The Adventure Continues.

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved

I just uploaded my first two novels to Amazon, and I guess that was pretty easy.

And I’m still experimenting with Mobipocket, and fooling around with a website, etc.

Having a minimal background in journalism led me to do some research. It looks like Amazon is not an exclusive publishing contract, and I guess it’s okay to go ahead and do that now. By extension, one would assume the same for Barnes & Noble and other booksellers. And there are lots of booksellers. When you consider those contracts, I can only go as fast as my tired old eyes will let me.

Also by downloading Mobipocket 4.2 Publisher version, I learned how to do it for myself—and knowledge is power. I’ve got a document file with about fifty or a hundred links, and at some point my head was about to explode from sheer data input.

By saving links, I can go back and review the stuff. Repetition will help integrate it into long-term memory. But I built up a pretty good overview.

I can now make clean files that read properly on the Mobi PC Desktop reader.

Basically, I took the original .rtf and converted to a .txt file. Then I put it through the ‘machine.’ On the reader, the original problem was the first few paragraphs were indented, and then nothing. For some reason the .pdf files didn’t work well when used as a source, but that may just have been my own files. You may get a different result. One phone file actually has indents. Huh!

So I fooled around with it a bit. That's all I can really advise anyone to do.

Essentially what you do is to space the paragraphs in your .txt file and this preserves indents; at least for the first few short experiments. I’m not sure if it’s even worth bothering with. At least now I know what to do if required. Right now, the file still has funny things happening with the chapter titles. They’re still all over the place. I may be able to fix it, who knows? I’ll fool around with it some more. My chapter headings are in two lines. Maybe if I combine them into one line, it will work properly.

They look like this now: Chapter One

Over the Hills and Far Away

Just thinking out loud here, but a fairly-clean .prc file will also provide a ‘fairly-clean’ .html file using Mobipocket. All I have to do is go in, clean up the chapter headings…save…maybe use it as the next source file for Mobi? And then clean up the desktop. I seem to be spawning versions at an alarming rate. All this work is probably unnecessary, but I like to have control over the end product. I can sell these versions off my own site, right?

To provide a clean phone-type file, simply remove all formatting! Simply convert to .txt. All you really need here is the title, copyright, the author, the ISBN, (maybe a URL,) a few >>> and then the text. All other info could conceivably go at the end of the book. Bear in mind you have such a small screen to work with. Remove all pictures before conversion. This saves in later problem-solving.

One wonders how many people would read 100,000-word novels on their phone. Demand might be pretty small, but it is a convenience and talking point—you can blog about it. If nothing else, it is part of the training and product-related research. There are file-download widgets, and with upgrades to a website, there is probably a paypal link that goes with it. These phone-type files might sell a few extra copies.

Setting a price is hard, but we’ll let the big guys take care of that.

I tried to buy a book off my small experimental site, but was told, ‘you are logged into the seller’s account.’

(There was only one way to find out and so I did the experiment. Essentially, I can’t buy my own book off my own website.)

In the case of a small website, (and I don’t have a lot of sales experience online;) how do I describe my products? Essentially, all I can do is to study what works for other people! Let’s be honest, few are willing to talk about the earnings. (I prefer not to speculate.)

For some reason I keep forgetting my ISBN password, but that is the least of my worries right now. At some point I read the word, ‘metadata,’ and it kind of boggled me for a while, but honestly, I think I will get through this.

Oh, yeah, in another experiment, I figured out that a .pdf is not the best source for the Mobi, for some reason. When I used a .doc, the cover art showed up and all the formatting was there. I don’t know, maybe it was the .docx file, or the .pdf, and its cover art that was doing it.

When I uploaded to Amazon, I thought nothing of it, but I uploaded those .doc files complete with cover art. I don’t know how that’s going to go, but apparently human beings are involved at some stage of the process. I wouldn’t want a double cover or anything stupid like that. Essentially if that happens I make a new file sans art and un-publish, and then re-publish. (I guess.)

It kind of goes without saying, that I have no idea of what to expect from all this.

And the learning curve continues. A few hours ago, when I resolved to go with Amazon, I did feel a moment of fear, or something.

Somehow I got over it. Anyhow, it’s four twenty-two a.m.

The odds of me falling asleep right now are mighty slim!

Editor’s Note: This story is evolving over time.

An excerpt from, 'The Case of the Curious Killers.'

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved



"When he comes out, follow him every inch of the way,” he ordered the computer.

“Come aboard,” Brendan typed into the pad, then watched as the computer focused a camera on the other craft’s top hatch, clearly marked with a red 'x' by his flight comp.

