"Writing is easy; I just open a vein and bleed." — Red Smith

This site is dedicated to writers the world over who write, not because it's their hobby, or the way that they while away an occasional afternoon, but because it's who they are.

Latest news about David Ross

David Ross is working to complete a BA in communications at Ashford University, which he is due to accomplish in August. He is looking ahead at perhaps going for a master's degree. He is very interested in a master's program being offered by another online university in Military History, something that has been a passion of his since he was a teenager (if not before!).
He will be appearing in a play at the end of the month entitled "All the Time in the World," which will be performed in the Maxine Theater in Valley Center, California. This is the world premiere for this original production.

What is "Veinwriter"?

"Veinwriter" is the fictional "product" I designed that helps writers avoid all of the work and stress associated with creativity. Read about it below:



Pendragon Writer’s Solutions       
P.O. Box 57
Palomar Mountain CA. 92060
dave@pendragon.net
760-888-8888

“Solutions for writers who lack the creative spark”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 1, 2010










WRITER SOFTWARE TAKES AWAY DRUDGERY OF CREATIVITY


  
Palomar Mountain, California—The Veinwriter ™ software suite from Pendragon Labs and Pendragon Writer’s Solutions Inc., addresses a nagging problem that all professional writers face: creativity— and leaves them the time for the important tasks of writing, such as marketing, tax planning and networking with magazine editors.
   
Reviewers are comparing Pendragon’s Veinwriter with Legalzoom.com for creating legal documents, or Cliff Notes for learning about famous novels without reading them. Veinwriter fills the same need for creative writers.
  
Red Smith famously observed that writing is easy,  “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Today all you have to do is sit at your computer keyboard and open Veinwriter ™ the new all-in-one software that streamlines and in some cases obliterates the onerous chores that fiction writers, novelists and other ink-stained wretches have always dreaded, namely: planning the story, creating believable, living—breathing characters, determining motivations, inventing conflict, resolving conflict, creating convincing narratives and, most tedious of all, writing the story.
   
Jeremy Hacker, CEO of Pendragon Writer’s Solutions, greeted the introduction of the new product. “Now there is writing software for the rest of us. Recognizing that we were probably not alone in lacking the ability to imagine moral dilemmas, write striking narrative or to engineer struggles between good and evil, we set out to create an enterprise solution that allows anyone who can use a keyboard to write a novel. The result was Veinwriter ™.”
   
Have you ever read a mediocre, uninspiring work of fiction and said to yourself, “I could write that!”? Well, now you can!
   
Plotting from introduction to denouement is a no sweat operation with the Veinwriter ™ leaving more time to plan book-signing tours and appear on early morning talk shows. If you don’t like writing, but like having written, Veinwriter ™ could be the out-of-the-box solution that allows you to start cashing checks long before you next have to change ink cartridges on your printer.
MORE
   
With the Faust add-on modules you can also harness modern state-of-the-art random number generators to a creativity matrix and convincingly embed thematic material that is guaranteed to impress reviewers at the New York Review of Books with your obscurity and narcissism.
  
Other modules include “He said, She said,” a time and laborsaving extension that actually allows you to compose believable dialogue AND conflict—in seconds! Forget writer’s block. You’ll finish chapters and short stories so quickly and easily that you’ll be able to sleep in late every morning. The “Dialect for Idioms” extension enables writers to create believable, vernacular, dialect and accents, all accessible from an easy, intuitive pull-down menu that allows you to choose, for instance: brogue, jive, gangsta, cockney and valley.
  
Best of all, Veinwriter ™ allows aspiring novelists and hopeful National Book Award winners to skip the countless hours of reading good, well-written fiction and non-fiction and to go directly to actually imitating those styles. You can write in the style of Pynchon, Kozinski, Roth and even mimic eccentric punctuation styles such as that of e.e. cummings and Cormac McCarthy, all without risking accusations of plagiarism.




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* * *
    The creative team at Pendragon Labs, based on Palomar Mountain in Southern California, is made up of writers and software engineers who know what it’s like to face yourself in the mirror the day before an important deadline and to exclaim, “I have no clue what I’m supposed to do next!” They failed to be published due to a lack of talent and ability, but thought they could fill a niche market by helping others to overcome what they felt was an inequality in the literary marketplace that limited success to those who possess narrative skills.    
   

Media Technologies

As part of my current communications "capstone" class, I was assigned to write about four different "media technologies." The technologies I chose to explore are:

• Social Media
• The iPhone and its various imitators
• Google, and its various services, including the ubiquitous search engine, but also life-enhancing services such as Google Voice and Google Docs.
• Casino slot machines

Social Media
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUycJ7eKRLWaZGQ1NnczbnpfMjZjZjkzem5oZg&hl=en
• The iPhone and its various imitators
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUycJ7eKRLWaZGQ1NnczbnpfMjdkcDRrazRnbQ&hl=en
Google, and its various services
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUycJ7eKRLWaZGQ1NnczbnpfMjhmZjd0bXBnNw&hl=en

• Casino slot machines

Since my characterization of slot machines as a form of media is somewhat controversial, or perhaps original, I'm providing two articles on slot machine technology that I wrote within the last couple of years for casino magazines. For those interested these articles explain some of the technology that is being applied in the modern casino.

