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[Jun. 30th, 2009|09:53 am] |
The folks at College Humor have been doing a good job of late.
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[Jun. 28th, 2009|06:38 pm] |
Today I learned if you try and put too many Random functions in an Excel spreadsheet (i.e. the command "=RAND()", which returns a random value between 0 and 1), it basically says "Screw you and your random functions" and returns nothing but 1.
So that's a lesson learned. |
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[Jun. 12th, 2009|10:44 am] |
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I'm not arguing that with you! |
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[Jun. 4th, 2009|08:10 am] |
The old Storyteller has passed...
It's hard to put my finger on how I feel. I don't think his books aged well. Well, strike that, I think the Belgariad holds up, but the rest show their formula too strongly. (And Regina's Song is awful. Sorry, it really is.) But he was a major voice in the genre, certainly an influence on me. And he will be missed. Goodnight, Old Wolf. |
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[Jun. 2nd, 2009|10:45 pm] |
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I just realized that every episode of Scooby-Do steals its plot from Hound of the Baskervilles. Seriously: you have a spooky, out of the way place, being haunted by some fearsome creature that there’s a legend about, and some nice person who owns the place… some scares and running around… and it turns out it’s someone just using the legend and some special effects to scare the nice person away so they can get the land. |
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[Jun. 1st, 2009|11:37 pm] |
Got back tonight from our extended weekend out to West Texas, namely hitting Marathon, Big Bend National Park and the McDonald Observatory. All of it was fabulous.
-In Marathon, which we made our "home base" for the trip, we stayed at Eve's Garden Bed & Breakfast. I must most earnestly plug the place for anyone planning to go out there. Beautiful, ecologically friendly place. Each morning Kate, the proprietress, fixes a fantastically unique breakfast from scratch, using as much as she can from her own gardens.
-Big Bend was gorgeous. Wide and open with towering mountains. I've put pictures on my Facebook, and I'll put some up here later. My favorite little encounter involved the difference between the park ranger and the gas station attendant. When I told the ranger we would take the Old Maverick Road (an "improved dirt road") to get to one part, she said, "If you don't have a four wheel drive, you might want to take a different route. I don't know about the conditions there right now, but there's been recent rain and you might run into trouble." The gas station attendant offered later (somewhat unsolicited), "You better not take the Maverick. In that car you'll flip over after three miles and get yourself killed. I know it looks like a shortcut, and it is. To the GRAVE!" Seriously, gas man, don't sugarcoat it for me.
- McDonald Observatory is fabulous, especially seeing Saturn up close. It did my sci-fi geek heart good. If I go again, I'll try and plan it during a New Moon, so there's no light-pollution at all. |
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[May. 27th, 2009|04:06 pm] |
Marshall's Guide to Life, #71:
If you pay more for shipping than you paid for the actual thing you bought... you just got screwed. Hard. |
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[May. 17th, 2009|11:54 pm] |
I've been research small-press publishers, and man is that a depressing avenue to follow. It's just... most of them give me bad vibes. Not that I think they're scammers or swindlers.... I think many of them just aren't very good at what they do.
For me, the line I have to draw is, is what a small publisher offers me apparently more than to what I could do myself with Lulu.com and Photoshop? And for MOST of the ones I research, the answer is no, it's not. Many of them look awful. Especially covers. I mean, damn, there are some awful, awful covers out there.
I'm not yet, definitely not yet, at the point of "Do it myself with Lulu and Photoshop"... but a lot of these publishers really don't present themselves as a better option on any level. |
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| Two Facebookish thoughts |
[May. 4th, 2009|07:49 pm] |
1. Every once in a while, I find the Facebook of a relatively famous person that I'm also relatively secure that it's the actual person rather than an elaborate ruse. (Though when you ask yourself, "Who would fake being Jill Hennessy or Roxanne Dawson on Facebook?", the answer is, "Someone out there would.") And I'm tempted to friend them. Just because, you never know.
2. When using the "People you may know" feature, every once in a while someone comes up that, based on the people I'm friends with that are friends with them, that I think, "I really ought to know who that person is." But I don't. I have NO FRICKING CLUE. |
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[May. 1st, 2009|10:08 am] |
This is pretty brilliant.
