Category Archives: writer

March 22, 2013 · 5:46 pm

Branding yourself day 5 – Goodreads and All Points Beyond

One thing most authors do first is go out to http://www.goodreads.com and make a profile for themselves there, because all the online writing groups say you have to do that. And everyone told you to get a blog, so you did these two things and still, nothing happened. So why did I leave these two important detail to the last day of my series?

Tools. You needed the tools to make these two venues as professional as is possible.

In the course of this week you have gathered together an arsenal of tools with which to make the best Goodreads profile you can. You are tweeting. You have your Author Photo. You have your Author Bio. You have links to your about.me profile, you are LinkedIn and made a book trailer. You opened a Pinterest account and you posted a poem to Wattpad. You just googled yourself, and you are still not on page one . Have patience! This is where we pull all these disparate threads together in ONE important, cohesive place:

Goodreads.

Open your Goodreads author profile. If you haven’t already made one, do it now!

1. Go to your Author Dashboard. If you never took the tutorial on how to effectively use Goodreads, do it now. It’s there for a reason.

2. Now look at your Bio – is it the concise, professional bio that you have used on ALL your other sites? This consistency is very important, although I am not sure why. When it comes to the internet, consistency is magic, and I’ve never really understood magic. It works, so just do it.

3. Does your blog link back to your profile page? I have the RSS feed for my book review blog, Best In Fantasy, link back there because Goodreads is a club for people who are passionate about books. This means my review blog updates there every time I make a new post, and I try to crank out at least one book review a week. The link to the blog you’re reading now, Life in the Realm of Fantasy is in my Bio.

4. Are all the books you have written, or been a contributor to listed correctly?

5. Have you read and reviewed any books on Amazon or Barnes&Noble? Re-post those reviews on Goodreads. Reading and reviewing is what Goodreads is all about, so if you haven’t read anything lately, take the time to write a paragraph about Pride and Prejudice or whatever books you have read in the past that inspired you to write, and post it. Be serious, because these reviews are part of what builds your profile stats.

When you are a member of Goodreads you will be invited to join many reading groups and you can get involved in a lot of discussions. This can be very good, OR it can be very bad. Tread these waters carefully! I have seen several authors raked over the coals in a sort of feeding frenzy when they were frank in their opinion of a poorly written book by a Goodreads author with many loyal friends. This is why I stay out of many discussions. The reviews I post on Goodreads are of the books I reviewed on my book review blog.

There will be people who tell you that Goodreads is a waste of time, haunted by professional trolls and wannabes. There is some truth to this assertion, but it is true only BECAUSE so many people use it. My Goodreads profile is the first thing that comes up when my name is Googled, so I can assure you I am very careful about what discussions I get involved with there.

I believe you do yourself a great disservice if you fall into the habit of harshly criticizing others in public forums. Ask yourself what you want agents and editors to see when they Google your author name, and make sure your behavior in public reflects that.

As a reader, I go to Goodreads to find great books written by indie authors, and I am rarely disappointed.

As you can see, my rating is quite average, and not really outstanding, but it is the FIRST link that appears on the Google search. This is where people will click first to see who I am when I submit a query to agent. This is why you must make sure it is as professional as you can make it.

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NOW–you noticed that number three on the above list mentions BLOGs. In fact, every venue for you to publicize your author name offers you the opportunity to POST THE LINKS TO YOUR BLOG(S). If no one knows your blog is out there, how can they find it to read it? Flog your blog all over the internet through the free, easy to use venues we have discussed this week! (This is not Spank the Monkey. That is something entirely different!)

If you have wondered why the blog that you never wanted but were pushed into starting has never done well, it may be that you haven’t promoted it. Every venue that we have discussed this week gives you an opportunity to show the world that you take your craft as an author seriously.

You do this by writing.

Update your blog once a week, three times a week, or daily–it’s up to you, but be disciplined and somewhat regular. Normally I update this blog every other day, although this week I updated every day. I spend about twenty minutes to half an hour writing it. It is usually stream of consciousness, unless I have some particular topic that I want to speak on.

