Eric Kent Edstrom's Blog, page 21

When I Have Fears That I May Be Obese (A Parody)

Some years ago I wrote this parody of John Keats' sonnet "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be". I still think it's worth a chuckle. I've put the original after for comparison.

WHEN I have fears that I may be obese,

That my fork's tines will relentlessly pitch

Chocolate cakes and bacon soakéd in grease

Followed by pumpkin pie and fudges rich;

And when I break my fast (well after dawn)

To find it whole before morning is through,

Longing for luncheon while bruncheon is on

Alone at the buffet I form a queue;

And when I quaff caloried elixir

Scorning the straw to slurp from the pail

To wash all food into the great mixer

Of my cavernous craw–then on a scale

   I judge the gravity of what I ate

   And think I'd be fitter at greater weight



I might have missed a syllable or two in there. Sue me! Besides, see my creative commons license below. 

John Keats





Here's the original . . .





WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high pil`d books, in charact'ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And feel that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore

   Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,

   Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

When I Have Fears That I May Be Obese by Eric Kent Edstrom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fan Art: Is This Notchy?

A fan* of The Undermountain Saga submitted this drawing of Notchy. This depiction definitely the "bear-like" face. In fact, it appears to be a bear's face on a bigfoot. I particularly like the perspective. The best part has to be the notch in the ear!

 

*aka me

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Lands Tonight (hopefully)

Like any self respecting science fiction writer, I haven’t missed a Mars rover landing. There are very few events more tense and more riveting than a space mission, particularly when something lands on something. I wish we were about to put some people on Mars, but I’ll settle for another rover. If you haven’t seen the seven minutes of terror video about the landing, here it is.

<

So they’re basically going to fire the retrorockets to slow the whole thing down, then lower the rover on wires. It’s the kind of thing a child would invent. I hope it works! I’ll be watching NASA TV http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ starting 10pm central. I hope they’ve got their bandwidth issues sorted out, because if it bogs down, I’m going to weep.

NASA's Curiosity Rover Lands Tonight (hopefully)

Like any self respecting science fiction writer, I haven't missed a Mars rover landing. There are very few events more tense and more riveting than a space mission, particularly when something lands on something. I wish we were about to put some people on Mars, but I'll settle for another rover. If you haven't seen the seven minutes of terror video about the landing, here it is.

<

So they're basically going to fire the retrorockets to slow the whole thing down, then lower the rover on wires. It's the kind of thing a child would invent. I hope it works! I'll be watching NASA TV http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ starting 10pm central. I hope they've got their bandwidth issues sorted out, because if it bogs down, I'm going to weep.

Danny and Em

One of the awesome fun things about writing a novel is getting to see the cover art. I went through several iterations before getting to the wonderful covers designed by Melvin De Voor.

One artist I worked with offered up this amazing piece.




But there was a problem. The girl, presumably Breyona, is the wrong race. The artist reworked the girl a few times, but it just didn't come together. Meanwhile, I had fallen in love with the picture and kept thinking that the girl looked like Em, Danny's sister.

In the end the artist and I worked out an agreement so that I could use this amazing image. You'll notice I've added it to the header of this website.

So here's the question. What are Danny and Em looking up at?

Tutorial: Getting Your Goodreads Reviews to Show Up on Kobobooks

Kobobooks.com recently opened up Writing Life for indie authors. This is awesome because you no longer have to go through Smashwords if you don't want to. While I love Smashwords, one of the great things Kobo is offering writers is a dashboard with more detail about sales. And though Kobobooks has a way to go to make their store experience all it should be, I'm encouraged by their inclusion of some interesting social features for books.

They've built in Facebook comments for each book AND Goodreads reviews!



But when you add your book to Kobo the the Writing Life portal, you're Goodreads reviews might not automatically show up. This is bad. If you're like me, you've done a lot of work to get folks to post reviews on Goodreads.



Well, I figured out how to fix that problem, and it isn't too hard. Shall we proceed?

Here is the Kobobooks page for my first novel, Undermountain .



I've highlighted with the red box the Goodreads review section. Here's what it looks like now that I've got it integrated.


That's pretty awesome! Notice that I've got five pages of GR reviews, which are all positive. That's because the book is good. Moving on . . .


If you want your GR reviews to show up you need to add the Kobo version of your book to Goodreads. Here's how.

Grab the ISBN number from your book's page on Kobobooks. See the highlight below.



Now that you know your Kobo ISBN, go over to Goodreads.com and search for your book. It doesn't matter if Goodreads finds it or not, because what you want is the Manually add a book link. See the highlight in the pic below.



When you click that link, you'll get the page below. Fill in the form with all your book's info. Use the Kobo ISBN in the ISBN13 field. Make sure the title you use is identical to your other edition's title.

At this point you might be thinking, "But my book is already in Goodreads." That may be true, but Kobobooks.com is whispering to Goodreads in the background, asking "Do you have any reviews for ISBNxxxxxxxxxx?" So if that specific ISBN is not in Goodreads, Kobo will get nothing to display. 

Okay, you're getting close now. The final step is pretty simple. In Goodreads you need to combine the Kobo edition with your other editions. This makes sure that any reviews you've got for, say your Amazon version or your Createspace POD version, are merged with the Kobo version.

So find your book on goodreads and click it so you are seeing the detail page for that book. Notice that in the pic below, there's a spot for other editions. One is my POD version, the other is the Kobo edition (I added it from my iPad and didn't have the cover art handy. I'll go fix that later.) It doesn't really matter. See that link I highlighted? Combine! Click it.

Now you're on the Combine Editions page. In the example below I've already combined the different editions of Undermountain. What you'll see is two (or more) versions of the same book, each with a check box. Check the books that are the same (and therefore should all share the same reviews) and click the combine "editions button."


When I did this, the Goodreads reviews began to show up on Kobobooks immediately.

If it doesn't allow you to combine editions, you may have to solicit the aid of a Goodreads "librarian." If you've made any friends on GR, it shouldn't be too hard to find one. Notice there's a Goodreads Librarian Group link on the right hand side.

I hope this quick tutorial has been helpful. And more than that, I hope that all your awesome Goodreads reviews help you sell a ton of books on Kobobooks!

Is This Hanameesovenama (aka Shaggy)?

The brilliant concept artist Cristof Grobleski created this stunning conceptual image of Hanameesovenama, one of the villains from The Undermountain Saga.





Hanameesovenama, of the bigfoot Council of the Strict (click for bigfoot sized view)



What do you think? Is that how you envision a bigfoot? I have to say, I totally love the robe.



View more of Christof's wonderful artwork here.

News Story About Me

Check out the interesting and somewhat controversial news item about me over at kalkion.com. I don't usually talk about my reasons for indie publishing here because it tends to be boring shop talk that readers could care less about.



I do like the last paragraph:

Edstrom plans to release the final book in his series in time for the holidays. After that he intends to start right in on the next. “I love writing. I’m good at it. And now, thanks to this new paradigm, I can give my readers what they want. More books!”

New (Brief) Interview With Moi

I was interviewated by a sneaky ninja over at the Kelworth files. Fun stuff. Find out my I answer to the question of how many ninjas it takes to change a light bulb!

Estimated Reading time: 35 seconds

Afterlife: The Trade Paperback!

There is little more rewarding than holding your new novel in your hands. Therefore, I continue to handle this little beauty . . .

So there it is. And you can have one too. Just pop over to Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com or other online book retailer and order one up.