Models - Extrapolated Worlds

Cover Reveal!

I am in the final stages of publishing my science fiction novel The Extrapolated Man on Kindle Direct, and am excited to share its cover with you in advance. Things are getting real!

It must have been twenty years ago that I came across a phenomenal tabletop game called Attack Vector: Tactical, published by Ken Burnside and with illustrations by Charles Oines. I took one look at the nuclear fusion powered torchships and said “Yes! Like that!”

Fast forward to early 2024, and I discovered Charles on Twitter, and asked if he’d be interested in doing a cover for a hard sci-fi novel.

I feel incredibly fortunate that he said yes, and here it is!

Site Name Change

As I wormed my way deeper into the self-publishing apple, and learned the mysteries of ASINs and ISBNs and required metadata and all that cool publishing sh*t, I realized I was bumping up against the pithy core by naming my website after my first book – The Extrapolated Man. I mean… there are more books in the works, and short stories, and artifacts. Pretty obvious in retrospect, I know. Let’s just say I was in a hurry to get something online, and I ran with what I had in hand, which was the book title.

But now I have to go buy ISBNs – which are the unique numeric IDs that get books into bookstores and libraries and virtually any online platform except Amazon – and they are not particularly cheap. We’re talking $125 per ISBN in quantities 1-9, and then $295 for a 10-pack. Which is conveniently and extractively sized to make you buy the 10-pack because you need at least 2 ISBNs and more likely 4, since they are specific to a unique product (ebook, paperback, audio book, hardback). Which is a bit of an astonishing ripoff if you think about it, because we’re talking about $125 for a single record in a database, that you create yourself. As a former database guy, I’d guess their incremental cost is in the pennies zone. Such is life in a world jammed full of monopolies.

But I digress.

Where I was going with ISBNs is that they include IDs for your product and for its publisher. Which in turn linked to a website. Which made me step back and go, huh, I should have a cool publisher name, and a nifty logo on the spine of my book. A row of Mars & Torchship logos lined up on my bookshelf would look pretty sweet. That appeals to my compulsive over-organized visual brain. But what website should it link too? Oh. Yeah. This one, ideally.

And so before I got too far along, it seemed best to change the website’s name to something more inclusive. Now, the usual drill is for authors to name their websites after themselves, because they’re the product, right? Or at least the brand. Douglas Franklin! W00t! But something about that kind of bugs me. I mean google doesn’t care. If I manage to get this lumbering beast off the ground, then searches on me will link to here just as easily as to me.com. And while “you are your brand” fits this end-stage-capitalism moment, where we are expected to monetize every fucking thing, it fails to capture the messy reality of life. I’d rather my brand was the worlds I create.

So here we are. Welcome to Extrapolated Worlds, home of author and maker Doug Franklin!

Publishing: Self vs Trad

When I told one of my friends that I had finally finished my science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, they replied that at least the hard work was over. And then we both laughed, because writing a novel is a lot like hunting moose. You go out and spend a week or so in the hills, having a nice time doing just about exactly what you like doing. Getting up early to hike, sitting under a spruce tree listening to the wind blow and glassing the hills around you, calling from a tree stand at dusk with a friend who has brought a little something to take the chill off. And then the moment comes: you’ve found a legal moose, and he’s close enough to shoot and not too far to haul, and you finally pull the trigger. And that’s when the fun is done and the real work begins, because it takes a lot of effort to turn a moose in the field into meat in the freezer. Those things are huge. I can’t even carry a hindquarter anymore; that’s what kids are for. (Thanks Sam! Thanks Max!)

So that’s where I’m at in this process. It’s time to turn this beast of a book into something that sustains me and my family. It’s time to publish. And that requires making a decision: should I self-publish or go the traditional route? I’ve dreamed about seeing my books on store shelves since I was a kid. So traditional publishing has a lot of pull for me. And I was fortunate to get some attention early on, right up to getting a contract offer. (Thanks Stoney! Thanks Walt!) That was such a rush. I had my finger on the trigger! But times have changed since I was a kid. Only 2% of traditionally published authors make over $100K a year. The next 8% make between $60K and $100K. It falls off pretty rapidly from there. The bottom line is that the vast majority of published authors need side gigs and hustles and maybe even full time jobs, because otherwise they simply can’t make ends meet.

That sucks.

It is also a relatively new phenomenon. It used to be that “midlist” authors could actually make a living at their craft. But over the last few decades, there has been a tremendous consolidation of the publishing industry. Which is of course the same story as in many other industries. Because capitalism! So as all that power and money accrues to a tiny number of publishing houses, what happens? Well, basically the producers (that would be me!) get screwed.

Here’s an interesting number: 2000 hours. That’s how long it takes to write a typical novel. (Mine is a bit of a honker, so probably more like 3000 hours, or really 4000 if I’m being honest because I spent a lot of time in revisions.) 2000 hours is also the aspirational American work year (8 hrs/day x 5 days/wk = 40 hrs/wk, 40 hrs/wk x 50 wk/yr =2000 hrs). So if you hold down a full time job and write a novel in a year, you worked 16 hours a day. I’m old enough to have a realistic sense of what I’m capable of, and 16 work hours a day ain’t it. So let’s do the math. Say I can tolerate an honest 50 hour work week. That’s 40 for the Man and 10 for writing. So at that rate it’ll take about 4 years to write the next novel. By which time I’ll be 67. Damn. Also, are any readers I manage to attract going to remember me four years after they finish my epic science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN? Ha! I think not.

