Hello friends,

Here's a long-overdue update on where things stand on my novel-in-progress Creation Science. I'm making progress on it, but obviously not as rapidly as I had envisioned or hoped. Here's some context.

Last autumn I sold the rights to my first novel, Acts of the Apostles, to Underland Press, a new, small, high-quality printing house. As part of the deal, I agreed to revise the book under the direction of Underland's editor-in-chief. Well, that turned out to be a pretty major undertaking. Said editor wanted me to eliminate some characters & related sub-plots, beef up some other characters and make some new connections between them, change some venues. . . in short, write a new novel based on my original book. Which I now have done. Yesterday I sent the editor what I *hope* is my final version of the book. She will make some edits, I'm sure, but I feel confident that my part of the work is essentially done. I think it will be a great book, and who knows, with a "real" publisher behind it, maybe it will get some traction. I think it's a great thriller, even if it has less of the quirkiness of the original Acts of the Apostles. But man, what a lot of work.

That's great, you say. But what does that have to do with me? I gave you money to work on Creation Science, not Acts of the Apostles.

The problem has been twofold: between working on the rewrite of "Acts" and whatever "day job" work I've been able to find in these hard times, I've found it difficult to find time and energy for Creation Science. I have been working on it, but not, I confess, "flat out." And the second reason is that the stories kept bleeding into each other, or rather, the two versions of Acts of the Apostles kept bleeding into Creation Science, with the result that Creation Science kept trying to be nothing more than yet *another* version of Acts of the Apostles--with a diabolical villain, bioterrorism, an unlikely band of Scooby-Doo misfits who must overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to save the day, etc. But I don't want to write that book again -- I've rewritten Acts about a million times since 1995, and I can't bear to do it again -- and moreover I don't think you signed up to support me in order to get a warmed-over Acts of the Apostles. You want something new, and great, and that's what I'm trying to write for you.

I do apologize for the delay. But I'm just trying to put food on my family, as the saying goes, so I've tried to make the best of the opportunities presented to me even as I am trying to honor my commitment to you.

So let me tell you where I am on Creation Science.

The book does deal with my same old preoccupations. On the literal level the plot involves the convergence of biological and digital technologies, corporatism, religious fundamentalism, nasty bad guys, complicated good guys, betrayals, misunderstandings, and all that good stuff. Hackers too. And scientists and Russian mafiosi. So the title "Creation Science" refers to both the ab-initio creation of new life forms, and to the religious fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of the biblical creation myth. Also, as with my "Mind over Matter" trilogy (Acts, Cheap Complex Devices, & The Pains, considered as one work), there is a metafictiony aspect to Creation Science, where I kind of investigate the whole idea of where stories come from, and whether we can create a science of (artistic) creation. So the title Creation Science has at least three meanings. The book takes place mostly in Boston and on Martha's Vineyard, with a decades-old backstory, Cryptonomicon style, set in central Africa. So that's all well and good, but I had a lot of that in place when I came to you via kickstarter asking for your financial help to finish the book almost two years ago. What have I been up to since then?

What's new, what I've been working on, is the storyteller's voice, the point of view. I've wrestled with this a lot, and I've found an approach that's got me pretty jazzed. I hope you like it too.

Creation Science is now a first-person story, told from the point of view of one Albert Joseph Compton, jr., a mixed race (mostly native American (Cherokee & Wampanoag) with some admixtures of African & European) young man, originally from Tribal lands in Oklahoma, who winds up on Martha's Vineyard due to an unlikely, but not totally implausible, set of circumstances. He is a smart, friendly, funny fellow, but his outsider status makes him detached and skeptical about just about everything. His interest in science and the (Greek/Latin) classics set him apart from his childhood friends on the reservation, his ancestry and personal history set him apart from the "mainstream" & wealthy society he finds himself thrust into in Massachusetts, and his skepticism sets him apart from his extended family  -- what little family he has -- who are all fervent creationists.

