Geek Link!

For all you archaeology buffs out there, possibly the coolest archaeology geek link I've come across in a long while:

The Archaeology Channel

This is a great website. All sorts of neat videos on all things archaeological. I watched a really interesting one on the relationship between early steel forging and the deforestation of part of India.

Very cool.

Great Weekend!

I just finished up at Ad Astra, and I want to say, I had a blast!

As with every con I've been to (all three now) folks were friendly and fun, panels were great, the other speakers lots of fun to discuss and argue with, and everyone very nice. Some great costume work, too.

So, lots of fun was had, lots more to be had. My next goal is Worldcon in Montreal in June, and I'll be blogging more about that soon. And now, I need a nap and then, I need to do homework.

Ad Astra - Quick Saturday Blog

Having a great time so far at Ad Astra. I actually had people at my reading of Small Magics! It was amazing. Especially when you realize I was opposite the guest of honor meet and greet and the pajama party. I damn near left myself.

And I had my camera in my pocket and was going to take pictures but I forgot. Sigh.

I had a great time. I met the woman who will be editing my next book for Dragon Moon Press: Gabrielle Harbowy. Nice woman, great sense of humour was willing to listen to me ramble on for far too long.

Got to hear Douglas Smith read one of his short stories. He's amazing. Great writer. Has his first novel nealrly done and I can't wait to read it.

(Word of advice to folks out there: long periods of low sleep + too much caffeine = babbling idiot)

Today, I've got a panel in the morning and an autograph session in the afternoon. Then I get to come home and miss entirely the evening sessions in favour of grinding out this report which we should have done far more on by now. Oh well.

Off to shower and shave, then off to the Con!

A Little Bit of Luxury

It's troubled times, we all know, and there's many folks facing a lot of hardship. Those of us who have jobs are working hard to keep them, and those who don't are working hard to find new ones.

In the midst of all this struggle, though, a little luxury is a fine, fine thing. Here's a great little article on luxuryfrom CBC. It's also a great reminder that luxury doesn't have to mean having all the fancies.. It can just mean treating yourself once in a while.

Now THAT is comedy!

This one is making the rounds of facebook, but I had to put it here after reading it:

Pub is closed by Monty Python grenade

Yes, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch is once more loose in the world.

*snerk!*

Ad Astra, Bookmarks and Marketing

Well, another long weekend filled with work. Fortunately, half of it was for myself instead of for class, so that was nice.

Built a bookmark to help push Small Magics at Ad Astra next weekend. My reading is at 9 p.m. Friday night, and I'm hoping to bring in some people. I'll also be doing a signing on Saturday at 4 p.m. I'll be bringing copies of Small Magics, so if you want one, here's a place to get it.

The bookmark is pretty cool:



Not bad for 8 hours work on Gimp (open source image manipulation software. Not Photoshop, but mighty good). Now the issue is, can I get them printed on time for Thursday evening, which is when they are stuffing them in the package. Got a call out to a print shop near my work, so we'll see what happens.

Very much looking forward to Ad Astra. I haven't been since Sandy McMaster and I did a stage combat demo there year and years and years ago. Should be lots of fun, a good chance to promote the book, and I get to do signings and all that other fun stuff.

Also, while surfing for ideas for the website at work, I came across a couple of interesting sites. One — Browsershots — allows you to see what your website looks like on a bunch of different browsers from all over thee internet. Mine looks mighty similar in all of them, so I'm quite pleased. Another — WebDistortion — is by an Irish web designer and is giving me some interesting ideas for when I resdesign my website, or possibly when I hire someone else to do it. I'm kind of busy and those things take time. Also some good articles on web marketing.

And finally, a fun little piece on why you get all your best ideas in the shower, and how to retain them.

And that's it for me. From Sunday night to Thursday I had a grand total of 16 hours sleep, so I'm now playing catch up.

Hey, only three more weeks of classes left, then a week to recover, and it's time to start editing Cold Magics (the blurb is halfway down the page). I'm looking forward to it almost as much as I am looking forward to getting started on my next writing project.

Another Late Night

I am once more burning the midnight oil, and unfortunately, not writing while I'm doing it. This has been a pattern for the last few months as I take classes and try to stay ahead of them.

Unfortunately, it isnt happening.

Right now I'm wired on caffeine to stay awake, struggling to get finished what I need to get finished (which is neither writing nor classwork but some old business which should have been resolved months ago), and hoping that once this is out of the way, I can get focused on the things I need to focus on to get caught up and maybe, with luck, even ahead.

On the bright side, I'm booked to go to two conventions this summer, and have to book myself into a third (that one in Montreal - expensive, but the publisher will be there).

Anyway, back to the grind. I want to get to sleep before midnight.

Geek Link!

'Oldest English Words' Identified.

Interesting little article on some lingusitic studies trying to determine which words in our language may be the oldest, and which are most likely to disappear in the near future.

Cool.

More Marketing Stuff

Can you tell I'm taking a class in this right now?

Anyway, found an interesting site called Dosh Dosh with some good marketing information on it, run out of my hometown of Toronto.

Not sure what's with all the anime images but they do attract the eye and the information they are hanging around is sound. There's some good tips for those of us trying to organize a marketing campaign.

This article, for example, on Push Marketing vs Pull Marketing does a nice job of laying out some tactics to use online for getting more folks interested in what you sell.

Anyway, it is late, and no more homework is happening tonight. I'm gonig to see if I can get some sleep and manage a workout tomorrow morning.

Geek Link!

At last! We can bring Neanderthals back to life!

We can! Really! Maybe. Or maybe not, depending whose opinion you ask.

Here's the article.

More importantly, they have just about recreated the neanderthal genome which will tell us a great deal about the evolution of humankind as we know it.

