“Big Book Giveaway” Begins
Missy Frye has graciously allowed me to give away a copy of the Love-Idiot book in order to support the “Just Write Blog Carnival,” which has published numerous links to my own articles and stories.
This is just the first in a large number of giveaways happening across the Internet over the coming weeks. I’ll post more later.
-TimK
P.S. If you’d like to give away a copy of one of my books, please contact me and let me know. There are still some as of yet unallocated.
Teaser Tuesdays: Talyn (again)
Driving up the Maine Turnpike this weekend, I took pause from, of all things, the landscape. Not just from the beauty of it, but I got a feeling that it was distinctly American. In Maine, the culture still retains some of the human community values that I often associate with the original Americans. And for just a moment, I could imagine myself dwelling on the unpaved American landscape, with pride.
I wondered what would have happened, had those of our progenitors not been decimated by disease in the 18′th century, how different might our history have turned out. And I promised myself I’d think about writing an epic fantasy or SF story about it, with a fictional people locked in the same conflict, facing the same issues. And then I discovered that Holly Lisle had written than story.
Actually, I don’t know yet that Holly has written the same story I wanted to write. I only know that over the weekend, I had a great deal of time to read. I picked up Talyn, which I had just started. And I found as the story developed that Holly was exploring many of the same issues I wanted to explore, and from a similar perspective. And I found that she had done so by creating a fictional world rich in history, culture, and human need.
And magic. In the world of Korre, where Talyn lives, people use magic as technology. Talyn herself is one of the Magics, a person who has a talent for magic, and in her job as a Shielder, she protects her tāak and her country from the magic attacks of the Eastils.
Read the rest of this entry »
A Star-Trek-style Ebook Reader
Scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, "A Fistful of Datas"
Now that I have some money coming in, one of my top items to get is an ebook reader. And in my typical style, I began thinking of all the ways I’d love to use such a device to help me in my work. Unfortunately, in my typical style, no reader out there does most of what I would want to do.
I realized that what I really wanted was one of those PADDs they have on Star Trek. It can work as an independent device that you can use to read or write content. But it also seamlessly integrates with the main computer system, to retrieve and store data and to share content with others.
Read the rest of this entry »
Teaser Tuesdays: Talyn
I’ve been absent, as you may know, because my computer’s mainboard died, and I’ve been busy with a new software contract, and our only working car stopped working, and then my computer’s hard drive died. (Yes, I’m getting tired of it all.) As a result, I hadn’t had have much time to write over part of June and the whole of July, and I truly missed writing. (But that’s another blog post.) I also didn’t have time to read, and I missed it, too. Now that life is returning to kinda-normal, I’ve finished reading Truffles by the Sea, which I loved, and A Time to Tell.
One of the beneficial side-effects of the software contract, of course, is that I have the money to do something I’ve wanted to for some time: an Internet-wide book give-away. I’m in the process of contacting numerous book bloggers, asking each if she’d like to give away a copy of one of my books. I can mail the books to the winners, but I need bloggers to host the giveaways and choose the winners. I don’t know that I’ll ever do a giveaway of this scale ever again. If you’d like to be included, please contact me and let me know.
For my next read, I long for a story that I’ll adore. That means something by Holly Lisle. Specifically, Talyn. I’ve left this book of hers sitting on my shelf for far too long, just because I haven’t gotten around to reading it. “Not your average fantasy book,” according to Robin Hobb. This book should’ve been an order of magnitude more popular than Twilight, were it not for Sturgeon’s Law. A book with as rough a birth as any book gets. An epic story born of an epic concept that was years in the making. According to Holly, “the best world I’d ever built, with the best cultures, the best people, and the best stories in my career.” I’ve just begun reading Talyn, but from the very first pages, this book effuses inspiration.
Read the rest of this entry »
God Has an Ironic Sense of Balance
Photo © 2010 Mike Cohen CC 2.0 BY NC ND
I apologize for the delay. It’s been over two weeks since my last post, and I haven’t replied to anyone’s comments or emails. Part of the reason is that I billed over 30 hours last week on this new software-development job, a heavy week for an off-site contractor. (I’ll have to explain to you the math of billed contractor hours versus employee hours sometime.) And I’ll probably bill about 30 hours this week, too. In between those hours—at least last week—I spent numerous hours taxiing the family around, my Beloved to and from work, my daughter C to and from school. I would get up in the morning, drive around, and get home just in time to start working with the guys at Client Z, out on the west coast.
That’s because we had one working car, and it wasn’t even ours.
Read the rest of this entry »
Another Car Bites the Dust?
Photo © 2008 David J Laporte CC 2.0 BY
“Why does all this stuff happen to us? It can’t be bad karma. We never did anything.” Or so says the Little One. And I think she’s right. Sometimes shit just happens.
And if it could have waiting just another month or two, I wouldn’t even be in a jam. Incredible. It’s like, just when you think things are looking up and you can breathe easy and ends will finally meet without stretching, the universe is like, “Uh. Hold on a sec—” Or as Dad puts it sometimes, “Cheer up! Things are going to get worse.”
