I’m going to talk about something you can get for free, so be sure to read to the end. Or skip to the section marked FREE. 

In 1989 I read my first cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive. That novel got me reading science fiction again. Until then, I’d been on a Fantasy bender for the six years, and yes, you can get drunk on fantasy. My apologies to my brother and sister, for making them dress like hobbits and forcing them to call me The Great One. They partied like ewoks on Endor when I moved out for college.

Cyberpunk is considered an old genre (the cool kids are doing steampunk) but it appeals to the mundane science fiction reader in me. It’s mundane because Cyberpunk has similarities to reality, such as the absence of spaceships flitting from star to star at speeds faster than light (at least OUR spaceships). Cyberpunk stories are near future and filled with high-tech lowlifes. It’s a good genre for tales of “warning” because it’s mundane enough to see how our day-to-day life contributes to the tale’s vision.

What’s Hawaiian cyberpunk? Sunglasses and surfboards with datajacks? (Might as well do something with that leash around surfer’s leg.) Honolulu Hottie is my take on it. It’s a novelette which is like a novel but a third of the size because I only kept the good parts. The story’s about Nafi, a world champion surfer who got a regular job but get’s seduced by a political activist. She gets him in trouble, he loses his job, and they’re on the run from a corporate coverup that requires them dead. Surfboards, datajacks, crime, and poy. You know, Hawaiian cyberpunk.

Free to Blog Subscribers

(if you’re not a subscriber, subscribe by entering your email address into the upper right corner of this webpage and you’ll get an ARC)

Honolulu Hottie is live on the Kindle for $3.00 to the worldwide public. If you’re subscribing to this blog for email service, you’ll receive a free copy. In the publishing industry, we call this an Advanced Reader’s Copy, or ARC, meaning you get it in advance of the public. You’ll receive in your email a Honolulu Hottie ARC.mobi and a Honolulu Hottie ARC.prc file which you can load onto your eReader device. The Amazon rep on the phone told me that they don’t support their Kindle users–no matter what device–loading .mobi or .prc from anywhere outside of the Kindle store. So they aren’t being helpful. But Amazon does offer a free Kindle Previewer application that you can install on your Mac or Windows computer. You can download it from here (windows, osx) or from Amazon. All you have to do is launch the Kindle Previewer, then drag-and-drop the .mobi file into the application (or file->open the .mobi file).  Other free options are:

• Calibre, but they don’t handle the page breaks in the Kindle book so I don’t recommend it.  It’ll work, but some of the material before the story starts gets jumbled and that’s not very pleasant.  But it will display the nice custom fonts I used. (See the thumbnail to the right.)
• If you use a mobile device or Windows, you can use MobiPocketReader.  To bad they don’t have a version for OSX.

Since I want you to enjoy the story rather than fiddle with technology, I suggest you go the Kindle Previewer route.

Available in the Kindle Store

Those with a generous heart may hesitate to accept a free e-book, but it turns out I have a lot to gain: Your love of course. That’s ever in the fore of my mind. And your undying gratitude. That’s cool too because anything that doesn’t die has to be pretty damn cool. Most of all, I’m after your review of Honolulu Hottie on Amazon because a Kindle book without reviews is a lonely Kindle book indeed. So take a look at your ARC (on the Mac reader, drag-and-drop the .mobi file; for the PC, I imagine you do a file->open and load the .mobi; if you have a Kindle reader, plug it into your PC and copy the .mobi file to it; for the iPhone, I couldn’t do it so maybe some smart person will post a comment on how this is done) and then follow this link to Amazon and tell the world what you think in as few or many words as you want.

I’ll close with a surfer’s farewell: if you decide to ride that giant swell cresting the horizon, remember to keep the waxy side of the board up, the fin side down, and your datajacks rust free.

The real life situation was cliche enough for a movie (I’ll talk about the movie later):
An actor who played in cowboy movies was president of the US and was insinuating that the next toughest country was evil. Both sides had the firepower to destroy the world many times over. But then a movie came out on ABC and changed everything. A movie that produced a “what if” vision so terrifying that the US government and people started to carefully think about the consequences of attempting to destroy those they called evil.

Check out Alexander Veer’s writeup about how the movie The Day After changed everything in a powerful wave of activist science fiction.

It was 2009 (late) before I started watching the animated series Star Wars Clone Wars.  The show had been running for a few seasons already.  In fact, the animated series has been imagineered in a few different flavors: a movie released to theatres, a Cartoon Central TV series, and an Adult Swim styled cartoon movie.

Frankly, Lucas Films has made it an organizational mess.  It took me a few hours of IMDB, Wikipedia, and Google research to figure out what there was to watch and in what order to watch them.  Here is my rescription for catching up in four steps.

Step 1, watch the live action movies

The first two movies are the setup for the cartoons. Their names are: Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith.  If you are a very orderly person, you may opt to not watch episode 3 until you do steps 2-4.  But I’m not very orderly so I recommend  watching the live action movies first, and because sometimes it’s nice to know where a character is headed, and then watch that character at an earlier time and see how he struggles along that path.