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUycJ7eKRLWaZGQ1NnczbnpfMjlxYmdwemNmaw&hl=en

Here are the two articles:

New Technology in Slots
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUycJ7eKRLWaZGQ1NnczbnpfMzBmbWZnOHNneA&hl=en

Slots Management

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUycJ7eKRLWaZGQ1NnczbnpfMzFmNm0zOWpkMg&hl=en


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About David Ross's books

A brief introduction to "The Argus Gambit"

Should he expose the secret society of scientists that was trying to destroy his world--or join them?

In this science fiction thriller set in the second half of the next century, very little is as it seems as a policeman investigates an assassination that cost him his job, and may have deprived humanity of its only hope of surviving a devastating famine.

America has become isolationist and anti-technological, facing inwards from its responsibilities as a great power, and from the challenges of the future. It seems that the only hope lies in the immensely talented scientist Dorian Nye, who has translated the cryptic Strubeck Equations, which can save the world from a South American grain blight that threatens the planet's survival. But Nye is killed, and the policeman charged with protecting him, Mel Hardrim, is held responsible for his death. But it isn't Nye's body lying in the morgue, and suddenly Hardrim has gone from being just an incompetent cop to a suspect in a kidnapping of international ramifications.

Hoping to salvage his career, Hardrim investigates the scientist's disappearance, but as he digs deeper and deeper, he is drawn into a maze of deception, murder, and political intrigue, which has as its center a shadowy group of scientists known only as the Argus Society. Nye may have belonged to this group, and they may have caused his disappearance. They may be plotting the destruction of civilization, or they may be Mankind's only hope of survival. With his life threatened at every turn, Hardrim's choice is to expose the Argus Society, or to join them.

"The Argus Gambit"
was first published by: St. Martin's Press.

Author's notes
: It took me 12 years to write my first novel, "The Argus Gambit," but in reality I wrote the novel several times before I got to the point where I was satisfied with it. I was such a perfectionist when it comes to my writing that it took the common advent of the personal computer for me to be able to finish what had come to be more a member of my family than a book. It also took me a long time to finish because, in the nature of an extremely immature writer, I wanted to throw in everything but the kitchen sink: every wonder, every political twist and turn, every societal evolution, every fad and fancy that ocurred to me. Writing this book was such fun for me that I never wanted it to end. Fortunately, on reflection, much of this additional material did not find its way into the finished book.

Not autobiographical in even the slightest degree, the novel does contain some characters who strongly resemble friends of my youth, as well as a character my friends claim physically resembles me. Many of the scenes and bits of dialogue I constructed as I spent long nights pushing a broom and running a cash register as a night clerk of a convenience story. Many's the customer who probably thought I was a little bit wacked out when they saw me muttering to myself, when actually I was polishing bits to submit to the typewriter the next day. It's amazing to me how the most mundane of jobs can give wing to the imagination if the writer is willing to let it do so.

Where the book is definitely me is in my insistence to populate it with passionate, romantic, larger-than-life characters who believe in the greatness of Man, that the greatest good of Man is creation and technological advancement and his greatest joy the expansion of human knowledge.

This philosphy has been stated far better than I by literary giants of the 20th century, such as Ayn Rand, but I borrow the overall title of the two-book series (the other book being "The Eighth Rank") from T. E. Lawrence, who in his "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" wrote "All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible." That sentiment is also at the bedrock of the philosophy of my protagonists.

"The Argus Gambit
might be called a philosophical novel, yet I hope that I have had enough fun with the plot that the reader will have fun with it, too, whether or not he or she cares for philosophy.

A brief introduction to
"The Eighth Rank"


"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that if was vanity; bur the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible." -T.E. Lawrence

Jason Scott, Sherlock Michlanski, and Jacob Kane were the most prized pupils of the Argus Society: three brilliant young men of extraordinary and diverse talents. Three prominent members of the secret international conspiracy of intelligentsia. Three people whose dreams were humanity's hope. Mankind's madness has threatened the entire world. President Jeffrey Shefferton, having seen no answers, has authorized the Sunside Project, Jason Scott's plan for feeding the world by utilizing the Strubeck equations. Only the equations are not what they seem to be nor is the Sunside Project. It is, in fact, a dream that only Kane, Michlanski, and Scott can make possible. In this thrilling, Panoramic vision of the future Davis Ross has brought to life the future first depicted in The Argus Gambit. Bold and adventuresome, The Eighth Rank is a dynamic science fiction novel of the highest rank.

Praise for David Ross's first novel
"The Argus Gambit"

"In The Argus Gambit, David Ross shows how the balance of military and political power can change and change. I enjoyed his vision of our world after a few more turns of the wheel, and look forward to later books in the series,"

-Vernor Vinge, Hugo Award winning author of Marooned in Realtime

"Ross's political struggles are convincing and dramatic…. Top marks for presentaton and effort." -Kirkus Reviews

"David Ross's The Argus Gambit, is that rare kind of novel that attempts to be both general philosophy and interesting fiction. With this book, Ross places himself in the Libertarian/Objectivist tradition. I'm neither, so I can't speak for his orthodoxy, but for the non-Libertarian, non-Objectivist, this book is more accessible-and a lot more fun-than Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. He didn't convert me, but he certainly entertained me. Ross's world-building, characters, and plot are more credible than Rand's-where she gives us lecture, he gives us real blood-and-thunder action." -John Barnes, author of Mother of Storms

"Ambitious….it has everything from taps into the earth's core for energy to the search for FTL travel, from political conspiracies great and small to protagonists who play the sitar." -Locus