Zentek Tales

Bad advice for the soon-to-be-divorced

2011-08-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

I sort of promised myself I wouldn't do this, but the level of insanity that surrounds me at this time has reached newer, higher peaks that I never dreamed would be possible.

In the spirit of satire and sarcasm, I offer the following bad advice to those who have become involved in a divorce, their own, and can't think or act rationally about it:

Revenge: How to accomplish it in several easy steps.

Say you've been married for a really long time and your spouse decides one day he's has enough of your emotional and financial abuse that you've been dumping on him since the day he first asked you out, and it's been getting worse for the last few years as his health declined, he lost his job and can't afford to support himself, let alone you, even though he's taking care of your aging mother for you (you can't be tied down with responsibilities like that, but he can).

Forget about the facts that you've been spending his money as if he were still making four times as much as unemployment pays, overdrafting checks and exceeding your debit card limits (you already maxed out all his credit cards and can't get any more), forget that your house that you've "owned" for years costs more than half of what his unemployment brings in, forget that your COBRA insurance is about to expire (and costs more than the rest of what his unemployment could pay), or that your son has lent most of his college funds to you and his father to help keep the family afloat, or that your daughter's college education costs more than you and he (actually just him – you don't work, remember?) are making. Never mind about the fact that you refuse to get any kind of job, even though there are plenty available, because you have professional licenses (that you haven't used for more than two decades) and couldn't get work in your former fields anyway, and forget that any kind of job would help keep the family afloat, even one for minimum wage. This isn't about helping out the family finances – that's his responsibility!

That rat bastard needs to pay, and pay, and suffer while you're at it.

Here's what you do:

As soon as you get the summons and petition for divorce in your hands and can breathe again, rush off to your nearest women's shelter and set him up for some really bad times ahead. You can get your friends involved later, but first you need to get that family car smog-checked (by him, so you can take it away without having to come up with some money to pay for it yourself). Meanwhile, you can arrange to fake some low resolution photos that look like they show you with bruises in a sensitive area – some place most people don't see even at the beach. Be sure you do this with someone you can trust not to turn you in – say another family member who hates the guy as much as you do now. It doesn't matter if the photos are way old, or grainy, or black and white and of which it's really hard to determine the veracity. After all, he's not an attorney, he won't know how to challenge them properly if you can act convincing enough when it comes to court, and at this stage, the judge will buy it because he doesn't know either of you.

Then file a domestic violence complaint against him – not with the police, because that would be a false police report and they take too long to respond, but with the divorce court so you can get an immediate hearing and, while you're at it, prejudice the judge against him. It's not hard to do this in Orange County, California – this is the home of domestic violence intolerance, thanks to Mr. & Mrs. Brown, Nicole Simpson's parents, who live here (and that part is a really good thing, even if you're just using it to get back at the guy who dumped you). Even if it weren't, the standard for a restraining order is pretty much the exact opposite needed for a criminal conviction, especially in domestic violence cases – any reasonable doubt that the accused isn't 100% clean as a whistle will do. If they're wrong, that can be fixed later.

Next, call up the local adult protective services agency and accuse him of abusing your mother. (You can have a friend do this if you're concerned about the repercussions.) Yes, that's right, the mother you couldn't be bothered to take of yourself because you hate dealing with doctors, the elderly ill or anything that remotely smacks of death and you'd rather run off to your daughter's college hundreds of miles away to visit her than take care of your mother, the mother you also emotionally abused for decades whenever you needed money she had and that bastard refused to pay out of those huge stashes of money he has hidden around somewhere (even if that money doesn't really exist, either).

If that doesn't work, which it won't because any reasonable person might see that she's in reasonably good shape for her age and he's taking care of her pretty well without your help (and you wouldn't move in with her to help out, so he had to) and he cooperates with them 100% and more, then come over to visit her to try and force him out onto the street whenever you feel like dropping by to harass him. After all, you have a (temporary) restraining order against him.

Now, he may resist by calling the police because your restraining order specifically excludes your mother or her house from being "protected" against him (he lives there with her permission, remember?), and you can't force him out of the place where he lives. Don't worry, you can take care of that soon enough. The police will take care of him, right?

That might not work. After the police have seen you get hysterical because you couldn't get your way, and he stays calm and controlled, not easy given how little trouble you've had pushing his buttons all these years and getting him to lose control, his voice and all sense of gentility when you goaded him, it's time to try that police report. After all, if you can get him arrested before the hearing on your restraining order, you'll win.

It helps to tell the truth when you do things like this because the police tend to investigate complaints like this. Unlike the divorce judge who granted your restraining order, they have to meet the criminal burden of proof – guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If he denies your story and has a credible witness, they won't move forward because that's instant reasonable doubt, especially when that witness is telling the truth – that your complaint is invalid on its face (i.e., a total lie). Chances are pretty good that the police won't go after you for filing a false complaint – they're too busy trying to catch real criminals anyway.

As long as you're at it, make use of your auto club road service a few times on the bastard's dime. So what if you've already used up your four free calls for the year – the jerk has some money hidden away somewhere, you just know this, and he gets stuck with the bill anyway – it's his membership! (And if he can't afford to pay the charges because of the financial situation, so much the better. He deserves to be stranded in the middle of the night when his car breaks down and they refuse the call without payment. You can get a little taste of revenge this way, too, even if you don't know about it.)

Arrange to bring an attorney to the hearing, one who knows almost nothing about family law, but you can get him for free through that women's shelter. Since your bastard filed for divorce without one, chances are pretty good he won't bring one to court, either. Remember, he's broke, just like you. You attorney can rattle his witnesses (they've never been in court before), and the judge will go along with the slightest possibility that you might be in danger.

As soon as you get that order, take your friends and treat your mother to an afternoon out. That way, you can bribe her with some hot cocoa while you coerce her into giving you an unrestricted durable power of attorney and you can have even more ammunition against the bastard. Technically, you might have to pay for someone else to take care of your mother, but you can use this to move against him even further.

While you're at it, accuse your demon of having broken your mother's dentures, starved her, dehydrated her, stolen her credit cards and ID. That'll help. Forget that you knew about her broken dentures for more than a year, and that your mother was the one who broke them, quite by accident. Never mind that you already have her medical ID and you know she lost her wallet some time late last year, the one that contained her state-issued ID, long before the bastard filed to divorce you. Insist that he stole the credit cards even though you and other witnesses (who aren't as much on your side as they should be) know that he left them all behind, along with all originals of her financial records, just the way she kept them.

Then, just when he finds out that you've cut off his means of affording your mother's care (because he was using her money for that, with her permission, unlike you), and during the recess when Congress refused to fund extended unemployment, call the police on him again. When that doesn't work, because they can see your mother's fine and the bastard just brought her home from her doctor, who also didn't think she was in any danger from him, call adult protective services again and have your friends do so, too. With enough calls, they'll come back out. After they take her away, at his request because he knows she's better off in a nursing home now that you've taken over all her money, you can harass him out of her house and into the street where he belongs.

Now it's time to get a real attorney ('cuz that first one didn't want to be involved in your case, even though he did make some promises to the court to be a go-between) so you can go after your demon for spousal support. So what if you could easily find a job that pays more than he's getting (minimum wage would be good enough), you shouldn't have to work. You never really did and he's got all that hidden cash around somewhere, remember, the cash that doesn't exist?

Before it's altogether too late, make sure you go to a doctor who can check you over for anything serious before the insurance runs out. If he finds anything, you can always blame that on the bastard, too. Once the insurance expires, you can claim he canceled it. He can't respond – you have a restraining order.

You know enough about the courts to know that you can get a quickie hearing for motions if you file for them ex parte (literally meaning one-sided, but in legal briefs, an emergency application for a motion, usually restricted to life-or-death situations). That's how you got the temporary restraining order in the first place, the one that is now good for years. This time you can use it to get some money out of the wretch. But wait, the court does not agree – this isn't an emergency.

That's okay (well, not really, but you get to stew on that more later). So what if your attorney quit. You can get that first one to file a phony elder abuse charge, again in family court because you couldn't prove that one in criminal court, either, and that'll get him thrown out of your mother's house once and for all. You can allege that he starved her, dehydrated her, stole all her money (that's the money you browbeat her out of plus the money she willingly loaned or gave the both of you to help support you and the kids, even though they are now adults and could theoretically pull their own weight) and that he's the only reason she can't come home again. Don't bother to sweat the little details, like who would have to take care of her when she came home, or how much that would cost because you wouldn't do it even if you could. (And who cares if it's now a year later and she still can't come home because she can't take care of herself anyway and you won't.)