Albert, by the way, is named in honor of a dear childhood friend of mine who had a personality much like his namesake's. My friend Albert, a graduate of an Ivy League university, was murdered in a holdup in Atlantic City twenty years ago while working in a liquor store in a bad neighborhood there. (How the hell did a smart guy with an Ivy League degree wind up working in an Atlantic City liquor store? Life's funny twists and turns, improbable, but not totally implausible. . .) Because Albert's family moved away from my home town when he was in 7th grade, he and I wrote letters to each other. For years. A *lot* of letters. I still have his, and am using them as source material for the book.

From the moment Albert starts to tell his story, the first sentence on page 1, you will know that you are listening to a yarn, or, if you will, a saga. Albert references the Greek and Latin myths; he uses fancy, literary language, he exaggerates, he contradicts himself. And although he skips forward and back in time, the story he tells is a conventional one, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with good guys and bad guys, a protagonist with a challenge, and so forth. Thus there is a meta-fictiony aspect to the story, but it's not as in-your-face metafictiony as, for example, my book Cheap Complex Devices. The metafiction comes mostly in the form of the literary allusions, which remind you that you're reading a story. If I do my job well, you can either ignore or pay attention to this aspect of Creation Science, depending on whether you go in for that kind of thing. Anyway, to set your expectations, on the literary fancy-pants scale, I expect Creation Science to come in somewhere between Cryptonomicon and Gravity's Rainbow, but much closer to Cryptonomicon.

Now that, I do so dearly hope, my novelist work on the new Acts of the Apostles is done, I'll be concentrating all my novelist efforts on Creation Science. I'm going to try to stay out of the "when will it be done?" business, since I have such a terrible track record. But I do promise that I'm working hard, and I'll try to be much better about the updates.

Friends, backers, generous souls:

I am going to finish writing this book. It's going to be good.

But I feel bad that it's taking me so long to do it: if you're getting this note, it's because you put cash up front. You're entitled to a accounting as to why you don't have your copy of Creation Science yet.

I really had hoped and expected that you would have had the book in your hands (or on your electronic reader) long before now. Alas, I haven't finished writing it yet. I still have a pretty long ways to go; a few months at least.

Three things have slowed me down:

1) the usual wrestling with the story that most novelists experience. Every time I think I know where the book is going it seems to go, or to want to go, someplace else. I do feel conflicted about this, when the book goes off in some new direction, usually an unsatisfactory one. Part of me says "just keep writing, don't worry about it." And part of me says "Well, this is crap. You're going to have to do better. This simply isn't good enough. Go back and start again."

I don't want to be prissy, precious or perfectionist and neither do I want to keep rewriting the book forever. But I don't want to give you a lousy book, a mere rehash of Acts of the Apostles. I'm trying to write my best book yet. It's hard. It's always harder than I think it's going to be. I do console myself with the knowledge that my experience is not atypical for novelists, and that taking two years to write a thick, good, book is not unreasonable. But I feel a bit stupid that I thought I had it figured out, that I thought it would be easy to take the basic chapters & outline I had a year ago and turn it into a good book quickly. I should have known it would be a bitch kitty.

2) Technology is changing too fast, and I cannot slow it down! I went to the IGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) Jamboree at MIT a few weeks ago, and it was both inspirational/exhilarating and scary/depressing to see how fast the field of synthetic biology is changing. I went to a bunch of presentations on work that would have merited Nobel prizes twenty years ago, but which merely get a nod today. And this is work being done by undergrads, on four-month projects. It really is mind-blowing. Every time I think I've invented something scary and just-over-the-horizon, it turns out that some smart bunch of kids somewhere has already done it. Being topical and "cutting edge" is harder than it used to be. Or so it seems to me.

3) The Real World has raised its ugly head. In all candor, my financial situation is not great; in fact it's horrible and scary. My last full-time paycheck was in November, 2007. So, unavoidably, I've spent much of the last year looking for work and doing the work whenever I found it. This circumstance has sapped both time and energy from Creation Science.

It's been one hell of a recession, let me tell you. Work has been really hard to come by -- or at least it has been for me. But there are signs that things are opening up (I won't say more so as not to jinx anything.) But the point is, Creation Science has had to take a back seat. I do think that's changing now; I hope so. (I'll give details as soon as I can).

