Tudor Robins's Blog, page 11

Just because you can Google it …

I really love David Gaughran. I highly recommend his books – Let’s Get Digital and Let’s Get Visible – if you want to publish yourself.

I love / hate when David Gaughran has a new blog post. Love, because it will be informative, and accurate, and interesting. Hate, because it usually means somebody’s done something immoral or unethical, and he’s calling them on it (Two words: Author Solutions).

David’s post today talks about something infuriating, illegal, unethical, and blood-boiling that happened to him personally.

Feel free to read it yourself, but a lot of it revolves around somebody taking David’s work, without his permission and without compensation and then being stupid enough to say (on Twitter – stupid!) “The article was copied from an online article that I read and passed along to our authors… Perhaps you should sue google,” followed by “Everything on google is liable to public sharing.”

Uh … no.

And, by the way, the group that wrote this – IndieWriterSupport.com (not linking to these yahoos) claims to offer support to writers. I’d be careful taking “support” from somebody who thinks that “everything on Google is liable to public sharing.”

So, to get to the point – no, you cannot just take things you find using Google and use them for free.

Not writing, not songs, not photos.

Nothing.

And, you can get yourself into quite a bit of trouble doing so.

That’s not to say you can’t find great things on Google to share. You can. It’s perfectly fine to – for example – share my blog post. To do that properly, you’d acknowledge that I wrote the post. You might then put the first line or two on your blog and you’d then have a link to my blog for readers to finish reading it on my site. This brings readers back to my site to read the post, which is where I intended them to read it in the first place.

If you really, really, want to put the whole thing on your site – you can ask me. I’m easy to find and contact. You just email, explain why you want to put it there, ask me if it’s OK, and I say yes or no.

The same is true of any of my writing. If you want to tell someone you loved my latest book (if so – thank you) you can use a few lines to explain why.

If you want to publish more – if you want to post a whole page, or pages, you can ask me. I’ll probably say you can’t just post chunks of my book for free, but you never know. You need to ask.

Same with photos – oh my goodness, these are so abused. It’s now so easy to right click and – voila – you have an image to use as you like. Right? No …

If you didn’t take them, or the photographer didn’t say you could use them, they’re not yours.

Not yours.

So, what can you do? The easiest thing is to find photos that are free to use.

I have two ways of doing this.

1) Through a Creative Commons search. Just put in your keywords and see what pops up.

2) Using Google’s Advanced Image Search. It will bring up a form that looks like this and, under “usage rights” you can select “free to use or share.”

In both these cases, you still have to read the fine print. What does the photographer / image creator want you to do in return for using their image? Probably give credit. Sometimes they say you can alter the image – sometimes not. Sometimes you can, but you have to say you’ve done so. Please follow the rules. You’re getting somebody’s work for free – don’t abuse it!

Bottom line, this isn’t crazy hard to understand, this isn’t unreasonable, this isn’t rocket science. If you didn’t make it, it’s not yours. If you’re not sure if you can use it, ask. If somebody says no, stop.

It’s true, we’ll never stop all the pirating / theft / stealing of material on the web, but – trust me – being lumped in with those who do it is not where you want to be.

Be smart, be respectful, and set the example for others to be respectful of your work, too.

Thoughts in my head …

I have a lot of thoughts that go through my head. Many (most, perhaps?) of them are not interesting, but I figure if I’m going to stand any chance of writing blog posts, I’m going to have to write about the thoughts in my head.

So, today: Sponsorship.

Specifically, sponsored posts on blogs.

A Creative Commons image: “2012 usgp laguna sponsor wall” taken by ScottMDI.

I don’t read them.

I won’t run sponsored posts. Most blogs I read don’t have sponsored posts.

But one, or two, do.

I find these posts tend to be the very longest ones the blogger writes – they are LONG. Perhaps the blogger feels the need to give the sponsor their money’s worth? And maybe that’s part of the reason I don’t read these posts. They look boring. Dense and hard to get through.

I wouldn’t read them anyway, because I don’t trust them.

If you’re paid to write something – even if you’re convinced you’re being free and clear and unbiased – well, you’re not.

And, in a way, it would be unethical for you to be free and clear and unbiased if you took somebody’s money to promote their product. By taking their money, you’re making a deal to be on their side. Until you stop taking their money, you should be on their side.

Now, don’t get me wrong – and don’t start protesting – that there’s nothing wrong with this, and you’re allowed to do this, and it’s your choice, and you would really, really like this product / service anyway, even if you weren’t paid to promote it – that’s as may be, but I still don’t trust your post.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, from where I sit, sponsored posts are a waste of the advertiser’s money (because I don’t read them), and a waste of the blogger’s time and effort (because I don’t read them) and they also, maybe, possibly, diminish the impact of your blog overall – because I don’t read them, and I enjoy your blog less on the days you post them.

