Our long march to publication continues…and nothing says it quite like the final cover art, rendered in all its glory (and living color) for all to see! It’s already been posted on Amazon, but I thought you might like to get up close and personal right here on Hammerjack.net. Go ahead–click and enlarge, if you dare…

There’s an old saying that your story is only as good as your villain. If that’s indeed the case, then SEVEN DEADLY SINS will be a real treat. Nothing but baddies as far as the eye can see, with lots of great mayhem to keep you turning pages well past your bedtime. With any luck, my fellow authors and I will even give you a few nightmares–or at least a reason to look over your shoulder the next time you take a walk down a dark, foggy Argelian street.

When you write as much as I have, you develop a real fascination with language.  Most people take their own for granted, having spoken it all their lives;  but try and explain your native tongue to someone unfamiliar with it, such as a visitor from a foreign land–or better yet, a small child.  I’ve found that English can be a real mind bender, what with all those homonyms and homophones, hard and soft consonants, “i” before “e” except after “c”–it goes on and on.

What’s even more interesting, though, is the evolution of the language.  Back in the day, bad was bad.  Then bad was good.  Now bad can be bad or good, depending on the context.  Words have been distilled into their text-messaging equivalents, so that terms like LOL are now part of the cultural lexicon.  I know people who communicate almost exclusively using movie quotes.  Pretty amazing stuff, really.  And it only gets worse if you have a teenager.

There are, however, lines that shouldn’t be crossed.  Take, for instance, the psych professor at Bennington College–in Vermont, natch–who thinks that the words “nerd” and “geek” should be banned from polite conversation.  According to him, what the world needs now is tech, sweet tech, and that saddling people with those terms only promotes stereotypes that chase people away from those professions.

Ah, where to begin?

In the first place,  the kind professor has the whole cause/effect relationship backwards.  People don’t end up as nerds because they get into tech–they get into tech because they’re nerds.  It’s in their genes, man!  I went to an engineering school, and believe me–the guys spending their nights in the aerospace lab weren’t missing out on any frat parties to be there.  You can’t just stop being a nerd or a geek.  It’s an integral part of your identity, no matter what you do for a living.  Tall ain’t short and fat ain’t skinny.  Refusing to call out the obvious doesn’t change a thing.

Besides, are we really so far gone  that we can’t see that geek and nerd are actually terms of endearment?  That geek is chic and nerds set the new standard for badassery?  Hell, I’m a geek and I’m damned proud of it.  I saw The Final Countdown fifty–count ‘em, fifty–times as a kid.  I programmed my own Zork-like fantasy quest on my Commodore 64 back in the day.   I even have a souvenir commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint with Spock on it.  Not Zachary Quinto Spock, but Leonard Nimoy Spock.  My wife won’t let me display it in our house, but I still have it.  So there!

Let’s stop being so concerned with labels and just accept ourselves for who we are.  As Gilbert said to the Betas in Revenge of the Nerds, “There are a lot more of us than there are of you!”  So come on, people–embrace your inner geek.  And don’t ever be afraid to wear that badge with pride.  After all, we run the world now.  Just ask Bill Gates and Steve Jobs…

I just finished up the first pass edits for REVENANT and sent them off to my new editor at Pocket Books, which means we’re now officially in the home stretch for publication next March.  For the technically curious, the first pass is the actual typeset copy of a book as it will appear in its final form–kind of like a sneak preview.  I’m always jazzed at this stage of the game, because it means the book is really coming together.  All that’s left is to get a look at the cover art, which should be appearing shortly.

The first time I went through this, way back during the editing phase for HAMMERJACK, I was most surprised by how old-fashioned the process really is.  I just assumed that most of it got done electronically and that I’d be e-mailing all the changes back and forth.  Believe it or not, though, it still involves a lot of paper.  First of all, there’s the all-too-painful marked-up copy that you get after the initial edit (you know, the one with the red ink that points out all the screw-ups, clumsy passages and continuity goofs).  After that, the line editor gets a whack at it, combing out whatever spelling and grammar errors might remain.  Line editors are like the drill instructors of the publishing business:  rarely do they get much glory, but nothing would work without them.  Also like a DI, they can really get in your grill about doing things their way (which, in my case, usually involves the creative use of punctuation).  Fortunately, authors get to strike back with the all-powerful stet–which I’ve used to save the lives of helpless commas on many an occasion.

