Joel Arnold's Blog, page 20

July eBook Sales and Stuff

July brought 100 Kindle sales for  me, plus a handful via Smashwords, my best month since I uploaded my writing in May. So with that, I can buy four tanks of gas!

I also received a few nice reader reviews on Amazon.

For Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse, there was this:

"5.0 out of 5 stars Solid Collection, July 2, 2010 By David J. Dalglish "Author of The Half-Orc Series" (Missouri) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)    Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Bedtime Stories...

Recent & Decent Audio Books I've listened to lately

Since I have a little commute to work, and I like eating in my car with the windows down over lunch, I often listen to audio books during those times, and a couple that I've listened to recently have been excellent.

The first was Class Action; The Story of Lois Jensen and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy - read by Gabrielle De Cuir. This was the book that eventually became the movie North Country. It's a fascinating and rather disturbing a...

Wallpaper

My wife and I spent much of yesterday taking down the wallpaper border in our living room and kitchen. We started using the spray stuff, but after getting rather frustrated with the slow progress, we tried out the steamer some friends of ours lent us. This worked much faster, although watch out for the water that drips out of that thing when it's going - ouch!

And my calves are achy from spending so much time on a ladder. I didn't realize I had muscles there to get sore.

So now we have the wall...

Field of Vision

One thing that I find lacking in trying to sell ebooks is the narrow field of vision in which they can be displayed. When I walk into a brick and mortar bookstore, my field of vision is huge – my sight is full of shelves and shelves of books, displays, posters, end-caps, signs. There’s the New Releases section for both fiction and nonfiction, the Local Interest section, the Discover New Writers section, the Buy Two Get One Free section, the Summer Reading section, the periodicals – you get...

Changes in Listening

While driving with my family recently, my daughter, Paige, wanted to listen to a song in the car, and she did it by finding it on the iPhone which was plugged into the auxiliary channel of the car's stereo. That struck me as so different than when we slightly oldsters wanted to listen to music in the car. Sure, we had our cassettes, but even those were sort of new when I was a teenager, and my parents didn't have a cassette player in the car when I was growing up. If we wanted to listen to mu...

Psychic Ulcers - or - Does that involve a copay?

What happens to all of those stories inside of us that we can’t get out due to lack of time or initiative? Do they eventually rot and metastasize? Do they have a shelf life? Is there a time period after which if we finally go back and try to write it, that particular story has gone bad? I sometimes feel an urgency that if I’m not working on my writing at least a bit every day, then parts of stories - those stories wanting to get out - start to manifest themselves as something akin to ulcers...

Northwoods Deep - Kindle release!

My newest horror novel, Northwoods Deep, is now available for the Kindle. Based loosely on Native American Folklore, as well as the Brothers Grimm Hansel & Gretel, it follows two sisters who embark on a canoe trip into hell.

At a mere $2.99, you can't go wrong!



The back-of-the-book blurb:

Bakadewin; The Ojibwe word for hunger.
Bakadewin; an ancient evil guarded by an old man in a mosquito-ridden forest.

Five children and their adult chaperon set off on a hike along the Mesaba River. All vanish...

Parkitecture

Some photos I took of the 'off-limits' tree-house near the apex of the Old Faithful Inn.

Above is the bell-hop who took me up there. I think his name is Edward, if I'm remembering correctly.




I took this pic while standing on the steps that lead up to the roof and the widow's walk. Visitors are unable to see this side of the 'tree-house', since the angle that people can see it from below makes it impossible. But isn't that the wildest damn woodwork you've ever seen?



Looking up at the...

The Weekend

Paige was in the play The Wizard of Oz over the weekend, playing a Winkie. It was fun to see her. The play itself wasn't the version you're used to; there were different songs in this, and a few different plot points -- methinks there was a little bit of skirting around copyright issues? Who knows. Anyway, it was fun to see my daughter up on stage. I would've been scared to death at her age, but she was a total pro.

Sunday, Melissa and I went to see Eric Hamblen, one of the professionals who r...

Finding the Forgotten

One thing I've noticed when pursuing my genealogy interests is that there are so many people out there who've been forgotten, just waiting to be found, whether it's on a gravestone in a neglected cemetery corner, or within a blurry handwritten line from an old census record. There are the burials of those who seemed not to matter enough to warrant a mention so many years ago, or those who've lost their voice due to the fading ink of old diary entries.

One person I greatly admire is Harvey Ron...