Just Some Random Stuff I Noticed

I saw this Barbie at work and immediately thought of Van Halen.



Not that I think she looks like any of the women in the video, but something about the short skirt and glasses just makes me think of her as "Hot for Teacher Barbie" every time I pass by.

I did a double-take as I passed a video rack which had these two DVDs on the same row.

I mean, it's just weird to see two covers with almost the same gesture, but with two very different meanings.

Yeah, I know, nothing of substance here. I spent most of the day mulling a very long, very depressing post about the despair which once again threatens to overwhelm me, but it does me no good to post about it. By which I mean, staying positive doesn't seem to be doing me any good either; objectively, my situation is getting no better no matter what attitude I maintain. But dwelling on all the negative things I can't do anything about just makes it miserable as my life swirls down the drain. With artificial positivity, I can at least fool myself into thinking it's a water slide or something. "It's like a ride!"

Early Spring?

Okay, not really, but it feels like it. I don't know if it's the weather breaking or a larger change in my attitude, but the last few days have been interesting. I had a busy weekend with lots of activity out of the house, unusual for me, and then last night, I started watching Master Chef on Hulu. I watched the rest of it today, and missed cooking so much that I bought some honest-to-goodness produce, which I haven't really done since, I don't know, 2008?

Cooked steak and potatoes tonight, and though neither one was really very good, it was enough just to dip my toe back into the skillet. I feel as if good things are starting to emerge now, even though I have no rational reason to believe it. I'm on a financial precipice, and everything could come crashing down at any second. But at the same time, there's sunshine, and friends, and Death Wave on the Kindle.

And yes, this is a plug. It may be a dark and bitter book, but there's a beating heart in there. It's a fast read with humor and action, and it's only $2.99. And it's not only for the Kindle. Amazon provides reader software for PC and smartphones as well. Plus the mobi format can also be read in conjunction with the Mobipocket Reader, if like me, you have an old Palm PDA.

And if you do like it, I would ask one favor: please tweet it, or blog it, or just tell a friend about it. I'm going to be putting up one more preview (this time a darker section from about mid-book) on Wednesday, and I'm hoping that it will generate some interest.

Not Loving Snow Right Now

So on Monday night, this blizzard rolls in. So I had to miss work on Tuesday, because though my car was in the garage, the snow outside was already a foot thick and it was still coming down hard.

The next day, Wednesday, I got out with a shovel and had to dig a trench down the side of my house from the garage behind the house to the fence. It wasn't hard, because the snow was loosely packed. It was almost like shoveling marshmallow or something. It took a lot longer than I expected, though, because I had to go something like 50 yards. It didn't matter anyway, because work called at 3:30 p.m. to say that I didn't need to come in. They were closing the store a half-hour before my shift was supposed to start. So I got the trench shoveled out through snow which was piled 3 ft high in places.

Thursday, I got in my car and tried to drive to work. I got halfway down the Death Star trench, and my car got stuck; I hadn't shoveled it out quite wide enough in that spot. So I had to roll down the window and crawl out onto the hood, because the snow was literally as deep as the window at that point. I got the car dug out and drove down to the end of the drive, but gave up at that point, afraid to brave the actual streets from all the reports I was hearing.

Yesterday, I tried again. Got in my car and pulled out to get into the street. Literally got stuck 6 feet from my driveway. Looked up and down the street and saw four other cars stuck and abandoned and decided to quit. Later in the day, I walked to the Med-X drugstore and bought a little food. It took an hour and a half, and I fell seven or eight times, but the snow was soft, so I didn't hurt myself. On the other hand, none of the streets were very clear, even the main streets. I missed work again. An entire week of income, gone.

I really don't get why I'm so skittish about leaving my house this time. Maybe it's just that this level of snow is unprecedented in the time I've lived in Tulsa, but I don't know. I think it may be just because this car is an automatic, so I don't feel as if I have as much control driving it. Or maybe it's related to the greater crisis of confidence I've had in every aspect of my life, so I tend to shut down more easily, rather than rise to the challenges. Or maybe it's the related fact that my current job has no real responsibilities, not like the Army, or my supervisory positions at TV Guide and the station where I had to lead by example. There's nothing resting on my shoulders other than my own fate.

