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Showing posts from August, 2017

Celebrating the Summer of the Loving Dead

Credit: Pixabay.com This summer has been a 50 th anniversary for the Summer of Love but it’s also been a summer of the loving dead. The latter began with my work on the “Circa Sixty Years Dead” paperback edition  and it has continued with this weekend’s Zombie Walk here in Sacramento. Sacramento Zombie Walk and Carnival of the Dead Today was the 17 th annual Zombie Walk for Sacramento. But I only attended the pre-Zombie Walk Carnival of the Dead, yet hardly even that. There were a lot of neat games and booths there, not to mention costumes of the living dead. However, it was so damn hot on this 104-degree fahrenheit Saturday afternoon/early evening that I didn’t stay for much more than an hour. I’m surprised the heat didn’t do a further job on the zombies’ already rotted skin and flesh! But the event was a knock-out and, though I wasn’t there for it, the actual walk really turned out to be a knock-out! The undead really gave it to the alt-right and they

‘Circa’ Now With an Improved Book Cover; Imprint Logo; Joe Hill

While we still have some daylight this weekend before the solar eclipse, let me show you my past week in writing, viewing and even drawing. These include advice from son of Stephen King, author Joe Hill and the improved book cover for the paperback version of “Circa Sixty Years Dead”. Joe Hill Interview on You Tube This afternoon, after watching my Saturday morning (vintage) cartoons on YouTube (actually one was a live-action kids sci fi series from the seventies, Space Academy ), I watched an interview with NOS4A2 author Joe Hill. He had a lot of interesting things to say about his writing and useful techniques he uses for it. One of those techniques I’d like to try with my own stories, which helps both story and character development. That technique, he says, is taking a character from a larger work in progress and writing a separate, shorter story around it just for the sake of developing the character. That’s a technique that I can definitely use since I often st

Tools Not to Miss if You Self-Publish a Paperback

If you happen to not have purchased the paperback copy of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” then no worries. You may be better off waiting a few days and I’ll leave it at its initial low price of $3.89 a little longer. The reason I’m saying this is because, as I promised you last post, I purchased a copy myself as kind of a proof (or author’s) copy. It turned out to be a proof alright. A proof that it didn’t come out the way I intended it to. I confess much of this was due to myself missing overlooking certain tools on Kindle Direct Publishing’s cover creator program. If you happened to have bought a copy of the paperback version of “Circa” you probably noticed a long, ugly, gray line running along the left edge of the front cover. Not only that, but the lettering of the title and the image under it were pixelated. “Circa” is not a cyberpunk story, so the pixelated edges won’t work for customers. I apologise if you bought it like that. Credit: Pixabay.com The problem

‘Circa Sixty Years Dead’ Now In Paperback!

Well, finally it’s here! “Circa Sixty Years Dead” is now in paperback format. If you’re like me, and prefer to read books in their physical forms instead of on a screen where you can’t even feel the pages that you are reading or where you can’t even put it on your (physical, not virtual) bookshelf to show your guests that you’ve read it, then now you can have the full literary experience of “Circa”.  To celebrate its print release, I’m offering the paperback edition of my short fiction story at a low price. After all the challenges and frustrations of navigating through self-publishing technology, it feels great to see that your book is available for purchase, let alone that it has been published—self-published at that. So I’m selling the print edition for the low price of $3.89! But this bargain won’t last long, so if you are interested in purchasing a copy or, better yet, several copies then head on over to Amazon now. In fact, as part of this celebration, I’m going to get a l