Happy 40th anniversary (shameless plug)

I sat on my bed and listened to the big Hitachi transistor radio that my parents had bought me for Christmas 1968. An announcer at NASA ticked off the altitude as the craft drew closer to the moon, then a pause, and then: "Uh, Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

What better way to mark the 40 years that have passed since July 20, 1969, than to get your own copy of a fabulous retro science fiction novel that includes some key scenes and, um, earthshaking events on the moon itself?

Yep, it's a shameless plug for my first novel, The Imaginary Bomb. Ain't I a stinker?

Return to podcasting

You may or may not have stumbled onto Uncle Warren's Attic #53, now available in a podcatcher near you. But he made an announcement that I'm kind of pleased about, in that OMG-what-am-I-getting-myself-into kind of way.

UW, who launched into the podcasting world with his reading of my first tome, The Imaginary Bomb, will be doing the same for my novel under construction, The Imaginary Revolution. We have worked out a weekly schedule where he will read three chapters a week for eight weeks, beginning Aug. 10 with UWA #54 and concluding with a gangbusters UWA #61 on Sept. 28.

This is partly a shameless marketing exercise and partly an incentive to keep me writing the remarkable story of Raymond Kaliber and independent Sirius IV, which I plan to inflict on the world around mid-October. As such, it may remind longtime readers of the debacle that was The Imaginary Lover. The difference between that uncompleted novel and this one is that, unlike that one, I know how this one ends. In fact, I have the final chapter mostly written already. This puppy is coming. The only wild cards that could throw off the schedule are the day-job factor and unexpected life events.

Uncle Warren's technology has advanced a bit since he bragged about the wonderful analog system he used to record the I-Bomb. That iMac of his has capabilities to do things that would have been pretty unwieldy to accomplish with the old stuff alone — but the old stuff is still part of his system. So the new novel may sound, shall we say, different from the I-Bomb.

And it is different. It's not a sequel in the sense that the I-Lover was, although it does take place in the same future universe as the I-Bomb, and there will be some references to the events of the first novel, as the time lines of the two books intersect at one point. In the first book, the declaration of independence by the encampment at Sirius IV was a subplot that partially drove the action. In this book, that declaration is the main plot.

Alas, I have not figured out a way to bring Bob Whelan, Pete Wong and Baxter Hetznecker into this story, so this is not a continuation of their story. Do you have to have read The Imaginary Bomb to fully grok The Imaginary Revolution? Probably not — but if you want to buy The I-Bomb anyway, I ain't stoppin' ya.

I heartily suggest you visit or subscribe to Uncle Warren's Attic over the next couple of months if you haven't made it a habit already. The geniuses at Richardson & Bluhm are working hard to make it worth your while. OK, we're playing hard, actually, but the result is very similar.

Refuse to be Afraid: The book

This will be the first Richardson & Bluhm book from the 21st century. The Imaginary Bomb and The Adventures of Myke Phoenix are things we found in the attic and said, "Why didn't these get into print in the 1990s when they were written?" But Refuse to be Afraid is where I've been going since I first started these little scribblings 33 months ago, and I hope to have it in your hands on or about the third (!) anniversary of my first, tentative post.

How do you like the cover? Too stark? Too bland? Right colors? Horrendous colors? Your constructive criticism is more than welcome.

It took only a few weeks after I launched Montag for the predominant theme to develop, and I'm building longer pieces around the "unfinished essays and spontaneous eruptions" of this little corner of the Web. (And thanks for the phrase, Wally!) A couple of excerpts from the opening chapter:

As this book heads to press, the United States is waste-deep in a presidential campaign. As in all other political campaigns, it seems, the issues are our fears. One candidate plays on our fear of being unable to make ends meet, of living from paycheck to paycheck, and the terror of what might happen if the paychecks stop coming, of what might happen to our loved ones if anything were to happen to us. Another candidate plays on our fear of those terrorists, of the people with difference faces than ours who want to destroy our way of life. Both candidates promise that if we will turn ourselves over to them, we will be safe and secure.

There’s really only one place where you’re totally secure: A jail cell. Surrounded by four walls with barred doors and windows, you can’t be hurt. (We’ll set aside your fear of earthquakes for the moment.) Government leaders who promise you safety from outside influences can only deliver by caging you – by stripping your liberty away, either one freedom at a time or all at once.

Benjamin Franklin was right, presuming he really said these words attributed to him: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” ...

