With my Writer’s of The Future win, I’ll be going to Los Angeles in a few months and there’s no telling who I may meet at the workshop. It’s therefore a logical time to order the new business cards I’ve been putting off. But what is a business card in this day and age? When I meet someone new, it still makes sense to hand them a card with my contact information and a little space to jot a note. Sure, why not? But no one is going to file that card away like in days of yore–I certainly wouldn’t. And no one needs the info bloat that has become common today, what with websites and screen names and sometimes icons jockeying for real estate. No, I only need the card to do a couple of things, but I need those things done well–and one of them is giving my new found acquaintance machine readable contact information.

What then, are my new design requirements for my new business card?

To list basic contact information, phone, address, email, and linked-in profile.

To contain a vCard, encoded as a QR code for easy smart phone scanning.

To highlight my web presence and brand.

To be free of clutter and professional in tone.

To have a sleek design by a professional graphic artist.

To be free of the cost of a professional graphic artist.

Okay, so my first stop was to visit www.qrcode-monkey.com and create my quick response codes. I created one encoding my basic contact info as a VCard and another encoding the URL to a landing page under my top level website, www.cStuartHardwick.com.  It’s important to put as little data as possible in a QR code because the more data you cram in, the smaller the picture elements and the harder it is to decode. We do NOT want our new business contacts futzing around with balky QR codes! So the VCard is minimal, and the link is to a landing page that may contain more information along with anything that changes or that I decide to add later.

Next stop was Moo, a well-regarded printer with a robust online card designer featuring lots of stock, graphic artist-designed templates to choose from. After sorting through this for a few interminable forevers, I found a design I liked. It did not allow me to put the QR codes where I originally planned, but it did allow me to upload a graphic for the back of the card. So with a little editing in Pixlr, that was easily sorted.

The final design, I think, is spot on. It’s clean. It’s clear. It highlights brand and essential contact info. On the reverse, the QR code for the landing page has a little icon to make clear that it’s a website (such icons are a free feature of QR Monkey, but y themake the code more complex so I elected not to add one to the vCard).

If you’d like to try out Moo yourself, follow this link and you’ll get a small discount if you decide to order:

http://www.moo.com/share/6nmwg2

So that’s that. And now, I think, it’s off to work I go.

YeeeeeHaaah!

I’m an L. Ron Hubbard, Writers of the Future winner!

I don’t normally get too excited about awards. Writing is a long-haul proposition, and the payoff comes from years of slogging away more than from any one event.

But this is a big deal, the big enchilada, the American Idol of Scifi. This is the best known, most highly-respected award for genre short fiction, and one of very few opportunities for beginning authors to garner national exposure. Moreover, it means I’ll be flying to Los Angeles for a week-long workshop with some of today’s best authors.

I’m now an alumni in the company of Stephen Baxter, James Alan Gardner, Dean Wesley Smith, Dave Wolverton, Nancy Farmer, and David Zindell, to name a few. There’s no way I’m not getting excited about this!.

I will have to find my bow-tie, thought, but that’s okay. Bow-ties are cool.

I just got the word that I’m a finalist in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest! I earned an honorable mention a year ago and the certificate is propped on my desk for encouragement. Thousands enter WOTF each quarter, and to be named a finalist is a huge honor and reward for many years of work and study. I understand that the winner will be announced within the week, so fingers crossed!

As a writing exercise, I was asked to re-imagine a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost in a more contemporary setting. I could imagine none more appropriate:

A puddle plunked where the stone of the platform should be. Darkness in daytime. The kind of day Japan had seen too many of, the kind that wiped Pompei and Krakatoa maybe. The dark shifted a little, just enough to show a bit of sky instead of roof.

I climbed, through or over what I still don’t know. I climbed the way a man does when he hasn’t figured yet if he’s half-buried or half-dead. I stopped when there was nothing left to climb. When I thought, maybe both.

Tuesday, a handful of yen and a pack of smokes had bought a night in Mrs. Ying’s comfort house near the unfinished imperial bunker outside Nagano. I’d been sent to fetch minister Tōgō south for a meeting with Stalin’s man. If Japan was the land of the rising sun, it had seen brighter days. But the mighty imperial navy had shown its stuff, and so had imperial mettle. The meeting was to take place inside the great Mitsubishi torpedo and ammunition plant. We’d helped Stalin beat Hitler just by remaining neutral. In coming years, we’d help him beat the Americans just by staying alive. At least, that was the message on Tuesday.

This was Thursday. Tōgō was dead. The train station was gone above the platform—the ammunition plant too, and the Kawanami shipyards and—hell, all of Nagasaki. Not peppered by American bombers. Not burning and scarred and broken up. Gone. Erased. From the river to the hills.

