I usually follow politics pretty closely. I stay up on the news and regularly read half a dozen politics blogs and intermittently read a dozen or so more. I get good and aggravated at least twice a week, if not twice a day here lately. And you know what? That shit stresses me out while adding exactly zero value to my life. Then yesterday I heard that the awful Citizens United decision will enable each of the two main presidential candidates to throw A BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS at advertising this year.

Aaaand I’m checking out. I’m already saturated with this shit to the point where I suspect it’s having lasting effects on my blood pressure, and this ill wind blows me no good whatsoever. So, no more politics for me between now and November. There is no minor piece of news or scandal that is going to change my vote. The Republican party has gone absolutely batshit insane, and that’s pretty much all I need to know, unless something of historical proportions happens, in which case it will bubble up to make itself noticed regardless of whether I’ve checked on Andrew Sullivan or Paul Krugman or who-the-fuck-ever that week.

Instead, I will take the time I used to spend tormenting myself with this crap and do something more worthwhile. Like, learn C++. Or Sanskrit.

Jill Elizabeth hath tagged me with a meme. Now, normally, I am a giant sinkhole for memes. Or maybe like the roach motel for memes–they check in, but they don’t check out. What mathematicians and engineers call a “sink.” I regard this as a valuable service to society, because without an adequate number of sinks, the damn things will circulate FOREVER. In this case, though, I figure I’ll mutate the thing somewhat and use it as a way to pass folks along to authors I know.

I know I should be careful about mutating these things–in nature, this is how the flu turns into SARS or whatever. Oh, well.

The meme is: Go to page 77 of your current WIP and post seven sentences from it. Here goes:

“You cut your own strings,” Karyn said.

“Huh?”

“But they’re coming for you anyway.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But his mouth tightened even further.

“Sure,” Karyn said. On the rare occasions she volunteered some information, that’s what everybody said. I don’t know what you’re talking about. They were always lying. She’d learned to let it go. This wasn’t the time, anyway. The hallucinations were starting to get especially vivid, which wasn’t a good sign. A few more hours of this, and I’ll wish I were insane. Actually, I will be, for all practical purposes. She fought the urge to check her jacket pocket again.

Then I’m supposed to tag seven authors, but fuck that. Instead, here are seven authors who you should just go check out regardless of their state of taggedness:

J.H. Sked

Tom Andry

Conrad Zero

Michael Montoure

Andrew Van Wey

Kevin O. McLaughlin

Joseph L. Selby

Enjoy!

One night a week, give or take, I volunteer to teach math to a handful of high school kids. Mostly these are disadvantaged kids from screwed-up families, so they’re arguably the ones falling through the cracks of the educational system. And those appear to be yawning, gaping cracks. In the year or so I’ve been doing this, I’ve learned one hell of a lot about the current state of American secondary education, and it is not pretty. Here are a few observations:

1.) In poor schools, kids aren’t allowed to take their books home. This is not a problem in, say, Highland Park, but it appears to be universal in Dallas area high schools that are not dominated by white kids. The rationale, and it’s tough to argue with, is that the books tend to disappear once they leave the buildings, and the schools can’t replace them. However, it does make it pretty fucking hard to do homework without any reference material. And generally in these schools the process for making copies of things is intentionally Byzantine, to discourage teachers from doing it on the school’s dime. Nice.

2.) These kids are failing upward year after year. I have been doing ninth-grade algebra and tenth-grade geometry tutoring for kids who have to add single-digit numbers on their fingers. How in the fuck do you even get to ninth grade without being able to add seven and nine in your head? And don’t get me started on multiplication tables.

3.) Pursuant to #2, it apparently takes years to recognize when these kids are out of their depth. One of the kids I work with recently got put in special education, where she struggles with figuring out which mathematical operation you need to use in order to, say, figure out how many cans of Coke are in four six-packs. For the six months prior to her change in math class, I was trying to help her with her regular math assignments, such as the slope-intercept formula of a line and the quadratic equation. It was obvious in ten minutes of working with her that she wasn’t prepared for that, yet she stayed in that math class for the better part of a year, and God knows what she was doing in the years prior to that.