The line edit is a very important copy, because from that point on the paper manuscript becomes the publishing master, containing all the marks for the typesetter for things like italics, dashes and scene breaks.  At this point, the author’s job is to check the line edits, stet out the stuff he doesn’t want changed, and make whatever last-minute changes come to mind–all on the paper, so there isn’t a lot of room for monkeying around.  Once the publisher gets this copy back, it gets released to production, where a typesetter actually goes in and retypes every word of the manuscript and formats it into the first pass.   And here I thought it was tough doing it the first time around.  I don’t know who you are, valiant typesetter, but I salute you!

So as you can see, getting a book to market involves a lot more than cocktail parties and press junkets–although those are kinda fun too.  By the time it hits the shelf, a lot of people have worked very hard to get it there.  Let’s all give them a hand, shall we?

Even though the major networks have done a rather conspicuous job of not covering the story, if John Stewart has his teeth around Climategate then I can safely assume that most of you have heard of it by now.  In a nutshell, it seems as though those wacky cut-ups at East Anglia University in Great Britain–which happens to be the one-stop shop for global warming information–was caught fudging its data, thanks to some leaked e-mails that illustrated the shenanigans in rather graphic detail.  We also found out that the source code used to create their climate models is hopelessly buggy–not that it makes much of a difference, as the University somehow deleted most of the raw data used to track temperature changes over the last 150 years.

In military parlance, this is what’s known as a Charlie Foxtrot.

It’s also what happens when science intersects with politics:  what’s supposed to be a dispassionate collection and analysis of hard numbers instead turns into some ham-handed manipulation of statistics designed to create a panic about something which may or may not be real.  Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought that science was about what you could prove.  That’s the reason that peer review journals exist:  to present data and findings so that other scientists can reproduce the results under the same conditions.  In that respect, science invites skepticism.  More than that, science thrives on it.  Without others doing their best to poke holes in your theory, you could easily work off assumptions that are dead wrong.

Unless you work at East Anglia.  Apparently those guys are all avid readers of Science Made Stupid (which has a disturbingly prescient breakdown of the modern scientific method)–that, or most of them got their degrees from the Bernie Madoff School of Climate Studies (Motto:  “As long as people keep buying in, what’s the big deal?”).  Problem is, eventually you have to square what you’re selling with what people can see with their own eyes–namely, that there ain’t been a lot of warming for the last ten years or so.  Talk about your inconvenient truths.

So what’s the bottom line?  Well, honest enviornmentalists should be pissed for one.  I don’t know about you, but if mankind really is causing the planet to roast, I’d like to know about it.  Thanks to the East Anglia’s data massage parlor, though, we may never find out–because now they’ve cast doubt over the entire study, not to mention a scientific community that was so anxious to hop on the climate change bandwagon that they didn’t bother to ask the tough questions.  Trust us, they said.  We’re scientists.  We don’t have an agenda.  As it turns out, they don’t have much of a basis for their climate models, either.  That’s a hell of a thing to take on faith, guys–particularly when you’re talking about remaking the entire world economy to combat CO2 emissions.  After this episode, don’t be surprised if people won’t just take your word for it.

Even if there is a consensus.

Apparently this is National Novel Writing Month.  Kind of takes me back to the days when I could crank out a 1,200 page book in four months flat.  Like many other things I used to be able to do when I was 21, not so much anymore…

I had an interesting e-mail exchange with a media columnist from my local paper, the St. Petersburg Times.  The columnist swings pretty well to the left end of the political spectrum, but I’ve always found him to be intellectually honest–which is why I was interested in his views on  Rush Limbaugh’s failed attempt to buy an ownership stake in the NFL.  For those of you late to the party, several major media outlets ran with some nasty quotes attributed to Limbaugh that were never verified, and turned out to be false.  But that didn’t stop the ensuing controversy from torpedoing Limbaugh’s bid to become part-owner of the St. Louis Rams.  Anyway, here’s how I opened up:

I wanted to get your take. . .[n]ot in terms of whether or not the NFL made the right decision (folks can debate that as much as they want, but the NFL is a private organization and they can admit whom they want at their discretion), but rather in terms of what I consider to be outrageous behavior by certain media outlets in parroting some inflammatory quotes that Limbaugh never made.

It’s disturbing that a national organization like CNN would simply take a wikiquote entry as gospel and then run with it without the least bit of verification.  I may only be a lowly Texas Aggie journalism grad, but I can tell ya–if I had engaged in that kind of reporting in my Journalism 101 class, my prof would’ve flunked me on the spot.