Boyce would be coming in through the airlock. A small ship like that wouldn’t have a large-scale transport device, he figured. There was a little bungee-corded pocket on the right side of his seat. He put the gun in there so only he would know.

With the Glock snug as a bug in a rug, he watched the suited man, and studied him carefully through the sensors for weapons, any unusually bulky or hard objects on him. He looked pretty clean. Sim just stood there. He seemed to be licking his lips…but he could worry about that later.

"Scat,” he told the kitty, and she boogied for the back room.

“You weren’t kidding, Hartle, a very intelligent animal, why it’s almost as if she could speak sometimes,” babbled Sim.

“Shut up!” blurted Brendan.

“Unlike myself, you mean,” Brendan said into the sudden silence.

Finally the guy was here and Hartle unlocked the door for him. Standing aside he let him pass down the little corridor, closely studying the body language to try to get some kind of a clue, as to the threat level from this guy.

The helmet came off.

“I’m at a bit of a loss,” admitted Brendan, “I don’t know whether to say good morning, or good evening, or what?”

He stuck the butt of a smoke in a bowl he used for an ashtray.

“Normally we say, greetings,” the man said gruffly.

“Okay,” said Brendan non-committedly.

Boyce blanched in a crazy way when he saw the scarf sitting there on the arm of the co-pilot’s seat. Hartle scooped it up, twisted it around his neck and noted a bit of colour begin down low on the man’s neck. It crept up to his face, eyes and forehead, and he took a big deep breath. His white-skinned head and hands turned a pale shade of green. And his chin dropped a bit. Brendan tucked the ends into his shirt-top, feeling like Hugh Hefner, only younger, all muscular and tougher than whale shit. He tried real hard not to smile.

The being tried to compose itself.

“I have come to talk to you about the Princess,” he said; a harsh tone in the voice, but the thing was trying to keep its cool about it. “You are to stay away from her.”

“Oh? Really? And why is that?” asked Brendan, not trusting this guy one bit.

He stood there glowering at Hartle, then spoke again.

“She is not of your class. You are a bumpkin. She is to marry me,” said Boyce.

“Is this true?” he asked Sim.

Sim shrugged.

“Not entirely. There is pressure of a kind upon her to marry, and Boyce’s people have been pushing for a match,” admitted the Sim. “But nothing has been finalized yet, in fact far from it—as you should know, young man.”

Boyce glared at Sim.

“Stay out of this—this is between me and the troglodyte,” barked Boyce.

“He didn’t mean that, Brendan,” said Sim, and Hartle just laughed.

“Sure he did,” he quipped with a gleam in his eye.

Briefly, he considered killing Boyce where he stood, but realized it might create more problems than it would solve. Still, action was required, that much was obvious. He stood to his full height, pulled the Glock out of the seat pocket. He handed the weapon to a startled Boyce.

“Go ahead…make my day.”

Boyce held the pistol tentatively, hand visibly shaking as he looked from one to the other. Neither Sim nor Brendan spoke. Brendan just towered over him.

Brendan stood there calmly, and waited for what might happen next. It was just as he thought. The man was all bluff. He hastily put the gun down on a level spot, watching Brendan with narrowed eyes.

“So…” he said, “I can see I’m wasting my time here.”

Brendan began moving again, to usher the gentleman to the door.

“Stop in anytime,” he told the man, in as friendly a tone as he could muster.

Something clicked in. A gut-busting wrench of adrenaline hit him as he noted the set of Boyce’s head and neck, his shoulders all bunched up like that.

Just like a cat, a fuckin’ cat ready to pounce…

Brendan’s fist shot out straight from the shoulder to its fullest extension, but Boyce was fast, real fast and it merely grazed the top of his right shoulder. He fired a knee with all his might into Hartle’s groin; while not a good hit Brendan began to go over because he hit the co-pilot’s seat trying to back up. But on the way down, he managed to slam a pounding shot into the other’s solar-plexus region.

Bending, Boyce began to turn green again, but started off on a spinning kick to Hartle’s head, and tripped over a carpet seam on the cabin floor and spun into the back wall. Covering up more now, Hartle made it to fully upright again. Out pounced his flicking fist, and a little blue blood began just above Boyce’s left eye. Again the man counterattacked, Hartle began to see stars every time he got hit. Punch for punch he could only take so many hits.

Next time he fell, he coyly stayed down, with head away and ass pointing up at the idiot; and when Boyce got in a little too close to him, he tripped him up good. Perhaps a little too good—Boyce went down hard, striking a glancing blow with his head on a sharp corner. He stayed down, and Brendan had a sick feeling in the stomach. If the man came up again, he would be damned hard to handle. He’d caught the alloy corner framing of the passenger seats.

