NaBloPoMo

November 6, 2013

Book Promotion – News to Me!

Cover art by Lars Huston.

Cover art by Lars Huston.

The author is sometimes the last to know. Amazon currently offers my novel WAS IT A RAT I SAW for free. I don’t know how long the promotion will last. I don’t know how Amazon customers are even made aware of it, yet there are many downloads, so somebody is in this loop!

I have chosen to avoid snarky reactions about wanting to retain control. I am instead opting for This is an interesting turn of events. Wonder where it will all lead.

Anyway – if you had meant to get an e-copy during my recent Smashwords promotion, you might as well pop over to Amazon and get a copy there.

WAS IT A RAT I SAW is a psychological thriller involving split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. If you do read it, please post a review! (Let me know if you need guidance about how or where to post reviews.)

November 5, 2013

How Long Is That In Dog Years?

Today is a milestone: Required Writing is one year old. So. Is my blog a toddler? An adolescent? A septuagenarian?

How does a blog lifetime compare to a human’s? We don’t yet know what the maximum lifespan of a blog is, do we? Clearly, many of them die young, after scant months or a handful of years. But how long might a blog keep going? Should it? Can we look to some other realm of pop culture for a comparison?

The Tonight Show?

Days of Our Lives?

The Fast and the Furious?

The New Yorker?

Mad Magazine?

Rolling Stone?

The Rolling Stones?

The Sex Pistols?

Dear Abby?

James Dean?

Betty White?

What do you think the right comparison should be? I confess I have no clue. Should I want my blog to live fast, die young, and make a good looking corpse?* And I hope I immediately know when it is time to go. Like the song** says, it’s better to burn out than it is to rust. Although I would prefer to do neither. My goal is to keep writing until it is time to stop. 

=============

* What movie is this from? Anybody?
**The song being “Hey hey my my”, which Neil Young wrote about the advent of punk (with some lyrics derived from Devo’s days as copy writers, and the ad campaign Rust never sleeps). Or was that “My my hey hey.” For obvious reasons, I always mix those two up.
November 4, 2013

Eerie Erosion

The WP Weekly Photo Challenge wants to see eerie in black and white.

An unusually low tide exposed this heavily eroded metal sea wall at East Beach in Santa Barbara, CA.  I wondered if it was possible to strip the beauty from an ocean photo. To convert beauty to eerie,  I changed the image to black and white and then tinted using Photoshop. This was as eerie as I could get.  I believe the answer is no. Even post-apocalypse, sun on ocean remains beautiful.

beachwall

Photoshopped. I like the way the sun bleeds into the water.

The original image.

The original image.