Continue reading »]]> Those of you who “know” me (inasmuch as anyone knows anyone online – I could be an 85 year old great-grandmother of seven, for all you really know), know that I’ve been a diehard Mac/iDevice user for quite some time. And while that’s still the case (I live in, and will always live in, a Windowless house…get it?), I’ve modified my “mobile” usage over the past year.

I’m jumping on a plane tomorrow (well, walking slowly so as not to alarm TSA) to Spain for an 8-day business trip, and for the first time since my pre-laptop days (right around the time the mammals rose up) I will be traveling without a Mac of any sort. This is a BIG step for me. With the lone exception of a one-night trip to Milwaukee last year (which totaled less than 30 hours away) when I brought only an iPad, this trip will be Mac-less for the first time.

As sad as this may sound, I’ve been preparing for this Mac-less trip for a while, knowing how my mobile habits were changing. And now, for the first time since those mammal days, I don’t even technically own a Mac laptop. The trusty MacBook Pro is now in the extremely capable hands of my son Zack, who will surely put it to great use. I am now down to the eclectic mix of:

• Main computer: Mac mini (running dual-core i5 processor @ 2.3 GHz, 8GB RAM, added in a 256GB SSD drive – smoove)
• Laptop: Samsung Chromebook (installed Ubuntu on SD card, so it dual boots to either Chrome OS or Linux…muahaha)
• Tablet: Nexus 7 (completely replaced my iPad 3 – just much more portable & convenient)
• Phone: iPhone 5 (I haven’t moved away from iOS, but I am curious to see the next Nexus phone…)

On this trip, the latter three will be joining me. No Mac at all. Weird. But what I’ve done is set myself up to be completely Mac-less on a mobile basis.

I’ve switched my business emails over to GMail – matter of fact, I now have five different email accounts feeding into it, so the Chromebook easily handles it. With Chrome OS, you can’t “install” apps – everything is web-based, and I’ll be the first to tell you there ain’t no decent web-based IMAP service for email.

I’ve got all email accounts running into K-9 Mail on the Nexus tablet, meaning I have a true separate IMAP system for each one when needed. I’ve also got movies and books, of course.

And finally, the iPhone is jailbroken, so I am able to create a wifi hotspot wherever, whenever (even in Spain next week). Meaning even if I’m running the Chromebook in Chrome OS (as opposed to the LInux side, where I can use LibreOffice, Gimp, etc. even when offline), I am able to fully use the web-based stuff.

I’ve even got an app for the Chromebook called Code Anywhere, meaning I can log into my business’ website via FTP, change HTML code, and reupload. My biggest fear to being Mac-less on the road was losing the ability to use Dreamweaver to change web pages, but Code Anywhere works in a pinch.

So now my out-of-office work is done on those three devices. Which on a side note, combined cost less than the MacBook Pro…hell, the Nexus plus Chromebook total cost was the same as a base wifi-only iPad…and they weigh less!

And it should work just fine…right?

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How about a little Western to spice up your work week? I’m happy to “reintroduce” a good friend who has been here before (though before I had that cool little bookstore/cafe image above), Robert Swartwood. Author of horror, suspense, and thrillers (including one of my favorite reads, No Shelter, with the butt-kicking Holly Lin) has dipped his toes into a Western genre for his brand new release, Walk The Sky.

Check out Robert and his work on his site, follow him on Twitter for some off-the-cuff food remarks. Plus he’s got some swag to give away, so read through and leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Ladies and gents, Walk The Sky:

One of my favorite genres is the Western.

And I say this as someone who hasn’t watched nearly as many Westerns as he should.

In fact, considering the amount of Westerns out there, I’ve probably seen only a handful.

But for some reason it’s still a favorite genre.

Yes, there are tropes that seem to constantly pop up — the anti-hero, the cavalry, show down at high noon, and wanted posters, just to name a few — that our understanding of life in the “old west” is probably nothing like what it was really like to live back then.

Still, the setting seems to make for great storytelling, or at the very least, exciting storytelling.

Walk the Sky, a short novel I co-wrote with the late David B. Silva, is a subgenre of the Western: the Weird Western. It starts out as a typical Western — two men on the run from a posse — but then quickly veers into supernatural territory.

It was great fun to write, but also challenging, as we tried to stay true to the time period.