4.) Standardized testing is a disaster. For some kids, I’m sure there’s a lot of benefit to learning how to calculate the volume of a cone. For the kids I work with, they will have a job and responsibilities in (in some cases) less than a year, and nobody has taught them how to balance a checkbook, put together a budget, or calculate how much their paycheck will be. Yet school budgets live and die by standardized testing (thank you, No Child Left Behind!), so kids who don’t know how to figure out the end result of taking an 8% payroll tax out of forty hours of work at seven bucks an hour spend all their time learning to navigate the coordinate plane and calculate the area of a fucking parallelogram. What’s my responsibility here? Help them pass their class–which will in turn at least help them get a high school diploma and prepare them for something–or help them with the skills needed to, you know, actually live? I still haven’t figured this one out. Back in my day (walking to school, snow, uphill both ways–you know the drill), these kids would have been in a class we called “Consumer’s Math,” and the next year one called “Business Math.” Neither taught algebra–they were actually useful. (Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE algebra. I like geometry even more, and calculus and statistics send me into paroxysms of joy. But none of that makes sense in this context.)

5.) One hour a week is not enough. It’s hopeless, in terms of teaching these kids math. It could work if I spent an hour a night, but they have other things on their schedules (as do I), and the folks who schedule the volunteers are so goddamn disorganized that it’s a miracle I get in there once a week without some kind of scheduling snafu. (As it is, I occasionally show up and nobody is there, because they changed the schedule and didn’t tell me. Oops.) I’m not teaching these kids math, for the most part. Mostly, I think I’m providing one of the few examples of male role model they have ever encountered, and I’m helping them feel good by being willing to spend time with them. (And, in some cases, I spend half my tutoring time each week talking upset kids down off their “I don’t need fucking math tutoring!” invective and just trying to be supportive.)

I don’t have solutions for any of this (well, except for the standardized testing thing–that one’s obvious), and I’m still thinking through a lot of the issues, even after a year of doing this. But if you have any suggestions, load me up.

Sigh.

There’s an old joke that virtually everybody who’s gone through engineering or physics school has heard. I won’t belabor it here, because it’s not all that funny, but the punchline is, “First, we assume a spherical cow…”

(A Google search on “assume a spherical cow” will net you literally dozens of variations of the joke. Knock yourself out.)

On one hand, the joke is supposed to highlight the absurdity of abstracting away all the important characteristics of something for the purpose of modeling, and boy do I ever get that. On the other hand, though, the nature of modeling is such that, in any given model, something must be abstracted away, or you don’t have a model–you have the thing itself. So the challenge of modeling is to abstract away the bits that are unimportant for solving the problem you’re trying to solve and leave the critical bits, or as Einstein said, a model should be as simple as possible but no simpler. The trick is always to figure out which bits are important or not.

Anyway, I’ve been using a tool for a few years in analyzing politics that I call the spherical politician. A spherical politician is one who really believes that the positions he espouses are the best way for the country to proceed and will be good for everyone–he or she is not corrupt or self-aggrandizing, but really a public servant who has the best interests of the community in mind. His or her proposals may not be the best from some objective standard, but he or she thinks they are. Like, is really convinced, and acts accordingly.

As you can see, a spherical politician bears as much resemblance to an actual politician as a spherical cow does to its real-world bovine counterpart, but it is a handy device for thinking about some things. I’ve been surprised by looking at certain decisions what an assumption of sphericity does. Take Obama’s recent embrace of Super-PAC money. He spoke against that awful Citizen’s United decision when it happened (and with good reason), and yet here he is  a few years later taking the money anyway. Does that mean he’s corrupt?

Well, what would a spherical politician do? A spherical politician who genuinely believes that his policies are the best for the country takes the money, because not getting re-elected will be genuinely bad for the country (in his mind, anyway). It requires no corruption or narcissism to arrive at this result.

So, since I’ve been watching the Republican primary with morbid fascination, it has amused me to try to figure out which of the current crop of candidates are spherical. Here’s what I have arrived at:

Ron Paul: Dude’s a fucking bowling ball, only without the holes. I think he’s genuinely fucking crazy and many of his proposals would be disastrous for the ENTIRE GODDAMN WORLD (see: Abolishing the Fed), but he means that shit, and he’s not in it for himself.