H/T to Kat, who told me about it (and put stuff like this on your blog, will ya?)

Classwork

I'm taking a corporate communications certificate right now. Lots of fun and lots of good PR information (gee, why would I want that? Hmmm)

Part of my assignments for one class is to put together a survey for people to take. It's part of an imaginary PR campaign for a mental health charity.

It is anonymous and does not record IP addresses. So if you have a minute or two to spare and would like to help, go here and fill it out:

Click Here to take survey

Thanks everyone.

Valentine's and Coraline

Valentine's Day today and what better way to enjoy it than going to see a creepy kid's movie?

(After a really, really good dinner. Steak oscar with crab and a shrimp skewer. Yum.

Coraline, based on the book by Neil Gaiman, is amazing. Excellent animation, excellent combination of stop motion and CGI. And well acted, too, I thought. Fairly faithful to the book, from what I remember. And take a good look at Coraline's dad and think of who he looks like.

Excellent movie, highly recommend it. Do not take small children to it. It is rated PG-13 for a reason.

Here's the trailer:

A Little Friday Night Music

Heard some Bruce Cockburn on the way to work this morning and had him in my head most of the day. Here's one of my favourites.

Book Marketing: Website Stuff

I'm prepping up marketing plans right now, as I've mentioned recently, getting ready for a re-launch of Small Magics and some other exciting things, and part of that, of course, is my website.

Now, my website has existed in a state of benign neglect for most of the last two years and I haven't had the time, energy, or money to do much about it. Things are still pretty similar in terms of time and energy, but I do have some money (gotta love having a job) and that makes things better.

So while looking around for tips on developing a better website, I came across the blog of Rich Page, who calls himself a web optimizer and who has a decent blog with some good tips directed towards making your website more attractive to those who visit, and more effective at pushing your product. Some good reading there for those who are interested.

There are a few things I need to do very soon on my website, starting with getting a good content management system so I can update it quickly and easily, rather than having to do all that HTML I'm not so good at. Other stuff:

• Put this blog on my website for better visibility
  
• Turn my website from a shell site (which means all pages have the same URL, basically -- it's cheaper) to a proper website to increase my SEO (search engine optimization)
• Develop the social media tools to make the website accessible across different channels
• And a whack of content updating

So, lots to do, and while it often feels like this has very little to do with writing, the fact is that is I want other people to read what I write, and to do that, I need to let them know I'm alive. And a good web presence is a cheap and easy way to do that.

And now, sleep. I'm tired.

Cold Magics

... is finished. I just completed the first draft.

About bloody time, too.

And now, I sleep.

Researching and Learning...

Been doing a lot of wandering as I prep my maketing plan for the Small Magics relaunch and the advent of the next book in 2010 (oops, did I let that slip?) and have been gobbling down whatever information I could about the publishing industry in general, as well as small press, literary festivals, conventions, and all that fun stuff.

It's been good, though I'm suffering from information overload at the moment, justbecause there is so much out there. Still, no rest for the wickedly determined (or maybe just hte wicked, I haven't decided yet).

One of the more interesting things I found along the journey was Publishing Trends website and blog, which features articles about publishing and what people are reading. Interesting places to learn more about the industry.

And now, back to work. I have 20 tabs open on this browser and would like to deal with them all tonight.

Then there's that pesky writing thing I'm doing...

Update:

And another cool one: The Writer's Edge

Running Down the Dream

I haven't been blogging much lately. The joys of working full time, commuting two hours a day, having a small child, taking classes, getting exercise, writing in what spare time I have and desperately trying to get more than 5 hours of sleep a night.

So what am I doing all this for?

I want to write fiction for a living. Not for part of my living; for a living. I want my books to be on shelves across the country, around the world and translated into different languages. I want to be cranking out at least 2 books a year, and I want to do it for the rest of my life.

It's a long row to hoe. And as all of you may have noticed, it's taking a while.

Life has a nasty way of interfereing with one's plans, and my life has certainly been interfering with mine. That's all right. Life is how you get the material you need to write.

So why I am telling you all about this?

Well, I some interesting developments have happened recently. My wonderful publisher, Dragon Moon Press, and I are going to relaunch Small Magics. This fall, I think, though we haven't got a solid date yet. And we are doing this as part of a publicity campaign for something else, which we will announce at the relaunch (hint, it's been a while coming...)

The next step on this is simultaneously building the publicity campaign for the Small Magics relaunch and the campaign around the big announcement. It means lots of writing, lots of media work, and lots of learning to do thingsI don't know how to do, like developing RSS feeds, podcasting, and developing specific social media directed campaigns.

There's lots to be done, including, possibly, a new blog that details this whole mess, as well as keeping up this one. And it's all going to take time. You know time, that one thing I don't have any of this year?

If it isn't challenging, it isn't fun.

The next steps are for me to finalize my publicity plan for the Small Magics relaunch and get working on that at high speed, keep writing on the other projects, and finish my classes at high speed. I'll be finished them this fall, all things being equal, but meanwhile, there's lots to do.

That's me. Stay tuned, and I'll be starting to put in details about the process.

A Doctor in the House

As a note, when I tried to embed this from quizfarm, it came out absolutely awful. I had to make a jpeg from a screen shot and add the link, just to make it fit. You can still get to the quiz from here; just click the picture, but I don't recommend trying to embed the code in your blog.

The Furnace is Broken

Bloody hell.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Yesterday was my birthday and I had a blast. Saw Moliere at the Tarragon Theatre, which was a fantastic performance, brilliantly directed. Then we went out for dinner and had a nice evening with my wife while my mother looked after our daughter. Life was good.

And here, by coincidence is a video my daughter spotted on YouTube, which I found hilarious:



So to everyone whose birthday it is or was, happy birthday. Enjoy the song.