After hearing news yesterday that Indigo’s Shortcovers had reached an agreement with Smashwords to receive feeds of the latter’s digital books, I went back and re-examined the whole digital rights management issue. It would seem the code-breakers win once again, in that despite all the encryption you can put on digital content, if someone really wants to pirate your work they can. And faced with the fact that you’re never going to stop this sort…
If you’re going to be a writer of any kind, you have to research. No escaping it. Fail to and a reader somewhere in the world will catch that one inconsistency and call you on it, and for them, because of that oversight, the story will most likely lose credibility. You may even lose them as a follower, not something to dismiss with a pshaw in this new age of immediate entertainment gratification. Recently I…
A departure today in remembrance of those who have served, and those who have died serving, the countries they love. Whether that service was by choice or unwilling conscription makes little difference after the fact. What remains is that these men and women were and are subjected to what we ask of no one in normal society, that they face irrationality and fear, prejudice and privation, struggle and death, and then return to us whole,…
I’m not sure how many other authors are greatly influenced, or not, by music. For myself, music plays a very important role in helping me to visualize the environment I’m creating, as well as set the tone of a particular scene. This enormous influence is one of the reasons I mentioned in the afterword of From Mountains of Ice my preferred music list when I was writing the novel. Unfortunately, one reader felt that because…
The book signing Saturday at Indigo Books in Burlington, as part of the fall promotion tour of From Mountains of Ice, went well. Although sales weren’t brisk, certainly they were acceptable and interest from both customers and staff was keen. Had a delightful conversation with a fully engaged and connected young man by name of Holden (wonderful old name) and look forward to a continued discussion with him over the next months on things literary…