Book Review: "Dreadful Beginnings", by Marty Shaw

Those watching the publishing industry know that this is an exciting time for those who want to take nontraditional routes; with the ease of e-publishing and increased availability of tablets and smartphones, more writers are taking to the virtual streets themselves, bypassing traditional publishing houses. I've joined with the independent author's support/promotion/marketing group Literary+ for the occaisonal review and perhaps another surprise or too; today I'm reviewing Marty Shaw's novella "Dreadful Beginnings", the first of his "Penny Dreadful" series. Enjoy!





Review: "Dreadful Beginnings", by Marty Shaw 

Marty Shaw's new novella "Dreadful Beginnings" promises to begin his new suburban fantasy series,  "Penny Dreadful". It's a face-paced and fun story, marred by overly broad characters and a bit of a simplistic, straight-forward plot. 

We first meet our heroine, recent high-school graduate Penny Dire, as she's quitting a telemarketing job after only two days.  The initial impression of Penny is of a carefree and immature for her age young teenager who doesn't seem to care that her friends all have jobs and doesn't see to have or want a plan for the future. She also has a gothic style befitting her name, an artistic bent, and an affinity for cemetaries.  In one early scene, Penny visits one of her favorite tombstones: 

One ancient stone looked especially photogenic, but looks could be deceiving. I 
had used up a whole memory card on this ancient rock, trying all kind of different filters and lighting angles. In real life, the tombstone called out to me and made my skin tingle whenever I was close to it. But it was just a dumb slab of granite in the photos. For some reason, I couldn’t capture its essence on film. I knelt down and brushed away some of the grime, feeling the familiar electric tingle on my hand when I made contact with the stone. Maybe a charcoal rubbing or possibly even a foil casting was needed to really capture the spirit of the piece. 

This painted a nice picture of how Penny sees the world, and shows rather than tells us about her budding talents. Sadly, this picture of Penny as a budding artist who sees things more deeply than others doesn't recur through the story, nor does it figure in Penny's eventual training as a demon hunter. Her irresponsibility and shortsightedness don't factor either, leaving her eventual demon-hunting persona feeling somewhat generic. 

The initial buildup to the paranormal events is nicely done, with small magical effects giving the reader - and characters - hints that the world doesn't function quite normally before leading us to the climactic battle with a demon. There's just enough tragedy to make the threat seem real without letting the story sink into real "horror". When the final battle comes, it is exciting and suspenseful, with real stakes and a satisfying conclusion. 

Shaw's biggest weakness is that his reliance on archetypes makes it hard to really care about the characters. Penny's artistic talents and ambitions are forgotten, leaving us with a sassy demon-hunting teenage girl. She meets a mentor - the improbably named Doctor Horror -  who tells her just as much as she needs to know, with cryptic riddling hints before literally vanishing. An overprotective mother. A gruff magic-shop owner with a hidden heart of gold. I couldn't  escape the feeling that, even if I hadn't met all of these people before, I knew someone just like them from another book. It ends on a promisng note, with hints about the identity and nature of her mentor. 

In conclusion, while there isn't as much depth as one might hope for, "Penny Dreadful" is an entertaining, quick read with promises for more as the series continues. It is available from Amazon for your Kindle