The book is called Refuse to be Afraid, but you’re not human if you’re not afraid from time to time. What I hope to encourage you to do is to keep your fear at bay. Don’t let it control your thoughts and actions. I’ve been writing about Big Fears, the fears that lead to airport checkpoints and surveillance cameras and sometimes even to wars, but little fears make us miserable, too. We don’t speak out for something we believe in, because we’re afraid of the repercussions. We don’t ask that attractive person for a date, because we’re afraid of being turned down. We don’t start writing the Great American Novel or quit our jobs and start that business we really want to start – because we’re afraid it won’t work out. Worse, we’re afraid of the changes success will bring in our lives.

When I say, “Refuse to be afraid,” I’m not telling you to deny that anxious little feeling or that paralyzing terror. The fear is real. I’m just suggesting that the thing that terrifies you can’t possibly be as awful as the paralysis. And yielding control of your life, i.e., your freedom, is likely to produce scarier results than an environment where everyone is free.

For now, tidbits like these are only available by browsing this blog. A good place to start is down there on the right, with the list I've immodestly labeled "B.W.'s Greatest Hits." Come summer, you can sit in the hammock or at the picnic table and enjoy this stuff out in the sun. R&B doesn't yet have the capability for advance orders, but once we figure out how to get that done, you know we will.

While you're waiting, nothing is stopping you from enjoying the little bits of light reading we've produced for you thus far. Click here and you're on your way.

I-Bomb download discount

I've marked down the cost of downloading The Imaginary Bomb to the same price as a hit single: a mere 99 cents. What the heck, you're contributing the paper and ink, after all.

If you'd like the fine folks at Lulu to do all the work, it's a tad more but less stress on your printer. Of course, with the download, you can read it on your screen, too — the electricity's on you. (-8

Richardson & Bluhm update: March

Sorry I've been a bit of a stranger in these parts; I've been working on the book project planned for April 15 release with Warren Bluhm's name on it, and the project has been altered a bit over the past few days.

Originally a collection of short stories named Wildflower Man, I told you last month it would feature two stories he wrote in the mid-1990s about a superhero named Myke Phoenix. Well, the ongoing archaeological dig in his attic revealed three more fully-realized stories, and the tone of these tales is so different from the other short stories that we've spun the book into two projects.

Thusly, we plan to release a 120-page tome called The Adventures of Myke Phoenix, which will feature four "full-length" adventures and a related mini-story, along with a shorter, and therefore more inexpensive, collection called Wildflower Man. Depending on a number of factors, they'll either come out around the same time or within a few weeks of each other.

Listen for more details in the long-awaited Uncle Warren's Attic #48, which ought to be finding its way into a podcatcher near you sometime later this week. And the Richardson/Bluhm projects scheduled for later in the year are still on course.

Of course, while you're waiting for all this, you can always purchase or download your own copy of my Imaginary Bomb, which is certainly the publishing sensation of 2008.

The joy of writing

This will seem a bit odd, but then I hope you've come to expect that from me: I forgot how much fun it was to write the adventures of Bob Whelan, Pete Wong and their mysterious new friend Baxter Hetznecker, until old buddy Wally Conger wrote a nice review of The Imaginary Bomb:

What’s this science fiction novel — at just 24,000 words, it may be more of a novella — all about? Well, it’s a comedic romp posing as an intergalactic political thriller. It’s an apocalyptic space opera told with a grin and a wink. Which isn’t to say that The Imaginary Bomb doesn’t have its share of edge-of-your-seat moments.

All during the last couple of years, since I pulled this old manuscript out of the basement and polished it up for the podcast and book versions, and as I tinkered with the aborted sequel, The Imaginary Lover, it was work. Satisfying work, I must admit, but work. Maybe that's why the sequel barely got beyond some minor tweaking. It took Wally to remind me it was also fun.

I just may slip into my old skin as the relatively omniscient narrator and see if I can find my way back to that "Are we having fun yet?" attitude. Thanks for the reminder, Wally!

P.S. Thanks to everyone for making The I-Bomb #38,157 at the Lulu Marketplace! We have nowhere to go but up ...

Cross-posted to B.W. Richardson's Imaginary Age

My 24,000-word masterpiece

The early reviews are trickling in, and — aaaagh! — a friend has spotted a typo that has been hanging out there on the World Wide Web for nearly two years.

