My classic barbershop experience

Posted by on January 14, 2012 No comments

I went in for a classic barber haircut about two weeks ago at Pappy’s Barber Shop on El Cajon Blvd.

This was a single antique barber chair located in the back of a tattoo parlor. The barber was a 24-year-old guy who’d gone to barber school (he is not Pappy; he is one of Pappy’s minions). He wore a classic barber smock, and he gave me a haircut, shaved the back of my neck with a straight razor, and massaged my shoulders with two of these handheld barber massage machines. They look like this.

This is now a trend, according to an article I read somewhere that I can’t find a link to now. Classic barbershops are cropping up all over the country. It was the kind of experience you usually see in gangster movies.

They do hot-towel shaves, too, which I’ll try one day for a special occasion.

The barber seemed surprised when I asked him to trim my ears and eyebrows. “We don’t usually do that but since you asked…. ” he said. I was surprised at his surprise. but he was 24 years old, and I suspect all his clientele is under 30, mostly under 25, and so he lacks experience with the out-of-control eyebrows and ear hair a guy gets after he’s 45. And that’s not even talking about the nostril hair. Let’s not talk about that.

I liked the classic barber experience, and it was inexpensive, only $17. But it was a bit too much of a production to make a regular thing out of it.

Plus I did a little haircut experiment. Ten years ago, I decided my hair was sparse enough that the only way to avoid looking ridiculous was to start getting it cut really short, with a #2 clipper all over, about 1/8″ long all over my head. That’s the only haircut I have had since, except for twice when I went totally crazy. Once I went for the #1 clipper, which is even shorter than the #2.

And a few months ago, I was really out of control and said make it as short as you can without actually shaving my head. And they gave me a trim with something called a #0 clipper.

When I went to Pappy’s, it had been a few months since I had a haircut, and I wanted to do something different. So after brief consultation with the Hair Styling Professional, he gave me the #3 trim up-top, and a #2 and #1 along the sides.

And it’s been a couple of weeks and I don’t like it.

For one thing, I don’t really have a good conception about just how bald I am in the back. It seems to be neurologically impossible to form a mental picture of the entirety of your own head. From the front-on view, which is the only way I can visualize it, my hair looks merely thin. But I suspect an outside observer would say I am mostly bald. And the #3 clipper on top doesn’t look good from any angle other than the front. Or so Julie tells me, and after inspecting my scalp while standing between two mirrors, I believe her.

Normally, I’d wait a couple of more weeks to get my next haircut. The new haircut isn’t that bad. But a week from today I’m off to an all-hands corporate meeting, during which photos will be taken. And I suspect these photos will replace our existing profile pictures on our various websites. I’ll want to look my best for those photos, if only because I’ll be looking at them several times every workday for a very long time. So it’s off to get another haircut later today, and this time I’ll just go back to Hair Cut Pros, the Vietnamese place I’ve been using the past couple of years.

Creative writing, progress report

Posted by on January 2, 2012 No comments

The current novel is at 22,000 words. I think it’s going to end up at 50,000 words, which is wicked short for a print novel, but feels like a good length for an e-novel. It’s going to be the first of a continuing series.

I have a backlog of existing work to revise and post: Three shorts stories and two novel drafts. I really need to be working on those. But I hate to let a day go by without doing a little original creative writing, and that seems to be all that I have the energy or time to do some days. I need to be more patient about this, just chip away at things a little a day. That’s how creative writing works. It’s much slower than blogging or journalism, which is what I’ve done professionally my whole career.

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” is selling all right all things considered. Two reviews on Amazon, one five-star and one four-star. Fifteen sales to date on Amazon. One sale on Barnes & Noble. It’s a decent start. It’s $5.65 in royalties. Journey of a thousand miles, single step, and all that.

Many ebooks don’t sell any copies at all, so I’m already ahead of the game there. My sales are good for a first ebook from someone unknown at creative writing who doesn’t have a popular blog or other social media platform to promote it. I mean, my number of Twitter followers, Google+ and Facebook friends is good, but it’s not spectacular. My personal blog doesn’t get many readers. And it just wouldn’t be right for me to use The CMO Site to promote my creative writing — not right, and disastrous professionally. The CMO Site and my creative writing are two different things; one is my career and the other is my hobby and a side-business.

I need to get the ebook posted to Smashwords so it’ll be available on iBooks, Sony, and other stores, as well as available for download. Then I can start the real marketing; writing some background posts for my blog, Google+, and Facebook, and also sending review copies to other people’s blogs.

