I’m not going to bang on about it in this post, but the basic idea is that it contains a series of puzzles. Each puzzle — text with a lavish accompanying illustration — contains clues to one specific concept, quality, object or other meme-like notion. The answer is linked with (embodied by, found at, associated to) a physical place on Earth. Looking at the solution’s physical place using Google Earth will reveal patterns that can be found in the illustration, confirming you’re on the right track. Then, taken together, the answers to all the puzzles form the clues for one last puzzle that will lead you to the final treasure spot. The winner will get a 50k euro prize.

Although I’m still on my normal twitter account, @ghostwoods, I’ve also got a Treasure Hunt-specific twitter account, @Dedopulos. I’ll be answering questions there, mentioning interesting stuff, and giving occasional hints. When I have longer pieces of information to reveal, I’ll probably do it here and put links up there, assuming that Carlton, the publishers, agree.

In other news, the novels I’m publishing via Ghostwoods Books are doing nicely. If you haven’t had a look at them, and you like genre or speculative fiction, you should definitely have a peek. They’re very reasonably priced, fully up to professional grade of course, and getting good reviews on Amazon. You can click on the links to the right to read full details and a decently-sized free sample of each one.

Of course, there are no clues to the Great Global Treasure Hunt hidden in any of the novels. It would be unthinkable of me to do anything like that and I know you’d be shocked — shocked, I say — at any suggestion otherwise. So, whatever you do, don’t go reading the Ghostwoods novels because you’re hoping for a clue on how to win 50k. No. Definitely don’t do that. Go read them because they’re really good.

A dark, sexy subculture romp, All Lies and Jest is a novel about belief, delusion, were-mosquitoes, and the dangers of being so open-minded that your brain falls out

Sezin Koehler’s American Monsters is a disturbing horror story about super-powered female trauma survivors taking the rave scene back from the predators.

Ghost Patrol, by P.D. Jordan, is a taut science fiction thriller about perception, mind control, and what it actually means to be a human being.

Finally, long-time author and game designer Greg Stolze’s SwitchFlipped is a fast-paced, gritty urban fantasy novel set in the cracks behind what we think of as reality.

Remember! No sneaky looking inside any of those books for clues regarding the hiding place of the Treasure! I utterly forbid it.

Unusually for a meme, SOON can be damned creepy, and it is that context which makes it amusing. It was started by the lolcat forum icanhazcheezburger.com back in ’07. It kinda languished there for a while, but started picking up last year. In the last few months, best-of compilations have started to appear, bringing the concept out into the wider web.

To save you having to go look for them, here’s a selection of some of better ones!

If you liked this post, check out All Lies and Jest by author Kate Harrad. It’s got were-mosquitos, irritating elf wannabes, Holographic Evil Jesus, homicidal Christians, a girl who changes her personality more often than her shoes, and a very healthy dose of snarkiness. I think you’ll like it. 

But what does Fair Trade publishing mean? Well, I drink a lot of coffee. I’ve been impressed with the Fair Trade initiative, given how badly screwed coffee growers tend to be. Growing coffee takes years. So can writing and publishing a book. In practice, this translates to a 50/50 income share with authors. If I can’t make my wages and expenses out of my half of the income, I don’t deserve to be publishing. I’ve been writing for 20 years, and have more than 100 books out there. I’m determined to be the publisher I always longed to find.

But Fair Trade has to extend to readers, too. Traditional publishing is falling apart under the weight of its own greed. Far too many companies have been unfairly avaricious for too long, complacent in their power as Gatekeepers of what gets published. The digital revolution has changed all of that. Readers are sick of being treated like stupid, naughty children. For the reader, Fair Trade means a great book, well written and fairly priced, prepared to full professional standard, free of crippling DRM. Every Ghostwoods book has been painstakingly laid out, proof-read, and then proof-read again.

The Ghostwoods launch novels represent the best in modern fiction. You can see the covers just to the right of this post. Click on one, and you’ll be taken to that book.

