Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Self-publishing is not ALWAYS a good thing

Just because everyone can have a voice does not mean they should use it.

Read the reviews. Also note the price: wotta bargain, eh?
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Saturday, April 23, 2011

That smell of books

Karl Lagerfeld, the designer, is developing a perfume that smells like books. Do I need to say more? I think not.
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Monday, January 10, 2011

What books were best-sellers the day you were born?

This fun little application tells you what fiction and non-fiction books were on the NY Times bestseller lists the day you were born.
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Friday, November 12, 2010

Book #27 is underway!

I can't say anything about it yet except that I'm doing this one completely on my own--that is, I'm writing it, arranging for editing, cover art, publishing, distribution... the whole schmear. There's no advance, no money up front, and no promises. This book is going to be on a tight deadline, so I'm going to be jamming for the next few months. For all I'm guaranteed, this is completely gerbil-like typing activity that will keep me occupied and off the streets 'till the economy picks up. All this notwithstanding, I'm still looking for fulltime work, but there aren't a lot of jobs here in Eugene. So I'm doing the one thing, looking for a second, and seeing what turns up. I'm having fun. 
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Thursday, November 11, 2010

Huge enormous book proposal out the door

After some days, I've finally completed the book proposal I've been working on. When I got it all done, I saw a lot of why it was taking so long: it's 41 pages long.   This sets a record for my longest book proposal ever, by about 15 pages. (A joint proposal with someone else with a 15 page resume doesn't really count IMO.)
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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Awful library books

Someone I follow on Twitter posted a link to a site listing awful library books. These are books currently in public libraries that are just plain awful for one reason or another. Most of them have achieved awfulness simply by becoming totally outdated; for example, this book from 1989 on how not to catch a computer virus or this book on running a farm with wonderful comments about what the farmer's wife does.

Of particular interest are the books on states and countries from 30, 40, 50 years ago, such as this book on the Soviet Union from 1968. (Insert "In Soviet Union..." joke of your choice here.)
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Sunday, July 18, 2010

Maybe my words are sacred, after all!

My dear friend Bonni had a problem a few days ago: her house burned down. The whole thing didn't actually burn to ground, but I won't be surprised if it's going to need to be rebuilt completely because of smoke and water damage. This is really common for houses with even 40%-50% fire damage: the smoke just pours through the rest of the house and there's no good way to get it out of the walls and ceilings. It's tough stuff and we are all looking for ways in which we can help her.

But the funny thing about this that she told me today was that she was in the master bedroom looking for whatever might be salvaged and there were only two books that weren't damaged by fire, smoke, or water: the two copies of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Disaster Preparedness" I'd sent her. In other words, the book I'd co-authored with Dr. Maurice Ramirez on how to survive disaster seems to be reasonably fireproof. 

I guess my personal mana extends a thousand miles away even to my books. Hey, am I fuckin' cool or what?
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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Buy this book!

I have a friend named Mary Wise. I've known her through the STC for about 15 years now. She's a pip. Mary's a great technical communicator and was even the president of the STC at one point (which is no small accomplishment). Mary is also a professional clown. She's a Ringling Clown College graduate. And she's written a book entitled Girl Clown about her first job as a clown with a small circus.

It's a very good book. I just finished it a half hour ago and I needed to come tell you about it right away. You should buy a copy. Or even two.


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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Calling all rockhounds

I drove up to Portland on Sunday to attend a book signing and celebrate the release of Garret Romaine's latest book, Rockhounding Idaho. This book is his latest volume of interesting tips and locations for rockhounding in the Pacific Northwest, following Gem Trails of Washington and Gem Trails of Oregon. All three of these books are well-researched and interesting. If you are at all interested in rockhounding or you have a friend or relative in the PNW who likes getting out and about, consider getting them one or even all three volumes.




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Thursday, August 06, 2009

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Disaster Preparedness

The latest book, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Disaster Preparedness," is out at last. It's everything you need to know about how to survive a disaster, any disaster. There's info on such things as creating a Go-Pak, emergency shelters, sheltering in place, dealing with kids, seniors, and pets, and working with insurance companies and putting your life together again afterwards.

