Irregular Temporal Probability

Don't forget to visit the new site at dvspress.com

Kenneth had never seen an irregular temporal sphere before. Bernard leaned on his knees and held the object between his hands, staring at the golden center, swirling like the center of the galaxy and throbbing like a dying heart. It glowed subtly. Temporal singularities were uncommon playthings, even for the wealthy.

“So what did you decide to study?” Kenneth asked, putting down his tablet. He was starting to get fatigued from his class readings. Temporal vibrating membranes was a hugely interesting academic area, but required more of Kenneth’s brain power than he could spare with Bernard sitting in his dorm room.

“My parents want me to study irregular temporal probability,” Bernard said, rolling the time-sphere around in his hands. “That’s why they bought me this.”

New site! Announcing DVS Press

The time has come, at long last, to move beyond the confines of this site, beloved though it may be. If you are a regular reader, I thank you for visiting once again, but I would ask you to please visit my new site, DVS Press, at dvspress.com.

The need for something a bit more expansive has been one of slow building, but the moment has arrived. The new wordpress backbone gives me a lot more options for design and control, and will ultimately make the production of a quality site suited to my purposes an easier, more efficient endeavor. Wordpress has more expansive CSS support and control, which will allow me to go from writing of my content to publication without any extra effort. On this site, in order to get proper looking text and indents, I had to code all of my posts in html, an annoying if not laborious process. This was especially true in the publication of Muramasa, in which I elected to utilize many footnotes for vocabulary explanations. Every post with footnotes had to be coded in html with internal href tags and then saved. If I ever returned to edit the post, blogger would overwrite these references and code with, essentially, nonsense.

The short of it was that making functional documents was a labor of love. Now it will hardly be a labor at all. In fact, I can finally do all my writing in word, with my own formatting which makes ebook transitions easier, and copy-paste to my site and have the correct formatting there too.

I also think that you will enjoy the look and feel of the new site. I have left behind the dark theme of Prometheus for several reasons. The original justification for using light text on a dark background was for the reader's comfort, as staring into a computer screen displaying white pages can be tiring to the eyes. It's quite a bit like looking into light bulb for me, and so I often work with darkened backgrounds. However, analytic tools have shown me that better than 50% of my readership are accessing the site on mobile devices. Dark backgrounds become much less legible and comfortable in bright spaces, such as out-doors, a typical place to be looking at one's phone or a tablet. This compounds with my recent format change to 1,000 word updates, which for many means that the amount of time spent "looking into the lightbulb" is rather minimal. Additionally, dark-themes sites just seem denser and less appealing. The aesthetics of the new design I find more inviting. I hope you will too.

For a short while, I will be duplicating the content on Tears of Prometheus and dvspress.com. All previous content has already been migrated to the new host, but the extensive cataloging present on Prometheus hasn't been done there yet, so if you are looking for a particular article, this site will still be your best bet. I encourage you to stop over to the new site and take a look.

Happy reading!

-David V Stewart

Muramasa: Blood Drinker, an Author's Reflection

Yoshitoshi, c. 1866

At long last, the writing and subsequent digital publishing of my “little” samurai novel is complete. The first words were typed while I was on a break from teaching a special education class in El Segundo, California, and the final words were written in an uncomfortable high chair in a Starbucks that was attached to Marriot in Sacremento, California. That is somewhat symbolic for me, as there were as many words written away from home as at home; my life has been in a state of upheaval for some time, but I still got the work done.

 Muramasa was definitely the most challenging work I have completed thus far, and not just because I was away from home so much. Unlike my earlier true fantasy novels, Muramasa was historical fiction of sorts, and that required hours of research. I made a lot of decisions and took a lot of new paths with this book, with some panning out and some being less successful. Overall, I count it a success. This is because I:

1. Finished a book. This is always a big deal.

2. Devised a means of achieving my vision of monetized content that is free to end users. I even made a small amount of money from the serialization.

3. Expanded my writing, research, and web coding skills because of necessity.

4. Got myself motivated to build a new, better website that will deliver my vision with more efficiency and with better aesthetics.