Three stars

The HDBaseT adventure continues

HDBaseT has been around for a few years now and, to the likely disappointment of the initial HDBaseT consortium, appears to have settled into a role as a midpoint; it still isn't a format likely to be seen as the input or output to a device, but is widely used in distribution and switching. I had the chance to ponder and discuss this with some of my colleagues in the commercial AV industry at AMX's showroom during the two-day certification class for their HDBaseT system: Enova. It's striking to see how far this technology has come, and how different manufacturers can take the same underlying chip set to create very different-feeling solutions.
The idea for HDBaseT is a grand one; to have one and only one cable connected to each display.  That cable, a standard network cable with standard RJ45 connectors, would carry uncompressed high-definition video, audio, control, and even power. Yes, they expect to power your display via the same Cat5 jumper that carries everything else. One cable in this case literally means one cable. In real world applications, that isn't what's happened. For one thing, native HDBaseT inputs and outputs. Even if manufacturers want to use this kind of system, even mid-size displays in the 50 to 65 inch range outdraw HDBaseT's upper power limit by an approximate factor of 10. So, like a phone company  running fiber to the curb before converting to old-fashioned copper, we're left with easily-pulled Cat5e cables to a receiver-box giving way to good old HDMI cables for the proverbial last mile. We're not quite where we someday can be, but it's an improvement. Crestron's Digital Media is an HDBaseT solution, as is Extron's XTP and AMX's DXLink, the heart of its Enova solutions.
How do solutions compare? Not only does Enova have a different feel from Crestron, but AMX's DVX (a family of all-in-one presentation switchers) behaves differently from their DGX (more conventional digital matrix switchers). One thing I hadn't known - because I'm not in the habit of removing the case on expensive pieces of electronics unless I have to - is that while it looks like one seemless piece of hardware, the DVX is, in fact, card-based. My notes include a glimpse at its innards, highlighting the HDMI input cart swappable with a DXLink card for another model. It's a clever design philosophy which allows AMX to inexpensively and reliably use one platform to produce a suite of units with slightly different features. 
So how does Enova compare to Digital Media? At a glance they're similar; each has a presentation-switcher with built-in control processor, audio mixing, and an amplifier. Each line boasts a modular matrix switch capable of handling different video formats. Each has a series of Cat5 transmitters and receivers. Each handles HDCP key authentication, effectively eliminating any risk of running out of keys in large systems. Looking a bit closer, one sees differences.
The first distinction - of  which AMX is justifiably proud - is that each output on an Enova system has a built-in "smart-scaler" which reads the  EDID from a display and scales the image to fit. This means that even in a large system with many different displays each device will get an image at its native resolution. Their contention is that other practices, like choosing "best common", not only leave adjusting resolution to a device's onboard scaler, but fails to take advantage of the higher resolution in the largest display in a system. It adds a certain measure of cost, but AMX feels that they give value for it.
The second distinction is that each AMX matrix switch has a control processor built into it. This makes for a neater and more compact installation, but isn't a tremendous improvement over the inclusion of a standalone processor, and burying it in the switch gives you the new problem of having no local control ports. Unless everything in your system has IP control, you'll have to build out the system with varying add-ons. In all fairness, AMX has a nice suite of IP-based control port expansion modules, and seems to have a philosophy of preferentially using IP-based controls.

What about the distinction within the Enova line? At Enova training in AMX's New York showroom we got a demonstration of both the DVX presentation switcher and DGX matrix switcher.  The performance in switching speed is markedly different, with the DVX switching, I would estimate, twice as fast as its cousin. The difference was explained as a result of different engineering teams working on the two devices, and upcoming firmware updates to let the DGX catch up were hinted at. (it was further explained that the slower switch time - one and a half to two seconds - was a result of the switcher dropping sync when it changed sources. It is very interesting how the same hardware can have different performance given different firmware.
What about venerable switching manufacturer Extron? I don't have much to say about their XTP line; certainly until they start shipping the Cat5 input and output cards for their switcher, they can't be said to have a real solution available. Even given that, they're still behind the curve in not having a DMPS300/DVX style presentation switcher available. They have added power injectors to their XTP line, but it is, at the very least, unclear that these would work with other HDBaseT solutions.
Long story short? It's an exciting time in the commercial AV industry as we finally seem to have the hardware, software, and expertise to start making digital video work closer to the way it should; many of these solutions are, if anything, easier to use and more flexible than old analog solutions.

A side note: my adventure at AVI-SPL has come to an end, so I am open to new opportunities in the AV field. Anyone reading this is welcome to comment or drop me a line with any openings in the New York metropolitan area.

Stay tuned for a book review later this week.

Collaborative Blog-hop story - Part the Fifth: Message, Hold the Bottle

In my apparent inability to shy away from cool-sounding projects, I've joined the talented Carrie Sorenson, Nicole Pyles, Yolanda Lane, and Tena Carr for a pass-the-story collaborative effort. Part four ended in quite a cliffhanger, as our heroine discoverd... something. There's a tendency on these kinds of stories for people chapters to end right before an answer to some question, with the next participant having the pleasure/responsibility/option of giving the big reveal. With the story only half-over (we'll each get one more turn) I can't reveal too much, but to be fair to the reader we need to give something.

