Walker Long's Blog, page 4
April 8, 2017
Emily Foxx reviews Swapship Troopers
Check out this brilliantly written review of Swapship Troopers!
I highly recommend this to anyone that loves a good action story with hot passionate scenes added to the mix.
April 4, 2017
Walker Long on the Front Page? What?!
That’s right! Swapship Troopers is up to #20 in the Best Sellers in LGBT Science Fiction on Amazon. Let’s hear it for high genre granularity! That puts me on the front page. And — check it out — Ursula K LeGuin is a mere 4 slots ahead of me. Me and Ursula, we’re tight like that. I’m coming for you, Zen DiPietro.
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March 29, 2017
Sally Bend Reviews Dora’s Box
Here’s a surprisingly touching review of Dora’s Box by Sally Bend over at Bending the Bookshelf.
Dora’s Box is a surprisingly touching story that is equal parts comic, romantic, and erotic.
http://bibrary.blogspot.ca/2017/03/doras-box-by-walker-long.html
March 28, 2017
How To Use Zapier to Format WordPress Posts for Triberr
Lately I’ve been using Triberr to expand the reach of my social media posts. How it works is, you join a group (called a “tribe”). You share posts from other members. Other members share your posts. I get a couple things out of this. For one, I get fresh content for my social media accounts. For another, my own content gets shared out to more people that it otherwise might. Win/win.
Triberr isn’t perfect, though. For one thing, it has a complete lack of respect for the browser back button. For another thing, it’s almost impossible to get into a tribe. Most users seem to use Triberr as part of a set-it-and-forget-it social media strategy — it’s not uncommon to see “XXX logged in 3 years ago.” As a result, many tribes are not actively maintained. I fixed that by creating my own tribe. Viola!
The second problem I had was that my posts looked lame. Triberr reads the RSS feed of your blog, but it was not set up for the RSS format used by WordPress.com blogs. My posts came through in plain text only (no formatting) and no images — not even the Featured Image!
[image error]Would you click “ADD TO QUEUE” for this lame post? Me either.
It turns out that Triberr reads through the post and uses the first image as the post preview. Of course, when it is getting only plain text there are no images. Furthermore, in WordPress the Featured Image (which would be perfect for the post preview) is not a part of the post itself, but saved in another XML element. So the information is all there, but Triberr doesn’t know how to use it. My posts come up with no image.
There is a Triberr plugin for WordPress, but I use a free WordPress.com blog so I can’t use plugins. That sucks! I want my money back! Oh, wait…
Out of desperation, I turned to Zapier.com. Zapier allows you to make Zaps, little web applications, that can automate online tasks. You don’t have to have extensive programming skills, and they offer a free account.
A Zap consists of two parts — a Trigger and an Action. The Trigger is the input. Something happens which causes (triggers) the Zap to run. The Action, then, is what happens when the Trigger is hit. Zapier includes a crap load of possible premade Triggers and Actions from a wide range of popular web sites, technologies, and protocols. There are literally hundreds.
For my Zap, the Trigger was a new WordPress post. Of course Zapier has a WordPress App. You simply select the App from the list and enter your WordPress login. There are a variety of actions you can trigger from. I chose to trigger off of a “New Post.”
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For this Zap, my Action uses the built in Zapier RSS App. This App creates an RSS feed and adds a new item whenever my Trigger is fired. The RSS App has a number of fields to define the new item. For Feed Title I just typed in “Walker Long’s Blog,” because it’s my blog.
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You can also use info that was collected by the Trigger, which is labeled “Step 1.” Just click on the little List+Plus icon in the upper right of any text area. This will pop up a list of all the fields that Zapier read in Step 1. For the Item Title text area, I found a Step 1 field called “Post Title,” which contained the title of my WordPress post. For Source URL I chose a field called “Link” that gave the URL of my blog post. That was easy!
Even more powerful, you don’t have to just use the Step 1 fields as they come. For this Zap, I wanted to make sure my WordPress Featured Image was shown in Triberr. I knew that Triberr would l use the first image it found in the post, so I simply inserted the WordPress Featured Image at the beginning of the Content area, before anything else.
The Featured Image URL is in the “Post Thumbnail” field from Step 1. To make sure Triberr understands that this is an image, I wrapped the image path in an HTML Img tag. Next is the text of the post from the “Post Content” field. This is, luckily enough, is in HTML format.
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Then I went to my Triberr settings and added a new blog using the feed URL from my Zap. The results aren’t instantaneous – you have the Triberr update rate on top of the Zapier update rate now. But when they do eventually show up, my posts have snazzy images!
