Non WFTL Blogs

My blog is currently hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google. I use their FTP blogging service so that the URL of my blog can be hooked to my SFWRITER.COM domain: sfwriter.com/blog.htm.

But now Google is eliminating that service -- yup, just yanking it, poof, gone. Anybody know of a blogging solution that will let me import my existing entries and put new ones at the same sfwriter.com/blog.htm URL?

Here's the notice from Google:

Dear FTP user:
You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.
The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.
Regards,
Rick Klau Blogger Product Manager Google 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

I posted this on Lou Anders's Facebook wall, in a conversation about making sure cover artists get credited, but want to share it here, too:

And let's not forget the ART DIRECTOR. Rita Frangie, the art director for Ace, has done absolutely amazing design work for me, Joe Haldeman, Allen Steele, Charles Stross, and others, but because she doesn't blog or party at cons, no one in SF fandom knows her name. But she's a frickin' genius.



Robert J. Sawyer online:
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A minister wrote to me over the weekend to say it was a "cop-out" that my Neanderthals in Hominids and its sequels never had any religion; oh, he could understand a story about a kind of humanity that had turned away from religion, but not one that never had it; he said a lack of religion betrayed a fundamental lack of curiosity about their origins on their part. My reply:Thank you for your very thoughtful letter.

Indeed, a man of the cloth might say it's a cop-out to not explain why the Neanderthals don't have religion and are incapable of the same leap you yourself have taken, but the point I was making was the opposite: the rational position based on looking at the evidence around you is that we're just here.

It is not a lack of curiosity to say that, and then try to fathom the random mechanisms -- from quantum fluctuations in a vacuum to evolution through natural selection -- that might have led to that; indeed, the lack of curiosity, if I may be so bold, is in positing some magical cause that requires no other explanation.

That is, rather than asking how do the Neanderthals possibly justify their lack of belief, the books ask how we possibly justify the presence of our belief. :)

Thanks again for taking the time to write me! I really appreciate it.
Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Last week in Montreal, I gave a talk about how one structures a story. I spoke about how the stakes should get higher and higher with each subsequent plot revelation. This weekend, we encountered a perfect real-life example of that structure:

• First revelation: my books are no longer on sale at Amazon.com (personal jeopardy)
  
  
• Second revelation: OMG, it's not just me; all Tor authors have had their books pulled from Amazon.com (people the main character cares about are in jeopardy, too).
  
  
• Third revelation: it's not just Tor, which is a small operation in the grand scheme of things, but the whole vast Macmillan publishing empire that's affected (the whole nation is in jeopardy).
  
  
• Fourth revelation: Holy crap, the entire future of the publishing industry is at stake (the whole world is in jeopardy).

The Authors Guild explains it well, in this press release entitled THE RIGHT BATTLE AT THE RIGHT TIME:February 2, 2010. Macmillan's current fight with Amazon over e-book business models is a necessary one for the industry. The stakes are high, particularly for Macmillan authors. In a squabble over e-books, Amazon quickly and pre-emptively escalated matters by removing the buy buttons from all Macmillan titles (with some exceptions for scholarly and educational books), in all editions, including all physical book editions. Thousands of authors and titles are affected; hardest and most unfairly hit are authors with new books published by Macmillan that are in their prime sales period.

Yet if Macmillan prevails, the eventual payoff for its authors (and all authors, if a successful result ripples through the industry) is likely to be significant and lasting.

For those of you who may have missed it, here's the story so far:

Last Thursday, Macmillan CEO John Sargent informed Amazon that beginning in March, it would offer Amazon access to a full range of e-book titles only if Amazon were willing to sell books on an "agency" model that would pay Amazon 30% of e-book proceeds and allow Macmillan to set its own retail price for e-books. (Currently, Amazon buys e-books as a reseller at a discount of 50% off the retail list price and sells at the price it chooses.) Macmillan's price under its agency model, in many cases, would be higher than the $9.99 ceiling that Amazon has been seeking to impose on the industry.

If Amazon didn't find the agency model acceptable, Sargent said Macmillan would expand its "windowing" of e-book editions. "Windowing" is the practice of waiting until a particular edition of a new book has been on the market for a while before making cheaper editions available. Publishers have for decades waited until the hardcover sales window has closed before opening the sales window on paperback editions, for example. This helps protect the sales channels for hardcover books. Windowing e-books is similarly believed to help protect a publisher's sales channels for physical books. The risk with windowing is that some owners of e-book devices are angered that low-priced e-book editions aren't available as soon as books are released in hardcover form.

