giveaway

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Fight valiantly to-day; and yet I do thee wrong to blog thee of it, for thou art framed of the firm truth of valor

270-red-boxing-gloves-vector-image-free

Good morning and Happy Boxing Day!  I hope that all of you who celebrated yesterday had a wonderful Christmas, and that those of you who celebrate Hanukkah continue to have a wonderful Festival of Lights.  For all others in the northern hemisphere, I pray that thou dost celebrate the passing of the solstice and the lengthening of daylight…and in the southern hemisphere, enjoy your summer!

For those of you who choose to celebrate Boxing Day in a twisted and quasi-literal sort of way, I remind you of this:  bare-knuckle boxing engenders fewer fatalities than does boxing with gloves, because the latter encourages far more frequent blows to the head, with consequent shaking and damaging of the brain*.  Honestly, I doubt there are (m)any who do such a silly thing, and precious few of us, with bizarre senses of humor, who even consider the possibility.  Still, just in case, I thought I’d bring it up.

And now, a quick and more or less final reminder:  My giveaway of free books (Kindle format) ends with the passing of the year (and, by some reckonings, the decade).  By the time my next regular blog post goes out, the offer will be over, so if you want to join the numerous beneficiaries of this giveaway, please, get in touch with me either here in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter, or through some other means that will reach me, and make your request.  I will need an email address eventually, to which to deliver the link for your e-book(s), but as long as your request is sent before midnight on December 31st (according to your local time zone) then you will receive your giveaway, even if the email only follows later.

For those of you who are resistant or ambivalent because of the necessary Kindle format, I’ll simply remind you that electronic books are far more ecologically and environmentally friendly than are paper books and other physical printed media (magazines, newspapers, etc.).  This is one of the great advantages of modern electronic media, and it is far from the only one.  This blog, and squillions like it, is another.

On a related note, I’m “currently” partaking of a book in both Kindle and Audible format (at separate paces), and its subject is the potential sustainability of perhaps the most precious resource of all: the healthy duration of our individual lives.  The book is Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, written by the eminent Harvard biologist David Sinclair, along with Matthew LaPlante.  I highly recommend it, and I’ll probably write a review of it on Iterations of Zero once I’ve finished the book in both formats.

Speaking of IoZ, I’ve posted a few things there in the past day or so.  The first was a recording of me playing a rather amateurish guitar version of “Greensleeves” aka “What Child is This?” just barely in time for Christmas.  The second was a release of two earlier recordings of a sort of karaoke and “duet” of me singing the Radiohead song “Knives Out”.  You’re welcome and encouraged to listen to all three recordings, and I’d be happy to receive your feedback.  I’m a glutton for punishment, it seems.

Unanimity editing has gotten slightly less than its usual attention of late, partly because I’ve been stricken with a flu-like illness, possibly the actual flu**, and have been relatively miserable for the past six days.  I’m on the mend, however, and though not quite back into full boxing form, I’m eager to return to the ring.  Other things, such as an office move at my job, about which I was none too happy—but with which I’m becoming more enamored—and just the general schedule derailment caused by a midweek holiday, have also intervened.  I did not edit at all yesterday.  I was too busy eating.

Nevertheless, the book proceeds more or less steadily, and publication is on the visible horizon, unless I’m falling prey to a metaphorical optical illusion.  After that, I mean to finish my novella and then publish it among other stories in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Then I’m going to be doing something rather more light-hearted than Unanimity, a sort of fable called Neko/Neneko, which I think I’ve mentioned here before.  That’s all assuming my plans don’t change, of course.  I didn’t have any mice helping me make those plans, so hopefully they won’t gang agley.  That’s what the quote by Robert Burns (aka “Robbie”—or perhaps “Rabbi?”) recommends against, isn’t it: men making plans with the help of mice?  It was something like that.

In any case, the holiday season is not yet over.  A New Year beckons, as does a new decade, and though great Nature recognizes not our arbitrary subdivisions of days and years and centuries and eons, such things matter to humans, of which I am one***.  So, enjoy and embrace the time.  Make merry (and possibly Pippin); indulge yourselves in ways that don’t cause harm to others or yourselves; and by all means, give yourselves some belated Christmas gifts by requesting a free copy of one or three of my stories.  We all need things to which to look forward to bolster our enthusiasm for life, after all.

TTFN

*It can hurt your hands—a lot—to hit someone in the face with bare knuckles.