See earlier parts the first, second, third, and fourth (and, despite this being a time-travel story, I suggest you read them in that order):



And now, without further ado:

"Message, Hold the Bottle"

She was in a study or an office, dominated by an ornate desk of some kind of dark wood surrounded by stacks of notebooks and papers hapharzardly strewn about. There it was, carelessly thrown under the desk; a cheap, tiny notebook of the sort grade-school kids buy in Septembers and discard in June if their houses aren't burned down under mysterious circumstances. The pages were yellow with age, the binding crumbling, and the cover marred by an uneven crease - the same crease across the cover of the powder-blue notebook tucked into Gnat's pocket. A torn-off corner revealed a pen-and-ink drawing on the page below.

A wave of heat flowed through Gnat's chest and into her throat, Tyler's voice encouraging her to keep looking came from very far away, past ringing ears and a rush of vertigo as the floor seemed to twist under Gnat's feet. She sat heavily on the floor under the desk, and remembered.  Not the flame, but the time after in faux-homey offices with a fatherly looking bearded man with a notebook and a leather chair and questions and a notebook and not the flame but its memory and a notebook.

Gnat's first set of foster parents had believed in therapy, believed in her needing a sympathetic ear after what happened. At least for the first few weeks, until the trauma faded into the past and the forty-dollar-a-week copays started to add up. Dr. Blintain was a nice man, a gentle man, a bit like young Gnat's idea of what a college professor would look like. Or, for that matter, how a headshrinker should look. He listened a lot, asked a lot of questions about what her foster parents were like and what she thought about them and how she felt when she thought about her family and how she felt now. It was the last session - the last forty-dollars that her foster-mother would pay for Naomi's sanity - when Doctor Blintain finally helped her find the words for what was wrong in her life.

"My parents, my room, our house, my brother, they were all mine. They were me. And now, I'm, like, sharing. It's like I'm snatching bits and pieces of other people's lives and they aren't me."
Dr. Blintain handed her a little pocket composition notebook. He didn't slide it across the table, didn't toss it to her. He really handed it to her. His fingers might have even brushed against hers. "Make some space for yourself. Write poems. Draw pictures. However you want to express yourself, just do it. Consider it your therapy homework."

Gnat shook her head. "But I'm no good at any of those things."

"Not the point. Even if nobody else sees it, this can be your private space. Something yours."

That was her last session, and she was rarely without a notebook since. The little memo pad Dr. Blintain had given her, spiral books, marble composition books.   Even on the streets she'd buy one with rare saved-up pennies or, in desperation, shoplift them. The first thing she drew in that first notebook was the flame-imp; a malevolent little sprite that set fire to houses and killed families. It was short and twisted and hateful, with little lightning bolts in its eyes and crooked limbs. Drawing it made her feel less aweful about the fire, helped her forget the truth that there was no imp, but...

That didn't matter now. Now, in the present, she saw this impossible notebook with the half-torn cover. And underneath, in the visible page, was the imp.

As her head cleared, Gnat heard Freddy speaking to Tyler outside the room. "I knew this wouldn't work. It's desperate and crazy. Look at her."

Gnat carefully, surreptitiously palmed the little notebook as she stood up, tucked it into her pants alongside its twin. "I'm OK guys... just a little lightheaded. This is alot for me."

She slowly made her way room to room, her mind racing. What could she point to them that would satisfy them, at least long enough for her to read through that notebook herself. Because once she saw the imp's leering face, she knew she'd not share it. At least not right away.

She made sure to visit four more rooms, carefully looking under furniture and behind curtains for something she knew wasn't there. Finally, she came to a bedroom. Half-hidden under a bed was a snowglobe. Hrm.. complicated enough to hold a message, delicate enough that they might not crack it open right away... yes, this would give her some time to think.

"I found it", she said weakly. "This is it."

Freddy fixed her with a hard stare. "That? What do you think that is?"

Gnat swallowed. She knew he'd see through him; she just knew it. Still, she thought she knew the right answer. "It just feels right. It feels like it's a ... a message."

Freddy gingerly took the snowglobe from her hands, turned and gave it to Tyler.

His fingers did not brush against hers.

