*Insert Witty Title Here*

So. This past year has been spent reflecting on what I want to do next in my life. Last December I took a break from all forums, facebook, and twitter. It took a month or so for my creativity to start coming back, but it did. Now my mind is racing with new ideas for stories, for drawings, for paintings, for crafty things, for new adventures. YeeHaw! What impossible dream do I want to pursue next?

As I stood here poised for my next big adventure in life, I realized that I needed to tie up a few loose ends.

With Emerald Tales and Crystal Codices, I achieved what I set out to achieve. I published stories and poetry that I thought should be published, and I gave a boost to a few writers who had never been published before. Making money was never my goal for those publications.

Then Amazon launched its Kindle Direct Publishing which is a much better way to publish those longer short stories than I was doing. If you can't find a market for your short stories then I highly recommend that you consider Kindle Direct Publishing.

Being a publisher is not something that I always had a burning ambition to do. It was an idea that I had about five years ago, and I made that idea a reality. Mission accomplished, but do I want to continue? The answer to that question was no. There are aspects of publishing that I really don't enjoy. And I suck at marketing.

So with the contracts almost all expired, I've decided to permanently close to all submissions. I'm not closing the company, yet. I still have Mette Pesonen's The Annals of Hypnosia in print until next April. And maybe I'll take it off in a different direction down the road.

As for this blog, I'll still post random musings about writing and funny videos when I find them.


I was going to post a youtube video of two dogs dining, but I got an error message. I'm wondering if the drunk monkeys in the previous video are involved as I got the following error message:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, show them this information:
lyanjFHp7u7cznRGW3_ZMrfPSrndv_dq7k5AtggT89Gv_gxXcOQ1H9trwV8F
... a thousand more letters redacted

Post-it Note Wars

I saw this on CNN dot com: Post-it Note Wars Rage in Paris

At the beginning of August, employees of Ubisoft, a French computer gaming company, put up an image from Space Invaders in their office window. The next day, BNP the largest bank in France and across the street from Ubisoft put up a Pacman in their window. And now across Paris, office windows are decorated with images created with Post-It notes.

They have a website of photos taken of the windows. You can find it at www.postitwar.com Some of the images are amazing.

My personal favorite is this one. It's in Amsterdam not Paris. The juxtaposition of classic European architecture with post-it images in the windows just tickles my funny bone.

Because caring is sharing

If you were wondering why I sometimes post things that are way off the topic of writing and publishing like elephant polo and led sheep, it's because a story idea popped into my head when I saw it. Since caring is sharing, I share them here with you. If it gets the creative juices flowing, then my work is done. If all you do is smile, then my work is also done. :)

Landfall in Norway?

This is a screenshot that I pulled from the National Hurricane Center. It shows the potential track of Hurricane Katia.



If the storm does as it is predicted to, then it will bypass the US, brush Scotland and make landfall in Norway. And while it will be called a posttropical cyclone, the strength of the wind will be the same as for a category one hurricane.

With all the extreme weather that we've had this year, I thought that we would have something extreme in the hurricane season. Hurricane Irene causing so much destruction in Vermont was strange enough, but this possible landfall in Norway (Norway ?!? WTF?!?) takes the cake.

Extreme Sheep Art

Mix a flock of sheep, LED lights, some shepherds, and a camera, and you get this:

The Tough Guide to FantasyLand by Diana Wynne Jones

I heard about this book several years ago as a must have for anyone writing fantasy. I finally borrowed a copy from the library several months ago. It was so funny that I ordered a copy from the bookstore.

Even if your only knowledge of fantasy is The Lord of the Rings movie, I think you'll find this book really funny to read. And that is a bit odd because it is organized like a dictionary, but I read it front to back occassionally stopping because I couldn't breathe as I was laughing so hard.

A small taste of what's inside:

CLOTHING. Although this varies from place to place, there are two absolute rules:
1. Apart from ROBES, no garment thicker than a SHIRT ever has sleeves.
2. No one ever wears SOCKS.
See also CLOAKS, COSTUME, and KNITTING.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones; put it on your books to buy list.

Plot or Sequence of Events?

Recently I read a bit of historical fiction set during World War II. One of the subplots of the book got me to thinking about plot and the difference between plot and a sequence of events.

To summarize it, two pairs of nazi spies sneak into Jacksonville, Fl then proceed to create chaos by blowing things up. One pair heads west blowing things up until one of them screws up the timer. The bomb goes off early killing that pair. The other pair heads north blowing things up until one of them gets involved with a mob prostitute. An altercation with her mob boss ends up with the pair of spies being killed. Game over.

The thing is even though the bad guys end up dead and thus stopped from creating further chaos, the telling of it doesn't feel satisfying to me. There was no one actively trying to catch them. Those who were looking into the bombings dismissed it as not being the work of nazi spies. These spies did not have a goal that they were trying to achieve other than wander around the continental US and blow things up. And they encountered no real obstacles, in terms of local law enforcement, blowing up their targets. If these guys hadn't run into misfortune, they would still be running around blowing things up today with no one having a clue that they were doing so.

So what this really is is the telling of a sequence of events like one would read in a history book and not a plot or a story. And what turns a sequence of events into a plot or a story is having a goal and having obstacles to that goal. Otherwise what you get is they went here, they went there, they did this, they did that; all of it without purpose and no reason to keep reading unless one finds a recounting of events fascinating.