Your blog is the place where you showcase your published work and offer buy links in the sidebars. You can discuss the weather, the cat (I love indie author J.D.Hughes‘ posts on William the Cat.)

It’s through making use of the most cost-effective venues out there —>Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, LinkedIn, About.me, Goodreads and your personal blog that you build your brand, your author name. It did involve some effort on my part for the first week or so when I was getting these venues up and running, but now they really maintain themselves. All I do is write, blog and periodically check twitter. I am not even a fanatic about twitter–I use a free program called Hootsuite to schedule tweets for the week ahead, spending maybe 10 minutes on Sunday morning, and then I simply respond to tweets that interest me or thank people when they mention me.

I can’t say that I have made huge sales or become a best seller, because that hasn’t happened. I’ve only been officially doing this for 2 years, and I’ve made all sorts of newbie mistakes in the process. But the point is, I keep at it, and I keep my professional profile updated. If you want an agent or publisher to take you seriously in this new world you must take your own career seriously by presenting your name and your work in the best light possible.

In the new world of publishing, the internet (Google and other search engines) is your ‘Store Window.’ Your books are your ‘display’ in that store. Your name is the ‘brand’ that prospective searchers see. Am I branded like ‘Nike’ yet? No, but the late Robert Jordan is, and he mastered the internet thing in the mid 1990’s when his Wheel of Time series first went viral. By using the tools that are available to us we can achieve the best results possible.

One never knows what will convince a prospective reader to try your book, so offer them every opportunity that you can.

Thank you for sticking with me through this whole week of my take on marketing your name. Now go out there and build your brand, one brick at a time.

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

Tagged as battles, fiction, Flogging your blog, Goodreads, humor, literature, magic, Nike, twitter, writing

March 21, 2013 · 5:33 pm

Branding Yourself day 4 – Pinterest, Wattpad, YouTube, Oh, My!

This is where things get a bit sticky. Pinterest. Wattpad. YouTube. Oh, My!

What the heck? By now you’re feeling like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

Well, today we are going to talk about ways to get the work you have sitting on your desk OUT and into the hands of prospective readers. One of the most surprising and random of these venues is Pinterest! And yet, it has been incredibly useful in attracting readers to this blog. And, lets be real, NOTHING is easier than setting up a Pinterest account and getting started there.

What is this Pinterest thing I keep talking about? It’s like a scrap-booking site for things you find on the web. You ‘PIN’ things you come across on the web and then your followers can repin them if they are as pleased with it as you are.

According to Wikipedia, the Fount of All Knowledge: Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies, and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own pinboards, or ‘like’ photos. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann (of West Des Moines, Iowa), Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, the site is managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and inventors.

SO what does this have to do with your career as an author? I don’t know, exactly. But it works! I think the value is in the connections you make through pinning an re-pinning things that interest you. These things represent your interests, i.e. motorcycles, collecting silver tea-strainers, BOOKS, anything!

I have two boards: Writers’ Paradise and Vegan and Loving It (Mostly). AT the top of the page, you will see my bio, and the link to one of my books. I need to change that so that the link comes back to this blog. You only get 160 characters to write your bio with, so use them wisely.

Quote from Pinterest’s help page: A pin starts with an image or video you add to Pinterest. You can add a pin from a website using the Pin It bookmarklet or upload an image right from your computer. Any pin on Pinterest can be repinned, and all pins link back to their source.

The important thing here is the part about ALL pins linking back to their source. My Pinterest boards are located at: http://pinterest.com/cjjasp/

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Now we are going out to something called Wattpad: FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Wattpad describes itself as “the best place to discover and share stories.” It’s a YouTube for electronic text stories. The content includes work by undiscovered and published writers. Delivery emphasizes the mobile phone platform, using the free Freda ebook reader.[1] According to Wattpad founder and CEO Ivan Yuen, “marketers can currently upload material for reading by mobile users at no charge”.[2]

About nine in 10 users are readers rather than writers. Around four in ten users are U.S. based; traffic also comes from the U.K., Canada, the Philippines, Australia, and more. Approximately 75 percent of users access the site through their mobile device. ^[1]

The most popular genres on Wattpad.com and the Wattpad mobile app include Romance, Paranormal, and Fan Fiction. The site is also home to Poetry, Humor, Science Fiction, Thriller, and others.

