I got that email this morning telling me it would be 48 hours....

Well, that was wrong. The books are out now.

The kindle version of Serpent's Quest, all spiffied up and expanded, is out RIGHT NOW. It's 125k words for $1.

Yup, just ONE dollar.

And Fireborn Law is out also. Although it somehow got referred to as part of the Dark Brothers series, and not Lycan Blood's second book. I will have to get that fixed. The covers appear a tad messed for some reason. You can snag the proper covers from the print versions or my website

There is a new free software at Amazon that you can download to read your kindle books on your computer. You no longer need to own the expensive reader.

So that's pretty cool.

I finally got satisfaction from Amazon's kindle program. On January 26th, Tim Willard uploaded Serpent's Quest and Fireborn Law to the kindle publishing program. The next day, I went on and approved the books. By the next Monday the books were still not released and no explanation was offered to me by Amazon. Their info is that the books are supposed to be out within 48-72 hours. I tracked down a contact email addy and inquired. According to them, they sent me an email that I never received. They wanted proof that I had the rights to my own OP backlist.

More email was exchanged and on the 8th (yesterday) I was reaching the point of rage (I'm a curmudgeon, remember?). So I went to find a phone number. I ended up going in through customer service instead. There is no phone number available for their dtp-support. I kept getting emails asking "did this solve your problem?" and I started hitting the "NO" link in the email. This finally got me a more productive phone call.

The "Cuss-tomer" support person said that they could at least bump my request up to a higher level.

That made me feel great until I got an email from the exact same person I had been dealing with. This person had kept telling me that they were "researching" my facts.

Well a few minutes ago I got the news that the books would be released in kindle format within 48 hours.

Everything is go.

It seems that David Byron who ripped off several authors is now having a spot of trouble and wants authors and others to give him nearly $2k to rescue him.

Good luck with that David *snicker*

From: "david byron" *****gmail.com
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2010 12:56:05 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: please i need your favor

Hello,

How are you doing? I just believe you are doing great. This might just be a surprise to you but I want you to pardone me for not informing you about my traveling to Edinburg for a three days Seminar. It was something urgent and i didn't even inform anyone about this traveling. You know what, I just got myself in serious trouble here due to my carelessness. I got my wallet misplaced on my way to the hotel I lodge in after the Seminar yesterday which was actually the last day. My money,phone, cards,diary, my return ticket and other vital documents are all in the wallet. I'm so worrried now as I have lost all contacts. I can not even make calls, i just have to use the internet to send you this email so that you could help me out with $1700 to sort myself out here and to pay for my hotel bills. But I will appreciate any amount you could afford. I will pay you back as soon as I get back home.

You can send the fund with my name and the address below via any Western union money transfer outlet around you or inside any bank. This is the fastest way for me to receive the fund here immediately. I will really appreciate your effort in helping me out.

Name : david byron
Address:*deleted to protect the guilty*

Thanks alot, looking forward to hearing from you soon

Child sacrifice in Uganda is an intense article.

What I find very interesting is that this same country recently passed a law requiring that active homosexuals be executed.

I'm not known for my political correctness. It was pointing out things like this that got me banned from a fair number of feminist groups, blogs, and website et al.

I started looking at the situation with Cornwell's lawsuit against her stalker, Leslie Raymond Sachs.

I had stopped following it for a few years. Then I got curious a few weeks ago. She won her lawsuit. Yet, Sachs has (in violation of court order) continued putting up other websites about it, still making the same claims.

I found that (and correct me if I am wrong) Sachs appears to have self-published his Amanda Poe Mysteries under an imprint called Pussycat Press. He accused Cornwell, initially, of plagiarizing his novel, The Virginia Ghost Murder (1998), when she published The Last Precinct (2000). When he got no satisfaction, he began to follow her all over the internet and spread vicious lies about her.

The website I found a few weeks ago by Sachs has already been taken down. Someone must be watching him.

Not wanting to give money to Sachs by purchasing his book new, I located and purchased a used copy of it. I purchased a new copy of Cornwell's book.

