It's A Living

As a movie trailer copywriter, occasionally the heavens smile upon you, and your ethereal finely-wrought prose appears in the newly released trailer for a movie about a machete-wielding Federale on a mission of blood-soaked revenge.

Behold the Machete trailer below. The magic happens at the 57-second mark -- the 'When a man has nothing to lose,' line is all mine.

Truly, it's moments like these when I'm just grateful for having been given the chance to touch so many people's lives.

 

Closed Timelike Curves

io9 has a recent post on closed timelike curves - and doesn't that sound exciting. Honestly, I don't fully understand what a closed timelike curves is, but in broad physics terms, they allow for pastward time travel within the framework of the theory of relativity. The interesting part is that they manage this by insuring that if you traveled to the past, you wouldn't be able to change anything (thereby avoiding any messy paradoxes). Basically, when you returned to the present it would be the same as when you left it. 

How the universe goes about 'insuring' that nothing changes becomes an obvious issue and the theories are all pretty vague. The following is from the io9 post, and talks about how the timeline-changing scenario of shooting your own grandfather (maybe not the nicest thing you could do) - and in turn paradoxically voiding your own existence - might be avoided. 

...something will happen, such as the bullet being defective or the gun misfiring, to stop your temporal assassination. This can involve some very low-probability events - for instance, the manufacturer becomes incredibly more likely to make that specific bullet improperly than any other, for the sole reason that it will be later used to kill your grandfather. It might even come down to an ultra-low-probability quantum fluctuation, in which the bullet suddenly alters course for no apparent physical reason, in order to keep the paradox at bay.

I've been giving this some thought recently, since a closed timelike curve  plays a big role in the new book. My approach has been that if you were to go back in time and change the past - then those changes would already be seamlessly integrated into history. So while it might seem like you're changing things, in reality you're just ensuring the normal chain of events.

And for the record, let's leave our grandfathers out of it.

-Physicists Reveal How The Universe Guarantees Paradox-free Time Travel [io9] 
-Closed Timelike Curves [Wikipedia]
-Previous Project X Posts

Read Me At: WEbook

I recently wrote a guest post on digital publishing and The Canal for the website WEbook. Check it out here.

Time Travelers Wear Sunglasses

This photo was floating around a few months back, but I'm finally getting around to posting it here. It was apparently taken in 1940/41 at the reopening of a bridge in British Columbia, but amusingly it has gained some recent attention due to the individual standing right of center, whose choice of fashion seems strangely out of place. Time travel, of course, being the most obvious explanation.

           
Funnily enough, a couple of articles/blogs have referred to him as the ‘hipster’ time traveler, which you have to admit seems appropriate, with his hoodie/t-shirt ensemble and general slacker vibe.

           
I guess when you’re a time traveler, eventually things like witnessing the dawn of civilzation gets old, and all you really want to do is check out a good old-fashioned bridge reopening.

-Forgetomori
-Previous Project X Posts

Diversion Books

Diversion Books, who is publishing The Canal as an ebook (available for the Kindle for $5.99), has recently launched their new website. Check it out here. There's even a photo of yours truly lurking on there somewhere...

It's The Truth

Bumper sticker, as seen at Buyolympia.com.

Canal News: The Bat Cave

Updates on Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, the real life inspiration behind my horror novel, The Canal.

Found some fascinating photos from inside the 'Bat Cave', an abandoned canal-side building that used to house a MTA power station. Click here for the slide show. More photos and additional info on the building's recent history can be found here.

-Portrait of a New York City Brownfield: The Batcave

-Nathan Kensinger Photography
-Previous Canal Posts

Read Me At: The Rumpus

I recently wrote a short piece on Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which you can now read over at The Rumpus. It's a weird riff on a weird book, so be sure to check it out. Here's the link.

Canal News: Viva La Flushing Tunnel

Updates on Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, the real life inspiration behind my horror novel, The Canal.

The canal's flushing tunnel is pretty much the only thing that keeps the stagnant and bacteria-ridden Gowanus from becoming exponentially even more stagnant and bacteria-ridden. So it's nice to see this unsung hero get a recent write-up in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which explains a bit of the tunnel's history. Constructed in 1911 as an anti-pollution measure, the tunnel helped draw fresh(er) seawater into the canal by pulling water from the canal and pumping it out to Buttermilk Channel (I always thought it was the reverse, that water from Buttermilk was pumped into the canal, but apparently this didn't begin happening until 1999). 

This was necessary to help clear out the raw sewage that was being dumped in the canal. Of course, the flushing tunnel was inoperative for almost 30 years starting in 1960, a period when the Gowanus was pretty much at the height of its awfulness (culminating around the 80's, which is when the events in my book take place).

As part of the Gowanus' current rehabilitation the tunnel is currently being upgraded, and when completed its input of fresh water will increase by almost 40%. There will also be a decrease in the amount of sewage that makes its way into the canal as well. All in all, between this and the forthcoming EPA cleanup, things are starting to look pretty good for the Gowanus.

-The Other Gowanus Cleanup [Brooklyn Daily Eagle]

Stephen Hawking On Time Travel

There's a recent article by Stephen Hawking in the Daily Mail (via) where he gives his thoughts on time travel. It turns out he's a believer -- in a sense.

While he's not a fan of pastward time travel and doesn't believe it to be possible, he does propose a few methods for futureward time travel. His ideal one involves a spaceship that could travel at immense speed. The faster you travel, the slower time passes -- allowing you to remain young(er) while most of the universe around you ages.

Which is kind of a yawner, to be honest. But if you prefer your theory of relativity to be as simple and elegant as possible, then you usually have to throw out the contradictory stuff. Like visiting the past, paradoxes, and hot tubs.

-Stephen Hawking: How To Build A Time Machine [The Daily Mail]

The Canal: On The Kindle

The Canal is once again available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon. New cover, new formatting, new publisher -- no digital library is complete without it (I've checked). Get it here.

The Canal 2.0

Cue the trumpets. The Canal now has a new cover, via my digital publisher Diversion Books. The book will momentarily be off the shelves, but expect to see it return soon, after which The Canal will once again be available in various e-book flavors, along with the new cover and updated formatting (as for the paperback edition, it's currently in limbo, but will hopefully be back again soon too). Stay tuned!