A lot of the Westerns you see on TV nowadays take liberties with the setting and characters and even weapons. Originally there was a scene in Walk the Sky where a jar of gumballs falls off a table and shatters, sending a scatter of them everywhere. A friend who read an early draft did some research and found that gumballs hadn’t been invented during the time that the novel takes place. It wasn’t a big problem — we easily changed gumballs to penny candy — but still it was something we initially overlooked.

Another thing we needed to research were the weapons used back then. When we think of Westerns, we immediately think of six-shooters and Winchesters, but many of those guns weren’t invented until the early 1900′s, and as Walk the Sky takes place in 1875, we needed to be conscious of which weapons that were featured (we didn’t, for instance, want to feature a gun that wasn’t invented for another three years). Sure, we could easily have fudged the weapons to make them work, but it was important to us to keep the setting and time as realistic as possible.

And that, I think, is one of the reasons I enjoy the Western genre so much. Nowadays there’s just so much technology that it makes it almost too easy for the good guys and bad guys. But back then, there were no cell phones or computers or Internet. If someone was in trouble, they couldn’t easily send out a text message. It helps ramp up the suspense. And it also helps us remember a time when we didn’t take all our technology for granted.

ABOUT WALK THE SKY:

Things are bad for Clay Miller and George Hitchens.

For starters, they’re on the run from a posse out for blood. Then, as they ride through the Utah desert, the two come across the crumpled body of a young boy on the brink of death. The boy can’t speak, but it’s clear he’s frightened of something nearby. When asked what’s got him so scared, the terrified boy writes three letters in the dirt …

DED

By nightfall, Clay and George are tied up in jail. They can’t move. They can’t speak. They can do nothing but listen to the boy, outside, screaming for his life.

Yes, things are bad for Clay and George.

And they’re only going to get worse.

Walk the Sky is available in paperback and on Kindle (US and UK) at a special introductory price of 99 cents.

Enter to win a free copy of the paperback at Goodreads.

What’s your favorite Western, either book or TV show or movie? Let us know in the comments section by Friday 4/19 midnight EST, and Robert will gift five copies of the Kindle edition to random participants.

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Many thanks, Robert, and much appreciate the kind giveaway. Wanna win an e-copy of Walk The Sky? THEN DO WHAT HE SAYS.

Continue reading »]]> UPDATE: Photo (actual one, not the stock photo of a piano I found on Google) at the bottom!

Another in a long line of Proud Dad posts. My son is boarding the bus, along with 60+ other Red Blazered young men, on their way to Carnegie Hall for a performance today. (Before you ask, yes – I tried the “how do you get to Carnegie Hall line…it’s lost on today’s youth).

I couldn’t be more proud, or floored. Yes, THAT Carnegie Hall. Wow…just, wow. I wonder if he, at 12, has any idea how amazing this is? Probably not…but that’s what the Internet is for, right? Posterity, man – that’s why I do this.

UPDATE: Photo on scene!

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I’m proud to introduce a good friend (though that may be presumptuous of me – she may hate my guts for all I know…) I’ve had the rare privilege of meeting in person. Yes, real flesh and bones in a world of bits and bytes. Leah Petersen is a talented author, an outspoken supporter of fellow authors, and a very entertaining Twitter follow (especially if you hate your day job – she’s got some great one liners).

I read her debut novel, Fighting Gravity, last year (review here), easily one of my most enjoyable reads of the year. Truly great storytelling, hard to put down, and I attribute that 100% to the characters she created. Those characters are back for another story, picking up where the first left off. Cascade Effect (The Physics of Falling, Book 2) was released last week, and Leah was generous enough to stop by the “all new” Author’s Cafe to chat about it.

—-

A big thanks to Leah for taking time out of what I can imagine is a very busy launch week. Do yourselves a favor, folks. Visit her site. Follow her on Twitter. And most of all, take a look at Fighting Gravity (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Goodreads) for the first in this series, then Cascade Effect (Kindle, Goodreads, other outlets coming soon) to pick up the story of Jake and Pete as it moves forward.

Continue reading »]]> Thought I’d put up a quick post about the true start of baseball season for me: my son Evan’s opening day. (Plus I wanted to try the WordPress app on the phone).

I hustled him out of his Philadelphia Boys Choir practice (yes, another Proud Dad plug) just in time for the game.

