Unexpected Applause: CassaFire

Instead of doing a cover reveal, today, for Alex Cavanaugh's new book, CassaStorm (due out this fall), I thought I'd review the second book in his trilogy seeing as how I just finished reading it. As it turns out that's going to be a bit harder than I thought it would be. Harder because I just didn't enjoy CassaFire

the way I did CassaStar (follow the link to the review).

The main reason is the time jump. I've decided that I just don't tend to like stories with huge leaps ahead in time. Like in The Dark Knight Rises. Of course, I realize that I was nearly alone in my lesser opinion of that movie, so maybe this is not a thing that bothers other people. However, it does bother me, and I had a difficult time reconciling myself to the fact that 'Fire was supposed to be nearly 20 years after 'Star. The character didn't seem any different. It was like he just stepped ahead 20 years into his future and was still wrestling with the same issues. At no point did I feel like I was reading about the cares and concerns of a 40-year-old man. He still felt like the same 20-year-old from the first book. If the story had been set, say, two years later, I don't think I would have had many of the issues that I did.

To make that issue worse, Byron seems to have not advanced in his career at all in the 20 year interim. We know that he planned to quit being a fighter pilot at the end of the first book, but, here, 20 years later, he's just flying a shuttle, and I had a hard time buying into that even if it was by choice. Again, I could see that after two years, but 20 years later was really stretching my suspension of disbelief.

There are some other issues with details about the world setting that niggled at me a lot, too, but I can't really go into most of those without the risk of giving things away, but I will say this one thing: Where are the rest of the Tgren people? They entire race seems to be totally existent within the one city of Ktren. A whole planet, but all of them live in this one city? Maybe, that's not how it is, but that is how it's presented, and it just... bothered me. In some respects, it reminded me of episodes of Star Trek or Stargate because of that, and that works in a 40 minute TV episode, but I kept waiting for some mention of the rest of the people and, other than the Bshen (who seem to be another race entirely), it never came.

In the end, I think I was looking for another 20,000 words or so to fill out the story some. I do realize that the focus of the story is Byron and his relationships, especially with the new woman in his life, and that was well done, but it felt too much as if it was being acted out upon a cardboard stage rather than a real 3-D environment.

That said, I may feel differently about this book once the next one comes out as it seems it is going to build on what was done in CassaFire. If, in retrospect, 'Fire serves as a good building block for what happens in 'Storm, I could end up with more positive feelings about it despite the sparseness of the background.

Oh, and I wouldn't be me if I didn't mention the editing. The editing in 'Fire wasn't quite as good as the editing in 'Star, and there were some repetitive errors that bugged me, which distracted me from the story. Some missing words here and there, repeated lines of text a couple of times, and misspellings. Mostly things that other people won't notice, since other people seem to have not noticed them, but there were enough this time around that it's worth noting. That said, in comparison to a lot of other things I've read, even novels published through big, traditional publishers (>cough< Snow Crash), it was pretty clean. [I mean, in Snow Crash, it was like he sneezed commas, and they just left them on the page wherever they landed.]

So, in the final analysis, I really like CassaStar. It's a good read, kind of a buddy space opera kind of book. It deals with the bonds of friendship and how important they can be. CassaFire is okay. If you really like 'Star, it's worth giving it a look, at least. It's a romance, and the romance is pretty well handled. There are themes of friendship, also, but, really, it's about the girl. Looking forward, CassaStorm has an intriguing plot and, just from the summary, a lot of world details that haven't been revealed before. I'm intrigued, so I will certainly go on to the next one. It's possible that 'Storm could make 'Fire completely worthwhile. I guess I'll find out this fall.

How To Win at Magic: Part 3: Playing the Deck (or "It's All in the Timing")

Okay, so you've collected your cards, and you've built your deck, now you need to play the game. Now, it's time to win! Right? Right! That's what this is all about.

There are two basic schools of thought about winning at Magic:
1. It's the deck.
2. It's the player.
As with most extreme positions, it's a combination of the two. The best player in the world can't win with a crappy deck, and the best deck in the world isn't going to help a crappy player. But, since we've dealt with the deck building (on a very superficial level), let's deal with the crappy player. Um, I mean, let's deal with playing the game.

There are, of course, too many different deck types and styles to go into any specific detail about how to win with any particular deck, but there is one general reason why people lose with even the best decks possible. That reason is bad timing. Yeah, playing Magic is more than a little like being good at telling jokes. Jokes are all about the timing, too. But, then, so are books.