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Do you have an easier way? Or another cool use for Zapier? Let me know in the comments!
[image error]Now there’s an eye-catching post!
March 27, 2017
Publicity Image: Swapship Troopers
I’ve been tinkering around in my graphics program again, and I’ve come up with this marketing image for Swapship Troopers. It’s basically the book cover and a bunch of quotes from reviews, so it didn’t take long to make (unless you count the time spent harassing reviewers).
One thing I did differently was to use a 2:1 aspect ratio. That’s supposed to look best on twitter. We’ll see how it turns out.
Boundless Book Reviews Reads Swapship Troopers
Check out this beautiful review of Swapship Troopers! It’s a review after my own heart.
I don’t think it should matter what gender people are if you love each other nothing and no one should hold you back.
March 20, 2017
Publicity Image: Dora’s Makeover (final)
I’ve finally finished the drawing for my Dora’s Box publicity image. Now I can plaster this all over and (hopefully) interest a couple people in reading the book.
It turned out in my initial draft I had the wrong leg in front. No wonder the anatomy wasn’t making sense! Now, however, things line up much better. As a bonus, she is able to show much more skin. That’s always a good thing. And talk about long legs! If you scaled an average woman to fit those legs, her head would be off the top of the picture.
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You may notice some suspicious shading on the front of her dress, as though there’s something hidden underneath. It’s quite subtle and could just as easily be ordinary draping of the fabric. Between you and me, though, there’s a magic cock under there. Shhh. Don’t tell.
[image error]Random is a process, right?
I’ve also added a few snappy quotes from some of the good reviews of this novel. If the leggy futa doesn’t convince you, I’m hoping peer pressure might help. This is a good time to shout out to the great people who leave reviews. Thank you so much! You guys rock! The time you volunteer for writing reviews will help make sure there are weird-ass stories like this one for a long time to come.
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March 15, 2017
Publicity Image: Dora’s Makeover
I’ve been working on a publicity image for Dora’s Box, and I decided to give you all a little sneak preview. I was so inspired by Robert McGinnis’ brilliant painting for the Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster that I just had to try my hand at creating my own version. This image represents Dora after her roommate, Julia, has put her through a complete makeover. Dora is starting to come out of her shell and build confidence in herself. She’s ready to take on the world!
Like all of my book covers, this was drawn in Inkscape. Most of the techniques are ones that I used in the Swapship Troopers cover: color gradients give her skin tone more natural variation. Highlights are made by putting down a white spot and blurring the hell out of it. Shadows are done in much the same way. One big difference is body shape. Quantrill from Swapship Troopers is a short, voluptuous woman. Dora, however, is long and lean (which is why the McGinnis painting seemed so perfect).
Another technique I haven’t done before is sequins. Fucking sequins! I couldn’t figure out how to make them look real, so I had to draw every single fucking sequin. Actually there was a lot of copy/paste involved (thank Jove for computers) but it still took for-damn-ever. I think it turned out pretty well, but I can’t recommend this method unless you don’t mind going crazy.
[image error]Fucking Sequins
Of course, I meant this to look like , but my artistic skill is not quite up to that challenge apparently. For some reason she looks more like . Oh well. There are worse things.
[image error]Holly Golightly or Elizabeth Swann? It’s a work in progress.
Hey, go to Amazon and read the book!
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February 28, 2017
Cover Art IV: The Lesbian, the Bitch, and the Bathrobe
I was working on releasing The Lesbian, the Bitch, and the Bathrobe in paperback, so I decided to update the book cover while I was at it. The text was a little dreary, so I pumped it up with a gold finish. The gold look is easy enough to achieve in inkscape — it’s just a repeating gradient from yellow to white and back again.
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I also inserted my lil’ ole’ signature into the artwork because, heck, I drew it so I’m going to take credit for it. Actually, Swapship Troopers was the first cover art that I liked enough to actually want to sign, but I’ve since gone back and signed all my others as well.
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You can find this book on Amazon Kindle and soon available in paperback!
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February 10, 2017
An Open Letter to America
Dear America,
We promise we are not your enemy. Have we ever hurt anyone? No! Then why the fear and distrust? We’ve had such good times together. We’re pretty sure you like us. Sometimes it seems like you can’t get enough of us. But then you turn away like you’re ashamed we even exist! We were there for you when you were weak and vulnerable, but now what do you want? We should just disappear?
Please accept us as we are. Don’t be afraid.
Sincerely,
Boobs