Flagrant self-promotion:

Buy “The Biggest Man in Lilliput” here for $0.99:

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” on Kindle

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” on Nook

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” is now on the Nook Store

Posted by on December 29, 2011 No comments

Just a quick note to let you know that my ebook short story, “The Biggest Man in Lilliput,” is now available on the Nook Store, priced at $0.99. Buy it here.

And its also available on the Kindle Store. Buy it here.

More formats to come. I’ll probably go with SmashWords for everything else. I have downloaded what feels like a prodigious amount of documentation for getting started with that.

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput,” my first ebook, is on sale now! Is this exciting or what?!

Posted by on December 27, 2011 No comments

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” is on sale now at Amazon.com, priced at $0.99.

This is a huge deal for me. I’ve dreamed about being a published science fiction writer since I was a kid. And now I am. Well, sort of. This is not the way I imagined it when I was a teen-ager; I thought I’d first get a couple of short stories published in science fiction magazines, then get books published through traditional publishing. This is a different path.

And, truly, I won’t really feel like I’ve achieved the dream until I’ve sold at least 100 copies. That’s my initial goal — 100 copies.

So what are you waiting for? Buy it now! MY CHILDHOOD DREAMS HANG IN THE BALANCE!!!!! NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING THOUGH!!!!!

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” is a battle of wits to save the 21st Century nation of tiny people from a mob of human religious fanatics. Mayor Yoby of the Lilliputian City of New Mildendo has to save the day by outthinking his enemies. It’s got thrills, humor, and a little satire.

It’s a short story, 5,600 words, and should take about 35 minutes to read.

Julie did the cover, and also was my most valued first reader and copy editor. Didn’t she do a terrific job? That’s right, this ebook is a family project. SO IF YOU DON’T BUY IT THAT MEANS YOU’RE AGAINST FAMILY VALUES.

The photo on the cover is gorgeous, you can take a closer look here. It’s by Scanrail. It’s a photo of Stockholm, Sweden, standing in for the fictional city of New Mildendo, Lilliput, in my story.

I’ve submitted the piece to Barnes & Noble for availability on the Nook; I expect approval by Thursday. I’ll let you know here when its available.

Update: And now that’s done. Buy “The Biggest Man” in Lilliput on Nook for $0.99.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started.

It rained the morning the mob of Gullivers descended on Lilliput, the kind of fast, driving rain that was typical for summer storms in that country. Rain was a deadly threat to Lilliputians caught outdoors. A few unlucky Lilliputians were pummeled to death by raindrops, or drowned, every year.

But Lilliputians had centuries of experience protecting themselves from rainstorms. They dealt with the threat. They either stayed home to wait out the rain, or commuted through a network of tunnels under the city.

The morning the Gulliver mob descended on the City, Mayor Yoby stayed home in the Executive Mansion to wait out the rain, coordinating weather control by phone. When the weather cleared, he headed in to City Hall.

He rode the public omnibus to work, a long metal tube strapped to the back of a domesticated lizard. He liked to ride the bus. The political bloggers of Lilliput said Yoby’s favoring public transportation was an affectation, an ongoing PR stunt. They were right. But that was only part of it. Yoby just plain liked meeting the people of the city, letting anybody who had something to say come right up to him and say it; riding public transit gave him an opportunity to do that.

That morning, Yoby got an earful from one of his constituents, a dowager complaining about an infestation of ants in her candy store. The knee-high insects were harmless, but they terrified the children, and left their damn smelly pheromone trails all over the premises. Yoby was in the midst of reassuring the woman that the Sanitation Department would get on the problem when the bus driver paged him in a barely intelligible voice on the vehicle’s scratchy public address system.

Yoby excused himself. The bus was packed with Lilliputians, but they shouldered out of his way when they saw him coming. They recognized the mayor.

Yoby was hard to miss, a man with skin the color and texture of a well-worn, favorite boot, a bald, egg-shaped head, and a barrel-shaped body, wearing a sharp business suit. At more than six and a half inches tall, he was a veritable giant among Lilliputians, towering more than a half-inch over most of his fellow citizens.

When Yoby got to the front of the bus, he found two uniformed cops waiting for him, accompanied by the mayor’s chief of staff, Piopo, a handsome, middle-aged Lilliputian woman.

“You’re needed in City Hall,” Piopo said. “Code Rampaging Giraffe. We have a mount waiting for you here to get through the crowds. We must get moving immediately.”

Yoby indulged his only two vices. He lit a cigar and swore.

