Happy St. Valentine’s Day

“>Magical Girl Concept for Dungeon Hunter Champions” by Xuexiang Zhang.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day. In case you don’t know, this holiday is in celebration of a Christian saint and martyr. The earliest hagiography has him martyred under Emperor Claudius II after he tried to convert the emperor to Christianity. A later hagiography asserts that he was executed specifically for marrying Christian couples, and another legend has him sending a love letter to his beloved, possibly a jailer’s daughter. Some of this may be fictional, but it’s possible that multiple Valentines were conflated, and it is also common for real, historal saints to accrete legendary material over time. His feast’s day is associated with romance in part because of a folk legend that birds mate on the fourteenth of February.

This Valentine’s Day has seen significant winter weather across much of the country. Here where I live, we were anticipating a bigger storm than we actually got. The predictions were so bad, my church encouraged parishioners to stay home this Sunday, which we dutifully did, though the actual “storm” turned out to be much milder than some considerably worse blizzards I’ve been out in when I lived farther north.

Staying home, however, gave me opportunity to cook brunch for my wife. She had recently used a bunch of egg whites in a recipe, so I decided to use the left-over yolks to make hollandaise sauce and serve eggs Benedict. It turned out reasonably well, though I don’t think this photo does it justice:

Eggs Benedict with potatoes O'Brien.

In any case, I am still working on preparations to produce volumes 1 and 2 of Jake and the Dynamo in the next few months. Being stuck at home does have its advantages. So stay tuned.

Sipping and Editing

Find me on BookBub

I’m formatting manuscripts and talking to potential cover artists, so I must again ask for your patience with the lack of content here (multitasking is not my forte). Anyway, I have a new author profile at BookBub. It’s quite spare at the moment, but since I have three book releases in the near future, I want you to know this is a platform where I’ll be announcing book deals and the like.

Of course, I have added it to my steadily growing portfolio of social-media accounts.

You can check out my first book review on BookBub.

Netflix’s Adaptation of ‘Winx Club’ Is a Steaming Pile of Crap

Note: This essay has been edited, and an additional section has been added.

Netflix is infamous for its disrespectful adaptations of existing properties, probably mostly because of its live-action version of Death Note. I regret to inform you that Netflix has recently decided to give its signature treatment to one of the best-loved magical-girl titles from outside Japan, the Italian cartoon Winx Club. The new Netflix series consists of six episodes, with the possibility of a second season.

Manga/Anime/Netflix Adaptation Meme

I tried to watch it. Alas, this will not be a proper review because I couldn’t make it very far into this dreck.

Continue reading “Netflix’s Adaptation of ‘Winx Club’ Is a Steaming Pile of Crap”

Marketing Research Begins

Tonight, although I’m still working on turning manuscripts into formatted novels, I am also beginning to look into promotion and marketing. I signed up for a class, and I bit the bullet and purchased Publisher Rocket, which analyzes Amazon data to help an author select the best categories and keywords. I am staring at it and can tell it will have a learning curve: It’s not hard to use, but its information is not easy to interpret. Also, all the categories that appear most relevant to my work have major players in their top slots, which probably means I need to dig deeper to find categories I can conceivably be competitive in.

In any case, tonight is yet another work night. If you’re interested, check out my Social Media page, which I have updated with some new accounts. If you’re using any of the platforms listed, I invite you to follow me; it takes only a moment and will help me build an audience.

Find Me on Social Media

Using social-media apps can feel like screaming into the void, but they’re still basic author-promotion tools. Since I’m planning some new book releases in the near future, I’m working to arrange and build my social presence. To that end I’ve created a new page for the blog that lists my active social-media accounts. You can find it in the menu at the top of your screen. WordPress will automatically push to some of those services, but others I have to update manually. So I created the page for my convenience as much as yours: When I post, I can easily find all my accounts and update the ones that need it.

So if you use any of the services listed, I invite you to follow me there. Much of the content will of course be mirrored from this blog, but I will make an effort to include original content on most of those platforms and to interact from time to time with other users. (The exceptions might be my author pages and Tumblr, which mirror the blog but for which I have no other plans at present).

Also, I likely don’t need to say this because my readers are unusually polite for internet denizens, but I wish to note that I am really, really not interested in the politics of social media. I’m only interested in creating a web presence and promoting my work. If you see an app listed that rankles you, I will not remove myself from it because you complain. If I stayed off every app that someone has said people should stay off of, I couldn’t use any.

Also, I’m thinking of creating a MySpace account just because it would be funny.

New Book, ‘Pulp on Pulp,’ Available for Preorder

A collection of essays by pulp writers, entitled Pulp on Pulp*, is up for preorder on Amazon Kindle and will release on January 19th. It is currently listed as 99 cents, but it will be free forever when it releases. Last I checked, it was number one in Amazon’s new releases related to authorship.

The collection is edited by the prolific author of military sf, Kit Sun Cheah, and the equally talented Misha Burnett.

Two of the essays in this collection are by me. Since my interests are out of the norm for “PulpRev” authors, so are my essays. I discuss both the writing of harem comedies and what really defines a “strong female character,” with references to magical girls.

*This is an affiliate link but, as already mentioned, the book will be free forever, beginning on its release date.

Roffles Lowell

If you’re still around, contact me. I want to give you money.

Editing and Formatting

I’ve almost finished plugging Jake and the Dynamo into Vellum. I’m still deciding whether I actually want to commit to this software’s steep asking price. It doesn’t offer a lot of customization, but it does remove a lot of major headaches. I’ve got pretty much the entire text and the illustrations plugged in and now just need to clean up a few artifacts from the reformatting. I admit it looks really clean, and it shows how it will come out both in print and on several devices.

My only serious complaint at the moment is that I can’t add a caption to a full-page image. I can insert illustrations with captions, but then I can’t make them as large as I want.

Update

The family is back from the hospital. We were there for quite some time because our little baby was too small to ride home safely in the car seat, something that might not have mattered except we live over an hour away from the hospital. So we had to wait a few days until it was safe to take her home. She is now sleeping soundly in her new crib.

My wife is also doing well. She and the baby are both troopers, having put up with a barrage of medical procedures. For my part, I mostly changed diapers, rubbed sore shoulders, and looked forward to being able to change my clothes. Since the baby came a month early, I was not yet packed for the hospital, and even if I had been, I probably would not have anticipated how long the stay would be. I have finally, just now, been able to clean up completely and feel civilized again.

It’s interesting, though, that when you have a newborn daughter, a lot of inconveniences become miniscule. I have had to go days without proper hygiene before (for archaeological reasons), but I have never before been so little bothered by it. Also, the lack of sleep, though it taxed me physically, never led to the irritation it normally would.

Anyway, our family is mostly moved in. Since the baby wanted to make her arrival before the end of , our Christmas ornaments are still up, so we’ll be taking those down tomorrow. I’ll also spend my spare time in the evening, between diaper changes, on my project, which is getting Jake and the Dynamo ready for a re-release. I’ll let you know how I progress.

Also, if anyone wants to plug a potential cover artist, now is the time. (Yes, the cover will be changing.)

I have baby pictures, but I’m going to restrain myself from posting them. I’ve shown pictures of my wife on here a few times, but I think it best to exercise caution when it comes to pasting small children’s photos on the open web. So no pictures for now.