The simple reason? Because I’m not 13.
Category Archives: Social Networking
The new site is up and running
I finally decided I needed to take my web site into the 21st century, and it definitely needed a push to illustrate that this is the site of a writer, not just a random web site that someone uses to make blog posts every now and then. One of the things I was aching to do was to build a page where you could find all of my currently released novels. There are officially 9 of them released, which includes:
Innocent Until Proven Guilty
Leader of the Losers
Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time
The Ameriad: The Untold Founding of America By the Survivors of Troy
The Teddy Bear Conspiracy
Destiny
Deadly Deceptions
Darkened Passages
Absent Without Leave
All of the novels I have written under other names, I have decided not to include in my listing. I’m basically trying to have those names make a success on their own, so we’ll see how they do without the star power of my own name to propel them forward. Yeah, that’s a joke, but anyhoo.
Some of the nice features I was able to implement with the new site included a lot better access to social networking areas that I’m tied to. Before, it was just kind of random. Now, the icons for the specific sites are at the top of the page, which means being a lot easier to link that way.
The other feature that is kind of nice is that the menu bar at the top also allows me to emphasize some of my works in progress. I’ve been wanting to share the map for Reagul for quite some time, and this offers just the opportunity to do that. I’ll be including a lot more information on that property and the Deck Const in the near future. I’m really excited about both story lines, and I hope others are, too, especially when they start to see some of the stuff that’s going to be coming out of those lines.
It took me nearly the entire day (aside from teaching) to get this all configured. There’s still more work to do, but at least it’s finally on a good footing for future innovations.
Let me know what you think.
More of writers being taken advantage of
Yesterday, I received an email from some entrepreneur in San Francisco who “offered” to sit down with me for lunch in San Francisco in a very expensive location (described in detail in the email as if that location was somehow a selling point of having a casual lunch with some woman I don’t know). Anyway, she was appealing to the fact that I was a writer who needed to “move to the next level”. And I guess that somehow this lunch “date” was going to make this happen in some bizarre way.
I should point out that the lunch “date” we were going to have was going to cost me $350, but if I was one of the first responders, I’d save $100.
So, being bored with my life, I googled her name and discovered that she seems to be under all sorts of very interesting legal scrutiny for a bunch of really interesting decisions she made over the years, some involving marital spats of a friend of client of hers and some actions she may or may not have taken as a part of some domestic dispute.
But I didn’t find anything to indicate that she was successful in helping anyone’s career along, which made me wonder why would someone, out of the blue, contact me about something like this when the only thing she had going to her name was somewhat of a scandal involving domestic abuse. And I really couldn’t come up with an answer.
So it got me wondering if there’s a whole industry of people like this who devote most of their time and energy to taking advantage of hopeful writers (inventors, game creators, or whatever) and offering them to somehow put them in touch with their elusive dreams. Cause it was a nice little appeal when I first read it. Of course, being the kind of person I am, I’m always going to investigate it first, but I wondered how many other people someone like this ropes in on such schemes. Hell, for all I know she’s legit and secretly has been the success behind Stephen King and Brad Pitt. I doubt it, but I’ve never been considered all-knowing.
What it does tell me is that people in my field need to be really careful because these sorts of leeches are out there seeing gold in the paths of dreamers and believers. Those of us who are the creative type constantly want to believe that our passion can bring success, and people like that are constantly there to make sure we stupidly take these types of leaps right before emptying our wallets and disappearing into the woodwork again.
We just have to be extra careful.
Now that I’m on my own
The last day of work for me was on Tuesday, and it was one of those days that really didn’t have a lot going on. I came in expecting to be given grunt work to do most of the day, but the senior boss decided that I would have my exit interview at 11:30 AM, and then I was finished with the job as of noon. Still got paid for the entire day (or so they say), and then I was kind of on my own from there. I forgot to pick up some medication at the pharmacy at work because I was in such a hurry to leave, so I’ll probably have to wander back there this weekend and do the pick up of that stuff.
So, I’m now in the process of putting together my writing projects and pushing forward on those. I completed and published my novella, The Beast of Begmire, and I’m trying to see about getting it listed for free on most e-book sites. I also put it up on Wattpad this evening, so it should be available for anyone to read free there.
My next project will be to complete A Season of Kings, and during that project I’m still working on completing the first book of the series I’m writing with Marie. Hopefully, we can get that one moving forward, as I seem to have a lot more hope for that series than any of the fantasy ones I’m writing.