Get a Wattpad account and start posting short stories and poems that reflect your best work. I now have three short stories out there, and plan to post one a month for this next year. I have a bunch hanging around that just need a bit of polishing. I may serialize a novel there.

The first thing to know is that your User Name should be your Author Name with no spaces, as ALL your work is published on Wattpad under that name. Mine is ConnieJJasperson. This is a GREAT venue to develop a fan base. Indie Author Shaun Allan published his book, Sin, one chapter at a time on Wattpad and in the space of one month he had over 289,000 reads!

Sin

Thriller #9 / Paranormal #22

24 parts / 127 pages, updated Feb 15, 2013 PG-13

Dead, dead, dead. Say it enough times and it becomes just another word. What would you do? Could you kill a killer? Does the death of one appease the deaths of a hundred? What about that hundred against a thousand? What if you had no choice? M… read more

289,069 reads

647

Do I have to say any more? I didn’t think so.

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You Tube – why would I even mention this? Well, you may not have noticed this, but I have several ‘book trailers’ in the sidebar of my blog. These are short, 60 second or so, commercials for my books; teasers. if you will. The purpose is to give prospective readers an idea of what to expect if they buy one of my books. The links to them go in your sidebar on you blog, on your Goodreads Profile, and your Amazon Author Page. I have no data available to say if they work or not as far as generating sales go, but they may. A person who is interested enough to click on this link is wondering about your book and if you have that one little foot in the door, why not take advantage of it?

Book Trailers aren’t a requirement, but they are fun to make, and they cost me nothing. I get the music for free from my daughter, Meg Clear who is a fabulous musician, or from Free Music For Videos which I make a voluntary donation to for the use of their music. Donations are not required, but I like to support the artists. (See their link in my side-bar to make your own donation.)

Many people say trailers do no good, but when fans of Meg Clear Google her, what comes up as the number one listing on page one of her Google profile? The very first trailer for The Last Good Knight that I made when I was with my former publisher. That version of the book is unavailable now, because it has been completely re edited and redone under Myrddin Publishing Group. But the title of MY book and MY author name are out there under HER page, and we BOTH benefit from this. As someone once said, all publicity is good publicity, and while I don’t believe that to be true in all cases, I will take the advertisement and be grateful.

I make my trailers using Windows Live Movie Maker, and using Free Public Domain images, and Royalty Free Music and Free and Royalty Free Images from Dreamstime.com. Dreamstime is inexpensive, which is the keyword for me, and you have a great record of the legal work for your own files.

It does take some time and research to locate images and music that 1. reflect what you want to say about your book and 2. Are LEGALLY available for your use (and I suggest you keep a file for each trailer with both digital and hard copies all the legal use provisions for each image and song used).

Make a short script using the blurb from the back of your book, keep it down to 30 or 60 seconds and voila! You’re a producer!

If you don’t want to deal with Windows Live Movie Maker (which is a hinky program at best,) a GREAT site for doing thisfor free or very cheaply is called ANIMOTO. Many authors go to this site for affordable trailers for their websites.

So–that’s it for today. Tomorrow we will take on GOODREADS. Your Goodreads profile is the cornerstone of your brand and, outside of blogging regularly, building that profile is the single most important thing the indie author can do for themselves.

6 Comments

Filed under Books, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, writer, writing

Tagged as Amazon.com, blogging, books, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, Pinterest, Social Media, Wattpad, writing

January 18, 2013 · 2:03 am

Mucking out after the dragon

I thought I had The Last Good Knight all cleaned up. I was SURE I had it as straight as could be! Many eyes have looked at it, and still there are places that need attention! Fortunately, Carlie Cullen is applying her red pen to the hitches and halts in the flow, without changing the story or the structure since it has been published for so long. It’s a good story, probably my favorite but it has had a rough life.

