A few days ago, Goodbear asked about free video editing software.  This isn’t an area in which I have a lot of experience, as I don’t do much video editing (all my video is perfect as shot … :-P), so I did a little research.  Linux users have a number of choices in this area, including Cinelerra and Kino; these are the only ones I have tried (although see Blender, below).  OS X users, of course, have iMovie built in as part of the iLife suite (I’m not going to get into the whole iMovie ‘08 vs. earlier versions of iMovie controversy). But what are Windows users to do?

I don’t have recent experience with Windows video-editing software, as I haven’t used Windows at home since I ditched XP for Linux back in 2004.  But I did find some packages that seem to be worth looking at:

• Jahshaka is an open-source video editor for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.  It claims a number of features, such as animation, painting on video, and multi-format capability.  The screenshots look pretty good, but I wasn’t able to test it out; it’s not in my Ubuntu repositories and I couldn’t get the source code to compile or the binary installer to install.  (If I really wanted to use it, I would bang on it until I got it installed.)  Windows and Macintosh users are unlikely to have a problem installing it.  Users of Fedora Core will probably be able to install it, too, as that seems to be the distro that the installer is aimed at.
• Wax is a Windows-only video editor and compositor.  The screenshots look okay, although the dating on the site suggests it hasn’t been updated since 2005.
• I mentioned VirualDub in an earlier comment.  It seems to be more of a video capture/processor application than an actual editor, but it may be useful for actually getting the video from the camera to the computer.
• Blender is an extremely slick-looking cross-platform (Linux, OS X, Windows) “3D content creation suite”.  This one is in the Ubuntu repositories, so installing it was a matter of ticking a checkbox and clicking “Apply”.  I haven’t actually used it yet, but I did fire it up and poke around inside.  It looks like it has all kinds of capabilities that I don’t really understand, but the next time I want to make a movie, I’ll definitely check it out.  The one thing I didn’t immediately see is a way to import external videos into it … being a “3D content creation suite”, I’m not sure it actually has this functionality.  I will report back later.
• Windows Movie Maker is, well, Windows Movie Maker.  I vaguely recall it from my Windows days, but I never used it much.
• AVIEdit is a video importing and processing application, which would seem to put it in the VirtualDub category.  (It’s from Russia, but don’t be afraid; it seems to be a legitimate piece of software.)
• And finally, there is the t@b ZS4 video editor.  (This site also contains links to some other free software, such as The GIMP.)  This is another cross-platform (Linux, OS X, Windows) application.  I didn’t try this one out, but the screenshots look comparable to the other packages.

This is not a complete list of everything I found; it’s just the highlights.  More information and several additional applications can be found at this site.

It’s been a while since I did a “free software for writers” entry, mainly because I’m kind of running out of free software that I can label as specifically for writers; I may just switch over to doing “free software for anybody” posts.  However, I do have at least one more program to write about, and that’s Audacity.  Audacity is an audio recording, editing, and mixing program.  I’ve mainly used it to fix glitches in audio files (such as MP3s with a skip in them) or to change sound levels; the local Arthur Murray uses it to change the tempo of songs without introducing distortion so that, for instance, a ridiculously fast samba like “Jazz Machine” can be slowed down so that mere mortals can dance to it.  (My wife insists on the full-speed version.)

So now you’re probably thinking, “Well that’s just fascinating, Jim, but what makes Audacity free software for writers?”  To which I reply with one word:  Podcasting.

Although I don’t do this myself, a number of writers have found success with recording podcasts of their stories or serializations of their novels.  Some, like Cliff Burns over at Beautiful Desolation, distribute (or plan to distribute) the podcasts on their own; some go through clearinghouses such as Podiobooks; some go through “audio magazines” such as Bound Off.  Even traditional dead-tree publications like The New Yorker are doing fiction podcasts (although, as a longtime subscriber, I can state without reservation that The New Yorker is anything but a run-of-the-mill dead-tree publication).  No matter how a podcast is distributed, though, it first has to be created; something has to turn the analog spoken words into digital bits.  That’s where Audacity comes in.  Its features are too exhaustive to delineate in this post, but a full accounting can be had here.

