Richard McGowan's Blog: Smashed-Rat-On-Press - Posts Tagged "brain"
Friday the Thirteenth and Valentine's Day
Heads up lads, lasses, and others (large or small) and all the visiting ships in low orbit around Earth. It's almost Valentine's Day, and that means, in the immortal words of Stephen Sondheim:
No, actually, it means... Free books for everyone who contacts The Rodent at Smashed-Rat-on-Press before the clock strikes midnight at the end of Valentine's Day in sunny California! Just drop a note and stake your claim. Everyone's doing it, and you can, too! Be the first on your block to own a genuine SROP classic!
And, our Friday the Thirteenth Special last-ditch effort today is... Oh, wait... Hey George! Do we have any more of those orange doo-hickies in the lost & found bin?
When you're in love
you're in love all the way
from your first little kiss
to that marital bliss...
No, actually, it means... Free books for everyone who contacts The Rodent at Smashed-Rat-on-Press before the clock strikes midnight at the end of Valentine's Day in sunny California! Just drop a note and stake your claim. Everyone's doing it, and you can, too! Be the first on your block to own a genuine SROP classic!
And, our Friday the Thirteenth Special last-ditch effort today is... Oh, wait... Hey George! Do we have any more of those orange doo-hickies in the lost & found bin?
State of the Rodentia, 2016
Good evening everyone. It's that time of year again... When bustling things begin to wind down and we all meander toward a few days of utter repose in the last week of December. When we pause to take stock of what's been clogging up our presses. When we roll a big (now legal in Santa Banana) spliff and try to forget that Humanity is aboard a runaway train careening at high speed toward the yawning abyss of mass extinction...
It's time to look up and smile, and pause for a brief but happy examination of what happened this year at our homey little press, and to discover what befell our precious little rodents beneath their cozy rock.
First, 2016 was a rather terrible year for writing, which is a trifle sad. Smashed-Rat-on-Press only released three rather slim books, and one additional toss-off, all year. The writerly word-count was also depressingly lower than in the past couple of years, coming in below 73,000 words (not including blog postings).
These are the books that came out this year from SROP:
(Thankfully, the low annual output can be neatly blamed on the horrors of American politics, as 2016 is turning out officially to be the most depressing year since 2001, as well as the year from which we are least likely to recover. The bright part of the year's offerings is that we were able to work four times with our fabulous photographer/illustrator/friend, Jennifer Garst.)
Now that we've got the catalog issues out of the way, let's look at sales...
The SROP paperback sales for the year 2016 totalled [drumroll please]... eight books, for a net income of zero dollars and zero cents. The total for e-books sold is... two books, for a grand total income of $3.54. Yay! That's just enough for a boutique coffee beverage, so we're now chomping at the bit, ready to splurge at the sign of the mermaid.
But wait, there's even more good news! Because 2015 was one of the slowest sales years on record (a mere three books all year), 2016 sales were more than 300% higher; and not even much lower than 50% of the record 2014 sales year. So the rats are hopping with glee tonight and have a special beer already waiting.
Meanwhile, the infamous list of SROP titles that have never been read by anyone but the author and the cover designer has grown longer. So that is a feat of which we can be quite proud, hardly (perhaps never) duplicated in the last 500 years of publishing history.
Just in case nobody's looking, here is a formidable display of never-been-read SROP books:
And remember, there are only 10 more days until the burning of the books for Yuletide.
And now, adios muchachos as we say in California... Onward and upward to 2017 and beyond.
It's time to look up and smile, and pause for a brief but happy examination of what happened this year at our homey little press, and to discover what befell our precious little rodents beneath their cozy rock.
First, 2016 was a rather terrible year for writing, which is a trifle sad. Smashed-Rat-on-Press only released three rather slim books, and one additional toss-off, all year. The writerly word-count was also depressingly lower than in the past couple of years, coming in below 73,000 words (not including blog postings).
These are the books that came out this year from SROP:
(Thankfully, the low annual output can be neatly blamed on the horrors of American politics, as 2016 is turning out officially to be the most depressing year since 2001, as well as the year from which we are least likely to recover. The bright part of the year's offerings is that we were able to work four times with our fabulous photographer/illustrator/friend, Jennifer Garst.)Now that we've got the catalog issues out of the way, let's look at sales...