***

Gullivers were both lifeline and threat to the Lilliputians. Since the destruction of the home islands by a volcano shortly after the historic visit from Lemuel Gulliver, Lilliputians had settled in a diaspora all over the globe. Eventually, they formed a new nation, on the east end of Long Island, just a few dozen miles from the Gulliver city of New York.

Lilliputians traded with Gullivers for food, medical supplies, rare materials, and perhaps most important, knowledge.

Artwork and scientific discovery had the same value no matter what the size of the producer. Lilliputian livestock and vegetables were prized for their delicate flavors. Lilliputians worked in the movie and TV industry, especially as actors — they could do a normal movie on a tabletop, and put on an entire, sprawling epic in a single room. The entirety of James Cameron’s classic Titanic was filmed with Lillputian actors in the bedroom of a suburban house. And, with their tiny hands, Lilliputians excelled at delicate work.

Lilliputians and Gullivers were partners in commerce and culture. And yet, the so-called threat posed by Lilliputians was a constant thread running through the more bigoted wings of Gulliver politics. The Gullivers claimed Lilliputians hated America, were stealing human jobs, corrupting morals, distributing pornography, collaborating with terrorists, selling drugs, pirating music on the Internet, and every other imaginable sin.

Get the ebook. Read the rest.

My 16 favorite iPhone apps of 2011

Posted by on December 21, 2011 No comments

These are the apps I find most useful. I compiled the list just by reading the app icons off the first and second screen of my iPhone. The only apps on this list are ones that I’ve been using more than a month, to prevent infatuations from getting listed.

Social

Tweetbot ($3). My favorite Twitter client. Mac bloggers can get rhapsodic and precious in their Tweetbot reviews. I just like Tweetbot. It’s fun and easy to use.

Instagram (free). My love for this free social photo-sharing app snuck up on me. I thought I was just trying it out, and then I tried posting a couple of photos, and a few months later I was hooked. Whereas Flickr seems to have gotten crustier over time with useless features, while failing to keep up on essential capabilities, Instagram does everything a photo-sharing site should and very little that’s unnecessary. Using Instagram, you can post photos, write captions, share with other people, view photos from other people, Like photos, leave comments, share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networks, and that’s about it. It’s like Twitter for photos. Oh, crap, now I’m the one sounding precious, aren’t I?

I can do without the filters on Instagram, but everybody else seems to like them.

Foursquare (free). I check in regularly. I don’t know why. I never get any offers. Rarely, someone I know has checked in at the same location, but if they’re there I almost always know it already. And yet I still keep tapping that button.

Facebook (free).

Fitness

Lose It! (free). Keeping a food and exercise journal is key to losing weight and getting fit; you need to write down every bite you eat, and every time you work out. That’s important for two reasons: For controlling the amount of food you eat, of course, but also to become conscious and mindful of what and when you’re eating.

Most fat people aren’t mindful; they just eat compulsively and automatically. Keeping a food journal requires you to be aware of what you’re putting in your mouth.

I weigh and measure every meal and snack. I take precise measurements with a scale when I’m home, often down to the gram. When I’m out, I estimate. Lose It tracks the calories of those foods, and also the calories burned exercising, and does so with an easy-to-use and attractive interface.

This year, Lose It added a bar code scanner, which has proven very useful; when I’m eating packaged food like a frozen dinner, I just scan the barcode with the iPhone camera and Lose It automatically tallies the calories.

Lose It’s database and calorie calculations aren’t the greatest. I find that most of the foods I eat aren’t in the database; I have to add them manually. Fortunately, I only have to do that once for each food; after that, Lose It remembers. Likewise, I’ve had to adjust my daily calorie budget; Lose It’s recommendations are way off. But Lose It makes it easy to do those things.

I use Google to find the calories of any foods that aren’t in the database. For example, Google grilled turkey and brie sandwich and you’ll get several entries; I just pick the median amount and enter it in to Lose It.

RunKeeper (free). I use it to track the duration and distance of my daily walks.

Both Lose It and RunKeeper have social features and badges that I don’t pay any attention to, with the exception of posting my RunKeeper results each day to Facebook.

Weightbot ($1.99). Lose It lacks a good diary for keeping track of your weight over time; it’ll tell you what you weighed last time you weighed yourself, but not what you weighed six months ago. That’s what Weighbot is for. It’s less important now that I’ve hit my goal weight, but I keep it up anyway.

