Jim Hodgson's Blog, page 9

Air Europa and the Legend of Skunk Farts – Hodgsons in Spain Part 1

My wife and I were able to afford to go to Spain for our honeymoon because one of our friends was kind enough to help us with a pair of buddy passes. We are, after all, a nurse and a writer. Employ one, get another free.

If you don’t know what a buddy pass is, it’s a feature of airline employment through which you, an airline employee, can assist a friend with access to deeply discounted travel. We have flown this way before. It has its ups and downs. You might miss a flight or two, but on the other hand, you might luck into a flight that has open seats in first class.

A first class passenger wonders if she should buy a boat.

Or, as was the case with our outgoing flight to Madrid, you might miss four or five flights rapid fire, running from gate to gate for each, explaining the situation again and again. But we accepted that this might be the case when we asked to fly standby, so we do not complain.

After some hours, we ended up flying to Frankfurt, Germany. We bought a flight via mobile phone to hop back to Madrid.

“Oh jeez,” those ignorant of geography will say at this point, “Why didn’t you just get a train? Everyone in Europe travels by train all the time! Trains are easy! Get a train!” It’s 19 hours train ride from Frankfurt to Madrid, folks. Paris to Bordeaux? Train. Frankfurt to Cologne? Train. Frankfurt to Madrid? Take to the skies, Hans.

Even at a couple of hundred dollars for Air Europa tickets from Frankfurt to Madrid, we were still very much in the black, and hopeful of making the last train from Madrid to Toledo — our intended final destination on day 1 of the Honeymoon — once we landed.

We did not know, at the time, about the legend of Skunk Farts.

The Legend of Skunk Farts

As the legend goes, Air Europa was founded in 1986 by an entity known as Skunk Farts. No photos of him exist because he is visually and spiritually repulsive. Someone could take a photo of him, but no one wants to. He’s that awful to behold. For the purposes of this account, the following approximation is included.

Skunk Farts (approx.)

Skunk Farts’ dad is Dick, a heat-crazed rattlesnake who drinks too much and often vomits down his front. His mother is a gigantic nightmarish humanoid form made of lava and mule leavings named Martha. Skunk Farts’ hobbies include cutting in line, smoking cigarettes outside fitness clubs, and saying “It’s not THAT funny,” whenever someone laughs. He often declares loudly that he has “no filter,” but really just likes saying mean things about people. Air Europa is, according to legend, the philosophical extension of everything that is repulsive about Skunk Farts.

But we didn’t know about any of that yet.

Deutschlanding

When we landed in Frankfurt we had been traveling for something like 18 hours. We immediately looked to the departures board to see where we needed to be next, but Air Europa aren’t motivated to post that information. That would be helpful.

We stopped by this quaint German coffeehouse to wait and enjoy some authentic German espresso. I wish we knew the name of the place, but it was in German.

Can anyone translate?

The caffeine wasn’t helpful. We were already anxious and it was making us jittery. Air Europa still had not posted the gate information for our flight to Madrid, and we had only an hour to make it to the gate, wherever it was. Nor did it appear with 50 minutes to go. We checked the board again and again. Finally, with 45 minutes to go, the gate number appeared: D27. We grabbed bags and hoofed it.

In our home airport of Atlanta, once you are through security at the main check in area, you can access any terminal or gate without having to be re-examined. Not so in Frankfurt. They also don’t have Ludacris’s Chicken & Beer restaurant in Frankfurt like we do in Atlanta. Get it together, Frankfurt.

As I checked my watch for the fiftieth time that minute, my wife handed her phone with the ticket info to the security official in the security line.

I had a moment of cold dread, expecting this person to say we had to have printed boarding passes to go through security, but the lady said we could get boarding passes at the gate. At last, a bit of luck!

Finally through security, we fast-walked toward gate D27. It was the farthest-possible gate from our position. As we got close, we noticed a woman looking expectantly down the hallway. Could she be waiting for us? It started to look like we’d made our flight to Madrid. We would make the train to Toledo and get to the AirBNB lodging we’d paid for. We’d be a little late and quite tired, but otherwise okay.