Here, let me give you an example:
There is this card:

Before this card was removed from the game, it was the most common first turn spell in the game. I'm just gonna say that there is no reason to throw a "Lightning Bolt" on the first turn of the game. That's what's called bad timing. Despite its appearance, the bolt is a very versatile card, and using it on the first turn is a waste of something that could turn out to be more useful later on.

In similar fashion, players of blue tend to be very prone to using

at their first opportunity. I don't know about you, but the first spell I play is never my best card, so you wasting a "Counterspell" on it only helps me out. What I really used to love watching in tournaments is when someone would throw a "Lightning Bolt" on his first turn, and the other player would counter it. The most amusing thing about that was that one of those players was still gonna win.

So I want to jump back to my "Mr. Suitcase" example from the last post. Specifically, I want to talk about Mr. SouthLA. He waltzed into the store sometime during the summer of '94, literally, with a briefcase full of the top cards. I'm talking, like, 20 or "Black Lotuses" and everything else that implies. He had just moved up from south Louisiana to open a law office. No, I don't actually have any idea whether he was a good lawyer or not, but I will say I would never have hired him based on his Magic skills. Or lack thereof. See, he thought that merely the fact that he owned all of these cards that rest of us could only salivate over (it actually took me a really long time to build my complete collection of Beta/Unlimited and Arabian Nights (because we never got those sets in Shreveport, and it didn't take long before they were impossible to order) made him the best player in the city.

Oh, how wrong he was.

See, he had a timing problem, and, although he could build decks that only the rest of us could dream about, he didn't know how to play them. He never really got it, either. The fact that he had all of  these amazing cards often allowed him to play through his whole hand, or pretty close to it, on his first turn. The problem was that, once he'd done that, he had nothing left to play, and everyone knew it. There was no reason to wonder what he might have in his hand or anything, because we all knew he had nothing.

Of course, he started complaining that it was the fault of his deck. So he and I did a little experiment. We switched decks. Let me make it clear, here, that my decks were mostly composed of common cards. There were a few rares here and there but, mostly, commons, and I would just beat the stuffing out of him, and he couldn't understand why. I mean, his cards were better, right? That must mean his deck was better, too? Okay, his deck was pretty good. Anyway, we switched decks, and I proceeded to kick the snot of him with his deck. Which made him mad, so we switched back. And I knocked the stuffing out of him. I'm sure you get the idea.

The point is that winning at Magic is not all in the deck. It's also in the playing of the deck. The biggest issue most people have with being effective players is patience. You can't just play through everything in your hand as you draw it. There's lots of waiting and knowing when to use specific cards.

Which is a lot like writing. It doesn't matter how good your story idea is if you don't know how to plot it out. You can't just throw everything at your reader at once and expect people to want to keep going.

A while back, I read this particular paranormal mystery book, because, for some reason, people love the series, and I figured I may as well see what was up with it. Did I say it was a mystery? Well, that's what it said, anyway. So I was reading this nearly 300 page long book, and I hit about page 85, and, bam!, there's the killer revealed right there. But I'm thinking "no way" because I'm only on page 85, and there's no way she'd just lay it right out there for us and in front of her protagonist, too. So I kept reading, and it was increasingly apparent that I'd pinpointed the killer, but I kept thinking "no way" because it couldn't be that easy, right? There must be some kind of twist that I couldn't see coming! These books were popular, so it just could not be that easy. Her protagonist could not be that dumb, right? Well, it was that easy, and her protagonist was that dumb, and I never read another one of those books. And I'm still not sure how, after reading that first book, anyone would ever continue on to read a second one. At nay rate, the author cast her "Lightning Bolt" on the first turn and, then, continued to play through everything in her hand in the same way until she had nothing left to play but 200 pages left to write. It's the holding back that keeps the readers reading, not the giving away.

Like telling a good joke, timing is everything. In Magic and in writing. Seriously, I always loved when my opponent would go first and hit me with a "Lightning Bolt" on his first turn, then, on my first turn, I'd drop a

and a

And, yet, the same people would do that same kind of thing over and over, because they could not resist playing the card just because they could play the card. That's seldom a good reason for doing anything.

