Mike Jastrzebski's Blog, page 55

Preventative maintenance…

C.E. Grundler

I’ve been feeling quite miserable for the last few days, but I suppose I had it coming. With this many cumulative years of old boat (and old Dodge) ownership in my wake, I should have known better. It’s far better to do preventative maintenance early on than let things slide, figuring they’ll never sneak up on you. Then again, this little matter was easier to ignore… after all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

You see, ever since my teens, visits to the dentists always resulted in a conversation regarding my still present wisdom teeth. They should be pulled, I was informed. Why? Because they’d hurt when they came in, I was told, and they could cause problems. Perhaps, but if babies could handle teething, so could I. And based on what I’d seen from others I knew, having them extracted was no walk in the park. So long as they didn’t bother me, I wouldn’t bother them.

Well, I managed to dodge that bullet for a good run, but it caught up with me the other day. I had no choice, one of these still unemerged teeth had to come out. I took the Novocain route over general anesthesia, so I got to enjoy all the fun sound effects, tugs, crunches and pulls, the stitching, all that good stuff. Drills, picks, pliers, and I can only imagine what else. Unpleasant would be an understatement, though at the time all that kept running through my head, (aside from a drill,) was the image of every frozen, snapped bolt I’d ever extracted from an engine block. The process seemed pretty similar. I’m just glad the oral surgeon didn’t resort to the can of WD40 and a blowtorch.

Now that I’m starting to feel better again, I’ll be getting back to work on the boat. Back when the bridge deck project began, I’d extracted all the old fasteners and drilled out each hole. Now I’ll be filling those countless cavities, prepping for the new decking. I’m certainly looking forward to a solid deck beneath my feet – and eating solid food once again!

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Davits

This week, after owning Rough Draft for seventeen years, I put davits on the boat. For those of you who are not boaters, davits hang off the back of the boat and are used to carry the boat’s dinghy. Here’s a picture.

Now I suspect that there are some readers out there who wonder what took us so long, and others who wonder why now after all this time? The truth of the matter is that we’ve done fine without davits. I actually decided to buy the davits not because I had to have them for our dinghy, but because we had no other place to put solar panels. I plan to put a large solar panel on top of the davits. I bought heavy duty, 1 1/4 inch stainless davits from Garhauer Marine that will hold a 200 to 300 watt solar panel, and our dinghy. The cost was $1300.00 and I feel the davits are well worth the price. I’m ordering the panel this week so I’ll report on the installation when it arrives. I’ve only got about 5 weeks before we plan to head south and back to the Bahamas. If all goes as planned we hope to either explore the lower Bahamas, or head further down into the Caribbean.

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Writers Must Read

 

I’m a little more than half way done writing my sequel to “Stairway to the Bottom.” My schedule is changing from early morning writing to whatever time I can sit down at the computer. I still spend time putting chapters together in my head when driving or lying in bed, but I also read and try to read more when I’m writing – which seems to be all the time, these days!

I just finished James Lee Burke’s “Creole Belle” and am almost done with his daughter Alafair Burke’s “Never Tell.” Yeah, for you readers of Burke that didn’t know his real daughter’s name is Alafair just like his fictional daughter!

I find that reading good mysteries helps me as a writer. Of course, Stephen King used my idea in his book “On Writing.” Only kidding, King got the idea without my help, but it is a great book for writers and I don’t say that only because his beliefs on writing are similar to mine (maybe that has something to do with it, but not the only thing).

As King mentions in his book, writers have to read. I add to that, that writers should read in the genre they write. Read the writers you enjoy, respect and/or are impressed by. Doesn’t mean you have to understand or like everything they write. When I find a passage that really impresses me, I read it over and ask ‘why does that impress me?’ When I figure it out, and sometimes it’s not that easy, I have to consider if it would work in my writing. I’m not talking about stealing the sentence or paragraph, but the style or technique.

It works in reverse too. No one writes the perfect book. We try, it’s our goal but there’s always a reader that will find something wrong. As a writer, you should read to learn from others and that includes when you find something that bothers you in a book you otherwise enjoy. Why does it bother you? Was it done to bother you? Figure out what it is that bothers you, and in your own writing make sure you haven’t done almost the same thing. If so, find a way to fix it.

I try to explain to my wife that while I am under the stilt house, smoking a cigar and maybe sipping something cold, and reading, that I’m writing. She has a hard time believing that, but then again when I’m bar hopping, looking for a new character to put into a story, she doesn’t think that’s work either!

When you write, who do you read? Who influences your style your technique? I’d like to know.

www.michaelhaskins.net

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The end of an era

Last Wednesday, Mary and I were lucky enough to be able to watch as the space shuttle Endeavour made its final departure from the Kennedy Space Center.

One of my biggest regrets in life is not having seen the shuttle take off on a mission, and it saddens me t0 think that our country no longer has the means to send astronauts into space without relying on another country to take us there. I know there are plans for a new spaceship, but plans often go awry.

Although I write and mostly read mysteries, there was a time in my life when science fiction was my genre of choice, and when I was young I would have given anything for a chance to travel in space. Maybe that’s why I feel the way I do about the mothballing of the Shuttles.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve lived through our country’s entire journey into space. I was eight years old when the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit around earth. I didn’t watch the news back then, but I can remember the adults in my life talking about it. They were awed by the fact that someone could put an object into space, and frightened that it was our Cold War enemy, the Russians.

As I watched the Endeavour fly by on the back of that jumbo jet I was proud of our accomplishments as a country, and saddened by the memories of the tragedies of the astronauts who perished over the last 50 years. The men and women who died on Apollo 1 and the shuttles Challenger and Columbia were all heros, but more than that, they were visionaries, and I can’t help but wonder how they would have felt about the final flight of the Endeavour.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

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Calibre is a great weapon in fighting exclusivity

by Christine Kling

This whole ebook revolution/evolution thing is making me crazy when it pits friend against friend. I get it that some people love paper books, and they will continue to read them no matter what. I don’t believe paper books are going away any time soon. But in the ebook world, it is also getting nasty with Nook and or Kobo folk lining up against Amazon. I’m an old hippie and I remember Rodney King’s famous line, “Can’t we all just get along?” Above all, I’m just jazzed that so many people today are reading! That is cause to celebrate!

Think about it. Amazon released the first Kindle in November of 2007, which now seems like a very long time ago – but we are still in the early days of this ebook revolution. By most estimates, ebooks in late 2012 still only account for around 20% of book sales, although that number is growing at an astonishing rate. Looking at the state of the market is causing many to remember the days of VHS vs, Beta in the video market, given that we have several different formats for ebooks that don’t play well together. Right now we are watching a battle as the top ebook stores are fighting for dominance in the market, and one of the tools they are using is exclusivity.

Today’s market has narrowed down to two dominant formats: Amazon’s MOBI or AZW and the EPUB format used by Nook, Kobo, iBooks and others. Amazon is offering authors the opportunity to place their books in the Kindle Select program which permits them to make their books free  for 5 days out of any 90 days. This hitch is, the books must be exclusive to the Kindle Store. Barnes & Noble offers their program Nook First whereby new releases are given lots of advertising and push if they are made exclusive to Nook for 30 days. And now Kobo is offering an 80% royalty to self-publishers as an incentive to prevent them from going exclusive on any of the other platforms.

So what’s wrong with all these offers to self-publishing authors? The problem is that exclusivity is not good for readers – the very folks we writers should be most concerned about. I’d like to thank Lynn Demarest for her comment on my Sept. 7th blog for reminding me just how important it is to acknowledge that “Readers are gold.” Without them, there would be no point to writing. I honestly do treasure ever sale, every email from a reader, and every review. So one way or another, I’ve got to figure out how to survive in these times when perks are given to those who go exclusive, and when deciding to sign with an Amazon publisher means at least one of my books must stay exclusive to Amazon.

Enter calibre. For those of you who don’t know, calibre is a “a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books.” This free application runs on Mac OS, Windows and Linux, and readers can use it to convert a book purchased on the Kindle (or any other platform) to an epub file that can be read on a Nook or Kobo, etc.

I also learned something new when I went to their website. I’ve been pronouncing it wrong. The name of the software is pronounced just like the make of my boat – Caliber. And the makers of the software do not capitalize the name. I found both of those tidbits interesting.

Now I consider myself to be a bit of a tech geek. There aren’t many applications that scare me off. But every time I’ve opened calibre and looked at it, it seemed too complicated and I’ve put off learning how to use it. Until today. Sometimes I decide to write a blog about something technical just to force myself to dig in and use it.

And guess what I discovered? It is an awesome program and it’s not got a stiff learning curve at all. In fact, there is a great demo video on the home page that pretty well explains it all.

Because of the Kindle Select program and Amazon Publishing, there are lots more titles on Amazon than on the other sites. And due to the Amazon Select program, there are more free books offered there. So what I wanted to know was how could someone who does not own a Kindle get an Amazon title onto their Nook or Kobo or Sony device. So here are the steps:

Download and install the free calibre application.
Download the free Kindle app for your computer here.
For our test project, go to the list of free Kindle Books and download a book of your choice. When asked where to send it, send it to the Kindle reader for Mac or PC.
Once you’ve “bought” the book, go to the links at the top of the Amazon page and select Manage Your Kindle. There you will see the title you just downloaded and at the far right  of the page you will see the word Action. This will give you a drop down menu where you can select Download and Transfer via USB.


Now open the free calibre application you have downloaded. After establishing where you will save your library and telling the app what ereader device you own (use default if you don’t own one) then click on the the far left icon at the top of the page Add Books. Navigate to your download folder and select the book you just downloaded.
Once the book is in your calibre library, you can click on the link Convert Book to translate the Kindle version into an epub. An even simpler way to do it is just to connect your Nook or Kobo to your computer with the USB cord. The device will appear at the top of your calibre app in the menu bar and you can just drag and drop the book you want to convert to the icon for your Nook or Kobo and calibre will convert it and transfer it onto your device.

Okay, there is one big issue here that could jam up this whole process. It’s called DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management, and it basically locks up books so that they cannot be copied onto another device. Most books that you buy from major publishers will have DRM on them and you won’t be able to convert them. However, many Indie authors like me don’t use DRM and you can easily convert any of my books to the format the will work for your Sony Reader, Kobo, Nook or whatever using calibre.

Calibre is a terrific app for translating DRM free books from one  format to another. I am an avid Kindle fan and I’m happy to have my massive library in the Amazon cloud, so I don’t really want to use calibre to manage my library of digital books, and I found that some aspects of the app did’t work well – for example it claims to have this cool function that helps readers find the best price for a book on the Net, but in my experience, it found all kinds of weird books that slipped into the search results for who knows what reason. It was useless. But for conversion and fighting against the tide of exclusivity – calibre rocks.

 

Fair winds!

Christine

 

 

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I’ve got it all…

C.E. Grundler

The lovely house on a nice tree-lined street in a nice little town in the ‘burbs. A fifties ranch, four bedrooms, two baths, two car garage, pretty yard with flowering shrubs and a swimming pool size koi pond. The only thing missing is the picket fence. And I don’t want any of it. But explaining why I’ve begun paring down my life towards escaping this text-book American dream is something most people simply can’t understand.

To quote Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap!” It’s a life that requires us to be commuters and consumers, working to support an economy based around conspicuous consumption, that demands we continue to work longer and harder and continually acquire just to sustain a standard of living society and the media deem ideal. And it’s a lifestyle I never signed up for. But what’s that saying? Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. (I believe credits there go to John Lennon, who certainly had other plans. And there’s a lesson in that as well: life can be shorter than we expect, and far as I know, there isn’t a do-over button.)

I’d never planned to end up in that house in the ‘burbs – Plan A was to live on a boat – to live simply and to travel — but events set me on a different course. And the more time passes, the more I know this is not where I want to be and how I want to live. And the more I work towards Plan A, paring down my life to the essentials, the more I discover just how much that confuses most people. Could I seriously want to leave all ‘THIS’? Yes. More than they’d ever imagine.

Much of what has always appealed to me about the liveaboard life is the minimalism of it. You don’t fill a boat with stuff that doesn’t serve a specific purpose. You don’t acquire without putting great thought into what it is, what purpose it will serve or what value it would hold to you. There is limited space, which sets a limit to the possessions you keep aboard. It’s a lifestyle that favors the frugal, a lifestyle that requires less income to sustain, and therefore less work to maintain, which in turn leaves more time for actually living. True, there are many paths to living on a simpler, more sustainable and modest scale, but boats are what I know and where I want to be. I suppose for the general population it seems a radical, fringe sort of lifestyle, but that doesn’t make it any less valid or viable. Still, here in the land of ‘more’, I’ve discovered it’s hard to explain that I’d really be much happier if I owned far less. But fortunately, one of the first things I’ve let go of is caring what other people think.

So, for those of you who already made this shift, how did those around you react? What would you have done differently? What would you have done sooner, or not at all? Any regrets?

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Joyce Holland on getting back to writing

By Joyce Holland

I love dealing with MuseItUp Publishing. (A Canadian publisher) They have been absolutely great. Their editing process is twofold, they assign you a content editor and a line editor. Sweet. And then comes the cover artist. Loads of support. Can’t beat it.

