Que Sera Serees Bonus: Deleted Chapter
One of the hardest things to do as a writer, other than the actual writing part, is to kill your darlings. No, not the characters (I don't seem to have a problem with that) but the words. With Que Será Serees, this came with the entirety of one of my favorite chapters, Chapter 4. Augh! "Mir 4 Arms" is where, in the pre-final drafts, we met Li Rinaldi, his ship's personality (imaginatively named "Ship"), his daughter, and some ancillary characters. As much as I wanted to keep the Li/Ship thing in the story, the fact is that most of the information was repeated elsewhere. As much as I liked this chapter, the larger story lost little by its excision. I still wonder if I did the right thing. I liked the last draft of the novel that still contained this chapter. Thing is, that draft as a whole wasn't polishing up well so I dove in and tightened things up a [...]
DSLR Parallel Alignment Tool
The assembled and tested alignment tool. An on-going project of mine is to construct an inexpensive rig so I can use a DSLR with a decent lens to photograph artwork with high resolution. Since this will require "stitching" a grid of photos together, it's ideal if the distortion is kept to a minimum. Of course there is going to be some lens distortion, that's unavoidable. But if tilt/yaw distortion can be minimized, that means fewer new digital artifacts are likely to be introduced. To that end, it was clear that I needed some sort of tool to ensure that the camera's film plane was parallel to the artwork. I needed a reticle set. Prep A search of the web yielded nothing helpful. There are some calibration tools for rifle scopes and some for microscopes, but I was unable to find anything that was: 1) small; 2) affordable (i.e. cheap); 3) and would allow me to set up a [...]