This is the one tale that never had a real line-edit, and I was so new to this business that I thought the brief once-over my former publisher gave it was a true edit. They were new at the business too, and were learning a lot as they went along. It was a good edit, in that it cleaned up certain obvious things, but it was very quick and not a true, in-depth edit. I was not involved in the actual edit, as the changes that were made were not offered to me for my approval. Thus, getting that book re-edited so that it reads more easily is somewhat like mucking out after a dragon. Just about the the time I think it’s all done, there is another steaming pile of…goodness…look at the time, I should be cooking dinner.

Having worked with two editors since leaving the former publisher, I now see what was NOT done for The Last Good Knight the first time, and thank god, one of my editors, Carlie Cullen is giving it her attention. The biggest challenge is dealing with these things and moving on, instead of banging my head on my desk in frustration when she points out something I should have seen.

But that is why these sorts of edits are SO critical. We, as authors, only see what we THINK we wrote. This is something I can’t stress strongly enough–get an independent eye on your work. If you have a friend who has worked as a paralegal for her entire career, proof-reading lawyers briefs as Irene Luvaul did, even better! If you can’t find an editor you can afford, you can do this: Print your work out one chapter at a time, and sit down with the yellow high-lighter. take an envelope and go down the page one line at a time. You will catch a great deal that way!

I don’t feel nearly so badly about TLGK once I take a close look at my earlier works though – those tales who began their lives on the old Mac in the mid nineties. Once they were transferred to disc and then transferred again to PC they were put away and forgotten. Some have great storylines, and really fun characters, but I would have to completely rewrite them in order to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear they are right now. There must be an entire library of badly written prose on those old mac floppies.

There are many flaws in my earlier works, especially the ones going back to my days of pecking them out on the old IBM Selectric.They are rife with misspellings, poor grammar, clichés, head-hopping, and hokey dialogue. But underneath all the bad fluff I see the bones of the story I was so proud of having written in the first place, and I realize that there was spark there. This is why I say don’t be discouraged by your first initial draft of any work. All it needs is a lot more attention from you and the eye of an editor.

I was once a singer in a heavy metal band, and the opening lines of one of the songs I wrote went like this:

“It’s a cold and lonely morning, the sky dawns bland and white.

The emptiness inside my heart is as chilling as the night.”

It was cheerful little tune (NOT!) but with my ex-husband’s awesome guitar solos it was quite popular among our friends. We were very hip and very serious about the craft when we played. Of course I was 26 at the time, and quite sure I was the next female Ronnie James Dio. The band as a whole took ourselves far too seriously, and it soon got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore. It was a long time before I realized exactly why we fell apart the way we did, when we were having such a good time playing small gigs as a local band. We became too caught up with the art of the music, instead of getting on with it and we forgot why we were doing it in the first place.

I admit that I don’t need serious anymore. I don’t need to take my writing so seriously that it’s not fun.

With that said, I do need to turn out the best finished product I am able to do, and that means allowing someone I trust to look at it and say, “This just doesn’t read right. Maybe if you change this a little….” I am not married to my prose, although I am sure it is the finest prose in the world. Oh, look…more dragon poo.

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Dragons, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, mythology, writer, writing

Tagged as Art, dragons, fiction, humor, literature, mythology, writing

January 14, 2013 · 7:03 pm

The Terry Pratchett School of Prose

One of the earliest influences on my sometimes smartassed style of writing was Sir Terry Pratchett, O.B.E.‘s watershed fantasy series, Discworld. Sir Terry takes J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and William Shakespeare, as well as mythology, folklore and fairy tales, and mashes them up in this hilarious series of tales. There are 39 books in this trilogy! Talk about prolific!

Discworld is a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle, Great A’Tuin. Oh my goodness – what opportunities for mayhem were locked in that kernel of a plot! The series begins with “The Colour of Magic.”