‘All Lies and Jest’, by Kate Harrad, is a counter-culture thriller with a delicious vein of dark humour. In it, you’ll meet crazed cultists, psychopaths, lettuce-eating vampires, and a chilling conspiracy to bring about the end of the world.

‘American Monsters’, by Sezin Koehler, is a post-modern feminist horror, and a savage indictment of rave culture. Its heroines are traumatised, quirkily super-powered, and absolutely not putting up with any more shit.

‘Ghost Patrol’, by P.D. Jordan, is a tense science fiction story. When a brilliant young space captain is captured by the enemy, he finds himself thrown into a lethal game of psychological cat and mouse with his would-be reprogrammers.

‘SwitchFlipped’ by Greg Stolze is an exciting urban fantasy about a normal guy who gets drawn into a lunatic reality where people can turn into electricity, where ghosts live suburban lives, and where nothing is impossible, if you’re prepared to pay the price.

The digital revolution is a very exciting time to be a reader. It’s exciting for writers, too. I’m determined to bring the two together, as pleasantly and generously as I possibly can.

The most useful tool in the eBook publishing fight is Calibre. It’s free, so go get it now :)
http://calibre-ebook.com/

Calibre will convert stuff for you to just about any format. Which is nice. To get your docs ready for it, prepare a Word file and save it as HTML. If you’re not using Word, the info below still applies, but I can’t vouch for how clean the html output will be from your word processor of choice.

Anway, specifically, prepare your book in one single Word document as follows:

• Use fonts sized to 10, 12, 14 and 18 points only. 10pts equals the kindle’s default text size.
• Left-align, with justification and hyphenation turned off.
• In Tools / Options / General / Web Options / Encoding, set the encoding to UTF-8.
• Strip all tabs, double spaces and multiple lines of blank space from the document. This really is important. Quick way: in the edit/replace pop-up, replace ^t with nothing, ^p^p with ^p, and two space characters with one space character. Alright, I admit it, the double spaces won’t screw the formatting up, but nowadays they make you look clueless.
• If for some reason you’ve put in manual breaks at the end of each line of the page, I’m afraid you’re mad, and you definitely need to take them out again. Paragraph breaks at the end of each paragraph. Nothing else.
• Set the line spacing to single and the paragraph before/after extra spacing to zero.
• Put in CTRL-ENTER hard page breaks at the end of a chapter (as opposed to trusting it to a style definition).
• Use word styles to define yourself chapter headings, indented body text, and all that other good book-style stuff. If you want blank lines before or after certain elements — or want stuff centered — now is the time to do it. For example, I have a style for those # # # spacer lines that has a 12pt gap both before and after the paragraph.
• Make a note of the style name you use for the chapter headings. Don’t use it for anything else, and make sure no other style is called something that includes that name as a sub-string. So if you call it ‘chapter’, don’t have anything else called, say, ‘achapter’ or ‘chapter-small’, or what have you.
• If you choose to not indent the first line of the paragraph after a break — and well done for choosing wisely — pick a separate style for first paras and put it in manually. Yes, it’s a pain. Sorry. You’ll need to remember the style name you picked and, crazily, actually give it a first line indent of, say, half an inch. This is the opposite of what you want, but it is because Word is stupid, and we’ll need to tweak it later.
• If you want to know how it’ll look on a Kindle, change the text font to Trebuchet 10pt, which is a close comparison. Different Kindles have different screen sizes, so don’t worry too much about the size of a page as such. So long as you don’t have any 3″+ single words, you should be fine.
• If you want people to see your title/author/dedication page as a default, put the first line — and only the first line — of that page in your chapter heading style.

OK, that’s all the formatting you need to do. Save it by selecting:
Save As / Web Page, Filtered (htm, html)

This option gets rid of most of the vile cruft Word tends to spatter HTML files with. It’ll give you the usual “SAVE YOUR FILE LIKE THIS AND CROCODILES WILL EAT YOU!” warning, but just go ahead.

