I figured out the key to selling Trip to the Quiet Room…
I will be awaiting your call for the movie rights…
I Figured It Out — Instant Best Seller
Author: Head Wombat
Out of a Rain Delay
Well, we’ve emerged from the rain delay, but the numbers aren’t looking a heck of a lot better:
And if you prefer the old Boston Garden hockey scoreboard look, that empty, soul-sucking void is racking up an impressive number of penalty minutes:
New Year, New You, Just Don’t Tell Everybody About It
So the newest* social** media platform, Social! has launched a new helpful conversion tool for 2017 to help you, yes, you.
One thing I’m trying to do in 2017 is drop off social media for a bit more, and Social! kind of fits my needs, in that it’s not terribly social at all. So what I’ve done, and the gang at Social! have created a handy guide for this process, is that I’ve taken my Facebook and Twitter accounts and replaced them with the super cool Social! replacements.
For example, for Twitter, I visited http://supertart.com/social/tw/index.html on my phone. I then hit the little sharing icon, like so:
I then clicked on the Add to Home Screen button, here:
At this point, I picked a name that would fool me into clicking this app instead of the real deal:
And that was it. Now, I’m a chicken, so I chucked Twitter and Facebook somewhere in the nether regions of my iPhone screens, so they’re still there, but just that bit more out of reach, which encourages me to get off my phone and onto writing (or at the very least onto writing in Scrivener on my phone or doing some editing of the latest manuscript in PDF Expert). So that’s 2017 for me… me, the dregs of Trip to the Quiet Room and a little manual about nose picking.
Check out the how to for Facebook or Twitter and hopefully that’ll help you get off your own personal echo chambers into an even more personal echo chamber.
* Warning: May not actually be the newest.
** Warning: May not be terribly social
Cahokia — Sub-Par Maya Ball Game Team?
Annalee Newitz has an interesting article on the ancient city of Cahokia in modern day St. Louis-ish that’s worth a read. Of course, this whole city was predicted (years after it was found) by the fascinating and edifying History of the Mayan Ball League. As a major stop on the Mayan Ball League All Stars tour, the Cahokians had to adapt their game of Chunkey to the more physical ball game.
Of course, Chunkey was played with spears, which helped the Cahokians overcome the physical advantage by simply chucking spears at the opposing players, and may also have contributed to the downfall of the Mayan Ball League. But their fans were super-polite about the spearings…
The Magic Funtime Butterfly Ranch
Anybody else seen one of these flyers up around your town?
Facebook’s fake news crisis deepens — BBB News
Despite repeatedly insisting that it’s not his fault, Mark Zuckerberg had to face down an angry mob armed with pitchforks and torches, the burning kind, not the more gentle, battery powered Irish and British kind.
Continue reading “Facebook’s fake news crisis deepens — BBB News”
Rain Delay
I don’t know if it has anything to do with our new residence in beautiful Dalkey, but it seems like something’s gone sideways, with our dear author-tracker:
We’ll see if and when the storm passes, but here’s hoping our intrepid author (oh, me) gets back out on the field without serious injury.
Dalkey is a little town maybe twelve miles south of Dublin, on the shore. It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental. Small shops look closed but are open. Dalkey looks like an humble settlement which must, a traveller feels, be next door to some place of the first importance and distinction. And it is — vestibule of a heavenly conspection.
-Flann O’Brien, The Dalkey Archive
Dr. Belly, I Presume
Listen, I think Chad Finn is the business. I don’t think I’ve ever disliked an article or column he’s written. He’s usually thoughtful, measured, and eloquent.
And he nails it again this week, with this article “Rick Porcello and the best out-of-nowhere extraordinary seasons in Red Sox history.” He takes us on a nice road trip down memory lane, celebrating some of the unexpected delights coming out of Fenway.
It’s almost like the very reverse of my story, “The Curious Case of Doctor Belly and Mister Itcher”, which was part of the excellent Further Fenway Fiction.
In that story, one loosely based on what happened to Matt Clement, a promising pitcher takes a ball off the noggin and proceeds to meltdown for the remainder of the season. He starts the next season on fire again, and like some phantom echo of the hit off the head, he collapses in the home stretch again. It’s been really, really fun watching Porcello turn from Mr. Itcher into Dr. Belly.
The collection’s worth getting, if you’re going to get any of the Fenway Fiction anthologies, as I think it’s got the strongest work, by far; a collection of Red Sox fan writers who were still writing in that afterglow of having seen a Red Sox team win a World Series in their lifetime. So go read Chad’s article, then go buy Further Fenway Fiction to read in between innings.
Ice Guardians to Honor the Place of Tough Guys in Hockey
I almost expected to see William Murphy, the protagonist of Trip to the Quiet Room, make an appearance in the trailer.
Go check out the article at http://www.thehockeynews.com/blog/ice-guardians-aims-to-honor-the-place-of-tough-guys-in-hockeys-history/. Obviously I think the enforcer character is an interesting one and it looks like this movie is an excellent exploration of that role.
[No other news to report that I can report right now, Trip to the Quiet Room still as yet unpublished, I’m still as yet unagented, water is still wet, ice is still very cold and only a little speckled with blood.]
Trending Micro-Genres
I feel like I should get some credit for including at least three of the ten trending micro-genres, according to Audible.com.
Trip to the Quiet Room is a story about an ex-hockey pro struggling with his retirement, possible post-concussion symptoms, family life after the daily grind of a professional athlete’s routine, and the explosion of a time machine in his bathtub. It’s a story about escaping to the seaside to tend butterflies. It’s a story about a mysterious orphan showing up on the doorstop of Central Massachusetts’ favorite tourist attraction. It’s about a cotton candy factory that employs child labor for better or worse. It’s a story about the FBI playing catch-up with some of the CIA’s rumored more esoteric investigation techniques.
Surely this would make some sort of Audible.com list, if only someone would publish it…