Rick Santorum: He’s pretty damn spherical, too. Kind of like a slightly flat basketball. Or, as The Onion would have it, “..Rick Santorum Believes Every Deranged Word That Comes Out of His Mouth.” He’d be even worse than Ron Paul, amazingly enough, if he ever got elected.

Mitt Romney: HAHAHAHAHA! As I remarked to a friend the other day, Romney is about as unspherical as you can get, without being actually corrupt. If the man has a belief he’s stuck to for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, nobody knows what that is. Other than the belief that he ought to be president, of course. I’m pretty sure he really believes that.

Newt Gingrich: Actually corrupt. By all available data, actively evil. What is the opposite of a sphere?

You’ll note that this type of model has something in common with the spherical cow problem–it doesn’t actually reveal whether or not somebody would be a GOOD legislator or executive, only one potential aspect of that. Sphericity is not enough, which is why all the folks saying, “But he’s so sincere!” back when GWB was president didn’t impress me.

New release – To Rule This Broken Earth is now available in ebook format at the usual outlets:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

Awesome cover art by Renu Sharma.

From the description:

The trouble with the various rulers of the earth is that they’re nearly all wizards, and the trouble with wizards, if you ask Dave Valdman, is that every one of ‘em is crazier than a two-headed ferret. Dave is plenty happy staying beneath their notice, staying on the move, and delivering mail and the occasional cart of potatoes. But when Dave rescues a fugitive priest from the soldiers of an infamous warlord, he is drawn into the kind of conflict he’s spent his whole life avoiding.

The priest, Father John Mallory, knows that war is brewing. As the local despots gear up for a surprise attack on the city of Crosse, Dave is in a position to get Mallory and his knowledge into the hands of people who could save some lives with them. That only draws him deeper into the conflict, and before long Dave finds himself acting as a go-between among the various kings, rulers, and military leaders, desperately employing any stratagem he can come up with to keep his friends alive and the body count low.

Magister Patricia Larsen, the instigator of the coming conflict, doesn’t view herself as a warlord. Her domain lies out at the edge of the habitable lands, in a place where, without magic and sacrifice, the corn grows backward into the ground and the cattle speak in strange tongues. She has united the local wizards to strike at Crosse, in the hope of carving out a livable section of territory for her people. But Magister Larsen’s new alliance is unsteady, and she’s had to partner with some of the nastiest magic users on earth, leaders with their own ambitions and unholy desires.

As the land boils over into war, Dave finds his wit and his loyalty tested to the limits, and Magister Larsen begins to learn the steep cost of trying to rule this broken earth.

I’ve been recording music in one fashion or another for somewhere between twelve and fourteen years. I started in college, almost immediately after starting to play guitar, in order to get song ideas down. My first recording machine was a $12 Kmart cassette recorder that sounded absolutely fucking atrocious, but it got the job done. I was fascinated by the permanent record of a transitory event and the ability to go back and hear what I was actually doing, instead of what it felt like I was doing. I was hooked. A year or so later, my old man gave me his old Fostex four-track cassette recorder, and there was no looking back after that. Since then, I’ve pretty much been responsible for recording every band I’ve ever played with, as well as my own solo activities. Some other time, I’ll probably write up a retrospective of that for my own amusement, but for now I have a different mission.

Gear is the great bugaboo of recording music. Everybody seems to think there’s a piece of miracle gear that will fix all their problems, when really it’s almost all what you KNOW rather than what you HAVE. That being said, I’ve been down some dead ends in the gear department, and there are definitely some things that will make your life way fucking harder than it has to be. I’m not a professional by any means (though these days I record and mix OTB with pro gear), but I’ve worked with enough consumer-grade, professional, and “prosumer” (and oh, how I hate that word) gear, that I’ve got a pretty decent idea of what gives good bang for the buck, and I sure do wish I could go back to when I was starting to do this stuff seriously and give myself some advice on gear.

So, here it is: A short guide to minimizing gear headaches, or What I Wish I’d Known Ten Years Ago. This is not a list for a professional, nor is it a list for a casual hobbyist–it is a list for a stupidly obsessed hobbyist who might make a little money here and there off it, but mostly just wants to make great-sounding music for him- or herself and is concerned about the most reasonable way to do that on a budget. Lots of lists of this nature leave a lot up to discretion: “This might work for you, or this, depending on preference” blah blah blah, but fuck that. Since this is a message to a younger version of myself, I’m just gonna tell it straight the way it works for me.