**It serves me right for not having gotten my flu shot this year.  I can offer no excuses.

***No matter what I or anyone else may occasionally say.

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Being holiday, the blogger’s shop is shut.

Solstice

Welcome, one and all! It’s Thursday, which means that it’s time for my weekly blog post…as you already know, since you’re reading it.

I hereby remind you all about my book giveaway, which continues until the end of the month, the end of the year, and—by some measures—the end of the decade.  If you contact me and let me know your choice(s)—or have me make the choice(s) for you—and give me an email address, I will send you one novel or three short stories, in Kindle format.  I’d love to be able to send you out hard copies, of course, but I can’t really afford to do that right now, and currently, most of my short stories are available in electronic format only.

Don’t wait!  Time is ticking, as it always does, unless you travel at the speed of light (which you can’t, since you’re made of particles that interact with the Higgs field).  Next Thursday will be “Boxing Day”, as the day after Christmas is called in the UK and related places*.  By the following Thursday, the giveaway will be over, its metaphorical carriage having turned back into a pumpkin at midnight on December 31st.  So, give yourself a free holiday gift.  You have nothing to lose but a tiny portion of your time and a tiny bit of storage space on whatever electronic device you might use for e-books.  And you would gain…well, in my biased but humble opinion, I think you’ll gain some enjoyable stories.

Speaking of which, this week I finished another round of editing on Unanimity, and I’ve begun the next one.  I mean to find ways to tighten up my schedule so that I can go more quickly from now on.  The whole project is taking sooooooooooo long, and I really can’t wait—or I don’t want to wait—for the book to be out so you can all read it.

I did a minor experiment on Iterations of Zero recently, with some conflicting results.  Near the end of last week, some thoughts occurred to me that I wanted to get down quickly, and I didn’t have the time to write them, since that would have interfered more with my editing schedule.  So, I just recorded the thoughts aloud on my voice recorder app, and later in the day, I edited and published them on IoZ, here.  The response was decent, both on the site and on my social media pages.  Pleased, I did a second, more formally prepared but no more formally spoken recording earlier this week (it was about eight minutes long and the previous had been about five, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference).  That second recording has gotten no response at all on WordPress, as of this writing.  I’m not sure why.

Arguably, the first topic—depression, a subject near and dear to my heart, so to speak—was drearier than the second, which was political philosophy.  Maybe right now, with all that’s been happening, people are fed up with politics, at least in the US and the UK.  If so, I can hardly blame them.  Maybe the second title was a little too cryptic.  Or maybe the recording was simply missed because I posted it early in the week, and I’ve been recently publishing my IoZ entries toward the end of the week; maybe people who would have been interested simply didn’t notice it because of the erratic timing.  Or maybe people are just too caught up in the rapidly approaching holidays to take time out to listen to an eight-minute ramble.  Maybe audio is just not a good format for me.

I’ll continue the experiment a little bit longer (your suggestions are welcome on that score) to give it a fair day in court…or in Congress, or in Parliament, or whatever.  The audio format has advantages and disadvantages.  In first draft at least, it’s quicker and easier to get audio out (though I do type fast).  Audio, however, doesn’t tend to be as well-organized as a typed and edited blog post.  It’s easy to skip ideas accidentally and realize the fact too late to make corrections (without a lot of trouble doing the sound editing, anyway, which is not complicated in principle, but which can be tedious).

But audio can feel more personable sometimes, I think.  I know people like to watch videos of people talking about ideas at least partially for that personal touch, but I’m not quite able to get over that hurdle of anti-narcissism.  Also, videos are so data intensive that I find them wasteful, unless adding the visual portion really improves the conveyance of ideas.

In my case, video just gives people the option to look at my ugly mug while I’m talking, which is only going to put them off their lunches.  I suppose I could consider it my contribution to fighting the western epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but at this time of year, with so many celebratory meals being enjoyed, I’d just as soon not be accused of ruining someone’s holiday dinner.

And with that, I’ll wrap things up for this week**.  For those of you who celebrate it, I wish you a very merry and happy Christmas, which will have passed by the time you read my next weekly blog post.  For those of you who celebrate Hanukkah, I wish you the happiest of that holiday, which will be well underway by next Thursday.

And of course, all of you please enjoy any and every other of the many celebratory holidays that come at this time of year, having evolved from older celebrations of the Winter Solstice (which is in three days).  I wish all those in the northern hemisphere the happy anticipation of the lengthening daylight to come.  Those of us who are Seasonally Affected can at least look forward to our spiritual weight beginning to lighten in the days and months to come.

