The End of the Boat Parade... (pictures I like)

 

merry 'mas

It's Still a Boat Parade! (pictures I like)

 

Does Mrs. Claus make this Santa more real than the others?

It's Still a Boat Parade! (pictures I like)

 

It's Still a Boat Parade! (pictures I like)

 

It's a Boat Parade! (pictures I like)

 

Santa was on more than one boat! How did he do that!?!?

It's a Boat Parade! (pictures I like)

 

This Is Christmas (twelve)

This Is Christmas (two)

This Is Christmas (one)

A Pocketful of Marbles

Remember marbles?
Not, do you know what is a marble, but do you remember marbles? Like from when you were a kid. Back when marbles were magical and sprang into existence through spontaneous generation and you only acquired new ones by finding them, trading for them, or having some benevolent Being gift some to you. When I was a kid, I did, in fact, have a special bag just for marbles. And acquiring new marbles was always cause for trading with my friends, some of whom also had marble bags though some just had jars.

Marbles were like trophies. When you're a kid, trophies also are like magical totems that come into existence for the sole purpose of being awarded to kids who have risen to the level of trophydom. After all, you can't buy trophies at the store, so they must be special. Unless, you know, there are special trophy stores... which there are... but you don't find that out until you're older. Like that whole Santa Claus thing.

But marbles! Marbles were better than gold. Of course, mostly, you could only trade them for other marbles... unless you had some super-cool marble, and, those, you could trade for almost anything. They were magic baubles. You could do a lot when you were a kid with a pocketful of marbles.
Not so much anymore, probably, but the philosophy is sound.

Because, in the end, marbles are worthless. Just bits of polished glass.

Dazzling, polished glass.

Right now, Republicans, the voters, are being dazzled by these bits of polished glass. GOP congressmen have filled their pockets with marbles and are trading them for your freedom. For our freedom, and you Republicans keep handing us over to them in exchange for shiny baubles that mean nothing.

They offer you a wall to keep out all of those dirty illegals,
and you give them your healthcare.

They offer you a tax break,
but they raise your taxes so that the rich can continue to get richer.

They offer you jobs
but give you a ruined environment.

They offer you guns
but give those to you as mass shootings, because the US is #1 in the world in mass shootings, the GOP is determined to keep us that way. After all, America has to be great at something, right?

They offer you marbles,
and you give them your freedom.

Unless your idea of freedom is the freedom to pay them more money. For everything.
Because that's what the GOP is all about, pricing the poor out of life and making slaves of them. And if you're not super rich, you're the poor. In the Republican world view, there is no middle class, and they're doing everything they can to siphon all of that money up to people who already have too much.

So if you're a Republican or if you vote Republican, especially if you voted for Trump (#fakepresident), I hope you have fun playing with your marbles. Maybe one day you'll open your eyes (or get your heads out of your asses) and see that you gave away everything of value for a few bits empty promises and polished gas.

Lies Writers Tell... To Other Writers (Part Two -- Your First Novel Sucks) (an IWM post)

As I mentioned last time, we writers have convinced ourselves of a lot of untruths, and, you know, it's fine to believe an untruth if that's what you want to believe. My kids, the two younger ones at any rate, still choose to believe in Santa Claus. At least, I'm fairly certain they know he's not really real, but they want to believe in him so they choose to do so. It's part of Christmas at our house so they choose to believe and that's totally okay.

Now, it would be a different story entirely if they were out telling their friends that their families were doing it wrong if they didn't have Santa as a part of their Christmas traditions.

However, if you ever sit it on a kindergarten class at Christmas time, those kids really believe in Santa -- I mean, really really believe in Santa with their whole hearts --and they will set out to tell anyone who might happen to say that Santa isn't real just how wrong he is. And that's where we writers are with this first lie (and I think it's the biggest, most damaging lie we tell): Your first novel sucks!!!

* * *

For the rest of this post, you will have to hop over to Indie Writers Monthly, and you really ought to do that.

1. You'll get to see a list of some very famous first novels.

2. You'll get another "lie" song.

the saddest day of the year and some review news

The tree is gone and all of the ornaments and decorations are packed up. Including that Santa Clause and the nutcracker that sat out on the piano this entire past year because I forgot to pack them up the previous Christmas. Everything is plain again. But the room is bigger now.
Okay, so it's not bigger, but there's no longer a tree in it, and, even though the tree was in the corner, it was a tree in the house, and that takes up some room.
But it's all gone, now, and the tree is outside in a big, black can looking so much smaller than it did when it was in the house.

I think I managed not to clog up the vacuum cleaner with pine needles this year.
Of course, I thought that last year, too.
And the year before.