One of my favorite books in the series is “Mort.” It is the 4th book and is the first to give Death the main storyline.

As a teenager, Mort had a personality and temperament that made him rather unsuited to the family farming business. Mort’s father, named Lezek, felt that Mort thought too much, which prevented him from achieving anything practical. Thus, Lezek took him to a local hiring fair, hoping that Mort would land an apprenticeship with some tradesman; not only would this provide a job for his son, but it would also make his son’s propensity towards thinking someone else’s problem.

The conversation between Lezek and his brother Hamish as they discuss Mort’s future in the opening pages is hilarious and quite revealing in its simplicity. In this snippett, Lezek and Hamish are observing Mort as he attempts to frighten some birds away from the crop.

“He’s not stupid, mind” said Hamish. “Not what you’d call stupid.”

“There’s a brain there all right,”Lezek conceded. “Sometimes he starts thinking so hard you has to hit him round the head to get his attention. His granny taught him to read, see? I reckon it overheated his mind.”

At the job fair, Mort at first has no luck attracting the interest of an employer. Then, just before the stroke of midnight, a man concealed in a black cloak arrives on a white horse. He says he is looking for a young man to assist him in his work and selects Mort for the job. The man turns out to be Death, and Mort is given an apprenticeship in ushering souls into the next world (though his father thinks he’s been apprenticed to an undertaker).

I love the snarky way Pratchett takes clichés and runs with them. He grabs the boring, bland, overdone themes of western literature by the tail and swings them. When he sets them down they are SO much more fun to watch!

What I have learned from the Terry Pratchett school of prose is that dialog tells us as much about the speaker himself as it does about the words expressed. In the quoted passage above we see enough of the two men who are speaking to have some idea of who they are. Pratchett gives us the personality and demeanor of the character in those simple lines. We can see them, fully formed in our minds eye as they speak. .

That is the hand of the master, and it is what I someday hope to be able to bring to my own work. The important thing to remember is you must read the works of the masters, because if you have no idea of what good writing really is, you can’t write it. Read the best works in your genre and continue writing your own stories and never let the struggle of getting your work out there take away the joy of writing it. It’s not easy, going indie, but it is so rewarding!

11 Comments

Filed under Books, Fantasy, Humor, mythology, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Discworld, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, mythology, Terry Pratchett, writing

January 4, 2013 · 8:31 pm

Vegans and Version Control

2013 has kicked off with the usual spin through the blender of life. I’ve begun a 31 day journey into the vegan lifestyle, and so far I’ve not noticed anything missing from my life other than dairy – giving up cheese is my one regret. Four days into it and I’m still committed. Not sure if I’ve lost any weight, but I don’t feel puffy so that’s something. Unfortunately, with the return of my thyroid tumor (benign) and a writer’s lifestyle ( I WRITE about athletic people) my chances of losing any weight are slim without both changing my diet and my level of activity. Walking is now a part of my day, walking and thinking about where my stories are going. At this point it is unlikely the tumor will be removed again, but one never knows. When I had the first one removed in 1981 I lost 50 lbs in 3 months.

Health issues aside, writing is also a real spin in the blender. I have 3 books in various stages of the editing process and two being formatted for print. Oh, the Agony! I am working on three or four different things every day and lets be real, I get sidetracked quite easily. It’s difficult to make the transition from my fantasy life to reality, and wait–is that a Rainbow YouTube video? Whoa, Munich in ’77…. Ronnie James Dio… Ritchie Blackmore….

Ahem.

I also have to make several revisions for Forbidden Road as suggested by my Beta Reader, and then Carlie Cullen will receive that one back for final approval.

The best thing (sarcasm) is when I get an email from one of my editors and I attempt to save the attachment in the wrong file! Believe me, proper version control is crucial in this business! I do this by saving a file in a separate folder for each step in the editing process and labeling them in a particular way that never varies. Let’s say I am saving a new file for Forbidden Road. It is the fourth time Carlie Cullen has seen it, and I have completed the revisions per her suggestions. This is the path and how I label each step in the process:

>Forbidden Road > File Folder> FR 4th Edit Complete > FR Ch 1 4th edit CC – cjjasp complete

I will attach that file to an email and Carlie will sign off or suggest further revisions. If she sends it back with further suggestions then a new File Folder will be created, for the 5th version.

