Patrick Chiles's Blog, page 30
April 20, 2012
The Prodigal Son Returns
Admittedly that stretches the analogy too far, but it makes for a good headline at least. Hey, you’re here reading this, right? If you’ve not read Boyd Morrison’s work (and I highly recommend The Ark), he was the first Kindle author to hit the big time with a legacy publishing deal. Therefore he’s been a [...]
April 18, 2012
Your Government at Work
Now come on, you know THIS is funny!
April 13, 2012
A Good Argument For Concealed Carry
Because you never know when you might be walking down the street and run into a FREAKING BEAR. Also a good reason to not text while walking… 
April 12, 2012
My Own Way of Sticking it to The Man
It’s tax time, which often sucks. ‘Nuff said about that… I can’t do much about your IRS tab, but I can make your reading entertainment much less painful by offering Perigee for 99 cents, this weekend only. But wait, there’s more! To make it even easier, I’ll provide the Amazon link for free: http://www.amazon.com/Perigee-ebook/d... Now [...]
April 11, 2012
It's On Like Donkey Kong
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department has followed the EU's lead and let the other shoe drop in the Apple / Big Publishing "agency pricing" scheme. There had been talk that some of them were trying to settle before things went this far, but it looks like DOJ is in the [...]
April 10, 2012
The View So Far
Since Perigee is nearing the end of its 90-day Kindle Select period, this seemed like an opportune time to reflect on what I've learned so far about self-publishing. (Crickets chirping) Wow, it's quiet in here… But seriously folks – it wasn't easy. Is it less emotionally draining than the query/wait/reject/repeat cycle of traditional publishing? Well, [...]
April 8, 2012
Sneak Preview: TERMINAL VELOCITY
If you're wondering what happens to the main characters from Perigee, here are the sequel's opening pages. I'll drop in a few more select scenes at random over the next several weeks. . . . Keep breathing. Simon Poole could barely think of anything else at the moment. He'd always taken it for granted and [...]
Happy Easter
Yeah, I'm late posting but it's been a long day. Long weekend, too. I just cooked my first Easter dinner all by my lonesome, as the wife was busy whittling down our tax bill. She was amazingly successful, so perhaps I should cook more often. Spent the first part of the weekend at my brother-in-law's, [...]
April 5, 2012
Need for Speed
If you follow aeronautics, this is a significant development. Plus the pictures are really cool. Economics aside, noise is the single biggest impediment to building a new supersonic airliner. The reason you never saw Concorde zipping across our skies is that nobody wants sonic booms trailing across their country on a regular basis (especially Boeing, [...]
Once and Future Past
The Atlantic recently posted a couple of really nice photo essays on the space program. The piece on decommissioning the space shuttles isn't too surprising; that's a big and fairly recent deal. The Gemini story is more surprising, as it happened nearly 50 years ago and is generally only thought about by space geeks like [...]