The SROP paperback sales for the year 2016 totalled [drumroll please]... eight books, for a net income of zero dollars and zero cents. The total for e-books sold is... two books, for a grand total income of $3.54. Yay! That's just enough for a boutique coffee beverage, so we're now chomping at the bit, ready to splurge at the sign of the mermaid.
But wait, there's even more good news! Because 2015 was one of the slowest sales years on record (a mere three books all year), 2016 sales were more than 300% higher; and not even much lower than 50% of the record 2014 sales year. So the rats are hopping with glee tonight and have a special beer already waiting.
Meanwhile, the infamous list of SROP titles that have never been read by anyone but the author and the cover designer has grown longer. So that is a feat of which we can be quite proud, hardly (perhaps never) duplicated in the last 500 years of publishing history.
Just in case nobody's looking, here is a formidable display of never-been-read SROP books:
And remember, there are only 10 more days until the burning of the books for Yuletide.And now, adios muchachos as we say in California... Onward and upward to 2017 and beyond.
It's Nano Read Moar!
a.k.a, Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes of Fame Game
Hello. Happy Saturday or whatever day it is now on your planet.
Today I'm more bored than usual because the world is going to hell in a hand-basket full of napalm, but I've decided to stop reading about that for a while; at least until the flames die down. (Yes, yes, I could be in for a long wait.)
Meanwhile... This spell of hunkering-downer-than-usual leaves me with some free time. I could nap excessively, but instead, I'm going to give away two and a half hours of focused reading time, divided into fifteen minute chunks. That's a total of 10 chunks because the decimal system is "in" this month.
This game is for authors I don't know, and whose work I have never read. Sorry, but if you're a writer and I already know you it's probably because I already read something you wrote.
If you're a possibly lesser-known author whose work I haven't read before, now could be your chance to pitch something to a random rodent who will spend at least fifteen minutes reading it. This could be a good deal, especially for authors who, unlike Sanguinity Hematode, haven't won any major awards.
This is me trying to "give back" because I know it's hard to get people to read new authors, even for fifteen minutes.
There are some boundaries, so please: no horror, religion, billionaires, BDSM, werewolves, vampires, zombies, boy wizards, schools for witchcraft, military sci-fi, works-in-progress, or dystopian cultures. (We already live in a bellicose dystopian nightmare, so I don't want to read about them while trying to avoid the news.) Other than that, show me what you've got. There are 10 open slots, and one of them could be yours, on a first-come first-served basis. (Feel free to send your friends a link to this blog, but please don't post in groups or mail lists; the danger for an overwhelming deluge is too great. Let's call this a under-the-grass-roots effort.)
Here's how the game works. You either send me a private message (not a public message/comment), or figure out how to e-mail the rodent @ SROP. In your message you point me at a copy of a book you wrote and which is listed here on GR. That could be an e-book (EPUB, MOBI, PDF), or a preview that will take 15 minutes or more to read. But whatever you send cannot already have more than a handful of ratings here on GR (a handful means five).
If, after fifteen minutes of reading, I like the thing you send, I might keep reading it. (If I decide to read the whole book, I'll probably buy a copy. In that case, I'd probably even review it.) And finally, here's the safety valve for you: if I have a strongly negative reaction after 15 minutes, I will let you, the author, know my true thoughts and feelings, but I won't post them in public. Life is hard enough without extra contributions to universal negativity, but spreading a little uplift is OK.
As I add items to my little list I'll update this blog and let y'all know if/when the list is full.
Hello. Happy Saturday or whatever day it is now on your planet.
Today I'm more bored than usual because the world is going to hell in a hand-basket full of napalm, but I've decided to stop reading about that for a while; at least until the flames die down. (Yes, yes, I could be in for a long wait.)
Meanwhile... This spell of hunkering-downer-than-usual leaves me with some free time. I could nap excessively, but instead, I'm going to give away two and a half hours of focused reading time, divided into fifteen minute chunks. That's a total of 10 chunks because the decimal system is "in" this month.
This game is for authors I don't know, and whose work I have never read. Sorry, but if you're a writer and I already know you it's probably because I already read something you wrote.