If I had the sort of relationship with an editor I have with both Carlie and Irene when I was first starting out as a full-time writer, many problems I am still dealing with in my earlier work could have been avoided! But it is all a learning curve. The longer we do this the more we learn and the better we get at avoiding the little pitfalls of being an indie author.

I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien would have been as easily distracted by random YouTube videos as I am.

4 Comments

Filed under Adventure, Books, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, health, humor, literature, vegan lifestyle, writing

January 2, 2013 · 7:31 am

Which was that, anyway….

742px-L_Spada_Concierto_1615_Louvre As a mostly self-educated old lady, I’ve had to learn some real lessons, regarding the words ‘that’ and ‘which’. I finally managed to rid myself of the inadvertent overuse of the word ‘that’ in my writing, but in the process I find I have become a ‘which’, as opposed to a ‘witch’, which my children will tell you I have always been. Irene Luvaul, dear friend and editor on ‘Huw the Bard’ has spent many hours noting instances where I inappropriately used which instead of that.

Sigh.

I’ve spent 59 years using these two words improperly!

So, when DO we use the word that in an appropriate and defensible fashion? After all, too many that’s make the prose boring and forgettable. Some people say you must NEVER use it, but Irene says they are incorrect.

So does Grammar Girl, (Mignon Fogarty) on her awesome website for writers with questions. This website is an invaluable resource for folks like me, with some education, but no memory of what that education actually taught us.

There are instances where only that will suffice. When do we use the word that?

We use it when we have something called a ‘Restrictive Clause’. So now you want to know (as I did) what the heck THAT is!

Quote from Grammar Girl, “A restrictive clause is just part of a sentence that you can’t get rid of because it specifically restricts some other part of the sentence.” She goes on to give a specific example of a restrictive clause: “Gems that sparkle often elicit forgiveness.” See? Not just ANY gems elicit forgiveness in this sentence, but only gems that sparkle. It is restricted to one kind of gem.

So, now we know about restrictive clauses, but what about nonrestrictive clauses? Again we turn to Grammar Girl and she says, “A nonrestrictive clause is something that can be left off without changing the meaning of the sentence. You can think of a nonrestrictive clause as simply additional information.” Again she gives the example, “Diamonds, which are expensive, often elicit forgiveness.” The word ‘which’ isn’t really necessary, as the meaning of the sentence would not be changed if you left it out. “Diamonds are expensive, but often elicit forgiveness.” Sometimes the sentence is better without the extraneous word.

I still make a mish-mash of things as they fall out of my head and into my book, but I take comfort in knowing I am not alone! Writing is a journey, and I learn something new every step of the way.

2 Comments

Filed under Humor, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, humor, literature, writing

December 28, 2012 · 8:42 pm

Party On!

Happy Christmas and Merry New Year! As my favorite author of all time, Charles Dickens,English novelist (1812 – 1870), wrote in his epic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

If that doesn’t describe 2012, nothing does! So, let the revels begin! I will be celebrating the New Year with a small dinner party as I finally make that commitment to go fully vegan for the 31 days of January. If I find my health improves I will stay on the vegan diet permanently. It just so happens that this group is evenly divided between carnivores and vegans with those bearing the Y chomosomes being the carnivores.

So on Dec. 31^st I will spend the day making a dinner for the husbands AND a dinner for the wives! This will be an adventure. I will make a chicken marsala, and mashed red potatoes with grilled asparagus for the men and a curry and maple sweet potato soup for the ladies, along with salads and fruit for everyone. I make my bread vegan now anyway. I will keep you all posted on my progress with this new (to me) way of eating.

So put on your party hats and bring out the noisemakers! What better way to start the New Year than to enjoy a fine dinner, a brisk game of Monopoly and the company of friends?