If the media want to take Limbaugh down, fine–use his own words in a forthright and truthful way.   But making something up out of whole cloth?  That’s disgraceful.

Here’s what I received in response:

One of the things Rush has always used to his benefit, is the fact that there are not a lot of great ways to check what is said on a radio broadcast — especially one from many years ago.

If you want to read a story I wrote, you can jump on my newspaper’s web site and look in the archives, or pull it up on Lexis/Nexis. But there is no such archive for talk radio hosts or their shows.

That said, CNN acknowledged it made a mistake and Rick Sanchez has said he’s going to apologize.

Frankly, what surprised me about the issue was that i knew that quote was shaky, and there are plenty of verified quotes from Limbaugh saying racially insulting and stereotypical things…  There are some who will argue he’s just joking or its just satire. But some of the most powerful stereotypes and prejudice leveled against people of color has been done in a joking manner.

So maybe CNN got the details of one Limbaugh quote wrong. But there is no doubt in my mind that Limbaugh has been using race-baiting tactics for many years…  I didn’t think it should necessarily keep him from being an NFL team owner. But I’m not shedding any tears now that he’s been dropped from the bid.

Fair enough–but off the point I was trying to make.  I followed up:

How is that an excuse in journalism?  It’s either true or it isn’t, and not bothering to verify something like that is more than sloppy–it’s malicious.

The problem with CNN–even with Rick Sanchez apologizing–is that the media will not change their behavior.  This kind of thing goes all the way up to the editors, who seem to have lost sight of their jobs as advocates for truth and accuracy.  Any idiot knows that you don’t use Wikipedia as a primary source–and if you can’t verify something, you don’t run with it.  But CNN and MSNBC and others did.  That tells me something about the state of American journalism.

And here’s the columnist’s response:

I’m just not sure what you want.

CNN made a mistake about the details of its quote, has corrected the mistake and apologized for the mistake. Unfortunately, mistakes do happen when working on news stories, and the best measure of a news organization is how quickly and completely they deal with such mistakes.

But the larger point of the quote, that Limbaugh has made repeated inflammatory and divisive comments on issues involving race and stereotypes, is valid and backed up by many more quotes.

When is the last time Limbaugh corrected one of the many willful inaccuracies he has aired on his show?

So that’s the new standard in journalism?  Yeah, that’s my bad, but what the other guy did is worse?  I quickly e-mailed back:

I’d like to see editors and producers of news content exercise at least nominal care when working on news stories.  There’s a big difference between an honest mistake and sheer incompetence–or, less chartiably, outright bias.

The point is that this “mistake” should never have been made in the first place.  As you mentioned, CNN had a goldmine of verified quotes they could have used to make the same point.  Why did they go with ones that were false?  I believe it’s because they wanted them to be true because it fits their preconceived notions of the subject.  That kind of attitude is anathema to real journalism.

A reporter should be like a scientist, only interested in what he or she can prove–not engaged in wishful thinking.

Which leads to the columnist’s final word on the matter:

They didn’t make that mistake by assuming something about Rush Limbaugh which was inaccurate. He…has said many inflammatory and prejudiced things on the air. They unfortunately passed along a quote — which has been quoted by many other reputable news outlets, by the way — which turned out to be wrong.

But this mistake wasn’t the product of political bias. It was the result of knowing what Limbaugh does on air, but choosing the wrong quote to prove it.

This, by the way, is a classic tactic to try and keep news organizations from tough reporting. Raise enough of a stink over a minor mistake and maybe it will think twice before trying a tough report again.

You shouldn’t be a part of this tactic…

Got that?  Other news media are now considered to be primary sources for verification of the essential facts of an explosive news story.  Hey, if MSNBC says it’s true, it must be true!  No need to call the guy who supposedly made the quote and ask him to confirm or deny it, right?  I finished up with:

I’m all for tough reporting, but that actually involves some work, not just using Wikipedia.

Strange that a network that fact-checked an SNL skit wouldn’t even apply the same standards to a geniune news story.  Say what you will, but there’s a double-standard at work here…

Some may say I’m beating a dead horse, and maybe I am.  But it’s hard to stay mum when you see this kind of thing on display.  Truth, unfortunately, has turned into something viewed through a political prism.  Fake is okay as long as it fits the general template.  I don’t know about you, but that scares the hell out of me.