An Interview With: Jennifer Chase
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Uncategorized
1. Please start by saying a little about yourself.
I have a bachelor degree in police forensics and a master’s degree in criminology. Up until about five years ago, I worked in the corporate world in the area of business and accounting. I decided to change my current path into the criminal justice field, but an interesting thing happened during that process. My love of writing took over and I decided to write my first novel. Writing wasn’t anything new to me, I’ve written articles, copywriting, screenplays, and other types of stories throughout my adult life. I published my first novel in 2008.
2. Now please tell us about your books.
I’ve been a big fan of thrillers, mysteries, crime fiction and anything with a suspenseful storyline. I love to write thrillers and crime fiction. Compulsion and Dead Game are two books in an ongoing series that revolves around Emily Stone who hunts down serial killers and child predators anonymously, then emails her investigation to the local police. She’s been described as a vigilante detective or an angel of justice. My third novel Silent Partner pushes a K9 cop into the dark world of police corruption and a taunting serial killer.
3. When did you decide to be a writer?
I can’t say that I decided to become a writer because I’ve been writing for most of my life. In a way, it chose me. It gets into your blood and you begin to live, eat, and breath it. Maybe there’s a gene for it? Life is too short not doing what you love to do. Since 2008, I’ve not looked back after deciding to pursue my writing career.
4. Was it difficult to get a publisher for Compulsion?
I weighed the pros and cons of a traditional publisher and becoming an independent self-published author. I decided that I wanted to get my first book out and to test the waters to see if my book was something that I could build an audience. I looked around at publishers and decided to go with Outskirts Press, Inc. It was a good experience at the time and I learned quite a bit how publishing and marketing worked. I published my second book Dead Game with Outskirts Press, Inc as well. This time around, I wasn’t as thrilled, so I researched becoming my own publisher JEC Press. I couldn’t be happier. It was the best decision that I could’ve made. Now becoming a publisher is not for everyone, but it’s worth your time to investigate all avenues in order to make an informed decision for your books.
5. Are there any authors who particularly inspire you?
Yes, many authors, but the two that stand out the most to me are Dean Koontz and Jeffrey Deaver. I love the way these authors spin a story and create characters. I’m a big fan of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series with a quadriplegic criminalist. I find it inspiring how they build their stories, pacing, and the intricate twists and turns. I love that! Also, I like the way that they both can write male and female characters equally well.
6. Are the events in your book inspired by real-life events?
My first book Compulsion was actually loosely inspired by my experience of living next door to a violent person who threatened my life on a regular basis for more than two years. Talk about stress! Everything finally worked out fine. I met many members of local law enforcement, learned about crime and investigations, and decided to go back to school to study forensics and criminology. I took this bad situation and turned it into something good in my life. It’s proof that something good can come out something bad.
7. Tell us a bit about your latest book?
I just released my third Emily Stone Thriller, Dark Mind. I write all my books in the series to stand-alone.
A Serial Killer Plagues an Island Paradise…
Vigilante detective Emily Stone continues her covert pursuits to find serial killers and child abductors, all under the radar while shadowing police investigations.
Emily searches for an abducted nine-year-old girl taken by ruthless and enterprising slave brokers. Following the clues from California to the garden island of Kauai, she begins to piece together the evidence and ventures deep into the jungle.
It doesn’t take long before Emily is thrown into the middle of murder, mayhem, and conspiracy. Locals aren’t talking as a serial killer now stalks the island, taking women in a brutal frenzy of ancient superstitions and folklore. Local cops are unprepared for what lies ahead. In a race against the clock, Emily and her team must identify the killer before time runs out.
8. Are you ever tempted to write different types of stories?
Yes, I’ve toyed with the idea of writing more horror influenced stories, and even a zombie story. My first and most favorite type of stories are thriller and crime fiction, but you never know what I’ll come up with next.
9. What was your most exciting moment about being an author?
It’s the most exciting moment when you physically hold that novel in your hands. There’s nothing quite like it. Everything you’ve worked so hard for and spent all of your time on comes together in a reality. No matter how many books you write, every finished physical book is as exciting as the first.
10. What will you be working on next?
I’m currently working on a couple of horror short stories that I will post on my blog. I will be writing the next Emily Stone Thriller this year as well. You can find out all the most up to date information about my books and me at: http://authorjenniferchase.com/
SOPA
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Uncategorized
If you’ve been on the internet in the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that there’s something going on. Something called SOPA that seems to be annoying people and causing protests, such as Wikipedia blacking out its site for 24 hours. In case you’ve somehow missed it, SOPA is a bill being pushed through Congress in the USA with the supposed goal of stopping piracy on the internet.