At gate D27, we thanked everyone, smiled, and apologized. Security had taken forever. The ladies at the gate all seemed relieved that we’d arrived. It was still fifteen minutes before the flight time, but the very end of boarding time, apparently.

My wife handed her cell phone with the ticket information to the ladies at the gate. They started preparing to let us on the plane. That’s when a diminutive, smartly-dressed man exploded at us.

Legend holds that this plane is owned by Skunk Farts
The Well-Dressed Angry Air Europa Man

The man began shouting, “No! No!” over and over again. He ranted and raved at me and at my wife, seemingly okay with letting us on the plane late if we had boarding passes, but enraged that we expected to be let on with the flight confirmation. Remember when I felt lucky that the security lady said our flight confirmation was plenty? Hah!

The angry man raved on and on. He demonstrated his anger by stalking out of the gate area, then stalking back in and continuing to yell. The Air Europa ladies gaped.

I pointed out that we hadn’t had the gate information. He yelled that it had been added to the board an hour before the flight, presumably because he is of the new school of thought which believes that yelling lies loudly makes them true. I pointed out that I’ve never been to Frankfurt before and I don’t know the local customs or how to get around the airport. The angry Air Europa man did not care. 180 other passengers made it on the plane, he said.

By now my wife was crying and pleading. We were on our honeymoon and couldn’t we please just get on the plane? The man yelled and yelled and refused and stalked around and waved his arms.

I wondered, later, at what an utter wasteland this man’s personal life must be for him to be motivated to behave so at work. But perhaps I was being harsh. If the legend of Skunk Farts is true, perhaps all Air Europa employees are tormented at all times, and the well-dressed man can not help but occasionally take it out on travelers. We were just unlucky that the greater Air Europa legendary horror landed on us.

Finally, I just put my hand out to my sobbing wife and said, “Come on, honey. These people do not care about us.” She took it. We left.

Ich bin ein Frankfurter

As we left, defeated, the smartly-dressed yelling Air Europa man yelled at us to go to gate A38 to seek help. He could have merely spoken this information as a normal person would — it was clear to all present that he’d beaten us — but small people rarely have the class to be satisfied with their small victories.

Without any other options aside from letting my wife cry on the angry man until he drowned, we headed back out of security to the other end of Frankfurt airport.

Travelers note: if you want to go to any A gate in the Frankfurt airport to seek help or advice, be sure to get off the train at the B stop, not the A stop. The A stop is only for first and business passengers. You can walk from the B stop to A gates where there are airline employees to help answer questions, but you cannot reach them from the A stop. German precision at its finest? Jawohl!

Come not fly Skunk Farts skies.

After much walking and asking of questions, we found where we were supposed to be. There were no Air Europa employees to speak to about another flight. I called the Air Europa help line and waited on hold for half an hour, then finally spoke to a man who said there were no options and that Air Europa would not only not get us to Madrid, but they’d be keeping our money as well.

What kind of jackleg, ramshackle, shit-pot of a company behaves like that? Air Europa does. I’m not going to tell you not to fly with them. I’m also not going to tell you not to try to fornicate a running chainsaw. But if you do either, know that I warned you. And know that if you do successfully fly with them, your money is — according to legend — going into Skunk Farts’ pockets, and he’s a real asshole. It’s also helping to purchase nice clothes for a man who made my wife cry.

Madrid’s Finest Landmarks

It was clear that Air Europa was not a valid option for anything other than turning what little money we have into shouting and confusion, so we turned to Iberia airlines instead.

We bought tickets to Madrid. This time we got on the plane, which was good, but the seats were approximately 3mm closer together than my femurs are long. Luckily, my wife was in the seat ahead of me so I was able to ask her not to lean her seat back. By the end of the flight I was making a circular pad around each kneecap with my thumbs and forefingers to try to relieve the pressure so I wouldn’t shriek and wake the sleeping Spanish businessmen on either side of me. None of this has been exaggerated for effect.

We missed the last train to Toledo. The internet seemed to think that we could hire an Uber driver to drive us there, a distance of only about 45 miles, but as we’d been traveling for 30 hours and were exhausted in every way, not to mention that it was late at night by this time, I bought us a Madrid hotel room near the airport and we took a shuttle there and went to bed.

On the bright side, our hotel room had a lovely print of some Madrid landmarks.

So ended the first day of our honeymoon. Things would surely get better from here.

Right?

[Part 2 soon -Jim]

Facebook is the Real Problem With America & With Writing

A few times, articles from my satirical newspaper, The Atlanta Banana, went viral. As a writer, I accept that there is almost no pay for my work. But the notion that people relate to my work gives me a great source of satisfaction. It’s better than money. Really!

I watched our “shares” on Facebook skyrocket. Retweets abounded. The Reddit karma flowed like wine. I felt like I might possibly have gotten something right. And then I compared our web site stats and ad revenue with our social media performance.

It was abundantly clear that only a small fraction of our “readers” on social media were reading our articles. They were sharing them unread based on the headline.

This is how we’ve gotten where we are, and you’ll never believe what happens next!

Facebook knows what you like. Their business model is built on it. They sell you, and others who have similar interests, to advertisers. But Facebook also knows they need to show you stuff that holds your interest, or you won’t be around to see their money-making posts.

Memes, photos of babies, and clickbait articles all do very well for Facebook in this regard, and so do fake news articles and sensationalism.

Okay, but who cares what Facebook says? The 18-29s do, according to Journalism.org. Cable barely beats social media for those up to 49 years old. What will it be like 4 years from now? 10?

What if there was something that you needed to know, but Facebook knew you wouldn’t like it?

Do you think that Facebook would risk you missing their paid content to show you something you needed to see? I submit that they would not.

If you don’t agree, you’re not alone. Lots of people are in denial about it, including Mark Zuckerberg. Why wouldn’t he be in denial? Do you think his assistants speak up in meetings and say, “Hey, Zuck, this thing needs a re-work big-time”?

Now imagine there’s a candidate who is ready to tell a whole lot of people exactly what they want to hear.

Correct. All politicians do that. But what if this one never cared about being wrong, and only cared about being popular? How do you think that person would do on Facebook, on the partisan media, in the election?

Extra! Extra! Things you like are awesome! Everything else is crap!

Imagine it’s your job to sell papers, in person. You’re holding a paper that has good news about Obama. Do you stand in front of the bar where the Dems hang out? You’d be a fool not to. It’s just good business. But good business does not make a good society.

Caring makes a good society, but it is not easy to care about people who are either absent from your news feed, or demonized there. If you’re a moderate, it serves Facebook to make you into an extremist.

For Facebook to show its users content they know they won’t like, it’d have to be staffed by idealistic buffoons who are apparently unable to grasp the importance of monetary reward. That’s impossible. Most of those people are writers, and they can’t code worth a damn.

On Being a Writer vs. Being a YouTuber

I have been writing since the mid nineties but I only started doing it seriously when I needed it as catharsis just over 10 years ago. My future wife and I started doing YouTube six months ago because I thought it would be fun. I was right. It is.

Coming to YouTube from the world of fiction and humor writing has blown my tiny mind. If you put a gallon of thousand island dressing into a tuba and then had a giant with normal sized lips blow into that tuba for all he or she was worth, the flying goop, not to mention the noise, might give you some idea of how blown my mind is.

I don’t know what writing fiction is like for MFA types. I wish I did. I’m a college dropout, self taught. Trying to get people to read my work is hard. I fully accept and/or disclose that this might be because my work isn’t good. I’m proud of my books, but then, my mom was proud of my finger paintings and those were highly derivative.

Up the Tubes

Our YouTube channel is tiny by internet standards, but so far, most everyone has been kind, encouraging, and often hilarious. People who run other channels much more famous than ours have been crazy helpful and welcoming. They’ve provided advice and shared their audiences with us for no gain whatsoever other than they are nice people.

We’ve even been offered free products worth many thousands of dollars. We haven’t accepted yet because it hasn’t felt right, but the right relationship and time might coincide in the future.

Meet the Author

The authors up the famousness ladder from me whom I’ve met at conferences and festivals have not been interested in me or my work. This is an understatement on par with saying that cats are not interested in having ice water spritzed into their eyeballs.

Authors at or near my level have been great, but people up the ladder know they’re up the ladder and appear to want me to know they know. I’ve tried again and again to network with them, talking at length about their work that I like, and receiving, in return, the warmth one might expect from a marble statue’s ass.

On behalf of all writers who aren’t famous, I apologize to you, famous writers, if I made you feel like I might want you to read my work. I’d like to think that if I were making a living at this I’d make some effort to give back. Mind you, I’m at the end of the list of speakers at a given conference, but I am on the list. I’m not ambushing these people in the bushes outside their house and rattling my manuscript at them when they come out to get the mail.

Literary Agents

I have met and interacted with a few literary agents. Some of them I’ve even paid to take a look at my work. Not even my money could make them pretend to give a shit about anything other than the size of my mailing list. Which, you might as well know, is nothing to write home about.

The message I have received from agents every time I have spoken with them has been that your work must fit into a clearly defined area that they know and understand — dystopian YA, for example. If it doesn’t, you, the author, can head off down the street, disappear from sight, and fuck off forever from there.

I don’t begrudge agents that attitude. They are in business to make money, not help writers make a living. If they can find a way for the two to coincide, I’m sure that’s best, but at the end of they day they have rent to pay just like anyone else. Nobody wants to spend their day looking for a diamond in the rough only to end that day with nothing but a bunch of worthless rocks.

Better to look around for stuff that looks like stuff that already sells.

Socialism

If social media is any yardstick for writing success, I’ve had a couple of minor viral hits. But evidence suggests that most of the time people share what they share based on the strength of headline, not the content. If people trust you not to have porn (e.g.) on your site and they like your headline they will share it. It’s nice to have that vote of confidence, but without them clicking through to your site, you don’t make the fraction of a sliver of a penny you might have made from the ad view.

I know from the analytics YouTube provides and the jokes people post to our videos that our viewers actually watch. That’s all I’m asking for, folks. I just want to make something people can enjoy. I don’t expect to be great every time. I just want the opportunity to try.

Speaking in Conference

As a writer hoping to build a following, I have submitted myself to and attended various conferences and festivals. These are fun, but generally expensive. I am responsible for my own travel, lodging, food. I can sell books, but given that I stand to clear somewhere between $1-3 USD on one of my books and typically sell between 1 and 3 per weekend, it’s hardly a moneymaking venture. I wreck that profit within the first ten minutes at my temporary office, a.k.a. the lobby bar.

On YouTube, we have something called Patreon, where we ask people to support us each month monetarily. Here’s the crazy thing: people do. As YouTubers, we don’t really have a deliverable other than our content. People become our patrons simply because they like what we’re up to and want to see more of it. It is incredibly inspiring and humbling to have that support. I am a little misty reflecting on it.

To sum up: As an author and a lover of books, I wish I could make a career out of being a novelist, but after a couple of years of yelling and screaming to anyone who would listen about my writing I am overjoyed to have found some people who are listening, even if it turned out to be a different medium altogether.

If you are like me, and you are a novelist compelled to make work, take your novel, print it out, put it in a manila envelope, and throw it the fuck off of a cliff. Then go get it and put it into a recycle bin. And then start a YouTube channel.

What Happened to my Print & Kindle Book Sales When My Audiobook Was Released

I wrote a humorous guide to climbing the tallest mountain outside the Himalayas: Aconcagua. If you search Amazon for the word “Aconcagua,” you’ll see this:

That’s right. Fourth place for the keyword “Aconcagua,” after some jackets and Mr. Kikstra’s book. Look out, Krakauer. Watch your ass, Bryson. I’m a-comin’ for ya!

