My eyes glaze over when I read about optimizing web sites

If you ever write a post about optimizing web sites, I'm not going to read it. Why? Well, frankly, I see so many posts like this that after a while they become more platitudinous noise in the environment like posts reminding us to stay hydrated while jogging or to brush our teeth before we go to bed.

So, I will not describe here my time and effort this week to update my Garden of Heaven web site so that more people will find it, read a little here and a little there and then buy the novel. My intent was to splash more of my passions around the site and hope that others with those passions might enjoy reading about them in my fiction.
 
For me, all of this answers the question: what drives you? What do you like, what do you write about, and might people with similar feelings and likes be drawn to your fiction? If you like this question, you can read my post about it here: Authors, What Drives You?

Glacier National Park

My passions include Montana, mountains and hero's journey stories. Since Garden of Heaven and The Sun Singer are both hero's journey novels set partly in Glacier National Park, I added more Glacier information on my web site. If you're passionate about Glacier National Park and/or are thinking about becoming passionate about it, you might enjoy another of my historical posts about it here: All Aboard for Glacier National Park.

Screwing Mark Twain

The misguided people in charge of NewSouth Books believe they are helping literature and/or today's school children by removing the word "nigger" from Huckleberry Finn and replacing it with the word "slave." They claim they are simply finding a new way to express the truth. The truth about the days when Twain's characters lived and breathed is what they lived and breathed. One of those things was the word "nigger."

Those who want to "update literature" are doing authors a great disservice. Worse yet, they are doing today's readers a great disservice. The New York Times article about the screwing of Mark Twain is here. Author Lee Libro has a wonderful post about it here. I take a more indirect approach by writing satire about it here where a fictional book publisher issues a "cleaned up" biography of Harriet Tubman without the pejorative word "slave" in it.

Another Snowy Weekend

We had snow in northeast Georgia for Christmas. Now, weather forecasters are telling us we're going to have even more snow this coming weekend.Maybe five inches.

Atlanta and the towns to the north of it tend to be overly anxious about snow, so this weather report may be making a blizzard out of a few random flakes.Better safe than sorry, we say, especially those of us who remember the "Snow Jam" of 1982 and the very real blizzard of 1993.

If so, it will be a good time to stay inside and read--after throwing a few snowballs, of course.

--Malcolm