'Pig' now available as an ebook

I hadn't known about it until today, but the updated 2010 edition of my 1990 book What's That Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness (University of Illinois Press)  is now available on Google eBooks ($9.99).

It's best read either on the Web or on an Android tablet or iPad, the Google page says, partly because the pages are scanned images of the printed pages, not flowing electronic versions of the text. On a small device the print would be so tiny it might be hard to read.

The U of I Press reports that sooner or later Pig will also be available in other formats, such as Kindle and Nook, and presumably will be readable on them.

[Feb. 25. I bought Pig from Google eBooks and downloaded the free Google Books app for the iPad from Apple's App Store. Works fine on my iPad 2. The text is quite clear but a little small when read in horizontal double-truck fashion, but when the iPad is held vertically, the single page presented yields a very readable text.]

Pain

Hang Fire survived the publisher's first edit. Now it goes to the copy editor for final humiliation.

As promised, a rail report

The 19th century Baltimore & Ohio roundhouse at Martinsburg, W. Va..

For train lovers, the report on our journey from Chicago to Washington, D.C. is now on my rail travel blog at Trainweb.org.

By the way, the GPS atop my camera as described in a January blogpost does work aboard a moving train. When a photo is examined in Lightroom, I simply click a button and Google Maps shows me exactly where the picture was taken. Life doesn't get better than that.

'Hang Fire' gets a publisher

Finally. Yesterday the contracts arrived from my agent for the fourth novel in the Steve Martinez series, Hang Fire, and were duly executed and mailed back.

The publisher is Five Star Publishing, a subsidiary of Gale, the research book giant. It will bring out a hardcover about a year from now, then, if sales warrant, a paperback and an e-book version shortly afterward.

Five Star historically has marketed chiefly to libraries, not bookstores (although its wares are available on Internet vendors such as Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com). It's now expanding into the ebook market.

This publisher is not well known to ordinary readers, but is familiar to younger mystery and other genre writers as a first stop on the way to acclamation. (It is also familiar to old hands as a last stop after abandonment by traditional publishers.) Its advances are minuscule, but its royalties are generous and paid on time.

Five Star's books are respected in the trade. They are reviewed by advance services such as Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist and Library Journal. Even the New York Times Book Review notices them now and then. They win industry prizes. They establish careers and save them, too.

I have hopes.

Year of the Train

An eastbound California Zephyr approaches Castle Gate, Utah.

Some people think I was born with a flanged wheel on each leg instead of feet. They're not far wrong, for 2012 is shaping up to be the Year of the Train for me and the Lady Friend.

We are longtime rail travel lovers. We love to watch scenery unfold before our eyes. We love to go to bed on the prairie and wake up in the mountains. We enjoy meeting new friends in the lounge and dining cars. We simply prefer relaxed and unhurried travel.

And we don't miss the exciting experience of strangers prodding and fondling us at airport security.

We're starting the travel year in early February with a round trip on Amtrak's Capitol Limited from Chicago to Washington in sleeper roomettes. Our tickets include dinner upon departure and breakfast upon awakening.

Many people think Amtrak sleeper accommodations make train trips far more expensive than flying, and in many of not most cases that is true—but not on this route. We booked early, in December, and got  refundable round-trip sleeper tickets for $588. Two refundable economy round-trip tickets on United or American would go for $577. Of course, two nonrefundable "super saver" airline tickets would be $380, but add $50 (each way) cab rides to O'Hare and the cost rises to $480. Without meals.

The lesson: Don't assume that taking a sleeper room on a train is always going to be more expensive than flying.

Next up is a short 5 ½-hour coach round-trip in early March aboard a workaday Amtrak local, the Lincoln Service from Chicago to St. Louis, where I'll be delivering an address. Roundtrip rail fare: $40.50 each for senior citizens. Roundtrip air fare: $162. Plus cabs to and from both airports.

Pricewise, the Lincoln Service wins. Timewise, air travel is faster—tt's only half an hour. But those taxis might add an hour to the overall trip, and then if you get to each airport an hour before departure, you're looking at 3 1/2 hours in transit. Plus the aggravation of TSA's wandering hands.

Then there'll be a ten-day trip in late March on the California Zephyr to San Francisco Bay, in the service of getting trackside photographs for the upcoming e-book version of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. We'll stop in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, for a couple of days to take the waters as well as gather information and photos.

On the train we'll spend one night in a roomette and three nights in a large bedroom, all of the latter paid for by points amassed over five months on our Amtrak Guest Rewards Master Card. If we were paying cash, a round-trip in that big bedroom would be a staggering (but refundable) $3,532 for two people. Refundable round-trip air fare for two would be about $1,900, or if one wanted to take one's chances and book a nonrefundable ticket, $1,020.

