I suck at Mancala. Tried to read up on stategies, etc. but I'm only getting worse. Aaargh!

Download my book, FREE! http://tinyurl.com/6twdq7f

And share this link with everyone you know. "At The Lake", late 60s, remember what it was like? It's all here! Enjoy!

Annual Update.

It's after midnight, Sunday night. Actually, I suppose that would make it Monday morning. The Monday before Thanksgiving. I have much to be thankful for. I won't make the list here. It would go on for a very long time. I guess I should mention a few things that have happened since my last post. One of our dogs, Betsy, died this summer. She just went out into the backyard and laid down and was gone. We were heartbroken as you can expect. Molly, her mother, handled it better than we thought she would. About a month later, we heard that a young family needed to find a home for two 8-month-old cats, sisters, because their baby was badly allergic to them. So we brought home Maxine and Katie to be a part of our family. It's a slow process, but the dog and the cats are getting along well and Katie and Molly are quite fond of each other.

The bookstore is still running, although not doing as well as I would hope. In today's economy, money is tight and books are a luxury. Add to that the new popularity of e-book readers like the Kindle, the Nook, and various others, and good old-fashioned paper books are not as popular as they used to be. It affects all of our businesses, those of us who sell rare and out-of-print books.

I've probably promised to post more often in the past. I won't make that promise now but I will try to post more frequently. I'm trying to find a way to make one of my books available for free. I have the file in PDF format but I have no place to put it online so that I can direct people to the URL to download it. Once I get it stashed somewhere, I will let everyone know, here and on Facebook and twitter.

Thanks to Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, I should be able to post more easily now. Version 11.5 is incredibly accurate. Enough for now. Thanks for reading this far.

A WHOLE YEAR?!??

This is more than a little embarrassing. Where does the time go? Okay, it goes into relocating my book store, and flipping two houses for fun and profit. And I still wouldn't be here if it wasn't for a friend (Hi Rach!) asking about blogging and reminding me that I have this page.

Update: Betsy is fine. You wouldn't even know she had been in an accident or has Stage 4 hip dysplagia. Fooey on that doctor who wanted me to put her down.

No time to write lately. Maybe this winter.

Favorite book of all time: Tarzan of the Apes by ERB. Yours?

Latest Book Released!

Cyd Ropp and I finally finished our post-apocalyptic scifi novel and it's available on the Lulu website in our store there. It's called Reality Crash and we think it turned out pretty darn good. We based it on a screenplay we wrote a decade or so ago. The script made the quarter-finals at the Austin screenplay competition twice, but never sold. So we decided to novelize it instead. Check it out.

End of summer blues

Summer is over and with it the fun of writing a scifi novel with my writing partner, Cyd. We still have a few rewrites to do, but without the intensity of writing long distance every day for months. We used GoToMyPC.com and telephones. It was great. Feedback and critiques from our readers has been mostly positive, so that's encouraging.

On the homefront, all is well. Not much to report. Just waiting for winter.

New Book in the works

Some years ago, my writing partner, Cyd, and I wrote a screenplay called Reality Check. It got to the quarter-finals at Austin twice, and a couple of prodcos showed some interest, but nobody bought it. So it sat.

It's a good story. We always like it. Post-apocalyptic science fiction action/adventure. No aliens or space ships, just future technology in a devastated world.

So we decided to rewrite as a novel. We've been working for over a month now and today we'll finish the first draft. And we like it. We hope to have it done before the end of the year and cross your fingers for us that we find a publisher. Lulu is a last resort for this one.

Book published, painting done etc.

Driftwood is done and published. It's on amazon, like At The Lake is, but all four of my books are on lulu.com. Check them out.

I did my first oil painting a few weeks ago. It's positively awful. Like a five year old did a paint by numbers blindfolded. But I learned a lot about mixing colors and brush techniques and stuff, so the next one might not be so embarrassing.

Betsy has reached a plateau in her recovery. No better or worse than before. But still a happy girl.

The next book is percolating.

Two weeks with a horrible head cold and I've gotten absolutely nothing creative done. Aargh. Sick sucks.

Spring. I need it to be spring soon. Sunshine. Flowers. Blue skies. Spring.

Still crazy...

And still not done with the latest book, the one with the short stories and poems. I've changed the title to Driftwood, Afloat On An Ocean Of Eclectica. I found some old stories I had written, typed way back before computers. I need to scan them, rewrite them and get them into the book. Then I'll be done.

In the meantime, Betsy is nearly recovered. As well as she's going to be anyway. She clumps around and is pretty clumsy, but she's happy as hell to be able to walk and run. We're happy too.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

From the left, my Bob, my cousin Beth, her husband Fred, and me. And in the foreground, Molly and Betsy. Christmas dinner, 2006. It was quite a year. We finally moved into our house. We got our two dogs. Bob had a couple of good gigs on the east coast. I published my books and am nearly done with the next one, the book of short stories.

And, sadly, I lost my Dad this year. He was the sweetest, nicest guy on the planet and his sudden passing was devastating. It was back in April and I still miss him so much.

I'm really looking forward to '07. I still have much I want to write, and now I'm getting back into sketching and painting. I like impressionism so I might try my hand at that, particularly with those gorgeous mountains right outside our back door.

I wish all of you a wonderful 2007, too.