If he happens to get really lucky and find a place to live, you can start using an old tactic you used to use to get at people who bothered you or disagreed with you – take to the Internet. Remember how you used to write nasty articles about other people under assumed names, all over the web? You can do that again, except this time you can do some of that under your real name – almost. It doesn't really matter, except now if you use your real name, or part of it, you can really smear him. Just use the same scattergun approach you've been so successful with before – throw every conceivable act of domestic violence you can work into one article at him, especially if you can dig them up from real DV cases. So what if he never did those things. No one will believe him after you've shredded him enough, and if anyone defends him, just write about that on the web, too, but turn the situation upside down so it sounds like you're the aggrieved party. If any webizen stands up for him, accuse them of being him under an assumed alias (like you used to use a lot, before).

Remember, he can't contact you or harass you because of your restraining order. You, on the other hand, can harass him to death. You can call him anything you want because he can't respond. You can accuse him of anything you like, and everyone will just believe everything you say.

If one article doesn't work, do more. If you can go into groups where he used to be a member and smear him there, do that, too. Why not? He can't show up if you're there, and you can alienate his friends that way, double-sticking it to him in the process. You might be able to convince another sucker or two to buy into your fantasy world. After all, you believe it, don't you? Who wouldn't? Then you can get your new acolytes to post the same smears that you've come up with in your vendetta. It doesn't matter if any of it is true, as long as it escalates to new, higher, more inflammatory charges. Anyone who sides with him is also fair game, so don't hold back and don't worry about the truth. This stuff will live on the web long after you're all gone. Maybe.

That's how to get revenge if your spouse dares to break the chains you have him wrapped in. Go for it!

(Just remember, this is satire, even if the situation is real, and this is BAD advice.)

Fun With Dick and Jane – A Modern Horror Story

2010-03-22T23:45:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, I don't really do short stories, or horror either. I prefer fantasy romance-adventures. But I got this from my friend recently, and as lovely as the tale is, I thought it should see the light of day. Also, with editing my book and looking to land an agent, I've been a little busy lately. Here's Dick:

My name isn't Dick, but I'm going with it for this article. Many thanks to my friend, Mark, who is posting it for me.

I'm the one who wrote the Valentine's Day Lament a while back, but now I have a horror story for you.

You see, my wife, Jane, who happens to be an unemployed ex-professional kind of person, can't add.

It may be hard to imagine that a post-graduate school degree holder can't add, but it's the truth.

I've been unemployed for a while now, and my income, such as it is, is pathetically limited. It's not below poverty level, but it's also not enough to pay the bills, by about a factor of 4. Hell, it doesn't even cover my – er, our house payments and our insurance, and I'm – excuse me – we're probably going to lose our house next month when I won't be able to pay for it any more. At all.

That's okay, though – the utilities will be shut off soon enough because I can't afford them any more, either.

Yes, I've applied for the great Hope-and-Change President's home loan modification program with my primary mortgage bank, who just happens to be one of the multi-billion dollar beneficiaries of President H&C's Wall Street bailout package (hey, where are my billions?), but they have not responded, and I'm about to go late on my other home loan because, well, because Jane can't add.

We live in a community property state (California), which means, in terms of family law (only), everything that I earn is half Jane's. The IRS and the Franchise Tax Board don't exactly see it that way, nor did any of my prior employers, but she does. On the other hand, Jane does not seem to understand that this also means she has to pay half of the bills. This is a concept which completely escapes her.

Jane also seems to think that, since she doesn't have to pay (her) half of the bills, which I can't afford with all of my unemployment before giving her half, she can go off and spend "her" half any way she likes. If she spends more than that half (which she routinely does because she can't add up what she spends), and she refuses to look at our bank statements that show, quite clearly, exactly where she spent what she spent, then obviously I need to give her more out of "my" half: if not, she'll just write checks (which will bounce, or worse, get honored and really cripple our account) to spend what she doesn't have and can't add up (and I can't afford anyway).

Then Jane also likes to pretend that she never really spends anything, although she's usually quick to add "on myself." I suppose that cleaning wipes, shampoo, conditioner, her underwear and her particular brand of (expensive) drinks aren't really for her at all – they're for, well, um, someone else, whoever that is. I'm pretty sure that, if it isn't Jane, it's someone who is not entitled to half of our income (or obligated to pay half of our bills).

On top of that, this extra money she's spending gets to come out of "my" half of the unemployment, and magically there will still be the entire half, as if I never spent anything or gave her anything. As far as I can tell, I'm supposed to pay to support the whole family (i.e., all of the bills) out of "my half" of my unemployment, which, remember, wasn't ¼ enough to begin with, while she goes off on long car trips and expensive dinners at nice resorts with "her" half of the money.

Does this sound the least bit fishy to you?

It should, but I swear it's true.

Then it gets worse – Jane has threatened to take "legal action" against me because I'm not supporting my children (who are both adults, but let's gloss over that for now). Actually, she threatened to "go public on the web" about this, which would probably turn out to be libelous, if I could afford to sue her, as if she had anything that isn't already mine, for damages. Now I ask you, if Jane is spending half of my unemployment on whatever-it-is-she-spends-it-on, and the whole was not enough to cover the bills in the first place, and I still have to have clothes, food and drinks (non-alcoholic, and, by the way, all cheaper than any drink she buys – ever), where is that magical extra money supposed to come from?

I suppose God could supply it, or maybe the lottery (odds roughly 1 in 47 billion), or maybe the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes (odds roughly 1 in 120 billion). Wait – I forgot: I'm supposed to be her sole source of income for her entire life, and I'd better be a good sugar daddy or she'll – something. Whatever that something is, it clearly does not include earning an income to help support the family, unless that income comes from her very expensive profession, in which she hasn't engaged in more than 20 years and is therefore completely unsuited to do so without extensive (and expensive) retraining.

As another layer of joy (?) on top of all this, Jane has this strange idea that if she yells loudly and long enough, and makes a big show of all of this in public, especially with (false) accusations of neglect and lack of child support and so on, everyone will cave in and do exactly what she wants, especially doormat Dick (me). Apparently, this has worked for years with just about everyone, and I've only recently realized that I've been part of that problem. I have an excuse – I thought we were in love, or at least loved each other, and that she might be satisfied, or maybe even just nice about it, if I gave her what she screamed and yammered and bitched and moaned and cried and whined and – well, you get the picture. Of course, that never happens, I don't even get a thank you.

Most of the people I know think I'm pretty smart, but I've either been incredibly stupid, blind or obstinate not to have noticed this and handled it better before. I still have a lot to learn (but at least I can).

But, I can add, too, and that keeps me in touch with reality. Jane doesn't really live there any more, and frankly I can understand that part of the problem.

So, how was your day today?

In love and horror,

Dick

It's Time to Ditch the Banks

2010-03-11T13:04:00.000-08:00

Like many of you, I am living on the edge of going completely broke. Last month, due to other people who shall not be named, I got dinged for some "overdraft" fees against my credit union account.

Now, you'd think that it's a credit union, it belongs to the members, it shouldn't have those huge, outrageous bounce (and, hence, overdraft) fees that the banks do.

You'd be wrong.

The credit union where I have most of my accounts, which I can no longer in good conscience call my credit union, charges $29 per bounce or overdraft

Now, if this is going to be charged for checks larger than $29, or for ATM/debit card "charges" in like amounts, fine, I can live with that. I don't make those kinds of mistakes very often, and they're painful enough that I do my best to remember and prevent them.

But these were credit charges (as in, like those made using a credit card), on a debit card, which means that they were approved for processing by the credit union based on how much money was in the account at the time the charge was made. Yes, they really do that. So do the credit card companies (i.e., banks). In the mean time, more charges than there was available money in the account piled up, so when they all came in, they mostly went over the account balance and nailed me for overdraft charges. There were five of them, totaling $145, on charges that totaled less than $20 - three of them under $5.

(Don't ask me why the person who did this did so - I cannot fathom the mind of people like that. All I can say is that it wasn't me, and they were warned.)

I know an elderly lady who has two Visa accounts that were overcharged similarly, only these were actual, real credit cards, with credit limits that the bank chose to ignore and approve the excess charges anyway. Some of them were pretty large, and now she has over-limit balances that exceed her ability to pay them back - NOT because she can't pay off the charges, but because they don't handle over-limit charges the same way as under-limit charges, even they were the ones who approved the over-limit charges while the card was already over the limit in the first place.

You read that right.

Then there's the matter of how long they take to process a credit card payment. Most of them "say" that they'll post the payment on xxx date, but if you read the fine print it can take anywhere from 4 to 14 days longer, effectively giving them the interest on that amount for that long and denying you the credit for the duration.

Well, says you, that's no big deal, it's only a few dollars for a few days. This is true, until you consider that the banks handle MILLIONS of accounts this way, which means BILLIONS of dollars in transactions. They can make MILLIONS of dollars on this kind of delay, and in today's world of electronic funds transfers that take fractions of a second to occur, this is effectively stealing your money.

