Oh, hi there! Sorry you haven't heard from me in so long - today is literally the first time in three weeks I've had access to a computer with internet access. The good news is that I've still been hard at work, with or without the internet access, and just uploaded a bunch of new stuff to my site today for you to read and play with. I thought today I'd explain what they were and why I did them.

First of all, I've started a new series of short stories. It's called "Ten Science Fiction Stories," and that's pretty much what they are - ten pieces of short fiction, 5,000 to 6,000 words apiece, each dealing with a science-fiction topic at its core. The motivation behind writing these comes from the fact that I'm hard at work on my first science-fiction novel right now, a strange and dark epic called The Lazarus and the Superman. I've been trying to concentrate all my energy on writing this novel and not getting sidetracked into other projects...but, as you can guess if you know me, just working on the novel alone has not been enough this month to completely satisfy me. Instead of jumping into a wildly different project, however, that might take energy away from the novel, I decided to do a project that would complement the novel itself. Which is how "10SF" (as I call it) was born.

The stories run a wide gamut in terms of themes and styles - from love stories to dark conspiracies, comedies to erotica. At the heart of all of them, however, is the "what if" question that is the fundamental basis of all science-fiction. "What if a man traveled back in time because he was in love with a famous writer and wanted to meet her before she was famous?" "What if a computer became sentient and traveled the internet talking to people in chat rooms, but didn't realize it was a computer?" "What if a scientist built a robot with the capacity to kill?" "What if humans made first contact with an alien species and became the center of a whole alien-style Roswell incident?" Well, you see my point. The stories are sometimes funny, sometimes dark, but all based on the traditional groundwork behind which all science-fiction is based.

Like always, I've decided to release the stories not only as chapbooks for sale here in Chicago, but for free at my website as well. Unlike past projects, however, I'm not posting these stories as web pages but rather as downloadable .pdf files, which readers can then open in Adobe Acrobat and print out just like a real book. To be frank, this is something I've been wanting to do for awhile. It just makes more sense when it comes to longer stories - the reader benefits by being able to print it out and interact with it more like a traditional book, while I benefit by people not being able to cut and paste the text out of an HTML page and plagarize it as much as they want. I've never been able to afford a copy of Adobe Acrobat before, though (the full version, that is, that allows you to convert documents to .pdf format - Acrobat Reader, however, which you use just to open .pdf files, is free from the Adobe website), which is why I've never released a version of my projects this way. But over Christmas I found a piece of shareware called "Print to PDF" which basically does a cheap and quick job at converting a document into a format that Acrobat can read.

Anyway, so I have the first story of the series up at the website now, which you can go and download, read on your screen and/or print out and take with you. (The last page of the document details the upcoming nine other stories; they're slated to be written once a month for the rest of the year.) I've received some reports already of people not being able to open the .pdf file; in general, it seems that the newer your version of Acrobat Reader the easier it is to open the file. (All the problems I've heard of so far concern Version 2.5 or older of Acrobat; they're up to version 4.5 or something like that now, and it's free, so there's really no reason for you to not upgrade your version if you have an old one.) I am highly encouraging my readers to download this file, print out 10 copies or so on your workplace's laser printer, and hand them out to all your friends. Hey, why not, right? What has your company done for you lately? Nothing, that's what. Damnit, you deserve to be able to print out personal documents on your company's laser printer. Smash the state!

Anyway...the second new thing I have for you today is free typefaces! Long-time readers will remember that I'm a bit of a type nut, and when I finally received a copy of Fontographer about a year ago I was like a kid in a candy store. I very quickly invented my own font, called "Jason" and based on my handwriting, then promptly forgot all about Fontographer and the invention of other new typefaces. Well, anyway, I was cleaning up my apartment the other week and stumbled across my Fontographer handbook, and it made me realize that I had never bothered to invent any more typefaces since that first one a year ago. Well, beyond the hour a day or so that I'm working on the novel, I'm finding myself with a lot of time on my hands and not a lot to do (see comments above), so I thought I'd sit down again with Fontographer and see what kinds of things I could make happen with it.