Money is going to be tight, mainly because of the way Spectrum Health completes the quitting process. I can’t ask for my payout money from my retirement until the last paycheck comes through from SH, and unfortunately the way they work it out, it will probably be about a month before the last “paycheck” comes through, and THEN I’m allowed to put in the paperwork for that money. Which means February might be a bit crappy when it comes to paying my bills, and unfortunately I’m not really sure what the solution to that is going to be. If it’s not one thing, it’s another….
Another project I’ve been outlining lately is one that I had on a back burner for many years now, and that’s my Return to Camelot series. Every time I write a specific novel, I find myself getting tons and tons of ideas, dialogue, and even scenes from the next novel I’ll be writing after the ones I’m currently working on. For some reason, Return to Camelot has been the one that’s been building momentum lately. All I can do is write down the ideas and hope that I can get to the actual writing soon. My working titles for that series are:
1. The Once and Future King
2. Return to Camelot
3. Le Morte D’Arthur
They’re not massively original, but they’re working titles for now, and they seem to push the ideas of what exists within each volume. I’m kind of looking forward to writing that series, as I wrote the first couple of chapters years ago and still refer to those chapters from time to time because they were so very good. Yes, a writer can admire his own work from time to time. You wouldn’t believe how critical I am of practically everything else that comes through my word processor.
For some reason, every night I seem to be dreaming about work (the old job). I keep dreaming how someone is telling me I have to do something and it must be done on a deadline that has already passed. And then an inner voice tells me, hey, you don’t work here any more, and I kind of toss and turn through that. I guess the subconscious does that to you when you’ve been living and breathing a job for so long, especially one that was becoming really good at developing arbitrary deadlines and then sitting on the results for weeks while new deadlines are thrown at you for new work that will then be sat on as soon as it met its completion. Anyway.
So, that’s kind of where things are right now. And as so few people tend to read my blog, aside from the spider sites in China that seem to access my page hundreds of times a day, it would be nice to hear from people who are actually reading it. Otherwise, I might just have to discontinue it, as it’s turning very much into a diary where I’m the only one who is really reading it.
Taking Umbrage With the N-Word
There’s an interesting article on Salon this morning from Mary Elizabeth Williams on how white people shouldn’t use the N-word under any circumstance. Ignoring for a moment that most of MEW’s articles tend to be reactionary and designed to cause people to get upset over mundane things that they wouldn’t normally pay much attention to, the points she brings up are interesting, although I’m not sure I completely agree with all of them. I’ll let you read it for yourself and then decide. What I did want to discuss is my own particular perspective in the whole thing, coming from someone who would never use the word, mainly because I find it offensive, and even more important, that it rarely serves a purpose in any conversation I’ve ever had.
But I want to go back in time a bit to a friend of mine I had back in the days of my second visit to the college environment. I had decided to attend a community college (years after the Army AND West Point), cause I was interested in pursuing computer science as a future field. Anyway, my roommate at that time was a really cool guy named (for the sake of here) Bob. Bob was friendly, a good all around guy, and he was dating a woman that he was eventually going to end up marrying. He was also a pretty big guy, and he hung around with a bunch of other big guys, a few of them caucasians and a few of them of all different types of backgrounds, ethnicities and colors. But one thing that used to shock the crap out of me was that Bob used to refer to ALL of his friends as “my Nigga.” And they would refer to him in the same way. And none of them had a single problem with it.
I once asked Bob if that word didn’t bother him, and he looked at me like I was a moron. To him, the word had little contextual meaning as it did to me. It didn’t even have the same meaning to the African-American friends he had, because I couldn’t resist asking them either. They just didn’t grow up in an environment where they felt the typical socio-economic fabric that hangs over so many African-Americans of urban locales. They just smiled when I asked about it and didn’t have a negative thing to say whatseover.
No one thought of Bob as a racist, and not once was race even considered a part of the conversation.
But for me, I never could come around to using that word, even in the mixed company of where it was tossed around on a constant basis. I just didn’t feel comfortable saying it no matter how “welcome” the word was. And part of that is because I grew up in an environment where the word was used in very negative circumstances. The whites I grew up with around in the late 1960s and early 1970s were living through forced busing and the ramifications of the Civil Rights movement, so there was still a long of antagonism existing back then. I was fortunate in being integrated with very diverse populations as a child because I was dirt poor in an urban environment (Santa Monica, California). While many of my caucasian neighbors (meaning people who lived way out of my neighborhood of crack houses and prostitution dens) lived in isolated communities, I spent most of my free time at places like the Santa Monica Boys Club, which tended to cater to the poorest kids who couldn’t afford to spend time after school at the YMCA (where the richer kids hung out). So, I was exposed to all sorts of diversity that quickly educated me on what words were friendly and which words were taboo. As I was always a friendly sort of kid, I learned the ones that made friends (and made lots of friends) and discarded the words that turned friends into enemies.