Anyway, I do assure you that I'm working on this novel. that I am doing my best to make it my best book ever, and that I hope to have more news to report to you soon.

Until then, happy Fall/Winter holidays to you, and I hope you'll be happy with the end result.

Regards,

jrs

Hello Friends,

I still have not posted my draft documents to a common locker as I've been promising to do. This post from Jeff Vandermeer helps me explain why: http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/05/07/the-anatomy-of-a-novel-finch/

It seems that like me, Vandermeer -- a writer I greatly admire, by the way -- works on novels by writing longhand in various notebooks, sheets of paper, index cards, etc, and by typing things up on his computer. Eventually, of course, he types everything up in convenient novel format. It looks chaotic -- and in my case, anyway, it is chaotic -- but at the end of the process, one does (I hope) end up with a book.

In writing Creation Science I've tried to be more orderly and deliberate. But like Vandermeer, I keep falling into my habitual mode of writing & making notes longhand on whatever surface is handy or seems appropriate at the time. I've done it this way for Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices and The Pains -- and also for just about everything else I've ever written, from Salon essay to technical manual.

And of course, I'm continuing to revise the story (outline) -- hopefully making it better at each pass. I always think that I've got it nailed down, but then when I go back and look at it later I find things that need fixing. I'm not an OCD perfectionist (as evidenced by the fact that I've published three works of fiction); I do feel like I am converging and that the chapter outlines are good, and certainly much more detailed than any outlines I've worked from before.

But I'm still in notebook/note card/napkin mode, so I don't have much to share with you yet. Stay tuned. . . and I do promise to be more regular with these updates from now on. . .

Hello Friends,

Just a brief update on Creation Science.

In my last project update, I told you that I was wrestling with the whole problem of narrative voice and "point of view". I said that I was considering omniscient narration & the alternative, more conventional approach of having a limited number of points of view.

Well, I've surprised myself by going with first person narration.

The story of Creation Science is told from the point of view of Albert Joseph Compton, Jr, a somewhat morose disaffected outsider of mixed race -- part Cherokee, part Wampanoag, part European & African -- who winds up on Martha's Vineyard kind of laying low after finding out scary things about the bioterrorism lab in Boston.

For backup & accessibility, I'm keeping the draft chapters & notes on dropbox. You won't be surprised to learn that they're in a kind of chaotic state.

After I've put them in some kind of order and finished revising the first chapters I'll send out a link to my editorial committee -- promise. Soon. No later than a week from Friday, that is, no later than April 16.

You'll need to get an account on dropbox.com to read them, so if you're on the editorial team & are interested, please get yourself an account with dropbox.com.

In haste, with appreciation as always,

jrs

tomorrow.

I mailed out books today to everybody who pledged for the "one-and-one" prize. Acts of the Apostles was the most requested book, followed by Cheap Complex Devices and The Pains. It was a pretty good pile of books. The clerk at the Post Office suggested I look into getting an account so I can print labels and stamps at home. Yes, I should do that. Somebody remind me, please.

Tomorrow, dog willing, I'll send out sets of books to those of you who ordered the complete "oeuvre" -- my three already-published books.

Stay tuned for an update on Creation Science. I'm working on it; I like how it's shaping up. I hope to have a reasonable update ready by the weekend, if not sooner.

Sorry for the light posting; it's that busy time of year. But I do assure you, I'm working on it.

Happy Thanksgiving & After

On one of the more obscure public diary sites where I hang out, I wrote, a little while ago, Some lessons & reflections on Kickstarter. It contains a little laundry list of things I think I did right and wrong during the fund-raising portion of this project. In the comment thread I had occasion to link to a little blog post I wrote some while ago, Through Keanu, Darkly, to which my friend Kellnerin replied, "You, know, that's the kind of thing you should have reposted to your Kickstarter diary." Great. Now she tells me. Also in that thread I described, to a fan of Acts of the Apostles, the kind of book I intend Creation Science to be:

I will try to make it a page-turning thriller of the "Hey, I can just imagine Keanu in the lead role!" variety. Or even, "Hey, I can imagine Matt Damon in Jason Bourne mode in the lead role" or whatever. So it will be pretty much straight-ahead.