This was a bold move by Macmillan. Amazon has a well-deserved reputation for playing hardball. When it doesn't get its way with publishers, Amazon tends to start removing "buy buttons" from the publisher's titles. It's a harsh tactic, by which Amazon uses its dominance of online bookselling to punish publishers who fail to fall in line with Amazon's business plans. Collateral damage in these scuffles, of course, are authors and readers. Authors lose their access to millions of readers who shop at Amazon; readers find some of their favorite authors' works unavailable. Generally, the ending is not a good one for the publisher or its authors -- Amazon's hold on the industry, controlling an estimated 75% of online trade book print sales in the U.S., is too strong for a publisher to withstand. The publisher caves, and yet more industry revenues are diverted to Amazon. This isn't good for those who care about books. Without a healthy ecosystem in publishing, one in which authors and publishers are fairly compensated for their work, the quality and variety of books available to readers will inevitably suffer.

Macmillan's move is timely because, at the moment, the e-book market is still far smaller than the physical book market, but the e-book market is growing quickly. The longer Macmillan waited, the more difficult the transition.

Amazon didn't wait for March, when Macmillan's new policy is slated to go into effect; it decided to hit Macmillan immediately and comprehensively, removing the buy buttons for nearly all Macmillan titles, in all editions. This is a direct attempt to use its clout in the physical book industry to enforce its business model in the e-book industry. In some ways, it was an unusual exercise of power for Amazon. The company has used the tactic of turning off buy buttons on several occasions before, but, with major publishers it's usually selective, and doesn't turn out the lights on nearly all titles. That treatment is reserved for smaller publishers. (Authors receive no advance warning of Amazon's treatment of their titles, nor can they do anything about it.)

Amazon, it appears, overreached. Macmillan was a bit too big a foe, and Amazon's bullying tactics were a bit too blatant. (For a flavor of media reaction, see this story in Fast Company.)

Sunday evening, Amazon announced that it would have to "capitulate" to Macmillan, "because Macmillan has a monopoly over its own titles." (By this definition, nearly every company exercises a monopoly over its products.) We're all still waiting for that capitulation: Macmillan's books still weren't available on Amazon on Monday evening.

If Macmillan does indeed prevail, the economics of authorship in the digital age are likely to improve considerably. We may go through some rough stretches to get there, however.

You'll be hearing more from us on this matter soon.
Robert J. Sawyer online:
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Scott Westerfeld says it well in his blog:All discussions of [the Amazon/Macmillan war] will draw commenters who think they magically know how books should be priced, and who say there is no reason for electronic editions to be more than $9.99. A quick note to them: You don’t know what you’re talking about. Seriously, your back-of-the-envelope calculations are crap. The printing costs of a book are generally between 3% and 10% of list price. So in most cases, 10% should be your “first-printing” e-book discount, not 50%. That may seem weird to you, but that’s because all the cheap stuff on the internet is backlist (like Baen Books), subsidized/coerced (like Amazon), self-published (no editing or marketing costs), or promotional.
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"Identity Theft" -- my Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated / UPC Award-winning hard-boiled detective novella set on Mars -- is now available as downloadable audiobook from the good folks at Audible.com -- with physical media coming soon, too.

Publisher is Blackstone Audio, and narrator is Anthony Heald (pictured). "Identity Theft" is about 25,000 words long, or one-quarter the length of one of my novels; the audibook runs about two and half hours.

A motion-picture version of "Identity Theft" is in the works from Snoot Entertainment in Los Angeles.
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Holy crap! See this coverage from The New York Times.

Tor is the publisher of the current North American editions of my novels Golden Fleece, Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner, End of an Era, Frameshift, Factoring Humanity, FlashForward, Calculating God, Hominids, Humans, Hybrids, Mindscan, and Rollback, all of which are still in print.

This really, really sucks. I'm not pointing any fingers here (as Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the director of SF&F Publishing for Tor has said, "Tor is part of Macmillan, but I have no more idea what’s actually going on than you do. And yes, I’m not thrilled with that fact"), but it is an awful state of affairs.

Update: Letter from Macmillan's CEO.

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The rock band Van Halen used to insist that there be no brown M&M's in the bowls of M&M's backstage. They weren't just making outrageous demands to wield power, but they wanted to insure a level of attention to detail by the people behind the scenes, so that nothing actually important would get overlooked.