Years later, in the presence of Bob and his friends, I was completely out of place because the conversations they were having were alien to me, so I did what I did when I was a kdi. I listened and avoided participating whenever I felt uncomfortable. There are certain words I’m not comfortable saying, and I’ve discovered that that is probably never going to change.
This is why I don’t feel concerned that there are rappers out there using the N-word in their music. I generally don’t sing to rap music, mainly because there’s not a lot of it that insterests me. The types that does generally doesn’t have profanity in it, or it’s impact is in a completely different direction. I do think that there are a lot of people who feel they have to emulate that type of behavior to be seen as cool, and fortunately, I’ve never been known to be someone who seeks out that type of status. Whenever I consider myself “cool”, there’s usually a sense of irony or sarcasm involved.
Which brings me back to that word. I don’t know why people feel such a need to use it. But unlike the professor mentioned in MEW’s article, I don’t care enough about the fact that others use it to feel slighted myself. Words do have power in some circumstances, but what MEW and people like her don’t often recognize is that they also lack power if people don’t subscribe to their doctrine. Whenever I hear the N-word, I don’t think “subversive”, “cool”, or even “outrageous.” I think “uneducated” and “limited in vocabulary”. But then, when writing a novel, there have been times when I have chosen the simple phrase rather than the more complicated one because the message was the medium, not the other way around. And in those cases, I guess my own jury is still out.
Jelly Bellies are for eating, so please just shut the hell up
One of the few givens in today’s society is that either some pop star is going to try to push the envelope by participating in some semblance of outrageous behavior (like saying the wrong thing, or forgetting to wear her clothes in public, or just having sex with strangers in church) or that some corporate executive is going to overstep his or her authority and say things that probably should have been sent anonymously to the racist message board where it belonged. Today, the owner of Jelly Belly decided to come out against transgendered rights in California, somehow thinking that his ability to make candy filled with high-fructose corn syrup somehow makes him an advocate for anyone who advocates hating people who are just trying to live their lives without discrimination and problems that most of us generally don’t have to deal with because we’re part of mainstream society.
A few weeks ago, it was Abercrombie & Fitch. Before that, Chik-Fil-something or other (honestly, just didn’t feel like looking up their name to spell it right as their company isn’t that important to me that I’d waste that much time putting their name into a Google search engine. And before that, it was Martha Stewart doing whatever it is that rich white women do when they’re not doing what rich white women do normally.
The point is: I’m getting really tired of hearing about corporate CEOs acting badly in public. It was fine when I was dealing with Paris Hilton, who was kind of an acting-badly CEO, even though she’s not actually the Hilton CEO. At least she was attractive and said lots of dumb things that made me laugh, even if that wasn’t her main intention. She at least provided entertainment, and I never felt that behind her ridiculousness was someone who was actually out there hating other people for being different.
But that’s what these CEOs are doing. They’ve made a shit load of money off of the rest of us, and for some reason they think that somehow now gives them the platform to spout some really racist, homophobic bullshit that somehow is relevant to the rest of us. If anyone of us have a problem with what they have to say, they chalk it up as irrelevant because what’s relevant is that we paid them money to become very wealthy and now that somehow their wealth and power makes them think that their opinions are somehow more significant than the opinions of the rest of us.
Let me let you in on a little secret. Those CEOs are not smarter, more lived, or even cognizant of facts that the rest of us don’t know. They don’t have more education than the rest of us; some of them have tons less. The only thing they have that the rest of us don’t have is money and gobs of it. That money opens doors for them so that when they have something “important” to say, people listen, which is why we’re hearing their racist, homophobic rants instead of just eating their candy.
What really seems to be happening is that our media pays dire attention to these Neanderthals because of the money factor. This is why when one of them farts on national television, we all have to smell it for the next couple of days. So, if we want to make this problem go away, we need to write to our media sources and say to stop telling us whenever a millionaire/billionaire sneezes. We don’t care.
Sure, the usual response is to start the infamous boycott of Jelly Belly products, or whatever product a company makes when one of these morons starts spouting his or her nonsense, but most often these products are things we like; we just don’t like the owners of these companies who make them. Why should we lose the things we like because they’re made by morons we hate?