(This is called the "float" of a transaction - the time between the fund transfer initiation and when it completes. Banks have been making tons of money off of this for years - the time between when your check is cashed at the recipient's bank and when the fund transfer clears yours. During that time, the money "exists" in both places and earns interest for the banks - both of them.)

What to do?

There is a movement afoot to ditch the banks. I believe we need to do that in the biggest way possible.

Banks only respond to the movement of money, and they notice really fast when that means less for them.

So, don't use them at all, if you can.

Okay, that's not easy - you have your paycheck going into direct deposit, half of your bills (or more) are paid automatically from your checking account these days, and so on.

On the other hand, you can't overspend what's in your pocket. If you don't absolutely have to have a bank account, get rid of it. Use cashiers checks and money orders to pay your bills (although, be warned, the banks make money off of the float on those, too). Or just pay them in cash wherever you can.

But wait! you cry - what about my interest???

Have you looked at your interest rate lately?

Your bank charges you 5% to 30% interest on loans, fees, credit cards, and so on, and they pay you, what, 0.5% interest on your savings? If you're "lucky" and have an orange account (or other online investment savings account), maybe you get 1-2%?

If your account has millions in it, then that's "real" money. If not, get serious. You lose more in fees and charges than you do by not wasting your money in an "interest-bearing" account that earns more money for the bank than they will ever give you.

So, ditch your banks. It's the only way they'll ever pay attention to how much they're ripping you off and the fact that there is something you can do about it.

Valentine's Day Lament

2010-02-14T18:58:00.000-08:00

An acquaintance of mine sent this to me and asked if I'd post it somewhere. It is sad that there are people in this situation anywhere, particularly on VD, but so it is.

---

Once dearest one,

There was a time when we got along well, when I would do anything you asked, when I gave up all of my friends, hopes, dreams and aspirations because I thought you were my life partner, my friend and my loving support. There were times when I was sure we would be together forever and nothing could keep us apart.

Then things changed.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, "good" was no longer good enough for you. Buying what we wanted wasn't enough, we had to spend everything as quickly as possible because – well, I don't know why, exactly, but that is the reason we don't have a retirement account.

Somewhere along the way, what I wanted stopped mattering to you, and it became more important to you that you be right about everything than for us to be able to get along together. We even went through seven rounds of marriage counseling so you could get me fixed. You know why that didn't work? Because in the last go around on this matter, I figured out what you were doing.

Once, you seemed to care about me and my feelings. I remember, because I was crying about it, I think in the laundry room the apartment where you lived when I met you, and you didn't understand what was wrong. I suppose I should have realized it then, but it took me another decade or so.

There was a time when it seemed like I was the most important person in your life, and you certainly were in mine. I blew off my parents, my own family and a lot of other people who made indications that maybe things weren't all that perfect in "our town." I sure had enough chances to do that, and I fell into every last one of them. For you.

There was even a time when I could loan you money or have you hold it for me, and it would still be there when I needed it.

There was a time when you were nice to me, at least to my face, but somewhere along the way, you turned into a terrorist whose every demand had to be met or there was hell to pay, and I have paid by living in your hell for too long. Unlike the "real" terrorists, those suicide bombers who kill when they blow themselves up, when you blow up there's always more to come – unless and until you get what you want. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, cost be damned as well, and anyone who gets in your way..

It's too bad that, on this Valentines Day, 2010, I have to look back on those times and wonder where the hell they went. I know it wasn't me that turned away from you first, or decided that someone else was more important in my life than my spouse, or that you needed to sacrifice everything so I could accomplish any of my goals.

I'm not sure when it was, exactly, that your vision went from color and shades of gray to all black and white, so Bush-like in the distinctions of who stood where with whom.

It's sad because I honestly believed, through all our differences and our troubles, that we still had something of value, something to hold on to, something that would bring us together in the face of all adversity.

We could have gone anywhere, done anything, surmounted any obstacle, but we had to have an equal partnership, and that's something you no longer allow. Somewhere along the way, nothing I said mattered to you any more, and all you could see was what you want, what you need and how I wasn't important enough even to have a say in family decisions any more. I'm not even sure any more that we ever had anything like an equal partnership at all – you have to be in control and the center of everything, no holds barred, everything else be damned.

You claim that I control the money, but the truth is that you barely allow me any control at all, and I have to beg for house payment money or anything else that might help satisfy our legal obligations (debts), whereas all you have to do is raise the "it's for our kids" false flag and everything else is just deteriorating words, hurt feelings and your usual emotional blackmail.

I'm trying to remember a time in our relationship when I felt it was safe to be me, just me, and not some ideal image against which you always compared me, and I always failed. Now, I don't dare open my mouth because no matter what I say, it's bound to offend you. Gifts I give you are wasted – you either don't like them or you destroy them by neglect or outright damage.

I wish I could say something else, but frankly, that's the way I feel and think, now, and you've left me no choice and no other options.

You killed "us" before we even had a chance to be born, or grow, or blossom.

All you had to do was be an individual human being, but you had to be the dictator of all things in our lives.

Isn't it a pity? Isn't it a shame? Harrison got that part right, and he was married for life.

The Commonality of Zenteks

2010-01-30T19:46:00.000-08:00

For reasons which I may never understand, I originally posted this in the wrong place!

Wow, [a week and] five days since my last post! I was thinking no more than two or three, but what the heck.

I picked the word "zentek" out of thin air when I wanted to name the class of characters that distinguished my world from others in the fantasy genre. I wanted these seekers of enlightened power, whose life path took them from the ability to control themselves through various internal abilities that ultimately lead to an ability to control everything around them, to have an unusual and unique name. I was looking for a couple of things when I came up with the name: something that would be alphabetically last in any ordered sequence, hence the "z," and something that implied a devout acceptance of life as it is. Zen fits both of these.

The "tek" part was half a reference to technology and half just what seemed like a cool sounding follow on to zen.

How little did I know.

I was introduced to the joy of Google Alerts a number of months ago, and you can probably imagine my surprise at just how common a word "zentek" is in the real world. I get at least one alert every day for it, and most of them are not my own. (Guess I should fix that, huh?)

Most frequently, I get references to the Zentek Corporation out of Minnesota. They even do business that relates to my professional career - computers. If I had any desire to spend half of the rest of my life freezing my tail off, Minnesota might not be such a bad place to do it.

Never mind - I came to California from Michigan for two reasons, and freezing weather had something to do with it.

Second most frequently, I see references to a Professor Jürgen Zentek, who is the Chairman of the Institute for Animal Nutrition in Vienna, Austria. Actually, Prof. Zentek was the first occurrence of the word in an alert that I received.

There's a Zentek House in Bolton (UK?). a Zentek Solutions Ltd., Zentek International, Zentek Technology, Zen-Tek Instruments and so on. If you want to know who these are and what they do, Google is your friend. Someone, or maybe more than one someone, uses zentek as their user name on one or two forums or game sites I've seen in the alerts.

There are a number of people with the last name Zentek listed at one site I saw: Ann, Barbara, Cynthia, David, Edward, James, Joseph, Kathleen, Margaret, Nicholas, Ronald E., Steven and Theodore (and the professor, above).

I also see references to my stories, web page, this blog, and others that actually have to do with this, my creation. I even found a page that included two reviews of my first book that were written by people who did not purchase the book (interesting, hm?) and used pseudonyms to write those reviews. Do me a favor, please, and don't read the reviews. Whether or not they were right, they are, well, let's just say unflattering. I have a fair level of feedback that the book was enjoyable, regardless of its quality.

But I digress.

Despite the frequent appearance of the word "zentek" in references to people or places not related to my stories, I plan to continue to use it. In this context, it is mine, and appropriate.

What I find most curious about this is that the name I originally used for my stories was Legend Hunters, until I decided to do a Google search for that a couple of years ago. I mean, who else would use that name for something unrelated to fantasy epics?

Apparently, at least two books already published have the name "Legend Hunter," not including mine. I began to understand why working titles don't always wind up on the cover of the stories they were meant to name.

"Zentek Ascendant" seemed like a good change of pace, and, at least so far, it's unique, although I'm not sure how much I plan to use that any more.

So, what does all this mean? I don't know - it might be frivolous. My point, though, is that when you create a name for something you think is new, don't be surprised if someone else already has or is using that name in a completely different context.

Even if the name starts with one of the least commonly used letters in the language.

TTFN.

The Fantasy World of Free Computing - Linux (yep!)

2010-01-17T17:58:00.000-08:00

One of the great benefits of not being stuck in any one particular paradigm is that one can be flexible enough to evaluate new ways of doing things. I've never been one to stick to traditional ways of doing things forever, although I can be difficult to change paradigms, even when I find one that looks like it's better.

I've been a software engineer now professionally for over 30 years. Actually, yesterday was my official 30th anniversary. I began that professional career with a class at UCSD in Pascal programming on a Terak PC, three years before the IBM PC appeared and changed computing forever. By the time 1981 rolled around for me, I had already used at least five different types of computers for work, mostly programming, but I really wanted a PC.