Sometimes you put a man down, he comes up twice as mad and three times as strong.

Brendan could see that he was still mostly conscious. He sprung on his inert form like a spider, getting a good pin on the fellow. Grabbed the long blonde hair and looked into the eyes.

“You wanna fuck with me mister—you bring some friends next time,” he told Boyce.

Then, slowly, so the other guy could see it, he brought his right fist back and let one go. He stood.

“Looks like he’ll be out for while,” he told the sim.

Sim stood there assessing the damage.

“Cadet, eh? They teach ‘em pretty good down there,” Brendan observed.

“Quite so,” the simulacrum ventured. “He’s also from a planet with about twice Earth’s gravity.”

“In which case I’m a very lucky young man,” noted Brendan.

(Editor's Note: I like stories with a lot of aliens fighting.)

The Acolyte.

by Louis B.Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


Ari closed the door as quietly as he could. He was probably the only inhabitant of the sleazy rooming-house, with its alkies, crack-heads, pot-smokers and retards, who cared about the noise. He kicked his shoes off in the usual place.

He paused long enough to carefully hang his threadbare sport jacket on its peg, where the fog of late-night cigarette smoke, creeping in under the door, would inevitably settle on the shoulders, staining the grey gabardine a sickly shade of juicy, reddish-yellow.

Despite the grittiness of the carpet, and the sticky spot right in front of the couch, some black tar that had seeped in through a hole in the roof structure on a hot summer’s day, he padded around in his socks. Someone in the building was cooking cabbage again.

Soon he was stripped down to his gotchies. Ari stood for a brief moment in gratitude, savoring the cool of the tiny fridge as it pushed out cold air at him. The light briefly lit up the pale, ascetic, and pinched features of Ari Sutherland. The little mirror he used to shave with caught a transient flicker of his eyes. They were his best feature, with their intelligent, sardonic gleam, of an unusual dark brown, with sharp-cornered whites, very clear. He carefully sipped his beer, for he could only have the one tonight. Later. Later he could have maybe three. He took another tiny little sip of foam. Four would be too many.

He would need a clear head in the morning. Ari had somewhere he needed to be, tomorrow.

Ari needed to be somewhere else, somewhere a long ways away, tomorrow…

The brush cut, not the most flattering for a dark, brown-haired young man, had a touch of silver around the temples and sides. With those eyes, the effect was to make him truly distinguished. A glimpse of the man he might become, but it was all fake—a little peroxide rubbed in there once a week and it was totally convincing.

Ari had caught the eye of Marilynn, a tall, attractive redhead who affected the Gothic look, but her natural good fashion sense somehow made her avoid the more extreme options. She made Goth look fresh, and youthful, vital and intriguing, without puncturing herself full of studs, tongue-brackets, rivets, and tie-down rings for long-range trucking.

He grinned at the mental image, but she was very clean-cut, not all tattooed-up in blues, greens and purples.

Momentarily, he felt sorry for her. For both of them. What a sweet, innocent girl she must have been when the Brethren found her. Sensing a lost soul, alone in the big city, with no friends and nowhere else to go, she had quickly set about saving Ari from ‘the way,’ as she so elegantly put it. And she showed him another way. For a moment he thought of her fine, pale white skin. He knew he could have loved her. And yet he didn’t…he couldn’t. He could only use her…

Now he knew it would never happen. There were too many other things in the way.

The final meeting was tonight. He was to be purified, blessed, and baptized. He would become an acolyte, a probationary member of the congregation of the faithful. Ari pulled out the bottom drawer and there, under the black socks, one pair of which he planned on wearing later, the dull gleam of the pine box was revealed. It pulled heavily at his arm.

He carefully lifted it up onto the end of the bed, and sat there beside it, noting that he had indeed latched the door properly, and the bolt was on as usual. He moved the catch, and lifted up the lid to reveal the .44 Magnum, with its speed-loader, and rows of bullets in their sockets, with the spare box of ammunition nestled in its cove, snug in the black velvet. The most powerful hand-gun in the world.

Marilynn had taken him around the chapel, explaining the ‘format,’ as she called it.

Ari and a small group would be going through what sounded like a pretty elaborate ceremony. The cult was known for their deep mysticism, she explained. A figure had walked past the end of the room, past an open door, head down and somehow beaten looking.

That’s when Ari knew for certain, that his little sister Julie was a cult member.

They shouldn’t have done that. One way or another, his sister was coming home tonight. The only thing that truly frightened Ari was the possibility that Julie wouldn’t want to go.

Before even going in there, he knew the plan was seriously flawed.