Brown twilight drifted with smoke and the smell of burning flesh, and hung over fire and misery in all directions. Across the way, the cathedral gate poked up columns like logs from a fire. The dome lay in filth like a turned-out chamber pot. Where cherry trees had marked the canal, there wer eonly tangled girders, curling shattered roofs, and piles of tile and brick. Close by, there were other piles, heaps of rubble and ordinary things: chair legs, a shoe, a silver bento melted and charred. The station clock lay on a mound of rubble and charcoaled limbs. The face was black. The hands were gone. Flash-burned shadows read eleven o’clock.

Behind me, the rail line was just another heap, a tunnel from the mighty empire south into hell. Tōgō was dead, and the prefect. But it didn’t take a prefect to read what it meant. It meant the war was over, the empire done. Like an over-confident sumo apprentice, Japan had forced its enemy across the ring, only to be crushed by his weight.

And that was it. Two million dead and a generation of fanatics who so balled up history it was good for nothing but setting fires. Well, they were burning now—just as bright and warm as Tōjō and the emperor had dreamed, I imagined. If they had feared and hated America as neighbor, they could hate him nowas sovereign. But the time for fear was over. What more could an American president take than the emperor had surrendered to pride?

From the east, towards the medical center, came a lone woman’s cry. A chorus of moans suffused the middle distance. Nothing moved around me but fire and falling debris. The ball field by the river would be open land. Somewhere to the east, I’d find survivors. Somewhere in coming days, I‘d meet new masters.

I‘d survived the war. I damn sure wasn’t going to choke on peace. My boot crunched through what had been a centuries-old temple. I bowed toward the bay– toward the twilight gray of the sea, and recalled the English we had once amused ourselves by learning from the wireless.

“Welcome to Japan, most honorable sir. Would you please to buy some smokes?”

Better to deal with foreign devils than die for a disgraced god.

An agent I follow tweeted something today that caught my attention. “Gatekeepers don’t keep people out, they guide people inside.” This is in reference to the common tirade that literary slush readers often see from aspiring writers who feel they are being somehow unfairly excluded from the great global party of literary fame and fortune. Well, in all due respect to all three groups, no. Gatekeepers keep people out, first and foremost, and for good reason.

To explain why this is a good thing, consider my good friend Bob (whose name is not Bob) who I used to work with at GravyPants Inc. (where we made nothing in any way associated with gravy and only tangentially associated with pants).

Bob had him a music studio. The Yamaha DX-7 had brought FM synthesis to the nation in the ’80s, and now cheap computers and midi-editing software put studio-quality composition, editing, and mastering in the capable hands of any upstart gravy makers with a few gees and a few hours and a tolerant spouse.

Bob had him a music studio. Bob had him an orchestra, if he needed it, and a multi-track editor that would have made Walter Carlos weep back in the days before he became Wendy. Bob spent untold hours in his studio, then brought shiny new hi-fi chromium tapes in and handed them around the GravyPants office. They were technically excellent. The synthesized sounds were synthesized perfection. The recording quality was as good as, if not superior, to anything available on a commercial tape. Bob was a really nice guy. We liked him a whole lot, and he was set with everything he needed to be the next Aaron Copeland.

Except talent.

So we listened to his space music rambling futzing around until he walked down the hall and then counted ourselves lucky to have a brand new blank, ready for the next mix.

Bob had a big heart, and Bob had a music studio, but what Bob really needed was a gatekeeper, someone who knew at least enough about music to tell him he didn’t know enough about music to inflict his on an undefended world.

Gatekeepers are never perfect (they let Yanni in the door, after all) and it ‘s certainly a good thing that talented artists have ways around the gate. But without a filter, we consumers are left hopelessly mired in slush while artists with talent are left to starve.

Artists suffer another way too. If my friend Bob thought he was going to make it big in music (and many like him do) he had a far longer road ahead than he realized. Artistic success requires talent, skill, luck, and promotion. The last three, at least, can be purchased, but the investment in time, energy, and dollars can be large. The investment makes little sense without some hope of eventually reaching an appreciative audience, and the gauntlet of the gatekeepers (teachers and critique partners included, but particularly literary professionals) can be key to assessing artistic readiness and talent.

Another friend of mine owned a real-world, brick-and-mortar music studio. He had no particular talent either, but he made a good living teaching at the college and recording albums for church groups and artists hoping to make it big. It was a good, stable business, but it made him a little queasy. “Half of these groups,” he said, “I have to talk out of ordering hundreds of copies they won’t be able to give away.” In seventeen years, he reckoned, he’d only recorded one demo for an artist with a realistic shot at a career—much less fame and fortune.

