So, Pete has this new thing, see, and it happens to be launching today – he says the site isn’t fully functional as of yet, but he was determined to go live – something about pants, and links not finished.
I dunno – why don’t you go check it out. I’m “pretty sure” he’s wearing pants.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been scoffing at all the news reports claiming “The price of gas is nearing $4.00 a gallon!” mostly because I’d already been paying well over $4.00/gallon for diesel.
In fact, just two weeks ago, the price of diesel in my area went up to $5.02/gallon.
Am I pissed? Of course, we all are, right? You guys might not drive diesel vehicles, but every semi that delivers your goods to your stores does, and guess who’s paying the price? For my car, it’s costing me just over $60.00 to fill up if I’m totally empty. Granted, at 50 miles to the gallon, I can commute to and from work for two weeks on one fill up, but come on! My car can run Bio-Diesel, but I’d have to drive 115 miles out of my way to find the one station in the region selling that stuff.
So yesterday afternoon, I realized I needed to fill up. I made it to work, and I probably could have made it home if there were no traffic delays or issues, but I’d have to fill up before this morning for sure. When you take traffic, the time of day, and routes into consideration – it worked out that I got gas after work, before driving home. That let me combine a trip to the grocery store, thus saving on, you guess it – diesel.
Imagine my surprise when I pull up, swipe my card, and start pumping diesel that’s marked $4.86/gallon !
I smiled!
I was happy to see it had gone DOWN for a change. Not much, but down is always better than up.
Then I sighed as the irony of this situation slapped me in the face. I’m so used to the idea of $5.00/gallon, I was HAPPY to see $4.86.
That’s what this world has come to. Make them bleed profusely, so that when the flow is ebbed to a steady loss, they’ll feel the healing powers.
/Sigh.
I haven’t done this in a while – and since I did remember to apply underarm deoderant this morning, I’m feeling generous 🙂
Here’s a snippet of my novel Keeper, now available in paperback and pdf from Trunk Novels. If you like it, feel free to read more at the Trunk Novels website. Really like it? How’s about you buy the download, in pdf form? Or better yet, purchase a hard copy in Trade Paperback (think hardback size, without the hard back) to take Keeper to the beach, or give away as a gift. Share the love, spread the word, and support a starving artist. Then come back every month to read a new story from a new author.
Got a novel in your trunk you still believe in but couldn’t find a buyer for? Visit Trunknovels.com and check the guidelines – we’re open to submissions!
Ever have one of those days – the kind where you can’t remember if you did something or not?
I’m sitting here wondering if I remembered to put on deoderant or not. It’s one of those routine things that you do religiously without any real conscious thought. Something you do in the morning, when you’re not quite fully awake. Like when you drive to work in the morning and realize you have no memory of the commute.
I’m pretty sure I did.
I’m almost positive I did.
I think.
So it’s been quiet here for a few days mostly because 1) I’ve been busy, and 2) I’ve been REALLY REALLY BUSY!
Computers are such a love/hate issue. Last week, the people in charge of our networking system at work decided to switch things up a bit – justifying their paychecks maybe, I dunno. What it all means, in the end, is that when they’re done, I get to spend the next week or two remapping all of my shortcuts and macros.
All those little command lines that tell your computer what program to open or what drive to look in whenever you click a nice little icon. They all have to be changed to reflect all the new drive letter changes they decided would be NEAT-O COOL!
If it were just a matter of changing the path of all my desktop icons, I’d only be marginally put out. But for me, this means I have to go through hundreds of files in Access and redirect hundreds of individually inserted links.
And I can only do that if and when they’re successful in this transition – which so far hasn’t gone smoothly at all.
I can haz aspirin now?
So, I happen to live directly across an inlet from a massive naval base – it’s where my Father worked all of my life, and where my brother-in-law works now. I grew up here, and with the exception of 10 years spent living and working in downtown Seattle, I’ve been in this town all my life. Another 25 miles north, actually a mile from where I work, is another navy base where submarines are stationed.
What I’m getting at is, you get used to strange things happening. In the middle of the night, especially in the summer when you’re sleeping with the windows open, you’ll hear odd noises. Sound travels amazingly well over open water, and even better at night when everything is still and quiet. You’ll wake up, maybe you need to go to the bathroom, or you’re a light sleeper like I am, and realize you’re hearing what seems to be the pinging of a car’s door left open. It’ll go on for hours, and you know it’s not a car because it’s louder and stranger than that.
Or you’ll hear occasional explosions that can only be described as massive catapults launching. You get used to it. Radio station interference. Odd sounds.
But that’s the Navy.
What about the local power company?
See, where I live, my particular section of town never goes dark. During wind storms, heavy rains, whathaveyou, my sister’s house can lose power. My mother’s house is notorious for going dark in a wind storm, but mine almost never does. So when I DO lose power at the house, it’s really strange, and always followed up with a newspaper article explaning that some teenager’s car hit a pole, or a power surge took out a transformer.
Which made Tuesday a little different. I got home, my sister got home, and we decided to head out to the store – we leave the garage, and find the power suddenly out everywhere. After a ridiculously long trip through some heavy intersections lacking working lights, we get home and sure enough, the power’s out. It’s not too big a deal, we can still cook using our gas stove, and it came back on an hour later.
The next day, the newspaper tells us that “a transformer substation was switched off for no reason. It took them two hours to transfer over to another substation, and they’ll try to get this one “fixed” soon.”