So what does this have to do with self-publishing versus traditional publishing? Thanks for asking! These days, if I self-publish a novel on Amazon or Apple Books, instead of getting single-digit royalties like I would for a printed book, I get about 70% of the retail price. I also get a world-wide market. And I don’t have to thread the needle of finding an agent who finds an editor who works for a publisher who is very interested in minimizing their risk and maximizing their profit. Which could take years.

What I don’t get with self-publishing is marketing. That’s all on me. But as it turns out, as a noob it’s mostly on me in traditional publishing as well. And advances are thing of the past. Things that make you say “Huh,” right? So the question becomes one of values: do I want to make a living out of writing, or do I want to be part of the club? Make no mistake, I have as much vanity and ego as anyone. Probably more. I’d fucking love to be part of the club of traditionally published authors. They are my heroes. But I need to make a living at this, or I need to do something else with my time.

So there you have it: wants versus needs. That’s not such a hard decision after all. And who knows, maybe after I self-publish my awesome epic science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, I’ll get an invite to join the club. In the meantime, with a little help from friends and family, I’ll be hauling my own meat, Alaska-style.

Prostate Cancer – Part 2

In which my misadventures with prostate cancer lead to medical tourism in Germany…

A couple years after my initial diagnosis and adoption of a “watchful waiting” approach, my PSA test scores started to creep up, and I started looking for treatments that didn’t involve willful destruction of my basic plumbing. There were all sorts of semi-experimental procedures that attempted to do the job, like high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) and cryotherapy where they stick needles in and freeze the tumor, but at least at the time none were much better than a good old-fashioned prostatectomy. I was really hoping for the male equivalent of a lumpectomy.

Somewhere along the way I stumbled on hyperthermia, which involves jacking up the temperature of the rotty bits just enough to kill the cancer cells whilst leaving the healthy stuff intact. It seemed plausible, so next thing you know I was on a plane to Germany with my wife. Our destination was Klinik Marinus am Stein, there to submit myself to the tender ministrations of Dr. Axel Weber.

The big idea was – essentially – to microwave my prostate, which is an organ roughly the size of a walnut, without cooking anything else. So the way Dr. Weber did this was with a machine of his own invention. The process involved placing a balloon inside my bladder that anchored a microwave emitter a fixed distance downstream, as it were, hopefully in the middle of said walnut.

Now, there’s really only one way into a person’s bladder that doesn’t involve a sharp knife, which is through the urethra. Which in guys, exits the body through – you knew this was coming – the penis. So there I was, feet in the stirrups, with Dr. Weber leaning over me with a well-lubed microwave emitter roughly the size of a mechanical pencil, saying in a heavy German accent, “Look into my eyes!” while my wife looked on. It is a moment burned into my memory.

Yeah. Good times.

As a palate cleanser, I went off and trekked in the Himalaya for three weeks, which was a truly amazing experience. And also speaks to the degree to which the procedure was not destructive. But was it effective? Hard to say. My numbers went back down and stayed down for half-a-dozen years, so I thought it was a good spend at ~$8K all up (none covered by insurance, of course, because America).

But nothing lasts forever, and about the time the COVID-19 pandemic got rolling, my PSA scores reached the inflection point of the “hockey stick” curve and threatened to go vertical. Not a good sign.

More to come in part 3!

Gray Lies

When writing “Gray Lies,” I was thinking about how a transformative technology like World War 2’s surface ships versus aircraft could come about in the context of interplanetary warfare. Thanks to Larry Niven I was obsessed with Bussard ramjets and I settled on the scenario of old-guard fusion torchships – fusion rockets – being trounced by interplanetary ramjets. (This was before critics calculated that a ramjet would produce more drag than thrust.) I was also thinking a lot about Von Neumann probes – self-replicating space probes that could sweep through the galaxy in fairly short timeframes as these things go. Oh, and the idea of being able to upload minds into computers. It was a lot to pack into one short story.

I wrote it while obsessively listening to the 1990 release of Best of Van Morrison. Which is odd for several reasons; I’m more of a Pink Floyd / Grateful Dead kind of guy, and I usually don’t listen to anything with words while writing. Regardless, Best of Van Morrison was what got me into the groove, and is probably why the story has such an optimistic, or at least kind, ending.

The universe the original story imagines is immediately adjacent to that of THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN. I always enjoyed the works of authors who had created a somewhat consistent but large universe – again, Larry Niven in his Known Space universe, and much earlier, Robert Heinlein. Though it was sometimes hard to see how the pieces all fit together in Heinlein’s case! In any case, it would not take much of a rewrite to nudge “Gray Lies” over. The main discrepancy is the war between Pallas and Confive; in THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, the main conflict is between Earth (or proxies thereof) and Mars. And I’ve largely moved on from ramjets to more esoteric drive technologies, so that might have to be adjusted. But these are minor fixes – surface details that are easily reworked.