For your next trick, if you do want your first paragraphs without indentation, we have to do some very simple HTML editing. You need a decent text editor though. Notepad++ is wonderful, and free. Go get it here: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Open up the .htm file Word exported, using Notepad++. In the <style> section at the top of the book, you’ll find <font definitions> — oh, those wretched font definitions — and then <style definitions>. Find the style you used for those first paragraphs. It will be a line starting p.THISISTHENAMEIUSEDFORMYSTYLE, li.THIS… &c

Inside the definitions for that style, beneath the curly bracket, there will be a line saying:

text-indent:_SOMETHING_;

where something could be, say, 28.3645pt or 0.5in, or what have you. Change that to 0pt. Zero points, if your browser makes that looks like a little o. Y’see, Word feels that a 0pt indent is the default, and thus doesn’t need saying; but plenty of e-Readers think that indented text is the default, and that 0pt does need saying.

Anyhow, don’t worry, that’s all the HTML editing you should need. Save the file.

Now you can import it into Calibre. Open up Calibre, Add Book, and select the .htm file. It’ll add it to your library, and say that it’s there as a ZIP, and probably call it something like New Book by Unknown.

Select the book, and click Edit Metadata. Put in the correct title and author, select browse in the area next to the blank cover to pick a cover image — for the Kindle, you want it to be 600×800 — and also put in any other info that you want: publisher, date, genre tags, &c &c. Then click OK.

Finally, to Kindle it, select the book and click Convert Books. In the top right corner, select the output format MOBI. You have plenty of other options for other eBook readers too, should you want.

You should have already sorted the Metadata and any cover that you want, and most of Calibre’s default settings are fine, so there’s not too much to do. So go to the table of contents tab. Make sure the “Number of Links to add to table of contents” value is at least one higher than your number of chapters.

Then click on the sparkly wand icon to the right of the blank line that reads Level 1 TOC (XPath expression). In the ‘having the attribute’ box, put “class” (without the quotes); In the ‘with value’ box, put the name of your chapter font. Then click OK at the bottom, and Calibre will create you a .mobi file.

If you have a Kindle yourself, Calibre can transfer the book to it for you, or you can just open up the Kindle in Windows Explorer and drop the file in the ‘documents’ folder. You’ll be able to use ‘go to’ to move to the Table of Contents — and from that through the chapters — or to the cover, or whatever. The book will open by default at the first of the entries in the Table of Contents (which is placed at the back, by the way). So, if you did put the first line of your title page in the Chapter style, it’ll open there. If you didn’t, it’ll open straight into the first chapter.

And that really is all there is to it. Easy.

One last thing to note is that if you have your own table of contents already built (in Word, say), I have no idea how to get the Kindle to recognise it. It is theoretically possible, using a ‘toc’ tag, and the web is full of ‘useful’ solutions to the problem, but I spent several days trying them exhaustively, and none of them were any use whatsoever. The only thing I found that worked was having Calibre auto-generate the TOC. So cut your losses, and let Calibre do it.

If you really insist on a self-made TOC, I gather it _does_ work using the TOC as a separate file, and creating the .mobi using MobiPocket Creator (also free, from http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscreator.asp) but I am completely unable to help you with any of that!

In the mean time, I had a bit of a look at the upcoming Bioware MMO yesterday. Star Wars: The Old Republic claims that its new emphasis on story, voice acting and player conversation choice is going to change the MMO playing field for ever. It’s quite a claim, particularly given the general Star Wars game concerns that Jedi and Sith are always going to be wildly over-represented when players have a choice and, to stay true to the universe, will be wildly over-powered.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M1PCIW2JSI

Having watched some of the gameplay and info videos, it looks as if the class balance in Old Republic is going to be pretty solid. The Jedi and Sith are powerful, yes, but they’ve split both into two classes, one more lightsabery and one more force-wizardy. That allows both to be a little less utterly uber.