The simple fact is that these CEOs are nothing more than people who were lucky at getting their product to the market and made a killing doing it. What they’re good at is business, so if they want to tell me how to run a bookstore, then the media should pipe that discussion to me. But I don’t go to a guy who makes candies in order to find out how I should feel about social issues in America. For that, I usually go to social figures who have knowledge in those areas of information. By the same token, I don’t turn to LGBT folk to find out the best way to reinvest my 401K; that’s not their expertise. Sure, one of them might know something about it, but you generally don’t just randomly go out into a crowd and start trying to get knowledge by hoping that maybe one of them might know something about the issue you’re dealing with. At least I don’t, any more than I have a tendency to avoid bringing my back pain issue to my dentist, who might feel bad about it but can’t really do anything to make me better.
So, with that said, can you CEOs please kindly shut the fuck up and get back to selling us things we don’t need?
Martha Stewart loses it on Twitter and CNBC thinks it’s a big enough story to do an entire story on it
The other day, Martha Stewart lost it on Twitter. The upside (or downside) of it is that she dropped her Ipad and then threw a fit because she doesn’t understand how technical support works (in that they usually don’t send someone to your house to fix something you broke, especially when it was given to you for free, even if it was given to you for free by the founder of the company). Basically, the title of the story, if it was worth the time, should have been “Old Female Celebrity Doesn’t Understand How Business Works” or my other favorite: “Old Woman Yells At Kids to Get Off Her Lawn”. Neither is appropriate but they’re probably better than the drama that ensued.
You see, CNBC, and I”m sure many others, seems to think it is a big enough story to have five news pundits sit around a desk and discuss it on national television. Really. 5 of them. What it boils down to is that five highly paid commentators sat around a table and discussed an old woman’s tweets about how she broke her Ipad. We have fewer commentators at one time discussing whether or not the US should get involved in a war in the Middle East. This should tell you what kind of priorities our national news have.
I think that any time a news program starts off a story with a caption showing you what someone tweeted, that station should be taken off the air indefinitely and should be replaced with footage of goldfish swimming in a bowl. Only if the goldfish learn to tweet can the station be allowed to air news again.
I’m just saying….
When Best Friends Aren’t Best Friends Any More
I’m sure my story isn’t that different from everyone else’s story. Most of us grew up with a best friend or two (over the years) and then life may or may not kept us together. If you watch a lot of the movies that get released starring the usual suspects of male friends, you get the impression that these friends stay close friends forever, basically until they reach middle age and go through their middle age crisis moments together.
Unfortunately for me, that didn’t happen. And strangely enough I kind of wish it did. Let me explain.
I’ve had two really close best friends over the years. One was my friend Roland, who I believe I met when we were both about two or three years old. We lived across the way from each other in a low-income apartment complex, and my first memory of Roland was a fight we had where both of us went home crying to our parents. Immediately after that, I remember his mom and my mom conducting some kind of UN conference where the two of us were forced to become friends again. We remained friends from that moment forward, proving that, yes, the UN sometimes DOES work.
Our friendship lasted most of our childhood. Both of us bought the same blue Schwinn bicycle and we rode miles and miles on those things together. It was not unusual for the two of us to race 26 miles down the beach to Redondo Beach, California and then back to Santa Monica. For us, the enjoyment was the journey of traveling down the bicycle trail together, back in the days when you could actually ride down those paths without running over a million girls on roller skates.
Some of my most memorable moments were with Roland, including when we would run into Dom Deluise at the local department stores and then at McDonalds shortly after. We explored the world together and learned about the world as a shared experience only friends can truly appreciate.
When I was a young teenager, my mom died after a horrible illness that slowly drained her of life. When she died in the hospital, I remember calling Roland because he was the only person I wanted to talk to. Shortly after, he showed up with his mom and dad to the hospital, making sure that I wasn’t alone on that horrible day.
Soon after, I moved in with my older sister and her husband, which forced me to move away from Santa Monica. Roland and I kept in touch by phone, and every now and then I’d figure out a way to take the bus for a few hour trip to visit him, and sometimes he’d do the same to come to me. But as we were further and further away, we sort of drifted apart until we stopped calling and then never saw each other again. It’s one of those things I regretted deeply over the years, but life takes you where life takes you.
In Moorpark, my new home, I made friends with the person who was to become my next best friend, Ken. While we didn’t have the history that Roland and I had, we quickly built a friendship and quickly made up for the lack of history by inventing all sorts of adventures together. One of my favorite moments in high school was when the two of us were taking a Spanish class, and we were the two students who had already finished alll the lower level Spanish stuff so we were kind of put into a corner by ourselves to study on our own because they didn’t have a high enough level class for us to take. Because we were always together, we made a lot of noise and had a lot of fun. So the teacher felt she had to separate us. Therefore, we did what any normal duo of friends would do: We invented a sign language that allowed us to communicate from across the room from each other. We learned it quickly and immediately really pissed off the teacher who decided she wasn’t going to win this battle, so she let us sit next to each other again and never tried to separate us again.
