Random Musings

Say, that’s a really good line!

April 12, 2011 0 Comments

Stuff Every Husband Should Know

I’m paging through a copy of Stuff Every Husband Should Know that landed on my desk here at the office, just to see what I think of the book now that a year has passed since I wrote it, and made myself laugh with this line from the chapter What Happens in the Delivery Room: You might cry. It’s OK. Men cry, sometimes about things other than the World Series. This is as good a time as any. That’s funny. I’m allowed to say it’s funny, right? Because I think it’s funny.

Random Musings, Uncategorized, Writing

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Pay it forward

March 23, 2011 0 Comments

I don’t normally use my blog for this sort of thing but felt like this was something I wanted to share: A little real life story about doing good things for other people. The story has been kicking around for a while now — in fact, this blog post was written back in December, I just never got around to pushing it live — but if you haven’t yet read it, I urge you to. It’s one of those beautiful real life stories that give you some faith in the inherent good in people.

Random Musings, Uncategorized

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Happy Birthday to my coauthor, Jim McDevitt

February 28, 2011 0 Comments

When Jim McDevitt and I started writing about the works of Alfred Hitchcock way back in 2006, yeah, we talked about it becoming a book and people reading it and all the usual daydreaming. I’m not sure we imagined it would actually happen, though, or that it would do well enough to earn a paperback edition, or that we’d do 50 something episodes of a podcast based on the book, and that the podcast would get many hundreds of listeners, or a host of other things. But we did. Two beer-drinking baseball fans decided to do something silly like write a book. It worked out. And that’s cool. So with all that mind, happy birthday to you, Jim. I’m proud to share a book spine…
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Random Musings

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Thinking about doing some self-publishing, part 2

February 9, 2011 0 Comments

Yesterday I posted about self-publishing a local history book. Niche works like that are ideal candidates for self-publishing. An author with the will and skill can more effectively reach his or her target audience than a publisher, even a specialty publisher, and be more financially successful with it in the process. Yet that’s not what prompted me to start yesterday’s post, so let me pick up where I left off: I’m thinking of self-publishing some fiction. A short story collection or three. Digitally. My thought is, why not? These days print outlets for short fiction are few and far between. Most are already digital, and many are fly-by-night. Short story collections are generally only viable for established authors. While I’ll have a second book out…
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Random Musings, Writing

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Thinking about doing some self-publishing, part 1

January 27, 2011 0 Comments

The world of self-publishing, especially in the digital realm, is an exciting one. Not for what it currently is, but for what it could be. There are some established authors who are doing well in self-publishing. So good, in fact, they hope to get the publishing rights back to some of their traditionally published books because they can make more money doing it on their own. Other established authors are getting together to do the same. In theory there is a very exciting future ahead for self-publishing, ebooks in particular. I say “in theory” because I also have some strong reservations about the self-publishing boom, but that’s a discussion for another time. Right now I just want to talk about my own foray into that…
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Random Musings, Writing

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