Here's the thing, people don't fear an empty hand. Because I was known for holding back, for always having something ready, I was able to win games even when I had a big hand full of nothing. They'd hold back in fear of what they were scared was in my hand; all it took from me was, "Are you sure you want to do that?" That's the same kind of feeling you want your readers to have. You want them to have that tension over what might be coming, even if what's coming isn't really that bad. It's the tension that keeps the reader going, and it's the release of tension, the relief or the horror, that gives the reader enjoyment.

Contrary to the evidence I've given (with the Kird Ape deck), my favorite types of decks were the ones that were slow builds and allowed me to control the game.  As a writer, I want to control the game in the same way. Keep the player going just enough to allow them to think he had a chance and, then, slam! killing blow! I mean, keep the reader going... yeah, that's what I meant.

And some cards:

The deck I built around this card was so powerful that people forfeited to me (in tournaments) rather than play against it. I even won one because my final opponent refused to play against the deck. It was another of those decks that I made because the card was considered useless, and it's one of my favorite decks ever. I was actually banned from playing it, because so many people refused to play against it.

Land destruction was always one of my favorite deck types.

As were decks designed to do away with my opponent's library.

Something funny happened on the way to the forum...

Okay, well, I was going to say it wasn't actually a forum, but, technically, it is. Well, it's supposed to be, because the definition of forum includes "place for open discussion" (stress is mine), but this was clearly not such a place. It was just supposed to be.
And what happened definitely wasn't funny. Except, well, it kind of is; it just also made me really angry. Who says there's not humor in anger?

Let me explain. All back story is so that you will understand the surrealism of the actual event.

Several months ago, I was invited to join an authors' group on facebook. Against my will. Let me re-phrase that: I was added to an authors' group after I told the person that added me that I did not want him to. The group was the Author's Think Tank. I didn't want to be added, because he just wanted me in there so that he could flame me as he had already done in that forum once before and on his page once before and who knows where else. All of this was over a bad review. This incident where he added me was many, many weeks after the initial review, but I had posted about reviews, and, for whatever reason, he took my post about my view on reviews as a personal attack and added me to the authors' group so that I could see the "discussion" that was going on about reviews.

Mostly, that discussion included a lot of people calling me names, the most popular of which was "douche bag," because only a douche bag would leave someone a bad review. Or something like that. [If you want to go back and read the posts about reviews, they are here and here.] I want to point out that at no time during this thread of calling me names did anyone ever say anything about it. No said that the Think Tank was not a place for being negative; no told anyone to stop behaving in the manner they were behaving; no one took the thread down. It was, you know, "all good." And, honestly, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I have mine regarding the leaving of reviews, and that's that being honest about the review is the way to go. [But, then, really, if you want to know more, you should go back and read those two posts.]

Just to be clear, I did not get involved in that "discussion." In fact, I didn't say anything at all in there for a couple of weeks. I almost removed myself from the group, but I didn't. I mean, it was a group of 500 other authors, so I figured it might be worthwhile to stay. It really wasn't, not for me. Mostly, it was a bunch of people asking things like, "What's the difference between 'lay' and 'lie'? I can't figure it out," and watching people argue over it and coming to no conclusion. That's why you look things up.

Needless to say, I didn't say a whole lot in the group other than, occasionally, answering someone's question about something or pointing them at a source if no one else had responded. That and posting links to what I felt were applicable blog posts and links for when my Shadow Spinner pieces were available. In that sense, I did get a benefit from being in the group, because I know there were some people downloading my pieces.

All of that changed last week when I was unceremoniously kicked out of the group. Not just kicked out but not even notified. I just hopped onto facebook, and the link to the group was missing from my groups. I thought it was a facebook problem. At first. But, wait! Let's go back...

Here's what happened:
Someone posted something about how Stephanie Meyer had written Twilight with a screaming toddler in her lap while watching Barney, so, maybe, that was the way to go, because look at how awesome Twilight is. [I'm paraphrasing, but that is the gist of what she posted.]

I couldn't resist, so I responded with, "I don't know. I think Twilight screams Barney."
1. It was a joke.
2. I haven't read Twilight (and I don't intend to), so it was just a joke.
3. People thought it was funny and said things like, "I like Twilight, but I thought the Barney comment was funny."
4. I stated after several other comments that the comment had been meant just to be funny.