Media

Podcaster ($2). I listen to hours of podcasts every week, and Podcaster does a better job managing them for me than the native iPod app. Podcaster does automatic, over-the-air updates of new podcast episodes, and lets me create a playlist and listen to one podcast after another without having to manually start each one.

Audible (free). Audiobooks.

Productivity

OmniFocus ($20). The iPhone version of the ultimate to-do-list management app. I also use the iPad and Mac versions. Mainly, I use the Mac version, and use the iPhone version to add new items.

Due ($5). Reminders and timers. I use it instead of the built-in iPhone timer for a couple of reasons. One is because it supports pre-set alarms. For example, I have a pre-set configured at 5 minutes to time steeping tea, and another at 32.5 minutes for the turnaround point on my walk.

The other reason I prefer Due to the built-in timer is you don’t have to press a button to turn off; it rings for a second or two and then shuts off on its own.

Since this fall, iOS 5 has its own reminders app; I haven’t compared Due with that.

Due has many other capabilities, but I don’t use most of them.

Other

GV Mobile+ ($3). My preferred Google Voice client for the iPhone. I bought it before Google had its own, official client. It’s not so much better than the official client that I’d recommend others pay for it.

Soulver ($4). Better than the iPhone’s built-in calculator; it displays results adding-machine-tape style. You can also include words in your calculations.

TomTom USA ($40). GPS and turn-by-turn directions.

1Password ($8.99). Password management. One version runs on the iPhone and iPad, and it syncs with a version for the Mac. Essential for generating secure passwords, and remembering my hundreds of passwords for Web sites and networks.

Chipotle (free). Very nice mobile commerce app; it remembers our weekly order, and, with a couple of buttons, we order, pre-pay,then I drive over, cut to the front of the line (without making eye contact with anyone in the line — that’s important), pick up and go. I’ve been trying to get an interview with Chipotle about this app for The CMO Site for months; if you have any connections over there please let me know.

My 3 favorite gadgets of 2011

Posted by on December 20, 2011 2 comments

iPad 1: We got ours the day they came out, and we’ve used them for hours every day since. Primarily I use mine for reading Web articles through a variety of interfaces, mainly the Web browser, Instapaper, and Reeder. I also use the iPad a lot for Twitter and Facebook.

I skipped the iPad 2 because it didn’t seem to offer enough bang to be worth the upgrade. There’s a rumor of an iPad 3 coming in the spring, with a faster processor and Retina display. My mind isn’t made up whether to upgrade; we’ll see what else it offers.

I’d love a 7-inch iPad, about half the size of the iPad’s current 10.1-inch display. There are rumors that’s coming in a year. I don’t know whether to believe the rumors. A year is a long way away; I’m not going to worry about it.

iPhone 4: It’s never far away from me, not when I’m sleeping, not when I’m working at my desk, not when I’m out and about. I use it to track meals and exercise for fitness, to participate in social media, to listen to podcasts and audiobooks, to get directions where I’m going, as a camera, to write notes and to-dos for myself, as an alarm clock and, incidentally, as a phone. I didn’t go for the 4S for the same reason I didn’t buy the iPad 2: Not enough of an upgrade to be worth spending money on.

Kindle 4: I bought one of these in October when they came out, and it’s fantastic. I switched to ebooks when the Kindle app came out for the iPad, and didn’t look back; I’ve bought a couple of dozen ebooks in the past year, but only two print books, in both cases because they weren’t available electronically. The Kindle is lighter and more comfortable than reading on an iPad, plus it holds a charge for about a month. Julie has a Kindle Touch, which is the same as mine but with a touchscreen.

Not on the list: We watch a fair amount of TV at our house, and we have a DVR issued from our cable company, Cox Communications. We loathe that DVR. We miss our old TiVo, which, alas doesn’t support HD programming. And a new TiVo that supports HD would be too expensive. I’m thinking we might want to do something homemade with a Mac Mini configured as a server, either running iTunes or Myth TV. But there’s a question of (a) Time to set it up and (b) Expense.

I suppose I might want to put our new Samsung TV on this list. We certainly use it every day. But it’s just a TV; it’s not that interesting. If we put the TV on the list, we’d have to also add the microwave, toaster-oven, and electric water kettle, and where does it end?

If you’re a “Love, Actually” fan, and you haven’t seen the deleted scenes, do. They’re a treat.

Posted by on December 19, 2011 1 comment

We watched the movie again over the weekend. It’s definitely in a class of movies I could see every few years pretty much forever, along with A Christmas Story, Die Hard, That Thing You Do, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Wonder Boys, My Favorite Year, and Almost Famous.