As I mentioned, I have never used Audacity to record a podcast, but people do it; in fact, Audacity comes bundled with a number of different hardware packages, including microphones, USB turntables, and other audio capture devices.  So if you’ve got the itch to podcast, give Audacity a try before paying for one the more expensive audio editors.  You may find that it does the job for free.

Audacity is available for OS X, Linux, OS/2 (!!!!), and Windows, as well as FreeBSD and probably other BSDs as well.

So today, when trying to visit any site at Blogspot, I am getting this message from Google:

I’ve heard reports about this phenomenon on the tech podcasts I listen to (in particular it seems to frequently afflict Leo Laporte, for some reason) but this is the first time I’ve seen it myself. Mind you, I’m running Linux over here, so the probability that I actually have viruses or spyware is somewhere between nil and negligible. I’m thinking that maybe the warning should say something like this instead:

We’re sorry…

… but Windows has made the Internet such an unsafe place, crawling with botnets and spyware, that we are being super-paranoid and even though your browser headers* identify you as running Linux, we’re still not going to show you the page you want.

I have a suggestion for Google … just block everyone who’s running any version of Windows earlier than Vista, and let the rest of us visit you in peace.

* I realize that browser headers can be spoofed. I’m just using this as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Windows, since I haven’t done that in a while.

I’ve at last gotten around to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend , which has been on my “to read” list for years. I’m liking it so far, but what’s most interesting to me is that (minor spoiler alert), in Long Before Dawn, I took the same approach to crosses and other holy symbols that Matheson did–i.e., a holy symbol only works on a vampire who practiced the represented religion when alive. As the main character in I Am Legend, Robert Neville, says: “… neither a Jew nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan nor an atheist, for that matter, would fear the cross.” He later goes on to explain that because the classic vampire legend arose in heavily Christian Europe, the cross became identified–wrongly–as the universal anti-vampire ward, which is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote Long Before Dawn.

Other than this little tidbit, of course, the two books are completely different. Matheson takes a rigorous, scientific, naturalistic approach to his vampires, whereas mine are supernatural beasties who can fly around and turn into mist. Still, I find myself pleased to find that my vampire book has something in common with one of the undisputed classics of the genre.

Now if I can just interest Will Smith in starring in an adaptation of Long Before Dawn, that would be another similarity, and one I could definitely live with …

So I finally saw Cloverfield, which I had been wanting to see ever since I caught the trailer when we watched Transformers last summer.  (NOTE: Transformers did not put my wife to sleep.)

Now that I’ve seen Cloverfield all I can say is, God am I glad I didn’t see that on a big screen.  Even on our relatively small television (36″ — it seemed big when we bought it eight years ago …), the shaky-cam style made me a little uncomfortable.  In a real theater with a screen the size of a barn wall, I would’ve been yakking all over the person in front of me.  (I’m extremely susceptible to motion sickness.)

Anyway, aside from the shaky-cam issues that made me watch a good part of the film sidelong, I liked Cloverfield a lot.  I’m a sucker for giant-monster movies and this one was about 100 times better than the sad-sack remake of Godzilla from several years back.  Watching Godzilla I just felt sorry for the monster; this one scared the crap out of me, and the weird little critters that fell off of it were pretty nasty pieces of work, too.  (Have I mentioned that I periodically dream about one or more giant monsters rampaging through the city where I live?  Is that weird?  Doesn’t everybody have that dream … ?)

Interestingly enough, in the special features for Cloverfield, we learn that the monster is just a frightened baby and when it roars it’s calling for its mother.  So we were supposed to feel sorry for the monster this time.  Ummmm, okay, if you say so.  I thought it was just some badass trashing New York City for reasons unknown …

As per usual with a “rescue” movie, we have our little band of heroes who are risking their own lives to save a friend.  (The lesson of Cloverfield might be “After you sleep with the girl, call her and tell her you love her; it’ll make things a lot easier on you when a giant monster starts chewing up Manhattan.”)  I’d heard bad things about the performances, but I thought they were quite good.  In particular, T.J. Miller as Hud, the “guy behind the camera”, managed to make his character sympathetic with next to no screen time, just voice work.  Lizzy Caplan was terrific as Marlena, making me completely forget about her character from Mean Girls.  The other actors were fine and believable as well, but they were saddled with less interesting characters than these two.  In particular, I found the Robert Hawkins character, the putative hero, to be kinda one-note and boring.  Useless and uninteresting trivia:  In the late 80s I played a play-by-mail (PBM) game of space exploration called “Beyond the Quadra Zone”.  (This was before we had online gaming.  Hard to believe, eh?)  Anyway, the name of my character was Robert Hawkins.  Mr. Abrams, I’ll be expecting my royalty check in the mail.

