• Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    Nifty Stuff In the Bookstore

    Most Of You Don’t Know This… Our bookstore, North By Northwest Books and Antiques has one of the largest pharmaceutical collections in the world. All for sale. Sheldon McArthur, the former owner, loved collecting the stuff and he even found old drugstores that had gone out of business in the 1940s but nothing had been touched for fifty years. He would go there and clean them out. I bought it all when I bought the bookstore. Well, our store and strange collection was discovered by a YouTube program called Finding Goodies where these guys go around and look for nifty stuff and do videos about it. Dan (who does an…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    Poker Tournament Update

    The Practice Went Well… A decent small tournament that started with four tables (about forty people). It took me a couple of rounds to get settled in and some routines back in place. Felt like I was learning how to walk again. Very weird feeling. But after about an hour, I had a lot of chips and was getting the routines back. And doing a few new ones that are better for the long run. Enough people had been knocked out that we broke to three tables after two hours and then two tables left after three hours. At that point it becomes the middle part of a tournament and…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    Another Quick Trip…

    Headed for Vegas With My Computers… Where I will stay for a longer time this trip before having to head back to the coast in July to do a final clean-out of the big house. Right now I am sitting, after a long day of getting ready and packing and then driving, in a casino hotel in eastern Oregon. Going to play another practice poker tournament tomorrow evening here before moving on toward Las Vegas and home. I have gone through the first seven videos in the poker master class I am taking to refresh myself. Fun to have my focus there for a few short hours again. Learning, even…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    I Gave Kitten Pictures

    And Nobody Said a Word… That is stunning. Kittens and cats usually bring out the comments even more. (grin) I might have to try that again. How about a picture of Ashley and Thorne, named after Clark Ashton Smith and Thorne Smith? They were with us for over a decade each. Wonderful cats. (And yes, that is just a few of the digest collection behind them, but no idea what the cats are on.) Now, I have given you kittens and cats named after famous writers. What more can writers want? (grin) Monthly Regular Workshops… You can find them under Online Workshops to the right of this post. Sign up…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    Too Late To Write A Post

    But I Must To Keep My Streak Going… So you get me typing when I really want to just toddle off to bed after staring at this computer for far too many hours. Don’t you just love these filler posts? (grin) So how about a picture from the past? Me and the Wild Bunch. This is me two weeks after my house burnt down in 1985. My second wife and I had managed to capture these feral kittens when the mom brought them out from under our burnt-out house. We were staying in a friend’s apartment and the three kittens loved to just nap on me. My second wife raised…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff

    Thirty-Two Great Years

    Thirty-Two Years Ago I Met Kris in Albuquerque Algis Budrys had asked me to stop there and give two writers a ride to Taos, New Mexico where we were all attending a conference. Kris was one of those writers. We have been together ever since. I consider that the luckiest day of my life. We celebrate this day (May 4th) ever since. Kris (on Facebook) put up this picture of us taken at Taos that first week. I was thirty-five, Kris was twenty-five. So I thought I would show you a few more pictures in celebration of the thirty-two years. This picture is about a year or so later. Kris…

  • Fun Stuff,  Recommended Reading

    A Really Pointed and Fun and Funny Book

    Judge Bubba’s Christmas Letters. I mentioned this book last year and wanted to suggest it again this year because you will not only feel good reading these Christmas letters, but laugh and identify with much of it. Basically, you know the typical form letter you get from family or friends at Christmas? Well, these ain’t nothing close to typical. Judge Bubba decided the standard Christmas letter might be a little staid, so instead of polishing up and ignoring the funny or bad stuff of the year, he just puts it out there in a sort of story. Actually, a really funny story. Every year for twenty-one years. And this book…

  • Fun Stuff,  Recommended Reading

    Nifty Resource for Covers

    14 Tools for Making Book Covers… Nate at the Digital Reader just did a post on 14 sites for helping with making covers. Some of them make the 3d covers. I know some of you here are still paying far too much to have covers made. Time to dig in to a learning curve and start doing your own. In case anyone is interested, I do covers in InDesign with some help from Photoshop. If you go to Lynda.com you can get tutorials on how to learn either of those programs. But the article has some easier methods than what we use here. Worth a look, especially if you want…

  • Fun Stuff,  On Writing,  publishing,  workshops

    Major New Writing Bundle!

    Fantastic Writing Books and Discounts… Wow, Kris has put together one of the most amazing bundles to help writers I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of.  And AbleGamers is the charity on this bundle, which is one of the best causes I have ever seen. So instead of me going on here about this, let me use Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s words to explain it all and her thinking on how this all went together. Take it away, Kris… ————– The Write Stuff 2017 After a long day at work, consumers want one of two things: they want entertainment or they want escape. Entertaining fiction provides a great escape,…

  • Fun Stuff,  On Writing,  publishing

    Some Pulp Writers

    Some Fun Names and Facts… Since it was asked about talking about the old pulp writers and how some people liked that, I thought I would do a quick post on just a few of the writers who wrote a book a week for years at a time. Yup, a book a week. For years. British writers this post. There were numbers of US writers as well, but the British during the final years of the pulp era and the start of the paperback era had some amazing writers working down in the trenches. (1948 to 1955 or so) So I did some quick research of names I knew (and…