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

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

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?

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?

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)

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

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!

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!