So enjoy the original here; odds are good by the time it gets to Amazon it’ll be polished up to present the illusion that I’ve known what I was doing from the beginning!

– Magazine cover art by Peter Peebles

Prostate Cancer – Part 1

Back in 2012 my employer was eager to get ahead of healthcare costs, so they launched an annual biometrics program where employees got screened for all sorts of things. The theory was that early detection would reduce the need for expensive treatment later. Oh, and of course, lead to better health outcomes for the employees, though it’s unclear to me whether that was a key driver of their decision making process.

In my case, there were two red flags, which are interesting case studies of what went well and what did not. Good news first: I had moderately high blood pressure. Not the kind of eyeball-popping blood pressure that puts you in the ER, but the kind that takes years off your life in the long run. Something like 150/110.

I am very interested in living a long time (with certain caveats, like being healthy and able to engage with the world more or less on my own terms). So taking years off my life was definitely not okay. After a few pharmaceutical experiments, I settled on a cheap medication that knocks off 20-30 points without noticeably affecting my quality of life. Note that experiments were necessary; the first couple drugs had side effects that made me question whether those nominal extra years of life were worth it. (If you find yourself in a similar situation, I advocate not sticking with the first shitty hand your doctor deals you.) So, good news, right? Problem found, problem solved.

Now the second red flag: a high Prostate Specific Antigen (aka PSA) score. A high PSA score indicates a man might have prostate cancer, or as I fondly think of it, root rot. There followed many very expensive, painful, and in one unfortunate case, life-threatening diagnostics. That last was a doozy. Everything was pointing to, “It is very likely you have cancer Mr. Franklin, but the only way we’ll know for sure is by taking a biopsy.” So the way they take a biopsy of a guy’s prostate is by sticking something kind of like a mini nail gun up the ol’ poop chute and punching a needle through the wall of your rectum, through various other layers, and on into your prostate. Twelve times.

I’m a standard-issue cis guy, so I didn’t have a lot of a priori experience about how sensitive prostates are, but lo all these years later I’ve had many things inserted into me and can tell you, as my gay brothers already know, that it is quite sensitive. Getting core-sampled with a nail gun through your poop chute twelve times produces an altered state I hope to avoid in the future. It also has the side effect of ramming whatever shit soup is still coating your gut deep into your tender bits. (This after drinking 80 ounces of yummy Moviprep strands you on the toilet overnight waiting for your big date with a nail gun.) The docs anticipate this problem and give you a huge oral antibiotic right before getting busy with their nail gun. I’m told it works for 99% of the folks involved. If you happen to be part of the unlucky 1% like me, you get sepsis, go down the proverbial drain, and get to be on a first-name basis with the staff of your local ER.

But really this is all a long aside, because after all that fun, it turned out that my specific kind of prostate cancer was likely to grow very slowly, and could probably be safely ignored for years to come. Take note: they can actually do genetic tests on cancer these days, but you have to ask for it specifically, in advance. Even though my particular flavor of root rot was just barely on the evil side of benign, the docs were very keen on taking my prostate out as soon as fucking possible to eliminate any risk. Or to pay for their fancy robotic surgery suite, because capitalism.

There followed a period of intense research on my part, because it seemed unreasonable, if my risk of dying of prostate cancer anytime soon was quite low, to have a procedure that would likely have life-long consequences ranging from incontinence, to not being able to have an erection without some kind of pharmaceutical or mechanical assistance, to not being able to have one at all. My read at the time was that 1/3 of men who get their prostates removed need diapers, and 2/3 were not going to have a normal sex life after treatment. That’s like putting two to four rounds in in my trusty Smith & Wesson .357 revolver and playing Russian Roulette with my junk.

Now… I know, sex isn’t everything. And sure, I’ll give it up before I give up life itself. But if I don’t have to? If giving it up is OPTIONAL? I have friends who were in the same boat and now swear by Cialis. It was driving them crazy, sitting on a ticking time bomb whose fuse was lit, but the length of which was only sort of statistically knowable. I get it. But the saying goes that most men die WITH prostate cancer, instead OF prostate cancer. Root rot comes for all men in the fullness of time. And sex is one of my very favorite things in life.

So I said no thanks, I’ll just wait this out. Which drove the docs nuts. They could cure me! “You, with the intact prostate! Get on the table right fucking now!” But no. It must be frustrating to know you can fix some guy’s problem for good, and have him refuse. As it turned out, I was on the forefront of a wave of refuseniks, so much so that these days a guy with my numbers wouldn’t have even had a biopsy. They’d probably wait until the PSA was much higher, or there was some kind of detectable growth or readily noticeable problem like you can’t pee. (Detectable with a finger – which is delightfully and misleadingly called a digital exam.)

But the problem remained that I had cancer. I knew it. It was in there. So I couldn’t just completely ignore it.

Stand by for part 2, wherein I have medical adventures in Germany…