The shaky-cam invites comparisons to The Blair Witch Project, but it’s really the only similarity between the two.  (I hated The Blair Witch Project.  Blech!)

My wife more or less completely ignored Cloverfield the whole time it was on (all 84 minutes of it!), so I can’t really give it my usual rating of how long it took to put her to sleep.  But she must’ve spent at least a little time paying attention to it, because she said she also thought the performances were good.  Draw your own conclusions …

WARNING:  Comments on this review may contain spoilers.

Dragon Stones is now available direct from Lulu.com!  I’m still putting the finishing touches on the formatting before submitting it for distribution via the usual channels, but at this point I think that further changes are unlikely.  (And if I do change something after you buy it, then you will have a rare limited edition copy!)

As I’ve mentioned, Dragon Stones is a fantasy novel, so anyone who’s been a little squeamish about reading A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder or Long Before Dawn or (especially) Night Watchman needn’t fear — the goriest thing in Dragon Stones is a swordfight between a couple of the characters (but I won’t spoil anything by saying which).  If you enjoy fantasy novels, check it out — I don’t think you’ll be disappointed!

In other news, I’m still editing and formatting my ghost story Father’s Books as my next release.  Although it’s a horror novel (again), it’s not nearly as, um, intense (*COUGH* gory *COUGH*) as Night Watchman or Long Before Dawn, so even the squeamish might be able to read that one.  I’ll have my wife look at it and report back; nobody’s as squeamish as she is!

So this week’s Netflix selection was Peter Pan, the live-action version from 2003, not the animated Disney film. I had originally planned to do this as a double feature with Finding Neverland but we ended up watching them several weeks apart. (Finding Neverland put my wife to sleep almost immediately despite the fact that it starred Johnny Depp, but that’s because she was very tired.)

Anyway, Peter Pan is of course the story of how a small company introduced a new brand of peanut butter that eventually became part of the ConAgra Foods inventory of products … oh, wait, that’s not it. Ehhh, you know what Peter Pan is about so I won’t bother to rehash it. I will say that the film has an excellent cast, particularly Jason Isaacs as George Darling/Captain Hook (even if I did keep expecting Hook to say “My name is Inigo Montoya … you killed my father … prepare to die.”) and Rachel Hurd-Wood as Wendy, not to mention the guy who played Smee, who was just about perfect. (IMDB says his name is Richard Briers. Well done Richard.) We also get Olivia Williams sitting in a chair pining for her children in a fashion that gave me Sixth Sense Olivia-Williams-Pining flashbacks, but if you’re going to flash back, that’s a good movie to go to. Finally, Ludivine Sagnier makes a saucy little Tinkerbell, even if I have no idea how to pronounce her name, because she’s French.

Although it’s probably technically a children’s movie, there are enough humorous asides going on in Peter Pan to keep the grownups amused. (Most of these involve Smee and/or Michael’s teddy bear.) It gets quite dark toward the end, culminating in the climactic fight between Hook and Pan. Let’s just say that if you’re having a midlife crisis or anything, you may want to avoid this film; it’s not going to make you feel any better about your lost youth.

Peter Pan is basically one long CG effect with actors in it, but for once, the special effects do not get in the way of the story. In fact they’re gorgeous, and greatly enhance the overall fantastical feel. It’s like the entire film is set inside a Maxfield Parrish painting. I would recommend checking out some of the “making-of” special features, as the techniques used to create the effects (crew in head to toe blue suits — freaky!!!!) are quite interesting.

This movie put my wife to sleep in about an hour — not bad for a fantasy film starring a bunch of kids and not featuring a single appearance by Johnny Depp.

Hook & Inigo — Separated At Birth?

So I’ve alluded to the fact that I have a file with a LOT of rejection letters in it. I thought it might be interesting to pull one at random from time to time and post it, so everyone can experience the fun of reading what I like to call “you suck” letters (even though they don’t generally actually say “you suck”). So here’s one from 2000, for a short story called “Leech Field”.

I’m not sure what the legal implications might be of posting somebody’s name or e-mail address without permission, and I don’t really feel like bothering to find out, so in the interest of prudence I’ve pixellated out such information. Suffice to say, they didn’t buy the story.

I don’t have any real plans to try to find a home for “Leech Field”, so for those of you who are interested in making your own judgment, here it is. At just over 1,000 words, it almost but not quite qualifies as flash fiction (by my definition). Enjoy. Or not.

Leech Field

“Mind the leach field!”

The boy stops at the edge of the slope. The grass below is so green he thinks it might be glowing. The air smells bad; it was the smell that drew him at first. Usually he doesn’t go through the small hole in the fence around the strange old man’s property, but he wanted to see what stunk. He thought maybe he’d find a dead deer or something, but a leech field? That is totally weird, and exactly the sort of thing one would expect to find at the old man’s place.

The boy stands still, watching the slope, looking for telltale wriggling or squirming. There isn’t any. The scrawny old fart, rumpled and sweaty in pants and long sleeves and gloves on this hot day, walks quick and stiff down a narrow path to the left of the leech field. “Go on, get.” He waves a dirty shovel. “Ain’t nothing in here that’s any business of yours.”

“Where’s the leeches? I don’t see ‘em.”

“Ha ho, the boy’s a comedian. Get lost, now, before I call your parents.”

The boy sticks his tongue out at the man and then goes back down the hill to the fence. He squirms through the opening and onto the path, then runs along it until it comes out on the street a hundred yards farther on.

Leech field. The other kids have got to see this.

They’re back that evening just before dark, the boy and five of his friends. They’ve got flashlights and plastic shopping bags; they’ve got trowels from their mothers’ gardens. The boy figures the leeches must be underground, since he couldn’t see them before. The six of them descend on the green grass and start digging. They find rich black muddy earth, soft and malodorous; heaping scoops of it go into the shopping bags for later inspection. They get filthy and smelly, but they don’t find any leeches.

One of them discovers that the dirt is easily compacted into projectiles, and a mudball fight ensues. They return home encrusted with reeky drying clods of earth, to the collective consternation of the parents who have to wash them.

By Saturday morning, three of the six children are in the emergency room. By the next evening, all of them are ill with diarrhea, fever, vomiting, cramps. The boy is diagnosed with shigellosis, probably from contact with fecal material. His parents remember the condition in which he came home the night before. They ask him what he’s been into. The boy tells them that the old man up the street said there were leeches in his backyard, so he had gone with his friends to try and find them.

His parents know their son is a good boy and always tells the truth. They try to find out why the man would say such a thing. They call him first but there’s no answer, so they hop in their car and drive up the block to his house. He lives at the top of the hill, at the end of a long dirt driveway. He has no cable television, no city water. Everybody knows he’s rich but he lives like a mountain recluse. Chickens strut around his front yard like possessive feather dusters.

They knock at his door. There’s no answer, so they go around to the back yard. They hear muttering noises through the trees and follow them. The old man is working on a grassy green slope, patching holes in the sod. The air smells just like the boy did when he came home, only not as bad. The old man sees them and stands up, looking at them with his usual borderline-paranoid suspicion. “What do you all want?”

The father says, “We want to know why you told our son there was leeches in your yard.”

“Oh, is that right? I told him that? He the one dug all these damn holes in my leach field?”

“Him and some friends did,” the father says. “They’re all sick now.”

“I ain’t surprised.” The gaunt geriatric squints at them. “Don’t you all know what a leach field is?
It’s where my septic tank lets out. My tank’s all backed up and the guy can’t get out until Monday to pump it, so I got a leach field full a shit. That’s what your boy been digging in. Shit.”

“How dare you let sewage out into the ground?” the mother says. “Children play up here!”

“That’s why I got fencing around it. To keep your brats from trespassing. They come through the fence it ain’t my problem. Now you all get out a here before I call the cops.”

“You haven’t heard the last of this, mister,” the father says as they leave. “Not by a long shot.”

Monday morning rolls around. Some of the children are feeling better, but three of them are still sick and one is in the hospital. The boy’s father gets on the phone with the city health department and finds out that the old man’s septic system is not licensed. There is no record of it in the city’s files. Inspectors descend on the grassy slope like larger versions of the children, only with better equipment. They probe and dig and analyze.

The boy’s father leaves work early so he can see the old fart get what’s coming to him. At the end of the long driveway he finds a couple of police cars and a big police wagon. There are five filthy, decomposing bodies arranged on a tarp in the front lawn. A cop is taking pictures of them. The father recalls that the old man has been married many times. Sometimes he gets drunk and hangs around the post office talking about his former wives. On such occasions he will proudly assert that those bloodsuckers didn’t get a penny from him.

The barricade prevents the boy’s father from approaching any closer, but the old man sees him as the police drag him in handcuffs to a waiting car. “Goddamn you!” he shouts as he passes. “I told you all to stay out of my leech field!”

This is just a short note to let all who may be breathlessly waiting for Dragon Stones know that it has entered what might be called the “galley” phase, where I order finished copies from Lulu.com and go through them with a highlighter to fix any remaining formatting or style issues (at least, things that I consider formatting or style issues).  I’ve already been through this process with Long Before Dawn and it probably took about two months, but I expect it to go faster this time now that I’ve already done one.  I expect to hit my target of releasing Dragon Stones some time in June, though it won’t be available from book stores until 6-8 weeks after that due to the ISBN lag time.

In the meantime, I’ve started editing my next release, Father’s Books, a ghost story (of sorts) that I wrote after A Flock of Crows.  By now I’m sure everyone realizes that I can’t write a “normal” ghost story, but that’s the easiest way to label Father’s Books right now so I’ll stick with it.  More information will surely follow!

Last month, it came out that Amazon.com is instituting a new policy that print-on-demand publishers, such as Lulu.com and Hard Shell Word Factory (publisher of Night Watchman), must use Amazon.com’s own POD service BookSurge* or have the print editions of their books dropped from the main store (though they can still be sold by third parties through the Amazon marketplace). Some companies, like Lulu, quickly caved … uhhh, agreed to use BookSurge; others, like Hard Shell, are taking a harder line and refusing to accede to Amazon’s new rules. The net result, for me, is that Night Watchman may be disappearing from the Amazon.com store in the future. I will be watching to see if this happens; so far, it’s still there, but they only have one copy left (”order soon — more on the way”).

I haven’t quite decided yet what I think of this whole thing. I’m not really sure that Amazon doing anything differently from Wal-Mart, which is notorious for beating up suppliers to cut costs and lower prices.  I don’t think Wal-Mart runs its own factories and requires its suppliers to use them, though.  (I could be wrong; if I wanted to do stuff like “research” and “fact-checking” I would be writing non-fiction.)  I guess I’d have to say that on the face of it Amazon is being anti-competitive and the ultimate upshot is likely to be higher POD costs, but we’ll see how it shakes out.  I don’t have much to lose whether my books are on Amazon or not.  The ones who do have something to lose are, I think, the small publishers; a lot of folks in the small press and self-publishing world are extremely agitated about Amazon’s move, and some are calling for a boycott.  Will a boycott succeed?  Probably not; it’s likely to be more symbolic than anything else.  After all, Amazon has been boycotted before, notably over their one-click patent.  The Internet was a smaller place then (fewer tubes) and the boycott still had no noticeable effect.  The current issue at hand is about as arcane as the one-click patent issue, and just as few people care about it; I think Amazon will just get away with it, until and unless it attracts attention from regulators (i.e., never). In any case, I am neither an economist nor an MBA, so my opinion on such matters is probably worth about as much as I make on sales of my book from Amazon.com –  i.e., next to nothing.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a copy of Night Watchman and you can’t find it at Amazon, you can always buy it directly from any number of places, like Barnes and Noble or directly from Hard Shell.  Or you can just swing by the house and pick up a copy; I’ll even sign it, too.

*Disclaimer: I used BookSurge to tear apart, scan, and republish A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder after the original publisher, DarkTales, went out of business.