But I’m sitting typing this blog post in England. Surely a law being passed in the USA doesn’t apply to me. Right?
Actually, it does, largely because of the ridiculous definitions of foreign or domestic sites that are included in the text of SOPA. These definitions seem proof that whoever wrote the bill doesn’t really understand how the internet works. Websites are divided into two buckets: those that are domestic to the USA and those that are foreign. How is this decided? By where the domain name was registered. So you could have a web designer in the UK building a website, hosting all the data on a server in the UK, targeting content at UK customers, talking about things relating to the UK – but it could be classed as a domestic site under SOPA if it has a .com domain name registered in the USA. There’s no thought in the bill for where the data resides, where content was created, where users are or many other elements. So, despite the fact I’m in the UK, my blog would count as a domestic site as far as SOPA is concerned.
There are some other major issues with SOPA, as it is currently written. One of them allows sites to be taken down for suspected pirate activity. Note the word: suspected. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? A company that makes all their money online might have their site taken down because someone accuses them of pirate activity, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. This would be enough to put many start-ups out of business completely. It also opens the door to potential abuse. If two companies are offering competing services in the same area, one could accuse the other under SOPA to get the website taken down. While most companies wouldn’t dream of doing something like this, the fact that it would be possible, even easy, to do so, would open the door for those with less of a social conscience to completely abuse the system for their own gain.
Aside from the ease of abuse, there is a big problem with the fact that SOPA would call for the entire site to be taken down. Let’s say, hypothetically, that there was a single blog hosted on blog.com that was engaged in dubious activity. Under SOPA, the whole of the blog.com domain could be stopped, including my blog and hundreds of others that have done nothing wrong. A law to block or take down offending content is one thing, but what’s allowed by SOPA would be the equivalent of blowing up a small down in order to kill an individual living there. The bill takes overkill to extremes.
Then there’s the issue of what counts as pirate activity under SOPA. A single link to a site with illegal content would count, whether it’s deliberate or not. On this blog, I get hundreds of spam comments, often with links to random content. Most are automatically filtered by the system and sit in a pile awaiting moderation. But they’re still on the site. If a spambot posts a comment that contains a link to some pirated material, my site is instantly in violation of SOPA. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t me who posted the link, or that I would delete the comment on my next trawl through the moderation pile.
So, under the SOPA rules, hundreds of perfectly innocent blogs could be instantly pulled down without trial or due process, because a spambot posts a comment on a single blog with a single link to pirated content.
There’s an anti-SOPA petition that included a link to a copyrighted image on a post on the White House’s website. Under the terms of SOPA, the White House website is now in violation and the US government could arrest the US government, put them in prison for five years and fine themselves millions of dollars. Read about the ridiculousness here. Or you could just go and sign the petition.
The ideas behind SOPA are reasonable. The bill proposes to stop online piracy and make sure that people who create content get the money they should for it. As an author, I don’t want to lose royalties because someone pirated an ebook of my novel. So I agree with the principles behind it.
But what’s actually described in the text of the bill just doesn’t make sense. It would damage individual creative as well as companies. It is too full of loopholes that could be abused and would let authorities act on mere suspicion rather than proof. And it probably won’t stop piracy.
It could cause massive amounts of hurt with very little benefit.
SOPA, in its current form, needs to be stopped. Then the US government can sit down with experts who actually understand how the internet works and come up with a bill that would achieve the desired effect without causing problems for millions of innocent people.
Tech Tuesday: Turing Machines
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
2012 is Alan Turing year, celebrating the life of one of the founders of computing and one of the minds behind the cracking of the Enigma code. In honour of this, I’m writing a couple of Tech Tuesday posts about Turing’s contributions to computing.
This post, is about Turing Machines. He called them a(utomatic)-machines but they later became known after their inventor. To my knowledge, Turing never actually made one of these machines but he described them in 1936 as a theoretical exercise. By defining a machine that could calculate, or computer, answers to problems, he was able to know whether or not certain problems were actually solvable.
But what is a Turing Machine?
A Turing Machine consists of a few elements. First, you have a tape, broken down into equal sized sections. Each of these sections may be blank or may have symbols written in them (usually, 0 and 1, but you can have more). In general, when people talk about Turing Machines, it’s considered that this tape can be as long as necessary to complete the computation, so the tape is theoretically infinite.
The second element of the machine what’s called a head. This head is something which is pointed at a single section of the tape. It can read whatever symbol is written there as well as write a symbol onto the tape, replacing whatever symbol was there to begin with.
The machine also has a set of rules. These rules look at the state the machine currently is in as well as the symbol written on the tape and determines a next action. For example, if the machine is in state A and 1 is written on the tape, write a 0 onto the tape, move the tape to the right and go to state B, if 0 is written on the tape, write a 0 onto the tape, move the tape to the left and go to state C.
