Jordan Castillo Price's Blog, page 66

Scrivener blows my mind

It was remarked that all the names I generated sounded really white, and lo and behold, I found SETTINGS. I had it set on common-sounding names of either gender, based on popular American and British names. So I cranked the obscurity level, toggled it to male-only, added Hindi and Hispanic names, and told it to alliterate them. Hah!
Cristobal Clinton
Epifanio Ellis
Harshad Hazelton
Mahatma Manson
Frank Furse
Rogelio Redding
Alan Atkin
Archie Arnold
Chandrakant Charlton
Robbie Reid
Aditya Aslam
Basilio Burke
Damodar Dornan
Clarence Cannell
Octavio Oliver

I didn't mean to be dawdling today...but this is some cool shit.

ETA: What, how can the text-to-speech possibly sound that natural? Holy cow. MIND IS BLOWN. (Probably for the best I didn't know this before I finished GhosTV).

I just yelled Oh My God!

I did yell it out, but I don't think I startled Puffy, he looks pretty unflappable.

Kelly Cole
Amanda Ellis
Scott Lloyd
Lisa Green
Lisa Phillips
Daniel Robertson
Grace Thomson
Jason Barnes
Jeffrey Mason
David Clark
Jason Fisher
Grace Clark
Kevin Willis
Matthew Turner

What is this, you may ask? I just discovered that the writing program Scrivener (Mac) has a NAME GENERATOR! Sweeet!

And hooray, it's not yet 7:30 and I'm writing after two days of nothing but minding my online store...but of course I paused to revel in Scriv-love on LJ. I really need to explore the features. I'll bet it does all sorts of specialized things I don't know about. (I was looking to see if I could make it type a name by hitting a few characters instead, like GGG and then the long name auto-corrects.)

Also, I made my coffee a bit weak.

GhosTV on Amazon Kindle

And it's got a couple of really lovely reviews already! GhosTV: a PsyCop Novel hit the shelves last night, so Kindle owners...poise your finger over that irresistable buy button! Even if you bought the book from my store, I'd love it if you could click on the tags to help the book's search rankings.

The Wait is Finally Over! GhosTV is here!

Two years in the making, hooray! The biggest, juiciest (slimiest) PsyCop ever, GhosTV, just hit the virtual shelves. Over 111,000 words and nearly 400 pdf pages!

I expect the paperback to be available in about 4-6 weeks.

I've heard a few instances of computers stalling out when downloading...I wonder if the server housing my ebooks is going "WTF??" at the initial buying rush...hell, I'm pleased as punch to even HAVE an initial buying rush! But I'll be keeping my eye on my email, and if you have any problems, let me know and I'll manually send you the file. Email me here - jcp.heat (at) gmail (dot) com for the quickest reply.

Go to the GhosTV page

Random Dirty

I found this photo on the bus a few years ago:


I've always enjoyed it.

My slip was showing

Thankfully an alert reader let me know that my "making of" section of The Starving Years has been pointing to December for the past two months! Nothing like writing a couple of long essays and NOT LINKING TO THEM.

January's Starving Years Writer's Notes (on shifting between big writing projects)

February's Starving Years Writer's Notes (on using research plausibly in fiction writing)

Some people can't read their own writing...

Evidently I make thumbnail sketches of things and then forget what they are.

I think it might not be so bad except I let my visual art languish in favor of writing (because it's easier to do the things we get praise for, don'tcha know, and other than a few group shows I haven't had much luck in the art field.) In my mind, though, I was thinking fondly of these clever ideas I had, and how I should really develop them, and maybe do some interesting illustrations. All I needed to do was get my act together and set aside maybe half an hour a day to work on them....

So I scanned them in. Huh? I don't even know what the thing in the upper left is supposed to BE. I have "testing on bunnies" scrawled above it, but I don't THINK that's what it is. I must have been in a really morbid mood at the time, though.



I can identify the other things. That's booze pouring into a glass (lower left) a stack of identical canned goods (upper right) and a steak under plastic wrap on a styrofoam tray (lower right.)

I'm not discouraged, exactly...but I'm seeing the value of momentum. If I wanted to do this illustration project, whatever the hell I thought it was going to be, the time was when I was fired up about the thumbnails. Not now, months later, when I don't even know what they are.

Believe you me, there've been writing ideas I've let die, too. I have ideas all day long. I'm full of 'em.

GhosTV release date

My February issue of JCP News is here!

• Big red notebook
• GhosTV release date announced
• A Bitter Taste of Sweet Oblivion, links and giveaway

Go take a look!

Buggy

There's a leaf-footed pine seed bug walking very slowly across my kitchen counter. I assume he was hibernating somewhere and he woke up because temperatures shot up into the forties today. He's missing a leg.

I'll bet there's no name for this phobia

So I was just now noticing that my kitchen sponge, although new and not worn out at all, is kind of stinky. And I thought I'd tell you a little something about me you probably didn't know, but would find amusing when paired with the anecdote that follows.

I hate sponges. Mind you, I do use them...although it's likely if someone pointed out a different way I could do things I might take up a new way of doing things. I already use cloth handkerchiefs, a habit I picked up when I was about 16, and probably an oddity. I already use the heck out of my kitchen towels rather than using paper towels, which basically I use to mop up cat puke, but little other than that.

But the dreaded dish sponge. Eeeew. I wonder if my aversion began at my first job after grad school. I was an executive assistant at a design firm where my boss was always drunk. And one day he told me I needed to run the dish sponge through the dishwasher because it was full of bacteria. At first I thought he might be drunkenly kidding. But then I realized he was serious.

I wonder if that scarred me.

I have never lived in a house with a functional dishwasher, and frankly if I had one wish-list item, a dishwasher it would be--since I do a lot of cooking from scratch, which in turn creates a lot of dishes. Plus it would deal with that nasty sponge issue.

I've noticed that if I moisten (eewww) the stinky sponge and then cook it in the microwave for a couple of minutes, it smells a bit better. Although the scent of cooking sponge permeates the kitchen. But I conclude that the microwave zap has killed some sponge bacteria.

Okay, so here's the anecdote I promised you.

Ten years ago, I had this grand scheme to move from Chicago to Wisconsin and become a writer. All the research I've done suggests that the cost of living in Wisconsin is much lower, but I move here and, surprise! It's not.

So I see a nearby job opening at a library I've been to that seems friendly enough, and I apply. And weirdly enough, I get that job.

What's one of the first things they tell me? "Oh, here's a ziploc bag of letter-shaped sponges that goes out with a kit we check out to homeschoolers. Could you rinse those out?"

...

Oh God. They're MOIST.

(I could tell you how happy I am to no longer have a day job, but I doubt I can convey the depth of that sentiment in writing.)