It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Jan 10, 2011′
Time for your vegetables again — these are some of the highlights of my research journeys hither and yon in the great wasteland of cyberspace. Hope you enjoy!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad 12/27/10′
The new Clarke Lantham Mystery is here. Explore the true meaning of Christmas with murder, mayhem, ghosts, and unfortunate accidents of physics!
It’s hard to beat being thrown in an out-of-state jail on a trumped up charge 
as a Christmas present, but detective Clarke Lantham loves a challenge. So when he calls up his brother for help with bail, he thinks he’s prepared for the ordeal of spending a holiday weekend with relatives who put the “strange” back in “estranged.”
That was his first mistake. Unfortunately, with an old client gumming up the works, a ten-year-old niece with a ghost problem, and the occasional murder competing for his attention, it’s unlikely to be his last.
Currently available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
Time for your vegetables again. Here’s some of the fun stuff that’s flitted across my desk in the last few weeks.
Crazy Silly Creative Things
To start off with our garnish, you could do no better than watching this 3 minute video about what Welshmen really do with sheep. Don’t worry, it’s work safe–but you won’t be while watchign it. This is seriously, amazingly cool.
Johnny Carson presents The Great Flydini, an utterly silly and borderline obscene magic act that will leave you in stitches. Don’t let obscene put you off — it’s work safe.
While you’re at it, put down your drink before reading this story about the trials of moving house with a pair of neurotic dogs.
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Dec. 3, 2010′
The question came up on Twitter today: Are cons worth the time and money?
Opinionated though I am, it’s not an easy question to answer. So here’s a quickie list of the pros and cons garnered from a scarce four years of con-going experience:
Continue reading ‘Cons: Are They Worth It?’
If 2007 was the year I got serious about writing, then 2010 was the year when attitude and education caught up with intent. Think of it as the difference between declaring a major (2007) and doing your first internship in a Ph.D. program (2010). Up till this year, I did one book a year and a couple short stories, maybe a screenplay, plus a lot of sketches, articles, and reading (in additional to the normal load of producing).
This year, I’m on track to do 6 short stories, 1 novella, 3 novels, 1.5 nonfiction books, and 15 articles. Fully 1/9th of my lifetime’s word output has happened this year. And I also landed a collaboration deal for a nonfiction with one of the veterans in the business (you’ll hear more about this during Q1 of next year).
During the same time, I upped my education a lot. I’ve gotten my footing in what had previously been a bizarre and foreign business to my way of thinking, learned how to apply past lessons to the current domain, and taken several other business projects forward specifically because of the gaps this education has filled in.
One of the things that surprised me is the lesson I learned ten years ago at the beginning of my time in and around independent film is even more important in the writing business than the film business. I’m henceforth calling it Sawyer’s First Law of Apprenticeship:
Continue reading ‘Sawyer’s First Law’
The friends I stayed with in Portland had a cat who knew her business. She was a bona-fide, go-get-um, get-in-my-way-and-you’re-dead mouse hunter.
Fortunately,* I caught her in the act:
Continue reading ‘The Deadly Hunter’
This story is now available
at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
One of my favorite stories in all of mythology is the Talmudic story of Lilith. The insight it gives into the development of Judaism, of Hebrew mythology and culture, and its naked and impossible-to-talk-around display of preclassical sexual politics have all tickled the cockles of my geeky heart for two decades now.
What would happen, though, if Lilith were able to tell her own story in her own words? Perhaps something like this:
—Story Sample Below the Cut—
Continue reading ‘Now Available: Lilith’
I’m on the road, writing short stories and a little on the novels, and exploring the murky rainy depths of the Pacific Northwest. But it’s hard to get the hang of Thursdays, which is why they’re salad days. Neither fabulous restaurants, nor rain nor bad traffic nor dark of overcast day shall keep me from my appointed task of preparing your Link Salad.
Continue reading ‘Link Salad 11/18/10′
Buried Alive In The Blues, the apocalyptic fantasy I wrote for Philippa Ballantine’s Erotica A La Carte, is now available as a standalone ebook from all your favorite venues.
The end isn’t near, it’s here.
Irene, recently widowed, knows the Earth is drowning, and all she wants is one last night to dance. The best band in the world is playing just up the road in a blues club at the edge of what little land remains, and there she encounters a stranger, and a clue that might unlock the mystery of her husband’s death.
This is the way the world ends: not with a whimper, but with the blues.
The story is now available from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and from Smashwords.
This title is intended for adult audiences.
