Kinda quiet around here…

19 May
2011

Wow, so it’s been for­ever since I updated my blog…sorry about that!  Here’s a quick recap of my life since my last post:

  • The com­pany I worked for closed it’s doors
  • I was sub­se­quently laid off…
  • Attempt­ing to keep busy dur­ing my job search, I’ve been writ­ing vora­ciously (at times) and have been cre­at­ing web­sites for some friends
  • Work­ing on ways to make money…

In all hon­esty, I’ve been kind of excited.  When one door closes, it can some­times seem cat­a­strophic (espe­cially when your income is involved).  But I’ve been view­ing this as a great oppor­tu­nity to try some­thing new, and maybe even exciting!

In fact, the wife and I are work­ing through some excit­ing ideas right now.  I’ll tell you about them later, but suf­fice it to say that we’re dream­ing big!  Some­times you never know if you can do some­thing with­out try­ing it out.  It involves tak­ing some big risks, but that’s life, right?  No regrets!

So what’s new with you?  What did I miss?

Let me know in the comments!

 

Book Review: House of Skin by Kiana Davenport

25 Mar
2011

House of Skin by Kiana Dav­en­port
My rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars

Raw and beau­ti­ful — Kiana Davenport’s col­lec­tion of short sto­ries is some­thing you need to read. With an econ­omy of words, Ms. Dav­en­port cap­tures the love, pain, sor­row and joy of life among the peo­ple of the Pacific Islands. Some of the sto­ries will shock you, oth­ers may leave you cry­ing. But once you begin to read them, you will not be able to stop.

This is an eBook, so be sure to swing by Ama­zon and grab their free Kin­dle soft­ware if you don’t already own an eReader.

A big thanks to J.A. Kon­rath for bring­ing this author to my attention.

eBooks and Self-Publishing

24 Mar
2011

More stun­ning news on the self-publishing front: “Barry Eisler Walks Away From $500,000 Deal to Self-Pub”!

Thriller author Joe Kon­rath (aka-J.A. Kon­rath, Jack Kil­born, and Joe Kim­ball) had a dis­cus­sion with fel­low thriller author Barry Eisler last Sat­ur­day (March 19, 2011). I was going to post a few experts from the dia­logue along with a sum­mary and my own take on it, but the whole dis­cus­sion was so great that I thought I’d just send you along to Mr. Konrath’s site to take a look for your­self.  But do your­self a favor and go get some cof­fee first…the “dia­logue” is a pal­try 13,000 words long…
Read more… »

Book Review: Shadowmarch by Tad Williams

23 Mar
2011

Shad­ow­march by Tad Williams
My rat­ing: 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Williams’ Oth­er­land series, so I thought I’d give one of his fan­tasy works a read. I have to be hon­est — it took me a lit­tle while to really get into the book. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but I feel like I really didn’t iden­tify with or really care about the main char­ac­ters until later on in the book. Once the story got set­tled and mov­ing, I became more emo­tion­ally con­nected to the char­ac­ters even though they still came across as a lit­tle one-dimensional. Read more… »

Arrgg! It’s COFFEE Dang It!

22 Mar
2011

Okay, I can’t hold it back any longer. Like a zit pop­ping, I’ve got a major pet peeve break­ing the sur­face. Pus and all.

It’s like this: Why oh why must a fan­tasy or SF writer feel so darn com­pelled to change the word for “Cof­fee” into some­thing else?!

There’s no such com­pul­sion to change other things like pota­toes, car­rots, cher­ries, rab­bits, tea, dogs, horses, swords, etc. But no, for some rea­son cof­fee just has to be dif­fer­ent. What, is that word so wrong, so mod­ern, so Earthy, that it can’t be used in fan­tasy or science-fiction with­out fear of break­ing the reader’s sense of sus­pended dis­be­lief? Read more… »

On Reading

21 Mar
2011

The other day my lovely wife asked me if I could email her a list of books that I’ve enjoyed in the Science-Fiction realm for some­one at her work. Inspired by the idea that I Can Make a Dif­fer­ence in someone’s book choice, I got right to work. I stared at a blank screen and real­ized something…I really can’t remem­ber all of the books I’ve read. Not a chance. Yeah, there’s some stand­outs that come right to mind, but I some­times feel like they’re the obvi­ous choices — books that vir­tu­ally any­one inter­ested — yeah, prob­a­bly seri­ously inter­ested - in science-fiction would have either read already, still mean to read, or heard about and decided not to read (for what­ever rea­son).  But since blank pages kinda freak me out, I went ahead and threw them onto the list. 
Read more… »

E-People vs. Non-E People, and Other Nonsense

10 Mar
2011

So we’re sup­posed to get another win­ter storm tonight.  Not my idea.  Sorry.  Nor­mally I’m okay with snow — I live in Cleve­land by choice — but I’m just get­ting to the point where I’m sick of it.  It’s pretty and white, and then the plow trucks (finally) come and make it all nasty brown slush, and then it melts, and then there’s mud every­where.  Then my base­ment gets wet.  And then my socks get wet when I pad down to the base­ment to do laun­dry.  Read more… »

Background Noise

2 Mar
2011

My neigh­bor, bless his lit­tle heart, has been play­ing the piano.  Reg­u­larly.  I hear chro­matic scales early in the morn­ing, pen­ta­tonic scales in the after­noon, and a hes­i­tant “The Enter­tainer” sprin­kled lib­er­ally through­out the day (thanks a lot, Scott Joplin).

It wouldn’t be so bad — even almost cute — if my neigh­bor was a sweet lit­tle eight-year-old kid work­ing hard to con­quer the mighty piano.  But since he’s in his late 40’s, it falls a bit shy of endearing.

Read more… »

The Crash…

14 Feb
2011

I crashed my truck. 

On the high­way.
Going 60 mph.
Head­first into the con­crete divider.

Ouch.

Read more… »

First Drafts Suck.

10 Feb
2011

Our minds do funny things to us.  They play tricks.  It’s almost as if all of the world’s writ­ers have a union or United Nations-type venue that we are not con­sciously aware of, where our Minds gather and kib­itz, sip­ping tea and expen­sive liquor.  There they com­pose and over­see the Idea Olympics — a com­pli­cated series of ordeals or tri­als that our Minds come up with in order to test the merit of our every idea, thus — in the­ory — ensur­ing that only the strongest and best idea will sur­vive to be typed or writ­ten by our eager fin­ger­tips. Read more… »

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