It took me a while, but I plunked down over $4000 for my first IBM PC, complete with an Intel 8088 CPU, 64KB (yes, that's not a typo - 65,536 bytes) of main memory on the motherboard, a 256KB memory expansion card with parallel and serial ports, and a clock! It came complete with two double-sided 5 1/4" floppy disk drives that could hold an amazing 360KB of data each, and two were good so I could boot from one and leave it in while I ran programs or did word processing from the other. Also, because 320x240 color graphics monitors were too expensive, I went for the higher resolution 640x480 (I think) monochrome text-only monitor, which looked much nicer in green and white than the color dots that were uglier and harder to read.

I still have that piece of nostalgia, although it's mostly a dust gatherer in the closet (duh). Heck, the thing doesn't even have the capability for a hard disk drive on the motherboard - I'd need new hardware for that. (Stop laughing - this was 28 years ago - jeez!)

I never really liked MS-DOS. For one thing, a new version came out about every six months, and it cost another $100 (from Microsoft) each time, which was ridiculous. I didn't actually pay for an OS upgrade until DOS 3.3 came out, then again for DOS 6.22 and I may or may not have paid for DOS 7.???. For another, DOS is not really an operating system at all - it's more of a single-user interface to the computer that allows you to run programs. As bad as it was from the start (and many say it still is), Windows was at least a stab at a real OS.

As for MS Windows, well, let's just say that Windows 3.0 was still so bad no one liked it. Not even Microsoft.

Windows 3.1 was a whole different story. It only crashed about once per program you ran, and it had this really neat looking interface that might stay up long enough for one to study it admiringly before it crashed again. Half the time, when it crashed, it needed to be reinstalled.

In the mean time, I was busy working at my first company, laughing at the ever-richer Bill Gates and his hideous products that people somehow actually paid money to get. At work, we used our own computers with our own editors and so on, and word processing was still in its infancy.

This could get really long and boring, so I'm going to cut to the chase.

I was introduced to Linux through work (of course) in 1998. Frankly, I was not impressed. Yeah, it was free, but if you weren't a first-class geek, it was impossible. The average computer user would never take to it. Never. Especially not since Microsoft and the PC had pretty much invaded every professional computing workspace in the US, and a lot of software houses were making tons of money writing and selling Windows programs.

(Not me - I was too proud for that, and that's one reason for where I am today, but I digress....)

If you wanted a professional, supported distribution of Linux, you had to buy it, and one of the market leaders even way back then was Red Hat, one of biggest players in the Linux community today. I liked Red Hat, but I couldn't afford their prices, and, as I said, Linux distributions were still kind of immature and cranky, although once you had one running, it would run forever. Linux is a solid, reliable, powerful OS for many computer architectures, and with the GNU software community based out of the Free Software Foundation, there is a ton of UNIX-like capability built into even the most basic distribution, if you know how to use it.

Skip forward to 2007. Linux was becoming a buzzword in the computing community. Okay, actually the buzzword was "FREE" but they were not talking about shareware or even freeware, they were talking about Linux.

Why?

Because, my friends and readers, Linux has grown up. While not fully mature as a general purpose, all comers welcome, covers the entire marketplace kind of product, it is getting really, really close. There is a distribution of Linux that is (still) free and can be configured to look almost exactly like Windows. (No, I don't know how to do that exactly, yet, but it's coming and if there's interest, I'll figure it out and publish it. Here. Free.)

I got hooked because, in the summer of 2006, while I was off work on disability, I invested $39 in a copy of SuSE Linux, which was in transition to Novell Linux. I fought with it for several months before I finally gave up. It wasn't so much that it was radically different from Windows (be it 98, 2000 or XP), it was just plain hard to work with, and I don't say this lightly. To this day, I don't like SuSE Linux, but a lot of people do.

(What is SuSE? There's a fine reference that covers all this - it's called the Internet, and Google has many, many ways to find answers like that.)

In January 2007, I landed a job where part of my job was to learn a "new" version of Linux called CentOS. CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System, and it is essentially a free distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It comes with the GNOME desktop environment, a full-blown graphical user interface that has a lot of similarities to Windows in a general way, but it is stable, it comes with the OS, and, unlike the Windows OS and environment, it is also free. It was easy to use, easy to update, virtually all of the UNIX environment tools are included, and you can go off and customize the environment to your heart's delight.

I was hooked. I had the golden opportunity to install CentOS on my own desktop workstation as part of my employment (i.e., my employer paid me to learn this stuff) - what could be better than that?

Here's what - I upgraded my home computer to have enough hardware power to handle running CentOS almost exactly the same as my work computer, and took the plunge.

Now, like I said before, I'm a first class geek, so most of this was pretty simple to me. I've always been fascinated with this kind of technology, so poking around to see how it worked was a natural for me, and on top of that I was getting paid to do it.

Fast forward to today. I run CentOS on my primary desktop workstation at home, on both of my old, cheap laptops (I can't get rid of the older one 'cause the newer one's headset plug doesn't work - grr) and I strongly recommend it to all my friends. I even wrote a lousy book about it that you'll probably never see, but I learned a lot from writing the book.

Open your eyes back up, for heavens' sakes! I know I'm not that boring - that's why I put in the skips past the dull stuff.

And now, what you've all been waiting for: What's wrong with Linux?

Nothing. Really.

There are some disadvantages you need to know before you take the plunge, unless you're a techno-geek, too, in which case you probably already know about them (or already took the plunge).

Linux is different from Windows. This is actually not so much of a disadvantage in itself, but the reality is that most people who use computers are familiar with or hooked into the Windows methodology. Fortunately, Microsoft itself already started to make the break with Windows Vista and Office 2007 - it's all so different that Linux actually looks more familiar to the average 3.1/3.11/95/98/NT/2000/XP user than Vista or W7. Also, Linux is not written to use up every extra CPU cycle that Intel and AMD can squeeze out of their latest and greatest chips. The Aero look of Vista (that pretty, transparent sheen that eats your CPU) does, along with a lot of other, background stuff that takes up time behind the scenes. Finally, neither GNOME nor KDE, the other popular desktop environment GUI, changed for the main purpose of confusing the heck out of all users - they're just more feature-rich with more options you don't have to use.

Linux doesn't have a multi-billion dollar advertising corporation pushing for global dominance in the PC and business markets. None of the contributing corporations is pushing it that hard, either. Why not? There's no market share when all the software is free and anyone can get it. There's also the issue of the big software corporations that are already making a fortune on Windows-based software, the kind of fortune they can't make in a Linux-based, free software market. Finally, the vast majority of software available for Linux is open-source. If you just said, "Huh?" read on.

Open source software is software (meaning office productivity suites, games, graphics editors, entertainment software and so on - what you run on your computer after you log in and actually want to do something) that comes with the source code. That means, if you know what you're doing, you can modify it to fit your own personal or business needs. You can fix bugs in it if you find any. You can add your own features. The only thing you can't (legally) do is sell it or make a profit on it.

Software, even the games, that comes with Linux distributions is not the same as what runs on Windows. Actually, that's only half true. A fair amount of open source software does run on Windows, but it doesn't look like what the big products you're probably used to seeing do. For example, OpenOffice, a full office productivity suite that is free and competes more or less directly with Microsoft Office, does not look exactly the same as MS Office, and that can be a problem for businesses and people that are stuck on the MS Office way. But it runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, MAC and other OS platforms, all the same way.

Another disadvantage is that, while there is great coverage for nearly all aspects of computing under Linux, there are some particular programs that aren't available. For example, Internet Explorer, Microsoft's flagship web interface, problems and all, does not run on Linux. Most Linux users are cheering about that even now. The problem comes in where businesses construct their web sites using Microsoft tools that are designed to use IE's non-standard features, and although Firefox and certain other browsers can make up for a lot of that, there are some things that just don't work. If you use Firefox at all, you've probably seen some already.

(There are also some sites I've seen where IE doesn't work right because of its non-standard behavior. They are by far the rarer, but they did exist at one time.)

Finally (oh, thank God, he's almost done!), Linux can be confusing. There are several different distributions of Linux, and they don't all work exactly the same way. Red Hat, which also includes the Fedora and CentOS derivatives, is three. Debian, which includes Ubuntu and some others I'm not familiar with, is several more (there are a number of different distributions of Ubuntu). Gentoo, Mandriva, Slackware, SuSE/Novell - there a plenty from which to choose, and each one is just a little different behind the veil of the GUIs, mostly GNOME and KDE, although there are others here, too.

Linux still has two huge advantages: it is free, and it runs on almost any hardware.

It's a complicated world, if you want to see it that way.

I like to simplify it like this: pick one and go with it. I recommend CentOS.

(All registered trademarks used herein are the sole property of the registrants.)

A Christmas to Remember

2009-12-26T13:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I had one the best Christmases in my whole life, and it had nothing to do with the gifts I received. Actually, what I got was mostly very practical stuff, primarily designed for Christmas projects we have yet to complete, and a "new" owner's manual for my 29-year-old car.

A while back, Natasha, bless her heart, came up with the idea that we should organize a way to feed the homeless on Christmas day. We all thought it was a great idea, so we went to our club and presented the idea to them. They all liked the idea, too, and we began the effort. I put out the word around our local area, my wife collected food donations and made a lot of purchases with some donated money, and we went down to the Walk of Honor in downtown Santa Ana where a fair number of Orange County's homeless "live."

We managed to feed at least a hundred people, with drinks, turkey rollers, crackers, snacks and three large pumpkin pies, plus chicken-pasta dishes, hummus and some organic food that another couple (who happen to be in the organic food industry) brought in response to the word I'd sent out. It was incredible. We met so many nice people over the hour and a half or so that we were there, and there were other donors who came in their own trucks and SUVs with more food than even we could have imagined. I don't know how to describe how I felt being able to do this for others who are less well off than me, and I may be getting closer than I ever imagined to being in their place.

After we cleaned up and took home the materials we had left (no food - all gone :-), we put together some more gifts and went out to party with some dear friends in San Bernardino County, where they had an amazing spread of food laid out for their party. Of course, I stuffed myself, and we all had a grand time with people we had never met before but with whom we all shared a number of common interests. Natasha started playing piano, and our host's brother turned out to be quite an accompanist as well - he played piano while Natasha's angelic voice treated us all to a wonderful concert. Alex pitched in with some guitar play and we all sang several non-Christmas songs, to the pleasure and delight of all.

Several of the other guests were surprised that my kids would like songs by the Beatles, CCR, Don McLean and other, more classic rock and roll music, but considering their parents, that's not too big of a stretch. I am constantly amazed at how wide a range of music they like. I love the Moody Blues, but then I stopped listening to them for a number of years, not terribly impressed with their later music. Then, Natasha happened upon my CDs, fell in love with them and re-introduced me to their later good music and some earlier works I'd never considered all that great on my own.

The bottom line is that we had a truly special, very blessed Christmas, and I wanted to share that with you. It has nothing to do with writing or my books, per se, but so what?

I wish you all a happy and prosperous remainder of this holiday season and on into and through the next year. May divine blessings infuse your life with more good than you know how to handle, and may you learn how to handle that good with grace.

Online TV for Entertainment?

2009-11-26T17:40:00.000-08:00

October 10? Wow - that's quite a while since I last posted anything here.

It's been a kind of doldrums month, and I hit a blank spot with writing, so I thought I'd comment on something else - the wondrous treasure trove that online TV provides.

Hm, was that sarcastic enough?

I first discovered the wonders of online TV a few months ago when I was pointed at a really neat site called blinkx.com. This site has thousands of TV shows available for online viewing - sort of. What it really has is links to other sites that actually store the shows and then allow you to play them back with varying levels of commercials, subtitles, etc.

I found it useful when I wanted to see all of the Moonlight episodes that I recently discovered I had missed. Actually, I missed the whole show - it only lasted one season, but it was pretty good and better written than I expected. So I dove in at my son's urging, only to discover some interesting and highly relevant details:

Of the three storage providers, I could not access one of them at all (and, unfortunately, I also forgot their name - sorry).

A really nice one with good resolution and a nice playback interface is megavideo.com. The only problem, as it were, is that they really are a subscription service, so you can only watch up to 74 minutes of video at a time. That's enough for about 1 1/2 hours of a TV show (because there are no commercials - thank you), but not enough for a whole movie. Also, you have to get past the commercial at the beginning to watch a show, but that's fairly easy to do.

Another decent one with reasonably good playback features but a reduced video size (and generally horrible quality resolution, though it is watchable) is tudou.com. This is a Chinese web site (surprise), and the videos are filled with Chinese subtitles, which can get really annoying when they obscure a big chunk of the bottom of the screen. They have short commercials once in a while, at the start of a show, which are loud but, fortunately for those of us who do not speak or read Chinese, in Chinese. Also, they tend to be short. Tudou also has a minor irritating feature in that a lot of their shows are split in half, and not all of them load the next segment automatically. This can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it.

Then I started exploring some more. A show that I found I liked a little back when it started out was Eureka, from the SF channel (SciFi, now SyFy). I finally got hooked into watching the reruns of the third season last spring, and the new one over the summer. Through blinkx, I was able to catch up on the whole show - eventually. There were problems with the links, and not all of the shows were available all the time, but the worst part was that some of the links were to the wrong shows. IIRC, the first season got messed up about half way through and all the Tudou links are actually for the previous week's show. This is why there's a mystery "Episode 14" with no name at the end of the season - it's really episode 13, but since Tudou is off by a week, they had to do something, I suppose.

There are other significant drawbacks to online TV. Not all of some of the older shows are available online. This is annoying when I wanted to watch, say, JAG - the ninth and tenth seasons are not online at all (the 9th season was just released on DVD by Paramount, and the 10th is still waiting out there somewhere), and a lot of the shows are missing.

JAG is actually not a bad show if you're a huge fan of the US military, or if you can get past their heavy rah-rah approach (being ex-Navy, I know that the presentations are both distorted and inaccurate, but not in a way that interferes with the stories), and a lot of the plots are quite interesting.

I started watching JAG because I got hooked on NCIS watching the reruns every night on USA (on a real TV, but fake broadcasts - it's cable-only). I like the way the characters are developed and interact, and they've managed to cut back some on the gore last season (finally). When I wanted to find out the name of particular guest actor on the show, I looked it up in the IMDB and found out it was a spin-off of JAG. (USA also runs JAG reruns, and I happened to catch part of one of the two-parter that started NCIS as a separate show.) First I watched the pre-pilot of NCIS-on-JAG, then I thought I'd check out the rest of the show. Not too bad.

One of the other storage sites is called fanpop.com, which appears to be a defective interface to tudou.com - I can't get it to load the videos. Ever.

The other major online TV provider I've looked at is hulu.com ("an evil plot to destroy your mind - enjoy!").

For recent shows, like the latest episodes of Bones and NCIS that I missed on the original broadcast, they're pretty good. There are times when the loading is too slow to be watchable - it stops every second or so, mid-word and all, and that gets old really fast. On the other hand, I can't get Fox's "special, high-speed streaming" player to work on my machines at all. From hulu, I have no trouble watching the Fox shows.

However, there are also older shows that are still available on hulu.com that I like, when I can get at them. One of these is Highlander (the series starring Adrian Paul, not the movies). More than half the time, the videos are stubborn to load and don't. About half the time, after they've loaded, they freeze and drop the link, so I have to go back and reload and reposition. And occasionally I get a message saying that the video is not available, which is a lie - it usually means I have to clear my cookies, cache and other local linked data and start over again.

If that's the evil plot to destroy my mind, I'm not worried. It's more irritating than anything else, and it happens so much I don't watch as many in a row as I used to. OMG, I'm breaking my addiction to TV, physical and online!

All of this makes me wonder something: Since the US economy has deteriorated to the point where the vast majority of the jobs that are still available are service jobs (think waiters, busboys and infotainment) and most of what we're producing is just entertainment, occasionally disguised poorly as opinionated propaganda - excuse me, "news" - are these entertainment services anything more than just a way to keep us home, entertained and mindless?

I have to wonder and worry about that - I write, and I'd like people to read. My writing may not be classic or even particularly entertaining, but let's face it: Dr. Seuss is more challenge to our brains than ANYTHING on TV, broadcast, cable or online.

Tell me what you think!

When is a collection of books not a series?

2009-10-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

This issue has been bugging me for months, maybe even years - what makes a group of related books a series?

You might wonder why I would care, unless you've read my books (hint :-).

I have a group of books that I call, collectively, Zentek Ascendant. There are five books in this group and they are all related to the same subject, take place in the same world, involve the same characters (except the ones who die and don't come back - yes, that happens), and so on.

However, a lot of readers, not just in the fantasy genre, don't like series, especially not when they run on and on and on. I won't mention any books here by name, but there are gobs of them that fall into this category. Think of Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Terry Brooks and others.

Personally, I tend to like reading book series because they feel comfortable if you can get past the first one because the background of the series is already familiar. There's nothing wrong with writing a series of books that use this to their advantage, provided, of course, that they are well-written. I happen to like all of the authors I noted above, some more than others and not all because of their series books.

On the other hand, I also want my books to appeal even to those who don't like series, and that's where it gets a little tricky. Let's take a look.