In some ways, it's a shame we have to start the year by putting away all of the celebrations and make everything plain and normal again.
Then, I remember the year that my mom left the tree up until well after my birthday, which is in February, and how it had almost just become this part of the house that we all just accepted and no one noticed anymore.
We have to have that discussion with our kids every year, about how it's a good thing that Christmas is not every day, because, if it was, they would stop enjoying getting presents. It would be one of those things that my daughter would try to get out of because she wanted to go out to play, and the younger boy would be too busy playing Minecraft to bother with.

So, yeah, today was the day of ending the big Christmas event and packing everything away. A sad day.
But not so sad. It's time to get back to regular life again. Time to do some more writing. Almost time for the kids to get back to school, and that will not be a sad day. At least not for me. My daughter's ready to get back, too, even if the boys are not.

Well... so that's that. 11 months to go...

In other news, I have some reviews I'd like to highlight. Mr. Alex Cavanaugh himself read The House on the Corner during the holiday and had this to say about it:
"Once it got to the Imagination Room and the troll, it was incredibly compelling."
I can't really argue with that, now, can I? His whole review, which is fairly short, is located here along with his four star rating.
One other thing that Alex said is that the he found the character of Ruth to be the "most annoying creature in the world." I take that as a huge compliment, because it means I really did the job I set out to do in creating the characters for the book.

I really love hearing from people which character was their favorite. Ruth tends to be favored more among the younger readers, but it's not younger female readers, just younger readers as the boys favor just as often as the girls. Adult males have tended to prefer Tom. Sam has a good spread among all ages. I find it interesting and can't wait to see what people think as the story progresses.

The other review I want to highlight is one left for Shadow Spinner by a fairly high ranked reviewer on Amazon. The complete review is posted on "The Tunnel," but let me just share this one little bit here:
"The thing that really distinguishes this book and elevates it to the category of very happy find, is the careful and realistic way that Mr. Leon builds up the tension, the dread, the reveals and the threat in this story."
Then, he adds:
"There is room, though, for a thinking man's fantasy-father tale. There should be signs and portents. There should be odd things happening around the edges. Mom should be a little damaged and a little mental. Suspicious things should happen and there should be a slow unfolding of what's going to happen and what might happen. That's what you get here.
And you get it with real style."

Getting good reviews from anyone is great, and there is something special in having a friend genuinely like your work. You know, that person you hand it to and say, "I hope you like it," because you really hope that person likes it, and, when that person does it like, it gives you a little glow inside. But there's something else entirely when someone you don't know at all leaves a great review for you. It's an entirely different type of gratification.

So... it may be the saddest day of the year (Thursday, January 3, as I write this), but, you know what? Maybe everything's not so plain after all.

Let's Have a (Slim) Christmas Party

Today, I'm kind of double-booked. First, I'm taking part in Briane Pagel's

The Merry Christmas

To All

(e)Book A Day

Traveling Blogathon

(of Doom!)

There will be more of this

in relation to that

Also, today is the release party of

by the guys from A Beer for the Shower, and I'm supposed to be throwing a party for Slim for the release of his new book. I figure the best way to handle all of that is to combine the two events.

So we're gonna have a Christmas party for Slim and his book!
[Now, there are a bunch of rules for throwing this party, but I'm not gonna go through them all here. If you really want to know what they are, you can click this and go read them.]

The first thing you need for a Christmas party, a real Christmas party, is a Santa Claus, so that was the first order of business. I beat the pavement at the malls and shopping centers and found a few down on their luck Salvation Army Santa's that were more interested in the bottle than their collection buckets, if you know what I mean. I even recognized a couple of them from the local shelter where they would stumble into during other parts of the year. I'm pretty sure one of them didn't even work for the Salvation Army and only used his money for booze. I convinced them to show up at the park around noon on Saturday, figuring that at least one of them would make it.

Yeah, the party had to be on a Saturday, because on Saturdays the park is always full of jumpy houses from the birthday parties going on there. There's always at least three and, sometimes, a lot more. I figured with that many parties going on, big family parties and stuff with tons of extended family, that we could mingle amongst them, and no one would know which party we belonged to. Plus there would be plenty of food already laid out, and that would be a big bonus on only a $10.00 budget.

And, then, there's the pool. It's a nice heated pool there at the aquatic center on the other side of the park, not the kind of place that's likely to let in Slim and his homeless friends in any normal circumstance, but I figured I could catch the side gate at some point and block it open and really throw a party that Slim and his friends had never seen before.