Time, Physics, and Metaphysics. A Parody.

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved

Max Planck said at certain levels, for example at very short distances, or very high temperatures, under all sorts of unusual conditions; the regular laws of physics just don’t apply anymore.

While most believe that time cannot be changed, sometimes cause and effect don’t mean much because effects sometimes happen before their causes. It is generally believed that the universe is infinite in time. It has lasted forever and will go on forever.

As a philosopher, I find myself defining my terms with ever-greater precision. So one has to ask, what is the difference between infinity and forever?

There are those who believe in creation by God in six days. Some scientists have speculated about a continuous creation. Stephen Hawking described time like an anaconda, one that has swallowed a pig. He likens us to microbes, as if humans were e. coli in the belly of the pig—no matter how far we look, no matter which direction, we will never see anything more than the inside of the belly of the pig. He even speculates that the anaconda might swallow several pigs in succession, each of them traveling down the body of the serpent. It has been speculated that time might run backwards if and when the universe begins to contract back to its point of origin.

No matter what you know about a system today, you have no way of predicting what it will be like tomorrow.

Was the universe created by vacuum fluctuations, where particles appear out of nowhere, and then subside, and energies go back to a zero state, with the universe going on unchanged?

Some speculate there are multiple dimensions in space-time. My favourite is the fifth dimension, but some believe there are nine, eleven, or even twenty-six dimensions, and in truth the likelihood is that there are an infinite number of dimensions.

If a particle appears from ‘nowhere,’ and then disappears again, where did it come from? Where did it go to? Did it come from ‘null-space?’

There is no such thing as empty space. It has been supposed there is some kind of universal frame, a vector rigging field which pervades all of space. The term neo-ether has been used to describe the invisible something that fills the universe. We have to accept the notion that something exists everywhere. Some kinds of data remain forever unknown, for example the proofs of the existence of God. The ontological argument is that God cannot be proven not to exist; so therefore He must exist.

If you put a slot in a bead, and make a moebius strip out of paper, and put a dot of ink on the bead, and then thread the bead onto the strip; you will note that after one revolution the bead is rotated 180 degrees. In order for the bead to return to its original position and orientation, it must go twice around the loop. A geometric circle has 360 degrees, for an electron it apparently has 720 degrees.

A force is that which makes things do things. There are so far only four known forces in the universe. These are the electrical, of which magnetism is a manifestation; then there is gravitation, which is different from magnetism. Then there are the weak and strong nuclear forces. It is theorized that all these forces existed as one super-force in ‘Planck time’ at the moment of creation, which is described in event terms at something like 10 to the minus 54 seconds after the Big Bang.

With the Planck force, there would be more energy than you can safely imagine.

Wormholes have been described and accepted theoretically by scientists. They are about 10 to the minus 33 centimetres in diameter; with a duration of 10 to the minus 43 seconds. You can create a wormhole by heating a volume of space to 10 to the 27th degrees Kelvin or compressing some matter down to the black hole or neutron star densities.

(Don’t try this at home.)

Heisenberg stated the ‘uncertainty principle.’ It is a statement of probabilities, and uncertainties. You know the electron must be there, but you can never say where it will be at any given point in time.

According to the Feynham diagrams, when a particle goes from point A to point B, it splits into two and one of them must being going into a separate universe. Essentially what he’s saying is that a particle can be in two places at once—something even a ghost can’t do. A diagram of all possible paths the particle may take looks like a girl’s braid of hair. Just as when you sprinkle iron filings around a magnet, revealing magnetic lines of force, it has been postulated that there are temporal lines of force.

If you follow the lines of force—i.e. timelines, no problem. If you cross the temporal lines of force, energy builds up and a puncture is made in the fabric of time. At some point there is too great an imbalance in the system, but reality heals the wounds made in itself.

An object crossing time lines builds up potential as it moves. The pull of an object snapping back to its own time would release a huge amount of energy in the space-time continuum or matrix. Hence the mass limitations, which permits only very small objects such as the particles mentioned in the vacuum fluctuations part of our theory. Time is subjective, perhaps even imaginary. Time is closely linked to our perception of it, although many would tell you ‘there is only one moment’ is a fundamental truth. This is the ‘past is gone, the future never gets here’ line of thought. Perception is reality, truth very often depends on who you ask—or who is asking.

If you burn 100g of matter, you may well end up with 10g of ash, and release 90g of gasses, which should be confirmed by Avogadro’s Law. If you put 100 Newtons of energy into a system, you shouldn’t get any more than 100 Newtons out of it. A body at rest tends to remain at rest unless some external force acts upon it.