But maybe I’m crazy here – feel free to chime in – do you read sponsored blog posts? Do you trust them? Do you like them?

Let me know

Lessons Learned from Winter Running

Note: I started this post on December 29 and then I went away and enjoyed my holidays, so it’s still coming to you, but it’s coming late … sorry! (well, not really sorry for enjoying my holidays, but a bit sorry)

This is Ottawa today:

I knew this was coming last night so I figured if I was going to run today, it needed to be early, before most of the 35cms we’re expecting fell.

I got up at 7:00 (we’re on holidays here, so 7:00 felt early – and in fact it was still dark) and I ran.

This is what my street looked like:

This was actually taken after my run – so 8:00 a.m. – and it was so dark the streetlights were still on …

No surprise, I couldn’t follow my usual route. I started out trying, but there was already about 15 – 20 cm on the ground and it was deep.

So, I ducked down to a busier street – or what would normally be a busier street if it wasn’t still dark, and most people weren’t still on holidays, and the police weren’t asking people not to drive – and it had been plowed so that there was only 5cm or so on the surface and I ran to the end of that road and back.

Here are some things I thought about while I ran:

1) Sometimes the thing that kills you is not the thing you think will kill you. I thought it would be the deep, deep, snow making every step the equivalent of two or three regular steps. It wasn’t. It was the lashing, driving, whipping icy pellets being pelted into my face the whole way out. Ow!

2) It’s good to do the hard stuff first. As much as I hated those ice pellets on the outward run, I knew the wind would be behind me on the way back and I wouldn’t even feel them. True. Within a couple of seconds of turning around, I had forgotten all about the sting of them hitting my cheeks and eyes.

3) You might not want to follow in somebody else’s footsteps. As much as compacted lines of tire tracks look attractive when you’re struggling through deep snow, they can actually be much harder to run in. That packed down snow can be tricky and treacherous – it can slide out from under you when you least expect it to.

4) Then again, sometimes the well-worn trail is the best one. Sometimes those tire tracks really are the best place to run and following the path somebody else has worn ahead of you, is the best way to go.

5) And, sometimes, you have to do something completely different. About halfway home, I lurched off the street I’d been running on, onto a recreational pathway which hadn’t been recently plowed, but even though I wouldn’t have guessed it, the conditions were much, much better there.

6) The only way to find out is to try. You have to take a few steps in each kind of footing to see which one works best. Observing from a distance, or guessing doesn’t cut it.

7) Making an effort is worth it. Even if it wasn’t a blistering long run on bare pavement, with my legs stretching and lungs pumping, it was a run. It strengthened my muscles, it took away my stress, it set my day up right, and it gave me a sense of accomplishment. It was worth it.

None of this is earth-shattering, but I think these are things worth thinking as we work our way into the New Year.

Most of the above points can be equally applied to my writing – especially since I went indie. I’ve had to try new things. I’ve sometimes followed others’ paths – sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I re-think my approach all the time. I adapt, I change. I learn something from everything I try. Some things I’ll do again, and some I won’t. Some days it’s fun, fast, and easy; some days it’s a hard slog through blowing snow and freezing temperatures.

But it’s all worth it and I’m not stopping.

I’m not stopping.

Maybe that’s my slogan for 2016 … not stopping …

What’s yours?

HBR Book Club December Discussion / January Announcement

Over on the HBR site we’re revealing our book for January.

You can also get in on the Appaloosa Summer discussion on our Facebook page today.

Hope your holidays are going well!

My Gift to You

It’s not super-Christmassy here – no snow and no promise of a white Christmas. Which is unusual for Ottawa.

But, I did something this morning that really helped make it feel more like Christmas. I baked gumdrop cookies.

For our family, this is the true measure of the season. We always make gumdrop cookies at Christmas, and we only make gumdrop cookies at Christmas.

They’re delicious and they’re pretty. Delicious + pretty = festive.

I recommend sticking to green, red, orange, and yellow gumdrops in your cookies – somehow black, or dark blue aren’t that festive …

Here’s – as my gift to you – is the recipe:

Gumdrop Cookies

– 1/2 cup butter

– 1/2 cup brown sugar

– 1/2 cup granulated sugar

– 1 egg

– 1/2 tsp vanilla

– 3/4 cup flour

– 1/2 tsp baking powder

– 1/4 tsp each baking soda and salt

– 3/4 cup quick-cooking rolled oats

– 1/2 cup flaked coconut

– 1/2 cup gumdrops, cut in small pieces (or more than half-a-cup if you’re feeling generous!)