I don't think I can totally turn off the moderny/post-moderny thing however; that's just part of who I am. But there was that kind of stuff in Acts too, and nobody even noticed it, much less complained about it.

For example, in there's a scene in Acts when Nick meets Monty & Monty tempts him which is patterned nearly line for line on the scene in Matthew where the devil tempts Jesus. I did a lot of that in Acts, but like I said, nobody even much noticed.

In my other two books, that kind of literary fancy stuff ran wild. So I'm definitely going to reign it in in Creation Science. But there will probably be some of it, somehow or other.

I'm a bit occupied with family stuff and house winterization activities at the moment, but within the next week I expect to be neck deep in writing Creation Science. I'll posting a weekly summary of activities here, and for those of you who opted for the "watch it grow" prize, please stay tuned. I'll figure out a way to make the sources secure and accessible soon & you can keep an eye the project from there. Meanwhile, here's the little story about Keanu, lifted from my blog.

Through Keanu, Darkly
I saw A Scanner Darkly the other night in a giant, un-airconditioned, run down, smelly theatre in Burlingame, California. It was affected, disaffecting, funny, intriguiing, and depressing. And that was just the theatre. Wait 'til you hear about the movie.

Well I'm an ostensibly technoparanoid guy and my little corner of Wetmachine is an ostensibly technoparanoid site, and A Scanner Darkly is a Philip K. Dick story, right? And PKD is the patron saint of technoparanoaics, right? So, naturally. . . um. . . whatever. Or in other words, ergo. . . kumquats. Hey, are those aphids crawling out of you? What was I saying? I think I was going to say something about the movie, but, I mean, what do we really know about reality, anyway? (Other than that, y'know, giant, smelly run-down theatres smell a lot smellier when the air conditioning isn't working. (I mean, they do, don't they? Don't you agree? When it's all hot and you think you're going to suffocate in a nearly empty hall the size of a NASA hangar? (And will you kindly keep those aphids to yourself?))).

So at work the next day some guys were chatting across the bullpen. Now, I work at Laszlo Systems, creators of OpenLaszlo, and the guys & gals I work with are ubergeeks. They're the sharpest software developers I've ever worked with, and I've been in this biz since 1980. Which is to say, my fellows are part of the prime target audience for cyberpunk movies, which Scanner Darkly kinda is. Not as cyberpunky as The Matrix, mind you, but moreso than "Speed", with Sandra Bullock. So they want my verdict on the film.

"Well it's got Keanu in the lede role," I starts. . .

"Ugh," says Scott.

"Keanu!" says Adam, joining the conversation from about ten yards away.

"I can't believe you're such a Keanu fan," Scott says. "You're serious about that."

"I am"

"And you studied film at Harvard."

"I did." (Adam is one of those annoying universally brilliant people. He's a world class software designer who studied film in college. Taught himself programming on the side. . .) "I think Keanu is the best actor of his generation."

I observe that since Keanu stars in every cyberpunk movie ever made, maybe it's impossible to make one that does not star him. In other words, maybe it's not just an unwritten law of Hollywood that you cannot make a cyberpunk movie that does not star Keanu Reeves. Maybe it's a fundamental property of the universe, like the speed of light or Plank's Constant or something. Adam and Scott are too busy arguing about Keanu-as-actor to take any notice of my new (and I think quite insightful) hypothesis about this fundamental property of the universe.

"He was perfect as Neo", Adam says.

"Perfect as a two-by-four" Scott says. Scott is busy writing code as we're having this conversation. He's typing a mile a minute.

Adam meanwhile stands up and puts his hand out directly in front of him, like Neo stopping the bullets. Adam is wearing Neo-style shades, natch.

I say something about Keanu being like Bogart. Bogart acted like Bogart, not like a real person in the world. Yet he often was perfect in his roles. Meanwhile Adam and Scott have changed gears and are having a mini code review by proxy. Scott is verbally serializing some data structures across the room; Adam is catching and responding.