One of the many things I love about Love Actually, with its too-many-to-count story lines loosely weaved together, is that at least two of the storylines end unhappily. It makes the ending of the movie more bittersweet.

Something I noticed this time around: One turning point in the movie is when Alan Rickman’s character goes shopping for Christmas gifts, and buys an expensive necklace. Has he already decided to buy it for Mia? Or is he still thinking at that point he might buy it for his wife?

Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister character is less and less believable every time we watch the movie. And I still don’t care, because Hugh Grant’s character just gets better and better. Watch his face in the scene at the end when his bodyguard starts singing “Good King Wenceslas.”

The cut scenes are a treat. We didn’t watch them again this year, because we watched on Apple TV rather than a DVD, but I would have wanted to watch them if we had them.

I’m not usually a fan of uncut scenes and director’s voice-overs in DVDs. I’ve watched a few and enjoyed them, but I don’t anymore, and I don’t miss them.

Love, Actually is the exception. The uncut scenes are very good, because they are entire vignettes and story arcs, some of them featuring characters not in the released movie. Other DVD extras are just scenes or fragments of scenes, but these are whole stories.

Fans of the movie will remember Emma Thompson’s character complaining about their troublesome son Bernard. In the uncut scenes, we see a sequence where Bernard gets into hilarious trouble over a school assignment. In another sequence, we see the headmistress of the school caring for her terminally ill girlfriend. One nice touch in these two story lines: In the first one, the headmistress is a stiff, unlikeable authority figure, and then when she cares for her girlfriend, we see another side of her.

Another storyline deals with two women in an African village. The African storyline is loosely woven into the stories of the main British characters through a very clever device.

Yet another storyline deals with Liam Neeson’s character, whose computer has been taken over by a virus that displays porn pop-ups in his browser, just as his late wife’s parents are about to come over for dinner.

I understand why those stories and scenes were cut. One reason is that the movie is already very long. Another reason is that the Bernard and porn stories don’t fit the rest of the movie. They’re broad farce; the rest of Love, Actually is broad, but nowhere near as farcical as those stories. The climactic line of dialogue in the Bernard story, delivered by Emma Thompson, rings false. It’s too Hollywood.

But still: The deleted scenes of Love, Actually are well worth seeing, if you’re the kind of fan who sees the movie more than once.

And here they are on YouTube. Or, two of them at least:

Bernard’s story:

The headmistress’s story:

P.S. We also watched A Christmas Story again this weekend. My insight this time around: Ralphie is a horrible, horrible brat. The Higbee’s Santa should have kicked him even harder.

The Foundation as the villains of the Foundation Trilogy

Posted by on December 16, 2011 2 comments

Non-violence is one of the biggest themes of The Foundation Trilogy. Other space operas are filled with space battles and thrilling hand-to-hand combat. There’s very little violence onstage in The Foundation Trilogy. Mostly, the novels consist of people sitting around and talking.

The Foundation explicitly shuns violence. It’s founded on a planet without natural resources, by a colony of academics. They don’t fight their enemies because they can’t; they have to out-think their enemies instead.

One of the major characters of the trilogy is Salvor Hardin, a politician whose motto is, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

So the Foundation Trilogy is, on the surface at least, an extremely ethically advanced series. Forty years before the publication of the original stories during World War II, we had a president, Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war. TR embraced combat; he though war was essential to making nations great, and he said so publicly. In The Foundation Trilogy, we a philosophy of war as something to be avoided wherever possible, and avoidable by any competent person.

And yet the Foundation trades war for deceit, trickery, and cooperating in oppression.

The opening sequence of Foundation deals with Gaal Dornick, a young man from the provinces come to the capital to study mathematics under the great Hari Seldon. Once he arrives at the capital, Dornick learns that Hari Seldon has arranged to have him arrested. Any sensible person would have nothing to do with Seldon afterwards, but Dornick doesn’t seem to have much sense, because he becomes one of Seldon’s loyal acolytes.

Dornick and Seldon are on trial together, and they manage to escape imprisonment, but only by agreeing to leave the capital city, along with Seldon’s 100,000 followers, to the remote planet of Terminus. Seldon remarks that this was exactly what he wanted; his followers would never have gone willingly, so he had to force them to come with him.