There are chapters dealing with specific disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, blizzards, pandemics (with a great deal of information about H1N1 specifically), and chemical spills, but the most important message of the book is that all disasters are the same. Disasters disrupt the processes of your life and, while there are specific preparation issues with, say, hurricanes versus wildfires versus earthquakes, all of them disrupt your life and all of them require many of the same preparations: you have to have a Go-Pak, you have to have 72 hours of food and water and a couple weeks of meds, and so on.

In addition to the information on home disaster preparedness, there's a lot of information on how businesses can prepare for disasters and recover from them. You'll see how to create an effective disaster plan and find out how to get your employees to return to the office and help maintain your business.

Go buy copies for everyone you know!



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Monday, July 27, 2009

New book is in!

I just got an advance copy of the latest book. It's also available on Kindle.


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Sunday, March 29, 2009

Bill Murray and being rich and famous

Was talking to Brenda on AIM this evening and it occurred to me that I'd not added this story about being rich and famous to my blog.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaany years and a couple dozen books ago, I was in the middle of my 2nd & 3rd books (it was a simultaneous thing--hint: don't do this). I remember coming home and walking in the front door and saying to Patricia something completely fatuous about being rich and famous. She looked thoughtful and said "You know, Bill Murray was being interviewed on TV today and the interviewer started flipping him a little shit and said, 'Well, you haven't handled fame very well.' And Bill Murray got really bristly and looked right into the camera and said 'All you boys and girls out there in Televisionland who think you want to grow up to be rich and famous, let me give you a piece of advice: try "rich" first and see if that doesn't do it for yuh!'"

I found that to be an excellent piece of advice and I've tried to practice this to a large extent: given a choice between "rich" and "famous," I've gone for "rich" whenever possible. And you should, too.

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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Balancing your life when you're an author

The following comments are something I just posted on the Author's forum of SpeakerSite.com, and I think they deserve to be posted here, too.



I just got asked a very good question, about how one balances life and writing a book. We have businesses, families, spouses, and kids to deal with, so how does writing a book fit all of that? I wanted to mention this here both to spark discussion and because this may be helpful for people.

Writing books is a pest and it rarely pays off really for the time you spend. Compared to what I make doing independent consulting, contract writing, or writing magazine articles, books don't pay nearly as well for the time it takes to write them. Nevertheless, we do it because there's always that chance that that particular book will pay off handsomely and also because it's just one of those Things We Should Do. I also recommend it to everyone because your writing and planning skills improve enormously after doing even a book or two.

I haven't come up with a great balance to the process, myself. I wrote my first 15 books from 1987 to 1995, when I was in a marriage I didn't enjoy, so part of it was my way of keeping myself away from my then-wife. I was younger, too, so I had more energy and was able to skimp on sleep and survive in the short-term. (I ended up a Type II diabetic as a result of years and years of sleep deprivation, so don't do this yourself.)

In terms of finding balance in your own lives--assuming you do a lot of this--you might want to view writing a book as that extra 10-15 hours/week that we all need to do in self-marketing to keep the pumps primed. I would also strongly recommend not doing books (a) back to back or (b) simultaneously. Back to back will exhaust you and I've never done well writing two books simultaneously because I keep having to jerk myself out of one creative reverie and into another. I didn't like it and I ended up spending too much time in the transition and my writing speed went down.

The bottom line, though, is that this will take a lot of time and you need to be ready for it. I was talking to my current editor at Wiley the other day, who was saying the the Editorial Committee has this image of authors lounging around all the time. (He doesn't believe that himself, but the EC does, apparently.) "Ha!" I said, "I always tell my writing students that as an author you can work any 12 hours a day you like." He liked that one a lot. It's true, too.

BTW, I recently posted an article about those last few weeks when you're finishing a book. It equates being in prison with the writing process, but not in any way you'd expect from the sound of it.
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Saturday, December 13, 2008

Prison and writing

There are many connections between being in prison and writing for a living. A few of them are good, most of them are not so good, but none of them are the things I'm going to talk about.