The classic in high fantasy fiction that still (and properly, in my not-so-humble opinion) dominates the entire genre remians Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The question is, is LOTR a series or not? I say it is not, it is, rather, a set. To paraphrase, it is a single story in three volumes, each containing two "books." The Hobbit and LOTR, if considered as separate works, which they are, is a series, but LOTR on its own is a set - the story in each book is incomplete without the others.

Contrast this to, say, the Dune series by Frank Herbert and now his son, too. Clearly, these are individual stories, none of which is so dependent on its predecessors or successors for its content that you couldn't just pick any of them up and read a complete story. Whether you like it or not I wouldn't presume to say. You can even contrast LOTR by itself (a set) to the whole of the Tolkien collection, which would include the Hobbit, the Silmarillion and others I have not read, that are more in the nature of a series. You can better understand the whole history of Middle Earth by reading them all, but it is sufficient just to read LOTR or the Hobbit by themselves.

Without putting myself in that illustrious collection of writers I named above (yet), I have chosen to call the Zentek Ascendant collection of five books a set, not a series. It is a single, contiguous story that takes up all five books. Although I have made (and continue to make) an effort to make each one viable as a work on its own, at the present time of edits, only Return (book I) and Minx (book II), in their most recent revisions, which are not yet available for direct sale, are set up that way.

Return was always set up that way - I wrote it as a stand-alone story from the beginning. I didn't even know I would ever be writing any more of the story until it was done and I had slogged through it several times (and believe me, back then, it was slogging). After a few (dozen) edits, I began to itch for more, and I decided to continue the story and make the rest of it less structured in how I wrote it, and it carried me through the whole set. Now, with the assistance of a few groups of reviewers of my writing, I am also going through Festival (book III), with at least the partial intent of "fixing" Chapter 1 so that a reader does not necessarily have to read Return and Minx to enjoy it.

Am I shooting myself in the foot here?

I hope not. I just want to make it easier for readers to get one and want them all. I know that this will be much harder for me to do with Metamorphoses (IV) or, especially, Reckoning (V) because the story is a romance in addition to all the adventure and swords and sorcery and other stuff, and there is a suspense element built in as well - who did this to whom and why and how pervasive is this insidious plot? The reader might not appreciate the love story or the whole plot if they just start with Metamorphoses, for example.

My recommendation?

Get the whole set. I promise that it will be worth the read, unless you really hate high fantasy adventure romance epics. Heck, you might even like it anyway!

Let me know what you think....

Zentek Ascendant complete (old news)

2009-09-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

As some of you have probably noticed already, mainly because this is such a late announcement, the Zentek Ascendant story is complete. All five ebooks are now available.

So why am I calling it a story instead of a series? See below, about two paragraphs.

I've also posted an offer on the home page - buy the print edition of book I, Return and email me a proof of purchase, and I'll give you all five ebooks F*R*E*E. That's currently around a $15 value, if you consider ebooks as having value.

I've also modified my home page rather dramatically. Take a look and see what you think, and tell me. The opening page has lots of links to click through to the main site (which is called page 2, now), but it will automatically redirect there after about 20 seconds. I've been told I should get rid of that front page - what do you think?

As for why the "story" vs. "series" distinction? To me, this is all one, long story that just doesn't fit well into a single book. It's not a series any more than the Lord of the Rings is a series - it's just one story that fits better into three volumes, five in my case.

For example, the Dune series is just that - a series of single volume stories that are part of a larger universe but aren't all the same, single story about the same people. The Xanth series by Piers Anthony is also a series, along similar categorical lines.

On the other hand, the Belgariad by David Eddings is more like a single, long story in five books. In some respects, mine is a lot like that, only the "coming of age" aspect in my books is quite different from Eddings'.

Take a look, see what you think, and tell me, please! Comments welcome.

"Metamorphoses," Latest Editions Released

2009-08-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

After weeks of slaving over the keyboard,...

Wait a second! You don't really want to hear about that, do you?

It's been a while since I posted anything here, so I figured I'm way overdue. You've been so patient, waiting for me to get my head out of, er, the dark, and I've been so, ah, busy. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Okay, enough fooling around. For now.

Metamorphoses, Zentek Ascendant, Book IV is now available in ebook format at my website. It took me a while, but I think the wait will be worthwhile because it's better than ever, and it brings you closer to the conclusion with some great new insights, revelations and a soaring romantic edge that - never mind, just read it! :-)

I also released the latest and greatest editions of Minx and Festival, improving their flow and style to be more consistent, more fun, more absorbing, more - I could go on all day; wouldn't you rather just get them and decide for yourself? I slashed the prices a while back because, although I still think they're worth lots more, I'd rather have readers than high prices or a whopping big income from them. I'd love to have a whopping big income - who wouldn't - but I realize that these are ebooks, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails, and I can't see driving potential readers away with "real book" prices for the files.

I have another idea: if you like what you see, buy the print edition of Return, whose print title is Zentek Ascendant, Book I: Return (don't ask, please), and I'll give you all five ebooks for free, including Reckoning as soon as it becomes available. The print editions, both soft and hard cover, are available directly from Xlibris.com, or on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others. As far as I can tell, B&N (barnesandnoble.com) has it for the lowest price so far, so get it there.

Comments? Questions? Nasty remarks? Feel free to post on the blog, or email me directly at zentektales@gmail.com. I love getting feedback of all kinds, and I have the leather skin to prove it!

Now available for less!

2009-08-11T09:03:00.001-07:00

Before you read any further, this is not a come-on for some massive, super-discount program that will save you gobs and gobs of money. That is, unless you buy a whole lot of my books.... :-)

I did a little survey a while back and discovered that a lot of other fantasy ebooks are selling for significantly less than I was asking for mine. I began to think about that and wondered - what was I thinking?

I was thinking that I worked hard on these books, they represent a lot of effort on my part, I deserve compensation, blah, blah, blah. All of that is true, more or less, (except the blah, blah, blah part). Then I started thinking, is that what I really want?

The answer to that is no.

Okay, so yes, I do want a lot of money, who doesn't? Even the ultra-rich (always) want more.

But that's not the point.

What I really want is a lot of readers who are willing to buy my work because they like it and they're willing to pay a little bit to get it. After all, these are ebooks, not something you can just hold in your hand and pick up and put down, like a "real" book (unless you have an ebook reader that handles encrypted PDFs and looks sort of like a book...). That means you can either read it on a computer, which can be somewhat simple if you have a netbook and really good eyesight, or you can print it out and carry around a sheaf of paper that is too thick to staple together with a normal stapler, even if you print it 2-up, back to back, or even smaller.

I can't sit at a computer long enough to read a whole book any more, even when I'm not editing it. (I used to be able to, but that's a long story, not for here.) My book won't generate any more income for you, unlike others priced at $20 and up that might, if you're diligent, lucky, a good salesperson, etc., etc.

So, I blew the prices down to a genuinely reasonable low that probably will never get any lower because, well, they are worth that much. I won't quote the prices here, but you can get at them easily on my home page, http://zentektales.com.

What do you think? Let me know - post a comment, send an email, or buy a book! :-)

By the way, I promise I will have Metamorphoses out this month, along with new editions of Minx and Festival, and Reckoning will be out next month. They really are almost done - just one more quick (ha ha ha!) clean-up editing pass.

Tell you what - if you buy now, or any time for that matter, when a new edition of any of my ebooks becomes available, I will email you a free update, unless you tell me not to do that. Is that better?

Before I forget, Return is now available on Amazon and other on-line retailers. If you search on Amazon for "Zentek Ascendant," you'll find it. If not, google for ISBNs 978-1-4415-3593-1 (paperback) or 978-1-4415-3594-8 (hardback) and be aware - I can't change those prices, directly. Check my web page - I'll be putting together a discount offer as soon as the whole set is out in ebooks.

Thanks for reading!

Just a quickie - news flash!

2009-07-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

A couple of things:

1. Ignore my last posting - DO BUY THE EBOOKS!

2. But wait for my next posting - I've finished all five of the series, but I'm in the process of re-editing. Should be done in a week or so, and there will be all new, lower prices, and a new cover for Return.

So rush right out and - er - come back in a week or so! (Ha ha ha!)

I'll send out notices when they're all done.

BTW, let me know what you think - comments are possible, so don't be shy....

DON'T BUY THIS EBOOK!

2009-07-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

What? Has he gone crazy? You may well be wondering....

I figure I've already told you why you should buy my story, so let me play devil's advocate for a few lines here and try to talk you into buying by showing you why someone else should not. (Did I lose you? Stick around, it will become clear enough.)

1. You don't really like fantasy adventure stories.

Good enough for me - what are you doing here anyway?

