Tag: bloggy business

First Contact

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

Recently I reinstituted a Contact form on the site after someone expressed difficulty getting in touch with me. Since then the site has been bombarded by brute-force hacking attempts, which is why I removed the original Contact page back in 2021. I don’t know what is about web forms but they’re blood in the water for attracting bots. I’ve now taken it down a second time.

If you want to contact me, the best way is through social media. Links to my profiles are available at the bottom of every page on this site and I’ve added a second set at the top of the sidebar that appears on blog pages (if you’re reading this on a desktop).

• Instagram and Threads are the best way to reach me. I’m often on Insta spending too much time watching videos about dogs, chimpanzees, and chimps petting dogs; and while Threads is a little chaotic during its salad days and I don’t check it often, I will receive notifications.

• I have a Facebook profile but I rarely check it. Facebook’s interface is like a child’s toy, full of buttons meant to keep you distracted while the grown-ups eat dinner but it’s cumbersome to use for practical purposes. You can reach out to me there but I may not notice for a couple of weeks.

• The less said about the website-formerly-known-as-Twitter, the better. If you tweet or DM me there, I will lock my car doors and stare straight ahead through the windshield while pretending I didn’t see it.

The Dead: Now Riding Even Faster!

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The Dead Ride Fast is now available on Smashwords and through a number of e-book retailers, including the iTunes bookstore.

I was reluctant to list The Dead Ride Fast with Smashwords and didn’t include it in my original marketing plan for the book, instead choosing to upload directly to each individual site. The price for maximum control was convenience, but as previously noted, control has been my overriding goal from the start.

Smashwords markets itself toward the, shall we say, less technically skilled e-book publisher. Their process uses a Word doc as the basis of an e-book, which it then transmutes into an epub via proprietary software called Meatgrinder before distributing it to retailers. As there is no way on God’s green earth you can produce a svelte, 100-percent functional ebook from a Word doc, I initially refused to consider Smashwords as a venue.

However, upon failing to list The Dead Ride Fast on the iTunes store, I reconsidered Smashwords as an end-run around Apple’s cumbersome process, and after some snooping I discovered you can upload a finished epub of your own making to Smashwords, thereby bypassing the Word/Meatgrinder channel. The only downside is that homemade epubs have to pass a manual inspection for compliance, which (I think) the Meatgrinder products don’t have to endure. That inspection delayed availability for a few days but was hardly a dealbreaker.

Once an e-book is accepted by Smashwords they blast it to practically every e-book retailer on the planet, so if you prefer some other store beyond Amazon, it’s probably available. For a full listing, head over to The Dead Ride Fast page on Goodreads and shop away. Don’t forget to leave a review there or anywhere else! Five stars are a writer’s bread.

You may also notice some shiny updates around this site, including a fresh author photo and a brand new contact page. Too shy to leave a public comment? Feel free to reach out in a non-creepy way by sending a DM! Or even reach out in a creepy way. ‘Tis the season, after all.

Short News, Post-Election Post Edition

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.

— Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt

We can’t stop here, this is bat country. Are you experiencing anxiety, depression, and terror after last week’s election? Congratulations! Now you know how it feels to be a libertarian after every election! As a veteran of such emotional swings, might I suggest a period of self-reflection? During this time you could consider the libertarian idea of opposing government’s — and specifically, the executive’s — possession of far-reaching powers; as well as the possibility that blaming white people for all the world’s ills is unproductive, and that better ends might result from outreach toward America’s rural working classes. Following that, I propose sampling my daily medicine. Work out. Run. Read. Write. Help settlements. Don’t assume someone else will fix a problem. Keep a sense of humor. You’re not alone.

Let us not have such a machine any longer. Earlier this week LitHub published a list of 25 books for resisting the coming Trump junta. Notably absent was Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Thoreau’s full-throated cry has been out of favor with some on the left ever since Ronald Reagan (who was raised a Democrat) co-opted the radicalist idea that government is the problem and not the solution, but maybe it’s due for a comeback. Open Culture has a nice backgrounder on Civil Disobedience, an essay I find supremely inspirational and evergreen.

Truth is weirder than any fiction. If instead of nonfiction you’re in need of a politically relevant novel, I really enjoyed Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country.