Sachs' book arrived today. The copy is autographed. Not that I wanted his autograph. I only discovered it on opening the book this morning. Large type size means that it is not actually a novel length work, but closer to novelette or possibly novella.

The next thing that I discovered was that the writing was extremely poor.

Which brings me back around to the exact same point I tried to make about Jordan Scott vs Stephanie Meyers.

The nature of plagiarism and the ignorance of the people who are doing the naughtiness of suing name authors.

I will be the first to admit that plagiarism does occur. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously.

However, the fact that a book by a name author and an obscure book by an unknown share some basic elements in common does not make it plagiarism. It is not unusual for books to have things in common. No one has a sole ownership on, say, vampires. No one has a sole right to historical events, cultural aspects, or other matters.

There's an online shop that trademarked the word "Thane." Does that mean we have to take it out of our history books and our fantasies? No.

If more than one person decides to write about the same minor point in history, does that make one of them a plagiarist? No.

Some things are borrowed and used so often that they become tropes.

Some people make actual refs to other authors, friends, and works in their novels and stories. I have a mage who lives on an island the size of New Zealand and raises colored sheep. Her name is McConchie. Unlike Lyn McConchie who also raises colored sheep, my character's sheep are green and purple.

One of the largest things missing right now on the internet is a sense of proportion.

Because someone else wrote or did something similar is no reason to assume plagiarism, waste money on lawsuits, or (as in the case of Sachs), subject someone to a wealth of unfair abuse.

After all these years I can't put all of the pieces right in my head. I have only an image that hit me so hard at seven years old, a month shy of eight, that it haunted my dreams as a child.

But it came back to me again as I was writing a scene of disaster.

Comparing dates, I can see now that it happened around the time that I had polio. I cannot tell you which event came first.

What I remember is the overwhelming sense of panic among the adults (my mother and my grandparents). We were living in Long Beach, California. The navy shipyard there would have been a primary target if the missiles had been launched from Russia.

The image?

Empty shelves. Row after row of empty shelves in the supermarket. My mother trying desperatedly to get enough food to get by if the crisis came to blows. For about five years afterward I used to hoard candy in a box under my bed. I was constantly asking for money to buy candy, but I never ate it. The candy went into the box. Eventually my hoard was discovered hidden behind boxes of toys and taken from my possession.

Brian Keene speaks on a subject dear to my heart and one I have been talking about in bits and pieces for months now.

There is a wide chasm of quality and direction between an established author bringing out their own backlist and an inexperienced first time writer self-publishing.

I just received this email, but the author is far more interesting than the email itself.

I am currently putting together a book that will be a tribute to Forry Ackerman, entitled Cinemassacres: A Tribute To Forrest J. Ackerman, located here http://bearmanormedia.bizland.com/id402.html which is currently being revised to a different title and guest list. I would consider it an honor if you would agree to do a written interview for the book. If so, I'd just send you some Q&A via email, you'd answer the questions, send it back via email. Easy!
If you might be interested, let me know, and I will get back to you ASAP after the holidays.

Best Wishes for a happy holiday,
Iron Dave

--
Iron Dave
http://fictionprodigies.webs.com
http://ligaturemarks.webs.com
http://nvhmag1.webs.com

On Line {Contact hours} Monday to Friday - 8am to 2pm Saturday - 9am to 2pm
Sunday- Email me at your own risk. LOL!
***
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message. Thank you. Your e-mail address is not shared and is kept confidential.

____________________

Well the name rang some chimes, but I could not remember why. So I googled him and then I remembered a comment from Lewis at the Rusty Nail.

I also checked out the websites he listed in his email.

authorsden

Several years ago, I read a book by an author I will not name. I usually refer to him as Bonehead the Barbarian. I was working for Jane Letty at the time and he was a new client.

He had written a book that featured an aged warrior who had a big legend attached to him. It was not until summer of 07 that I discovered where he had borrowed the idea from. What I did know at the time was that Bonehead's character was not convincing and that he had difficulty with his characterization and clarity. He's sold a lot of books to the small press, but nothing to the majors.

Bonehead had a habit of saying that all fantasy from the majors was "pussified" and that irked me big time. At one point he said in reference to a very influential female editor, "I'd rather be published by the small press than have one of my books come out with a sanitary napkin as a slipcover."