Oh, heck, I can't give up that easily. Have you ever read a fantasy adventure story? A classic myth? A fairy tale? If you have and you didn't hate it, give Return a shot. Ebooks are not that expensive, and you can read them on your computer, your laptop, your netbook, your ebook reader, or you can do it the hard way: print it out and read the hard copy. (Okay, that pun was not intended, but it's there, I'm not deleting it!) Now, if you have an inkjet printer, this could take some time. Even my laser printer takes a while to print the whole book. "But it's 232 pages!" you protest. Yes, it is. It's also a PDF, so you can print it out in multiple pages per sheet, though I wouldn't recommend anything smaller that 2 pages side by side unless you also have high quality magnifying lenses....

2. You don't like ebooks.

It's available in print, too. Come and visit and follow the link! I should warn you, though, it's a lot more than the ebook (I have no control over the publisher's price). If you want to wait another month or two, it will be available from Amazon.com, probably at a discount. I'll announce that here and elsewhere when it is (big time!). If you don't mind a wait, I'll be collecting orders for discounted sales in a few days - visit the web site and check occasionally.

3. You don't like game-based books.

Frankly, I don't blame you. In the more usual case, you're entering a fantasy world created by one or more other people, then reading someone else's filtered view of that world. It's like reading a story that takes place in Middle Earth, not written by J.R.R. Tolkien, or a Narnia story written by someone other than C.S. Lewis. Sometimes this works, but....

Fear NOT! This is different. I wrote the game, and only about a dozen people have ever played it! Not only that, it isn't published, so the only point of view you are stuck with is mine. In fact, the game has little to no impact on the story - you don't need to know anything about the game to enjoy the book. I could just as easily have written the story without the game, it just so happened I wrote the game first.

4. You don't like series stories.

Me either. "Oh, right! You always write things you don't like!" you say. Let me ask you this - do you think that The Lord of the Rings is a series story?

The Zentek Ascendant series is really one, long story broken into five reasonably sized, conveniently separated volumes, and you don't even need to read all five (although it is best as a whole). You could buy Return and stop there. You could start with Minx and stop there. I'll admit that the last three really do depend on each of their predecessors, more than the first two, but, if you don't mind starting or landing in the middle of a long story, they're all good on their own. In my (not so) humble opinion, of course!

5. "So, you think you're as good as Tolkien, or Lewis?"

You tell me - buy the book, or the whole story (all five books), and tell me. I wouldn't undertake such a comparison - I've been told that my writing is good, but that's from a fairly small, pretty friendly and sympathetic select non-group of readers, and a lot of it is NOT about these books at all. I could tell you that my books are the best you'll ever read, and they might be, but I have no illusions on that score. Again, you tell me. Please. :-)

6. Why should you feed my ego?

Not one good reason comes to mind. I didn't write the books to get an ego boost. I wrote them because I couldn't NOT write them. There was a story inside me, bursting to get out, and I had to write it down. I enjoyed it so much, I wanted others (like you) to have the same experience, or better. For all I know, your imagination will take your experience of the book way beyond where it took me.

You could also hate it - not all fantasy is for everyone, and I may just not be your cup of fantasy-tea. The nice thing about books is that, if you don't like one, you can pass it on to someone else (maybe with a little compensation for your initial expense in buying it). You might not like it, but you have a friend or two who might.

So, to sum up, don't buy this book.

Really.

Buy the whole story! Share it with your friends!

Most important of all, enjoy yourself.

What's so great about this series?

2009-07-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

That's a presumptuous question. How can I tell you why my own work is so great that you just have to put everything else down, get it, read it, enjoy it, and spread the word?

Heh, heh - I just did! :-)

Seriously, I looked over an article yesterday that talks about what's wrong with modern fantasy epics - mostly series, game based, badly written, old plots, flat characters and so on. For what it's worth, these are not particularly specific to fantasy epics at all - pretty much anything that has been written can have these flaws. They do tend to be more pronounced in fantasy epics because, in these, you're entering a different world, one that is fairly close to the author's heart and most likely quite personal, even if it takes place here and now on Earth.

Little things like consistency of the world, the scenes depicted therein, how complete the world creation is or was, can make a novel more or less worth reading depending on their quality. If the world is internally inconsistent, or there are holes in the presentation, these can hurt worse than just bad writing. If the author is just spinning a tale to make some money, or for any other surface reason that is not related to a deep commitment to a good story on a world that is as real to them as they want it to be to you, the reader, it won't fly.

One of the most sensitive of these sore spots is old plots. Even the greatest works of fantasy literature use or reuse old plots, some older and more used than others. J.R.R. Tolkien used themes from mythological bases and older works of fantasy, in addition to the very real experience he had just completed, having lived through the most horrendous event of his day, World War II, in creating the Lord of the Rings. C.S. Lewis used one of the older and more popular themes in western civilization for the background of the Narnia series - Christianity. The successful writers in fantasy epics find new ways to tell old stories, mixing them in different ways with new approaches, etc., etc.

You already knew all that, right?

What I've been beating around here is my own work (surprise!). My primary work so far is a five book series, collectively entitled Zentek Ascendant. If you've been reading any of this, you already know that this is a game-based series of books. Uh, oh, that's two of the potential pitfalls of a good fantasy epic. I'll get to the others shortly.

The world I used for my backdrop was from a game I wrote. That's just how it happened. My original intent in creating the game was to play a really good game that had some new features in it I hadn't seen in other games, and eight or nine other people helped me play-test it for almost seven years. Then I had this crazy idea that if I wrote a book based on the game, I might have better marketing luck with the game. (That has nothing to do with marketing - don't try this yourself!) The advantage that this created for me was a consistent world with "natural laws" I could follow when creating a story about it. The game is not published, or even available in any form right now, except these books. As much as I like it, I like the books far, far better.

I've also found that series can get really tired after a while. I've burned out on several of them myself, mainly because I became accustomed to the author's style and didn't see enough in the continuing (never-ending?) stories that was of value to me. There were a few that I stopped reading because the stories went off in directions I didn't like.

So, why on Earth would I write my own? Am I nuts? Maybe. Originally, I just wanted to write a story that followed a game-driven adventure, and it was awful - really, truly awful. It was hard to read, hard to follow, stiff, contrived and so on. I wouldn't even consider trying to sell that - thing - now. It was so bad that I had to try another story, one that would be easier to read, even for me. I started writing something else - a continuation of the first book, but from an entirely different perspective. This time, I was just going to tell a story, from my head onto paper (okay, into a computer), and see where that took me. Six books later, I had a monster on my hands. I wanted a trilogy and instead wound up with seven books of widely varying lengths and content. I've reorganized, edited and re-shaped it several times, and the pentology it now comprises is the best way to read it.

In case you're worried about book 1, you can rest assured that I have edited it for years, probably close to a hundred times. When I read it, I enjoy it - I think it reads well, is interesting enough and paced to keep your attention all the way to the end, even though there is more ahead. It has none of the original flaws any more, and editing it for publication was more fun than I expected. (Yes, it's available in print.)

What does all that mean? I have one story to offer, it just takes five books to tell properly and completely. Is it well-written? Of course! How can you ask? However, I can't judge my own work from a sufficiently impartial objective to say. I can tell you that I've read it through dozens of times, and I enjoy it all the way through. When I go back and look at one of the books and say to myself, "Ugh - another edit? Why do I do this?" that feeling goes away within a page or two, and after that it's hard to stop and make a change.

Are there old plots? Almost certainly, though I made no conscious effort to include any. I've read enough mythology, fantasy, fairy tales and science fiction that some of this comes out in my writing. That said, this work is all original, both in the themes and the way the characters handle them, with enough connected subplots to keep the story grounded in (a fantasy) reality. Life is not just one simple story that fits together end-to-end. Are the characters flat? Not to me - they are quite real, and they are not based on any other characters in any other stories. (Okay, there are a number of conventional inter-character relationships that have been used before, but all in new ways. Trust me! :-)

Zentek Ascendant means "zentek on the rise," which does kind of encapsulate the main thrust of the story. I also thought it was a catchy name. The five books are Return, Minx, Festival (which are all available as ebooks), Metamorphoses (which should be finished this month, I hope) and Reckoning (which is awaiting a final proof-read once Metamorphoses is done). Take a look and see how much you like them. Return is priced low so you won't be out too much money even if you hate it, and you won't.

Enjoy!

What is a zentek?

2009-06-26T00:12:00.000-07:00

So what is a zentek?

A long time ago, near the dawn of the fantasy role-playing game era, there were essentially three kinds of characters - warriors or some variant thereof, religious spell-casters and secular spell-casters. In EPT, they were warriors, priest and magic-users. Being a big fan of "Ill Met In Lankhmar" by the great Fritz Leiber, I also rather liked the idea of a thief character class. D&D picked that one up a long time ago, so even though I used thieves as one of the primary classes, I wanted something new, something I had not seen in any game I'd researched. I liked the ideas of spell-casters whose extraordinary capabilities came from divine worship (priests) or from incantations, with or without some kind of "power word," or magicians.

