Category Archives: Personal

It’s all about me. :)

I love my credit union



On Friday, I went down to the credit union and one of the women there asked if my book was out yet. I told her it had been delayed until Jan. 15th.

 Next thing you know, all four employees were asking me for details, cooing about how fascinating it sounded, and then asking if I’d autograph their copies after they buy them.

Did I ever say how much I love First Tech Credit Union?

New banner image

How do you like the new banner?  The image is based on original artwork by Glenn Chadbourne, depicting me as Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s The Shining

It isn’t perfect. I’m hoping the WordPress theme I use can be customized to allow for the artwork in its original form, as opposed to the stretched version I’m using to make it all fit.

But I like it.  Certainly a lot more than that boring old pen I had up there.

Here’s the artwork in its original form.  (Thanks to my wonderful daughter for her help with the formatting.)

Don’t you love it?

Going to the movies

Here’s how you can tell someone else (in my case, my wife) has always been getting to the movie theatre first and buying the tickets: it’s finally you in line and you hand the guy a twenty for two tickets and can’t understand why he’s looking at you for more.

New Half-Year’s Resolutions

Most normal people wait for the end of December to roll around before deciding on New Year’s Resolutions. I, however, have never been called normal and don’t feel like waiting the six months.

So here are my Half-Year’s Resolutions.

  • Write 150,000 words of new fiction. This averages to a little under 6000 words each week. I expect to exceed that during July and August, my easiest months, to give me a cushion for the final four months of the year, which are always my most challenging. (Day job plus teaching at night plus the hockey writing, which doesn’t count.)
  • Make 26 new e-books available on Kindle, NOOK, and Smashwords. This will be a mix of my short stories and nonfiction. I make no promises to adhere to a strict once-a-week schedule, though.
  • Get from three-t0-five cardio workouts in each week. This extends a challenge I gave myself at the start of the year, one I’ve met all but six times and most of those were two-workout weeks. (I’m also giving myself a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for last week. See my previous post about the Kris Rusch Death March.)
  • Eat healthier and attempt to reduce the volume to less elephantine proportions. (No snickering there, in the back of the class!) To make the goal more specific, I’m shooting for five days a week that I can say my eating has been in harmony with a goal of living a long, healthy life.
  • Meet the too-private-for-posting financial goals my wife and I establish.

If you feel you’ll benefit from making some resolutions yourself, go for it. Feel free to post them in the comments section or privately. But write them down. Specific, written goals work a lot better than vague ones only in your head.

Vanity Fair used to annoy me but not anymore

There’s something wrong about a magazine having its Table of Contents on page 38 and what’s more, it not being a complete table but rather one that just lists the feature stories.  If you want a listing of the columns — and yes, it was a column I was looking for in Vanity Fair — you have to flip to page 64.

I mean, I get it.  The whole idea is for me to flip through 37 pages of advertisements in search of Table of Contents, Part I, and then flip through more pictures of blue-eyed women and guys looking like I never have nor never will look like to get to Table of Contents, Part II.

But here’s the thing.   I’m not going to shop at Hugo Boss or Ralph Lauren or Bloomingdale’s just because I flipped, annoyed, past their advertisements.  I won’t start using Clinique spot remover or wearing Guess apparel, not even that fishnet-and-garters thingie on page 22.

I was wondering if Vanity Fair might not do those of us without a shopping gene in our bodies a favor by granting us a special edition that has the Table of Contents right on pages one and two.

Then I took a closer look at the cover and saw that Vanity Fair is already providing a special edition that goes even one better.  If you look really closely (and squint a bit if you’ve got eyes like mine), you can see the page number in very fine print of every article showcased on the cover.

So to Vanity Fair, I salute you and say in the immortal words of Emily Litella, “Never mind.”

Believe in miracles?

According to a friend on Facebook (I’m too lazy to look it up), 73 percent of people polled by Newsweek thought the question, “Do you believe in miracles,” was a good question for a first date.

My thought is that it’s a matter of context.  It all depends on whether it’s a reference to religion, the 1980 Olympic hockey team, or whether they’ve got a shot at getting lucky.

A crash in the night

I woke up at 2:59 this morning to a loud crash. I thought sure someone was in the house but my search (wielding, of course, a fearsome steak knife) turned up nothing.

Some detective work after I got up  concluded that it must have been snow avalanching off the back roof onto the bulkhead.  But I can’t really tell because you can only see that part of the roof from the backyard and I’m not willing to trudge through snow that deep to find out for sure. 

The alternate theory is that the crash in the night is connected to me reading Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars right now.  The supporting evidence?  The snow on the roof at the front of the house hasn’t moved an inch and remains about two or three feet high.

More Music For Another World reviews

Some more good reviews have come out for Music For Another World, the British anthology that includes my story “Blue Note Heaven.” One review called it “one of the anthology’s most original stories” which was really nice to read.

The trade paper version is still only available through Amazon UK, but there’s a Kindle version now.

Here are links to the other reviews:

Angela Slatter and Jack Deighton.

A short story sale!

My short story “The Floater” has sold to an anthology called Bride of the Golem.  I really like this story and hope you will too.  There’s no set publication date right now, but I’ll provide updates as they become available.

A look back on 2010

What a year!

I sold my first novel, Cracking the Ice, to WestSide Books.  It will be appearing in May, 2011. That all by itself makes 2010 a watershed year.

I also sold three short stories: “Age is a Four-Letter Word,” “A Simple Matter of Priorities,” and “Blue Note Heaven.”

I wrote another novel, several proposals, and a number of short stories.

So although I’m a bit disappointed in my productivity over the latter part of the year, it’s still been a terrific year. 

I intend to make 2011 even better.