Cream butter and sugars. Add egg and vanilla. Beat well.

Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture. Add oats, coconut, and gumdrops.

Form into balls which will be lumpy due to the gumdrops!

Bake at 375 degrees, about 10 – 12 minutes (or, basically, bake the way cookies bake best for you, in your oven).

Makes about three dozen (depending on cookie size).

These are great for sharing, giving away, and eating! Maybe not for those with loose teeth, though …

Join Up Release! (Phew … just made it …)

I said I’d release Join Up before Christmas and here we are … December 22nd and Join Up‘s out on Kindle.

This story was hard to get going. I felt a lot of pressure to write the story I thought my readers would want to have as the final book in the Island Trilogy. And, what I thought they’d want to read about was Meg and Jared. But I just didn’t have a Meg and Jared novel in my head.

Until I realized maybe the Island Trilogy wasn’t a trilogy, and maybe this didn’t have to be the final book, and so maybe I could write whatever story I wanted to.

I definitely needed the help of my amazing editor – Hilary Smith – to release that story, but once I did, it came fast and easy. The book you’ll read, if you read Join Up (and I hope you do) was more or less written in a month (now that it’s done, it’s so easy to forget the tough months that came before, and the hard weeks of editing after!).

So, it’s out, it’s available, and I hope you’ll read it.

Here’s the blurb:

A summer at one of the poshest riding camps in the province. A hundred horses. Rolling hills ribboned with hacking trails and cross-country jumps.

It could be perfect. Unless you’re Lacey Strickland, and you’re leaving Salem, Meg, and Jared behind on the island.

The only thing that isn’t hard to leave is Lacey’s memory of her first kiss, delivered in a spring-scented hayfield, which sizzled, then fizzled into nothing at all.

The other thing making camp less-than-perfect for Lacey? She’s not a cosseted camper, but a staff member – teaching riding lessons from sun-up to sun-down.

In Meg’s first letter to Lacey, she writes: “I bet anything there’s at least one amazing horse waiting for you there. And maybe a new great – if not best – friend.”

Is Meg right? Could Lacey meet a horse she’ll love just as much as Salem? And are there new friends in her future? Maybe even somebody who could give her more than just one kiss in a hayfield?

And here’s where you can buy it.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments – you know I love your feedback!

Horseback Reads Book Club – Appaloosa Summer

Some of you – many of you, perhaps – will know that over at Horseback Reads, we’ve started running a book club.

Those of you who know that, may also know Appaloosa Summer is this month’s selected book.

Well, we’re getting through December really quite quickly, and we’ll be discussing Appaloosa Summer on our Facebook page on Monday, December 28th, so for those of you reading along – or those who’d like to start now – I wrote a book club update on the Horseback Reads blog and you can read it here …

Bonus – Appaloosa Summer is free, free, free today to help you get reading (or to get a friend to)

Island Series Readers – We Need to Talk …

Has anyone noticed something different about the Island series? Maybe the fact that I’m calling it a “series” and not a trilogy?

It’s not a trilogy anymore. I don’t know what it is. I know for sure that I’ve written three books, and I know I have an idea for another long-short-story / short novella and for another book. I’m pretty sure the series isn’t over, so it’s an open-ended series for now.

I feel like it’s important to tell you this, because some of you might be surprised that the main characters in Join Up aren’t Meg and Jared.

M & J are there. We see them. But Lacey takes centre stage in this story.

I hope most of you will go along with this. I hope you’ll grow to know and love Lacey like I have.

If you do, great. If not, I’m sorry, but this is the book that was in me to be written. It was my best possible next work in this series.

If I had forced this book to be all-Meg-and-Jared-all-the-time it would have been less than my best work.

And I never want to give you – or the Island series – less than my best work.

Meg and Jared will always be part of this series. You’ll see them again. You’ll find out more about their lives. You’ll even find out more about their lives in Join Up.

It’s just that you’ll find out more about Lacey’s life.

Why am I telling you this now? Why did I want to get this explanation out of the way?

Because I have the blurb for Join Up, and I want to share it with you, and I don’t want you to be shocked, or wonder what’s going on.

So, without further ado, I give you the Join Up blurb:

A summer at one of the poshest riding camps in the province. A hundred horses. Rolling hills ribboned with hacking trails and cross-country jumps.

It could be perfect. Unless you’re Lacey Strickland, and you’re leaving Salem, Meg, and Jared behind on the island.

The only thing that isn’t hard to leave is Lacey’s memory of her first kiss, delivered in a spring-scented hayfield, which sizzled, then fizzled into nothing at all.

