It’s crunch time, people. We are less than two weeks out from the end of the Geek & Sundry hard science fiction competition. Yes, we are in the lead. But there are no guarantees. Though my wife insists I stop hustling and giving all of my free time to this publishing contest before my daughters forget their daddy’s name, I can’t sleep properly until I see my dream of publishing this book come true. It’s not crunch time, it’s Captain Crunch time.

Saleem Dar, a fan of the book has provided this killer puppet rap for The Punch Escrow:

Share it with your friends, tell them if they pre-order the book I’ll buy them lunch. Yes: It’s THE LUNCH ESCROW. What a great idea for a promo Tal’s sleep deprived 12:34am mind! Let’s run with that. On top of all of our other giveaways and raffles, I am announcing the ultimate giant raffle: One lucky (for some definition of that word) winner will be taken out to lunch by me. I might come to you or bring you to me. We will *not* be teleporting. It will be an epic lunch. We will not eat bugs, which are the primary protein source for people in in the 25th century (turns out soylent green was just beetles). It will be awesome and delicious, and anyone who’s pre-ordered a book gets an entry. You get a second entry when someone you refer pre-orders a book.

Oh, and the winner of last week’s shirt and a mug raffle is... Erik Ebert! Erik, I’ll be in touch at the end of the campaign to sort out shipping logistics. There’s another raffle this week, keep those pre-orders and referrals coming!

Last thing:

I haven’t really been using this to promote other books, but there’s one I think  you guys should really check out. It’s called Lucky by RH Webster, and from what I’ve read so far it feels like this generation’s The Last Starfighter. I like it not only because of that, but because the protagonist is a girl, and it’s seeming like the kind of story I’d really want my daughters to get into. 

It’s officially getting competitive up in here! Seems like all three of the top entries in the Geek & Sundry contest have hit triple digits. And speaking of triple digits, I intercepted this unbroadcast Paco The Puppet video from International Transport:

Apparently they were going to release it when I hit 250 individual readers (which just happened!) but the word on the street is that Paco disappeared! They are offering a huge reward for his return. I, on the other hand, am offering huge rewards for your referrals. Every book purchase you make or refer will get  you into a weekly raffle where I’ll be giving away Punch Escrow vintage International Transport t-shirts, teleporting coffee mugs, hoodies, and much more! You can find your referral code on any book page by clicking on one of the share options on a book page. Not only will referring your friends to buy the book enter you in the weekly raffles, but you’ll also earn a $10 Inkshares referral credit!

Thank you for your help in getting here. We’ve still got almost three weeks until the contest is over and I can’t win without your support!

I don’t know where the line is, but I’m sure International Transport has crossed it in their latest salvo against me. Using beloved children’s puppet Paco to subvert your children into convincing you to boycott my book. Have you seen it?

To celebrate our 250th hour along with our Quillification (that’s a fancy word I made up that means the book is definitely getting published), I promised you guys something special today, and boy are you going to get it:

When one is dealing with "hard science fiction" it’s particularly important to get the facts right. For example, one of the best hard science fiction writers, Larry Niven, got a very important fact wrong in his first story, "The Coldest Place" (1964). In this story, the coldest place concerned was the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun. However, Mercury was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance with the Sun before the story saw the light of day, meaning it was published with known scientific errata. Oh well. It didn’t seem to hurt his career much.

Since "The Punch Escrow" is set in the 25th century, I expect that I will have gotten a lot of things wrong. I’ve done my best to avoid such missteps, but since I am only a fan of quantum physics and not a quantum physicist myself, I leaned on my highschool friend Joe Santoro, a real life medical physicist, to vet (and sometimes invent) the science necessary to make my world scientifically plausible. Joe is one of the nicest, smartest guys in the world. He’s probably blushing reading this, but without him there probably never would have been a Punch Escrow. To celebrate our publication, I wanted to share a short interview I conducted with Joe. Consider this the first in a series of interviews with people who have been invaluable to me in making Joel Byram’s world credible.

Tal: I guess first question would be your name and what you do for a living?

Joe: My name is Joe Santoro and I am a medical physicist. I work in a radiation oncology clinic at a hospital on Long Island. We’re the guys that make sure the medical linear accelerator is delivering the correct radiation dose to patients undergoing radiation therapy. We also come up with the treatment plans for patients which dictates where the radiation will get delivered. We’re responsible for routine QA of most of the various components that comprise the radiation delivery chain, i.e. the CT scanners, LINAC, on-treatment imaging, etcetera.

Tal: What was the thing that made you want to get into physics?

Joe: Now you’re making me use my way-back machine. I guess I would have to narrow it down to 3 things at a really early age; astronomy (just looking up at the sky), magnets (which are cool at any age), and a fascination with things just crashing into each other. I subsequently became obsessed with meteorology to the point where I was making weather reports daily and posting them on the classroom door. Incidentally I didn’t end up “specializing” in either meteorology or astronomy but these early interests were springboards into studying (particle) physics and mathematics later in life. To this day I still love a great meteor shower, looking up at the moon, or a spending hours a day on Wunderground.com

Tal: In science fiction books, scientists are often presented as characters with no sense of humor. I think that’s why The Martian is so beloved by the scientific community, because it presents hard science side by side with toilet humor. It was something I wanted to capture for the Sylvia character in the book, she’s a quantum physicist, but she’s also happy to drop a dirty joke. As a professional physicist, how much of a role does humor play into your daily work life? Can you give any examples?

Joe: It’s funny you ask that. When I think back on the influences that shaped my personality as a scientist (and just a regular person), I think of Peter Venkman (Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters) and Chris Knight (Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius). Perhaps it was just a function of watching and re-watching these movies at a really mentally malleable age, but both characters made the prospect of being a scientist seem like something really cool to aspire to.

I think having a good sense of humor allows you to deal with the absurdity, randomness, beauty and cruelty of the universe in way that complements science’s attempt to establish some sort of framework for all that. I think taking oneself too seriously is a hazard in both scientific pursuit and life’s pursuits. After all, what’s the point if you can’t have a good laugh every now and then?

It goes without saying that working in a radiation oncology department can be extremely stressful and tragic on an almost daily basis. I’ve been at places where joking around is discouraged and I can tell you, people don’t last too long at those places. Without being able to joke around with the people I spend the better part of my day with, I think I would want to throw myself in front of train at the end of the day.

Tal: I’ve asked you to help me convert mosquitoes to flying steam reformers, keep self-replicating nanos in check with ecophagy cages, and make human teleportation possible with density functional theory, among other absurd requests. Your one caveat to me was to ’beware of using too deterministic language in the story’ - Can your elaborate on why you said that?

Joe: Did I say that? It sounds quite serious. I guess what I meant is that when talking about things inherently “Quantum”, it requires us to use the language of chance and probability instead of certainty. Quantum physics describes the world of the extremely small and at these scales, familiar quantities like the position, velocity, momentum, and energy of an object become fuzzy and probabilistic. Instead of specifying these quantities as definite values like we’re used to for say a car traveling on a road, we have to instead speak of the expectation value of these quantities for an object like an electron. Quantum physics can say that the most probable location to find an electron orbiting a proton in hydrogen atom is the 1.5 times the Bohr radius but nothing more definite. This is in contrast to saying that saying that our car is at position X,Y,Z, traveling at velocity V. It’s definitely a different way of thinking about reality and I’m not sure anyone really ever gets used to it. 

Tal: Last question before I let you go back to saving the world one patient at a time: What one quantum physics breakthrough would you like to see happen within your lifetime?

Joe: That’s a doozie. If you’re going to make me pick just one I would have to say commercially viable quantum computing coupled with photonic data storage and transfer. The exponential increase in processing capability of a quantum computer will enable humanity to solve all sorts of currently intractable problems across dozens of disciplines. This also has to be accompanied by a completely new ways to move and store such enormously large quantities of data which means moving away from electronic data storage and busses to light speed photonic data storage and bussing. There are even some people using organic compounds like DNA as a means of storing extremely large quantities of data. The coupling of these nascent technologies can potentially change the course of humanity in unimaginably fantastic ways.  

I can’t thank Joe enough for helping me build the world in which The Punch Escrow takes place. And I can’t thank you all enough for helping me bring that world to light. To that end, I’m unveiling the first three chapters of The Punch Escrow. Please note that these are still from the first draft of the manuscript, so there will be errors and the chapters as they appear in your books may be differently worded or organized. I hope you enjoy them.

Lastly, for those of you participating in the t-shirt giveaway, there’s a short survey here about the color/ink options.

Okay. First thing this morning I told my wife, "Baby I’m so Quilltastic," and she said, "Shut up and bring me some coffee." So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

I want to give a special shoutout to Brett Bynum who was the pre-order that put us over the top! Thanks Brett!

So we got to 250 pre-orders 24 hours ahead of schedule. Let me break down what that means you guys have been pre-ordering 1.16 books per hour since this campaign started. That’s pretty much amazing, and you all deserve something special. So let’s start by announcing that everyone who backed thus far at the "Buy This" level or higher is getting a limited edition future vintage International Transport shirt. Give me a few days to figure out the logistics of that. Going forward, anyone who backs at the "Feeling Spendy?" level will also get a shirt. So that means the shirts won’t be going out until after the campaign is over, and at that point I will get your info from you. Check out the previous update if you’re curious what the shirt looks like.

Also, as promised, tonight I will send out Chapters One, Two, and Three, which sounds like a lot but, they’re kind of  a preamble, preface, chapter 1 - So shouldn’t be overwhelming. Also, I would encourage you to check out the new International Transport video on the book’s page, we’ve officially ruffled their feathers! 

