Auspicious Signs

The New Year is starting off with a bang! While my packing up the place in Parks is going slower than planned due to the fact that I have a cold, I may already have a buyer. I also got a confirmation call this afternoon for a gig playing at an attorney’s conference in [...]

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My Half-Novel

The critiques of “Return of the Shadow Lion” that I have received so far are fairly consistent and there is a relatively simple solution to 90 percent of the difficulties my dedicated readers had with the story. All I have to do is stick Books Three and Four in the series together, and “Presto!” [...]

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Critiques, Confusion, Consternation

I’m so confused…
Having dedicated readers from an online writer’s group critique one’s novel is a whole new experience for me. I’m not sure what to do with all of the ideas, suggestions, corrections, and criticisms. Each person has had something valuable to add; each person has also at some point missed something that I thought [...]

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To NaNo or Not to NaNo, That is the Question

I’m still debating whether to take on NaNoWriMo this year.  I want to, but I am still up to my eyeballs with moving and jobbing and everything else I’ve got going.  I wouldn’t even consider it, except that “RSL” is complete and being critiqued. I don’t expect the crits to be done before December, so [...]

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On the Track and Picking Up Steam

It’s been over a week since I last posted, so I thought I’d do a brief update at least…
I spent most of last week in Phoenix job-hunting and apartment-scouting. I’ve got a line on a guitar teaching position at a music store, which I will know more on at the end of this week, [...]

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Living a Real Life

Got a post up in another blog carnival… This time “Jump. Fall. Fly.” is over on http://thetallpoppy. blogspot.com, who is this week’s host of the “Living a Real Life” blog carnival.

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NaNoWriMo Looms

Ah yes, NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer’s Month – lurks just beyond the horizon. I got an email that they are reworking their website in preparation for an October 1 kick off.
Has it only been a year? Close to it, anyway, that I scrapped the screenplay I was writing and started fresh with the novel [...]

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Love and Promises

Writing is what’s on my mind today. My post, Nakedness, is listed on the Personal Power Blog Carnival at Pinkblocks.com. Last night I sent out my revised Part One of “Return of the Shadow Lion” to my Dedicated Readers, or DRs as they are known in Critters.org/critique.org lingo. The critiques, or crits, that came [...]

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Wordprexy

I’m all for open access to the Internet, so I was prepared to be somewhat lenient in my views towards wordprexy.com in their stated efforts to get around Turkey’s ban on WordPress. What I wasn’t prepared for was to go onto my blog on wordprexy’s mirror and see porn ads. Enough already.
Freedom of speech and [...]

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Web Para-sites

Now I’m really getting cynical. I did my Alexa search and after half-a-dozen pages of seeing my scraped writings (and with more to go), I got angry all over again. I clicked on one of the sites for “free guitar lessons” and saw pretty much what I expected with my content. Gee, I didn’t know [...]

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Vigilante Blog Justice…How to Out a Scraper Bot

It all started out innocently enough. I just got mad about my content being scraped over and over. I’m all for humans using technology to eliminate drudgery and expand opportunity. What I don’t like is humans using technology to use other humans.
After railing about the injustice and applying a few ineffective remedies, I decided to [...]

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What a Difference a Year Makes

My more usual optimism has returned this evening, leaving the melancholy of midday to fade away into memory. As I drove to Flagstaff to have dinner with my friend Margie, I realized how reclusive I have become the last few months – two trips to Flag in a week feels positively extraverted. Between the novel [...]

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Thank You for Reading

Those of you who’ve read other posts here probably already know that I take a certain geeky pleasure in my blog stats. I get a kick out of seeing what new country shows up on my Sitemeter map and it’s a big deal to me when I hit a personal record of some kind.
A few [...]

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Three Great Ways to Increase Your Site Traffic

Now that I’ve gone to putting at least one link back to this site somewhere in every post, I’m finding lots of my original content scattered around cyberspace. I’m not getting trackbacks, either; I’m finding the posts off of referrers coming into this site and to Flamencophile.com. They don’t even have the decency to give [...]

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Wiki Mind Map

Geek fun. Well, flamencophile.com is going to have to have one of these…

WikiMindMap is a free, open source Flash browser that organizes a set of links into a mindmap. Too cool. It’s written in Java using the Swing toolkit and it’s compatible with Drupal, too. Try it out on Wikipedia.org by clicking the picture to [...]

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