Does this sound like the behavior of one of history’s good guys? Apparently so, because the Foundation reveres Seldon. They continue to revere him even after learning that the mission of the Foundation was another lie. Seldon had said he wanted the Foundation to prepare a great Encyclopedia of human knowledge to shorten the dark age following the fall of the Galactic Empire. Fifty years after the founding of the Foundation, Seldon comes back in a recorded message to reveal that, too, was a lie. He was only interested in getting all those academics isolated from the main body of the empire, unarmed and helpless, so they could use nonviolent means to start the climb to the second Galactic Empire.

The Foundation continues in the tradition of its lying founder. Faced with hostile neighbors with more military power but much less advanced technology, the Foundation gives its neighbors the secrets of atomic power. But the Foundation also starts a fake religion, with the premise that its technology isn’t the result of science and engineering but of miracles and magic. Thus, the Foundation perpetuates the ignorance and oppression of billions of its neighbors so that it can strengthen its own power.

So who, exactly, are the villains of this series?

Hat tips. I.e., tips for hat wearers

Posted by on December 15, 2011 No comments

Hats should be removed indoors, unless the headgear is part of a costume. Ask yourself: Is it Halloween? Am I at a science fiction convention? If the answers to these questions are no, then the hat comes off indoors.

Unfortunately, this means most of the time you shouldn’t wear a hat, unless you know you’ll be outdoors nearly all the time. Because in public places, there’s nowhere to put the hat when you’re inside, except for leaving it on your head, which is barbaric. And that’s too bad, because hats are excellent.

In the Mad Men days and before, there were hatcheck girls and hat racks for gentlemen and ladies to leave their hats while indoors. But they aren’t around anymore.

Ideally, ball caps should also be removed indoors. But it’s OK to leave them on. It’s no big deal. They’re just caps.

Knit caps should only be worn outdoors, and only during the coldest weather, never for decorative purposes. They are not decorative, they’re functional, for warmth. Worn inside, they make you look like a hipster idiot.

My first ebook: Getting closer

Posted by on December 14, 2011 No comments

Julie did a bang-up first pass at creating a cover for my ebook short story. It looks sharp and professional, playful and a little bit serious, capturing the tone of the story nicely. It uses a gorgeous cover photo too; it’s the one titled San Francisco Cityscape With Cookware on this page. I love the photo — I love all the photos on that page — but I don’t think they’re quite right for this particular story. And I don’t have permission to use them. So we’ll have to find another photo. That’s OK, there are plenty of public-domain cityscapes available on the Internet.

The story, by the way, is called “The Biggest Man in Lilliput.” It takes the premise that a colony of Lilliputians built a city on North America, and now it’s survived to the present day, with Internet access and political blogs and all the other accoutrements of modern life. I guess you could say it’s a fantasy-comedy-thriller. It’s short. I’ll be selling it for $0.99. Or maybe $1.09, because apparently $0.99 is a red flag that says crappy shovelware just dumped into an ebook file without even being proofread.

No, I think I’ll just go for $0.99. Pricing for electronic goods, where the cost of reproduction and distribution is near zero, is hard.

I want to have the story for sale by Christmas. E-reader sales are going to be huge for Christmas, and all the people with empty new e-readers will want something to read right away. So that’s an opportunity to make some sales.

I will be using ZappTek LegendMaker software to handle the conversion, which is supposed to be automatic and easy. But I vaguely remember little quirks of ebook formatting that don’t appear to be covered by the LegendMaker documentation. For example: Covers for epub-formatted ebooks, which is the format used by most ebook readers, need to have opaque backgrounds. But the Amazon Kindle requires a transparent background. Or maybe I’m misremembering. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I need to look into this.

I don’t just want the book available in one place, though. After the Kindle store, I’ll put it up on the Barnes & Noble Nook store. Then here, adding a storefront page to this Web site. This blog runs on WordPress, and I understand it’s not difficult to set up a cash register on a WordPress site. I’ll also want to put the book up on as many other ebook sites as I can find; I understand SmashWords is good for that.

Now here’s a fun idea: Con-Dor, a local science fiction convention, is March 2-4. I’d like to print up postcards with the book cover and promotional materials to give out at the conference. Better yet: Postcards to sell, with redemption codes for the ebook. Buy the postcard, come to the Web site later, enter the unique redemption code on the postcard, and claim your copy of the book, prepaid. As if that’s not nerdy enough, I’d like to get a Square credit card reader so I can take credit card payments when I’m just walking around. But only if the convention rules allow it; I don’t want to be a dick about it.

Also: Writing. The most important part. At this point, I have a lot of material in the pipeline — several short stories written and abandoned that need shaves and haircuts, two novel drafts requiring revising, and a third novel in progress. Lots to do.

2012 is going to be a fun year.