The Internet is terrific. Self-publishing is a great advance. But for most artists, professional gatekeepers offer one thing that no technology can, a reality check.

This is my meet & greet intro for GUTGAA. If you don’t know what that means then either you aren’t in the writing biz or you need to follow this link.

Either way, Hi! I’m C. Stuart Hardwick. Welcome to my little sliver of the Internet. I grew up in South Dakota, and my writing springs from the intersection between the Wild West and the Space Age, the History of Earth and the dreams of mankind. After decades of technical writing, I turned seriously to fiction just a few years ago and write science fiction principally, but also historical tales and all sorts of other things. I won the Colonnade Writing Contest in December, and am pursuing a graduate certificate in writing from UC Berkeley.

Q: Where do you write?
A: Well, mostly Earth but…. No seriously, I write everywhere: the bus, coffee shop, back yard swing, standing up, sitting down, in a boat, with a goat. Well no…goats are annoying.

Q: Quick. Go to your writing space, sit down and look to your left. What is the first thing you see?
A: A cup of coffee. No, wait. The dog. Who gave the dog a cup of coffee?

Q: Favorite time to write?
A: When I’m awake. Seriously, I write whenever I have time, but different writing tasks require different circumstances. If I had to pick a favorite time, though, I would say “whenever the alternative is waiting on something.” Writing can turn an hour stuck on the bus and in traffic into a blessing.

Q: Drink of choice while writing?
A: Seriously? Actually, I drink mostly decaf, and to keep from tanning my insides, sometimes a nice flavored sparkling water. When I can get them, I like to nibble on cherries while I edit.

Q: When writing , do you listen to music or do you need complete silence?
A: Music generally, and specific music. When writing sci-fi, I generally listen to Tangerine dream and Daft Punk. Recently I altered the tone of an entire short story in response to its resonance with a particular piece of jazz. Never, ever, anything with lyrics.

Q: What was your inspiration for your latest manuscript and where did you find it?
A: If I told you that, I’d have to kill you and write a scene about it. Usually, I start with scenes or characters. I write a few scenes and the story and the relationships emerge from that. Then I stop and plan out the story and start looking at structure and pacing and balance.

Q: What’s your most valuable writing tip?
A: Writing takes humility and arrogance, and maniacal patience. Have faith in your voice and vision, but make sure you learn continuously. Be prepared to wait indefinitely, but work aggressively toward your goals.

Fun facts:

* I’m left handed and have been known to paint with both hands simultaneously.

* In high-school, I wrote a computer program to train myself to touch type.

* I once worked with John Carmack–a couple of years before he wrote the video game Doom.

* I know how to juggle, and prefer clubs.

* I play piano a little better than I juggle.

Thou Shalt Capitalize Proper Nouns.

I don’t make the rules folks, but we all benefit from them, and my fellow writers, well criminy—look them up will you?

Earlier, I ran across a thread in a writer’s forum — a well-respected writer’s forum mind you–that went on through page after page and month after month of ignorant prattle about whether to capitalize “bible” or “the Bible” or “God” or “gods”. Every single post, it seems, missed the point utterly. You capitalize proper nouns: God, Zeus, Elvira Mistress of the Night, Scoobie Doo, what have you. It has nothing to do with whether you believe in God or whether you want to pay respect or reflect the importance of a figure.

We don’t capitalize God out of deference to God. We don’t do it because we believe and fear his wrath. This is not a question of style or belief or fashion. We do it out of deference to our reader, because we believe and fear his scorn. Even Christopher Hitchens would write, “God is not  great”. We don’t capitalize Charles Manson because he is so influential (well, I certainly hope not!) but because that’s his name. Piss off Charlie you git.

We also generally capitalize adjectives derived from proper nouns, such as Malthusian or Reaganesque. Oddly enough, notable exceptions to this rule include “biblical” (generally not capitalized anywhere in the English speaking world except the editorial department of the local Baptist church), or vedic or talmadic. For the record, neither theist or atheist are capitalized, but Baptist is. The latter is a religion, a proper noun and derived from a proper noun, the former are  states of being (adjectives), like “agnostic” or “fed up with people who can’t be bothered with an Internet search before stating an opinion on the Internet”. Oh, and “Internet” is capitalized because American dictionarists are under the collective misapprehension that it’s a proper noun instead of a noun meaning “a network connecting computers in two or more installations”, as opposed to “intranet”.

So atheists, you still have to capitalize God and the Bible. Theists, you still have to capitalize Wiccan and Galilean, and Darwinian. Anything else just wouldn’t be cricket, Cricket.