by john | Jan 10, 2011 | Poker
Free money is always the sweetest money, and this week I managed to claim a little of the sweetest money when I played in the inaugural Gambling Tales Podcast Freeroll on Full Tilt Poker. The kind folks at FTP put together a freeroll for us, and Special K and I promoted it to the best of our ability (which means that he did a lot of work, and I sent a couple tweets and emails, which is about the same division of labor as we have on the creation of the podcast, but that’s beside the point). All our efforts resulted in the freeroll filling up before it even started, with 1,000 people registered!
Now if they’d all showed up, I’d probably still be playing in the damn thing. But fortunately for my time commitment, only about 25% of the people that signed up actually played. A big part of my hated that, because there were some people who would have happily played that couldn’t get registered, but since I can usually outplay a ghost stack (only usually) I attribute my deep run to the fact that only two people at my first table were actually people. I managed to not get into any confrontations with the other live player at my table, and built up a decent little stack for myself by the time most of the ghosts were blinded off.
After a little while I finally got moved to a table with some real live people, which was a lot of fun, because the whole point of playing for me was to interact with our listeners and have some fun with my friends. I ended up at the same table as Special K for a while, then got moved, then got moved back, and hung around and hung around until the money bubble burst, guaranteeing me at least a $.06 return on my time! Ok, leave me alone, it was my first tourney cash of the new year, a real milestone. I played around, trying not to get involved with anything too embarrassing, and after a while I realized that being one of the hosts of the show actually was making me play better. Even though I’m a terrible poker player, and did get into one big hand with a guy where I called a preflop raise with suited 8-9, caught an 8 on the flop and then went runner-runner boat on him to send him home, I generally didn’t play too stupidly. So maybe I should host more tournaments if they’ll make me play better? Nah, one a week is plenty.
So this Thursday we’ll have another Gambling Tales Podcast freeroll, and this time we will not be releasing the password anywhere but on the show, so go listen and register! Congrats to DeeBakes for being the inaugural GT Podcast Freeroll winner! I had a blast playing and chatting with Dee, and hope that he can make it to a WPBT gathering sometime soon (like December)! So if you want to play poker with me, listen to the podcast and sign up!
Then last night I signed up to play the PokerSluts Tour Stud Hi tournament, with such stud geniuses as myself, BamBam, DocChako, VeryJosie, and GadZooks. At least one of those players is actually good at stud, and if you need a hint, I guarantee that it isn’t one of the men! That should narrow the field for you a little, huh? I built up a big stack early by being a ridiculous card rack, picking up trip 6s at least three times in the first three levels of the tourney. Just like I said to Doc early on, I caught cards early on and went card dead once the blinds got high, losing a big pot to Gadzooks when she made a flush on 5th and I played bad, then losing another big pot to SmBoatDrinks (or something like that, I don’t take notes and pay very little attention because, as I have said time and again I am a bad poker player) when I played bad again. So then I missed a big draw, I think I had a flush and a straight draw, or maybe a pair and a flush draw, or something that felt like it was a good draw that missed, but I might have mentioned that I don’t take notes so I don’t really remember, so gimme a break, I drink a lot and forget things, okay? So I bubbled, and that sucked, but it was a lot of fun seeing those folks again, and Zooks puts on a great tourney series, so check that out sometime!
by john | Jan 9, 2011 | Writing
It’s 7:03 PM and I’m 2,000 words off my goal for the day. So of course I’m writing a blog post instead of working on the sequel to Hard Day’s Knight. Because that’s how I roll.
My initial goal for ROW80 was to do 5,000 words per week and get the book finished by the end of the challenge. Well, I kinda dedicated this weekend to writing, and I’m floating at somewhere in the 14,000 word range since we started. I hit 5,000 words on Thursday, knocked out another 1,100 Friday and then did a little over 5,000 yesterday. I’ve done 3,000 or so today, and the book as a whole is right at 25,000 words. I think this book is going to run a touch longer than the first one, because a red herring I put in the book is taking longer to resolve than I expected. I needed another twist in this subplot, and I should finish this side plot up tonight and get my vampires out of FairyLand and back into the real world. Yeah, I just wrote that. You’ll have to buy the book to figure that one out.
So I think this book may end up around 70-75,000 words, but since it’ll primarily publish in ebook form, who really cares? Even in print form it won’t be too cumbersome, since I’ll be doing the 6×9 size just like I did with the other books. I also got about 500 words in on a new book, which is a terrorist thriller completely different from anything else I’ve written. If I get back to it, and decide to publish it, I may need to look at a pseudonym for that one. It’s just so far afield from the urban fantasy genre I’m working in that I don’t want readers to go looking for something like The Chosen or Hard Day’s Knight and get all confused. Of course, it’s still gonna be me writing it, so I have no doubt that it’ll have a fair share of snark in it. Either way I’m months away from even thinking about that issue, so it may be all resolved by then.
I’ve started to sell a few more copies. Hard Day’s Knight sales are starting to pick up, but it needs some review love. Hopefully folks will see the Win A Kindle contest and write reviews to enter. I’m not unhappy with it so far, it’s averaging about a copy a day, which is good for me. For now. Hopefully in a year or so I’ll look back on those numbers and chuckle fondly. Alright, back to the grindstone – go buy a book!
by john | Jan 7, 2011 | Writing
So I hope you enjoyed Willie’s guest post yesterday. And if you came here because of Willie’s post and decided to hang around, welcome! I will be opening up this space to guest blogs from independent writers in the future, once a week. So if anyone wants to pimp a book, or a project of any type, feel free. I don’t have any restrictions on content, because if I tried to keep this blog PG-13, I’d never be able to whine effectively about my poker game :).