I have to say I was a little stunned by the cover for Murder By Design when I first saw it. They had asked me how I pictured it. Okay…hmmm. I said: I see a primeval swamp, dotted with cypress trees dripping Spanish moss. And I see a boat caught in a shaft of moonlight as it drifts across the dark water.

Well, when I opened the file I saw this woman who looked like an escapee from the cast of Buffy the Vampire. The woman in my book is the victim not the killer. LOL But, hey, you gotta admit that is some gorgeous cover, and it looks kinda swampy. (?) It’s currently available as an ebook on Amazon, and will be in print before Christmas.

   

They are also doing a sci-fi short story I wrote called Harem, which will be available from Amazon at the end of September. Like the first one, I’m not sure where the artist got her inspiration, but it rocks! I’m mad about it.

I have thrown my agenting gear into idle for the moment. Not as far as submitting to publishers for my clients, but in regard to accepting submissions. No more until after the new year. I need the time to regroup, get caught up, and send out some material of my own.

Which reminds me, has anyone seen the announcement from Amazon about their new Kindle Serials program. I have sent one off to them. It’s a superhero romance called Nero’s Touch. Saying little prayers as I watch for an email response. I really like their idea of bringing back serials. Someone said, it’s just another name for material in series, but I don’t see it that way. When I think of serials, I think of The Perils of Pauline, or some-such, with cliffhangers at closing. Serials are more like short stories with the same characters, and can be stand-alones. Right?

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Two steps forward, one back

By Mike Jastrzebski

Overall, work on the boat has been going well, but we had a little setback this past week. This past spring we had troubles with our engine, an old Atomic Four that has served us well for the sixteen years we’ve owned the boat.

The real culprit wasn’t really the engine, but gas that had gone bad. Junk from the gas tank had made it’s way to the carburetor and we had to have it rebuilt. After that the fuel pump died, but we finally got things going and made our trip to the Bahamas and on to Cape Canaveral.

The engine ran fine throughout the trip, but when I started the boat Thursday the engine kept cutting out at low idle. After several attempts to adjust the idle I ended up pulling the carburetor. Today I’ll disassemble it and clean it out. Hopefully that will solve my problems.

On the writing front I’ve been working a little on the outline for the Wes Darling Bahamas book. I can’t wait until the boat work is done. Then it’s back to the Bahamas where we plan to hole up behind some deserted islands so I can work on the book.

Also, if you haven’t read Dog River Blues (A Wes Darling Mystery) yet, it’s free through tomorrow, 09/18/2012. Give it a try, it won’t cost you anything.

// ]]>

Amazon.com Widgets 

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It’s a dog’s life

Barney on watch

I’ve written many times on this blog about my desire to try to live simply. And once I even wrote about how my sweet old blind and deaf dog Chip added to the simple joys of my life. He slept most of the time, he was always there to greet me with a doggy smile, and he asked little of the world or of me. I still miss him daily.

Enter Barney.  You see, being a crazy dog person, I only lasted two months without a dog, and so back in late May, I adopted this terrier puppy from United Yorkie Rescue.

Simplify? Ha! What was I thinking? I’ve visited more vets, gourmet dog food stores, groomers and little dog foo-foo boutiques in the last three months than I dare admit to.  What is going on here?

This little Twelve-pound Terrier Terror has taken over my life. First of all, they told me he was a runner and I’d never see him again if I ever let him get away from me. What they didn’t explain is that he is also an escape artist. I’ve tried every single type of harness made and the little guy just turns around, backs up, folds up his shoulders, almost like he’s dislocating something à la Harry Houdini, he slips right out of the harness. After filling up a boat locker with half a dozen different harnesses, I finally found the best one, and now he has almost chewed his way through it. I’ll be back to the boutiques again soon.

Barney’s mug shot

As you can see from the mug shot taken of him when he was first found as a stray on the streets of Miami, Barney was in need of a haircut. I think he looks a little like a miniature version of Chewy in the Star Wars movies. So, off I went to a groomer, not daring to use the clippers I so often used on Chip. He returned a handsome dog, but I even with his fur cut as short as it is, he still manages to come home from many a walk an absolute mess. You see, in Florida at this time of year, with daily downpours of rain and 15 hours a day of sunshine, most grass grows about an inch a day. Five days after they’ve mowed, it goes to seed. Barney is a seed magnet. I’m sure, if I watered him, he would sprout and become a REAL Chia Pet.

My Chia Pet

When I try to de-seed him, he bites and grows and fusses and generally makes it impossible. This morning I am late writing this blog since last night he found a particularly fertile seed patch and we came home to 2 hours of fighting, after which, I said in frustration, Screw the blog, I’m going to bed.