I’ve got lots of other exciting things coming up, but you caught me 24 hours ahead of schedule, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to thank you for making this possible. 

Quill on, Wayne.

Quill on, Garth.

Okay.

This campaign started 90 hours ago. In that time 91 readers have joined the party and pre-ordered 123 books. I don’t want these updates to become spammy, so I’m going to shut up until we get to 250. Let me just answer a few more of the most common questions I’ve received in the last few days:

Q. Are you really giving away those awesome t-shirts?

A. Yes. Here’s the deal with the shirts: If we get to 250 pre-orders in the first 250 hours of this campaign then every single reader who pre-ordered before we hit 250 will get a vintage, limited edition International Transport shirt. This is a fairly tangible possibility considering we’re already at 123 pre-orders in 90 hours. However, if we do not get to 250 pre-orders in the first 250 hours, do not fret. First, everyone who pre-ordered at the "Feeling Spendy?" level will definitely get a shirt regardless of where we are at 250 hours because they bought 3 or more books!!! - and I’ll definitely do some kind of other giveaway for the other levels. I’ll figure something out, people. But seriously, let’s get to 250 in 250 and then everyone gets shirts and the book gets made. Get your friends and family in the Punch Escrow chair people!

Q. What’s your plan for the microfiche?

A. Okay, nobody but me calls them microfiche, but when it comes to the mysterious world building diagrams I’ve been posting, I’ll likely keep doing one every day until the end of the campaign. They’ll be getting posted on The Punch Escrow Facebook Page.

Q. Will you be posting more chapters?

A. Yes, I will post chapters 1, 2 and 3 when we hit 250 pre-orders. Right now we’ve got chapters 4, 6, and 8 in their entirety as well as the all-important Gallimaufry.

Q. I have a question you didn’t answer?

A. That’s not a question. But if you do have any additional questions PLEASE get in touch. Oh, and since this is the last update for a while, here’s a video my five year old daughter interviewing me about the book.

The first human teleportation experiments were only referred to by their codename, Project Bragaglia, after the Italian futurist Anton Giulio Bragaglia. 

98 Books pre-ordered by 72 readers in 48 hours!

My goal is 250 readers in 250 hours. If we get there, I’ll give away a few of these vintage International Transport shirts I managed to steal at their last volunteer recruitment event:

In the mean time... Look, I know the rumors have been rife, but please don’t propagate the Project Honeycomb rumors. The good folks at International Transport assure me it’s a non issue. They’ve asked me to include the following statement in my update:

"Tal M. Klein’s ’The Punch Escrow’ is a work of fiction. As of the date of this report, International Transport has not received a national security order and no FISA ordered searches or seizures of any kind have ever been performed on International Transport assets."

Okay. It’s safe to say you guys BLEW MY MIND today. Let’s do the count for the first 24 hours:

59 books, pre-ordered by

41 readers

1 crazy video which I may have to integrate into the cannon

So right now I’m sort of speechless. Let me use this space to answer some questions I’ve been asked over the last day:

Q. Who designed the cover?

A. It was designed by Simon Clarke of Minegraphics. Some of you may know Simon as Slim from Goodgroove Records, my partner in crime in The Sly Players. I’m very excited to collaborate artistically with Slim again, previously he also designed the cover art for my Plastic Starfish album.

Q. What does The Punch Escrow mean?

A. This has been a very popular question today so I sent out the Gallimaufry earlier today. That turned out to be more information than most people required. Let’s make it simple: The basic idea is that teleportation would generally suck as a transportation method because if something went wrong you get something like this:

When someone teleports, the Punch Escrow is a room in which the they are held, well, in escrow, until they safely arrive at their final destination. That way if anything goes wrong during teleportation, one of the conductors could just cancel the trip and the traveler would walk out at the point of origin as if nothing happened. 

A. What’s the status of the book?

Q. The manuscript is done, there is a finished first draft of The Punch Escrow out there. It’s about to enter it’s developmental editing phase. I have some big announcements about that which I’m saving for later.

Q. Are any of the retro styled documents you’re posting in the book?

A. No, they’re just world building tools. Here’s a new one. Seems like International Transport was investigating Joel’s on and offline social behavior:

If you have any more questions or feedback, I love hearing from you. Thanks so much for your support!

This party has started! Thanks to the 17 of you who follow me now, I am hoping to exponentially grow that number over the next month and a half. The first draft of the manuscript is done, it has been thoroughly beta read by a bunch of hard hitting sci fi nerds, and much of their feedback has been incorporated. The Punch Escrow is about to enter developmental editing mode by one of the most amazing people I’ve had the fortune of getting to know lately. I’m very excited to have this person rip my book to shreds and put it back together in imminently more consumable form.

I’ll also be posting regular updates on The Punch Escrow Facebook page, so please take a second to give it a like. If any of you have a book for sale here, I would be happy to do a funding pact. With that, please enjoy this schematic of the walk-through walls in Joel Byram’s world: