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Marketing 102
Beginning with a shameless plug for my book, not out yet but awaiting final approval — The Obeahman’s Dagger. You’ll understand that I had to do that. What’s a self-published writer with no marketing budget to do? But I have to tell you — this whole marketing thing, well it’s no fun. There were parts of…
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Sleepy Robots
Are we preparing the ground for the robotic takeover? We work impossible hours trying to keep up with the virtual city that literally never sleeps. Only a robot could cope with that schedule. I’m a science fiction writer mostly because the idea of the scientific method is at the heart of my intellectual processes. My…
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Book Review: Blackbird Rising – A novel of the American Spirit
On June 17th 2015, nine people were shot dead in a church in Charleston, S.C.. The shooter was a young man who claimed that he was motivated by ethnic prejudice. Though it was first published six years ago, my reading of Gary Earl Ross’ BLACKBIRD RISING: A Novel of the American Spirit bracketed that tragic…
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Writer’s Anonymous
I think addiction is an organic and necessary faculty of human beings. It’s our brain’s way of learning but when it results in self damaging or harmful behavior, we label it ‘addiction’ instead of the more accurate ‘learned behavior’ or ‘habituated response’. We learn to drive a car using the mechanism of addiction. It’s all…
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The Editorial Committee
That’s my editorial committee pictured on the right. From the left, Grace, Zizi, and Zachary. My desire to write originated in the nightly story-time sessions we’ve always had and the difficulty I was having finding new fiction that they enjoyed. Classics are good, and we’ve always included them in our library, but I’m convinced that…
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Routines and production
I’m convinced that one of the worst habits a writer can contract is an addiction to cliches. It’s perfectly okay to use cliches in everyday, spoken communications, so if I were speaking to you, like, in public, one-on-one, I’d probably say something like “I’m a creature of habit” to introduce this topic. But this is writing,…
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ART vs art
Which are you, an ARTIST or an artist? An ARTIST is one whose art is intellectually driven, high-brow stuff that may or may not be socially or politically conscious, but aims to ‘speak’ to people of means and substance, while ‘artists’ have none of those ambitions, content to do work through which they hope to…
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Housework
I was surprised by a bit of nostalgia today. Prior to getting down to writing the next book, I decided to archive all the files related to Dagger; couldn’t bring myself to delete everything like I probably should. So I made a new folder on my Dropbox, named it DaggerArchive, and stuffed every old file…
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Getting off the ground
If you’re gonna fly, you’ve gotta get off the ground, right? For the last six days, my book has been languishing in the Amazon Kindle bookstore, unread by anyone. So I decided to shake things up a bit and run a free promotion; if people don’t read the book, I’ll never know if it’s any…
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Waiting, Learning.
I’ve been working on preparing (formatting) my book for the in-print edition with CreateSpace. Some people might be interested in the nuts and bolts of this processespecially since I’m an Ubuntu user and I’ve done the whole thing myself using OpenOffice Writer, Inkscape, and Gimp. That’s all free-to-use software. I’ve also spent time with Sigil…