Timeliness

Just as I decided to rip apart the back cover blurb for Hard Day’s Knight, I find this post on the Publetariat today. Pretty nice, so I re-wrote the back blurb to more closely follow that format, and posted it on KindleBoards to crowdsource some feedback. I think within a day or two of working with the folks over there I should have a decent blurb ready to go. Then of course I’ll have to re-do the back cover, adding on the blurb, order a proof and approve it, and then the new copies will be ready sometime next year. Not a big deal, frankly, since I’ve got about 30 copies on order and ten in my truck, so I have plenty to sell until then. Once I’m done with HDK, I’ll probably re-do the back cover to The Chosen to incorporate some of the great reviews the book has gotten. Then maybe they’ll both be pretty much ready for public consumption.

HDK should be good to go in digital format next month. Rob tells me that we’re still on track to get the conversion done this month, and he’s the man, so I trust it will happen this week or next. Then it’s on me, and with Thanksgiving, a trip to Atlanta for work and a trip to NYC for vacation coming up I can’t make any promises. I would like to go ahead and release it for Kindle so that I can get some recommendations going before all those e-readers are given as Christmas gifts. I think the e-book market is going to see a huge swell this January as people load up the kindles and iPads they got for Christmas, so it’s fairly important to have as much product on the market as possible to catch the wave. I also really do believe that we’ll see this happen every year for the next several years, so it doesn’t kill me to only have two books out. That’s about all I can manage with a day job, anyway. And I’m a long, long way from not needing a day job. Speaking of which, I should go do that for a while instead of screwing around on here.
Happy Thanksgiving, folks! I’ll catch up with you after the holidays!

Adventures in opiates

So the crud that I am now getting over has passed into the wife, and apparently the crud is in reality bronchitis. And my wife, being much more sensible than me, decided to go to the doctor for it. She got a course of anitbiotics and some codeine-laced cough syrup. Unfortunately for her, this was the end of her good decision-making for the day.

Upon arriving home and reading the instructions, she saw that she was to take 5 ml of cough syrup every six hours. Now my first answer would have been to find out how many teaspoons are in a ml, or vice versa. Or alternately to just turn up the bottle and take big swallow. But Suzy did neither of those things, instead deciding that two tablespoons seemed about the right dosage.

Which is correct. If you’re a wildebeest.

So after ingesting 30 ml of codeine-laced cough syrup, my wife is at home high as the proverbial kite, and not enjoying it. You see, while 3-4 times the normal prescribed dosage is about right to catch a nice buzz, six times the normal prescribed dosage makes you itchy and twitchy, at least if you’re my wife. So I’m at work, still coughing up the last dregs of my illness, while she’s at home, looking at the pretty colors on the wall and finger-painting the dog. (I might be exaggerating, but not much).

Good times, kids, good times. In other worlds, I’m now about 5,000 words into Volume 2 of The Black Knight Chronicles. In this episode, our boys fight trolls. Real ones. Real BIG ones.

Upcoming events

It’s going to be a busy few weeks around the old Casa de Hartness (since the last few months haven’t been chock-full AT ALL). This week is obviously Thanksgiving, which we’ll be spending in South Carolina with mi familia. It’s either a note on how frugal I’ve become or what a cheap bastard I am that I’d really like to take a Cheesecake Factory Pumpkin Cheesecake with us for dessert, but I’m balking at dropping the $50 on it. It’s not that $50 is a huge sum, but it’s a lot of money for one 10″ cheesecake, and I’ve gotten cheap about things like dessert recently.

Then Sunday I have a book signing at Park Road Books, which is one of only a couple of independent bookstores left in the Charlotte area. I’ll be signing anything anyone wants to buy, hopefully my restock order will be in by then (and hopefully I’ll need it!).

Next week I’ll be in Atlanta the first part of the week for work and then when I come back to Charlotte Suzy and I will be getting on a plane to go to New York for our 15th wedding anniversary. Sometimes it feels like just a few months ago that we were in college down at Winthrop together, and now we’re going off to the Big Apple to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center, check out America Idiot on Broadway, and go shopping at Mood fabrics in the Garment District (I’ll take a book, hopefully they have chairs for husbands). Suzy and my sister Bonnie are HUGE Project Runway fans, so this trip to Mood is a real highlight for her. Me, I could meh about the whole thing because I don’t know anything about fabric, but if it makes her happy it’s worth the trip.

And then I’m home for a couple days and then I turn around and head off to Las Vegas for the annual WPBT debauchery-thon. I’ve got a room at the MGM and would like to do a small book signing there for some folks if people let me know that they want copies of books. That will take some logistical figuring out between now and then.