It was a perfect plan and one that almost worked out perfectly.
I got not one but two Santa's, both with their Salvation Army buckets in tow. There were four jumpy houses. The people at the parties thought the Santa's were part of someone's celebration, and the kids swarmed them, eager to unload their Christmas lists. Who cared if the Santa's didn't exactly smell the best? And all the kids gave me the chance to unload them of their half full bottles of assorted spirits and their money buckets, not they had much in them, having already splurged on alcohol. Still, I managed to scrape together $6.38 from the two buckets, bringing my party money up to more than $16.00!

Slim and his friends started filtering in, and, sure enough, no one noticed them. At least, not for a while. I suppose the fact that they quickly took advantage of the jumpy houses while the kids were off seeing Santa clued a few of the adults into something being wrong, and I saw little groups of them start to whisper and point and shabby men bouncing around somewhat like fleas or lice. I gotta tell you, though, you're not likely to see a more amusing sight than 20 homeless, inebriated guys bouncing around in a couple of jumpy houses. It was so funny that it delayed anyone making any calls for at least 10 minutes. In fact, it wasn't until little Jimmy started complaining about the smell while he was trying to bounce that one of the parents finally had enough.

At that point, I thought it was time for a swim, so I propped the gate open and announced to the guys that it was time for the hot tub. You will have never seen such a sight as 25 homeless guys charging a swimming pool, half of them getting ready to go in in their own birthday suits and the other half viewing it as wash day. One of the Santa's dumped a lap full of kids onto the ground and started stripping out of his Santa suit. I gotta tell ya, those kids are gonna need some therapy when they grow up.

Slim had never dressed up as Santa before and, seeing the distress of the kids, he gathered up the costume as the buck naked Santa ran for the pool. You know, that Slim is certainly a nice guy to get dressed up as Santa at his very own party, and he sat right down there and started taking requests from kids while trying to tell them about his unfinished novel, Genghis Khan's Mongolian Starship.

But that's when all the trouble started. Not with Slim, with all of his party goers. The people working at the pool didn't appreciate the swarm of homeless, especially since the pool water went from crystal clear to a somewhat soupy mud color fairly quickly. Not to mention the number of naked men and the fact that several of them were hanging their now washed clothes up on the fence to dry. Those guys at the pool called the cops before you could say Jiminy.

I took that as a sign to get out of there, having kept my head by staying away from the punch I spiked with alcohol I liberated from the Santa's. Come to think of it, it was just Slim's friends that were doing the inebriated bounce in the jumpy houses. I suppose the parents just thought their kids had been doing a bit too much jumping and that that explained why they were walking funny and slurring their words.

Most all of Slims friends got arrested and held over night, but they still thought it was a swell party. They got to bounce around, get a heated bath, and get a free meal down at the station. The cops left Slim at the party, thinking he was, in fact, Santa Claus. Before he left, the parents made sure he took his collection bucket with him, which many of them had donated to, especially after he'd sat so patiently listening to all the children. Slim made out even better than I did: $87.42! But that Slim is a bit too generous, and he took the money and dumped in some other Santa's bucket after the police wouldn't let him bail his friends out of jail with it. But Slim had a pretty fine time, too; he told me so.

And now for the gift part, because I'm supposed to give Slim a gift for the release of his gift. So I'm gonna give to Slim the same thing I'm gonna give to you, and this is where it ties back in to the blogathon. Today only, today being Monday, December 17, I'm making "Christmas on the Corner"

FREE! one more time.
But that's not all! Today is also the release of

"Part Eleven: The Kiss" and that's FREE!
And, because I'm such a nice guy and I want you guys and Slim to have such a nice Christmas, I'm making all of these others FREE!, too:
"The Evil That Men Do"
"Part One: The Tunnel"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
"Part Four: The Cop"
"Part Five: The Police Car"
"Part Ten: The Broken Window"
and
Charter Shorts!
That's a lot of FREE!

Also, I want to support Brandon and Bryan in their endeavor to get Slim out into the world, I'll give one lucky person that says "I want it!" in the comments a copy of The Sensationally Absurd Life and Times of Slim Dyson. They've been posting chapter segments about Slim on their blog for a while, and it's shaping into a great story, so let me just say, "You want this." And you do. I'm not gonna just gonna pick a random commenter, you have to let me know you want a copy, then I'll use my super secret technology to pick a winner from those of you that let me know you want one. A Kindle copy, that is, that I can email to you.

And, last but not least, my book The House on the Corner is part of a special 12 Days of Christmas give away. You can win a signed, physical copy of the book and read the interview with yours truly over at Into 'da Fiyah. Make sure you stop by and check it out!

So... go grab all the FREE! stuff, and let all your Kindle app bearing friends know about them, too!
Oh, and have a

Merry Christmas!