On top of that, they’ve brought the other classes up so that they do, in fact, kick lots of ass. Rather than weaken Jedis to the point where it’s time to go off and fight cave rats for ten levels, they’ve brought everyone up to being seriously dangerous from the off. In addition to the four Force classes, there are bounty hunters and secret agents on the Imperial side, and troopers and smugglers on the Republic. Force users don’t get much in the way of armour or insane gadgets; the other classes do.

The weakest class in terms of sexy image is the Republic trooper, but they’ve shored that up by making the character feel quite considerably like the Master Chief from Halo. The sod has some pretty colossal guns, too. They claim everyone is fully balanced, and honestly, it looks like that’s the case.

They’re insisting that all classes are flexible. They do break down into the old tank-melee-ranged-heal pattern, to my disgust, but there are plenty of options in class development. One class each side can be adapted to all four roles, two more to three roles, and one to just two, and the devs insist that once specialised into a role, each class is as potent as any other in that slot. Respeccing will be possible, at least partially. Everyone gets companions, although they’re not compulsory, and healers will be happy to know that the more healery they get, the more their companion gets boosted, so you can actually level as a healer.

One thing that does definitely excite me is that they’re encouraging exploration of the worlds — not just as a necessary way of stumbling over extra quests and the such, but also with rewards of hidden, out of the way goodies. They mentioned holochrons, if I recall correctly, giving permanent stat bonuses. As a dedicated explorer, that rocks.

There will undoubtedly be plenty of Jedi weenies… but all of the roles have the potential to be very entertaining. Plus they’re saying that there are absolutely no duplicated quests from class to class, let alone from faction to faction. Each class is the focus of a specific dedicated story line, has an entirely different pool of companions to draw from, &c &c. I assume the various storylines will dovetail towards the top levels, but they’re claiming that there will be massive replayability, and the stuff they’ve put out so far does seem to back them up. So even if there is a glut of Jediots, they may well then dissolve into other types as the game progresses.

Having said all that, I note that there are ‘World Quests’ and ‘Flashpoints’ (dungeons, effectively), and I suspect that when they say there are no duplicated quests, they’re talking only about Class Quests. I seem to remember seeing that Class Quests are a high %age of starter worlds, about 40% of mid-range worlds, and a smaller %age still of later worlds — so there could in fact be a bunch of tedious common content to have to wade through. It depends on how level-scalable the Class Quests are, I guess.

The story devs are saying that each class’ personal story will extend as updates roll in, and it seems to me that an update adding a class will give a whole new meaning to the idea of extra alts. There is an end-game, they say, but it looks like they want different play-throughs to be as compelling an option. One dev estimated the time to levcap — 50, at launch — as 200 hours.

Having looked at some of the “What character do you want to play” developer polls on the main site, the four Force classes are getting an average around 14% of the vote each, with the other four classes getting an approx av of 10% each. If people really mean it, class balance will be no worse than in WoW.

The combat looks really good, incidentally. It appears, from gameplay footage, as if the game choreographs fights a lot — so you might just be hitting “bash with light-saber” or whatever, but your toon will be swinging, lunging, slashing, stabbing, leaping, and so on. On top of that, the emphasis on moving combat from ‘one mob per party’ to ‘one PC per group’ does appear to make things feel much more fluid and epic.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeZYGgcUDcY

Of course, take all the above with a big pinch of salt. All the videos will have been PR’ed to the max. The most recent gameplay video, of ‘Flashpoint’ Taral V, managed to come off feeling like it had been shaved, lubed and buggered comatose by the Marketing department, which was depressing. It also immediately split the party into the same boring quad of taunting tank / sneaky distance DPS / big melee DPS / control ‘n’ heal. Then there are those uncertain World Quests, and there’s been a couple of comments about side-quests that sound like they involve killing X nearby gribblies. So it could all end up as “WoW with a LOT of cut scenes”.

But this is Bioware, with Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age under their recent belt. Almost everyone is bored with WoW now, so anyone planning to base off that is setting themselves up to fail mightily, as Rift is finding out. Bioware are claiming a very different effect, and the bait-n-switch strategy has been a spectacular failure in MMO land repeatedly, so they’d have to be utterly stupid to be relying on that. Given that their release date has recently slipped from Q1 2011 to ‘before the end of 2011′, it could be that they’re busy tweaking some of the more tedious aspects. Or they might just be dragging their heels.