Some years ago, I was talking to my stepmother on the phone. I was near the end of a book at that time and I asked her if, as I suspected, she had noticed a stage in the writing of any book that I just became really grumpy with the project and had a hard time working on it, regardless of how much fun the book was and how much money I expected to make from it. She said, "Oh, yes!" and told me a story that I think will be interesting and educational for all of us in this silly business.

(Background: my stepmother was on the police force for 20 years. She was the first woman to graduate first in the class at the Tucson Police Academy and she worked her way up through the ranks to become one of the very few woman police chiefs for a major metro area in this country. I'm enormously proud of her.)

Elaine said that the worst point for escapes and attempted escapes is right before prisoners are due to be released. This has been recognized in incarceration for decades. This is because you've been incarcerated for however long and you can see the end in sight but it's not there yet and it really pisses you off.

What they generally do for prisoners as they get to be short-timers is put them in solitary and lock them up tight so they can't get out. This isn't really done out of any sense of charity for the prisoners, who don't appreciate being put in lockdown at all for some odd reasons. No, the jailers' idea is to prevent escapes because it looks bad on their records. But it's still the best thing you can do for the prisoners, too, who don't need to try to escape and get time added to their sentences.

Elaine said that this can and does happen as close as 2 weeks before release: The prisoners just hit the wall and they say to themselves "I'm due to get out of here and I can't take it any more!" She says that you can see that the end is in sight and you really resent the last effing bit!

Elaine went on to say that this is much the same with any major project. She went through much the same thing, she says, when she retired from the force a few years ago. As she was getting down to the last couple months of her 20, she was having more and more motivational problems with heading to work. However, she had structured it so she had enough vacation time to give her an escape hatch if she just couldn't deal with it, so she could phone in on vacation for her final 5-6 weeks if she needed to. :)

What can we learn from this?

1. Writers will always feel cranky right near the end of a project.

2. Possibly the best kindness an editor or publisher or manager can do for a writer is to tighten the thumbscrews and make sure they don't leave their desks as the deadline approaches.

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Thursday, October 23, 2008

The Broccoli of Death, or something like that

This one isn't mine. It's on the Bread and Honey blog. Apparently, the folks at Cascadian Farms are having fun with packaging.

Interestingly, Cascadian Farms is up in Rockport, WA, which is the home of one of my all-time favorite trivia questions from Washington Trivia:

Q. What started a 15-hour fight in the town of Rockport, WA, on May 16, 1973?
A. Tim Roetman drove a cement truck over a whole group of motorcycles.

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Saturday, February 24, 2007

My sister's going to be on national TV

My sister Lorraine, who's a thanatologist, is off to DC to be on a TV show entitled Living with Grief: Before and After the Death. Very cool!

Addendum, March 3: Lorraine had said "national TV" when she was telling me about it, but it's actually a national teleconference. It's still cool, though, and she's selling lots and lots of her books. (Come to think of it, we need to get our little sister Susan to write a book and we'll all three of us be authors.)
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Monday, March 13, 2006

The Diagram Prize Winner for 2005

The winner of The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year was announced today:
People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting Bystanders and What To Do About It, by Gary Leon Hill.
The Diagram Prize "honors bizarre and odd books for their creative and unusual titles." 1980, 1989, 1995, and 2004 are particularly masterful. Past winners of this prestgious award are:

1978 Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
1979 The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution
1980 The Joy of Chickens
1981 Last chance at Love-Terminal Romances
1982 Population and Other Problems
1983 The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling
1984 The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
1985 Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts
1986 Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality
1988 Versailles: The View from Sweden
1989 How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
1990 Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual
1992 How to Avoid Huge Ships
1993 American Bottom Archaeology
1994 Highlights in the History of Concrete
1995 Reusing Old Graves
1996 Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
1997 The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition
1998 Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw
1999 Weeds in a Changing World
2000 High Performance Stiffened Structures
2001 Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service
2002 Living with Crazy Buttocks
2003 The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories
2004 Bombproof Your Horse

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Thursday, August 11, 2005

"Poditorial" -- it's MY word!!

