Blog Tour

I'm on a blog tour!  What is that you may ask?  I have no idea.

Just kidding.

A blog tour is a chance for me--as an author--to write some guest blogs and do some interviews for bloggers all around the web who love books.  It was all put together by a woman named "Inspired Kathy" (that may or may not be her real name) and you can read about it--and catch up with the installments you may have missed--go to I'm A Reader Not a Writer!

Make sure you thank the people who are publicizing my books by hosting me on this tour.  Leave comments and, most importantly of all, buy my books!  (The best place to go for links to buying my books for Kindle, Nook or Smashwords is Garison Fitch.)

Election 2012

I am not looking forward to voting this year.  Usually, I enjoy voting.  I wish there were actual curtains and a lever to pull like in the old movies, but even though there aren't, I generally like voting.  Not this year.

And it's not the "down races" I am down on.  I've got my preferences on everyone from Senate down to County Commissioner and I will proudly cast those votes.

What I can't get enthused about is my vote for President of the United States.  I don't like either of our top 2 options.  I guess I could vote for one of the lesser known candidates from some obscure party, but I can't decide whether the possibility of casting a protest vote overrules the idea that I'd just be throwing my vote away.  (And then we get into the discussion of whether any vote matters and, well ... for the sake of this blog, let's pretend/assume all votes matter.)  So I'm left to choose between Obama and Romney.

Yuck.

Both men seem to be good husbands and fathers, so I'll give them that.  After that ...

I know we're not electing a Pastor-in-Chief, but we've got Romney coming from a cult and Obama coming from who knows where?  No, I don't think he's a Muslim.  I don't know the man, but my impression is that Obama's only god is Obama.  In a paragraph or two I'm going to describe Obama as a hardened leftist, because that's how he has always governed, but I'm convinced he'd sell out his leftist buddies in a heartbeat if he thought it would help him in some way.

Obama is ardently pro-abortion, voting to refuse protection for babies even after birth, so I hate that aspect of his policies.  Romney gives great speeches about being pro-life and has generally voted that way, but he picked some judges while governor of Massachusetts who were very liberal on this aspect, so I'm not enthused about him on this score, either.

Obama is a hardened leftist whose financial policies I can't stand and have proven themselves to be abject failures every time they've been tried (by him and every other Keynesian idiot of the last 3/4 century).  I like Mitt's stated financial policies, but I don't know that I trust him to carry any of them out.  He looks too much like he'll be of the "McCain School of Let's Give Away the Farm in the Guise of Being Amicable With the Other Side".  I hope he's not, but I'm not holding my breath.

Foreign policy?  Obama has shown himself to be pretty clueless in this area, seeming to think that the force of his personality will solve centuries of rancor.  I don't know that Romney has any foreign policy experience and other than George Schultz, I'm not sure who he's listening to.  So this one's a toss-up between "proven ineptitude" and "ambiguity".

Someone once said you're better off with the devil you know than the devil you don't know, but the devil I've gotten to know for the last 3 1/2 years is pretty awful so I can't bring myself to vote for him to continue his path of destruction.  On the other hand, I'm sure not enthused about Romney, either.  He's saying all the right things now--and if I thought that was the way he'd govern I'd be all over his bandwagon--but ...

I guess I'll walk into the voting booth in November (I don't like early voting just because I like do it on voting day--don't know why), hold my nose, and cast a vote for Romney.  Maybe he'll pick a VP that I can enthuse about (Obama's out on that score, too), but I think my main hope for not leaving the building with a horrible taste in my mouth are those down ballot races.

That's kind of like hoping the complimentary mint is enough to overcome a mediocre-to-bad meal, huh?

Kindle Romance Novels: A Star Falls on Oklahoma by Samuel Ben White

I don't just blog and write westerns, I also write novels!  Check out this great review for one of my recent novels:

Kindle Romance Novels: A Star Falls on Oklahoma by Samuel Ben White: Look here! A Kindle Romance Novel for $2.99 / £1.90! In the US Kindle Store In the UK Kindle Store Rising star Sonya Kiel suddenl...

You know, it kind of is a western.  It takes place in western Oklahoma, and part of the conflict is the difference in thought processes between a London girl and a man of the American west.

Reviewing “Hydroland” by Justin Martin & Mel Todd

            a review of the preview by Sam White

A powerless member of the new media, I was given the gracious opportunity to preview an upcoming comic book by the above-mentioned Martin & Todd called “Hydroland”.  Briefly, Hydroland is the story of a people who live in the water.  They’ve lived in peace until, suddenly they are invaded.

Now, the preview I got to see gives some hints at what the invasion is (thematically) but not how it is carried out practically—in the comic book, anyway.  I won’t give that away, except to say that it’s going to take some skill to carry out.  These guys have it, I think (they tell a good preview, anyway), but it’s tough.  How many times in school were you shown a painting or read a poem and the teacher told you about all the deep, sensual or violent undertones and you sat there thinking, “I thought it was about a basketball that’s gone flat.”  And try as you might, you can never see anything other than the flat basketball.

Martin and Todd are creating (the full book’s not out, yet) an ambitious story of sin and redemption, couched in a story of an underwater society and depicted in an artistic style that is reminiscent of the best of R. Crumb’s work but (IMHO) more cheerful, even when the story itself takes a grim turn.  The bits of artwork we get to see in this preview (download the preview for free here: http://comics.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=99418) are intriguing and make me anxious to see the finished product (many of the pics in this download are production art, but I love looking at that kind of thing and seeing how an artist goes from pre-production to post-).

"Long Road to a Second Chance"

After much thought, I have finally come up with a new (and hopefully better) title for the novel that used to be named “Psalm 88″: “Long Road to a Second Chance”.

Why the change? I liked the original title, and it does have a lot to do with the book itself, but it kept confusing readers who saw the title and thought I had written a commentary on the 88th Psalm.

As I rethought the story of the book in an effort to find a new title, I kept coming back to the thought that it’s the story of two people who run away from their problems by running together. Playing with different ways to express that, I finally came up with “Long Road to a Second Chance”.

You can order “Long Road to a Second Chance” here !

Read it, you’ll like it!

Tradition

I've come up with a good ad line for my next novel ... "A futuristic fantasy in the tradition of Louis L'Amour!"

The people who have read it so far--those wonderful free proof-readers without whom I could not publish--think this is a great idea. You see, the novel is set ten thousand years in the future, so that's where the futuristic part comes in. It's about a man who is washed ashore after a battle against the forces of evil (hence the fantasy) in an unknown land. In the process of getting back to his wife and children, he has to cross deserts, fight bandits, and lead a revolution. Hence the Louis L'Amour.

It's more than that, though. I actively set-out to evoke a sense of Louis L'Amour in the writing, in the way the sentences were constructed, in the way the story played out.

I once heard of an author who was well-respected (though I never cared for his work) who thought "The Great Gatsby" was the greatest novel ever written. So he copied it down by hand to see how each sentence was written.

I have never done that with Louis L'Amour, but I have read his books over and over. I have a notebook of favorite phrases of his on my computer and notes I have made for myself about his work. They say that flamingos are naturally grey, but they turn pink because of all the shrimp they eat. If my writings evoke Louis L'Amour, it's probably because of all his work I have ingested. This book, though, is the first time I specifically tried to be "L'Amour-colored".

Here's hoping it worked and that you enjoy "A Thousand Miles Away". (Coming soon!)

New covers for my time travel novels. Other covers are coming for at least 7 of my other published novels. Plus, the covers of the forthcoming novels will follow along in this theme in an effort at establishing some branding.

What do you think?