You also need to define what the starting state is for the machine and one or more stopping states. If a machine arrives at a stopping state, the calculation is over.
But why should people care about Turing Machines? Nowadays, computers can do a lot more than just move a tape back and forth. Yet Turing Machines were discussed in two different modules of my university course because they are still significant in understanding computing.
One reason is the power behind this apparently simple model. You can, in theory, calculate using a Turing Machine anything that you could calculate using a more complex computer. I say in theory because there are a couple of things that Turing Machines aren’t good at (solving two problems at the same time, for example) and because it wouldn’t be practical to use a Turing Machine as the complexity of the problem increases. While the model allows for the tape to be as long as necessary and for the machine to have as many rules as required, you wouldn’t want to build or simulate a Turing Machine with a tape twenty thousand miles long with five thousand states and a few million rules. You’d be sitting forever waiting for the calculation to complete.
Once you’ve accepted the limits of practicality however, these machines are very useful in the theory of computability. This is the study of what can or can’t be computed. Essentially, there are some problems a computer is capable of solving and some which is can’t. A problem is proved to be computable if you can design a Turing Machine that would solve it. As stated above, this isn’t necessarily practical, so a problem is also proved to be computable if you can solve it using functions which have been proved by Turing Machines. For example, it’s possible to design a Turing Machine that adds two numbers together, therefore addition of two numbers is solvable. Multiplication can be thought of as repeated addition (e.g. 3×4 is just 3+3+3+3) and since we’ve proved with a Turing Machine that addition is computable, multiplication is computable. You can do this again and again, building up the complexity until you can work out if very complex functions can be computed.
When computers were first created, they were a long way from the machines we have today. The earliest computers were machines that, as the name implies, computed the answers to calculations. Turing Machines were the first of these and so were the foundation that led to the massive range of computers available to us today.
Tags: Alan Turing, computers, Turing Machines
Review: Death Cloud by Andrew Lane
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Adventure books, Book Reviews
Death Cloud by Andrew Lane is written with the permission of the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd and tells of the early life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character, Sherlock Holmes. This novel is the first of a series telling of Sherlock’s teenage years and how he came to develop the keen mind and detective skills which are demonstrated in the original stories. This book is a fast-paced adventure aimed at teenagers and needs no background knowledge of Sherlock Holmes to be enjoyed. Andrew Lane has tackled the challenging task of creating a series which is consistent enough to the original to appeal to fans, while remaining accessible to those who haven’t read the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I can’t speak yet for the other books in his series, but this one certainly meets that goal.
In Death Cloud, young Sherlock is told that he can’t go home from boarding school for the summer holidays but must go stay with an aunt and uncle. While there, he befriends the independent Matty Arnatt, who recently saw a strange black cloud that was somehow connected with a death. Sherlock is informed that he is to have a tutor, Amyus Crowe, a cheerful man determined to teach Sherlock how to think. When they find a second dead body, Sherlock’s curiosity is peaked and he is determined to unravel the mystery behind the two deaths and the strange, black cloud.
Together with Matty, Crowe and Crowe’s daughter Virginia, Sherlock begins to uncover the facts and come to face with the man behind the deaths, whose plot could spell disaster for Britain. The story is written much more in the style of an adventure or thriller than a standard murder mystery. The tension is kept throughout not so much to find out who was behind the deaths but how, why and, more importantly, how to stop him. The mystery, combined with a sense of danger, keeps you turning the pages to find out what happens next. There were a couple of not quite believable escapes, but that’s all part of a fun adventure.
Altogether, the book is an action-packed tale that gives a bit of insight into a beloved fictional character. The supporting characters are interesting and believable. The mystery is very cleverly constructed and the adventure is maintained throughout. I would recommend this book, regardless of whether you know anything about Sherlock Holmes. I’ll certainly be looking out for the other books in this series to see how young Sherlock continues with his second mystery.
Tags: adventure, Andrew Lane, books, review, Sherlock Holmes
Review: Mind the Gap by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Book Reviews, Fantasy books
Mind the Gap by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon is a modern day fantasy novel set in London. It tells the story of Jazz, a girl raised by her mother and constantly watched over by men known as the Uncles, who were never entirely trusted. One day, Jazz returns home from school to find her mother murdered by the Uncles. Her last act was to write a warning in her own blood, telling Jazz to hide forever. Jazz flees and finds herself in a maze of old shelters and disused lines in the London Underground. She meets a group of runaway kids who call themselves the United Kingdom, protected by a man named Harry Fowler. But there’s something else down in the dark, the spirit of London manifesting itself as ghosts in the old tunnels. And sometimes, the spirits scream.
