Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 215

Monday Bullets

I hadn’t realized the Find Smudge contest was going to be quite so frustrating for folks.  I apologize for that.  I think I miscalculated the Challenge Rating on ol’ Smudge.  We did have four people who managed to find him, and the random number generator has picked a winner.  Congratulations, Sean!  I’ll e-mail you about your book.For everyone else who wants the answer, go to your web browser and type in the following URL: www.jimchines.com/[Your Name:], replacing [Your Name:] with — well, you ge

Workshop Wisdom

Okay, “wisdom” might be an overstatement.  But at Penguicon this year, it occurred to me that I’ve been doing writing workshops for a long time.  As a participant, I’ve done creative writing class discussions, the Writers of the Future workshop in ‘99, Critters, and then several years with a local group until they dissolved.  Eventually, I started cofacilitating workshops, helping to run them at ConFusion, ConClave, and now Penguicon, among others.

That’s a lot of fiction feedback, and after a wh

Contact Form Fixed

Booya!  The contact form is fixed!!!

I am a sexy, shoeless god of PHP!

Ahem.  Don’t mind me.  I’m just feeling way too smug about this right now.  (The fix required a manual tweak of a php script in the plugin.  Since I don’t know PHP and this is, as far as I can tell, a completely undocumented issue, I think I’ve earned some smug points.)

So, way too many hours fighting with this plus more hours getting through another chapter of the book means it’s time for ice cream!

Real post coming soon, I prom

Busted Contact Form

So apparently the contact form on my site isn’t working. I’ve done some preliminary troubleshooting (with several different plugins), and I’m guessing either my own PHP broke it or else it was the permalink change. If you’ve used that form lately, I didn’t receive your message.

Unfortunately, this includes any contest entries from yesterday.  I’ve had one correct entry so far (that I know of).  If you found Smudge, please e-mail me at jchines42 -at- hotmail.com.

My apologies, folks.

Free Book & New Books

For a while, I’ve been using the gift certificates from Amazon to fund my book giveaways.  Readers click on my Amazon links to buy things, which leads to gift certs for me, which I turn around and use to have Amazon send out free books.  Sounds great, right?

Only I had a minor case of dumb.  Shipping one book from Amazon runs $3-4 in shipping, so every winning copy of The Stepsister Scheme eats about $11 from one of those gift certificates.

It suddenly occurred to me that I could use Amazon’s 4-fo

Canon Fodder

Terribly Twisted Tales [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] came out last month.  This is an anthology of twisted fairy tales, so I’m sure you’re all shocked to learn I contributed a story.  But for some reason, I’ve been nervous about this one.  I wrote “The Red Path,” which gave me a chance to explore the origin story for Red Riding Hood from my princess books, but I wasn’t sure it really worked.  So I was happy to find a review listing it among the best stories in the anthology.  (Kelly Swails also g

The Sleeping God, by Violette Malan

The Sleeping God [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy], by Violette Malan is a nifty book.

As heroic fantasy goes, this book has a fair amount going for it.  Well-built world and mythology that fits together rather well, badass mercenary protagonists who are more than just caricatures, a sprinkling of secrets and intrigue, and of course, a sleeping god.  Our heroes are mercenary brothers* Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane, who take a job escorting a young girl back to her noble house but soon find them

Why Books as Children is Just Plain Creepy

From a random author interview:

“My books are my children.  I love them all, and could never pick a favorite.”

Same author, different interview:

“Oh yes, I trunked several of my children back when I was starting out.”

The author at a booksigning:

“Psst.  Hey, you.  Want to buy one of my kids?  Take two, the older one and the newborn!”

The bookstore staff three months later:

“Time to clear some shelf space for the new arrivals.  Get out there and start stripping children.”

The library, where anyone can– 

Wordpress 101

I’ve gotten a few questions about Wordpress lately, so thought I’d share the bits and pieces I’ve learned as a relative newbie. For those of you who aren’t into web stuff, feel free to skip this one.

I knew almost nothing about Wordpress going into this, but there were a few things I wanted to accomplish:

Maintain all of the content from my old site
Host my blog on my domain and mirror it to my other sites
Create a theme that could be easily tweaked or updated without a lot of work

At this point,

Is Your Book Appropriate for My Child?

This is one of my least favorite questions, and the one I’m asked most often.  The best times are when parents tell me they’ve read the book, but still ask me whether it’s appropriate for children.  Yes, this has really happened.  On more than one occasion.

Should your kid read my book?  How the frak should I know?  Some parents let their kids read the pop-up Kama Sutra at age six.  Others think The Cat in the Hat will turn their children into drugged-out hippies.  (Some of Seuss’ more adult work