However, I also wanted to see a rare but occasional type of character whose abilities, or powers, came from within, who had fairly clearly defined abilities that still had flexibility, and whose beginnings were modest, but built up through experience (and survival) to become quite powerful in the advanced stages. They also had to have some kind of behavioral constraints, if for no other reason than that with enormous power comes enormous responsibility. These characters would be loosely based on a mix of mutants (a la the comic-world's X-men and Inhumans), martial arts practitioners (along the lines of Shao Lin priests), zen monks and the insatiably curious who devote their lives to the study of how the universe works.

Thus was born the zentek - a "warrior of the spirit," one who takes life as it comes, who prefers to avoid violence even though they are quite capable of delivering it, who preserves nature but has the curiosity and drive to explore and develop as much as possible along the way.

The official description from the (unpublished) game rules, slightly paraphrased, is this:

The Zentek Order acknowledges the fundamental harmony of all things, and they study skill disciplines which center around their development as human beings interacting with and, ultimately, controlling forces of the physical and transphysical universe. Zenteks use neither weapons nor armor, they have no guild language like other [guilds], and they are philosophically opposed to combat under almost any circumstances, although they can be very good at it. Zenteks do not feel themselves to be in competition with anyone for anything, thus making them generally friendlier than sorcerers to other [characters]. However, they are just as much unique individuals as any other characters, and personalities will vary (as they should). Zenteks must have exceptional intelligence, extremely high life force, with all other character attributes above average. The potential zentek must apply at a Zentek Sanctuary (their meditation and education centers, which are usually easy to locate, since the Order is always looking for new members and such are somewhat scarce) to be admitted. The novice must then spend four years at that center learning the first three of the Zentek Order disciplines. Learning the first discipline normally requires two whole years of study, but it results in an immediate increase in self-awareness and control, thus raising the zentek's life force.

Zenteks study sixteen clearly defined disciplines, a cross between straight skills and spell-like powers, that range from self-awareness and control at the beginning to amazing energy powers towards the mastery end of the spectrum, with certain absolute restrictions that keep them viable as characters of interest. This may seem to be limited, but the ways in which these disciplines can be applied can be as creative as the players or, in this case, the author.

It's not always easy for zenteks, and it shouldn't be. Otherwise, zenteks would dominate the game, or the world, and become boring really fast. So, they cannot use weapons or armor of any kind. They are sworn not to initiate or provoke any kind of violence, though they may defend themselves in any way they feel necessary to survive. Above all, they may never harm natural animals - those which have no innate, rational, "human" intelligence (as if humans actually had any), and are both alive and unaltered by any kind of magic, even if the zentek's life is at stake.

In game terms, they are rare, and a tricky combination of player imagination and referee discrimination. For characters in a book, they may be completely unnecessary. Of course, in the Zentek Tales, they are the author's delight.

I like to think of them as sonnet-characters - there is a specific form into which they must fit, but within that form, they are unlimited.

What are Zentek Tales?

2009-06-25T00:55:00.000-07:00

You may be wondering, what is a "zentek tale" and why should you care? Actually, you're probably also wondering, what is a zentek anyway?

The easiest part of the above multi-part question is the caring part - because it's fantasy-adventure material!

In order to explain this properly, a little history is in order. I promise to keep this short.

Back in 1977, I was in the Navy, on a ship that had just steamed up to San Francisco for a 2-3 year stint in drydock. As a navigation specialist, I can assure you that being in drydock is like being bored out of your skull - what kind of navigation does one need to do when the ship isn't even in the water?

(Answer: none - we do grunt work, like sandblasting the hull, and boatloads of paperwork!)

My best friend at that time came to invite me to this really neat thing going on down in one of the other crewmen's room - a game unlike anything else I'd ever heard of. It was called "The Empire of the Petal Throne," and he said it was a lot like D&D. (I wasn't really up on most of this sort of thing, but I knew roughly what that meant.)

To keep this short, let's just say that, as a long-time fan and avid reader of fantasy fiction, I was completely captivated. I took this game home (which, by the way, saved my sanity, or at least I think it did) and continued to play and referee (act as the dungeonmaster) the game, convincing my fiancee and some college buddies to join me as well. (We even once did a 24-hour scenario involving 100 player-characters - crazy, eh?) When I graduated and got my first job as a software developer, I found other allies in our quest for adventure, and some new games.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of taking some of the concepts I found in several of the games and combining them into EPT, but the more I worked on this, the more it became clear that I was doing what I saw as "other people's work." So, I invented my own fantasy role-playing game, containing elements of many of the games I'd seen, read and played, but with a heavy content of as much original material as I could dream up.

A large portion of that original material was devoted to the invention of the zentek character type, and upon this the idea of the Zentek Tales is based.

Okay, you say to yourself, got that much. Now, what is a zentek? A zentek is what I called the spirit-warrior character type in the game, but they are neither spirits nor warriors.

It's late and this is getting kind of long, so I'll explain that in my next post!

Web page caught up to reality - sort of...

2009-06-23T02:21:00.000-07:00

My web page is now caught up to the most current state of ebookage (including prices, print editions, updated previews, etc.). Come on over and take a look.

Recommendations for other really good books welcome, too.

Editing can be fun, too

2009-06-22T10:22:00.001-07:00

Editing can be fun, in addition to improving the content of one's writing. I have found a number of places where little improvements popped up at me as I was going through my list of words to check. Of course, as I went, the list also began to grow. Initially, I found three words that I saw "too frequently" (to my eyes) that I thought might need to be altered in the content of each of the five books in my series. That list quickly grew to seventeen, and now stands at more than double that, with some grouped into categories. Many of these are fairly simple, consistency checks, to make sure I use the same style for all references to a particular character's name or title.

Some of them are kind of abstract, and the list just keeps getting longer. It now fills almost a whole page in what I think of as my deep background file, which contains my references on what should (or should have) happened when, changes I've made, back stories that aren't in the books, and the like. It could be viewed as a kind of outline file, but it was constructed mostly in reverse - after the stories were already written.

What does this mean? Delays in making the works available. I'm beginning to understand why Ms. Rowling took SO BLOODY LONG to come out with Deathly Hallows - getting it right doesn't come overnight.

Now available in PRINT!

2009-06-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

The really big news for the day is that the first book in the Zentek Ascendant fantasy-adventure epic series, Return, is now available in print - hardback and paperback.

Take a look! More information at http://zentektales.com, including previews of the first four books and ebooks of the first three. (Books 4 and 5 are still "in production....")

Jumping in with both feet

2009-06-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

Now available in print - Zentek Ascendant, Book I: Return

Zentek Ascendant, Book I: Return is the new, exciting swords-and-sorcery fantasy epic from new author Mark A. Richter.

"So captivating, I had to force myself to put it down, just to get anything else done." - Alex H.

Return's challenging adventures take place in a harsh, medieval world, a primitive throwback from a highly advanced civilization that totally collapsed millennia ago. Nature has regained control, and lack of technology has forced mankind and its non-human allies to depend on cooperation rather than coercion. People develop their abilities depending on their guild membership and its support. Some become great knights, clever thieves, or powerful sorcerers, while others struggle just to survive their lives of impoverished peasantry or miserable serfdom.

Christophane Lord, a zentek "spirit-warrior", is the duke of a small province in the chilly northeast corner of Idlewild. Darnak Sparre, a huge knight in the famous Kalsharia Cavalry, and Chris's best friend, serves their prince as Chris's bodyguard. An exquisite but ragged novice thief named Minx plays a small part at first, but watch closely as this insouciant, ferocious beauty makes her clandestine, provocative way into the heart of the tale.

The story begins in the vast southwestern Idlewild desert, where Chris and Darnak narrowly escape the first in a mysterious series of vicious assassination attempts. On their weary way home from an extended diplomatic assignment, they chance upon some hardy friends who join them along their journey, in spite, or maybe because, of the hazards they face. Besought by multiple obstacles of different terrains, rural inns and urban intrigue, they make their precarious course across the treacherous wilds over the many miles, overcoming diverse, often lethal challenges to their lives and skills along the way.

"Chris made it a point never to ignore his intuition discipline.

"He felt that small cringe in his mind warn of danger, imminent death ahead, as he and Darnak rode down the desert road. He reined in his horse. Hard.

"The horse reared, emitted a strange, weak snort and crashed to the ground. Chris leaped clear and tumbled to the cobbled road, his cloak flapping out around him, like a large, two-toned bird, sandy hued on top, dark blue-gray underneath. On his way down, for a fraction of a moment, he took in a glance of the fletching of an arrow that had pierced his horse's chest, not too far from where his own vulnerable midsection would have been. The zentek awareness he had honed for years paid off as his intuition saved his life. Again...."

Complete with a full color map of the entire western land mass of Wilderness, Return also includes a sneak preview of Book II: Minx.

Join Chris, Darnak and Minx in the first installment of the greatest adventure of their lifetimes....