By the all-seeing Eye of Agamotto. Doctor Strange was a fun but fairly mediocre experience with its main strength being the excellent interpretation of Steve Ditko’s vertiginous artwork from the character’s early days. While not a 1:1 translation, the visuals conveyed that same MC Escher sense of distortion and confusion that disconcerted this young reader. Over at Vulture, Abraham Riesman has a great piece about stalking Ditko (still alive — who knew?), and along the way details Ditko’s feud with Stan Lee and his gradual withdrawal from the world in anger and bitterness. It’s a fascinating and yet scary CT scan of an incredible talent consumed by mental illness.

Just say nyet. Probably because the Russians and Chinese are inside all of our servers these days, I’ve been flooded with spam through the phonetically rendered e-mail address that used to be on this site’s About page. I’ve removed the address until I can determine a better way to present it. In the meantime, if you want to contact me the best way is either @ing or DMing me through Twitter.

The Loss Leader of Life

~ Jackson ~ 1 Comment

Seems to be growing well.

Every New Year I vow to attack this blog with great vigor, resolving to update it at least once a week with reports of my adventures and successes which I assure myself are many and sundry. And for a while this goes as planned. Then summer arrives and I am reminded of the projects and endeavors I swore to do as I peered at the yard through rime-laced windows and it all goes out the door. Figuratively. Literally.

Which is how it should be. There are only so many days in a year, only so many of which are warm and pleasant, and I am less grasshopper than ant. Over at UncMo my friend Christina, who is a thousand times more articulate than I am, has recently embraced the freelancer lifestyle in which “every hour has to be accounted for.”

The upshot is, every hour is billable to something. Your livelihood. Your loved ones. Your sanity. Your soul. Remember that’s always true, whether you’re freelance or not: Every hour is billable.

So running and paddleboarding and building and maintaining gardens and manufacturing tiki bars with the sons and performing various minor household upgrades and binge-watching Jessica Jones and working for money and sometimes — sometimes! — actually writing something for submission has not left much time for dear old bloggy. And yet at odd moments I have tightened a few gaskets. I reorganized the Clips page to highlight the good stuff. I truncated my biography on the About page. (True story: more than one venue has identified me as an “archaeologist” even though I haven’t performed practical archaeology in 14 years. I prefer short one- or two-sentence bios to accompany my byline, and always justified my longish About page for those who took the trouble to click over to learn more about me. Alas, this seems to have confused some people who think studying archaeology as an aid to one’s historically themed writing is the same as doing it as a profession — so out went the education along with other superfluous details). I still don’t know what to do with the Genericons in the lower right corner; I don’t like them but haven’t found a substitute.

The garden smells of basil, the arugula is as light and sweet as cotton candy, and the pumpkin vines are already out of control. I PRed a 5K last month. The garage sports a fresh coat of paint. The Sound is warm and perfect for swimming.

 

In With the New

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Who has two thumbs and just entered the twenty-teens? THIS GUY.

For over a year I’ve been wanting to update this site with a fresh WordPress theme. I had been using the same template since 2008, but because The Journalist was no longer supported (I think its designer forgot about it five minutes after writing the code), I was modifying it as I went. The biggest problem was making it look good on smart phones and pads, and I completely lacked the skill to somehow make it backwards responsive.

There were many things I liked about The Journalist — the clean white layout, the big punchy blockquotes — and so I wanted something that kept those features. Then again, I also wanted something with bigger typeface (I experimented heavily but could never achieve the perfect intersection of font, line spacing, and kerning), a top menu instead of a sidebar, and most of all, to be responsive to devices. I sought and I seeked but my metal detector never uncovered the diamond ring in the sand.

And then, colbie caillat! Earlier this week I stumbled upon Caroline Moore’s Penscratch and installed it. It still needs some fixes: I want to tweak the color palette a little more, and while I like the simplicity of the top menu, I’m not sure how to handle navigation within the blog’s archives without cluttering it up or resorting to a sidebar. The About page needs a rewrite and I wish Genericons (those circular symbols in the lower right-hand corner) supported more social media, though they say some kind of update is in the works. Otherwise I love how Penscratch looks — and in fact, at this point I think the site looks better on my Android than my desktop.

The biggest improvement I could make here, however, is to post something more than once a month …