We’ll see, in time…

book by flyzipper

It’s time to do something about it. I drink a lot of coffee (surprise, huh?) and have been impressed with the Fair Trade initiative, given how badly screwed coffee growers tend to be. Growing coffee takes years. So can writing and publishing a book.

So Ghostwoods Books is a brand new deal — a Fair Trade initiative for writers. The principle is simple. Readers get damn fine books to read at a great price; writers get a friendly publisher who’s on their side, and is prepared to hand over a full 50% of the profits. Thats what partnerships are all about.

If you like reading, Ghostwoods Books are fully professional, top-quality books at least as good as any you’d buy in a store. Better, hopefully, because it’s not a committee of marketing and PR types selecting lowest-common-denominator content, but a small team of dedicated, passionate editors with decades of experience in all areas of publishing.

If you like writing, Ghostwoods Books offers a friendly, supportive, route to publication. Whilst we’re in the initial phases, publication will be electronic. If you want us to, we’ll also represent your book to print publishers. Later, we’ll be able to offer full print contracts ourselves. We’re currently open to submissions, so if you’re interested, read on!

The Case for eBooks

Despite what you may think, author’s royalties on printed books are generally pretty bad. They’re can be as low as $0.15 a copy, and even with horrible advances at just $3000 or below, books not on the A* list often don’t earn out their advance. It’s a complicated issue, but the sad truth is that everyone wants a big chunk of the sales price, and the author is right at the bottom of the pile. Unless they’re celebs, of course. But we’re not, and we assume you’re not, either.

Publishing eBooks gives a chance to cut out several stages of the feeding frenzy. Publication costs are also minimal, which helps reduce overheads. There are no print or shipping costs. Despite this, mainstream publishers have a tendency to grossly overprice electronic copies of their books, and it is really annoying readers.

Electronic publishers take between 15% and 50% of the cover price. This is pretty huge, but even in the worst cases — like Kobo — it still leaves a reasonable amount of money per sale, and that money is profit. That profit deserves to be split equally, because despite publishers’ opinions, writing a book is hard work that deserves a fair reward.

The Ghostwoods Books Approach

We’re looking for top-quality novels and non-fiction works to publish, initially electronically, at a reader-friendly price, somewhere between $5.00 and $5.99. All books will be thoroughly developed and edited before publication, as you’d expect. They’ll be properly laid out, ISBN’ed, and given attractive covers. Then they’ll be listed with every useful eBook publisher out there. We may record them as audiobooks, too. We’ll back all this up with promotion and marketing, review copies, press releases, submission to all relevant major awards and competitions, and lots of info as to how you can also help promote your work effectively.

Ghostwoods Books will only publish genuinely good books. No ifs, no buts, no back-handers. Particularly in eBook publishing, it’s vital to build a reliable reputation. The Ghostwoods Books seal will guarantee a top-quality publication. That’s worth more than a whole pallette of bus-stop posters and corny marketing stunts.

As well as electronically publishing and promoting your work, we’ll also represent your book as literary agents to the mainstream publishing industry if you want us to — and yes, that includes handing over electronic rights. The time will come when we’re able to offer print contracts ourselves, but it won’t be for a while. In the mean time, we’ll help you get there with other people, in return for standard agents’ fees. Selling just 5000 copies of an eBook is enough to get publishers to take you very seriously indeed, so we’re in the unique place of being able to bolster our agenting efforts with meaningful hard numbers.

Because our business model relies on very low up-front costs to get started, the one down-side is that we’re only able to offer a nominal advance against royalties. I know that sucks. Sorry. Normal agents wouldn’t pay any advance of course, nor publish electronically. To make up for it, we’re giving you a get-out clause.