All I know is, in previous situations like this, I got out and overcame the challenges and got to work even when other people were staying in. And this time, I haven't. I've shut myself up for the most part and just tried to ride things out. But I've lost a week's worth of income in the meantime.

So I really need to hope people start buying Death Wave. And if you can, please spread the word about Death Wave. It's available right now, it's affordable, it's a fast read, and it's not exactly like anything else you've ever read before. And you don't need a Kindle to read it. Amazon has reader software for the PC, as well as other mobile devices like i-Pads and smart phones. And it's in mobi format, so you can also read on Palm devices with Mobipocket Reader.

Sample chapters can be found here (with more publishing this coming Tuesday). Any help I can get in spreading the word would be appreciated.

(ETA: I just got back from a one-hour drive around the block and figured out two problems. Number one, the city has done nothing with the streets here. They plowed Pine, the main street in these parts, but the secondary streets have nothing, not even sand, and the residential streets have less than nothing. And number two, I hadn't realized how bad my tires were. I got a really good look at them while I was shoveling ice and snow out from underneath them, and they need replacing. Problem is, I can't even afford basic living expenses right now, let alone tires.)

And In Other News Which Isn't News

This story is making the rounds now, that an art historian is making the startling claim that the model for the Mona Lisa was actually a man.

And I would probably be saying, "Whoa, that really is startling," if it weren't for the fact that, when I visited the Louvre over 30 years ago, the tour guide said exactly the same thing as if it were a long-established fact, and even pointed us to the other painting featuring the same model, hanging in the same gallery.

This is news?

Death Wave Is Here

Finally took the plunge and published Death Wave for the Kindle. It's a tale of adultery, betrayal and revenge set in the days of the Great Depression. And there's a death ray.

The novel is a throwback to the gritty paperback thrillers of yesteryear, short and sweet and a very fast read. It starts out light and turns brutal as it goes, so don't expect the sample chapters on Hero Go Home to give you an idea of the tone of the entire book.

If you don't have a Kindle, don't worry. Amazon has software you can use on your PC or on other mobile devices and smartphones. The book is in mobi format, so you can also use Mobipocket reader software, if you have it. Best part of all (for you) is that because the book is short, it's priced at a low $2.99. That's less than a Western Bacon Cheeseburger at Carls Jr., and because it's an electronic file, there are no delivery charges added. You can't beat that.

In My Heart, I Believe His Name Is Smeaton

But they don't give his actual name.

Man Survives Fall.

Went to the launch party tonight for my friend Eilis O’Neal’s The False Princess. It’s her first novel, so it’s a special occasion. I haven’t read the book yet, but the excerpt I heard her read tonight was intriguing, something like The Prince and the Pauper with magic. Not only is she one of the nicest people I know, but she’s also a really good writer, so if you like YA fantasy, check it out.

I Am Tony's Complete Lack of Surprise

I usually steer clear of politics in the blog, because it raises my blood pressure and loses me friends. For instance, I stayed quiet when people, including people I know and like, were saying all sorts of insulting and ridiculously untrue things about the lack of civility on the right compared to the left after the recent shooting.

But this is just ignorant. Some of Barack Obama's supporters are complaining that there was no substantive plan for job creation in his SOTU speech last night.

Well, what did they expect? Number one, Obama's never had a substantive plan for anything. At all. His foreign policy plans have all boiled down to "I'ma talk them into stuff cause I'm, like, awesome."

And number two, he thinks he is focusing on jobs. He just doesn't know how. The boilerplate he regurgitated last night was substantially the same as the economic "recovery" plans he spouted during his campaign for President--clean energy, infrastructure, health care--with the exception that he got the health care part passed.

That's what's been so simultaneously frustrating and amusing about disillusioned moderates and independents complaining that Obama spent so much time in his first two years pushing health care and cap-and-trade instead of focusing on the economy. He was focusing on the economy.

