General Blog

Looks like I’ll be downtown at the local library, giving a speech on the 19th? With my usual timing, my employers are offering Dale-Carnegie courses for free at work, but they will be moving too slowly for me to have them under by belt by the time I hit the podium. But I’ve got an idea of what I’m going to say, so I’ll just work at polishing it up this week and getting it all ready for live-time. And any of you locals, if you have the time and want to watch your pal in action, come down and […]

Okay, as promised, here is my picture of me as a carney barker. Did three hours in the hot sun, heckling some 200 people through our concrete carnival. So that’s a new career path for me…

Here we go again. Wednesday at the club, I noticed that the car seemed sluggish to start. Today, when we wanted to go to lunch, it seemed inert. Dead battery. So we jumped it (what a circus that was – I had to push the car, the wife steered, and she put it into the hedge). Anyway, got it running, went out to lunch at a nearby Wendy’s. Came out and found it dead again. So home we walked, 100 degrees but lots of shade, so not bad. Brought the wife’s car out with the jumpers and started it again. […]

I’ll be at OASIS 25, the Orlando scifi convention at the Sheraton Orlando Downtown this weekend (May 25-27). Come by and get a book signed. If you don’t have a book, come by and buy a book and get it signed. If you have a signed copy, just come by and say hi! Looking forward to seeing all the crazy geeks all dressed up. Should be wacky and fun and interesting. Book review fans – the book will be in a little late sunday evening (but I’ll still get it to you). Got an interesting little indie one to look […]

Slow day at the sci-fi convention. 10am to 6pm, sold three books. Other sellers are making about the same rate of sales. Good point – well, besides those few sales, watching a guy manning a booth across from me read Early ReTyrement all day. Every now and then he’d laugh out loud, or call over to tell me what Mason was up to. This helped to get through the thanklessness of convention doldrums. Had a fan I didn’t even know stop by and tell me how much he liked it. Worth more than money. Also, got some leads on some […]

I‘ve been thinking about this for a while. The Book and Writing blogs are what this site is about – it’s what I think a lot of the writers I’ve met and corresponded with are most interested in. Well, before I formalized the postings about writing, it used to show up in the general blog. Once I formalized it, I marked it “Dog Ear” and moved it in with the book reviews. There are people interested in reading. There are people interested in writing. But not all readers are writers and vice-versa. After some consideration, I’ve decided to break the […]

A couple of months ago, I changed the setting for registration, allowing people to pretty much autoregister themselves. It was not a big thing. Been seeing people join the site since then. Didn’t really pay it any attention. After all, they were registered now, right? Wrong. Last night while moving columns about, I happened to duck into the user lists and saw about 30 people who’d registered and not been “approved”. I’m not sure if that meant you couldn’t post or get it easy or whatever. I didn’t know I’d dorked it up. But that’s what you get from a […]

Look, I occasionally poke around on the internet, looking for pictures of the ladies. No big deal. But yesterday was perfectly innocent – I’d gone looking for sound files for my new game Time Tripper. The muzzleloader I’d gotten off SoundBible.com was okay but it had someone saying “Ready… aim… Fire!” – not what you are going to want to hear over and over when five revolutionary war soldiers are firing at you. So last night I googled  “Muzzleloader wav”. Found some sites. Went onto the first. Then Microsoft Security Essentials lit off. Normally it never gets a chance – […]