In the April 26, 2006, introduction to the Imaginary Bomb podcast, which is revised and reprinted in the new print edition, I wrote about being inspired by a phrase that came to me in a dream:

Those dozen words formed themselves into a sentence, a surge of adrenaline raced through my veins, and a few weeks later I had a 24,000-page novel - well, maybe that's a novella - or maybe even a long short story ...

Yesterday I received an e-mail that said the book is delightful, but ... "Now, with (more than) 23,000 pages lying on the editing room floor, there must have been something in all those pages for another book or two."

Whoops. Remind me that in the second edition, the introduction will speak of "a few weeks later I had a 24,000-word novel." Proof-reading sometimes appears to be a lost art. With this and another that my friend caught, I'm now aware of four typos in the darn thing - in one sense, not bad for a 100-page book, in another sense, a tad agonizing. I know when I encounter a typo in a book, it breaks the illusion, taking me out of the story for a moment, so I humbly apologize.

Stiil, I remain pleased over how the first Richardson & Bluhm publication turned out and, of course, urge you to consider passing some FRNs our way to see for yourself. I expect the typos won't bug you as much as they bug me.

And here, dear friends, is the plan

The Imaginary Bomb, a novel by B.W. Richardson, edited and published by Warren Bluhm, should be available at Lulu.com by Feb. 1 at the latest. You've heard Bluhm's breathless reading, and now you'll be able to hold my breathless prose in your very hands. I will post the appropriate links everywhere I can think of when the time comes.

Wildflower Man: A Collection of Short Stories (working title), written and published by Warren Bluhm, edited by B.W. Richardson, has a target release date of April 15. The I-Bomb is running about two weeks late, but I think we can make this date. Again, you may have heard Bluhm's breathless reading of the title tale.

Refuse To Be Afraid, a book by B.W. Richardson with Warren Bluhm, has a target release date of July 15. These are essays and musings springing from Montag and Warren's late, lamented Green Bay Free Radical blog - what you've read before and then some.

And finally, a fourth book has a target release date of Oct. 15. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, this is the freedom novel I spoke of beginning a month ago. In honor of Sunni and the mysterious CK, I have given it the working title of F!#* the Quotidian until it takes a more coherent form. Based on my (lack of) progress to date, this may be the hardest deadline to strike, but I suspect that holding The Imaginary Bomb in my hands, 20 years after first conception, will be a motivating force.

You may have noticed I've set a goal of releasing a new book every three months. Ambitious goals are the only ones worth setting. I can't believe it took me almost 55 years to figure that out.

I wrote a little more about this first book at Sunni's place Wednesday night. Her idea for a Jan. 16 celebration was/is beautiful, and it's heartbreaking that connection problems kept her from participating herself. I have no doubt she'll more than make up for her (physical) absence - I used the parenthetical adjective because she was definitely there in spirit.

One Little Victory

By the end of the month, it'll be a big victory.

More tonight at Sunni's party - I just couldn't resist sharing a little this morning.

Yep, folks, it is what it looks like it is.

B.W.'s Book Report: preview

If you recognize the quotes I've been tossing out of late, you know what I got for Christmas and what I've been reading since a few days after Christmas. I'm just shy of the halfway point.

The last three months or so have sent me through Murray Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right, Frank Chodorov's Out of Step, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, and now this. It has been educational.

It would not be accurate to say that these books have shaken me to the very core. That phrase implies a rattling of my beliefs, an upsetting of the apple cart. Rather, this gives me the sensation of having been previously upset, being a bit lost, perhaps treading water for a very long time, and finally finding land under my feet, a foundation, a grounding, a confirmation of my beliefs.

These books did not shake me to the core, but they have touched my core. More importantly, I am not drinking Kool-Aid here. I do not blindly embrace every concept these three writers have tossed in my direction, but they have put words to thoughts that hovered in my consciousness waiting for the words.

More than three years ago now, something happened in my business life that did shake me to the very core. In many ways I have been drifting in an extended state of shock ever since. These authors have taken me by the shoulders and steadied me. A year after the initial shock, I started this blog. It has kept me sane. Here and there I caught glimpses of what needed to be done; unleashing The Imaginary Bomb in podcast form was the first of a handful of steps in that direction, but I was still shaking. My friends here — you know who you are — patiently helped prepare me to settle down. Rothbard, Chodorov and Rand have settled me down.