And then there’s Christmas. We’re probably not doing much in the way of gift exchange, because there’s not much we want, and because we’re going to NYC a few weeks before Christmas. I think the whole family is pitching in together to get my parents a new TV (which I can blog about here because my parents are blissfully internet-free), so that will be a nice upgrade over their 20-year old Zenith console TV. We’ll have to get a stand, too, because despite my sister’s protestations, having a TV sitting on top of the old, busted TV is never acceptable.

Oh yeah, speaking of sister – she’ll be staying with us for the week after I get back from Vegas because of her second hip replacement. Yeah, her second hip replacement this year. Sucks to be her. Except that she came through the first one with flying colors and now is in a lot less pain, so I guess it sucks less to be her. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there, since Suzy is the one with the caretaker gene and my contribution to having her in my house for a week is mostly whining about sleeping in the guest bedroom.

So that’s life here lately. As you can see, I’m trying to make a more concerted effort to revive the blog. At least this week. I’ve started on the sequel to Hard Day’s Knight, so hopefully it will be ready to go sometime in the spring. And I got word from Rob that the ebook conversion for HDK should be finished this month, so it will come out on Kindle in time for Christmas, which is exciting. I have about enough story for five books with those characters right now, and I’m working on a couple of other things intermittently. I don’t see me becoming Hocking-level prolific anytime soon, but maybe in a few years I’ll generate some real revenue from this little side gig and be able to focus on it more full-time.

NC Comicon

NC Comicon

Last weekend I went to Raleigh to participate in the NC ComiCon. I had a great time, despite feeling kinda crappy all weekend with the crud that eventually levelled me and kept me out of of work for the first half of this week.  But I got to meet some great folks, including Jim Valentino and Richard Case, and my booth neighbor Rob Anderson, creator/writer/publisher of Animal Control: Special Creatures Unit, a futuristic comic featuring funky hybrid animals like gatorsnakes, pandadogs and pocket dragons. Rob was very friendly and in good humor through the weekend and his upbeat patter kept me from turning into a bag of phlegm-filled sulk like I can easily do when I don’t feel well. I just hope I didn’t infect him with the crud as a thank you gift! Also had dinner with Rob and Chris Flick, who writes the hilarious webcomic Capes n’ Babes, which I’ve been a subscriber to for a couple years now, so that was a blast. I sold about enough books to make the whole thing financially worthwhile, so I’ll be on the lookout for other cons to exhibit at in the future.

And of course there was cosplay. The costume contest was Sunday, so anyone who wandered by my table with a decent costumed got corralled into having a photo with one or more of my books. Here are some of my faves.

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World Poker Tour

The following is a sponsored post.

The World Poker Tour is one of the most famous poker tournaments in the world, second only to the World Series of Poker.
The World Poker Tour, as its name suggests, tours the world, with tournament legs taking place in several different countries each year.
Highlights of the tour include the WPT Grand Prix de Paris, the WPT Spanish Championship, the London Poker Classic, the Bellagio Cup, the Borgata Poker Open, the L.A.Poker Classic, and the WPT Celebrity Invitational.

As with most major poker tournaments, players have the option to either buy-in to the tournament, or attempt to qualify online.
There are satellites for the World Poker Tour running on several different online poker sites.
The World Poker Tour attracts a lot of media attention, and many of their main events, including the Bellagio Cup, are televised.
The online casino sites that are affiliated with the World Poker Tour include PartyCasino, Casino Las Vegas, Swiss Casino, Noble Casino, and Titan Casino.
Some of the best professional poker players in the world take part in the World Poke Tour. The list of players includes big names such as Gus Hansen, Hoyt Corkins, Phil Ivey, JC Tran Daniel Negreanu, Joe Hachem, and Barry Greenstein.

The World Poker Tour has many poker tournaments with big money prizes. Titles in the tour are very prestigious, and the World Poker Tour Player of the Year award is considered to be a huge honour. The top players who compete in the tour have amassed career earnings of more than $5 million in the tournament, and there are several players with WPT career earnings in excess of $3 million.
The WPT was started in the United Sates, by attourney Steve Lipscomb in 2002, and was acquired by PartyGaming in November 2009. The tournament focuses on Texas Holdem poker.
The WPT TV show is hosted by Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten. The show gives the viewers that the commentary is live, however some commentary is added after the tournament, because gaming regulations prevent the commentators from observing hole cards while the games are in play.