The other thing making camp less-than-perfect for Lacey? She’s not a cosseted camper, but a staff member – teaching riding lessons from sun-up to sun-down.

In Meg’s first letter to Lacey, she writes: “I bet anything there’s at least one amazing horse waiting for you there. And maybe a new great – if not best – friend.”

Is Meg right? Could Lacey meet a horse she’ll love just as much as Salem? And are there new friends in her future? Maybe even somebody who could give her more than just one kiss in a hayfield?

Come along with me for the Lacey and ? ride – you’ll have to read the book to fill in the ? but I think you’ll like him …

Island Series News (free book!)

Those of you following me on Horseback Reads will know about our Book Club, and will know Appaloosa Summer is the Book Club selection for December.

Join Up – Book Three in the Island Series – will publish before Christmas, so this is a great time to read (or re-read) Book One!

A few things to get you started with your reading:

1) Appaloosa Summer is free on Kindle today. So, go get it!

2) If you prefer to listen to your stories, the audio podcast of Appaloosa Summer is free on Podiobooks. (Note: I’ll soon be moving APS to another platform and putting the audiobook up for sale, so download the podcast now!)

3) For a little background on the role publishing Appaloosa Summer played in my writing career, you can read the guest blog post I wrote for Book Bird Fiction, posted today, as part of Book Bird’s Christmas Advent spectacular.

So, get reading, or re-reading, or listening to – or get a friend to read – Appaloosa Summer, and follow along on the Horseback Reads blog and Facebook page for updates every Monday, then join us on Monday, December 28, for a full book club discussion.

Touring the Gyms #2

This week we actually had basketball in four different gyms, but I only have pictures of two of them today because one game I didn’t go to, and the other was just too early in the morning for me to make the effort to take a picture.

However, we’re back in both the non-pictured gyms very soon, so they will be photographed!

For this week I have photos of:

1) Hilson Avenue Public School

What can I tell you about Hilson? Well, first of all, it’s a JK to grade 6 school in the OCDSB – Ottawa-Carleton District School Board – which means it’s in the English, public (not Catholic) board.

Two reasons Hilson is interesting to us:

a) My older son could have gone there for the French Immersion gifted program which starts there in grade 5. It was a tough decision – should we keep him at our closest neighbourhood school, or move him about a kilometre farther away to Hilson? Our list of pros and cons was nearly even – social, academic, and extra-curricular issues all had pluses and minuses at each school. What it probably came down to was the “inconvenience” of having one child in a 9:10-start school half-a-kilometre away from home, and the other in an 8:00-start school one-and-a-half kilometres away from home … and that is how we know we’re spoiled. There are people sending their kids on forty-minute trips every morning to get them to school before 8:00 a.m. for the gifted program at Hilson, and it just seemed too hard for us.

b) When making this decision, we toured Hilson and, man – as you may be able to see from this photo – it is shiny new and bright and clean. That’s because Hilson, in a last progressive gasp of funding fairness, was demolished and rebuilt in the late ’90s. After that a moratorium descended upon rebuilding schools in the urban core. New schools could be built in the suburbs; they could be built in the country, but kids in the city lost the right to go to school in new buildings.

This is something a group of parents fought, and fought, and fought, when asking to have our own inner-city school rebuilt. And – no – I won’t subject you to the grimy details of this fight. I’ve written about it before, and before that.

Essentially, our school was deemed prohibitive to repair (due to general falling apart punctuated with asbestos, and mercury, and lead) yet, new schools just weren’t built in the city. It wasn’t done, and couldn’t be done, and the board really didn’t want to stick their neck out and ask the province to do that.

And, somehow, against all and massive odds, we are getting a new school. Our hope was that us, winning this fight, would show up the incredible lack of common sense, and the incredible unfairness of the idea that core schools could never be rebuilt. Our hope was that other inner city schools – maybe in neighbourhoods with fewer resources than ours, and less able to fight their own battles – might be more likely to receive investment in the future once we’d paved the way. Do I think that will happen? Well, I’m not very hopeful.

But at least we know it can be done. And before we got it done, Hilson was the last school to be rebuilt.

So that’s Hilson!

2) Glebe Collegiate Institute

Glebe is a high school (grade 9 – 12) also in the OCDSB (English, public) and, unlike Hilson, Glebe is OLD.

It’s old in reputation, and it’s old in looks, and – to be frank – it kind of smells and feels old.

Personal story for us about Glebe – my parents went to high school there.

*Walking into the school*

Me: Hey Evan, Grandma and Grandpa went to school here.

Evan: Yeah, it kind of looks like it.

And while my parents were at Glebe together, my dad asked my mom to go see Elvis with him at this concert.

And that’s Glebe for us.