When Obama was asked about economic issues on the campaign trail, he would inevitably end up talking about health care and clean energy as necessary prerequisites to building a stable, prosperous economy. He never really supported his contention that these things needed to be done first. He would simply say, "The first thing you've got to do..." and then go into his plans for medicine and energy and infrastructure "investments" to put the economy on a "solid foundation."

Maybe people figured he was just doing that media-consultant-driven thing where you turn any question to your big central theme, like Jack Kemp somehow turning a question on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a call for a flat tax. But I always figured that on some level, he really did believe what he was saying, no matter how stupid. What's sad for the country is that so many people were lulled by the mellow tones of his voice into ignoring the very ignorant crap he was saying.

So let's get a few things straight about Obama's nonsense. Number one, the health care law he got passed is not going to make health care better or more affordable, nor will it help the economy or job production. Even the people on his side have abandoned that fiction.

And number two, clean energy is not going to be some economic salvation, certainly not in the short term, and possibly not in the long-term either. Just the opposite, in fact. And I'm not just talking about the fact that any job gained in the "clean energy" industry is a job lost in the current petroleum and coal industries, making the whole thing a wash from the start.

Wind and solar energy are more costly and less reliable than fossil fuels, which is why they aren't more prevalent. The only way to make them cost-effective barring some amazing imaginary future technical breakthrough is to drive up the cost of fossil fuels through regulations and punitive taxation, which Obama admitted in rare moments of candor on the campaign trail. This drives up the prices of all goods and services, depresses the economy, causes more job losses. Worse still, it disproportionately hurts the poor, those downtrodden masses the left are continually throwing up as the justification for more and more government excess. The truth is, the left cares nothing about the poor except as a bludgeon to lash out at the things they're mad about.

The problem is not that Barack Obama has not been concentrating on the unemployment disaster. The problem is that he has no idea what a real job is, nor how to create one. He's like a cargo cultist, building something that looks like a runway in the jungle in the hopes that planes will land there once again. His speech last night was not an abandonment of the "laser-like focus" on jobs he's been promising every couple of months since he was sworn in. It was a demonstration of what his idea of focus on jobs looks like.

Super Movie Monday - Superman III, Part 2

Just testing the widget

Super Movie Monday - Superman III, Part 2

State of the Site-January

So it's been a slow January for posts here, as I've been concentrating extra-hard on Hero Go Home. I'm worked ahead for two weeks on Movie Monday and about to hit a section of the novel that will allow me to reuse a lot of material from the previous drafts, because it's the big 2nd Act climax.

Still no real income from the site. I did get one donation, which was awesome, not only because of the money, but because of the validation and the sense that if one person's willing to donate, others might be, too. I tried putting up ads from Project Wonderful, but that didn't work so well; it runs on bids, and if no one bids to be on your site, you end up with a big hole on your page.

So Project Wonderful is history, and I'm back to building up traffic as I try to figure out a new approach to monetizing. The Girl Genius ads are bringing in a small, but steady amount of traffic, and a few people have actually stuck around to read some chapters, which is good. Now I just need to kick it up a level to get more eyeballs in. I'm thinking of upping my advertising budget (which would not be hard, since so far, I've spent less than $5.00), and I've also added a widget to make it easier to share the posts on social media. So if you are active on Stumbleupon or reddit or delicious or Digg, and anything I've written catches your eye, please feel free.

I'm also thinking of putting Part III behind a paywall. In other words, you can read almost 30 chapters for free, but you'll need to pay to see how it ends. Not unfair, I don't think, but when I was considering the idea before, it was all academic speculation because almost no one had read more than the first two chapters. Now a few people are reading through, so I'll see if I can't get a couple of donations for the ending.

And in the meantime, I want to put otgether some T-shirts and/or other merchandise, as well as another couple of secret projects that I'm trying to fit in around the edges for other revenue streams, and seriously, it's hard keeping my mind moving in all the many directions it needs to go at once. So not everything's getting done, which is another reason why I'm pushing to get worked ahead. I just hate the sick feeling that all this work I'm doing is never going to pay, that I'll never be good enough at this for more than five or six people to actually like it.

