Browse: Page 31
By J. Timothy King on January 25, 2010
I’ll post tomorrow the short post about Julie and Julia that I was planning to finish today, because this was way more exciting. The first box of copies of From the Ashes of Courage came today!
With this book, I did not order a proof copy, so I spent the last week nervous that it might not have come out as good as I expected. Here you get to see the actual, printed product at the same time I do.
(Plus, I read a little from the first chapter, tongue-tied goofs and all.) Continue reading ““From the Ashes of Courage” First Book Reading”
Posted in Ardor Point, Books | Tagged book reading, video
By J. Timothy King on January 22, 2010
A number of short statements, commentaries, and useless insights collected over the last mumble-mumble months.
On Technology
Top Facebook group: “I’m not yelling…I’m Italian…thats how we talk.”
Top Facebook group that someone ought to start: “Walking around naked makes me feel sexy.”
Some weeks ago, I posted “Coconut” to my Facebook status, and no one noticed. Do you know how much that hurts?
If you have to force viewers not to skip over your video ads, then you’re obviously showing them the wrong ads. Continue reading “Quip Hits”
Posted in Entertainment, Love and Relationships, Politics, Technology, Writing | Tagged quips
By J. Timothy King on January 21, 2010
Photo © 2009 ex.libris CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Last night, in between my own personal renditions of the Mission Impossible theme on guitar, I walked out to the car, to drive to practice. And much to my surprise, clad in a tee-shirt, jeans, and denim jacket, I had completely forgotten about the snow storm we got here a couple days ago.
Frozen snow covered my car, 3 or 4 inches thick. And I needed not to be late.
How fast can you clear off 3 or 4 inches of iced-over snow from a car, without boots or gloves or a winter coat. I think I may have broken the record last night.
So what does this have to do with flowers? If you thought the answer was “Springtime”… not quite. (And now you know a sales pitch is coming.) Continue reading “An Ice-encrusted Car Means that Flowers Are Near”
Posted in Ardor Point, Books | Tagged offers
By J. Timothy King on January 19, 2010
Yesterday, we finalized From the Ashes of Courage and sent it off to the printer’s. We’ll get a pre-order page for autographed copies up on the shop ASAP. Amazon and BN.com &c should have it on their sites by February 1, and Google Books &c soon thereafter.
In the meantime, I’ve released the ebook version, which I’m making available for free download, at least for the time being. We’re going to be distributing this ebook (as well as my other recently released ebooks) via other sites, such as Amazon and Smashwords, too. That process is… uh… in process.
Teaser Tuesdays
Last week, I posted a “Teaser Tuesdays” post over at my Facebook page. But I think I’ll start posting it here instead, either posting the teaser in its own post or on another short post.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just follow the instructions in the weekly “Teaser Tuesdays” prompt there.
I just finished reading Sunny Deuber’s independent memoir, Living on the Sunny Side. (BTW, she’s made the PDF ebook available for free download from the book’s site.) My brief review: Continue reading “Teaser Tuesdays, and FtAoC News”
Posted in Ardor Point, Books, Teaser Tuesdays | Tagged Living on the Sunny Side, Sunny Deuber |
By J. Timothy King on January 15, 2010
“Mourners Chair” photo © 2008 Brandi Sims CC BY 2.0
I’m preempting my usual “Friday Fun” column, because this past week was a crappy week, crappy enough to justify a little mourning.
Tuesday afternoon, as you know, a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti, killing tens of thousands—maybe even 100,000. That number represents one out of every 95-or-so people in that small country.
Shortly thereafter, we received news of the passing of my mother-in-law.
Shorty after that, a friend received news of the passing of his grandfather.
(This series of events also explains why I haven’t been blogging this week.)
So instead of my usual humorous, lighthearted Friday sketch, today I’d like to talk about some of the thoughts that have occurred to me this week. Continue reading “Thoughts on Life and Loss”
Posted in Inspiration | Tagged death, grief, life, loss |
By J. Timothy King on January 12, 2010
Photo © 2008 Ralph Bijker CC BY 2.0
One of the axioms of writing is that you should write only what you know from experience. Writers extend that to say that you really only know how to write your own sex: men write only male characters well, and women write only female characters well. That’s why, they say, practically all romance novelists are women, because most men don’t know how to write female genres, because men don’t know how women really think or what they really want.
Whether or not I know what women really want, you’ll have to judge that for yourself. Whether I know, really know, how women think… sometimes, I think I do; other times, I clearly don’t. Whether I— not just I, but whether any writer can write what he’s never experienced, he clearly can, if he understands what he’s writing and can imagine it. Continue reading “Writing the Opposite Sex”
Posted in Ardor Point, Books, Writing | Tagged men and women, sex |
By J. Timothy King on January 11, 2010
Right now, I can’t use my MacBook Pro. I’m using C’s computer to write this blog post.
The photo shows what the display corruption looks like while booting. After that, I get the white screen of death.
