I just finished a meeting with Michale Cnudde, the gentleman whose novel I’ve been editing. I’m done editing! I’ve handed the all-important flash drive over to him to approve changes before we start formatting. Then I format it for epublishing while Tristan Tinder does the cover and formats it for print through Island Blue.

It’s a bright, shining new decade. In the past ten years we’ve had an economic collapse, Facebook, and the first lesbian kiss on TV. It’ll be interesting to see what the next ten bring forth.

Today is the first time in 456 years that the Winter Solstice and a lunar eclipse fall on the same day. From about one to two in the morning, all across North America, we can watch the moon fully eclipse.

After adventures with formatting and finding artists and the interesting process of getting on Duotrope, we are live with the first issue of Theory Train! It’s exciting, because it’s the first for-profit venture I’ve helped launch. We started in September, putting the whole thing together. Adam put together our website, Michelle got us listed on Duotrope, and I handled submissions. Meetings by Skype were our primary mode of communication, and it made for very odd one-sided conversations for anyone who happened to be in the same room as us.

I just watched The Social Network, the movie about the founding of Facebook. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the dotcom boom, where the dream was becoming a billionaire overnight by coming up with some clever new idea.

Wednesday was the launch of issue 8.2 of Island Writer, and it went wonderfully. All of the editorial staff were able to be there and we had a packed room with all the contributors and people there to hear the readings.

I spend a lot of my free time involved in the Victoria Writers’ Society, and a lot of that time involved in Island Writer, a literary magazine based around Vancouver Island. We only accept stories from the Island and the Gulf Islands. I do a variety of interesting things, none of which involve selection. It’s kind of fun how much of that there is. As the Editorial Assistant, I accept and blind all the submissions, convert them all to Google Documents, format them for the genre editors, and pass them on after the deadline has closed. I also verify that they’re from the Island, keep track of a multitude of spreadsheets, and answer questions. Today I sent out the rejection letters for the upcoming issue, which was slightly less fun, as I know it will disappoint some people. The acceptance letters will follow shortly, but they’re pe4rsonalized, and from the genre editors, so I don’t need to do anything more until we do the copyediting.

It’s been an education being involved with the magazine. When I started on the last issue, I’d only helped with selection for my high school literary magazine, and that was a dramatically different experience. This issue has been more of an education, as I’ve been involved since the beginning, including posting ads on Craigslist calling for submissions, and my duties have grown in other areas.

So I’m really looking forward to the launch of this issue, and working on the next one. I hope I’ll continue to be able to work with a great team and learn a great deal about the publishing industry.

This bout of sentimentality brought to you be a meeting earlier today; no, I most likely won’t be the next Editor in Chief, but we’re hoping that I’ll be able to do some definite training with the next Editor in Chief about production schedules and the other duties of the Editor in Chief.

As I’ve been typing this, I’ve had MuchMusic on in the background: music and 3-minute videos make good company later in the evening. One of the persistent commercials is one by Doritos about the band Down With Webster. One part of the ad focuses on the special edition bags of chips that have a spot on the back that you can hold in front of your webcam to get a free music download.

The MuchMusic website having that capability means that the spot is electronically coded, like barcodes, but in a different shape, which brings home far more that augmented reality, that 90s sci-fi darling, is very much a physical reality.

Video games that take place half in the real world and half electronically have popped up with regularity for the last while; my favorites of the genre are Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, which features a virtual scavenger hunt over physical San Francisco as a minor element, and Invitation to The Game by Monica Hughes, which approaches it from a different perspective; the involved subjects continue to think they are playing an electronic game even after the game becomes their reality. The blurred lines between the electronic and the physical makes this an interesting time to be experimenting with technology. And the blurred line is becoming increasingly more prominent; it’s more than just sales, like barcodes, and some electronic games for teenagers; the British postal system has come out with new stamps that, if you put your smartphone camera over them, will bring up a video presentation about the historical place or event depicted in the stamp. And if the British post is doing it, you know for certain that it’s no longer a fringe technology.

I recently discovered the blog Less Wrong, written collectively by a number of interesting people. I found it through a writing project of Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s. The whole idea of approaching human rationality as a sort of extended humanitarian science experiment fascinates me. The power of it is really evident in Yudkowsky’s, where his characters actually examine how and why they think; it gives them a depth of character, and makes reading about their adventures linear in a compelling way. They do things because of a trackable train of thought that follows logical processes, not because of magic or unarticulated ideals. How much more interesting, then, for real people to model the same behavior.

It was exhilarating and a little terrifying, and it only lasted about ten minutes. Tristan, the friend I’m visiting, took us on a country drive, that most American of activities. We went along county roads so overlooked they didn’t have painted lines on them, and were only wide enough for traffic to go each way if both drivers were polite and neither had a very big car. Corn lined both sides of the road, interspersed with mailboxes and deciduous trees.

She finally found a place to turn around at a small junction, marked by the Countryside Restaurant and the Broken Spoke Roadhouse, the biggest buildings for miles. Once we were back on the quiet road facing the other way, she pulled onto the grass and made me switch seats with her. It’s the first time I’ve driven, something I’ve been meaning to learn to do for years but never gotten around to.

With my death grip on 10 and 2, I managed to stay in my lane for the most part, and even managed to pass a truck going the other way. Tristan threatens that next time we’ll go at night, and I’ll actually have to stop at a stop sign.

Driving and the road compass a huge part of the American journey to adult-hood. One of the iconic works of the 50s and, really, the entire twentieth century, was On The Road. The act of it occupies a huge place in the American psyche, and I’m starting to learn, which makes me very happy.

I spent this last weekend trekking fabulously through the Victoria Steampunk Expo then down to Port Angeles and thence to Seattle and back to Vancouver and then home. In three days. I think. It was a great deal of fun. Working inside most of the day, I don’t tend to appreciate what a gorgeous corner of the continent I live on.

Met Christine Hart at the Steampunk Expo, though didn’t realize we were both in the Victoria Writer’s Society until Monday when I came back and she’d found me on DeviantArt. It’s a wonderfully small community out here.