Joseph Devon's Blog, page 14

Clock Day

This weekend forty-eight fiftieths of the United States, or something, will change their clocks and set them back an hour. This creates confusion, tons of messed up schedules, and programming madness.

But it's all worthwhile so our farmers can get more sleep. Or our lights can be on less. Or our daylight savings bonds can mature faster.

Why do we do this? What is the secret behind this mystery?

Yes, it's time for me to roll out my extensive explanation of Daylight Savings Time, it's history...

Probability Angels – Now with More Pumpkins!!!

[image error]On the one block walk to get my coffee this morning I was assaulted by no less than three different adds all telling me that someone was selling their normal products, only now they was crammed ass-full of pumpkin. You've got pumpkin coffees at Starbucks, pumpkin muffins at the corner muffin place, pumpkin doughnuts at Dunkin.

Everyone's suddenly fucking nuts for pumpkins.

I mean, I understand why, the whole winter gourd phenomenon isn't a new thing, but the sheer number of pumpkins being...

Experiment Results

Last week I talked about a little experiment being run by me and a Twitter friend, @Rolling20s. You can read about it in detail here, but the short of it was that @Rolling20s attended Con on the Cob, subsidized by me, and ran a vendor table there selling all things Matthew and Epp.

Here's the table:

Frankly I think it looked awesome. As you can see there are the books, some magnets leftover from giveaways, and I also printed up various works of fan art that have come my way through the fan art...

Why Marketing Your Books May Be the Wrong Idea

This coming weekend a new experiment will be taking place.

A friend of mine, @Rolling20s, will be attending Con on the Cob, a small gaming convention in Ohio. He will be attending on my dime and manning a table there selling all things Matthew and Epp. Which is to say, I registered him as a vendor at the convention and then shipped him a bunch of books and some promotional stuff. He gets to attend the convention and I get a man in the trenches with my product.

So all this week I've been...

Update from Contest Winner Saher

I've mentioned numerous times how there are often some challenges involved in getting a contest prize to a contest winner after a global contest. This year's Art Contest proved no exception as I had to get a Wacom Tablet to Lucknow, India. Which is here:

 

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This time around I actually didn't purchase the Tablet, due to fear of negating the warranty and…well whatever it was confusing.

But the Tablet has arrived! So very excited for Saher who sent along this picture:

She says it...

Soul Glow and Probability Angels

Every so often I go searching through the internet for myself, checking to see if any interesting reviews have popped up or if a forum somewhere might have been discussing me. It's a little scary sometimes how little of the internet one actually sees.

During these searches, in which I wander far far far far into the google results of various queries, I find that, like, 80% of the internet makes no sense.

It's just pages of babble or crazy-ass products crammed together or complete mirrors of...

A Crazy Pirate Emails Me

I get a lot of questions about the types of emails I receive from readers and what my fan base is shaping up like and when book three is coming out.

The answers are: varied; scoring high amongst gamers, housewives, and dominatrix phone sex operators; every time you ask that I kill off a character.

I did receive one email recently that I wanted to share with you. I stumbled across a website where a women was offering to "sell you e-books and then ship them to you." This struck me as odd, to say ...

My Blog Tour

Recently I went on a tour of the interwebs, giving interviews and writing guests posts at various sites.

I've posted some of them in some places but now that all of them are up I wanted to list them in one place for convenience's sake.

Thanks so much to everyone who hosted me!

First there was an interview at Back of the Book Reviews in which I my thoughts on Snooki came up for some reason. You can read that here.

Second was Donna's Blog Home who actually interviewed Matthew. That was a lot of...

Review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I did not like this book. I did not like this book's writing. I can't even…a critic of mine once claimed that I often "confused dialogue and action for summary" and this hurt my storytelling. Having read TGwtDT I can now safely say, "THANK GOD I CONFUSE DIALOGUE AND ACTION FOR SUMMARY."

Nothing happens in this book. Nothing. We are told that a lot happens but the entire thing reads like a sum up. In fact, at one point the l...

Your Guide to Building a Family Website

Recently my cousin contacted me via text looking for some help setting up a family website where he could share pictures and news with all of his relatives. Since I have website experience he came to me for help. I thought my informative replies could aid anyone out there looking to do the same.

 

My Cousin: I want to setup myfamily.com but don't know how to. The one thing that I can't do and want to do is a landing page myfamily.com where my family signs in and then they can see pictures and o...