Does time follow the laws of conservation? One might assume that it does, however, if we know anything at all about the universe, is that ‘anything is possible.’

This may be written as a corollary of Murphy’s Law; “If anything can happen, it probably will eventually,” in a universe where nothing is impossible. If we believe that the universe sprang forth from a singularity, either time existed before it, or it was created at that moment. Also, was space created at this time? Or did it exist previously, therefore giving the new universe somewhere to expand into? If space existed previously, what existed outside of the point of singularity?

If time sprang forth from the singularity, there is no such thing as a parallel universe, they must all be on a slight angle from each other, although there might be an infinite number of alternate universes. Each of these would be reality to an observer encapsulated within them. At one time, philosophy and mathematics were closely linked, but they have tended to drift apart. In a world of increasing specialization, no one has the ‘big-picture overview.’ This is indeed unfortunate.

A friend of mine once went to the library and took out a book on metaphysics. He returned it a day later, and the librarian asked him what was wrong with it.

“The damned thing’s all about religion,” he told her.

Recently Stephen Hawking postulated that the universe might have come into being without help from God. Yet a news report in the last year or two noted that scientists, I think this was at CERN, were looking for 'the elusive God-particles,' which may help to account for the breakdown in conventional physical theories at the quantum or nanoscpoic level.

What if time exists in discrete, 'quanta' or particles, particles which share some of the characteristics of a wave?

Is time a dotted line, and if so, what happens in the gaps?

(Editor's Note: Compiled from sources. Louis really isn't that smart.)

Aliens Better Think Twice Before They Land In My Backyard!

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


Ever since the late 1940’s, there have been a large number of UFO reports by individuals who appear to sincerely believe that they have witnessed alien spacecraft. (Refer to Project Blue Book, or the million UFO videos on youtube.com; etc.) They're, 'firmly convinced' they've had a real experience.

Some have claimed abduction. A few photos exist which, while not exactly defying analysis, cannot be clearly proven as hoaxes.

It is not my intent to state with certainty whether or not alien spacecraft have indeed visited our lovely planet.

There is little doubt that people have, on occasion, seen lights in the sky that cannot be readily identified. And it’s true that some photos and amateur films are quite provocative.

It should be noted that what one wants to see often appears and, of course, those who are capable of taking things on faith have a predisposition to believe with little material evidence.

I myself have seen things in the night sky, which I could not immediately identify. Having a reasonably good imagination, it was enough to make my hair stand on end.

Later, I decided it was probably tundra swans, lit from below by the lights of the cty. It seemed obvious that they were traveling at 40 knots; at an altitude of maybe 1,000 feet, and not a squadron of UFO’s in echelon formation, doing 120,000 mph 90 mlles up.

Yet I can’t say for certain that they were swans either – really just pale, amorphous blobs that seemed to flicker and shimmer in their silent path o’erhead, going north in early spring.

My point is this: If in fact aliens have visited this planet and are in the process of studying our culture for scientific or other reasonable purposes, then let them do it properly. They should send an embassy to the United Nations and establish their credentials. They should reveal themselves if their purposes are legitimate and honourable. I suggest this for their own safety and convenience. (Ours, too.)

Because otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, it's war. We have the right to know who's on our planet.

Identify yourselves and your place of origin.

What is your business on this planet?

Do you have anything to declare?

Are you bringing any meats, fruits or vegetables, or exotic animals onto the planet?

How long are you staying? How much money are you carrying?

We have the right to know these things, I can assure the reader of that.

Honestly, the aliens are better off to cooperate.

Because until then, if I can’t sleep one night, get up at three a.m. and see a bunch of bleepin' aliens traipsing around in my backyard, I swear I'm gonna pop a God-damned arrow into one of them. No questions asked. They're there at their own risk. They've been studying us long enough to know better, that's what I'm saying.

One night back in 1998, when I was living in Port Franks, Ontario; I saw three lights in the southern sky, about ten degrees above the horizon. First, one appeared. Then another behind it, and then another. The group slowly spread apart, then the delta formation stabilized. The trio of bluish-white dots cruised across the night sky in a northeasterly direction, covering about sixty degrees of the sky, then silently faded out. The whole process took maybe 20 to 30 seconds.

What really ticked me off was the thought of them up there looking down at me…and laughing.

Yep. If I ever get my hands on one of them little guys (or if you prefer, 'gals.') I’m gonna throttle them.

The body of an alien could be worth billions. Then I’d really be somebody.

And it’s all nice and legal. There is no law against murdering aliens for profit, is there?

I mean let’s face it. Aliens were not created in God’s own image and obviously they have no souls to worry about. I’m just, 'a good capitalist.'