To all potential readers (and anyone else), all around the world, I wish you all the best.

TTFN

*I have no honest idea what the name of the day means.  I doubt that it has anything to do with pugilism.  If it refers to Christmas presents, it’s strange to think of boxing them after they’ve been given and received.  If anyone reading knows the etymology of this term, I’d be delighted to learn it.

**Appropriately enough.

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I give away myself for you and blog upon the exchange. (Announcing a Giveaway!)

gift box

Hello, good morning, and welcome not merely to another Thursday, but to a new month!  It’s the last month of the year and, depending on how you divvy things up, it’s the last month of the decade (though an argument could be made that the decade really ends with the beginning of 2021, and that the twenty-first century began in 2001, not 2000.  But I’ll try not to split hairs).

I haven’t yet written this week’s Iterations of Zero post, for those of you who might be eagerly anticipating it.  I’m afraid that the freeform approach I’m taking to that project often leads me to leave it to the end of the week.  I may need to set a specific day for releasing it again, as I do with this blog, though I fear that might lead to perverse resistance on my part.  In any case, I don’t want to let writing it interfere with the daily writing and editing of my fiction.

Speaking of which, things are proceeding steadily with the editing of Unanimity.  I’m nearing the end of my latest run-through, which will put me truly over the halfway mark of that process, which is exciting.  I don’t know about you all, but I for one am anxiously looking forward to finishing and publishing that book.  I can hardly wait for someone (besides me) to read it.

And further, speaking of that desire, and of my fiction still, I’ve decided to do something at which I’ve hinted previously:  I’m going to do a giveaway of some of my fiction in honor of the upcoming holiday season—during which, by many a tradition, we give gifts to those about whom we care.  I certainly care very much about people who love to read, and I can’t help but have a narcissistic soft spot for someone who wants to read my stories.

This giveaway will be e-book only, for several reasons—logistics and cost not the least, since I am a poor boy*.  Also, my short stories are mainly published in e-book format, on Kindle.  In case you don’t know, you don’t need to have a Kindle device to read them.  The Kindle app can be installed on any tablet, smartphone, or computer, and it’s a free at Amazon for the asking.  Many of you might be resistant to the idea of reading books on Kindle, preferring them in the more traditional form.  I do have deep and personal sympathy for that preference, of course, but there is incredible joy in being able to carry a library of well over two hundred books in one’s pocket…which is what I do all day, every day, thanks to Kindle.  It also saves on shelf space and—nominally—on trees.  Of course, you’re clearly reading this post on some form of computer, so it’s presumably not too great a leap for you to use Kindle.

Now to the specifics and then the mechanics of the giveaway.  Some of my works are novels and some are short stories.  Since the Kindle versions of the novels are currently priced roughly three times the cost of each of the short stories, I’ll give anyone who wants them a choice: you can be sent three short stories or one book (one of which is actually a collection of three “short” stories, which makes things nicely symmetrical).  Lest you think that’s a meager gift, let me remind you that my short stories don’t tend to be very short.  Some of them are nearly novellas.  The shortest one, I think, is Solitaire, and it’s also by far the oldest and the darkest of my available tales.

As to the mechanics: to send you the books/stories, I will need to have an email address to which to send it/them.  You can contact me here, in the comments section below, if you like (this week or later in the year is fine), or through my Facebook author’s page or my Twitter account (see the sidebar).  In case you don’t want your email address to be public knowledge, which I do understand, you should certainly feel free to direct message me through Facebook or Twitter.  Don’t forget to tell me which novel or which short stories you want me to send you**.  You can find a list of them on my Amazon author’s page, or on Goodreads, or here on this blog under the subject heading “My Books”.

I will not save your email address externally, nor shall I use it for future promotional purposes, nor shall I sell it or share it with anyone without a court order***.  All I really want to share is my work with interested readers.

That’s about it for this week.  I look forward to hearing from you, and though I don’t attach any strings to my giveaway, I’d certainly love you to give me feedback after reading my stories.  But that’s your decision, and I’ll think no less of you if you don’t (for whatever that’s worth).

TTFN

*I need no sympathy.

**Otherwise I’ll just pick for you.

***Possibly not even then.  My respect for the courts is not what it once was.

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O, let my blogs be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.