Friday Flash - Variations on a Theme

Last week the good folk at the writing support/guidance/social networking group Literary+ (to be found on the Google + Social network site) ran a weekly Flash assignment: writers' addictions. The request was specifically for lighthearted, fun things; notebooks, pens, and chocolate rather than heroin, whisky, or illicit sex. Black as my soul is, I'd perhaps preferred a touch of darkness but chose to, for once, play more-or-less by the rules. I played a bit with mood and form, sketching a writer's addiction to writing in second-person present tense. Not my deepest or most interesting flash piece, but I liked the first paragraph. Perhaps it's a set of ideas I'll revisit at some point in more depth.

I played this one pretty straight, but I appear to have one of the higher quirkiness levels in this particular group. For the workspace photo contest, for example, most people showed cozy desks littered with pens, ink, pulp, and electronic devices. My photo (honorably mentioned as the most creative)? The very place where I'm writing these words: the 7 Train, westbound towards Manhattan. (Photo is at the Queensborough Plaza station. One stop east of "my" stop at Court Square, but sometimes I hop off early to get in a few blocks of walking).

Your Two Addictions to Writing

You awaken before dawn, to the LCD light of the alarm clock, yellow sodium light filtered through carelessly half-closed curtains, rhythmic breathing from the bed beside you. Take the pen from your notebook, quietly stride in the half-light to the door, gently pull shut behind you. Black coffee. The cat rubbing against your feet. Shards of last nights tangled with yesterday's plans jangle in your head, grinding, streaking, screaming at you. A sip of bitter black coffee quickens your heartbeat as your fingers dance across the keyboard, words and pictures and ideas flowing as the dawn comes, unseen and unnoticed.


You race home early, to the mailbox. Sounds of traffic, your neighbor's dog, the kids across the street all fade very far away. Your breath, your heart pause as fingers rifle through envelopes, for that one SASE even as you flip open on your phone one more time, checking for another review, a blog comment, cheers, applause, attacks. What did they say? Did anyone get it? Will they buy it? Then, to the keyboard, unpaid bills and advertisements and magazines sit discarded and forgotten for the moment. Now will come answers, now will come replies and, maybe, the next piece to send off into the world.


Which are you? Addicted to process, to the flow of words, the alchemy of ideas and experience and coffee and good gin? Or to the result - to human contact, to the feeling of reaching someone, touching someone, changing the world?

Addicted to writing, or addicted to having written?


Interestingly,  Tressa Green mined a similar vein, but relied more heavily on metahphor. You can see her effort (and check out the rest of her blog) here. My first paragraph has almost the same message as her piece, but in vastly different form to dramatically different effect. Does one work better for you?

Next week, I promise a technology post! Until then, thanks for listening. 

A Slight Change in Aethetics - Guest Post!

I'll be stepping away for the day to give writer Len Berry the reigns of the blog for one day only. Len is the author of the recently published Vitamin F, available for your Amazon Kindle or Nook

A Slight Change In Aesthetics

Writing is not always the simplest art form, especially when you do something that goes against the expectations of most readers.

I had to break a lot of those expectations with my dystopian novel, Vitamin F. This wasn’t because I was trying to be experimental, but because the setting demanded it. In Vitamin F, after a genetic crash, the population has become 88% female. Because of that, most people walking around are female, the world has shifted to a female mindset.

We don’t live in this sort of world, so I had to figure out how to show the differences between Vitamin F and modern society.

The first step is to look at the people in the world. Where a crowd typically means a random mix of people to us, in Vitamin F, it means something more specific. Half of the people in a crowd can’t be men, in fact, if men are around at all, they’re in small numbers.

It goes further than that.

Any time stock people go by—cops, guards, students—most, if not all of them are women. Our minds, shaped by society, don’t see specific groups as being a mix of men and women. We instinctively assign masculine gender roles onto doctors, firefighters, soldiers, virtually every group. True, we might use gender-neutral labels or even feminine labels, but, in our male-centric society, we default to seeing men in basic roles. It’s only when we describe things with greater detail, do we break from these molds.

For this to work, I had to take extra steps. Sometimes describing the shape of a single person would be enough, so long as I related that body shape to the others in the group as well. Other times, I used dialog to have the characters in a scene define gender for me.

After all, why do extra work when you can get characters to do it for you?

Something else I had to address was the sorts of events that happened in social settings. I could still use trips to bars, but I thought most aggressive sports felt like they’d be too much. Action movies seemed like something that wouldn’t necessarily go away, but would need to change into a more emotional experience. I kept poetry readings, but, since I don’t care for most poetry, my lead characters share my disdain.