Okay, so I'm writing about podcasting at the moment. It's fun stuff. John Iasiuolo of the Computer Outlook radio show told me that he'd trademarked "podmercial" (TM). I just was writing a comment about the types of podcasting programs you might have and I coined poditorial. According to a quick Google search, nobody's thought of this one yet. It's mine, damnit, MINE!!!

Poditorial

Poditorial

Poditorial

Yup. I came up with it first and it's all mine!

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

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Monday, June 20, 2005

Too busy for things to actually happen, lately

Okay, I know this is a little odd, but I've been too busy for things to actually happen lately. I've been working on online help and some book stuff, but I've been having nine yards of problems with all the computers in the house to one extent or another. The #1 computer keeps blue-screening and going off into mumble mode, the #2 computer has been randomly locking up solid for months (necessitating pressing the reset button), the print server keeps losing track of its hard disks (disk problem? motherboard? power supply? who knows???), and even Susan's Dell (aka "the POS") won't boot anymore. I'm waiting to hear from the local store about the arrival of the motherboard and other parts for my new computer.

Saturday, we had a big party for the choirs we're in at church. We had a wonderful time and it was a treasure to have everyone over. It also triggered us to get the house cleaned up and a bunch of art hung on the walls for the first time, which has a lasting and attractive effect. Great salads and lovely people. Lots of people had very silly songs to sing (it was something of a requirement)

Sunday am, I played as part of a Pete Seeger Appreciation service at church. One of the people putting the service together had known Pete Seeger when she was a little girl and he'd show up at UU summer camps in the Midwest and she'd follow him around with the other children and he'd sing them songs and tell them stories. And our minister was taught "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" by him (again, at a UU camp, decades ago). I learned to play banjo from his book, so everything I do is a tribute to him. I even have his signature on one of my banjos. I'm very proud of that.

We had a couple of speakers talking about their experiences with Pete Seeger and his music, a guitarist who's also in the choir played a piece of his, I talked about learning to play banjo from his book and played a banjo piece, and we heard a short bio. The offertory was a recording of him doing "Turn, Turn, Turn" and the closing hymn was his recording of "We Shall Overcome" which had a lot of us in tears. It was a nice service.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to keep the computers together long enough to generate online help for a client, get some other things underway, and do Society for Technical Communications Board of Directors work, which has been coming on thick and fast lately. It's good work and necessary work, I'm not complaining; it's just that there's a bunch of it on top of everything else... well, mostly the dying computers. I hate when the computers are being cranky. It makes me very frustrated.

To end this on a light note, take a look at the Church Sign Generator. Its purpose is actually not supposed to be a joke (although most of us will certainly think of things to use it for that are outside its intended purpose, I'm sure); it's supposed to be for people who want to see what a slogan would look like on a church sign. You can try things out for size, so to speak. In addition, there are dozens of examples of funny or clever church signs that people have photographed and sent in, such as "God so loved the world that he did not send a committee." Nice stuff, lots of it, and worth the 10 or 15 minutes it'll take to go through the site. You can also get church magnets of the signs you create at $5 a throw.

BTW, the FAQ for the site offers a link here to a wide variety of church signs that folks have generated. These are almost certainly not safe for the office or for the easily offended, so view with care.

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Friday, May 06, 2005

Friday evening and I'm off duty for the day

I'm done for the day. Nice day, really, but long.

I checked the blood sugar before dinner and it was vastly too high, so I leapt up to the health club and did a half hour on an exercycle and got it down to something tolerable at least. Time to stop screwing around and get back to the gym. I alluz feel better when I do, anyway.

Laura the amazing agent tells me that it looks like I've got a new book contact coming in shortly. Hot day-umn!

Heather Fox, the equally amazing PR person, sent news of a great book review on Slashdot.org of the Firefox book.

I'm going to watch some toob if there's anything good on and then fall asleep. The day starts early tomorrow. And goes forever.

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