Anyway, I liked Scanner Darkly a lot, but cannot give it an unqualified recommendation. First of all, it's about drug addiction. It's also about technoparanoia and all that other patented Philip K. Dick stuff about the nature of reality and so forth, but fundamentally it's about drug addiction, and drug addiction in this movie is presented honestly. It can be interesting to watch people's minds and lives fall apart; it can have its funny moments too. But it's really, really depressing.

Two other comments: I think the rotogravure animation was a mistake. Not a bad mistake, but a mistake. And also, Robert Downey's performance was brilliant. I'm going to see the movie again just to watch it. Some snotty reviewers -- several that I've read, actually -- have tsk-tsk'd about how over-the-top his scenery-chewing performance is. (Note to self: what are these same critics saying about Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow?). I wonder if these people have never been around anybody who's really smart and also stoned and tripping? Well, anyway, I loved Downey in this movie. And I loved Keanu too. And Winona Ryder too. Well, everybody was good in this flick.

The theatre added to the verisimilitude, but you can get nearly the same effect without it, I expect, so you can skip that part.

Trying to figure out how this video upload thing works. . . pardon me while I attempt to join the 21st century. . If you see a video here, that means I figured out how to post it. If you don't, then please ignore the interruption. . .

Happy birthday, me. For your present you get to contemplate how 115 people have pledged a total of more than $7,200 to support you in your novelistic endeavors. IF that doesn't make you feel pretty special, than you've got problems bigger than we suspected.

But no, wait! It does make me feel special! Hooray! Thank you, all Creation Science backers! What a wonderful gift you've given me. I feel so loved, aw, gee.

In looking back over the last month, I see that while I've been successful in reaching out to lots of people, there are still a dozen things left undone on my Kickstarter "to do" list. It's a lot of work to reach out personally to hundreds of people. Had I to do it over again, I would probably put a little more time into video updates about he book itself and a little less time into trying to get some "big name" people I know to support me with a tweet or a blog post. Jeffrey Zeldman is a pretty big name in the web-design world, an "influencer", as they say, and he has been an enthusiastic and generous promoter of this effort & has certainly brought me some readers & backers. But none of the 15 or so other similarly prominent people I know have even answered an email, and I really pretty much knew before hand that they wouldn't. So why did I pester them with follow-up messages? Making a few quick update videos would probably have been a better use of my time.

But the thing is, you never know until you try. I've received generous backing from people upon whose s*** list I thought I was on. Other people who have been enthusiastic fans and supporters in the past, who've written glowing reviews, etc, have not (yet?) signed on.

And of course, there are among the 115 backers we have so far dozens of people whose names I don't recognize; new friends. Welcome!

Any help in rounding up any nearby strays and corralling them into the pen in the remaining 15 hours or so will be much appreciated.

I wanna be sedated.

Well, not really. Contrariwise actually: I want to stay up all night and pimp this beast.

Hope you'll do likewise, and I THANK YOU ALL, Freddy Mercury style.

Remind me in the morning, tomorrow morning, to tell you about the Frank Zappa angle in Acts of the Apostles, and more importantly about his line about recording the song that's hard to play.

Peace out, friends. And pimp this dawg.

One love.

jrs

Check out the newest addition to the rewards: a 3-day vacation as guest of me and my Dear Wife at our home on Martha's Vineyard.

Yes, I know I said I was trying to figure out a way to attract lots of donors at lower dollar amounts, and this prize is pricey.

However, for the money, it's quite a good deal! Please spread the word on this one.

An old friend and new Creation Science backer writes,

"Living in Boston. Actually working on a bioterrorism-related project:
[redacted]. We use machine learning and text mining algorithms to
detect disease outbreak signals on the internet. V. sci fi. Can we get
a fictionalized appearance in the book? That'd be sweet."

My answer: FREEK YEAH, YOU CAN!

Anybody else out there who has potential material or ideas, please speak up: that's part of the whole kickstarter idea, init? (as we say in fake Cockney, because we've heard it on television).