His pitching line for his one inning:

1.0 IP, 3 K, 0 BB, 0 R

Three up, three down, end of inning (insert Good Morning Vietnam reference here).

Looking forward to a great season. At least it’s warm out…finally!

Update:He struck out with bases loaded. I’m disowning him.

Continue reading »]]> Though I bounce between TweetDeck, HootSuite, and even the Twitter app on my desktop, some new filters I’ve implemented on TweetDeck (not available on the other two) have made it much easier for me to stay sane and clean up my lists. Without further ado:

I’ve eliminated most of the #ff listings on Fridays (though my other devices still get notifications…), the automatically-generated robot newspaper Paper.li (I admit, I had one a couple years ago, until I realized how useless and self-aggrandizing it was), the social network of teens and sushi photos worldwide (my thoughts on that here), and “I just ousted Bob as mayor of the mens restroom on 5th and Broad” posts.

Yeah, I’m probably pissing some folks off out there by ignoring certain types of tweets. And I’ll get ignored back by some, I’m sure. But damn I feel better…

P.S. Can’t wait tell you guys I finally dumped Facebook…

Continue reading »]]> Happy Monday morning to me – here’s the first thing I see in my Inbox:

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that at least one of your readers has reported some problems within your book, Gabriel’s Journey (Evan Gabriel Series).

There are typos in your book. You can find examples of this error at the following location(s): Kindle Location: 447 / Error Description: “discrete.” should be “discreet.”

Be sure to check out the Typos section of the Guide to Kindle Content Quality Errors page by clicking the link at the end of this message.

For further information regarding these above reported issues with your book, please see the Guide to Kindle Content Quality Errors.

Yep, caught me. I did miss a discrete versus discreet (and thank you no, I don’t need a grammar lesson – it just got missed).

And while I could be all  like, “what?” and “who?”, I’m more like, “cool, there’s some quality control out there.” But then I’m all like, “but what about some of the unreadable jibbererish out there masquerading as novels?” But then I’m all like, “cool, they’ll get found and corrected too.” So then I’m all like, “chill.”

And Monday carries on…

P.S. Through the magic of ebooks and the 21st century, the error was corrected and re-uploaded in less time than it takes to down a mug o’ joe.

Continue reading »]]> A snippet from a scene out of Gabriel’s Return, book 2 in the scifi adventure series. Though I’d love for you to take a look at this story (which I think has the best action out of all three, but that’s just me), you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not actually starting with book 1, Gabriel’s Redemption. Or why not jump in with both feet for the complete trilogy? Or (never let it be said I didn’t give all the options), try out the series prequel for free – Gabriel: Zero Point. All are available on my Books page. Yes, I’m shamelessly plugging my books.

So settle back and enjoy some jungle carnage…

—

[In position,] came Olszewski’s burst.

Gabriel double checked the icons in his heads-up and verified everyone was set. He took a deep breath and reached over his shoulder to his concealed pulse rifle. His gloved hand closed around the stock, and he sent the confirmation.

[Proceed when you have a shot.]

Olszewski sighted down the scope and saw a minutely-detailed image of the hide. The steelroot was thick, but he saw some breaks in it, and the faintest hint of movement. Lining up the Dobranoc, he felt the tingle in his hand as he gripped the trigger pad. His neuretics removed the single-shot safety code, and he squeezed the pad.

Six depleted uranium rounds spat from the end of the long sniper rifle barrel at over nine thousand feet per second, only a few milliseconds between each round, and only a barely audible clack sounding at each one. The forty-eight caliber slugs tore into the steelroot, blowing huge chunks of wood in all directions. Olszewski watched the destruction through the scope the entire time, as the recoil on the Dobranoc had been reduced to near zero by the finest Polish weapons techs the Olszewski family could afford.

Out of the carnage, a bloody body holding a long rifle dropped onto a flat part of the yellowbole branch the hide was built on, bounced, and tumbled to the jungle floor below. Olszewski quickly safed his rifle and tucked it over his shoulder into its back pouch, then scrambled down the tree trunk, on the side facing away from the hide.