Still Breathing

Was off-line for several days, but I'm back now. It's weird coming back after a few days away. On the one hand, I've gotten the chance to do other things that I wasn't spending time on before (I meant to get a lot more work done than I did unfortunately--instead of working last night, for instance, I ended up listening to 80's music for hours, almost like traveling back in time, and the day before that, I watched three or four crappy vampire movies from a DVD set I got for Christmas).

On the other hand, everything has piled up with amazing speed: emails, game requests on Facebook, spam comments needing to be deleted, and after only three days away, I'm almost afraid to look at the news. Is the world even the same anymore?

Breathing Room

This week's chapter in Hero Go Home was a hard one to write. As the story has been serialized, I've been made more aware week by week of the need to press forward with the plot. In the earlier drafts, not much happened in the first two thirds of the book. It was all a gradual build-up to the frantic action of the last third. In many ways, it felt like I was just padding things out, having aimless conversations while waiting for hte word count to reach the magic number where I could start the climax to Act 2.

But this time, I've been more plot focused. So much so that sub-plots that had been important got almost completely dropped. And as the characters are headed into the big action climax to Part 2, I realize that I haven't really let people get to know the supporting cast as well as I should. So I decided to write a chapter in which not much happens, but the characters get a chance to breathe and just be themselves without pressure for a while before the hammer drops.

It wasn't easy. Because even though not much happens, I still needed to weave things together and make it flow. I had to try and make it interesting, illuminating not just the characters, but the world the characters inhabit. I hope I succeeded.

2010 In Review

This is not really a look at the year in any depth. More just a reflection that, my lack of submission to publications notwithstanding, I produced a hell of a lot of work last year. 33 recaps for Movie Monday (both on this blog and at Hero Go Home), along with 35 comics recaps for Out of the Vault. In addition, there were a bunch of Big Game Wednesday posts , along with almost 50,000 words of novel content for Hero Go Home, along with 21 Extras and at least 10 variations on the header image. And then there were the reviews for examiner.com for a couple of months there. And of course, the radio play (or audio drama, if you want to be technical).

It's not the machine-like flood of work that some other guys are doing, but for a guy who's so far been doing it strictly for the love, as it were, it's not bad. And I'm starting to get slightly more attention. So now I'm trying to put together a more organized and disciplined approach to this year's work, so that I can get the job done better and more efficiently, and maybe coax more work out of myself (as well as plan ahead better for things like Halloween--I want this year's to be *spectacular*).

I'm not calling it a New Year's Resolution or anything like. Just a modified approach that I hope will work better than what I've been doing. Fingers crossed that it will work.

Oh yeah, and somebody actually read all the way through Hero Go Home a couple of days ago. I hope they liked it and will tell friends.

The Year to Come

Cross-posting this to Hero Go Home as well, because a lot of what I'm talking about applies there.

I'm starting off the year feeling pretty energized about things. Things are coming to a head in Hero Go Home, the novel. They are about to kick into high gear in just a few weeks, and when I say high gear, I mean you haven't seen anything yet. That alien invasion back in Chapter 11? Small potatoes. Our heroes are about to get tested in a very big way, and after that... well, after that, look to Chapter 1 for a clue.

The current novel is a little over halfway done, I'm thinking, which means that it should be finished sometime in May, maybe. Since the donation model hasn't been working, I'm thinking of different ways to generate revenue. But that's contingent on getting people to actually read the story and be interested in how it turns out, which doesn't seem to be happening much. I'm getting more visitors, but not a lot of hits on the actual novel pages.

Still not sure what's to be done about that, although I may go back and revise the earlier chapters. Some chapters combine several unrelated scenes, because I wanted to provide a minimum level of content each week. I may break those down into shorter, punchier chapters. I'll also do some smoothing, because as the plot has adapted, and as I've run into deadline crunches, some chapters were rushed and are not as good as I'd like them to be.