But here's where the problem started, I guess:
Some other guy stated that he didn't like Twilight and gave legitimate reasons as to why he does not.
[I want to add that this is what it means to be a forum: having an open discussion about something.]
A can of worms ensued and there was a huge back and forth between this guy and, well, I lost count, a lot of women about the merits of Twilight. Evidently, he was a bad person for saying he didn't like Twilight.

He and I were kicked out of the group for being "negative," and the thread was taken down. Neither of us was informed of what was going on. In fact, as I said, I thought there was some problem with facebook for about half a day, then I asked in another group that has some overlapping members if anyone knew what was wrong with the Think Tank. It was fine for everyone else, and that's when I started asking around about what was going on.

Finally, there was an admission that I had been kicked out of the group, but the admins wouldn't say why. And, then, finally, someone who is friends with one of the admins was able to find out that it was because I was being "negative" and that <other guy> had also been kicked out for the same reason. So much for the idea of an open forum. Instead, what we have is a group of Meyer fascists where it's okay to call someone that's basically in the room lots of degrading and mean names, but it's not okay to say, "I don't like Twilight."

I find the whole thing just wrong. The whole situation makes me angry, because it is just wrong. It's screwed up. And the thing that angers me most is that everyone else was just okay with it. Not that it was advertised, but there was a thread brought up about it in the group as one person was trying to find out what happened. The response was definitely a "ah, well, tough luck for you" response. If I had been in the group and this had happened to someone else, I would have raised all kinds of hell over it and probably been kicked out to. BECAUSE IT'S WRONG BEHAVIOR. If one of my kids had behaved like this, there would be consequences and forced apologies, long discussions and reparations. Seriously, I'm not entitled to my own opinion? (Although it's perfectly okay for me to call someone IN THE GROUP a douche bag.)

And, as Bryan from A Beer for the Shower said to me about all of this, "If they can't take someone not liking their favorite book, imagine how they'll take it when they get a bad review for one of their own works." [paraphrase] No kidding.

Which brings us to our two hands:
On the one hand, I'm not upset about not being in a group that's run like this. If I had known, I wouldn't have participated in their little Meyercult to begin with. I would have left all on my own if this had happened to someone else and nothing was done about it.
On the other hand, it cuts off an avenue I had been using to promote my work, especially my Shadow Spinner serialization. Probably, it won't have any discernible impact, but I won't really know for a while. That part kind of sucks.

But the main thing about all of this is that the behavior is too indicative of a screwed up cultural mind set we have right now. A mind set that says it's not okay to express any opinion that says "I don't like that" or "That's not good." A mind set that says that is okay to actually be mean to someone that says something isn't good, but that's the only time it's okay to be "negative," because, for some screwed up reason, that's not being negative. And I'm not saying we should go out of our way to leave bad reviews or anything, but I do believe we shouldn't say something is great or awesome or whatever if it's not true, and I do think it ought to be okay to say "I don't like that" if we don't, especially if we actually have reasons for why we don't like it. And <other guy> had solid reasons why he doesn't like Twilight.

So that's my rant. I see the funny in it, but I'm too busy being outraged to laugh.

Softball and Food

It's softball season again. For my daughter, that is. Well, for all of us by extension. The fact that she had her first practice this past Saturday was all she talked about last week. About the fact that it was coming up, not that she'd been to her future practice and was talking about it, although that would have been pretty cool, because, then, she could have gone to practice twice, and she would have loved that. Practices this year are at the most inconvenient times possible for us, which has meant, for starters, rearranging her accordion lessons.

Practice is also much more organized this year due to her leveling up. Or, maybe, it's upgrades? No, I'm sure it's "Level Up!" She's a "10 and under" this year instead of an "8 and under." Her team name, though, took a hit, and she's gone from being one of the "Dragonflies" to being one of the "Ducks." I don't know about you, but I can't, in my head, associate ducks with softball. It's probably because of those movies, but I just can't do it. Although... maybe there was a Donald Duck cartoon with him playing softball? I can't remember. Maybe, I'm just thinking about the wrong kinds of ducks...

Like I said, her first practice was this past Saturday. I wasn't there for the whole thing (because I had to make a coffee run (9am softball practice requires coffee for adults (just sayin'))), but, from what I saw, she's easily one of the best (if not the best) catchers on  the team. Keep in mind that she hasn't picked up a softball since a few weeks after the season ended last year. That's, probably, my bad. I intended to facilitate her keeping up with her skillz during the off season, but, man, it's tough to hold that in my head with all the other stuff that's in my head, especially when it's not something that's happening RIGHT NOW, like it is now.