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Filed under Battles, Books, Final Fantasy, knights, Literature, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as Art, humor, Monopoly, parties, vegan

December 22, 2012 · 1:11 am

Alton Brown, the Futility of Stone Calendars, and Chocolate Chile Cookies

As Homer Simpson once said, “Mmmm… chocolate….”

I love to bake cookies, and I have found the tastiest cookie ever. I spent the end of the world baking cookies, just on the off-chance that the world would not end, and Christmas would arrive. If that were so, I would need to serve cookies and coffee to random guests as they might appear over the impending holidays, so better safe than sorry. The picture above left is for Chocolate Crackled Cookies, and is not only made with yummy chocolate, there is Roasted Saigon Cinnamon and Ancho Chile Powder in them. The odd sounding combination works perfectly!

Of course, Alton Brown tells us that when the Mayans and Aztecs were not killing time with chiseling long-range calendars, they were known to drink hot chocolate spiced with chilies. Of course, most Meso-Americans were quite busy with religious obligations and had very little time to pursue hobbies such a stamp collecting or assembling jigsaw puzzles, so calendar chiseling may have offered a diversion from the endless social rounds of war and ritual human sacrifice. Heck, even a simple ball game tended to end badly for the loser, so I’m sure a bit of hacking away at the old boulder with a hammer and chisel offered some relatively safe relaxation.

You know, I think the fact that the Mayan Calendar was chiseled into stone and ended on 12-21-2012 is a perfect reminder as to why we don’t use stone anymore for things like long-range calendars and day-planners. After all, stone is a finite medium! There is only so much stone available at a given point for a chiseler to chisel upon, so it stands to reason that at some point the calendar chiseler will run out of stone and the stone calendar will end.

Anyway, I find the Google Calendar to be much less trouble than a stone to fit into my purse, seeing as it is available on my phone, my laptop and my pc as well as the Android. Unfortunately, I am no longer allowed to plead ignorance in regard to appointments I’ve made and forgotten about. I get email reminders 2 days, 1 day and 2 hours in advance, along with pop-up reminders. The phone dings, and I (like Pavlov’s Dog) automatically reach to see what conditioned behaviors the digital-leash is encouraging me to exhibit now.

So now I that I have digressed and wasted copious quantities of time by baking, criticizing the Mayans time-keeping system and eating chocolate cookies, I will sit in my office and write a post (one day late) for my Best in Fantasy blog, this one examining the best book covers of 2012. There is some mighty fine artwork out there and indie books are just as beautifully covered as the books published by the ‘Big 6’ publishers.

3 Comments

Filed under Adventure, Battles, Books, Humor, mythology, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as Alton Brown, Art, Chocolate Cookies, humor, literature, Mayan Calendar

December 18, 2012 · 8:25 pm

Charles Dickens was an Indie Author, Too

Few people are aware that one of the most famous and inspirational books in the English language was originally self-published, and didn’t do as well as the author intended. Charles Dickens began to write A Christmas Carol in September 1843, and completed the book in six weeks with the final pages written in the beginning of December. Unfortunately he was feuding with his publisher over the meager earnings on his previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Because of that, Dickens declined a lump-sum payment for the tale and chose a percentage of the profits in hopes of making more money. He then published the work at his own expense. It was as expensive then as it is now to publish quality print books and high production costs netted him only £230 (equal to £19,128 today) rather than the £1,000 (equal to £83,164 today) he’d hoped and needed, as his wife was once again pregnant. A year later, the profits were only £744 and Dickens was deeply disappointed.

Formatting was as tough in those days as it is now and Dickens was unhappy with the first edition of the tale. It contained drab, olive colored endpapers that Dickens felt was unacceptable. The publisher, Chapman and Hall, quickly replaced them with yellow endpapers but those clashed with the title page which was then redone. The final product was bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages and was completed only two days before the release date of 19 December 1843.

I take comfort in knowing that the man who wrote the most powerful story of redemption in my personal library was an indie author too. Self-publishing is much easier nowadays, but nevertheless it too is fraught with costs and formatting difficulties. I have one last little formatting issue to solve in the Tower of Bones on page 361, and then I will be able to okay the final print version of it. Wonky formatting is the curse of my life!

This is the time of year when I watch every single version of A Christmas Carol that can be found. Alastair Sims, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Mr. Magoo and now Jim Carey occupy the small screen and remind me of what is really important in life – love and family. Even Mickey Mouse has warmed the cockles of my heart in the role of Bob Cratchitt.

And now, I must go wrap presents by the flickering light of my television, as once again the Ghost of Christmas Present leads Mr. Scrooge to see what he should have seen all along – that Christmas Spirit is a year-round emotion, and has less to do with cash flow and Black Friday Shopping and more to do with charity of spirit.

If you are feeling charitable, I would recommend these fine charities:

The Salvation Army

The Union Gospel Mission

Clean Water for the World

There are so many worthy charities, and any gift you make to them will benefit millions of people. I live in the lap of luxury, and I know it. I have a good roof over my head, a reliable income and a healthy family. I am grateful for all these blessings, and if you are similarly blessed, I encourage you to make some donations to your local charities as a way of giving thanks!

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Filed under Adventure, Books, charity, Fantasy, Humor, Literature, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, battles, Brittain, literature, writing

December 15, 2012 · 7:43 pm

Punish me no More

I was reminded about the book, Finnegans Wake, in a blog I regularly read. James Joyce wrote the classic novel, and James was a man who loved words. He loved words the way I love Ritchie Blackmore and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He couldn’t get enough of them and when old words didn’t suffice, he invented new ones. Puns, those low class examples of verbal violence, became an art form under the pen of James Joyce.

Robert MacLean’s most recent post for his fascinating blog on morality, humor, and art, ‘The Devil’s Pleasure Garden’ is on Fellini, and Shakespeare. He rambles though Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Fellini’s 8 ½ , and lightly touches on Luis Bunuel. I enjoy MacLean’s morality crises – his angst has led to some of the finest blog posts on creativity out there!

MacLean also mentions James Joyce’s incredible monster-piece, Finnegan’s Wake, quoting the delicious pun “…when they were jung and easily freudened.” I realized when I was re-reading MacLean’s blog today that the reason so many people despise puns is that for a pun to be funny one has to know what the pun is about. If a reader has never heard of Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud that pun will go right over their head. They get a sour look and say “I despise James Joyce – I don’t know what people are thinking calling him a genius.”

When people don’t understand something that makes other people laugh, they feel somehow inferior and they hate it. So my job is to not make my readers feel ignorant, and yet still write in such a way that my work is not ‘dumbed-down’. Humor is essential, and I usually love a good pun, but since the key to enjoying a good pun is knowledge and you can’t guarantee your readers will have that knowledge, it’s best to avoid puns when writing.

But for me, humor is crucial to keeping me interested in the characters. If you are going to have your characters grimly going about their work, with nothing to brighten the mood you have immediately lost me.

Shaun Allan’s brilliant work, Dark Places, is a classic example of how an author can blend humor into the darkest events, and keep his readers’ eyes on his book.

I find myself injecting humor into my work, not in a calculated way, but because it naturally flows there. Macabre humor is what keeps my family together at times—that ability to laugh at the worst times keeps us slogging through the strangest twists and turns of life. Oh, it’s a little embarrassing at times, but it gets you through it. And that is what happens with my characters. Lackland, Huw the Bard and indeed all the Rowdies rely on their sense of humor as the way to find logic in the worst of events.

In Tower of Bones, the sense of the ridiculous surfaces several times when the characters are under the most stress. Friedr is one of my favorite characters in the TOB series, as he is the most in touch with his sense of humor and his frequent lack thereof. Christoph was born with a joke falling out of his mouth, and humor is his armor.

Good grief! I just said “one of my favorites” – all of my characters are my favorites! Even the evil ones!