When it's all done, though, in the second half of the year, there will be a Kindle edition with everything included, plus some extras, as well as the option of an actual dead tree edition. And I'll be starting another Digger novel, which will probably be the prose version of the aborted webcomic story from a couple of years ago. I'm hoping to actually not bog down on the damn car trip to the hotel this time. There was some funny stuff you never got to see, and some characters I really want you to meet.

And in the meantime, sometime within the first three months of the year, I'm going to be adding something new to the site. I'm not going to say what it is just yet, but it's darker than Hero Go Home and will not be serialized in the same way. Ideas are still being firmed up.

Weekly Extras are going away. I still have some Extras in the works, but trying to come up with one every week in addition to all my other obligations has resulted in some less-than-satisfactory work, in my opinion. So the Extras are to be more sporadic, but better quality.

Out of the Vault and Super Movie Monday will continue like before, though, and this year, I'm getting a little more organized and planning further ahead in the hopes of both avoiding a crunch and putting together some really special things for Halloween and Christmas. There will also be an occasional non-super movie featured on They Stole Frazier's Brain.

And that's basically it, for now. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot. And I haven't even mentioned my whole other Secret Project. Whew.

Happy New Year, 2011

So I went out earlier in the week and bought some champagne, then I got invited to a party, then I bought a cigar, because I really wanted one and the two I have are both quite expensive holdovers from an earlier era and I want to save them for something special.

I went to the party and had a good time, but at some point, being the single guy (sort of) among all these couples gets sort of tiring, especially given how much everybody talks about sex, which I'm not getting any (for years now). So I left early, thinking I'd come home, pop the cork on my champagne and light my cigar and reflect on the year past and the year to come or something.

Instead, I discovered that this had finally happened, and any plans I had went out the window for a couple of hours. Mr. Plinkett is no longer the amazingly fresh thing he was, and the red meat in the reviews comes accompanied with a lot more fat than before, but still, he makes some really salient points, including some I hadn't expected. Kick ass.

Irony, Thy Name Is... Well, OK, Irony, But Still...

So I go out and place the ad on Girl Genius (a really fun webcomic by Phil and Kaja Foglio), and get a little bump in traffic over at Hero Go Home. Then I'm checking my traffic numbers and I see I'm getting a (relative) ton of traffic here at Frazier's Brain. What gives?

Freaking Foglio. The esteemed Steve Bissette (who was the kick-ass penciller on Swamp Thing back in the Alan Moore glory days) has linked to my article about D'Arc Tangent in the midst of a discussion with Dave Sim on Creators' Rights in the context of shared works. And on the one hand, I think it's really cool. And on the other hand, I'm sort of embarrassed by my uninformed BS'ing all the way through the article.

And I really wish I had the cojones to shill for Hero Go Home in his comments, but that would be in bad taste. Shit.

Tiny Progress

So I've dipped a tiny toe into the advertising waters by placing a tiny button ad on Girl Genius. Which is to say, I never see the ad when I click over there to check on it, but I have gotten some traffic in from it, so I know it's there sometimes. Apparently, even though I bid one price worldwide, the system breaks the bid down into regions, so basically, my ad is showing on Girl Genius everywhere but in the U.S., where the majority of my target audience is. I'm not sure how to fix that.

I'm placing the ads through Project Wonderful, which seem to be only wonderful for webcomics so far (in fact, I originally started the account when I was putting together the Hero Go Home webcomic, but never used it).

Here's the cool thing about Project Wonderful: it's set up like an auction, so you're bidding for space on the site, and your bids are automatically regulated so you never pay more than you have to.

Here's the bad thing about Project Wonderful: it's set up like an auction, so if your site has really low traffic (like mine, though growing slowly), you may get no one bidding on your site, and therefore make no money from ads.

So traffic is the key. And the two steps I've taken recently--adding Movie Monday and Out of the Vault, and placing the Girl Genius ad--have noticeably increased traffic, though it's still barely comparable to this blog, let alone a successful one. Networking would be good, except that I've pretty much cut ties with most of the people I should be networking with. The closest thing I've got to a networking arrangement was the guest appearances by naamah and sargon, who are also serializing a novel (an idea I shamelessly stole from them), but I haven't linked it because our audiences don't really overlap at all. I need to fix that; they did help me out, after all. So I'll just put a big NSFW label on it or something.