I found myself changing things so they might continue on. Some things were little, like referring to Tarzan as a woman, not a man. (There was still a Jane.) Especially since I take the lead characters, Bridgett and Penelope, on a trip through normal life, I made use of a sorority they both deal with. I framed the sorority from a lot of my dealings with college friends who were in those groups, but also from what I know about fraternities. Changing things to adapt to a different proportion for each gender became a small, but important task for selling the reality of Vitamin F.

The biggest shift I had to make to accommodate the story resulted in using one word in place of another. Most of the time, we talk about men and women in modern society. In Vitamin F, men are rare, a commodity, and socially second class. Because of this, I use the word “male” a lot more than I would in normal conversation.

In a way, this change is used by the Office of Genetic Security to make sure men are separate from women, not only distinct, but also not equal. While men are part of regular society, they have to undertake regular physical exams and make an annual sperm donation. It’s the sort of little word shift that Orwell talked about in 1984, so I thought it best to apply it in Vitamin F as well.

In crafting a story, it’s important to keep in mind the complete structure of the setting and the characters. The more unusual and distinct the world, the more it will require description and deliberation on how to approach even the smallest of elements. It doesn’t just paint a more vivid word picture, it also details the story and the plight of the characters trapped in its pages.

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Len Berry a lifelong resident of Missouri studied biology before turning his imagination toward writing. In his spare time, Len enjoys drawing, watching anime, and playing an occasional video game. He is the author of the dystopian e-book Vitamin F, now available for Nook and Kindle. Since Len is an active blogger, you can find out more about him and his projects at his blog, Reflections of a Writer.

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Thank you Len! I appreciate the perspective, and urge all of you to check out Len's blog and his book. His blog tour will continue tomorrow, and I'll take the reigns back for a Friday Flash and some other upcoming posts.

Political Correctness, Body Shaming, and Breakfast Food

I'll follow up my last AV-ish related post with a writing-ish related post. This week I'll give my take on one of those discussions I can't believe we still need to have: the crazed furor of what I call the "anti-PC police" with their odd insistence that any efforts to avoid offensive and harmful language is the first step on the slippery slope to an Orwellian dystopia.

What does my breakfast have to do with this post?
Read on!

One of the latest forays into free-speech absolutism came from a freelance game-writer and blogger named James Desborough with a post charmingly titled "In Defense of Rape as a Storytelling Device". Now, let me say right of the bat that Mr. Desborough is not a sociopath; he was not defending the act of rape but arguing, for reasons which I don't comprehend, against the idea that careful consideration should be taken  in fictional portrayals of rape and sexual assault. Part of his defense was the same thing I often hear from those who I think of as the anti-PC police; it's a free country, and he has freedom of speech. This is, of course true. The counterargument, of course, is that sexual assault victims have the right to not be re-traumatized by halfwits using rape imagery as a cheap way of creating dramatic tension. (As an aside, it's also true that an inflammatory title is a good way to get attention, but only if your first-grade teacher neglected to teach you the difference between good attention and bad attention).

How far will people go with this kind of thing? As far as we'll let them. At a recent comedy show, professional comedian and amateur knuckle-dragging semi-evolved ape-creature Daniel Tosh joked about how funny it would be if a female audience member were gang-raped right there at his show for saying that rape jokes aren't funny. But hey - he has free speech, right? Need we really be such free-speech absolutists to not think there should be a consequence for someone opining that a woman should be raped because it would be funny? There have been plenty of missing-the-point defenses of Tosh, including this one here, which references George Carlin. The difference is that Carlin knew what Tosh seems to either not know or not care about; that comedy, like all other artistic expression, can communicate deeper messages than making people laugh. He used comedy to attack rape culture; Tosh used comedy to normalize it.


In fact, all of the arguments in favor of so-called "political correctness" follow a similar formula;

• Using "gay" as  a pejorative accustoms people to thinking of homosexuals as inferior
• Using "retarded" to mean stupid marginalizes the developmentally delayed and perpetuates the stereotype that they can't be productive members of society.
• Using "girly" to denigrate a man (as when baseball player Vincente Padilla recently told former teammate Mark Teixera that he should play a woman's sport) reinforces gender stereotypes of  both men and women, with men as unemotional, tough and stoic and women nurturing and gentle but weak. It tells every boy that he shouldn't display emotions and tells every girl that she shouldn't be strong and competitive.