Opening day is about a month away. I don't watch sports, but I am looking forward to her games starting back up. I'm sure there will be progress reports.

The kids are also out of school this week. Well, two of them are. It's just their school, though, so this week promises to be one of ambivalence for me. On the one hand, I don't have to the school routine for the younger two, but I will still have to be up at 5:30am for the oldest one two of those days, because he does have school. And, since it's just their school, all of my daughter's neighborhood friends will be at school, so she'll have no one to play with, which means she'll be in the house all day bugging me or fighting with her brother neither of which is happy making for the writing. Or anything else. But, you know, no school routine. If I quit posting after this week, you'll know it's because my head exploded.

In other news, today is "Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"!

Tib gets hungry, and he's in a garden! But, well, there are... issues.
It's FREE! today, Monday, February 18 and tomorrow, Tuesday, February 19 for the Kindle or Kindle App. Make sure you stop by and pick up your copy. I'd say to click the little "like" button, but those seem to have gone missing from Amazon; I'm wondering if it has to do with the lawsuit against facebook over their "like" buttons, but I haven't seen anything about it anywhere.

Also, FREE! on Monday:
"Part Fourteen: Anger and Laughter"
"Part Thirteen: The Clearing"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Eight: The Cold and the Dark"
"Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
"Part One: The Tunnel"
"The Evil That Men Do"

Charter Shorts

How To Win at Magic: Part 2b: Collecting the Deck

As I mentioned, when we first started playing Magic, we didn't have a lot of cards. My one friend brought back, basically, a handful of cards from his trip to California, and we all ooh'd and ah'd over them, mostly for the art. We didn't even really know for sure how to play, because he didn't have a rule book, and he didn't even have enough cards to make more than one semi-serviceable deck. The first order for cards that we made was slightly conservative, because we hadn't played yet and didn't know what it would be like. When we got that first order, many of us (me) didn't even get enough basic land cards to be able to choose what color we were going to play. We had to play based on the land we had. You can't make a blue deck if you only have 4 islands, you know? Sure you do.

In some ways, those early games were the most fun. We had a limited card pool to draw on, everything was new and exciting, and there was a lot of sharing of ideas and card trading and all sorts of things so that people could try to get enough of whatever color they wanted to play in order to make a deck.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear, from the point of view of walking into a tournament, those decks sucked. Hard. It didn't really matter to us, though, because we were having fun, and, in all actuality, we were learning to really play the game because we had limited tools to play with and had to be innovative. In short, it was a good learning environment. And, well, tournaments weren't really a thing yet, anyway.

But we, all of us, continued playing and increasing the number of cards we had little by little. We increased our tools and we increased our skills and we got more competitive with what we were doing, which only lead to more card buying. There were two schools of thought about this ought to work:
1. You buy packs and you play with what you get. Trading with other players is okay, too.
2. You go out and buy the cards you want on an individual basis. You pay more per card, but you're assured of getting the care you want rather than buying 10, 20, or 50 packs without getting that one card you need.

I was (and am) more of type 1. I really don't like buying cards individually and would much rather buy packs to get the cards that I want. I ended with, well, everything I needed that way. Most of the time. That's how I built almost all of my collected sets.
We had a guy in our group, though, that was a type 2, and he started special ordering all sorts of individual cards through the mail. It wasn't very happy making for a lot of people in the group. Several of them (one of them being my cousin) really gave him a hard time about it.

There became a nickname for that kind of behavior: Mr. Suitcase. That was the general term given to anyone that bought up all the "most powerful" cards and carried them around with them. We had one of those guys at the comic shop. He'd come up from south Louisiana with a briefcase full of the "power 9" and other top cards. The thought, by a lot of these people, was that owning those cards and putting them in your deck insured that you would win. We'll talk more about that later.

But it was true... to an extent. Having better cards, increasing the tools you had at your disposal, allowed you to build a better deck. The more cards you have, the more options you have. The more options you have, the better your deck can be. Having a better deck is the first step to winning at Magic. I mean, before you can play, you have to build the deck, so building the best deck you can is the first step on that journey. I've known a lot of good players that couldn't build a deck that was worth spit, whether they had the cards for it or not.

Anyway, what I found kind of interesting about the whole "Mr. Suitcase" thing is that it was only applied to people that cherry picked their cards. I would have many more cards and, actually, sort of needed a suitcase for mine, because I'd buy boxes of cards all at once, but, since I was relying on the "luck of the draw," it was okay that I had that many cards. It always seemed a distinction without a difference to me, but, you know, oh well. I wasn't derided for it like Mr. South-Louisiana or the guy in my gaming group.

All of that aside, if you did tournament play, there would come a time when you ended up having to buy a card or two to make a deck ready for a tournament. Here is the very first card I bought all by itself:

It was another card I was known for. The limit for any individual card in a deck (other than basic land) is, generally, four, and I only had three of these guys and wanted a fourth for a big tournament and couldn't find anyone willing to trade one. I'd been making hard trades for the three I had, so, really, there just wasn't anyone left that had extras they wanted to trade, so I broke down and bought my fourth one. I won that tournament, too. Ironically, a few weeks later, after I'd gone to all of that effort to get four "Forks," the card became "restricted." A restricted card was limited to only one in a tournament deck. I still have those four Forks, though.

Writing is a lot like this process of collecting cards. You start out with a very limited tool set as a kid. As you grow, you add to your collection which allows for greater innovation in your writing. You can do more. There are two ways to increase the size of your writing tool kit:
1. Writing
2. Reading
I suggest both.

To be a good writer, you need to increase the size of your collection. That's all there is to it. You're not ever going to have anything worth reading (to a larger audience), if you don't go beyond, "See Spot run." That's a very limited collection, and you can forget making it in a tournament with a deck like that. If you see what I mean.

Here are a few other cards that were highly sought after in the early days:

This used to be the second highest priced card in Magic and certainly had a time when it was the most sought after. I think it's fallen a bit, but it's still in the top 10, I'm sure with prices in the $1000.00 range.

I always preferred this one, though. Better art and could go in any deck.

Speaking of going in any deck, the Sol Ring was a must. It was restricted, of course.

This was another card that was common in every deck. At the time, it was the most sought after card from  the Arabian Nights expansion. It's dropped to second place, these days, though, and is only worth $250.

The Nightmare... just because I like the art.

So You Wrote a Book...(an Indie Life post)

This post is a part of Indie Life. You can find out more about it here.

Well, I don't know if you wrote a book or if you're still working on it or, maybe, you're not working on one at all and just like to stop by and read my stuff. Whatever the case, today's post is related to what it's like to be an independently published author, because that's what Indie Life is about.

Writing is hard. Wait, no, writing is easy. Writing a book is hard. Up to the point in my life when I wrote my first book, it was the hardest thing I had done. I think I thought it would get easier after that, but, no, all the stuff you have to do with your book once you finish writing it is much more difficult than actually writing the book. Which is hard; I mentioned that, right? Most of that other stuff would fall under the heading of "marketing." Let's call it what it is: selling. Selling your book is much more difficult than writing it. Well, for most of us writer people, at any rate. Let's face it, selling takes a certain amount of extrovertedness, and most of us writers don't fall into that category, so trying to convince someone else to read the book you just wrote isn't the easiest thing (for us) to do. That's why we need those people that are good at that stuff, except, when you're doing this stuff on your own, you don't have access to those people. Generally speaking.

Not that those people necessarily do that great a job, because knowing what's going to be appealing to other people is a lot of guess work, so there's a lot of variability in it. But, hey, at least it wouldn't be me doing it (which is why it's my (not so) secret dream to be able to hire someone else to do the marketing of my novels and stories and tall tales). But all of that is kind of beside the point.

The point is this:
There are tons of ways to go about bringing attention to your work. There are people that will tell you two dozen "best" ways to do it. You have to be here. You have to go there. You have to be on this. Or on that. Or drinking a soda while standing on your head. Or walking around with an egg clenched in your butt cheeks. Hm, well, maybe that last one would work. Heck, I'd at least look into what kind of stuff you write if you used an egg like that as a marketing tool. The point is that everyone, EVERYONE, will tell you something different.

And, so, how do you choose?

You don't. You want to know why? I mean, do you really want to know why? You're not a marketer. Not a seller. That's not your job.