Here goes:

1.) Record and mix in the box (ITB). That means a computer digital audio workstation (DAW) will be the heart of your studio. I mentioned above that I am currently recording and mixing OTB (out of the box), but that is because I am severely short on time these days, and wrangling with bullshit computer problems is not worth it for me. Plus, mixing OTB is amazingly way better for my workflow. But, for most people, especially starting out, there are a million advantages to using the computer, as long as you have a good D/A and A/D converter and audio interface. As I write this in 2012, there is no sonic compromise to working ITB, or at least none you are going to hear.

2.) Buy a tower for your main studio machine, NOT A LAPTOP. Laptops are underpowered, non-upgradable, and you can’t really open them up and easily fix, say, busted video hardware. And they just don’t have enough room in the guts. I tried a laptop for a while, and it became an octopus, what with two external hard drives, a firewire recording interface, a USB hub, control surface, and other shit hanging off it. And, even though it was custom made for the express purpose of recording, I rode that poor thing into the ground, performance-wise. Get a tower.

3.) Get a pro to build your machine, somebody who specializes in computers for pro audio. There are too many weird conflicts and issues that can crop up when you try to jury-rig a budget off-the-shelf machine to do this job. If, for example, you don’t know whether you should be using TI or Ricoh for your firewire chipset, this is not something you want to fuck around with (TI, by the way. And yes, I learned that the hard way–but see below for one important caveat related to firewire). Get a pro to do it. I like ADK. (NOTE TO THE FTC: I do not work with, work for, receive compensation from, nor even know personally the guys at ADK. I just like their stuff.)

4.) Fuck firewire. Double-fuck USB. To date, USB has not been reliable or recommended for most audio work (some people will argue with me on this score–too bad). Maybe that’ll change with USB 3.0, but I don’t know. Firewire is more reliable for audio work, but I’ve had a lot of grief with it just the same. Typically, it will work fine 99% of the time, and then there will be some goddamn driver or bus conflict from nowhere–one that is totally unrepeatable, by the way–and I’ll get a nice, satisfying POP!! in the middle of my audio stream, even using a zillion-sample buffer. Or some other weird thing will happen that destroys my audio or crashes my session. I have had no difficulties whatsoever with PCI cards designed for audio, all the way back to an Event Gina I used way back in about 2000. These days I use an RME Hammerfall, and it works flawlessly.

5.) For most project studios, you’ll be adding one track at a time, or maybe two. Get the best two-channel A/D and D/A converters you can afford. As of today, you can probably get all the A/D and D/A you can handle for $800-$1000 per channel. More expensive than that, and it’s mastering quality–you almost certainly won’t hear the difference, particularly given the atrocious acoustics of most project studios–but that’s a whole separate friggin’ post.

6.) Get one good large diaphragm condenser. If you’re recording by yourself, probably virtual instruments and direct signals from bass and guitar will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but you’ll need at least one good mic to do vocals, acoustic guitar, and anything else that actually disturbs sound waves before getting to your computer, and it should probably be a large diaphragm condenser. I used a Shure KSM32 for many years before moving on to fancier things, and it’s a damn solid workhorse for the price.

7.) Get one very good pre-amp. This was a relatively recent revelation for me. “Pre-amp?” I thought. “Who gives a shit? The inputs in my Fireface will do just fine.” Jesus, was I embarrassingly wrong on that, and for a long time. A good pre-amp makes a WORLD of difference. That being said, you only need one. The guys who are mixing their API, Neve, and whatever-the-fuck-else pre-amps are looking for a certain special “something” from each, and–take my word for it–it’s too subtle for you to hear. Records were made for a million years with all the inputs going into one desk with the same kind of pre-amp on every channel, and yours won’t suffer if you do the same. I use a Manley TNT, which is God’s Own Pre-amp, as far as I’m concerned, and quite possibly overkill.

