, Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Christopher Paolini, C. S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Michael Crighton, James Herriot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, A. A. Milne, Tamora Pierce...

Go read them all.

Each book is a little piece of the universe (or parallel universe)--it's another place, another time, another world where anything can happen--since I myself cannot go whirling through the stars, I send my brain on extravagant journeys with hobbits and dwarves, or sit down to eat breakfast with a Wookie and a Martian. I even feel this way about text books. Even though I am not experiencing mysterious places and creatures, I am visiting my own world with new eyes and from an untried perspective.

A closet full of teleports. 

Now I keep them everywhere: in my kitchen, my living room, my bedroom. I leave piles of them on the floor next to my bed and scattered over my couch--on the coffee table, by my desk, in the bathroom.

This way, if I ever want to go somewhere, I don't have to go very far.

Because I have a house full of teleports.

Science, Bacteria, and Possibly Invisible Fish

I write about space a lot. I like the idea of wide open emptiness, giant balls of dirt or gas or fire floating in a vast vacuum, whirling around each other at unfathomable speeds unfathomably distant from one another. Thus I tend to ignore a plethora of interesting things that are tiny.

Take for example the mimic octopus, also called the thaumoctopus mimicus. It has the ability to mimic other fish. It copies their shape, movements, and color in order to swim in the open waters with little fear of being eaten. Scientists have observed it mimicking a lionfish, a flatfish, and sea snakes. An octopus playing copycat with fish--now add this: a black marble jawfish mimicking the octopus. Which mimicks other fish. It's like a bunch of four-year-olds playing in the yard, except four-year-olds don't generally get eaten.

Now, if fish could manipulate time, they would be immeasurably safe from their predators. At Cornell University (where my uncle went!) a group of researchers managed to disrupt the flow of light for a fraction of a second. Anything that happened in that fraction of time was completely hidden from observers. If a fish could disrupt the flow of light as it reached our eyes, we would never know it was there. Imagine how many species could be wandering around unfettered, unnoticed, unhindered because they had the innate ability to disrupt the flow of light.

You know you're always missing one sock?--an invisible sock eater that can warp light. Poltergeists?--time travelers with a light warping film all over their body.

But let's go smaller than fish, because magnificence and spectacularity don't stop at fish-sized. Take bacteria. They're fantastic creatures that can survive all over the place--they eat iron, arsenic, and who knows what else. What can we do with them? We can kill them--in fact, we're quite good at that in most cases. But apparently, they are also the key to the future of space: microbial fuel cells may be the new batteries for our robots and rovers and things that go to space. But why stop there? Perhaps microbial fuel cells will also power our invisibility cloaks and time machines. They may even be the future of entertainment: scientists have recently created LED-like screens out of living, glowing bacteria.

In the novel "Hogsfather" by Terry Pratchett (one of my favourite authors), Death said quite sagely, "Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom."

We're so silly.

Buckets Hold More Than Water

Carl Sagan, one of the most brilliant men of the 20th Century, described Earth like this: 


"Our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos, of which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky." 

If the Earth is a mote of dust, what am I?

Easy: I'm just me. 

Here is my list of things I want to do before I die, in no particular order:

Publish/finish my novels.

Go hang gliding.

Touch dry ice.

Introduce my cat, Goblin to my big brother and sister-in-law's cat, Chloe.

Fly on the Virgin Galactic (anybody want to give me $200,000?)

Write about flying on the Virgin Galactic.

Have Elton John sing "Rocketman" to me.

Go to Alaska and meet a bear.

Be a Verizon Cell Phone Tower Fix-it Man.

Take a cosmology class.

Meet Terry Pratchett.

Learn how to drive a tractor trailer and/or a backhoe.

Hug my mom. Pull my dad's beard.

Buy a nice writing desk and put it in a room with a window and a rug and a book case.

Watch my little brother play a show on drums.

See the aurora borealis, possibly while I'm in Alaska.

Any more suggestions?