Life

Has gotten in the way of blogging. I had a meeting Tuesday of the Naperville Science Fiction Writers Group (big name, little group - there are 3 of us) which was very interesting but ran long. Jackie Powers did a presentation on "Writing Believable Women Characters" which I found quite useful. She also handed out a guideline on points of view (POV). Jackie likes stuff written in a "tight third person," which is standard for romances. Me, as a guy SF writer, I prefer a looser third. For the two of you that have read my novel The Mars Run, yes, it's in first person. I'll not be making THAT mistake for a while.

We had a big series of thunderstorms roll through Chicago last night around 11:30 PM, and it managed to set off the alarms at the bank. Guess who had to go in and make sure all was OK? If that's not bad enough, I have to make a presentation to the audit committee today. Oh well, I'm golfing tomorrow afternoon, so not all is lost.

As soon as my review of "Visual Journeys" posts on TCM Reviews, I'll put it here. There's a bunch of LJ users that I'll need to link to.

Not helping at all

Short version: crap like this give all self-published authors a bad name. It really doesn't help that the book's web page tried to put a virus on my PC.

Long version: So this guy Anthony Anchor (a likely enough name) decides to self-publish a novel. Nothing wrong with that - I did it. But then he gets an anonymous LJ account, and jumps on con_central to trumpet it. I suggested that he post to different and more appropriate sites, and even gave the links. That post was ignored. It gets worse - the guy, when he's called out, argues about it!

I think jeff_duntemann said, "when any idiot can self publish a book, every idiot will." Here's exhibit # 2,479.