A few years later, after graduation, I joined the Army and Ken joined the Air Force. At one point, we were both in Germany at the same time, so I decided to hop into my Volkswagon Scirroco (sic), pick up Ken and drive the two of us to Paris, France. It was a wild, fun adventure that involved some young girl we found to help us find a hotel (because neither of us could speak French) who the hotel owner thought was a prostitute because she was negotiating the room for two American GIs (and then left with a smile right after she secured us the room, which caused the old woman working the hotel to suddenly realize she had played the wrong cards in her assumptions).
That was pretty much our last get together. Ken ended up being accepted to the Air Force Academy and is a colonel today, probably going to be a general one of these days. I wish him well, but I regret that our friendship faded and we really don’t talk any more.
Strangely enough, both Roland and Ken have connected with me through Facebook, so every now and then I see what’s going on in their lives, which when I think about it is actually kind of sad because at one time I was very close to both of them, and like that one hit wonder song “now they’re just somebody that I used to know”.
Weirdly enough, when I made contact with them on Facebook, I immediately had this feeling that I had found a long, lost friend and then things were going to be great again. And we rarely even communicate, which forces the “You Can’t Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe to play through in my head (which is funny because it’s probably one of the most often quoted titles of a book that people have never actually read themselves, so when they pretend to have read it, I always say “Stop Twampling!” just to see if there’s a reaction, which when there’s none I know they’re bullshitting me about having read it). Wolfe’s idea is somewhat true, and you never really understand it until the events play out that show you how true it really is. I read that book a decade or so ago, yet until I made contact with those two former friends, I never made the connection to what he was truly saying.
We’re halfway through 2013 and racists are still living in the 1950s
Cheerio’s did an interesting thing the other day. They created an ad where a white woman and her black child are having breakfast, and the kid goes to wake up dad, who is black. There’s no “hey, look, we’re doing an interracial thing here” commentary. It just exists as one of those “hey, life is life, so deal with it.”
Of course, the world couldn’t just leave it at that. As soon as Cheerio’s ran the ad, suddenly all sorts of uptight people had to chime in and make it out as if there’s something wrong because an interracial couple eats cereal in the morning. Imagine that.
What gets me is that it’s been 50 years since the very first interracial kiss (taking place in geek history between Captain James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura). You’d think that we’ve come so far since then, and we should be at a point where we just laugh at this sort of thing. But there are people in America claiming that this is the worst thing ever. Looking at the Youtube stats, 21,673 people liked the video, while 1.453 disliked it. We’re talking about 6.3 percent of people actually registering that they don’t like whites and blacks being depicted as in the same family. The only positive is that 6.3 percent is pretty small (for example: on You Tube, 50 percent of responders disliked A Tribute to Jar Jar Binks. But that’s a whole other issue as 50 percent liking Jar Jar is downright scary to me. But I digress….
What’s of more significance is that there are still people who have a problem with interracial relationships. When General Mills aired the ad, there was a constituted effort to remove hate responses from those who immediately took offense at the approach. What was surprising is that with such a controversial topic (which in my opinion should NEVER have been controversial), General Mills stuck to their guns and refused to back down to any outlash against their message.
It should be interesting to see if this becomes more than just an outlier conversation piece, or if it leads to something that might possibly bring the US into the 20th century (a century late, but at least it’s a start).
Wow, I’ve completely eliminated spam from my comments…also the start of NANOWRIMO
I made a change last week to my comment system, where someone now has to put in an answer to a simple mathematical question (like “What is eight – 5?). The last few days, I’ve had zero spam in my comments section, whereas I was receiving about 30-50 a day.
On other subjects, yesterday was the start of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) where writers (or wannabe writers) spend the month attempting to write at least 50,000 words of a novel (or a novel in 50,000 words). I’m 4182 words into my novel right now, and it’s a part of the Tales of Reagul series I’ve been writing for most of my adult life. This one is called A Season of Kings, and it begins during the year 180 or so BCE near Rome and then continues on the planet of Reagul (which is what most of the novels have been about). For those interested, this is the series that actually involves the name that’s part of my website: littlesarbonn.com. One of the central characters in this series is Sarbonn, the Sorceror, and his two apprentices Walner and Chandlin. Anyhoo. Have a great Friday.