Step 2, Go for an Adult Swim

Lucas wanted you to have something to do after watching Episode 2 Attack of the Clones in 2002, until he released Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith. So he gave you cartoon shorts. They were released in 2003, 2004, 2005 as teasers (sometimes on TV, sometimes in the theater).  Notice the “Adult Swim” rough and minimal style of animation on the front cover.  This series of shorts (also called the “micro” series) was later combined to make a large narrative about what Anni had been up to between Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. I enjoyed watching it very much. It’s an example of doing narrative with sparse dialog and lots of showing.
 

Step 3, Star Wars: Clone Wars movie

Notice the distinctive difference in animation on the movie poster versus the “Adult Swim” style.  This movie was used to kick off the TV series in Step 4.

Step 4, Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series

This TV series ran immediately after the animated movie and is still running today (crica 2010). The animation style is the same as that of the movie.  As of now, only two seasons are out in blu-ray.

Now go to Amazon or NetFlicks and find ways to enjoy the Star Wars experience! (Sorry, JarJar Binks is still included.)

The advent of the Internet has increased the rate of information flow. We used to wait a month for a new magazine issue or a week for a favorite TV episode. Today, life progresses at Internet time. Online magazines report not only daily but when the story breaks. You can watch movies ‘on demand’ rather than run to the video store or wait for it to show again on HBO.

The Singularity, a theory that says that since technological advancement has been doubling for the past centuries, we’ll reach a point where the change will become so rapid, that society will become wildly unpredictable. This point is called The Singularity.

Once The Singularity hits, your favorite TV show will finish its entire season BEFORE you’ve seen the first episode. This is upsetting because the last episode will be in a new HD format of a 1080googleP, and although it was amazing, it’ll be a commercial disaster because no one knew about it in time to watch its ten second season. (It jumped the shark in the ninth second.)

So before the disaster that is The Singularity, enjoy your leisurely Internet age of daily magazines such as Daily Science Fiction. Visit their website and subscribe, for free, and receive science fiction short stories. The eZine has just started up and will be releasing stories to their subscribers late this Summer/Fall.

One of the stories they’ll send you is a story I wrote called Bit Storm, which received honorable mention in The Writers of the Future contest. Diff makes a living setting up and maintaining an AI for a financial company. He makes the acquaintance of a greifer who goes by Slick Devil who challenges Diff to prove him wrong, that war is a natural and necessary in society and the skilled survive to prey on the weak. Although Diff tries to steer clear, Slick Devil involves him in a disastrous Halloween stunt that risks people’s lives.

As I’m sure there will be stories about life during and post Singularity, it would be irresponsible not to subscribe to Daily Science Fiction. You owe it to yourself to learn as much as possible before The Singularity is upon us. (People addicted to iPhones and PvZ is just a coming herald.)

Subscribe soon, before Daily Science Fiction becomes Hourly Science Fiction or, shudder, Quantum Science Fiction.

Sometimes a writer’s day job can really help him write.  It all started in 2000 when Asim Jalis, a friend of mine, kept pestering me about how to apply eXtreme Programming (XP) to writing.  I say pester, because, like an a fly buzzing around the room which had grown a mouth and spoke with the voice of James Earl Jones, he kept challenging me until I tried to do things like unit test writing, pair write, and a bunch of other crazy.  (Asim, when you become wildly popular and rich because people want to put recordings of you on their ringtones, you can pay me back.)

So we applied some of the XP practices to writing projects with a little success.  But it never revolutionized my approach to producing writing.

Later, after years of doing Agile Consulting, I’ve learned other Agile processes that weren’t so tailored to the task of engineering software.  Scrum is a great process that can be applied to the production of anything that you can make a list of “what you want.”

I decided to write a novel that teaches those in the software industry how to use this process, but in an entertaining way.  A more direct way would be to become friends with Asim, find friends like Asim, hire me as a consultant, or hire an Agile consultant.  But if you can’t do that, then you can learn the principles of Agile development from my novel Agile Noir, which you could read on a flight from Florida to Seattle and ALMOST get the same entertainment value as hanging out in a coffee shop with its author, or his friend Asim (he prefers his name pronounced Awesome, by the way).

What’s so novel about an Agile novel?  Well, Agile Noir is the only Agile business novel out there.  There are plenty of non-fiction books about Agile but hey, everyone–even non-Agile people–will enjoy reading a novelization about Kartar, a project manager, and how he uses Agile processes to save his project and his life.  That’s pretty novel!  The other novelty is that Agile Noir is being writing using an Agile process called Scrum.  And where XP didn’t fit the writing regime very well, Scrum worked very nicely.

Writers who may wish to use Scrum for their writing projects, Agile practitioners who wish to read an informal case study on applying Agile to writing, and readers who are interested in learning more about Agile, will be interested in the “making of” Agile Noir that starts at this page: Using Agile to write Agile Noir.  You will find links to photos and videos of me going through the process of using Scrum to write my novel.  And since the writing of my novel is still in progress, this page about the making of will continue to grow in an incremental fashion until Agile Noir is finished.

So check it out if you’re interested in Agile, in writing, or wondering what happens when you have friends like Asim who speak dramatically like Darth Vader.  All the time.