And all the things I'm trying to do to increase the viewership of the blog take away time from producing content for the blog. This is really hard, and I worry, now that a couple of people have read the first chapter and no further, that I need to go back and punch up the beginning to keep people reading. But I also need to be moving forward. Aaaarrggghhh, too many things to do and no idea whether any of them will do any good in the long run.

Aftermath

So there was no Christmasiness around the blog, because I put it over on Hero Go Home. And really, as I've probably said before, I'm not much of a fan of the holiday season. And if anything could make me even less of a fan, it's working retail.

My God. The day before Christmas was a frantic rush, with people grabbing whatever they could for last-minute gifts (and just as often, picking up something, changing their mind, and leaving it in another part of the store--that always happens some, but that day, there were just carts and carts full of it). The day after Christmas, when we put all the Christmas stuff on clearance, the crowds descended like locusts. The Christmas corner looked like a bomb went off back there, and there was a huge pile of discarded stuff all around the nearest price scanner, where people couldn't be bothered to take the things back to where they found them after deciding they still weren't cheap enough.

As for Christmas itself, not terrible. Dressed up in tie and hat again, like last year, and took my daughter her present. I was really proud of this year's choice: an art instruction book called Dragonart Evolution. Daughter likes to draw and is on a big dragon kick, so this seemed like a natural. And she seems to really like it, so I'm glad it worked out.

Went to Muskogee later to have dinner with my family. And that was nice, too, although everyone's getting older and frailer.

Present-wise, well, I have a car and a job (for now, at least), so I don't really need presents. Which is fine, because I couldn't really afford to get anyone else anything, either. But I did get a really nice antique plate from Japan from my mother-in-law, and a really unexpected gift from my stepbrother, which was awesome.

Now we just cruise into the New Year, and then I'll fill you in on what's happening with the other blog. I think it's staying.

Awesome Is Measured In...

(ETA: In case you don't know what this is referring to, you can read about it on Wikipedia here. I just thought it was kind of silly. The original artist is the same guy who inflicted this on us, though, so don't this is some kind of blanket endorsement of his work, though if he hadn't done that, we wouldn't have had this)

Hello?

Sorry, just listening to the echo. Without Out of the Vault and Movie Monday, it just seems so empty around here. It's my own fault, I know. The funny thing is, I did more posts this year than in any previous year on this blog, and yet now, it has fallen to almost nil.

The move has worked a little, though. I'm getting a little more traffic over at Hero Go Home from people searching out either the comic featured on Out of the Vault or from people searching out the featured movie. It's a bare trickle now, but traffic was so sparse that it's really noticeable.

My next step (assuming I'm able to renew the domain) is to get some ads out. That means I have to make up the ad banners, which means I have to come up with an interesting idea for an ad banner. And I'm debating whether to make it an animated GIF. Which would mean I have to learn how to make an animated GIF.

I doubt it's all that hard, and one of the things I've enjoyed about the whole Hero Go Home process is all the new things I've learned to do, but at some point, you just get tired of doing it all yourself. Plus, there's just so much work involved--every week I write a chapter, put together a new Extra, read-scan-write entry for Out of the Vault and watch-screencap-write entry for Movie Monday, plus most weeks revising the banner as well--that it gets mentally draining after a while. I would like to get back to some Big Game Wednesday, as well as doing some non-superhero-related Movie Monday over here again, but there's no way I have that much energy.

The holidays add their own kind of crazy on top of that. I've not been much of a fan of the Christmas season since I was a kid, anyway, and working retail during the holidays doesn't help. And with the present economic woes, I know several people who are hurting this Christmas season. At least I was able to get my daughter an affordable present that I think she'll really like. I hope.

Not sure where I was going with that, actually. Just venting a little, I guess. Go over to herogohome.com for the entertaining content. Nothing to see here, at least for a while.