Just sayin' for me it's always a red flag when some group or other wants me for something, then can't even get my byline right, dropping the initial as if it didn't matter. It always means other details are being sloppily attended to, as well.

Sigh.

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One of the reasons I love The American Heritage English Dictionary, Unabridged, is the extensive notes on word origins. This is from the entry on "Wednesday."We say the names of the days of the week constantly, but for most of us they are nonsense syllables.

The seven-day system we use is based on the ancient astrological notion that the seven celestial bodies (the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn) revolving around stationary Earth influence what happens on it and that each of these celestial bodies controls the first hour of the day named after it.

This system was brought into Hellenistic Egypt from Mesopotamia, where astrology had been practiced for millenniums and where seven had always been a propitious number.

In A.D. 321 the Emperor Constantine the Great grafted this astrological system onto the Roman calendar, made the first day of this new week a day of rest and worship for all, and imposed the following sequence and names to the days of the week: DiEEs SOHlis, "Sun's Day"; DiEEs Lunae, "Moon's Day"; DiEEs Martis, "Mars's Day"; DiEEs MercuriI, "Mercury's Day"; DiEEs Iovis, "Jove's Day" or "Jupiter's Day"; DiEEs Veneris, "Venus's Day"; and DiEEs SaturnI, "Saturn's Day."

This new Roman system was adopted with modifications throughout most of western Europe: in the Germanic languages, such as Old English, the names of four of the Roman gods were converted into those of the corresponding Germanic gods.

Therefore in Old English we have the following names (with their Modern English developments): Sunnandaeg, Sunday; MOHnandaeg, Monday; TIwesdaeg, Tuesday (the god Tiu, like Mars, was a god of war); WOHdnesdaeg, Wednesday (the god Woden, like Mercury, was quick and eloquent); Thunresdaeg, Thursday (the god Thunor in Old English or Thor in Old Norse, like Jupiter, was lord of the sky; Old Norse ThOHrsdagr influenced the English form); FrIgedaeg, Friday (the goddess Frigg, like Venus, was the goddess of love); and Saeternesdaeg, Saturday.Now you know. :)
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So different: e-ink vs. backlit LED; dedicated ebook reader vs. multipurpose device. Not sure which one I want -- may have to get both! :D
Robert J. Sawyer online:
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I've been trying to find time to write a tirade about the quality failure of most ebook editions (recent travesties in books I've bought from commercial publishers: the entire book being centered in one, no indenting or blank space between paragraphs in another)

But it doesn't have to be that blatant to still result in an unsatisfying experience. Publishers and ebook retailers: read this article by Kassia Krozser. It explains why so many serious book readers just walk away from the disappointing experience they have with ebooks. They may not be able to articulate what they don't like, but Kassia Krozser does a great job of explaining what's wrong.

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I received an email today from a person in South Korea who had just read FlashForward, my novel which is the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name, pointing out that I use the names of many real people in the novel, but for some reason changed the name of the UN Secretary-General from the real 2009 incumbent, Ban ki-moon ("a hero in Korea"), to Stephen Lewis, a name she took to be fictitious; she expressed fear that this would offend Korean readers.

My response:Many thanks for your kind words. Please note that I wrote the novel FlashForward in 1998 (and it was published in 1999); at that time Kofi Annan was Secretary-General of the United Nations, having assumed office in 1997.

Since no Secretary-General has ever served more than two five-year terms, it was clear Annan would no longer be holding that role in 2009, when the novel was set, and, lacking a flashforward of my own, I had no way of knowing that Ban Ki-moon would become Secretary General in January 2007 -- and so I proposed a likely candidate.

Stephen Lewis, the person I named as Secretary-General in FlashForward, is a real person, and just as Ban is a hero to many South Koreans, Lewis is a hero to many of my fellow Canadians.

Lewis was a distinguished Canadian politician (leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party from 1970-1978), was Canada's ambassador to the United Nations (1984-1988), and was deputy director of UNICEF (1995-1999). From 2001 to 2006 he was United Nations Special Envoy for AIDS/HIV in Africa. His name has been suggested repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I invite you to read more about him and his work.
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Last month, some high-school students (and the mother of one of them) dropped by my home to interview me for a class assignment (they were studying my novels FlashForward and Humans), and they've put two videos of that interview up on YouTube:

Part One (8 minutes)
Part Two (7 minutes)

(The sun is setting outside my penthouse windows as the interview goes on ... and the image gets darker and darker.)
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Peter Anthony Holder, a famed Montreal broadcaster and blogger, just sent me this wonderful email about my novel FlashForward, which is the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name, and, with his kind permission, I'm posting it here:As I mentioned to you I decided that it was high time that I read FlashForward. Needless to say, it was fantastic!