All that scenery and relaxation on the long Western train trips is costly, no doubt about it. But if saving time is not an object, you do get three days of rolling comfort with amiable fellow travelers as well as Rocky Mountain and Sierra Nevada vistas rather than four intense hours at 30,000 feet among indifferent strangers in cattle-car conditions. Some people would consider that priceless. We do,

Winding up our travel plans for the year: A fall round trip on VIA Rail's The Ocean from Montreal to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a ten-day ground tour of the Maritime Provinces. We'll of course fly from Chicago to Montreal. We could get there by Amtrak (Lake Shore Limited from Chicago to Albany and Adirondack from Albany to Montreal), but that would require a night's layover in Albany, not exactly the City of Gold for us.

It will be costly, of course. VIA's overnight trains are as pricey as Amtrak's, but we haven't yet decided which sleeper accomodations we'll choose—a standard bedroom for two (meals included) or a roomier, more upscale compartment in the classic 1950s Park round-ended dome/observation car that brings up the rear of The Ocean. More about this later.

Of course, I'll put up full reports on all the trips on my rail travel blog at Trainweb.org.

VIA Rail Park observation cars (here on The Canadian at Capreol, Ont.) also bring up the markers on The Ocean from Montreal to Halifax.

A sense of where I was

This morning I took my camera, a new GPS receiver attached to its hot shoe, up to the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, one of my favorite spots for photography. My goal was to see how well the GPS works in embedding geographical latitude and longitude, altitude and compass direction data into the digital files of my photographs at the instant I take them.

I stopped on the footbridge between the Botanic Garden's main island and the visitor center and took a quick shot (above) of the frozen channel between lagoons just southeast of the bridge. Then I went home and loaded the photograph file into my computer and called it up with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 software.

Quickly I clicked a button that took me over the wi-fi to Google Maps, and the result (considerably enlarged) is shown in the screen-grab illustration below. The green arrow marks the spot where I was standing when I took the shot. The red "A" symbol marks the point where the camera was aimed. The arrow and the symbol are absolutely dead on. [Later: I was mistaken about the nature of that "A" symbol. It simply marks the mailing address nearest to the arrow—in this case, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, IL 60022. That's still useful.]

The point, of course, is that weeks, months and even years from now, I will be able to recover from the computer's memory, if not my own, the exact spot where the photograph was taken.

Soon I'll be riding the California Zephyr through winding canyons of the Colorado Rockies and twisting ridges of the Sierra Nevada, shooting madly out the train's windows in the service of gathering photographs for the upcoming e-edition of Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. If all goes well, I'll be able to pinpoint (and describe) the location of every photograph with perfect accuracy rather than relying on my aging brain's ability to recall places and details.

Isn't that absolutely cool?

A sense of where you were

The device on top of the camera is a GPS receiver.

One of the tasks of a travel  author is to take decent photographs of the locales he is writing about, both as aides-memoires for the text and icing on the book's cake in the form of a photo section. Come March, the Lady Friend and I will be taking a ten-day-long trip to San Francisco Bay aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr primarily to gather new photos for the upcoming e-edition of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America.

As a photographer I tend to be an indiscriminate shooter, pointing the camera at anything and everything that appears in front of me, hoping to remember later what the subjects were all about and especially where they were shot. Is that a photo of the Colorado River at Dotsero or was it Orestod? Does this abandoned rail yard lie at Soldier Summit or somewhere else?

Some years ago I took a shot of a beautiful rock formation from the open vestibule window of a private car behind an eastbound Zephyr, but never used it anywhere because I couldn't identify the locale. Only after seeing someone else's similar picture of the same place a few weeks ago did I realize that I'd captured the western approach to Castle Gate, Utah, one of the lordliest sights possible from American rails. It's going to go right into the e-book of Zephyr.

Of course I should have taken notes on the individual frames, as a good photojournalist should, but "should" and "did" have different meanings. As a writer I am careful to do due diligence, but as a photographer I just have been too undisciplined.

But now there is a brand new gadget in my photo bag that I hope will make life much easier for me.

It is a Pentax O-GPS1, an inexpensive ($200)  little GPS receiver that attaches to the hot shoes of the current crop of Pentax digital single-lens-reflex cameras.

The receiver records not only the precise latitude and longitude of the spot where the photographer was standing when he snapped the shutter, but also its altitude above sea level and the compass direction in which the camera was pointing.

The camera embeds in the digital file of the photo all this information, along with the customary "metadata" about the f-stop, shutter speed, sensor sensitivity (or ISO), lens focal length, camera make and model, etc.

When I upload the photo files into my computer, I can use special geotagging software to find their precise locations on Google Earth or a similar mapping site. Being able to locate on a map the exact spots where I took my shots is going to be an enormous help.

That is, if the device works as I hope it will. I don't yet know if it will lock on to at least four satellites from the windows of a train speeding at 79 miles an hour, or if it can lock on from deep in a canyon.  We'll find out in February, when the Lady Friend and I will take Amtrak's Capitol Limited to Washington, D.C.