RETURN: Book Three of the Matt Turner Series update
Woe is I. It is with heavy typing fingers that I compose this post. Despite many a pitfall and unavoidable mishap, I had hoped to release Return before Christmas, but alas, it will not be so. While the final draft is near complete, and my last-minute substitute editor has been making decent progress, the book is definitely not in a condition I’m ready to hand over to all you lovely people. Further, while I’d love to be able to announce a firm new release date, that would be the 4th firm release date announced for this book in the past…
Threck City by Andreas Raninger
Mind-blowing Concept Art from World of Exigency
As one of my readers pointed out on my Facebook page, it must be surreal to have elements of my “worlds” brought to life in art. It is. It’s even crazier than hearing talented voice actors narrate my stories in the books’ audio editions (congrats to Ray Chase, winner of this year’s Voice Arts Awards for Best Male Audiobook Narration for his work on my A Warm Place to Call Home). Beloved Swedish artist and book cover designer Andreas Raninger whipped out the base of this panoramic Exigency concept art in maybe 30 minutes, spending the rest of the time tweaking…
Matty: A Matt Turner Series short officially released
If you haven’t yet read this Matt Turner prequel story, it’s now available for all ereaders. While not an absolute prerequisite for book 3, RETURN, it does provide some good background on the second main character. Matty: A Matt Turner Series Short is the 24-page story of the young psychometrist’s first “assignment” with his detective father, and introduces Joss Lynn Leland—an important figure in Matt’s adult life. Now available for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iBooks [iBooks url not yet working, will update later]. It’s a quick read, but maybe a nice hold-you-over for RETURN’s December release! Expect more short stories…
Kindle Family Library may be the e-Book’s final hurdle toward full paperbackification.
Amazon’s November 2014 update for recent Kindle devices* is a big’un, and Kindle owners have yet another reason to love Amazon (ignoring the fact that this new feature should’ve come a long time ago). Kindle Family Library enables two adults to share their entire libraries with each other across devices/accounts, and with no need to “Lend” often unlendable books from Big Pub. With this step forward, the Kindle experience inches closer and closer to the coveted state of full paperbackification (if I may) — that point in time when one can no longer cite what they’re missing by not owning a…
Amazon’s surprise announcement. CLASSIC Apple.
Surprise announcement from Amazon today. They somehow managed to keep this thing under the radar up to now, a feat Apple hasn’t been able to pull off for a while. As tech bloggers like to say, Amazon continues to out-Apple Apple. So what is this gizmo? It’s a black cylinder, 9″ tall by 3″ wide, with a light ring/volume knob, a couple buttons, and a bunch of microphones, plus a whole lotta holes for the hidden speakers. What’s it do? A bunch of things…watch the video below for a full understanding, but my take is that Amazon Echo is essentially…
The “Change One Thing” Technique
*This post originally appeared on my previous blog. Due to its nice “snapshot in time” content (from shortly after the release of A Warm Place to Call Home), and its explanation of the origin of Frederick, I wanted to update it and bring it on over to the new blog, where it belongs. Last year [around Apr, 2012], when I was “between books”, having completed The Opal, but not yet ready to work on Matt Turner #3 (MT3 to the cool), I began experimenting with a couple of stories that had been buzzing around in my head for some…
NaNoWriMo: This is Your Year
November is National Novel Writing Month. If you’re not familiar with this fact, you may have only heard its Mork-like abbreviation: NaNoWriMo. What began in 1999 in San Francisco, with a small group of 21 participants, has grown to half a million. The goal is to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days—extremely achievable if you write every day, and even with a few days off throughout. Emphasizing on finishing versus trying to create the perfect Great American Novel makes the mission even more attainable. Sometimes it seems like there are more people out there producing websites, apps, blogs, and advice…
You have nothing to worrEBOLAbout.
The wife and I always talk about “movie moments,” those bizarre/humorous/impossible experiences one would think are too bizarre/humorous/impossible to occur in real life. Today I went to the doctor for my first physical in several years. Upon entering the large lobby area, I immediately noticed that the admins and nurses behind the wide counter were all wearing gloves and disposable surgical masks. I’d been to this place numerous times before and knew it wasn’t the norm. When it was my turn to check in at the counter, I was standing beside a woman also checking in with the second admin….
AHAHAH—wait, Breaking Bad toys were at Toys R Us?
A Florida mom got enough signers on a Change.org petition to pressure Toys R Us into pulling a line of Breaking Bad toys from the shelves. I’m sure there are plenty of “bad message” toys still on those shelves that people could point to and say “How is this acceptable?” and we could do that all day. As a boy (yes, still) I can speak from experience that the coolest toys will almost always be the ones that concerned moms will abhor. We want badasses with guns and giant beastie things with movable jaws that can rip open the stomachs of…
Reviews and the Art of Dignified Silence
The Gordon Ramsay show Kitchen Nightmares’ most popular episode features Amy’s Baking Company and its—I’ll say—passionate owners, Samy and Amy. Prior to the episode airing, the couple was known to occasionally scream at customers, kick people out, and attack negative reviewers on Yelp. Since the episode’s premiere in 2013, and the onslaught of new (probably mostly) trolling reviews on Yelp, death threats, legal actions, and so on, the pair have decided to take a more strategic approach to their upset customers, public detractors, and instigators: they scream at customers, kick people out, and attack negative reviewers on Yelp. While their…
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