Tag: James Alexander

Swamped as usual – not enough time in a day to get everything done, I have been actively working on my site. Going against sound advice as usual, all because I like to be in control of all aspects of my writing – I am working on my soon to be open web store which has become incredibly time consuming.

Why would I be insane enough to do this you might ask? Partly due to the fact that I am slightly insane, but mostly because I love technology and always want to learn more about it. Also, I have always wanted to offer PDF versions of my work. Granted the market for PDF documents might be smaller, but I want my work to be available to all, regardless of what reader they use or if they even have one. Another big reason is that by offering my products through my website, it makes it that much more convenient for readers to obtain my work.

I’m also going to be dabbling with a new method of offering my books. Today, people are incredibly strapped for time. I’ve decided that by providing multiple version of my work, it allows for even more flexibility. I will be splitting my novel into smaller versions. A reader will be able to either purchase the full novel for the full price or they may purchase the split versions as they complete the story for a fraction of the cost. This means that a good portion of the story is available for sampling without having to pay the cost of an entire book.

I’ll be starting with PDF for now and working my way to add other formats as time allows.

So stay tuned – updates are coming soon!

This post really is not about a whole lot today.  I’m not even sure what category to place it in.  I suppose it will go in my “pet peeves” category since it’s a bit of a rant.

The newest hobby of mine is to make wine.  I’ve been making wines from kits and have slowly been building up my equipment supply since some of it is quite costly.  With a few kits completed, I decided it was time to move on to using fresh fruit.

After checking local prices, I found pears to be the cheapest.  I called around and located the store with the cheapest rates on pears.  I ended up ordering 25 lbs of pears to make 6 gallons of wine.  Aside from a few crazy looks when picking up that volume of pears, everything was fine.  It was at the checkout that brings me to my rant though.

I purposely went to the customer service line because I knew I had a strange order and it may need someone who was a little more experienced.

After glancing at all the pears I had, the checkout lady, I’ll call her Mrs. Prim for this post, gave me yet another crazy look.  It’s just pears, I thought to myself, Only a lot of them.  What’s the problem?

Mrs. Prim began weighing them out in a few bunches at a time even though I told her the weight – but I don’t blame her for it as I know people probably try to sneak things by all the time.  She paused a moment and looked at me and said, “Whatchya got?  Some kinda pear fetish?”

I had to repeat it to myself for a moment to make sure I heard it right.  I remember thinking to myself, Did she just ask if I had a pear fetish?  A bit stunned, I replied that I was making wine and needed a lot of pears.  I almost felt like saying, “Right. I’m going to take each one of these pears and use them for my kinky desires.  All 25 lbs of them.”

I know, it’s an off topic post tonight, but it is Friday so I think I’m allowed a free pass, and this is the beauty of a blog – I can write stuff just for the heck of it.  🙂

Yes, I know it’s been some time. I promise though, that I do have some updates on my progress with my next novel!

Always one with excuses, I will lay blame to the holidays and the nasty cold season that seems to be infecting everyone lately including myself. Between those two things and the last promotion I had for Beautiful People (which was excellent!), time has been quite limited.

Enough with the cry fest though. I have been working hard on my next novel. I had left it for some time and am having a really hard time getting back into it. I’m one of those that if I leave a half-finished project, it’s hard to get back to finish it. Luckily though, I had created a chapter summary for most of the chapters I had already completed.

After rummaging through each chapter, I see I had a good book lined up. The problem is though that the chapters are still quite disjointed. This led me to finding an amazing application called FreeMind.

FreeMind is an open-source, meaning that it is a free download. Basically, it is a mind map application. After downloading the application, I decided to give it a test drive using my stalled novel. Now I’m on the tedious task of entering all my chapters and characters into the program. I can see how it will help me organize my thoughts visually so that I can get back on track easier and speed up the editing.

I can’t wait to start my next project from scratch. This time, I will not set the project down until it’s done!