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[Apr. 27th, 2009|03:04 pm] |
I try and avoid writing posts about writing. It tends to get somewhat navel-gazing and I'm sure it bores the socks off of most of you. But besides writing, I don't do a whole lot more. Sure, cook, be dad, go to movies, watch TV, etc., etc. I haven't really posted on movies or TV for a while. I still watch a fair amount, though not as much as before. I don't feel a need, for example, to try out a show just because unless something really grabs me. As some of my shows have ended (like Battlestar Galactica orER), and others are likely to be done (like Terminator), I have less things to watch, but no great desire to fill that time with something else. So, while I'll sometimes get a sense about a new show might be cool (like I have with Leverage or Fringe, I haven't bothered pursuing them. Really, the only new show I started watching this season was Dollhouse, which I really liked, but I'm really annoyed that it basically wasted five episodes on Echo's-job-of-the-week stuff (as mandated by Fox), when what the show is now is much more interesting. My wife even likes it. My wife, the woman who loathed Buffy and Angel and really is unfond of Eliza Dushku. So go figure.
So, writing goes like this:
Crown of Druthal- I've dug this out of mothballs and have been heavily reworking it. It's what I've been breaking to by bi-monthly writer's group, but at 5000 words a pop, and twice a month, and like only get read every other meeting, it's a slow process. I essentially have notes on the first thirteen chapters, which I've only now really been putting to use. It IS easier doing major surgery with some distance behind you, though.
Thorn of Dentonhill (aka Tools of the Trade)- I've decided to send the current query letter & draft version to 10 more agents. If none of those yield a Full Manuscript Request, then I know I need to do some more fiddling.
Holver Alley Crew- I've been kind of stuck in this first draft for a bit now, hovering around 35,000 words and not quite finding the way to start the next scene. I've actually got a deadline with my Novel group of August 15th, but for that I'd like to have a rough draft done, well, REALLY by the end of May. I'd like to then be able to have the first 5000 words in a good, clean form by the end of June so I can use it for the Armadillcon's Writer's Workshop, and then at least it won't have any embarrassing spelling or grammatical errors. (Seriously, I recently re-found what I submitted to the 2005 Writer's Workshop, and... I hang my head in shame.) But the point is: stick, get on it.
Potential FronteraFest 2010 Piece- I've written about seven pages, and I think it's got interesting potential, though to do it correctly, I'd have to essentially buy four FF slots and do the piece four times, each with a different cast.
That's all I've got for now. |
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[Apr. 26th, 2009|11:24 am] |
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Does anyone know if something horrible happened to maple trees in Vermont this season or something? The price of real maple syrup is suddenly ridiculously high. |
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[Apr. 22nd, 2009|12:45 pm] |
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Is it just me, or do Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox have smoking hot chemistry? |
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[Apr. 20th, 2009|11:30 am] |
This is technically a commercial for Phillips Magnavox, but you can't really tell that by watching it. What you can tell is that movie-technology is totally bad-ass, giving us what is essentially a 3-minute tracking shot in a frozen moment through an awesome cops-verses-evil-clowns stand-off. Check it out.
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[Apr. 16th, 2009|01:41 pm] |
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Can the call be put out to force Rick Perry to resign? Because, seriously, suggesting secession? Seriously? We need to get him out of office NOW if he's this much of a tinhat. |
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[Apr. 13th, 2009|10:19 am] |
Lightly following this whole Amazon.com debacle, I've got to admit, I find it very perplexing. I can understand why people are upset, if the allegations are true... but at the same time, I've done searches for the various "affected" books, and had no trouble finding them. So I'm not sure what the problem actually is.
Were I feeling especially conspiracy theory-esque, I might hypothesize that a self-published author might try to engineer such an outrage so more people are searching for his book. It's not as if a majority of the sourcing of this outrage doesn't go back to a self-published author posting a letter he saved from Amazon, that couldn't possibly have been photoshopped or otherwise forged. It's not as if this isn't a tsunami of publicity and potential sales for an author whom otherwise would have been unheard of and ignored by most of the people who now are touting him as the front-and-center champion of this debacle. It's not as if said book probably didn't have a very high Amazon ranking to begin with. It's not as if now, 24 hours later, the listing of his self-published novel lists "Only 2 left in stock--order soon".
But I'm not the kind of person who makes wild conspiracy theory speculations. The fact that his book is now selling out and his name is getting a lot of play over the internet is just a happy side-effect of him stepping up and being a true hero.
Adding fuel to the conspiracy-theory fire. The whole thing was about gay books losing their ranking? What's Probst's current ranking?
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #53,257 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What's this?)
#1 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Literary Criticism
#8 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Fiction > Gay
#9 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Fiction > Romance > Gay
Hmmm.... somehow I bet it was a lot lower before all this. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 7th, 2009|11:10 pm] |
I need a beta reader for a Super Secret Project that I will, as of right now, only refer to by its code name of "Hot Iron Hammer".
Any takers? Let me know. |
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