How to Submit a Manuscript to us

If you’re interested, please email your manuscript — in a format MS Word can deal with — to ghostwoodsbooks@gmail.com. All genres / styles are welcome; ditto self-published works. We’re interested in non-fiction, too. We’ll get back to you as swiftly as possible regarding your work — very quickly, to start with, but it’s likely to slow down when things get really busy.

Things to include: A one-sentence strap-line that says who and what the book is about; a short synopsis of the book; some thoughts on things you could do to help market the book; a little info about yourself that people might find interesting, if appropriate; any other info you think is relevant; and the finished book.

Things not to include: PDFs; file formats MS Word can’t open; ZIPs, RARs, Executables, image files or viruses; ludicrous bravado; unfinished books; Public Domain works you’ve copied; manuscripts you don’t own all the rights to; books substantially shorter than 70,000 words or longer than 150,000 words; and poetry — simply because I know nothing about it.

Things that don’t matter: Page size, double-spacing, and other bits of over-anal formatting nonsense.

You’re welcome.

Sensible(-ish) blogging will resume here — at the latest — on Monday.

I’ve also re-started my entertaining* pollgame, The Great Game, with a new episode this evening. It’s an ongoing twice-weekly sci-fi/horror story where you choose what happens next at the end of every instalment, and I obediently go off and write about whichever path you’ve decided for me. I’m clearly a glutton for punishment. Anyway, you can find it here. Please do go have a look.

* it keeps me entertained, dammit!

If you appreciated this post, you should go have a quick look at SwitchFlipped by author Greg Stolze. It’s strangely heartwarming, for a thrilling tale of a normal guy swept up into the oddball world of the occult underground. I think you’ll like it.

So, I’m not dead. I don’t appear to be in any unusual risk of shuffling off the mortal coil, either. Which is nice. I stopped posting because I was laid flat with bronchitis, but it’s been arthritic pain that’s stopped me resuming over the last month. In other words, I’m OK, just ouchy. I’m scheduled to start the next level on the treatment pyramid within a couple of weeks, but I’m hoping to muster the determination to resume service here before then. Honest!

So thanks for sticking with me — and many, many thanks for your well-wishes and concern — and the Great Game and Ghostwoods will resume soon.

If you liked this insane selection of pictures, check out All Lies and Jest by author Kate Harrad. It’s got were-mosquitos, irritating elf wannabes, Holographic Evil Jesus, homicidal Christians, a girl who changes her personality more often than her shoes, and a very healthy dose of snarkiness. I think you’ll like it. 

When you feel that you have a fairly firm mental hold on it, add another digit next to it. You can pick one at random, or select digits from a number that has meaning to you, like your telephone number. Remembering to keep the ‘2’ vivid, hold the second number next to it. When it is stabilised, add another number, and then another, and keep going until you can no longer hold the whole number simultaneously in your mind’s eye. At that point, start back from the first ‘2’, and try building back up.

During your first attempts, you may find that even the initial ‘2’ is wavering and difficult to keep hold of. That’s perfectly normal; visualisation is not something that many of us practice. Keep at it, and you’ll find that you quickly improve. When you can hold an entire ten-digit phone number steady for minutes at a time, expand your horizons a little. Imagine the surface of your mind’s eye really is a blackboard, complete with chalk dust and a wooden frame. Rub a number out and replace it with something else. Fill in the rest of the classroom that the blackboard is in. Finally populate it with attentive, polite, quiet little children.

If you can hold the image of an entire class – with individual children in specific places – and still retain the numbers you started with, then you’ve mastered visualisation. You can move on earlier though if you are impatient to give up visualisation training, but make sure you can at least envision the blackboard and the wall it is mounted on. This is likely to take several weeks.

You’ll find that visualisation is easier some days than others. Factors such as fatigue, when you last ate and even the moon’s phase may play a role. Look back over your notes and see what correspondences you can identify. As well as the critical benefits your meditations will receive from well-trained visualisatory ability, be aware that when you work with images in your mind’s eye, you are painting pictures with the very fabric of Yesod itself. It is the essence of everything that Yesod is.