And then there is the question of Barney’s health. I wrote here about discovering his cataract back in the Bahamas. When I returned to the states, I took him to my regular vet and she told me that these juvenile cataracts can appear suddenly like that. It was nothing that I did that caused it. Then she recommended I take Barney to a doggy ophthalmologist to see about surgery.

So, okay, here’s the thing. Chip, my old dog, also got a juvenile cataract when he was about two years old (Barney getting one at 10 months is really young). But being the sort of person I am, I didn’t have it operated on. You see, in my quest to live simply, I said to myself, Chip is a dog. Much as I love him, he is a dog. There are human beings in Africa, Asia, South America, even in America who need cataract surgery and cannot afford it. Americans are incredibly spoiled and they squander valuable medical resources on their pets.

It sounded like a good argument to me, that is until Chip got a cataract in his other eye when he was 14 years old and deemed too old for surgery. He lived another 2 years as a blind dog, and though I did all I could to make his life happy and comfortable, it was difficult.

I don’t want Barney to live his last days as a totally blind dog, so here I am schlepping my dog off to the doggy ophthalmologist, only to be told there, that he can’t get the surgery yet because he has an eye infection/allergy, and they sent me off to the doggy dermatologist.

Did I mention that I’m trying to live simply and naturally?? That was when I called my son who pointed out to me that the dog had more doctors and specialists than either of us did. But wait, it gets better.

Yesterday, at the doggy dermatologist, I walked out of there $300 poorer and with a treatment plan that includes 2 pills and one oral medication that must be measured with a syringe and a 15-pound bag of kangaroo dog food. Yup, you read that right. Kangaroo meat dog food, and a bag of it that weighs one and a half times what the dog weighs and he will be eating it until Easter. When the vet told me that, this lover of Winnie the Pooh realized that I am now feeding my dog Roo.

And it gets better yet. He is not allowed to eat anything but this Kangaroo dog food because they are trying to determine if he has food allergies and they know he has never eaten any kangaroo before, so if things clear up on this, they know it was caused by something in his diet. If it doesn’t clear up, then it might be pollen or something else. So, how the hell am I going to get him to take these pills if I can’t hide them in some kind of treat? You should have seen me last night wrestling with him, shoving the pills way down his throat, only to have him wiggle out of my arms and then hack the pills up onto the rug. The drops that are supposed to go in his mouth ended up in his nose with all the wiggling. And I’m supposed to do this routine twice a day for the next 10 days.

And think about it. Barney is a boat dog. Where am I going to find kangaroo food in the islands??

I don’t know what to do. Chip lived to a ripe old age with minimal veterinarian intervention, despite their trying to convince me that he needed surgeries and EKGs and special meds for an ailing heart. The skeptic in me says these vets really saw a sucker coming when I walked in there with a cute little Yorkie.

I mean really, Kangaroo? Can it get any more absurd than that?

But for all the complications that this little Terrier Terror has brought into my life, for all the chewed socks and spilled wine and shredded papers, for all the wrestling matches trying to pull the burrs out of his fur, for all the times I’ve hunted everywhere for some item only to find it secreted away in Barney’s bed, every day he makes me laugh and ends the day curled up in a warm little ball of puppy fur asleep on my lap, and I feel like I’d do just about anything to keep him healthy.

What do you think? What would you do?

 

Fair winds!

Christine

 

 

 

 

 

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Oh, hey. I’m bleeding.

Yup. That was pretty much my reaction yesterday when I noticed that the steering wheel on my truck was a bit wet and slick. I’d smacked the joint on my official ‘Jersey Salute’ finger of my right hand while off-loading some heavy items. I’d registered the pain at the time, but hadn’t realized I’d actually sliced a substantial flap of skin off the top of the joint. Actually, it was still a bit numb. So I drove home, cleaned it up, and bandaged it. I had things to do, and this was a mere flesh injury — I didn’t have time to slow down for something as inconsequential as that. As the day progressed, so did the swelling, to the point that I realized perhaps some medical attention might be in order.

Four stitches, one tetanus shot, and a bunch of happy painkillers later I was finally feeling no pain. And in no condition to write anything, either physically or mentally, last night or this morning, which is why there was no post from me this morning.

I’m feeling far better now , though my bandaged finger is still rather puffy. On the bright side, though with the way my finger looks, if I need to offer someone the Jersey Salute,  it’s like giving it in ALL CAPS.

(I could have posted a picture of this, but I can promise you, it would look quite rude.)

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