But what new typefaces to invent? Aye, there's the rub. Just like any other form of inventing, the creation of new typefaces is not just done willy-nilly. Why bother spending a dozen hours working on a new font, just to get up the next day and find out that a nearly identical version of the same typeface has been in existence in years? I try to take the same attitude concerning fontography as most beginning inventors - that is, find something people need that doesn't yet exist, then fill that need. That's certainly the case of my first font, "Jason," because I've always wanted a version of my handwriting that could be used for typesetting. "Ulm," my second font, was motivated because I've always been a fan of the cool old "bauhaus" style Universal alphabet from the 1920's, but have never been able to find a copy for computers. "Ulm Distressed," my third font, came about as a learning exercise, to teach myself how to take an established font and then fuck around with it so it looks like it's been through a xerox machine a few times. And "WhyTwoKay," my fourth font, was invented for a very specific reason - because I have this one mini-chapbook that's the size of a business card, that I pass out for free whenever I do out-of-state tours, and I needed a font that could print legibly in 7-point type so I could squeeze as many pieces into the mini-book as possible.

Anyway, so there I am with four new fonts. And what does one do when they have a collection of fonts and nothing to do with them? Why, open up your own type foundry, of course! Which is exactly what I did. It's called "Font Size=1," or "FS1" for short. Basically I pumped out Truetype versions of all four fonts for both Mac and Windows formats, coupled them with README files, compressed them into .sit and .zip formats, then stuck them on the website for anyone who wants to to download and use for free. Hey, why not? Lord knows, I've certainly stolen...er, downloaded hundreds of shareware fonts over the years myself. I see my free fonts as a way of karmically giving back to the same type community which has been providing me with dozens of cool new fonts themselves.

These fonts should work fine for any of us out there who are strictly amateurs - that is, for people designing personal websites, zines, band logos, etc. Professionals in the graphic industry will probably be a little frustrated with my fonts, because they don't have that consistency of x-heights and kerning that only comes from someone being paid a whole lot of money to worry obsessively about stuff like that. You probably won't notice a difference unless you're an art director or a fellow typographer, which is why I encourage all of you to download to your heart's content. The only thing I ask is that you send me back a copy of whatever project you make using my fonts, just so I can put up a "samples" page at the site and gloat over all the cool things being done with my typefaces. You'll find a lot more details on this in the "README" file included in your download.

So, as several astute Chicago readers noticed last week, that was indeed my name in The Onion concerning a poetry feature up at this new cafe in Rogers Park. (I mean, sure, they spelled it 'Jason Pedis,' but several people caught on anyway.) I really didn't want to do the feature, to tell you the truth, but the host of the show is a regular at Joyblue where I go every Wednesday, and she begged me and begged me until I finally said yes. It was last Tuesday, up at this place called "Chase Cafe," a couple of blocks north of the Loyola campus. And how was it? Well, it was pretty much like every poetry event that seems to take place in Chicago anymore - really nice space, really friendly people, really shitty fucking poetry. The host passed around a tip jar right when I got off stage, and people were just throwing money into it, but then after the show when I went to collect it she said, "Oh. You don't understand. This money is for me." I finally managed to get her to give me half of it after throwing a complete hissy fit, but let me ask you - have you ever heard of an open mic where the host keeps the money from the tip jar? I didn't think so. Also, the host had me do my feature a full two hours before the open mic was over, which meant that by the time people were free to get up and move around and possibly buy my chapbook, there was only three people left in the entire audience. Ugh. Beware the inexperienced 21-year-old poetry hosts! God, no wonder I never do features in Chicago anymore.

And speaking of Tuesdays, this coming one (the 5th) is my birthday. It's my "Jesus" birthday, the 33rd, which I've noticed tends to hit guys a lot harder than women. I'm not sure what it is, but I think a lot of guys unconsciously compare their own life's accomplishments to Jesus' around this time - "Let's see, by the time He was 33, He was the Messiah. And what the fuck have I done with my life?" I'm not saying it's a particularly smart or even particularly rational thing for guys to do. I've never once claimed that the things us guys do are rational, just that we do them.