On the ground, two terrorists, obviously shocked at the sudden turn of events forty feet over their heads, jumped from their concealed hideouts and started firing automatic kinetic rifles wildly in the direction of the tree Olszewski had fired from. Gabriel pulled his pulse rifle from its pouch and brought it to bear, but waited as the scene played out. He was a bit too far back from the two positions to make a difference at this point; Negassi and Sowers were nearly on top of them.

Sowers jumped up from his position, only fifteen feet from where the terrorist had popped up, and raised his assault rifle. The terrorist must have caught the movement, and he shifted his firing towards his new target. Gabriel saw Sowers get clipped by several rounds, the impacts staggering him back, but he managed to fire off a few rounds, and the terrorist went down in a spray of arterial blood.

Negassi’s opponent was far closer, the icons in Gabriel’s heads-up nearly blending into one. He was shocked she had been able to get in that close undetected, but not nearly as shocked as the gunman was as two takobas flashed in the green-filtered light. His right arm was severed at the elbow and the rifle immediately stopped firing. He screamed in agony and surprise as the second blade arced his way. The scream ended in a gurgle as the takoba slashed across his upper chest and throat. Gabriel didn’t watch the end result, knowing it would be an image he wouldn’t want to relive later on.

He stood up and grabbed Sennett by the upper arm. The corporal hopped up from his position, and the two men double-timed it to the scene of the carnage.

As Gabriel approached the fallen terrorist Sowers had taken out, he noticed Sowers had taken his helmet off and was breathing heavy. “You okay?” he asked.

Sowers nodded, trying to catch his breath. “Caught me off guard, sir, that’s all. I’m fine.” He looked down at the body, which had taken several rounds to the chest and face. “They’re using steelroot as armor?”

Gabriel took his own helmet off, and looked down where Sowers was staring. He saw pieces of gray wood scattered around the body. “No, not as armor, but it looks like they’ve figured out it blocks our neuretics to a point. It appears he was lying underneath a pile of it.”

“Same here,” Negassi said. She was wiping her takobas clean, a blurry outline with two floating swords and a bloody towel making for a surreal image in Gabriel’s visor.

“Sowers, tend to the hostage,” Gabriel said, pointing towards where the unconscious man was tied to a tree. “If he’s completely out cold, hide him somewhere.” He paused and sent a shielded burst back to Eden City about the hostage, the third one he’d notified them of. One more, he thought.

A screech from above sounded, and Gabriel looked up to see a flutter of wings, followed by several dozen more as a large flock of spiderbats took flight from a nearby tree. He wondered what had set them off now after all the weapons fire, when suddenly a fat raindrop landed in his eye.

Shit, he thought. This will make the last few miles a pain in the ass.

The skies opened up.

—

Continue reading »]]> Yes, back in the heyday of social media, when I was young and foolish (okay, not that young), I did what everyone else did: sign up for each and every possible social media outlet, program, site, etc. in the hopes of ‘getting my name out there.’

They’ve come and gone. I’ve churned and burned Klout (might be the silliest I’ve signed up for – cancelled), Flickr (never bothered ever uploading), Instagram (I’ve made my feelings known about sushi photos), MySpace (kidding – just checking if you were paying attention), Pinterest (meh, I don’t have that interesting of a photo portfolio), and I believe everyone reading this knows (or senses) my stance on the ultimate time suck, Facebook. Plus probably a few others I can’t remember now.

I’m still active on Twitter, I try to stick my head in Goodreads from time to time, and do still visit Google+ (laugh all you want – it doesn’t have the scope of 1 billion users, but at least there are more interesting people and posts, fewer cat photos and memes). Which brings me to LinkedIn.

It was one of the first I signed up for, even prior to getting into the writing gig, as a way of networking with other business professionals in my industry. I don’t know where it went off the rails, but now it does nothing but remind me of Klout and its ridiculous +Ks. How, you ask? And I know you were asking. Here’s an email I received this morning:

This guy, Earl [name redacted], has endorsed me for a whopping 10 categories. It’s flattering and all, being recommended like that, except for one thing.

I have no idea who Earl [name redacted] is.

I don’t even know how I got connected to him. Never spoke to him, emailed, ran into at a trade show. So how does this “recommend” thing work again? Oh right, it’s like that retweeting post I did a few days back, where the author I mentioned retweeted everyone she could in order to get her own retweets. I guess I’m supposed to go recommend Mr. [name redacted], right? Yeah, great social media service…very legit. No thanks. Deleting account.