Now, my laptop may come back, because it eventually came back the two times it did this last week.
Frankly, it’s a little annoying.
What happens is, I’ll be doing something that stresses some part of the machine’s capabilities… but not always the same part. This time, I was watching a video and fast-playing through the boring bit, possibly stressing the video bandwidth. Last time, I was trying to start an application when the thing was already too busy, thus stressing CPU and disk bandwidth. The time before that… I don’t remember. In each case, the display suddenly corrupted, once in a diagonal banding pattern as you see in the photo, the other times with much worse corruption. Simultaneously, the computer crashed, hard.
Maybe my computer’s rebelling, because it’s become sentient, like the computers in Star Trek. Continue reading “Ever had a computer that wanted to make your life difficult?”
Posted in Technology | Tagged MacBook Pro, white screen of death |
By J. Timothy King on January 9, 2010
Photo © 2008 Umer Malik CC BY 2.0
My hope this new year is to form deeper relationships, to connect with people more closely, and to make greater, positive contributions to their lives. I’d say this post is one of the first big test cases.
I introduced these “hopes,” which could have been New Year’s resolutions—though I called them “wishes,” because I didn’t feel the word resolution captured their essence— I introduced them a couple Wednesdays ago, and then again in the context of a dream I awoke to on New Year’s day.
Maybe I should have called them “New Year’s prayers,” because that term could work just as well. Indeed, I have been praying for them to come true.
Today, in pursuit of an answer to that prayer, I was browsing through a long list of blogs that I had previously filed as potentially interesting. And I ran across the blog of “My Friend Amy”—that’s what she calls herself—and her weekend post, “Faith’n’Fiction Saturday,” a weekly blog meme. The title itself intrigued me: “faith” and “fiction,” what a très kewl combo! I had to read more.
This Saturday, she asks, “What are your New Year’s resolutions?” In particular, she wants to know, “Do any of your resolutions pertain to your spiritual disciplines or to your reading life?”
My answer (not exactly the kind of answer she had in mind, I’m sure): Yes, and yes, but more directly the former than the latter.
Here’s how… Continue reading “Faith’n’Fiction Saturday”
Posted in Inspiration, Personal Improvement | Tagged New Year
By J. Timothy King on January 8, 2010
Photo © 2005 Thomas Hawk CC BY-NC 2.0
I’m remembering my 20’s. Because everyone remembers his 20’s. I dropped out of school at 20 years old, met my wife at 22, married at 24, had my first daughter at 27, and my second at 29. Yes, the average American’s roaring 20’s are full of growth, choices, excitement, and dirty diapers, usually in that order.
Twenty is the age of true adulthood, finally. When you’re a 20-something, the whole world is before you. You can be anyone you want to be (if only you could figure out who that is), do anything you want to do (if only you could figure out what), achieve anything you want to achieve (if only you weren’t such an imbecile).
For me, the 20’s began with college. Or more precisely, dropping out of college, which I finally did after failing Materials Science for the second time in a row. I was attending Northeastern University, an Electrical Engineering major, which was fun my Freshman year, when I was 18. Then I turned 19, and it became less fun, but I was still learning stuff in class, and working in an electronics lab elsewhen. By half-way through my third year, however, I had been writing software at work—instead of doing electronics—and I was terrified of academics. (Still am. Terrified of academics, that is. And that’s completely unrelated to writing software, just for the record.) Continue reading “The Roaring 20-Somethings”
Posted in Humor, Stories, True Stories | Tagged 20-something, 20's, college
By J. Timothy King on January 6, 2010
A quick midnight blog post and an announcement.
I swear I did not coordinate this with Jamie Ridler. It’s either an astounding coincidence or a message from God. At midnight, a couple hours ago, Jamie prompted for Wishcasting Wednesday, “What dream do you wish to explore?” And as the song says, a dream is a wish your heart makes. (That’s a topic for another post.)
But I already wrote and posted the answer, about 12 hours ago, when I explored my New Year’s dream.
In summary, my dream is to make a difference through my writing about unquenchable hope, about spiritual growth, about love without strings. (And love without strings is a big deal with me.)
To explore this dream, to start with, I’ve posted free-to-download ebook versions of my two latest books:
- Love through the Eyes of an Idiot, the real-life romance story of my own search for love, (just-released electronic edition), and
- the advance text of From the Ashes of Courage, a contemporary romance novel about a young woman who has achieved everything she worked for, by sacrificing all the things she needs. (The final is scheduled for release on February 1.)
(That was the announcement, by the way.)
One of the reasons for posting these for people to download for free is because I want people to read these books, and I want them to enjoy them, and I want them to discover something in them that helps lift them up and pursue their own dreams.
And all of this reflected in a dream I had New Year’s day.
-TimK
P.S. Here’s the link again to the New Year’s dream post I posted yesterday.
Posted in Ardor Point, Books, Inspiration, Love and Relationships, Love through the Eyes of an Idiot, Wishcasting Wednesday | Tagged dreams |
