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Saturday, June 28, 2014

#LifeHack Fast Overnight Water Refill for #KCup Machine

I'm usually a patient person except when it comes to refilling the water chamber on our Keurig. The water from our refrigerator comes out incredibly slow. So what I just discovered is that I should just put in a bunch of ice from our ice maker in there at night and it will all melt in the morning.

This makes me feel like a genius. Kinda like when I think that picking up my socks off the floor with my toes saves me the two seconds it takes to just bend over.


Friday, June 27, 2014

@thebirthdayboys "That's all the birds."

For health reasons I never binge watching, but the wife and I just knocked out the entire first season of The Birthday Boys on Netflix.










Cover Blues

Popular Mechanics for Young Widows is all done. . . sort of. Everything's proofed, and formatted, except I don't have the cover right.

WIth covers I like to come up with the idea then give my rouch clip arty version of the cover to a professional to interpret in the best way they see fit. This time I'm drawing a blank. It has to be intriguing without giving too much away.

Here's my gallery of fails so far.


This just doesn't read. The crummy clip art makes the protagonist look like a criminal, but that's fixable. Color scheme is pretty yuck to boot.



This is just boring. I'm sticking with purple or pink as the primary color.

I'm basically trying to illustrate one of the main themes in the novelette which has to do with technology creating a large barrier in the protagonist's reintegration into life after the death of her husband. Once I get the image locked in, I'll send a note to the mailing list and we'll move onto this summer's other large publishing project: Patchwork!

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Proofreaders Ahoy

Proofreaders are doing a diligent job of working through the new story and giving feedback. Sounds like the title "Popular Mechanics for Young Widows" seems to be sticking. I've learned that 401k was established in 1978 and the percocet was released for the first time in 1976. Looking forward to more random bits of research facts as proofreaders send me more notes.

Friday, June 20, 2014

If your going to fake a reality show, do it like this





I understand the artifice in many reality shows. I can remember the first Subway commercial in Pawn Stars. At least in Urban Tarzan they wear their fakery on their sleeve.

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Patchwork Edits are in

In an unexpected surprise I received the draft of Patchwork back from the Editor last night a couple weeks earlier than expected. While this is written to be a chapter book written for elementary aged readers, I'm leaning toward ePublishing it as a non-illustrated preview copy while I figure out the traditional independent route. So look out for that in the month ahead.





Friday, June 6, 2014

My Writing Trends

I've been a little more self conscious about writing this latest novelette and have noticed these things about my writing:

  • I've started being much more liberal in editing down. I've been cutting out parts that I love for the sake of tightening up the story.
  • My mantra is shorter, shorter, shorter. I like short video games and movies that are 90 minutes long. If I can tell a short story in the time it takes to watch a movie, then I'm doing my job.
  • I tend to lean on characters asking themselves questions. Why is that?
  • Once the story is ending, I'm not one for a long goodbye. Let's wrap up these endings and go about our day.
Now that I'm self-aware of these, I'll try playing around with these conventions in the next work.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Who Needs a Movie?





The theme for the next book. . .

Preparing a Tidal Wave of Content

While I'm wrestling the latest proper novella through the final stages of ePublishing, I'm preparing some other content for serialization. I really like getting snatches of content at a time so through it would be fun to do this with Royal Ladybugs of Maryville and possibly the kids story.

Also happy to be providing some new writing in a new format very soon. More to come on that at a later time. in the meantime here's a sense of what it could be about: