New blog. Fresh start. Blue skies. All that stuff. Now for a few weeks of messing with a theme.

Some parenting anecdotes today. My son took a piece of bacon to school this week, and he couldn’t have been more proud of himself. He stole it off the counter as we were on the way out of the house, and even though it broke into three pieces by the time we made it to school, […]

Every time I exercise, I’m basically asking Death if he’s ready to take me that day. And when it’s done, when I’m panting and sweating and somehow still alive, I can’t help but feel the icy sting of rejection.  I’ve been making a quiet return to exercise now that Rainbow is mostly sleeping through the […]

“Reminiscent of the movies Clue and House on Haunted Hill, Vise Manor is a clever sci-fi thriller that kept me up well into the night to see what happened next.” – Sarah Orren, Reedsy Discovery

A couple years ago, I made the biggest mistake of my life: I got rid of all (most) of my print books in favor of Kindle. What can I say? I was taken in by that minimalism doc on Netflix. Fast forward to today, and I lament not having a bookshelf overflowing with science fiction and mysteries and light erotica–you know, all the genres my dad kept on his bookshelf when I was a wee little cyberpunk writer.

If you don’t know, Jetpack is a plugin that adds a bunch of extra features to your WordPress blog. Those features used to be contained in a single subscription, but now they’re available a la carte. With the goal of saving some money in mind, I started to wonder, What’s the minimum Jetpack plan required to be included in WordPress Reader?

I started self-publishing in 2004, and it took me a long, long time to figure out what most authors already knew: you don’t market to friends and family. For one, they’re often not your target cyberpunk-loving audience. Second, if they do buy your book, it will be because they either love you or genuinely enjoy your work. Either way, it’s a limited audience, and your efforts (and money) are better spent elsewhere. But… that doesn’t mean you can’t tell them you have a new book coming out. And since you’re just telling them, and not marketing, you can have a little fun with it.

After independently publishing NINE books since 2004, I’m still updating the way I put out books. Here is my current process, pared down to the bare essentials.

I try new themes every month, maybe even let them run for a week or two, but I’m always switching back to Typology. The theme focuses on your text and puts graphics and photos and complex designs in the background. If you want your words front and center, this is the theme for you. That said, there is something I don’t like in the design, and you can see it on the single post page.

Since Jetson’s passing, Cheyenne has been reasserting herself as the unequivocal Alpha of the Verastiqui Pack. She demands table scraps. She shoves her ball in our faces. She sleeps at the head of our bed. If she were still a pup, we’d probably take steps to correct this behavior, but she’s getting on in years […]