Well, with five days or so left to go & with the balance standing at $6.3K or so, I'm afraid I'm not going to dally long to chat. Like the proverbial politician who has no time to legislate because she's so busy raising money so she can get re-elected to another term when she'll be too busy to legislate, I'm off to track down friends and media contacts and random passers-by to see if I can enlist their help in this project. THANK YOU MAJORLY to all who have backed the effort so far. I appreciate the money and I appreciate the vote of confidence. Thank you. The money raised so far is a great start, I'm very grateful, but it's not enough to see me through this project, to which I'm now morally committed. So, off I go to hustle, hustle, hustle. No time to say hello, goodbye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.

Special thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman, jabberwock, Sarah Allen and ptw for their blog love.

This is the way the world works: "matey learn matey." (That's old Hawaiian pidgeon for how Hawaians learned English: each crew mate on a ship taught his other mates what he knew of the language.)

And so, mateys, please continue to learn your mateys about this project. Spread the word in person, in tweets & blogs and facebook and whatever.

I'll do my best to write a story worthy of your efforts.

This morning I have another practical exam in my effort to become certified "firefighter 1". Today's subject matter: hoses. I've taken three 1.5 hour classroom classes on hoses and water supply, and one 2.5 hour practicum (dressed in full firefighter gear, doing stuff with hoses at the station). It's interesting. Who would have dreamed there would be that much to learn about hoses (and couplings and nozzles and pressure and flow)? Not me.

So today I have to go to the Tisbury School, get dressed in my full PPE (personal protective equipment) and demonstrate that I know how to hook up hoses, advance attack lines up a ladder, etc, etc.

What makes the subject complicated is friction loss. Because of the friction encountered by water as it moves through the hose, you can get a lot less pressure at the nozzle than you pumped into it at the engine. Is the solution then to just increase pressure at the pump? Maybe yes, maybe no. You have to be careful not to burst your hose by overpressuring it, or to blow up your pump! Because friction loss is proportionately so much greater in an attack line (1.75 inch diameter, for example) than in a supply line (3 inch, for example), you want to bring the supply as close to the scene as you can.

Even if I don't miss a single class, getting certified will take 1.5 years (I have .75 year to to). I can still do lots of useful stuff at a fire scene without certification (I already have)-- but I won't be allowed within the collapse radius of a house on fire. I'm determined to get that certification.

What does any of this have to do with Creation Science? Nothing at all. I just think it's interesting & thought you might.

Ten days to go! Please, please continue to ask your friends to consider pledging a buck or two to keep momentum going.

And finally: the St. Jerome mystery deepens (see my earlier posts on this). I looked closely at the Poughkeepsie St. Jerome by Van Cleese and compared it with my post card of the Harvard painting, and while they're clearly painted from the same plan, they're not the same painting. The easiest way to see the difference is to look at what's out the back window. In one, it's a tree, in the other it's a field. I much prefer the Harvard instantiation; it's got a much more bewildered-looking saint.

I promise to update you more on the actual novel I'm writing Real Soon Now.

First, a disturbing discovery. According to teh internets, that St. Jerome picture I wrote about the other day now resides at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie! The Horror! I was just planning a trip to Cambridge to see it again. When the hell am I ever going to get to Poughkeepsie??

But on to happier news. Creation Science has just passed the $5k goal, and unless there's some "backslidin'" among my backers, I'm home free & will collect your pledges on November 17, my birthday. Hooray!

So a great big THANK YOU! to all who have pledged so far. Thank you very much.

It would be nice to have a little cushion, however.

The hard part now will be reaching out to get more backers now that the goal has been reached. People will have a natural tendency to say "oh he's OK; he's hit his mark; no need for me to chip in just yet." Not to mention, I've already reached out to a good portion of my friends and family; the challenge now will be to reach out to people I've never met.

My next update will be a little bit more about the book Creation Science itself, which I trust will be more generally interesting than talk about my fundraising efforts. But I couldn't very well let this milestone go unremarked. So thank you to everybody, and a particular shout-out to my friend & high school classmate Peter Reilly, who reached deep into his wallet for a generous pledge to put e over the top.