Oh, yeah, okay, I hear you. "But how will anyone ever know about my book if I don't get out there and sell it?" And I hear, "Well, you have a blog!" And I hear all sorts of other things most of them starting with "But!" So, yeah, I'm not saying to do nothing; I'm just saying that you shouldn't let the selling of your book become THE priority of your life. Especially if all you have is just the one book.
It's not your job.

Did you become a writer just so you'd get the chance to do some marketing? No, I didn't think so. [And, if you did, you can come market my book for me and skip all of that writing stuff. See what I mean?] You became a writer because you wanted to write, and that's what you need to be doing. Primarily.

Let's take a peek at the numbers. I wrote my first draft of The House on the Corner in about six months. That was 125,000 words. Yeah, it's a longish book. I spent another six months working on it after that and cutting the word count to all of 120,000 words. In the two years since then, the two years I've been blogging, I've only done a little over 100,000 words of fiction writing. See, the blogging takes a considerable amount of time and a lot of my words. Granted, I've written way more in total considering that I have something around 300,000 words of blog entries, but, still, the marketing has taken away from the writing.

Which is not to say that it's not necessary, because some amount of putting yourself out there for people to find (beyond just sticking your work on Amazon) is absolutely necessary. However, the best way to market your work, and the way that no one in marketing is likely to tell you about, is to go and write another book. Seriously. The greater your body of work, the more seriously readers will take you as a writer and the more likely they are to buy your books. So, as it turns out, your best marketing tool is to do the thing you want to do anyway: write.

So... what are you waiting for? Go write! Do it! Now!
Oh, but, um, first, go read my book! Trust me, you want to. Because that's the kind of seller I am. Now, excuse me. I have some writing I need to go do.

Tucker, Dale, and Evil

I just want to make it clear that I am NOT a horror movie fan. At all. They don't do anything for me. Probably, it's the lack of any real story in them, because, really, what kind of story do you need for a guy to go around killing people in the most gruesome ways possible? And, then, there's the gore, which is not something I need in my life. I mean, I went to see Punisher: Warzone (at the theater!), and that may have scarred me for life. Of course, that may as well have been a horror movie considering the lack of story and the excessive gore. I can count on one hand the number of horror movies that I've seen and thought they were pretty good: Halloween (the very first one, which I saw when I was a kid (I'm pretty sure it was an edited for TV version) over at a friend's house) and April Fool's Day (which I didn't want to watch, but I was kind of stuck at a party, so it was either watch the movie or go sit in a room by myself), which is worth it  for the ending. Okay, so that didn't even take a hand.

That being said, I love Alan Tudyk. Even before Firefly, I thought he was awesome as Steve the Pirate in Dodgeball, and that's where I recognized him from when we finally watched Firefly. Besides, how can you not love a guy that was in Spamalot? As Lancelot, no less, the Cleese character in Holy Grail (or one of them, anyway). So I was really torn when I saw he was in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, but what a great title, right?

I'm glad I finally broke down and watched it. Yeah, yeah, it has plenty of gore, but it's not exactly the mindless gore of your typical horror/gorefest movie. I mean, in Tucker and Dale, you're busy being shocked or trying not to laugh while it's going on. Like when [spoiler] the "stupid college kid" throws himself into the wood chipper. Trying to laugh, or not to laugh, while being horrified is maybe not as easy as it sounds.

Alan Tudyk is, of course, awesome, but so is Tyler Labine as Dale. They have a great buddy chemistry going, but, really, the success of the film is rooted Labine's performance as the best friend and the romantic lead as he chases after Katrina Bowden (from 30 Rock) as Allison, who is also quite good. Jesse Moss pulls off the preppy jerk and could have walked right out of any number of 80's flicks.

The true genius of the film is that it takes the idea of a "comedy of errors" and mixes it up flawlessly with the horror genre. It makes me wonder why no one else has ever done this. Or maybe they have, and I just never heard of it, but I'm more inclined to think this kind of thing hasn't been done before. All of the classic horror movie pieces are there: group of college kids going off into the woods, spooky warning from a creepy cop about how "you shouldn't go there," and a "ghost" story as a backdrop. Really, I was all set up for the typical horror movie and wasn't actually sure I'd watch the whole thing, even with Tudyk in it.

But you can tell there's something else going on from the beginning, you're just not quite sure what it is. Tudyk and Labine are saying "buddy comedy," and the group of college kids are screaming "the horror! the horror!" What you get... well, if you can take the gore, it's definitely worth the watch.