I mentioned somewhere earlier about how Scrivener makes it super-easy to create and publish ebooks of your own, so I’ve uploaded and made available two new projects this week. Here are the links and some info. I made the covers myself in Pages, and just dropped them into Scrivener. Pretty badass, huh?
The Christmas Lights is a PG-rated 100% clean Christmas story. I know, right? I was surprised when I wrote it, too! It’s only $.99 on Kindle. It was also in the collection Returning the Favor, but I thought it could stand alone and some folks who don’t approve of my potty mouth might be able to get into it this way.
Red Dirt Boy is a collection of all poetry, and it’s a lot of fun. There are drunks, strippers, guns, suicides, junkies, natural disasters, heartaches, broken headboards, beer and religion all in one little volume. It’s poetry for people who hate poetry, and I’m pretty proud of it. This is the first time it’s been available in e-book format.
So check out one or both of these new e-books, while I go hide in the mountains this weekend and write my fingers to the bone in hopes of having the sequel to Hard Day’s Knight out to you by the end of March.
And don’t forget to enter the contest for the Kindle 3/Nook/Amazon Gift Card! Buy something, it’ll give you something to read this weekend!
by john | Jan 6, 2011 | Writing
Hey folks, I’m opening up the blog to a guest post by William Meikle, an author I met through the KindleBoards message boards. William is doing a blog crawl to promote his upcoming book and put together a quick post for us today. I hope you enjoy it and check out William’s work!
William Meikle is a Scottish writer with ten novels published in the genre press and over 200 short story credits in thirteen countries. He is the author of the ongoing Midnight Eye series among others, and his work appears in a number of professional anthologies. His ebook THE INVASION has been as high as #2 in the Kindle SF charts. He lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of others in cyberspace, so please check him out at http://www.williammeikle.com
Single-Author Horror Short Story Collections
One of those Facebook apps got me thinking. It wanted Single Author horror collections not by Stephen King
It was hard to choose, so I went with the ones that got me started on reading beyond Dennis Wheatley in the days before Stephen King and/or The Exorcist.
1. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood
2. H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America)
3. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
4. The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson
5. The October Country
All of these were on the shelves of a small library in a steelworking town in Scotland. I doubt that is the case nowadays.
Staggering to think that I first read Lovecraft and Bradbury forty years ago now! I’m officially an old fart.
That does also mean I’ve read a -lot- of other collections, so here are five more, from more recent times.
1. Alone With The Horrors – Ramsey Campbell
2. The Dark Country – Dennis Etchison
3. The Ice Monkey – M John Harrison
4. The White Road – Ron Weighell
5. The Books of Blood – Clive Barker
In doing this I realize I’m missing many of my favorites, from Arthur Machen through Joseph Payne Brennan, Karl Edward Wagner and up to people like Conrad Williams, Steve Duffy and Tim Lebbon. But these are the ones that I go back to and re-read so I’ll stick with these choices.
For today at least.
by john | Jan 5, 2011 | Real Life, Writing
So on the first check-in day of ROW80 (Round 1), I should be at either 2,000 or 3,000 words, depending on whether I’ve gotten my quota for the day in or not. So where am I really?
3,795 words.
That’s right, kids, I’m almost a full day ahead of schedule, with the possibility of taking an extra day off on Friday, or forging ahead and getting a huge head start on next week. I won’t get any writing done tonight, most likely, because there’s an errand I’ve got to run to SC that will take up most of my night. but I pounded out 1,117 during lunch and I’m at that magic point of the book where I know where it’s going and how to get there, I just need to get my butt in front of a keyboard and write it.
I’ve also started using Scrivener for this project and have become totally enamored with it. I love how it organizes notes for me, and I really love how it makes converting to ebook super-easy. Since starting the trial I’ve uploaded a collection of poetry and a short story to Kindle, and I’ve re-formatted Returning the Favor and re-published it. I’m also probably changing the prices of all my books after my Kindle giveaway contest, so buy the novels now while they’re cheap! Once the contest is over my pricing structure is going to look something like this – short stories for $.99, short story collections $2.99-4.99 depending on length, novels $4.99-6.99 depending on length, with a loss leader of $.99 intro books in series. But those changes won’t kick in until April 1, so you’ve got plenty of time (and I have time to change my mind elebenty million times by then).
And today I finished my second workout in the Couch to 5K regimen. I have a little shin splint that’s really cutting down how much actual running I’m doing, but I did better today than I did Monday, so that’s progress. I only managed to run for about 6 of the 9 segments, but Monday I think I only did 4. Hopefully Friday I’ll be able to do all 9, but I may give myself an extra recovery day and do the run on my own Saturday.
And here’s another way to earn entries into the Win A Kindle Giveaway!
For every $10 you donate to my 24 Hours of Booty page, I’ll give you one entry into the contest. So go read about this great fundraising ride for cancer, and donate generously. You might win a Kindle for your trouble!