8.) Get a decent pair of studio monitors. That doesn’t mean you have to go overboard–the workhorse of the recording industry used to be the venerable Yamaha NS10, which was relatively cheap and everybody agreed sounded like shit. It didn’t matter. The most important thing is to know your monitors. I recommend powered monitors, so you don’t have to fuck around with trying to match the power amp to the speakers, and I recommend avoiding ported or “bass reflex” systems, since they use a bunch of goofy tricks to increase the apparent bass that might result in smearing or inconsistent response. Tri-amped is a great way to go, but expensive.

From casual inspection, it should be obvious that a setup like this is 1) not something that will hold you back, sonically–that is, the gear will never be your limitation, and 2) expensive as fuck. The only balm I have for the latter is a motto I developed for myself many years ago: NEVER BUY CHEAP TOOLS. That was with respect to construction equipment, but the same applies here. Yeah, you can work with shit tools, but ultimately you will regret it. Their performance is sub-par, they will break when you need them, and in the end you will spend more money replacing them than you would have spent just buying good tools up front. Sometimes I’ve had to break the rule, when I really needed something NOW and the cost of a good one was prohibitive–and I have always regretted it, every time, without fail. So say it with me, one time loud:

NEVER BUY CHEAP TOOLS.

Revision is a drag. No two ways about it. It’s usually a lot of tedious mop-up after the initial burst of creativity has worn off. That being said, my books would be shit without it. That mop-up is essential to making anything I write readable.

It can’t be made fun, but it can be made effective. Here’s the patented, time-tested, 5-step process that works for me (your mileage may vary):

1.) Eliminate 75% of the instances of the word “fuck” and its multifarious variations (fuck, fucking, fucker, motherfucker, dogfucker, everfucking, unfuckingbelievable, etc., etc., and so forth).

2.) Go back through and eliminate 75% of the instances of the word “fuck” that remain after Step 1. Upon completion of Step 2 in my case, there will still be too many f-bombs, I just can’t bear to denude my manuscripts any further. I mean, I know–Kill your darlings and all that, but there’s gotta be a line.

3.) Replace all the normal spaces in your twelve billion ellipses with non-breaking spaces. Doesn’t that make you feel better? It makes me feel better. I can’t adequately describe the amount of tension that drains from my spine when this is complete.

4.) Wipe the sweat from your brow and go get a drink. This has been hard fucking goddamn work so far. One more step to go (don’t worry–it’s a super-easy step).

5.) Go back through the manuscript and repair all the plot holes, bad dialogue, screwed-up pacing, cardboard characters, excess description, insufficient description, infodumps, idiot lectures, clunky sentences, logical inconsistencies, outright bullshit, typos, and other shit that is fucking up your manuscript. Especially the typos.

And . . . you’re done! It’s just that easy!

Behold! The Literary Mind Blender reviews The Price! Compares the book favorably to The Dresden Files and gives it a “Love it!” rating.

Interview up on Adarna SF, wherein I talk about the inspiration for writing Voice, some of my favorite novels, and a bunch of my favorite bands, among other random thoughts.

Thanks to Frida Fantastic, proprietor of Adarna SF, for having me!

I have been horribly remiss in updatery here, which I can only blame on a tragic celestial arrangement that brings us closer to the end of the year and does all sorts of perverse things to my schedule. Also, laziness. But! I’ve had a handful of absolutely fucking fabulous reviews lately, so I thought I should divert myself from my end-o’-year frenzy and make note. Here goes:

1. Adarna SF reviewed Voice, and I’m proud to say awarded 5 stars and, more importantly, the praise, “a motherfucking good book.” I can’t ask for better than that, and it’s not like those nice folks toss out 5-star reviews like candy. I think this is only the second one in the entire history of the site. Check out the full review here.

2. Black Sun Reviews reviewed The Price. The proprietor of that lovely website gave Voice a fantastic review a while back and asked what else I had in the works, so I forked over a copy of my latest, The Price. Another overwhelmingly positive review, starting from the first line: “Joseph Garraty is slowly becoming my favorite male author.” Wow! Read the whole review here.

3. Jill Elizabeth gave a fantastic review of Voice a while back–and recently she also included it in her list of Honeymoon Beach Reading books. She put a whole bunch of good books on the list, so I was honored to be in that company (Lisey’s Story, for one–and having my little book show up on the same list as one of Stephen King’s made me smile). See the whole list here.