Even though my book was self published by me and gets zero promotion or advertisement, it occasionally swaps places with Mr. Kikstra’s book for the lead spot for keyword “Aconcagua.” It doesn’t ever, however, sell better than the jackets.

This success is despite one of my favorite reviews, shown here.

Let me point out: I never mentioned fisting myself anally. I may have referred to butt cracks in general as “nature’s pocket,” but that’s a Futurama reference and therefore above reproach.

Nevertheless, on the strength of glowing reviews like that one, last year I decided — hey, what the hell? — I’ll record an audio version (story on that here). I’ve got a couple of microphones. I can affect a sonorous, literary voice. Let’s do this.

My hunch was that the audiobook would steal readers away from print and kindle, because I personally “read” a ton of audiobooks a year; lots more than print and lots lots more than Kindle. But the numbers tell a different story.

As you can see, I am rich as shit and you should become an author immediately so you can get on this gravy train. Choo choooooo!

Though the audio version of HTMA has only been out for three months, you can see that so far it has had no appreciable effect on print book sales. Kindle sales, in fact, appear to be up. Maybe people are seeing my title on ACX and thinking, “Audio? Nah. That sounds like something I’d read on a giant calculator.”

The interesting part is I thought print sales would be down thanks to people reading the audiobook instead. My sales are a joke, of course, but not more a joke than they were six months ago.

If you’re an indie author like me, and you’re considering releasing an audiobook, you shouldn’t let fear of declining print sales hold you back (according to these figures). You should, however, let these figures dissuade you from becoming an author in the first place.

How (and Why) I Recorded My Audiobook in a Studio Instead of Pretending My Closet is a Studio

Click to buy this amazing book.

I only get a few minutes of actual paper book reading per night before I begin watching automotive videos on YouTube in preparation for sleep. I’m hoping to have a dream in which I can afford lots of cool cars. So far, no dice. What’s worse, I also can’t afford them in real life.

I realize that I am not alone in my preference for audiobooks, which is why I’ve been pushing this year to get some of my work recorded.

My best-selling book is a mostly serious non-fiction account of a mountain I climbed called “How To Mount Aconcagua,” so I started with it. I recorded it at my house using various methods, and then got it into ACX, which is Audible’s portal for lowly-but-plucky DIY authors like myself. You can read about that process here.

Here I am in my “studio” having the time of my life.

Just kidding, I hated it. I have some recording gear and some knowledge, but both are bargain basement quality and out of date. I was also forced to use a “computer” and computers are assholes. They can barely be trusted to turn typed characters into internet letters. Ask them to accept a microphone input and turn that into an audio file and you’re likely to spend your whole day downloading drivers, calling support, and possibly murdering yourself.

Because I kept costs low and recorded HTMA myself, though, I’m already seeing a profit on my time. I’ve sold a couple of dozen copies, which is nice, but I believe I’ve also seen a drop in paper book sales. I’ll wait until more data is in to post those results, but it seems like people who would have bought the dead tree version have instead opted for the audio option.

Honestly, that’s fine with me. I just want to make a living making work. I don’t care if I have to come to your house and shout it through a trombone as long as there’s sufficient remuneration for my time, travel costs, and trombone polish.

On To the Next Project: Ten Thousand Gods

I, my editor Garret Marco, and my cover designer buddy Bear Roberts all worked hard on Ten Thousand Gods. I wanted top quality results for the audiobook. More importantly, I wanted someone else to have the responsibility of forcibly wrenching usable audio from the jaws of these pigheaded computers. So, I went to a real studio.

Here’s Paul, the gentleman who, for reasons that are unfathomable, has chosen to wrestle with computers as a profession.

It cost me $160 for four hours of Paul’s time. I don’t yet know how many copies of Ten Thousand Gods I’ll have to sell to recoup that cost, but it was already worth it. For one thing, he has a real-deal studio with audio treatments on the walls, plus top quality mics and preamps. I didn’t have to touch a single computer, unless you count touching my phone to take the above photo.

You can listen to a sample of the recording Paul helped me get on the Audible site here.

I also investigated having someone else record the audiobook for me in whatever method they choose to do so. You can invite narrators to send you samples of themselves reading your work on ACX, then, if you like one, offer them the job. But frankly, I didn’t love any of the auditions I got, especially not for the price they wanted to charge. I liked a few, but they wanted over $100 per finished hour of audio, which would have meant added cost to me.

On top of that, I like the idea of reading my own books. I read aloud a lot as I’m writing to make sure I like the flow, so I know exactly how I want everything to be presented. Hopefully, you’ll give it a listen and enjoy my work.

Open Letter: It Is Patently Absurd that You Do Not Manufacture Hoverboards with Larger Rims

Pay close attention to this correspondence, sirs, for I am about to save your business from a crash-and-burn that would make the Hindenburg look like a fourth of July sparkler. Failure in this matter will render you irrevocably the batting-headed waste flingers you appear to be.

You must begin manufacturing hoverboards with larger rims at once!

It takes nothing more than a shitty glance to see that large rims are a status item that spans all worlds. From priceless racing cars belonging to the oldest-money tweed-wearing stuff-shirts of Lord Chichester’s drawing room to the dirt yard whips of Atlanta’s most dangerous trap houses, big rims speak loudly. When they do they say “status.” And yet, your ridiculous conveyance manages but a few inches of rims.

What size are the rear rims of the Koenigsegg One:1, currently the world’s most technologically advanced road-going car? Twenty inches.

Upon what size rims did T Pain, also known as “Teddy Pender-ass,” roll up to the club in R. Kelly’s song “I’m a Flirt?” (I remind you that upon rolling up, assembled shorties were like “Damn!”) The answer is: twenty eight inches.

If you need any further evidence than these two examples, I invite you to check yourself into the nearest sanitarium wearing a placard that reads “Lobotomize with Force.”

Honestly. Do you really expect me and my family to glide effortlessly from the Tennis Store next to the shuttered Blockbuster to the Starbucks (inside the Target) on your hoverboards with our feet no higher off the ground than a rat’s teat? What will the neighborhood say?

Probably: “Hey, nice rims, dickweeds! Did you steal those off a shopping cart?”

And what can we possibly reply? Naturally a family-on-family battle ensues, but with what witty repartee? Zero, is what. And why? Because they are right.The rims are too small, and it is your fault.

Stop flopping around in the world of business like a fish in a box of foam peanuts. Get serious. Either manufacture your hoverboards with large rims — and I mean large — or fit them with hubs so that users can install large aftermarket rims. To do otherwise is to insult the universe, and the universe will crush you for the slight.

My Atlanta Explained Show Desk Build -or- How I Applied Stuff I Learned from Developers to My Live Comedy

Since I founded my satirical newspaper, the Atlanta Banana, I have been trying different combinations to get just the right live show component to complement the writing. We’ve held shows at music venues and art galleries, and they’ve been great fun. But I spent many years working in theatre — from my late teens, through college, and as a job — so I wanted a real theatre space.

The Fox is not yet interested in my work.

I investigated a lot of Atlanta’s options for performance spaces, and it was rough going. No one was particularly interested in my show unless I could afford to pay enough to rent the space outright. There’s not a lot of money in comedy writing, though, so the budget wasn’t there.

Beyond the financial concerns, I hoped someone would understand what I was trying to do, get excited about it, and agree to join up with me to make something great. It was a long search, with some disappointing moments, but I found those people at the Village Theatre.

Have Show, Need Desk

I have a lot of friends in technology, and from them I learned about the idea of iteration. Software folks don’t try to write a fully complete piece of software. It’s impossible to write “complete” software. If you try, the landscape will change before you can get your vision to market and you’ll be holding years worth of work that is useless.

What they do instead is try to get a viable product into user’s hands as fast as possible then continually refine it.

I had my show and the help of some brilliant — not to mention hilarious — men and women from Village. After many weeks of rehearsal, we put on a dress rehearsal and a “soft opening,” of our show and they worked. I knew I had my viable product. Now it was time to iterate and refine.

How to refine? Well, what do my heroes have that I don’t have? A budget for one thing. A team of top notch writers for another. But there’s one thing just about every show host has that I knew was within my grasp: a desk.

Granted, I’ve been out of the set design game for a while now, but I have a garage, some tools, and one of those look-at-me-I’m-creative Moleskine notebooks, so I set to work drawing some plans.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t read any of that crap. But I figured if I built a foldable wood frame I could throw an Ikea desk top on it and then add some touches to fancy the whole affair up some.

First, I put the frame together out of some 1×2″ lumber I bought at my local big box home improvement store. It took me some searching to find five pieces of this wood that weren’t bent to hell and back.

Then I added some 1/4″ plywood — a.k.a. “luaun” — to the outside and attached the sides to the front with some hinges. I considered using canvas but decided I wanted the stability of the plywood.

I also screwed up, because I didn’t account for the thickness of the front panel in the design of the sides. They were meant to fold flat, but they don’t. You won’t be able to tell I screwed up when the desk is in operation, but it’ll be a little less pretty in its folded-for-transport mode. Damnit.

Here’s the work so far with the fancy white tabletop I picked up at Ikea.

Then I spent some time sanding the plywood and filling in holes with Bondo, or as I came to know it when I was working for a guy who fixed up old houses in Atlanta’s Midtown area: restoration putty.

After some more sanding, I had the desk bottom looking pretty smooth.

Now that I had the desk bottom ready for some artwork, I set to work fancying it up. My original idea was to use a projector to show an image on it, then hand paint the image. If there’s one thing my years in set design have taught me, however, it’s that I am a completely crap detail painter.

Instead I measured the desk and created some artwork in Illustrator to wrap around all three sides.

I found a local Fedex and used their large format printer to print the image in black and white, then trimmed it to size using a utility knife and an aluminum cutting fence.

That done, I taped the artwork to the desk base, trimmed it to fit the sides, and then attached it permanently with some spray adhesive.

Here’s the artwork going onto the base.

And here’s the base with the artwork applied and the top resting on it.

Now I needed to focus on the practical use of the desk. I wanted it to look great, but also be collapsible so that it could be easily moved around. Village has a lot of shows going on, so they don’t want my set pieces cluttering up their stage all the time.

I needed a way to get the top centered on the base in the right place every time, so after some measuring and drawing I added these locating blocks to the underside of the desk.

Then I added these draw hasp closure things to secure the top to the base. This phase still needs some work because I want the desk to be completely solid and it’s not quite yet, but it’ll work for version one. Then we’ll iterate.

With the desk top attached to the base, it was time to move into the home stretch: making the desk look as fancy as possible. I wanted it to look a little heavier than it actually is, and I also needed some room to hide some under-desk electronics, so I added some molding to the three audience-facing sides of the desk top.

Of course, I screwed that up the first time. What’s the saying? Measure once, forget about it, then saw like hell? That sounds right.

Once I got the molding applied, I used some white silicone sealer to fill in gaps, hide screws, and hopefully make it look like a cohesive unit. I tell you, it’s all fun and games being a hairy beast of a man, until you’re working with white silicone sealant and you have to stop every two seconds because a piece of your pelt is stuck in it.

For the next phase, I ordered some LED strips with color capability from Amazon for about $25. I have used these strips before as under-cabinet lighting in our house, and they remain Sweetie’s favorite home improvement project that I have performed.

I used white ones under the cabinet, though, and I wanted color ability this time. I also ordered some connectors that were supposed to make bridging two pieces of the LED strips into a very easy process, but they didn’t work at all. I ended up just using massive gobs of hot glue and some cable management things I had.

It ain’t pretty, but it’ll work, and no one will see the underside of the desk.

I’m pretty pleased with the results. Here’s the desk with the glowing top on it.

And here’s what it looks like all (mostly) folded up.

Last but not least, the video evidence of the desk in action.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiYh_AbmBRg

 

I’m pleased with it. I hope you’ll come see my show Atlanta Explained if you’re in the area. In the meantime, we’ll be iterating.

