Category: Writing

We’re Number 3,003,712 Baby!

Woohoo! I cracked the top 4 million on Amazon!

Seriously though, thank you to all of you who have read my book and given me very helpful feedback. It’s already paid dividends with the second book, which incidentally is about at the quarter-mile post. This one is taking longer, because it’s a more involved story that requires a great deal of historical research. I’ll give you updates along the way.

Also, stay tuned to this space, because in the very near future, I will be participating in something quite new to the publishing industry: an online book-signing! It’s a clever idea that I predict will become more and more popular. I will be part of a panel with two or three other authors talking about their books. Invitees to the signing will be able to listen and ask questions. In addition, you’ll receive an author-signed Bookstub redeemable for the download of an e-book! I’ll make an announcement as soon as the date is settled.

I want to give a special shout-out to Jack for the Amazon review! You realize you’re enabling me to be a shiftless writer, don’t you? Thanks Big Brother, really!

An Interview with Mike Nelson

I’m a huge MST3K fan and enjoy amateur riffing in my living room. Still I can’t touch the originals! When it went off the air, Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy  continued this “art form” with RiffTrax.

Mike was the head writer for MST3K and still makes his living writing. Recently I came across this interview with him by Flightpath. Go read the whole thing, but I wanted to excerpt this quote especially:

Flightpath: How do you compare writing for RiffTrax, which is released quickly and online – people can get it instantly – with writing for other mediums you’ve worked in, like TV and print?

Mike Nelson: I just consider the writing of RiffTrax a hard slog at times, because you’re concentrating so much that the amount of time that it takes would probably surprise people, and probably be pretty daunting to most writers. But once you get the efficiencies of it, and you understand what you’re doing – and obviously we’ve done this a lot – there’s something very nice about relaxing into that. It’s like, some people just like doing manual labor to think. This is kind of the opposite. It gets you away from all of the other writing. You know, writing is hard, and I always try to avoid it. Even though I do it for a living, and I’m constantly writing.

When I hear people say, “Oh, when I just have some downtime, I just love to do some writing,” I’m like, “Really? Are you insane? It’s really, really hard!” But there is an element of relaxation to doing it for RiffTrax, where you know what you have ahead of you and it looks like a lot of work. It’s kind of like when I was a kid, I used to like when my dad would to tell me to move a big stack of wood. It was just like, “Well, you know, you just have to do it.” And there’s something about that, of just having this large task ahead of you, and just putting your head down and doing it.

Boy howdy! Well, back to the novel…but first I think I’ll mow the lawn.

Uh, Thanks?

Was cleaning out the spam trap. You’d be amazed at all the gunk that collects down there–Gives me the willies!

Anyhoo, while poking around, flashlight in one hand and a sharp stick in the other, I came across this:

I do not know what it be, but I do not want to lose you. Because, you treat the people I really ah, is the first time, so caring about. I just want to Hello, my dear friend, and I Can selfish, I do not want a distant blessing for you, I think we have Ke Yi Xiang Yi Qian did, but Huoxu, that it is a luxury.

I think it’s a bad idea to write, even spam, with a Chinese-to-English dictionary.

 

The Horror!

OMG! Look at those drapes!

Yeah, I’m linking another video. Get over it. In this particularly ghastly piece, we see a popular celebrity–so I’m told–carving up some books to make…a box.

At least the Nazi’s threw ’em on a bonfire. But this isn’t about a hatred of the ideas found in books, this is about the complete and utter apathy toward the ideas found in books.

And before you say it, yes I know, books are just things. You own a book, you can read it, use it to prop up a table leg, make a box, or fry it up with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Whatever you do, remember that book represents someone’s work. Good book, bad book, it doesn’t matter, someone labored over that manuscript to give it what life it has. But it seems that in our day and age, people would rather watch than read. Ideas are too much trouble. They might change me. Best not to care.

I don’t think that bodes well for civilization.

Here’s the link to BuzzFeed

Warning: this video contains disturbing images of vacuous people.

Unpacking Our Learnings

In the corporate world, it is imperative to leverage bandwidth so as to capitalize on all the low-hanging fruit, while maximizing best practices and core competencies, simultaneously enhancing our value proposition.

Ugh. I feel dirty. Hang on a minute while I disinfect my keyboard…/squirt /squirt…There. That’s better.

As a refugee from the corporate world, I have had to learn to speak and write English all over again. I have the double handicap of having spent over a decade working in information technology. IT greatly accelerates the decline of literacy because of the field’s over-reliance on acronyms to describe just about everything. Technology isn’t real until there’s an acronym for it. Even jokes are spoken in acronym. PFM and RTFM are two old chestnuts I have uttered more times than I care to remember.

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419 Fun

Is there anyone alive who hasn’t gotten one of these 419 emails yet? I didn’t think so. Just like bad sci-fi movies, they are enjoyable on so many levels: preposterous premise, bad sentence construction, bad use of tenses, hilarious Engrish, and downright cheekiness. Sadly, there are enough stupid and/or greedy people in this world to encourage these felons. Although, after you read a few of their emails, you’ve gotta wonder just how stupid and greedy you’d have to be to fall for ’em. On second thought, best not to think about it too much, it’s too depressing.

Here is one that I enjoyed immensely:

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