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Apr 30

15 Comments

What Makes a Blade?

We’re still alive, here at Caer Dave. The last assault was repulsed with a barrage of cupcakes. It was close for a bit, there, but one of the battle pucks managed to turn on the television, and the Horde is nothing if not easily distracted by the sweet and the shiny. Unfortunately, the ongoing vegetal threat has brought us all a great deal of discomfort. Wee Dave’s cough has been mistaken for the cry of the hunting hellhound. Wee-er Dave’s sinuses are an ever-giving wellspring of life-giving fluid (well, it’s fluid, and stuff can grow on it *shudder*). And me? Dave is fighting off a full-blown sinus infection through frequent application of saline wash, pseudoephedrine, and that wunderdrug: Afrin. With some success, I’m pleased to relate. Read more

Apr 30

30 Comments

Tuesday Morning Roundup

Good morning, everyone! I had a post all planned for today and poof! it disappeared from my brain before I could write it. So I went traipsing through the internet, looking for inspiration and came across a handful of articles I thought I’d share. The first has me standing up and cheering because the literary bullies have failed–it took time but Amélie Wen Zhao has decided not to continue bending to the will of the vocal few. The result is that her debut novel, Blood Heir, will be published.

Hurrah! Read more

Apr 29

15 Comments

Mixed Moss

10 points for anyone who gets the title reference. Barbs and I have spent much of our lives as rolling stones. We went where the work was, and later, when I could take work with me, where the best school for the kids was. And then… to Australia, where we had to start again basically from scratch, with  things so tight we had to ration slices of bread, and it was only my hunter-gatherer skills (in a new place, where I knew nothing) and very inept gardening that kept us fed after the rent was paid.  All the aspects of being a midlist trad author (doing all the checking on listings, providing all the publicity, pushing and publicizing the book, getting reviews etc. had had to be left to the people who get 90% + of the income for it. Of course – as usual – they did nothing barring botch a few things and mess about with my royalties. So things were pretty desperate… But we kept on. Writing, renting and moving, living frugally and saving until we could get a place of our own again.

Moving. Packing, carrying. I’m sick of it.

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Apr 28

11 Comments

Already?!?

How many of us have laughed, sometimes a little bitterly, at the little sign saying, “Deadlines: I love the sound they make as they go zooming past?” Or “If it wasn’t for the last minute, I’d never get anything done.”

Yes. We writers feel that a lot, either because of contract deadlines, tax deadlines, or self-imposed sales and publications deadlines. The threat of a hard time limit can be wonderfully inspiring, or it can turn a brain to mush. I tend to fall into the latter category, or used to. The words, “You have five minutes to finish your paper,” caused all cerebral function to cease. I might as well hand in what I had, or print it and turn it in, because the connection between hand/hands and brain had just been severed. Read more

Apr 27

26 Comments

Review: Avengers Endgame

Opened with heartstrings jerked, hard

Move to flashbacks

I shall love Marvel forever for Pepper’s character development

That’s the end of my review for today. No, I am not spoiling it for the rest of you! But I will talk about the whole series arc, and what it gives me, the writer, as well as me the person and me the Mom.

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Apr 26

21 Comments

Amazon reviews: the good, the bad and the ugly

Many of those who write here have commented in the past about the problem of “fake” reviews, or “buying” reviews, of books on Amazon.com.  It’s grown to be an enormous problem across that site, not just with books, but with anything where there’s an opportunity to con the consumer by making them think that a product is better than it really is.

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Apr 25

31 Comments

Allergies

I make no apologies for being allergic to stupidity (even, or perhaps especially, my own). My tolerance levels only decrease as I get older.

That’s not the kind of allergy I want to talk about today, though.

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Apr 24

20 Comments

Closing the Door

 

There is going to be a brief hiatus in the cover series for the next two weeks because I’ll be out of the country and can’t get access to my art computer, but I planned to have a post out today, I did.

Except we woke up to insurance confusion, bank confusion and airplane travel plans confusion.  This not counting “paperwork for ceremony in Portugal confusion” for number 1 son’s religious wedding. Read more

Apr 23

9 Comments

Landing On My Feet

Tired. Long week. The children’s disparate reactions to Mrs. Dave’s absence are exhausting. I’m doing the thing where I run headlong into my own limitations, again. I’m finding it irritating. So, per the Irreverend’s advice, I’m lowering my expectations.
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Apr 23

21 Comments

Adventures in Publishing

The last six weeks or so, I’ve been butt in chair and fingers on keyboard. Lots of words have been written. More important in some ways, new print versions of all my books are in the pipeline. It’s amazing how much work that entails. It is the sort of busy work I hate doing even though I know how important it is.

When I first started this indie gig, we didn’t have all the easy to use programs we do today. You whippersnappers don’t know what it’s like to have to hand code a 100k word manuscript with html tags to make sure the book looks the way you want it to on that e-ink reader without lights. And it snowed every day and no matter which way we walked, it was always uphill.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad but the first few books were coded by hand. Read more

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