And now what? That's a very good question. I have some ideas. I hope to be ready to share such as I can on Jan. 16.

A small splash of cold water

It's an interesting time to be in the media industry - come to think of it, it's always been an interesting time, as in the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." My entire career has been spent waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe I'm a jinx or maybe I picked the wrong industry, because my newsrooms have been frequently haunted by the spectres of efficiency and "this is just a business decision; you understand."

These spectres haunted the electronic media while I was part of it, with mega-mergers making local newsrooms less necessary, especially in radio - if you hook up to a satellite network, what do you need local faces for? In recent years they've lingered over newspapers. A week doesn't go by when some paper or another cites shrinking ad sales, lets some people go or hands out early retirements, and promises to do more with less. I've been fortunate - or maybe not - I've always been among those left behind to do more with less. Strangely, one person never quite can cover as much news as two people can, so we end up doing less with less. Peculiar, huh?

I am ever the optimist, and we recently had a small eruption that spilled over in other places when a commenter was seen (perhaps unfairly) as pouring cold water over my enthusiasm, but I have to caution PintofStout, who wrote in response to my Friday musing:

"I have actually thought about submitting stuff to local papers/websites and trying to swing into the traditional journalism route in order to write for a living."

The problem: We live in an era where more and more media, including local papers and Web sites, are inviting people to provide news tips, write guest columns and submit photographs. It's called community journalism, but the only compensation for all of this content is the joy of having your stuff appear in the newspaper or on the radio or on the Web.

The work of traditional journalists, people who get paid to write and take pictures, has been devalued by this trend. Enough people do enjoy sharing their views and photos that they don't care whether they're paid, and it's great to see more voices in the local paper. I just want to caution PoS and others that you may find that the path to writing for a living is narrower than ever.

The good news is the path has not been closed, and in fact no less an authority than Steve Pavlina has written just this week that working for free is a terrific foot in the door in any endeavor, including writing. Pavlina also has a couple of recent gems about how we're all self-employed and what to do about your conscience when it nags you about your wage-slave job. And the best news is the World Wide Web offers seemingly unlimited opportunities to expose your writing to the world - heck, that's how I got my long-dormant and soon-in-self-print novel out to the world.

So I'm not being discouraging in the end - I'm just cautioning you that the local paper may not be a source of FRNs. On the other hand, it just might - so give it a try. My advice is simply expect the worst so you can be pleasantly surprised when they offer you authentic compensation.

Blowing people up without the residual fuss

Isn't this nice, a bomb with the ability to do nuclear-style damage without all that nasty radioactive fallout stuff. That's sort of what I was shooting for, in a grander way, in my little novel The Imaginary Bomb.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has tested the world's most powerful vacuum bomb, which unleashes a destructive shockwave with the power of a nuclear blast, the military said on Tuesday, dubbing it the "father of all bombs." ...

Such devices generally detonate in two stages. First a small blast disperses a main load of explosive material into a cloud, which then either spontaneously ignites in air or is set off by a second charge.

This explosion generates a pressure wave that reaches much further than that from a conventional explosive. The consumption of gases in the blast also generates a partial vacuum that can compound damage and injuries caused by the explosion itself.

Oh, no. How can "they" have developed a weapon more powerful than what "we" have? Ah, but what's this down near the end?

U.S. forces have used a "thermobaric" bomb, which works on similar principles, in their campaign against al-Qaida and Taliban forces in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

I'm sure it's comforting to someone that governments continue to seek bigger and better ways to reduce people and buildings to dust. It is, on the other hand, a reminder that this is the only thing that governments are really good at.

I don't spend a lot of time checking TV news channels and such, but I haven't heard much about this on the puppet theater. I guess no one wants to give "the masses" something to shake them out of their lethargy and get them worried about what the maniacs in charge are up to. It's the new TV season, after all, doncha know. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - I confess to be looking forward to Sept. 24 and the season 2 premiere of Heroes.)

Just a reminder: They can kill us, but short of that we are still free. If a large number of individuals ever wrapped their minds around that fact, governments would become crippled. That's why they need, well, weapons of mass destruction.

In time for Christmas

Bluhm (my podcast voice and buddy of sorts) and I have been viewing how friends have negotiated the Lulu.com system with some success, and I'm ready to say you'll be able to hold in your hands and read The Imaginary Bomb at long last by the end of this year. Not sure if my deathless prose will go over as well in black and white without the colorful narration, but this project is way overdue. Feel free to talk among yourselves about this Earth-shattering announcement.

A little less certain is whether my Badger friend will complete his own little project, which has the somewhat unimaginative working title of Wildflower Man and Other Short Stories. Of course, the titular short story seems to have a bit of a cult following after it appeared in podcast form during the hiatus between the end of the I-Bomb series and the launch of Uncle Warren's Attic.

UW and I go back a long way, longer than we've admitted in the past. Someday I hope to explain the whole thing, but the nature of my day job requires a bit of discretion. Funny that a guy who subtitles his blog "Refuse to be afraid. Free yourself" would feel restrained in any way. Ah, the ironies of life.

Anyway, I thought you might want to consider tucking away 10 bucks or so per book in case you think owning these little gems would be worthwhile. I'll keep you updated as we work on an actual release date.

Hmmm ... reviewing the above, I may want to polish my marketing skills a tad ...

Free libraries and the RIAA

I had this thought while perusing Eric Flint's explanation of the Baen Free Library, which I discovered while browsing the Get Your Hands Dirty forum, which I really ought to contribute to at some point ...

Aren't public libraries a violation of copyright law as interpreted by the Recording Industry Association of America? I mean, here are people who buy one copy of a book and share it with hundreds and thousands of people, stealing royalties from the authors who otherwise would reap the benefits of selling that book over and over again to those readers.

If we apply the same principle that the RIAA uses to collect fees from radio stations and bars based on how many times they play a certain song, then some book-sellers group should be collecting fees from libraries based on how often each book is borrowed. It only makes sense.

Charging royalties to libraries for sharing books with people who didn't pay for them will make oodles of money for the starving authors, right? Well, no, of course not, and Flint's essay pretty much explains why.

Which reminds me ... this is the reason I've been meaning to post The Imaginary Bomb somewhere, so you can read it rather than listen to Bluhm read it, and then, of course, buy the book. First I have to publish the book, though ... I really oughtta get that done in time for the Christmas season ...

I-Bomb: The 200th download

By most standards of the marketplace, The Imaginary Bomb has not been a spectacular success. The next person to download Warren Bluhm's podcast reading of Chapters 1-3 will be only the 200th since it was posted last May 15. Slightly less than half that number - 87 - have stuck with the story long enough to download Chapter 27, the end of the adventure.

Those stats represent the real reason why I haven't gone ahead with my once-dream of self-publishing a print version, and why I haven't felt motivated to continue the saga of Baxter Hetznecker and his friends, although I did post what I've finished of the sequel, The Imaginary Lover.

Friends tell me the I-Bomb is a fun story, and probably the main reason the podcast barely made a ripple is that I don't know marketing from a hole in the ground. I will gladly entertain suggestions about how to reach a wider audience - send me an e-mail.

On a psychological level, The Imaginary Bomb has been an enormous success. This little novel - more of a novella, really - burst out of my head in an explosion of creativity in the late 1980s, and after making three paltry attempts to attract a publisher, I packed the thing in a cardboard box and left it in the basement for 17-18 years. Only when Warren slapped me upside the head early last year did I agree to take this baby step of exposing my story to the world, but at least it was a step. Instead of continuing to hide my stuff under a bushel basket, I lifted the edge of the basket and said, "Hey folks, take a peek."

Bluhm has since made great strides in home recording - although I should snidely point out that Uncle Warren's Attic hasn't exactly made him a household word, either, even though he is twice the marketer I am (read: Twice nothing is ...) - so we freely admit it's not the greatest podcast novel ever produced, but all of these things aside, I am celebrating the pending 200th download. That's about 190 more people than ever were exposed to the novel before last May 15, so I've expanded my audience by a factor of 20. If I did that every year, I'd be J.K. Rowling before I die, assuming I live as long as my grandfathers did and my father has.

Thanks to all who have sent and even written kind words about The I-Bomb, and if you haven't heard it yet, hey, you could be the 200th "reader" by clicking here - tell me what you think. As Pete Wong might say, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Done. For now.

For folks who were curious about the truncated second installment of my imaginary physics saga but weren't into reading only one chapter a day, the whole unfinished mess is now online, complete with an explanation of where it was going when my creativity shut off.

The whole sordid affair is here; chapter-by-chapter links are here.

I'm not exactly sure where we go from here, or when, but I think I'll be in a position to say sometime this spring. Stay tuned, as they say.