In 06, I had the first book in my lycan series come out and one of the central characters was Todd Sinclair, the protag's grandfather. He was an aged warrior, still a terror to his enemies, with a huge legend left from his youth. Separated by the disastrous conclusion to a great war, Todd spent ten years searching for Cahira before he finally found and married her.

In summer of 07, Steven Beeho read the novel and started pushing me to read David Gemmel, telling me that Todd was a lot like Druss. I kept telling him that I had read Gemmell. But when I went to my book shelf and pulled the book off, I was wrong. It was David Eddings I had read, not David Gemmell. So, I obligingly bought several of Gemmell's novels and chewed into them.

I loved Gemmell and I could see the similarities, even if Todd managed to have a far better life than Druss. After all, Todd managed to raise five children with his beloved Cahira and was the patriarch of a large extended family. Druss never got that lucky.

I'm glad that I created Todd before discovering Druss, because I imagined Todd myself and see the similarities as examples of certain archetypes.

However, I also realized that Bonehead had borrowed Druss for his character and made a mess of it. It may well be that you can't write old people until you become one. Or maybe you just need that kind of large extended family of diverse ages such as I grew up around.

Todd was, in many ways, drawn from a composite of members of my family. So he had a grounding in my own observations and experiences. I think that many writers who try to copy Druss don't have that to draw upon. The majority of people today do not grow up in that kind of huge family. They really have no idea what they are like. Even more to the point, very few of the middle class, safe and sound, over protected people trying to write today have known anything like the world war II generation I knew so well from childhood.

Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Bitten by Books has just reviewed Serpent's Quest and given it five stars.

I'm very delighted by it.

Life today has become an odd creature.

One of the things that Clarke Gable adored about Carole Lombard was the fact that she cussed in a casual fashion.

Today most people, especially the young wankers, prefer cussing to making a logical argument.

Our culture has inverted itself.

----------

On another note, I decided to talk about what is currently going on with me on the agent front. I had been trying hard not to mention it, but something happened today to make me bolder.

A friend insisted that I query Ethan Ellenberg. I did so and got a startling reply. He asked me to send him 3-4 projects to consider. I started revising and cleaning up the three projects I intended to send him and asked him another question since it was clearly taking me a bit more time than I expected. His website says he wants a 50 page sample with a synopsis.

I got an answer from him today and he told me to just send him what I had and forget agency protocol on the size of the samples.

So I have my fingers crossed.

He likes my creds. :)

A comment was posted here by interfexed that my anonymous and her sock puppet is (did anyone doubt it?) Delirum's child (aka Melissa Gavazzi). She has been harassing interfexed on her lj and attempting to use her college degree as a battering ram (assuming you can make one out of stale jello).

It seems that Melissa's college degree came from a scam institution called University of Phoenix. We've all seen the advertisements for it.

First example of fraud
Consumer Affairs take on it.
Distance-education. org

Anyone who manages to achieve such a multitude of appearances on Stupid free and SF drama as Melissa does is a walking, talking, typing disaster zone.

Her cop out education is an excellent example of it. I'm not the only one to have run-ins with her. However, her choice of college is prime subject for ridicule.

There are numerous scams and borderline bastards on the internet. Maybe if her "straight A's" had come from a legitimate institution of higher learning in her area (such as UMASS Amherst and Mt. Holyoke et al), her degree would rate some recognition for achievement.

But to be beating interfexed over the head with a scam degree is the ultimate in stupid.

My grandmother always said that the first person to resort to name calling and bad language was ignorant and had already lost the argument. By her measuring stick, Melissa has already lost.

Getting back to the spot where it concerns interfexed we find this example on her lj where Melissa contacted her a month later concerning statements made on stupid free. She did this out of the blue, and I have to wonder how many other members of the stupid free community received such love notes also.

I rarely write poetry and usually when I do, it's standard doggerel and not meant to be taken seriously. Here's my drunken dwarf song/poem.
-----------------


YO HO TO THE BOTTLE I GO


Yo Ho! Yo Ho!
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!
Ladies beware,
retreat up the stair
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!