I was halfway through the book yesterday (Saturday) when it just grabbed my by the throat and I couldn't put it down. I paused briefly for a late dinner, did a little bit of work and later stopped to watch Saturday Night Live. It was my intent at 1am to read a couple more chapters for about an hour or so and head off to bed.

The end result was I just stayed up all night and sometime around 6am I finally got to the last page. WOW. WHAT A RIDE!

I am so glad I decided to read the book before the return of the television show in the spring and I am going to urge any and everyone who is a fan of the show to grab the book NOW and enjoy it!

It's not often when reading a novel, that I pause briefly to think about my own existence, but FlashForward is a book that actually makes you do that. WHAT A READ! WHAT A READ!

I was thinking of saying "congratulations" on the success of FlashForward but that seems like a hollow word here. The book has been successful for a decade and is now a hit television series, so some sort of validation from me is pointless.

So what I will say is "thank you." Thank you for allowing me to see the future through your eyes, enjoy a good read and even think about my future, past and present in the process.

Everybody should read FlashForward and I will now go out and tell them so!

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You won't be hearing much from me here for the next little while. I'm going into heads-down mode to work on my script for FlashForward. I'm writing the 19th episode, scheduled to air Thursday, May 6, 2010. Ciao!

Photo: Robert J. Sawyer and FlashForward showrunner David S. Goyer


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Now here's a particularly nice and thoughtful fan letter; great way to start the day!I picked up Far-Seer back when it first came out back in '92. I was intrigued by the cover and the concept.

<shame>It sat unread on my shelf until a couple of months ago.</shame>

I don't know why I never got around to it. No idea whatsoever. I just never did.

Flash forward (pun intended) to 2009, and the launch of the television series FlashForward. Was hooked on the series from the word go. <shame>But I was still clueless...</shame>

Walked into a bookstore near the end of October and saw a novel on the shelf titled FlashForward. "Gee, that was fast, they already have a novelization out.... oh, wait the series is based on the novel!"

Blew through the novel in a little over a week (given the limited time I have for reading for pleasure, less than a month is now considered "blowing through" a book), enjoyed it thoroughly, and have been wondering how the series (which seems to have a bit more of an action/adventure spin on the premise) is going to modify itself to fit on television - and leave an opening for a second season...

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I realized that the reason the name "Robert J. Sawyer" sounded so familiar was because I already owned a book by the same author... that I had been (passively) putting off reading for over a decade...

Knocked that one out in a couple of weeks too. And have been metaphorically kicking myself for not having read it sooner ever since. Then to find out it is the first in a trilogy...

I felt even more stupid when I discovered that I had read and greatly enjoyed "You See But You Do Not Observe" in a time travel anthology (I'm a sucker for time travel stories) several years ago and hadn't made the connection to Far-Seer.

When I got a gift certificate to a bookstore for Christmas/Hanukkah, I knew exactly what I was going to spend it on - whatever other Robert J Sawyer books they had on the shelf. Picked up Calculating God and Hominids.

A few minutes ago, I finished Hominids (having polished off Calculating God week before last). You've become the latest annual "addict my dad to yet another writer".

I really am intrigued by the dichotomy of the anti-theist stance of Far-Seer and the pro-theist stance of Calculating God and the anti-theist stance of Hominids. (I'm now suffering from theological whiplash. My existential insurance company will be sending you a bill...) As someone who feels strongly about the debate, I appreciate the way in which you handled both sides of the argument in each of the books. But even more, what I really like about your books (so far) is that the plot resolutions aren't so much about accomplishing something, or defeating something, as they are about healing the suffering of the characters.

As an American with a Canadian wife, I also appreciate the lack of US-centric thinking.

Great stuff! Thanks for writing it!
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My friend David Widdicombe sent me this link. Pant-hoot!
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Great writer, great person. A real loss.
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SF Signal asked a bunch of experts for recommendations for science fiction books to be taught in schools. To my delight, Jack McDevitt recommended Wake and Prof. Paul Levinson recommended Rollback.
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A really nice video.

Thanks to Arwen Rosenbaum for the link!
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