If you're a possibly lesser-known author whose work I haven't read before, now could be your chance to pitch something to a random rodent who will spend at least fifteen minutes reading it. This could be a good deal, especially for authors who, unlike Sanguinity Hematode, haven't won any major awards.
This is me trying to "give back" because I know it's hard to get people to read new authors, even for fifteen minutes.
There are some boundaries, so please: no horror, religion, billionaires, BDSM, werewolves, vampires, zombies, boy wizards, schools for witchcraft, military sci-fi, works-in-progress, or dystopian cultures. (We already live in a bellicose dystopian nightmare, so I don't want to read about them while trying to avoid the news.) Other than that, show me what you've got. There are 10 open slots, and one of them could be yours, on a first-come first-served basis. (Feel free to send your friends a link to this blog, but please don't post in groups or mail lists; the danger for an overwhelming deluge is too great. Let's call this a under-the-grass-roots effort.)
Here's how the game works. You either send me a private message (not a public message/comment), or figure out how to e-mail the rodent @ SROP. In your message you point me at a copy of a book you wrote and which is listed here on GR. That could be an e-book (EPUB, MOBI, PDF), or a preview that will take 15 minutes or more to read. But whatever you send cannot already have more than a handful of ratings here on GR (a handful means five).
If, after fifteen minutes of reading, I like the thing you send, I might keep reading it. (If I decide to read the whole book, I'll probably buy a copy. In that case, I'd probably even review it.) And finally, here's the safety valve for you: if I have a strongly negative reaction after 15 minutes, I will let you, the author, know my true thoughts and feelings, but I won't post them in public. Life is hard enough without extra contributions to universal negativity, but spreading a little uplift is OK.
As I add items to my little list I'll update this blog and let y'all know if/when the list is full.
Mass for the Huddled
Hear ye, Hear ye! Today, Sunday the 13th day of the month of Lockdown in the Year One of Our Virile Corona, at 13:13 o'clock, the reverend Ently Beardmoss, Third Church of the Furry Vagrant, Santa Banana, will perform a hastily concocted musical Neo-Gregorian Punk-Chant Mass (in Latin) for the millions of huddled masses cowering in their homes, and the thousands of unwilling passengers stuck perilously in their cruise ships at sea. We are not kidding.
Joining "the Rev" will be musical guests Seismic Sisters in Cryme, suitably attired in hazmat suits. The church's aging Silvertone amplification system being what it is, and in consideration of the ongoing statewide lockdown, virtual participants are urged to tune their hand-cranked emergency shortwave radios to 13.13 MHz if they wish to partake in the live performance.
Prayer Tweets are being accepted throughout the day. Just whistle toward @TheRodentAtSROP. Today's collected tweets will be personally ignited on the beach by Sanguinity Hematode, who loves a good blaze, and sent skyward via helium balloon at 23:59:59, just before the day ends locally. The glorious event will be live-streamed by Mantissa Etherbright on Instagram TV.
Don't forget to check the annual SROP calendar, if you can find it, for more unbelievable events throughout the year.
As always, SROP is still offering free e-books for those in need, daily or otherwise. Merely follow the trail of bread-crumbs.
Joining "the Rev" will be musical guests Seismic Sisters in Cryme, suitably attired in hazmat suits. The church's aging Silvertone amplification system being what it is, and in consideration of the ongoing statewide lockdown, virtual participants are urged to tune their hand-cranked emergency shortwave radios to 13.13 MHz if they wish to partake in the live performance.
Prayer Tweets are being accepted throughout the day. Just whistle toward @TheRodentAtSROP. Today's collected tweets will be personally ignited on the beach by Sanguinity Hematode, who loves a good blaze, and sent skyward via helium balloon at 23:59:59, just before the day ends locally. The glorious event will be live-streamed by Mantissa Etherbright on Instagram TV.
Don't forget to check the annual SROP calendar, if you can find it, for more unbelievable events throughout the year.
As always, SROP is still offering free e-books for those in need, daily or otherwise. Merely follow the trail of bread-crumbs.
Smashed-Rat-On-Press
The main purpose of this blog is to announce occasional additions and changes to the SROP catalog or the site. And it doubles as a soap-box from which to gesticulate and babble...
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