How I Recorded an Audiobook and got my book “How To Mount Aconcagua” onto Audible

Click to buy this amazing audio book

If it weren’t for audiobooks I would never read as many books as I do, and it’s not just me. Audiobooks are now outselling print, according to some.

I need a constant stream of incoming books, both for my own personal enjoyment and to help prime my own creative pump. But last year I realized something: there was a dramatic mismatch between the way I consumed work like mine and the way my work is available. I’m no Seth Godin but I know that ain’t gonna work.

If I’m loosely exemplary of my target readership, and I don’t read much actual fiction in print, all my print/e-reader work amounts to a hill of dog squeeze. What if Vonnegut had submitted Slaughterhouse-Five as a series of flank steaks with the words branded into them?

Well, it’d still be a great book, but you take my point.

All I Had To Do was Record It

Luckily (in some ways), I have an abandoned career as a professional musician behind me. I know some things about recording, and I have some mics, cables, and software to facilitate such.

I just plugged my mic (a Rode NT2 I bought years ago), into my audio interface (an Alesis Multimix 4) adjusted the pop filter, and began recording into Garageband. I used the included presets to help with dynamics. Easy right?

Well, yes and no. I didn’t really like the results with the NT2, even though it’s a large diaphragm mic, so I ended up just using an old SM57 I had laying around. And I didn’t really like the echoey sound of the audio. In the parlance of recording, it had too much “room.”

So I threw a blanket over my head and my monitor, and that seemed to work. It was uncomfortable, irritating, and a little humiliating, but that’s low budget authorship for you.

Work was comfortable when I was doing computer stuff for a living. The only problem was I hated everything. Yeah. Everything.

Me during my IT years. PHOTO: Gage Skidmore
Next, Just Upload the Files to ACX

Once my files were uploaded, ACX sent me an email to let me know that my files were all shit and they didn’t accept them. My careful work with the compressor presets to make sure my audio was as near to 0(zero)db as possible without clipping was abhorrent to ACX. They prefer -3db or less.

And I’d foolishly thought an audiobook was a single large file of the book read start to finish. Nay. They want it all split up into chapters. And each chapter must have audio that announces it as a chapter, or else no go.

I got frustrated with the project at this point and forgot about it for a few months. Then a friend of mine who is a pro audio guy for the movie industry offered to help. At his house, we re-recorded the audio, this time with someone who knew what they were doing at the controls.

Eventually I met all the requirements ACX places on home producers of audiobooks, which, it seems to me, might be just a touch draconian. I had to do a lot of post-processing work in Audition to make the audio acceptable to ACX, but at long last I got the thing done.

A few days later, I got an email to let me know the title was live on Audible.com. And there was much rejoicing.

Now all I have to do is audio-ize my other six titles (and growing). Next time I’m going to a studio, dang it.

I wonder if some day authors will be skipping the intermediate print step altogether.

Ten Thousand Gods Episode 3 is Now Available

The third installment in my Ten Thousand Gods series is officially released. It can be had on Amazon or Kobo for just $0.99.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the series, you can start by reading the first volume for free. Here’s the link to the page covering the whole project.

I’m pleased that we’re now half way through this whole saga. Thanks for checking it out, and I’d love an honest review on Amazon or wherever.

A couple of recent interviews: The Bookshelf and BookGoodies

There is nothing at all I like talking about more than myself, followed closely by talking about my work. I’m delighted that I’ve had more chances to do that lately.

The Bookshelf is a book store in Thomasville, Georgia, and I had the pleasure of chatting with owner Annie Jones just the other day. We talked about my hero David Sedaris, the importance of reading, and generally had a ball. You can listen to the podcast here on iTunes, or right in your browser at this link.

There’s also a text-only interview up over at BookGoodies, where I talk about the future of publishing, advice for writers, and other things about which I am by no means an expert.

I’ve been working on Ten Thousand Gods Episode III today, so that should be ready for readers in the next day or two. Onward!