(My Little One is not so little any more, BTW. But I still call her that. She insists. I don’t think she wants to grow up.)
Since last week, I’ve started working this new software-development contract. Last night, I had my first real “Aha!” moment. The engineer I’m working with seems a capable guy and easy to work with. Blessings for a confirmed cynic. Money’s still a little tight, until I get paid on my first invoice, which should happen in about a month. That’s how it is in independent contract work. But we can make it. And in the meantime, I’m keeping track day by day of how much I’ve earned. Yeah, money is a poor motivator, which is something that people say who already have plenty of money. But as it turns out, this contract looks like it will be bearable anyhow, and maybe even enjoyable. I was actually feeling pretty good about my situation.
And then…
Read the rest of this entry »
If I Die, Please Post This Posthumously
Photo © 2005 thomas23 CC 2.0 BY NC SA
I’m sitting here in Dunkin’ Donuts, Wednesday morning, with nothing that I feel like writing about, eating a delicious breakfast sandwich that will probably set my cholesterol and blood pressure back six months, mentally preparing for my MRI, which will take place in about a half an hour. “Mentally preparing,” that’s the medical term for “working up anxiety that they actually might find something wrong with me, or that something might go wrong, like I’ll accidentally bring a steel nail file into the MRI room and the superconducting magnet will stab me to death with it, which I’m sure you agree would be not very pleasant.”
Why am I getting an MRI? The same reason I got a new BP prescription. (By “BP,” I mean “blood pressure,” and even though it does have to do with oil, not that kind of oil.) I’m getting an MRI, because over the past several months, I’ve been suffering from headaches, debilitating at times— migraines, we think, probably.
My father also suffered from migraines when he was about my age, and my brother and I were about the same age as my kids are now. Interestingly, as soon as we grew up and moved out of the house, my father’s migraines disappeared. So my headaches may be partially hereditary. The answer, in any case, seems clear: all I have to is wait until the kids grow up and move out, and then I can have nice things again.
Read the rest of this entry »
My Computer Is Back, and Maybe I Am Too?
Photo © 2005 Jimmy Hilario CC 2.0 BY NC ND
Ain’t it fascinating how your life can be completely derailed by a few days of computer downtime (and an impending new job, and a birthday party, and Mario Kart)?
My MacBook Pro’s checkerboard-display crashing problem, which first hit back in January, suddenly reappeared about two and a half weeks ago. After several hours of persistence, I finally got the computer to boot again.
All that time, I was not writing.
It crashed then once or twice more during the week, and through persistence I goaded it back, limping along.
This time, the problem seemed worse than it had in January. I felt it was about time to take it in for service. And then it stopped booting at all. I couldn’t get the computer to come back. But I didn’t know how I was going to afford the repair bill.
On top of that, my daughter C’s MacBook, which I use as a backup, it was also out of service. I had been running a data-recovery program on it for months, trying to get every last bit of data I could off of its failing hard drive. Again, I didn’t know where I was going to find the money for a replacement hard drive. But I knew I needed to work something out, somehow.
Read the rest of this entry »
Teaser Tuesdays: Truffles by the Sea (again)
I started Truffles by the Sea a couple months ago. Then life got in the way. Being an author and blogger is always a balancing act between reading and writing, and sometimes I fall off the high-wire. I’m about a quarter of the way through this Christian chick-lit— er, that is, beach-lit novel by Julie Carobini, and I’m liking it better than its predecessor, Chocolate Beach, which I did enjoy.
Today’s teaser, from page 37 (randomly selected by Random.org) of Truffles by the Sea:
“Doug’s running late.”
I’ve been sitting at Bri’s dinged-up kitchen island nibbling on slabs of French bread from the bakery while mulling over my earlier decision to ask her for a loan sometime after tonight’s dinner.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just follow the directions at the “Teaser Tuesdays” post.
-TimK
Friday Fun: Mission Magical
How I love Mission: Impossible! Let me count the ways…
There’s a quirk of personal history connected with this show. The first time I ever saw it was as a teenager, when I happened to catch a rerun of a 1970 episode, “The Killer.” In this episode, co-starring Leonard Nimoy, the IMF team cons a killer who makes all his plans at random, at the last minute, to prevent anyone else from knowing what the plans are and developing countermeasures. So they pull off the con by making all the decisions for him. A très kewl episode.
Then Mission: Impossible came back for two more seasons in 1988-90. And I completely missed it. I still haven’t seen those episodes, and they haven’t yet been released on DVD. But now that the entire 7-season Mission: Impossible original series has been released on DVD, I hope they’ll continue with the 1988-90 episodes.
(And then, of course, there were the Tom Cruise movies. But we don’t talk about those.)
Since I’m almost through watching the original series on DVD, I was considering some of the things that characterized this show:
Read the rest of this entry »