The above, of course, are blatant, obvious examples of poorly-chosen words being hurtful. What about more subtle ones? There are scores to choose from, but today we'll take on an issue close to my heart in female body images. As fellow blogger Katje Van Loon recently pointed out, all of Disney's "princesses" are skinny. In fact, the Sea-Witch Ursula is the only overweight female character I can think of in any of Disney's stories (Van Loon has a tangential point that plus-sized women don't get to be glamorous; you should read her post after you finish mine). Recent endeavors have been better, but many of the "classics" (Cinderella, to pick the most blatant example) use physical attractiveness as shorthand for virtue and physical ugliness for evil. Does the fact that the titular character is beautiful as well as good while her antagonists are ugly subtly steer girls towards tying their sense of self-worth to their appearance? Of course it can. It also leads boys to learn that joking about ugly people is OK.

Which one here is the virtuous one? You can tell by her cute nose!

Which brings me to my last example of the day: The Oatmeal (you didn't really think I was talking about breakfast food, did you?In addition to being part of a nice breakfast, The Oatmeal is a reliably funny online comic strip. When creator Matthew Inman was faced with a spurious legal attack, he responded with this charity fundraiser. Inman deserves all the credit in the world for defending himself in a way that was funny and ended up giving over two hundred thousand dollars to charity, but check out that last bit: the "drawing of your mother seducing a Kodiak bear". 








Not only is a "your mother" joke one of the lowest forms of humor, but drawing her as an unattractive, overweight woman trying to be sexy strikes me as the same kind of "lets ridicule the fat woman" as this classic from adultery-oriented personal ad site Ashley Madison: it's the idea that a "fat" woman trying to be sexy is absurd and should be laughed at. Never mind that a growing proportion of the population actually is overweight and some of them presumably want an active, enjoyable sex life. Let's all laugh at the fat girl who thinks she's sexy. Only skinny girls get to be sexy! We see the wrongness when it's part of a message we're already primed to disagree with (you should cheat on your wife), but should recognize that packaging it with a "good" message (philanthropy > douchebaggery, to use Inman's phrasing) is, if anything, even worse as it normalizes the message of fat-shaming.






"Political Correctness" is not  a set of shackles. It's the idea that we should be cognizant of the messages we are sending and stop sending bad ones.

Summer Projects

It's been a quiet few weeks here on the blog, mainly because it's been a loud few weeks in real life. Some news on what's to follow:

1) Flash Fiction Fridays - each Friday I'll post a short or super-short here, in this very space. Some might follow a theme, some might stand alone.

2) Technology/AV  - I've finished all of the training requirements for my new Project Engineer position. Hooray! Expect another AV post next week, and bi-weekly from there.

3) Literary+ -- this is a group of writers on the Google+ social network. They share encouragement, writing tips, cross-promotion of work, and even little projects and excersizes. I'll be participating in a serial with them, and will likely write something for an upcoming anthology (theme: The Stranger. I already have an idea or two).

3a) Literary+ Serial. Smoke and Shadows. Start following now. I promise I'll be along soon!

4) Blog-hop collaborative story - Remember Riley's story, co-written with Carrie K Sorenstein, Nicole Pyle? We're starting another one, this time with additional participants. First part is already upon Carrie's blog  here. I'll keep you posted.

There's also going to be at least one special guest poster here this summer! Stay tuned.

Summer Collaboration Challenge!

My more personal summer project isn't going to be on the blog; Chloe and I are working on a shared story together. They've just been learning to write stories in kindergarten, and I wand to give her the chance to practice over the summer so first grade won't be a complete "starting over". Her big passion at the moment is drawing, while mine is writing. So, to step each of us out of our comfort zones, I promised to illustrate each of my pages if she'll write a line on each of hers. The story so far - about a princess and her friend the dragon, is starting to take on a kind of meandering charm. Last night at bedtime when I asked her to name one thing about herself that makes her proud, she said that she's creative. Hopefully we can nurture that feeling.


Tomorrow I'll be back with a post about language, feminism, and breakfast food.

See you then.