Whaa? First, how does someone shut off a substation by accident? Second, why not just turn it back on?
Okay, whatever. Only now, I’ve just read online that my town is without power AGAIN – this time the explanation is “a squirrel, or perhaps a bird, must have touched two lines and caused a fire” and then, after that line, I read “power was out two days ago when a tree fell on a substation.”
WTF? Now we’ve gone from someone shutting off a substation for no reason at all, to “oh, I guess it was a tree” ???
Que the X-Files theme music, someone, ’cause I ain’t buying it!
Well, not literally, it’s not. But Literarily speaking, it is. The Trunk Novels webpage and blog are now Live and running, so hop on over there, check out my interview, read a few chapters, maybe even buy a paperback. Then come back every month to read a new author’s interview, and novel, short story or anthology.
A new author every month. New stories to tell – those treasured gems that we hold dear, but couldn’t catch an agent for. Tales that deserve a good home, even without a pedigree.
Tell your friends, share them with your family, spread the word. New Novels for the New Economy!
So, another 3-day weekend, another chance to PAINT MY BEDROOM!!
That’s right, folks. First I painted it way too dark brown, turning my little 10×10 room into the batcave. So then, in an effort to lighten it all up, I found Desert Sand, which turned out a little too pale and blah for me (plus, it had this odd sort of plum undertone). Desperate to find the right color, and dreading emptying out the room again, I forged onward.
To Lowes, where I brought home dang near every single paint square thingie they had ! After narrowing them down to the 5 best contestants, I taped those squares up on my walls, and lived with them for a week, noting how each one looked in the light, at night, during the sun, on a cloudy day.
Finally got that grouping narrowed down to 3. Then, tossed one out because it was so close to the other two. So I had it down to 2 colors, and got this crazy notion to do the entire room in one color but then do one wall in the other, like an accent wall. And since it was the darker of the two, I needed the accent wall facing the window.
So, on Friday, I emptied out the room AGAIN, prepped on Saturday morning, and got busy. This time (I must be getting better at this) I managed to paint with clothes ON and didn’t get paint all over me. With the help of my sister, she did the cutting in, I rollered on this new color – Cinnamon Brulee – and fell instantly in love.
FINALLY, this was the color I’d been searching for all this time! Then when it got time to paint the darker wall, I poured it out, ooohed and ahhhed over the pretty color, rollered it on one patch, and hated it. Luckily it was easy enough to paint over, so my entire bedroom (all four walls and ceiling) are now Cinnamon Brulee.
And it’s fantastic! No more painting for me! Who knew it could be SO hard to find just the right shade of color. Especially when you had this idea in your head of what you wanted, but couldn’t find a sample square anywhere that matched it.
Cinnamon Brulee = Happy Camper.
So today the mailman brought me my advance copy of Keeper, in paperback, printed by Lulu and offered up by Trunk Novels. And all I can say – since this is the first time I’ve seen a paperback printed by Lulu before – is WOW.
Seriously, my Ego is having a field day with this. The printing is absolutely perfect, the cover is glossy and amazing. I picked a custom cover art instead of the stock art supplied by Lulu and I think it makes all the difference in the world. In fact, with all of the Trunk Novel offerings, you’ll find custom cover art.
The binding is flawless, the print perfection. In short, the quality of Lulu’s print runs are on an exact even par with any book you’ll find on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. My Ego loves seeing this beloved older piece finally bound in print. And as a Trade Paperback, it’s slightly larger than a regular paperback. More the size of a hardback, really, at 6″ x 9″.
At Trunk Novels, you’ll find plenty of high quality, well written novels, novellas, and short collections in the coming year. All available to read Free online, or downloadable in pdf for Free – but I would encourage you, when you find a story you really enjoy, go ahead and purchase a hard copy through the Trunk Novels storefront at Lulu. That way you can share the stories with friends, pass them around your reading circle, trade them with fellow commuters, or just keep them around for easy reading.
Me, I’m still holding mine. It’s so purdy 😀
And now I can take it to the beach, without lugging along a laptop or giant 3-ring binder of printed pages.
In fact, I’m so thrilled with how Keeper turned out, I’m very tempted to give the recently rewritten sequels the same treatment.
When Captain Alex Marcase’s estranged father dies, he hopes his inheritance will be enough to fund his next deep space expedition. When his inheritance turns out to be a genetically-altered slave named Evan, it’s just the beginning of the end of Alex’s normal, orderly life. Not only does Even have his own brand of morality, his special abilities are also coveted by his late owner’s enemies. As the pair head into deep space with their enemies in hot pursuit and Alex’s chief rival ahead of them, will they be able to learn to appreciate each other’s unique abilities in time? Or will their differences be too much to overcome?
Keeper is a novel I wrote years ago, and figured it would never amount to much, but I enjoyed it, and several friends enjoyed it. Then I wrote sequels, several of them. But one day, I got the notion Keeper could be so much more – so I completely reinvented the series. Shaving 30,000 words from the original and shifting the entire plot, then I remapped the sequels and turned them into totally new stories that continued the newly rewritten adventure.
Make no mistake – this novel has not been traditionally published. It is now a Trunk Novels Production, available as a free download, or free to read on the internet at http://www.Trunknovels.blogspot.com and also available for purchase as a Trade Paperback.
Be sure to visit Trunk Novels for more high quality stories by serious-minded writers.
The Velvet Zebra 