Realm of the InterNutter

Thoughts, stories and ideas.

Some things I've learned

You can learn a lot from going overseas. All you have to do is open your mind when you open your eyes.

Long-ass blather follows. Go fetch a cuppa if you’re going to read this.

Considering that I have the attention span of a slightly concussed kitten, I’ll try to keep things organised with some bold headers.

Our current economic woes are our own fault and the solution lies within.

Basically, we let the corporate giants get that gosh-darn big, and it’s up to us to cut them down to size.

You don’t need them for stuff. You can make your own. You don’t need them for a job. All you need is a saleable skill and you can work for yourself. SO is. I am. You can, too. You don’t even need them for a place to sleep. There’s something like 27 empty homes for each homeless person in the US. The statistics may be otherwise elsewhere, but there’s almost always somewhere to go, even if it’s squatting in a cave, somewhere.

Consider what you absolutely, positively need versus what you want. You need air - thank the powers above that the big They haven’t found a way to make you pay for that. You need clean water. Given the current ecological crisis, you can make your own with a distillery and/or a homemade charcoal filter. It’s got to the point where you have to distil/filter rain, for crying out loud. These bastards have got to be stopped.

You need food. You can grow your own, even if it’s in potplants. Yes, it takes butt-tons of time, but so does social media. Guess which one is directly related to your getting fed tomorrow?

You need shelter. You do not need a split-level mansion cleverly constructed onto a cliffside. If you’re planning to farm, you do need some earth not directly exposed to stuff like the Monsan-toe-rags’ toxic spills and copyrighted gmod trash. Which, when you come to think of it, are almost the same thing.

You need community. Face it, face time makes real people of us. We’re exposed to other people’s feelings and realities and it grounds us. We need to help and be helped. Society exists because of helping and being helped. It’s in our makeup. When all we do is help ourselves, that’s when our minds decay and we turn into monsters.

You need to love and feel as if you are loved. And by “loved” I do not mean sex. Sex and love can go together, but they don’t have to. Ask any married person ;) Love, in my personal dictionary, is wanting the one you love to have the best possible existence - even if it means that you, personally, are not a part of it. That last bit hurts. Been there, done that, bought the hair shirt. Long story. If your brand of love means hurting the one you love against their will - you’re not in love. You’re in poison. Knock it off.

Ahem

So riddle me this:

I’ve been checking both my Smashwords account and my Adventure Map download area like some kind of zealot.

Okay. More or less daily.

Anyway.

Why am I more excited about people downloading the map than people downloading my books?

Is it because the map has a larger total of downloaders than my books? Or is it because I’m sabotaging myself somehow?

Or is it because my best-beloved more or less forced me to publish or perish with my

Read more »

Achievement unlocked: Exercise for the day

Some have noted that my life is boring. Heaven forfend I get excitement, because excitement usually involves someone’s life going pants and me doing some variant of the quirkafleg.

[The quirkafleg is a series of spasmodic paroxysms directly related to extreme disgust, a violent tantrum, or a combination of the twain. Use the word and confuse your friends and family]

Anyway.

Today I got my exercise by Culching.

Culch is a fancy word for “potentially useful junk” and

Read more »

Words an author never wants to hear

“We think your novel will make an excellent kids’ series.”

“How about [Completely wrong actor] to play the part of [Your hero(ine)]?”

“We love it, but can we cut the [Entire point of the whole damn book]?”

Hey, Hollywood. How about you trust that we did our best to write a good book and at least try to be faithful to the actual content?

Not that I’ve got close to getting there,

Read more »

Freakin' Lurgi

The entire family - minus me and the the antisociallite Captain Useless - have been struck low with Lurgi this week.

Which, for me, means interrupted sleep, tired days, lots of coffee caramel mochachinos, and entire swathes of the Blah’s.

More ranting on the Blah’s after the cut.

There is nothing more draining than the Blah’s. Everything is just… blah. Even the thought of it turns you off.

Going out? Blah. Having a decent meal?

Read more »

A call for volunteers

You’ve had some free samples of my writing [check the #story tag in my posts] and now I’m looking for Beta Readers because it’s just occurred to me that handing out stories for free before I try to sell them might just be a bad business plan.

So. Does anyone out there with sharp reading eyes wish to subject themselves to the alpha drafts of whatever the heck my warped mind concocts next?

Read more »

not really a question, but wow! so exciting! you've self-published. actually i change my mind, i do have a question. how was the...

The self-publishing process is a bit of a wringer. The site I have decided on [economic benefit of epub: cheaper distribution equals potential for more sales] has some exacting document standards and I literally spent half a week tracking down the right software to get it done right.

Long story short, I was looking the wrong way and it only took half an hour to install and get flying. Yay.

The next pain in the arse is copy/pasting my works from

Read more »

A small dilemma (and an ask)

Firstly, apologies to everyone who’s been expecting a thing a day. I’ve been busy with pestillence, family and (again) waiting for someone who could help me to get their finger out of the metaphorical divot.

All my loyal readers will know I’m on Smashwords now and have my first work allegedly up and multi-compatible.

C'mon. Buy the dang thing. It’s only two freaking dollars. I need the money.

Ahem.

Anyway. I have three other

Read more »

Of Cats and Kings (Story!)

Just like I promised, the story I’ve been holding out on you with.

Every now and then I have to have a go at some fairy tales. This is one of the ones I actually finished.

Of Cats and Kings

In all my nine lives, I have never seen a boy so dim as Victor. Absent-minded as a kitten, and half as clever. True, he could bumble his way through a day well enough - if he had someone checking

Read more »