Antarctic

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.  For those of you who are paying attention, I have not (yet) written a post on Iterations of Zero this week.  That parenthetical “yet” may yet become a superfluous “yet”, alas, because I recently suffered from a rather nasty gastroenteritis.  For the first three or so days of this week, I felt almost literally rotten, and I’m still rather washed out, if you’ll pardon the expression.  So, I may have to call this week’s IoZ post a miss, though it pains me to do so after only having done a few weeks’ worth of continuous posting.  I may need just to write a very brief entry there as an apology.

I have been able to keep up with editing Unanimity, though the process was rather slower than usual.  I’m again approaching the latter part of the story, and as expected, it’s not quite as gripping as it was the first several times.  This is good, since it makes me a more ruthless editor, which is a large part of the point of doing it this way.  I’ve already trimmed more than twenty-five thousand words from the original draft, but I’m not near my goal yet, so I must be increasingly brutal as time passes.

I have to admit, at the risk of seeming narcissistic, that I tend to enjoy reading my own stories.  There’s just something about them; it’s as though the author really knows me.

On the other hand, I continue to have trouble finding other people’s tales—including television and movie fiction—engaging.  There are shows and films and books out now that should by all rights be seizing my attention and holding it without ransom, but which barely raise an eyebrow.  I can’t even seem to force myself to partake of them.  It’s not exactly ennui, but maybe that’s the closest thing to it*.  The only stories I’ve been able to focus on lately are the Japanese light novel series whose title is shortened to Oregairo.  It’s about a collection of loners (this is not a contradiction), with a narrator who’s particularly misanthropic and cynical, though none of them are hateful or overly pessimistic.  Unfortunately, I’ve reached the end of the volumes that have been published in English, and though they’re good books, I’m not likely to reread them anytime soon.  This is a glaring departure from my usual pattern for books that I enjoy.  God knows how often I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, but it’s been well over thirty times, and even much more so for The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  The Harry Potter books don’t quite reach that level of repetition, but then again, I was already a working and studying adult when they came out.  I didn’t have the free reading time on my hands that I had in grade school, junior high, and high school, when I first read LotR and Thomas Covenant.

Unfortunately, I haven’t even had the will or desire in recent years to reread these great classics.  I’ve started Tolkien**, but I haven’t even gotten to the end of the first section.  Frodo hasn’t even been stabbed on Weathertop yet.  I just lost interest.  And every time I look at either the hard copy or the digital copy of this or any of the other books to consider reading them, I just kind of feel, “meh”.

I do a bit better with nonfiction, especially science books, including audio books.  This is certainly some consolation; I’ve always loved science as much as I’ve loved fiction (though, oddly, only very select science fiction).  Even this has its limits, of course, partly because Brian Greene, Sean Carroll, Richard Dawkins and the like can only write so many popular science books so quickly***.  I tend to devour them rapidly when they come out.  Also, unfortunately, a lot of science books in subjects I enjoy are just rehashing things I already know.  One can only so often read some new person’s attempt to explain General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics or Astrophysics or Evolutionary Biology to the layperson, especially when others have already done a better job on the subjects.

I think part of the trouble I have with enjoying new fiction—and even new nonfiction, but to a lesser extent—is that I simply don’t have the people in my life with whom I used to share that joy.  Because of that absence, even new potential happiness in reading such stories (or watching such shows, etc.) is tainted and soured.  It’s hard to take pleasure looking at photos of—or imagining—sipping cocktails on a tropical beach with one’s estranged significant other or splashing about in the surf with one’s children if one is currently wandering, lost and alone, in a frozen, Antarctic desert.

Not to be melodramatic about it or anything.

In lighter news, I’m thinking of setting up a promotional giveaway of at least electronic versions of my books and/or stories—one per customer—sometime soon…in time for the holidays, perhaps.  If I do, word of it will probably appear here, in this very blog, before it appears anywhere else.  Indeed, in a certain sense, it just has.

I wish all of you all manner of wellnesses, including ones you’ve never even imagined before, and which certainly I have never had the courage to contemplate.  May each of your personal world-lines become ever better with the passage of time.

TTFN

*It’s almost certainly dysthymia, with its attendant curse anhedonia.

**I’ve even tried rereading The Silmarillion, which I’ve read at least a dozen times in the past.  (It’s not as though I could have read it in the future, is it?)  No luck.

***Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould have been slacking off lately to an inexcusable degree, in my opinion.