Yo Ho! Yo Ho!
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!

When I’ve had a few drinks
It’s far clearer I thinks
I notices the winks
As the glasses we clinks
The lasses make passes I thinks

Yo Ho! Yo Ho!
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!

Yo Ho to the Bottle I go
The ladies are fleeing
I guess we're not meeting
I just wanted some kissing
But something was missing
Ooops me bottles got broke

My vampires like take out

My necromancers like to nibble in bed

My lycans eat table scraps.

My demon-eater adores Bloody Marys.

My tritons prefer Venus on the half shell.

My trolls have simple tastes: if it wiggles eat it.

"The reviewer clearly has no taste in prose, probably because they were too busy sipping lattes and sniffing their own farts to develop one, but the point still stands." Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Although they referred to me by name on the Nickolaus Pacione entry (he wrote a story about me called The Fandom Writer), they haven't yet done so here. But they keep adding to it.

I just have to alert them to the truth here. I don't sip lattes. I drink Folger's Instant and put one and a half tablespoons of instant coffee, add pumpkin spice creamer (when I can get it, it's seasonal) and loads of Hershey's coco, and then sugar. As to the farts, I don't choose to sniff them. I'm stuck with them. They're so horrendous you can smell them from the bathroom into the bedroom (seriously. I grew up on Tex-Mex and can't live without lots of bean dishes)

All kidding aside. One of the most important things in life is to learn to laugh at yourself.

It doesn't come easy. And I will get into that in another post.

-------------------

My friends and I have checked that entry several times just because they keep up with her so well. I've been getting some very strange PMs at various places and one of them claimed to come from a fan of Melissa's.

I encountered Melissa the first time on a poetry board that I owned. I did not go there often as I had set it up as a favor to a friend and then just became an absentee landlord who dropped in from time to time. The friends who ran it did not have the time to keep up with it any longer and I closed the board recently.

I have renewed the domain name. And I put a redirect to my main message board on the site.

For the past couple of months while playing Warcraft, I have been hollering "Kill the poooeeets"

I can honestly say that I am not certain if poets have cornered the market on stupid or whether other groups are equally obnoxious.

Then again, I may simply have become more cranky in my old age.

-------------------------

The 'washed up has been' bothered me for a day. Mostly because I have been slapped with that label so often since 07. But that's another story.

On the other hand, I chuckled at the image of sipping lattes and sniffing farts. One of the more interesting aspects of farts is one I discovered as a small child. Farting in the bath tub makes bubbles.

________________

And another note. I log IPs and I have definite proof that Melissa left that anonymous comment on the previous post.

I don't want another nitwit war. I have had three of them in the past 10 years. That's enough. However, I don't back down. So hopefully, the PMs and such will eventually stop.

Vampires are hemovores and hemophages.

They are not carnivores and they certainly are not vegetarians.

Well, actually they grabbed a review I posted on Amazon, plunked it into the entry on someone who calls herself delirium's child and attributed the review to "a washed up has been."

I'm getting used to the label.

I'll have to tell the folks who are still sending me fan letters in email that they have to stop reading my works because I'm not all that sane any longer.

To miss quote Shakespeare, "Better to have (professionally) published and been forgotten, than never to have published at all."

Victoria Strauss has an excellent article on self-publishing vs vanity publishing and she answered some of my long standing questions about my own effort to re-issue my books myself.

There's a lot going on that blurs the distinctions between vanity and self-publishing. Language is being cheapened by this. Good words are going bad as the nasties try to make themselves look like the good guys.

Caveat emptor.

I've been relaxing with a new PC game. It's in-expensive. Just $19.95. Torchlight is a load of fun, operates in a similar fashion to Diablo 1, and the graphics are awesome. They are also allowing people to make mods for it.

I beat the game yesterday playing on normal and now I'm going through again on hard. One of the things I like best is that you get two stashes. One for the character and a shared stash where you can pass items between characters. I have one mule to stash a lot of the set pieces and another just for the gems that you can socket into armor and weapons.

It's also nice that you get a pet and you can send it back to sell stuff without leaving the dungeon.