The story is an adventure that grips from start to finish, luring you in with the mystery of Jazz’s life. It quickly becomes apparent that more coincidence brought Jazz to Harry and the pieces come together in an intricate plot.
The characters are excellent, from the mysterious Harry, to the suave Terrance, to the amusing Hattie, whose main care is the hat collection for which she’s nicknamed. Every character has their own motives, which feed together into the main plot. The all feel real and plausible in a way which supports the fantastic plot.
The magic element of the story is layered in subtly. Although I found this book in the SF&F section of the bookshop, it’s not immediately obvious that it’s a fantasy story. The existence of the ghosts in the Underground are a key part of the plot but they are brought in in such a way that you can almost believe that there’s something mysterious down in the tunnels.
There was one thing that jarred me as unbelievable. The members of the United Kingdom get to and from their hideouts from Tube platforms. On more than one occasion, there’s mention of characters waiting until the platform is clear and then heading along the tracks. On some of the business stations in the London Underground. In the middle of the day. There’s always someone on those platforms; either they just missed the previous train, or they’re waiting for one that was less like a sardine can, or they’re trying to figure out where they should go to cross to another line. I’m quite happy to believe there are spirits of old London floating around the Underground tunnels but the idea of finding an empty platform at Piccadilly Circus during peak times is too unbelievable.
Other than that, it was an excellent book, with interesting characters drawing you into a cleverly thought out plot. Definitely recommended.
Tags: adventure, books, Christopher Lebbon, Mind the Gap, review, Tim Lebbon
Tech Tuesday: Invisibility Cloaks
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Tech Tuesday
Invisibility cloaks are a staple of fantasy. They’re also a reality. Sort of.
A Japanese group developed a coat which allows the wearer to appear transparent. The coat acts as a projector screen, displaying an image being detected by a camera on the other side of the person. This means that if you look at the front of a person, you can see what’s going on behind them.
It’s not quite invisibility and the perspective is a little skewed, but it’s a good start.
In this BBC news article, the creators say that they hope this technology can be applied to more practical uses, such as showing surgeons what’s going on in a person’s body, even when their hands are in the way.
It’s also something that the US military having been looking into to create adaptive camouflage for soldiers.
More recent research has been focused on cloaking devices by bending light around the object. They’ve apparently been able to hide a bump in a layer of gold. At the moment though, this is working in infrared rather than visible light.
So we’re a little way off having a working invisibility cloak, but we’re getting there.
Tags: invisibility, technology
New Twitter Competition
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Child of the Hive, Original fiction
I’m celebrating the launch of Child of the Hive in paperback with a small competition. I will be giving away a signed copy of Child of the Hive as the prize. To enter the competition, simply post a message on Twitter with a link to the Amazon page for the Child of the Hive paperback. Be sure to include the hash tag #childofthehive for your tweet to be included.
The competition closes at midnight GMT on Wednesday 30th November.
Tags: Child of the Hive, competition, twitter
Child of the Hive paperback
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Child of the Hive, Original fiction
My first novel, Child of the Hive, is available for pre-order in paperback edition. The official release date for this edition is 24th November.
Tags: books, Child of the Hive, paperback
The House of Books
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Writing Talk
Are you wondering what to do with supplies of old books? Maybe you could try building with them. A couple of years ago, a pair of artists built a house out of old books to go into an art gallery in Edinburgh.
There’s something that appeals to me about seeing works of verbal art being turned into a work of visual art.
There’s also a part of me cringing as I see someone put nails through books.
Signs I’ll Know I’m Famous
Posted by childofthehive | Filed under Writing Talk
As a relatively new author, with a book that’s sold in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands, it amuses me to come up with lists of signs so that I’ll recognise the moment when I’ve transitioned from obscurity to fame.
My first sign was: “Get an Amazon review written by someone I’ve never met.” I acheived this one quickly. The other signs have been a bit slower.
“Have a wikipedia page that doesn’t get deleted.” My first wikipedia got deleted for not being relevant on the grounds that it looked like someone was trying to use wikipedia to increase publicity. Yeah, there might have been a reason it looked that way.
“Get invited to do a signing at a convention.” I’ve done a signing at a convention, but I had to organise it myself and book a table. One day, I’d like to be invited back to sit in the VIP section.
“Be recognised in the street.” I’m not sure if this will happen, particularly since I’ve changed my hairstyle since the author photo was taken.
“Shops open at midnight for the latest release of my novel.” I can dream of shops opening at midnight on the launch date of one of my books, with queues of people waiting outside, desperate to read my latest creation.
“I’m asked for a photo of myself collating paper or holding twine by The Bloggess.”