—Story Sample Below the Cut—
Continue reading ‘Buried Alive in an Ebook’
Portland in the fog has all the charm and beauty of Los Angeles of 2029 in Blade Runner, but without quaint charm of suffocating corporatism. Instead, it defaults to a decidedly more Stalinist aesthetic: gray and oppressive during the day, moody and hazy at night. It’s skyline is punctuated by the occasional train yard and industrial complex on the one hand, and the very occasional example of exquisitely gaudy hyper-modernist architecture on the other. Driving through on a drizzly night (and, in Portland, most nights are drizzly), I’m often taken by the fancy that Paris, France and the Southern Pacific Railway crept into Soviet Moscow on a cold winter’s night to birth their love child and stow it safely in the city’s forgotten historic sections, so that they wouldn’t be publicly shamed by the rest of Europe.
On the other hand, there is Powell’s. And The Montage. And the other things about Portland that keep me coming back for a visit every now and then even though the weather is appalling and the streets are paved with potholes and designed according to arcane 1950s theories of traffic control that bear as much resemblance to the patterns of human travel as does spontaneous human combustion to real-world thermodynamics.
Continue reading ‘Live, from Portland’
The City that Never Sleeps…
…Needs a Detective With Insomnia
The first volume in the new Clarke Lantham Mysteries is now available at all your favorite online book retailers, in all ebook formats. This is the beginning of a year-long experiment with ebooks and other maverick content delivery techniques, and Lantham (in all his snarky, darkly-comic glory) is the headline star.
Today is the day to rush the markets — for only $3.20, what have you got to lose? Find it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.
To mark the occasion, there are a few things in store today. First, I’m launching a new website, specifically for the Lantham series, which you can find here. It has a series map and other stuff related to the current and upcoming mysteries. Only a little bit there right now, but it’s still worth the jaunt over. Check it out!
Second, I’ll be doing a live call-in show on Podioracket’s Blogtalk Radio show tonight at 6pm Pacific time. Join me, grill me, hear readings from the book. I’ll be yours for a whole hour, maybe two.
Of course, if you’ve never read e-books before, I’ve written a handy dandy quickie guide to the subject, applicable to all cell phones, e-readers, mobile devices, and computer platforms.
Finally, just in case you don’t know what all this hullabaloo is about, here’s the back cover summary:
A man of infinite social grace he isn’t, but what former disgraced Oakland Police Detective Clarke Lantham lacks in high culture he makes up for with his ability to slip into any role he needs to to get the job done (which is probably why he got fired in the first place).
Fortunately, the world needs private detectives. Unfortunately for Lantham, on this particular Saturday morning, “the world” consists of a fretful mother with a missing daughter, and the case she hires him for is about send reality staggering into the gutter like an eighty-year-old drunk.
From the posh shadow of Mount Diablo to the kink clubs of San Francisco to the genetic engineering labs of Stanford, Clarke Lantham chases down pieces of the weirdest puzzle he’s ever seen, all for the sake of a nineteen-year-old girl whose face he can’t stop seeing every time he closes his eyes.
Head on over and pick up your copy now — it’s already getting great reviews!
And, from the kitchen this weekend we have for you a lovely Link Salad, with leaves of history and science, garnished with a healthy dose of whimsy.
But first, I begin with a special treat for my free-wheeling brewer friends. Beer has always been a problem in space — not because of drunk piloting, but because weightlessness does weird things to the sense of taste. There’s also the question of what the bubbles will do to the body, and how drinkable beer will be in zero G anyway. Fortunately, someone is officially working on these problems so that we can take into space with us the drink that made civilization possible in the first place: Click here for Space Beer!
Now, on to the main courses:
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Oct 22 2010′
Seth Harwood’s new release, Young Junius, hits stores today. For those of you who like hard crime, this is the place to get it–it’s been garnering great reviews from Publisher’s Weekly.
I haven’t read it yet myself, but at his best, Harwood is phenomenal. Here’s the PDF so you can judge for yourself. Take a gander — if you like it, head on over to Amazon and grab a copy, or get a signed hardcover special edition directly from Seth’s website.
And speaking of crime, remember: Clarke Lantham arrives in ten days!
In the “should have done this a long time ago” department, I’m going to start offering up a semi-regular link salad digest. These are links to articles, books, lectures, and other cool stuff that I’ve run across in the course of my ill-fated attempt to grok the universe. They also tend to feed my creative churn, both in fine details (i.e. research) and in gross grist (i.e. ideas). Whether for that reason or because of the “cool stuff” factor, I hope you’ll find things you enjoy here.
This week’s Link Salad contains elements of science, sex, publishing market reports, book reviews, and is garnished with interesting cultural tidbits. Here you go:
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Oct 13 2010′
