Classical guitar - filing a broken nail (And a short story about Juan Se...

Segovia scales, part 1: C major in 2 octaves

10 Questions I get asked frequently about the guitar

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.

Fiction in the digital age: What do we do as writers?

Muramasa and the Mass Media Market

The online run of Muramasa: Blood Drinker is soon coming to an end. It won't be a swift end, and it probably will not have the end that was expected by my tortured readers, but it will be a good end. The right end. Rather than taking time and energy at the end of that project’s publication to wonder about the future, I thought it might be better to look ahead a little (ahem) ahead of time.

The Downfall of Traditional Media

"Prometheus Bound" - Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1618

The vision for this site came about through many years of experience in the arts, monitoring trends, and observing successful content creators. More than ever, I feel like our society is pushing harder toward content that requires no up-front cost to consume. This can be exhibited through the massive scale of online music “sharing,” which is, from a legal and indeed ethical perspective, rank theft. Other content, notably movies and cable TV shows, have had similar problems the last few years. When nobody is watching, the moral imperative to pay people for their work seems to be forgotten.

Rather than shake my fist at the wide swaths of people that use bittorrent and similar applications, I am going to use it as a message. When people had the option to not pay 18 dollars for a CD that contained a single song heard on the radio with the rest being totally unknown, they took up Napster on the offer. When people had the option to forego paying upwards of 100 dollars per month on cable to watch four installments of Game of Thrones, they took Pirate Bay up on the offer.

 In the media industry, such actions are lamented as they seem to represent a loss of revenue. The recording industry has lost a great portion of the profitability it enjoyed during the CD era of the 1990s. Nobody seems to think that people are buying less music because lots of it wasn’t worth paying for to begin with. The old music model relied on radio play of a single hit to sell a CD with 14 tracks on it, and the quality of those filler tracks was almost irrelevant to sales. When people could actually listen to the whole thing without the 18 dollar gatekeeping fee, or buy the one song they liked from iTunes, the highly-profitable model from the 90s was bound to fail. This hasn’t stopped the RIAA from trying, even going so far as to sue Limewire for an implied 72 trillion dollars, which is more than the combined wealth of Earth.     

The same is true of cable TV, which relied on selling large packages of channels to every single end user. With subscription services like Netflix, that model too should fail, though doubtless cable companies will try to keep it alive through manipulation of government entities like the FCC and might attempt to bully content makers. Even HBO, the long running “premium channel” has considered shifting away and offering HBO GO as a stand-alone service.