Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Book Link Widget builder v1

Super busy lately, but I did get to spend some time last weekend to put this together--and write two chapters, around 7k words!  Okay, so here's version 1 of the book link widget builder--generic version.  I made a Juno Books version here.  The idea is to get your readers, fans, friends, family, a good portion of the millions out there on the Web to post your link widget on their blogs, web pages, MySpaces, Facebook, etc., and make it easy for those who are looking for a good book to get yours.  That simple.

Here's an example with Tobias Buckell's, Ragamuffin, but it should work for any book.  Links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookSense and your publisher site.

Try it out!  Let me know what you think.

Want to create your own widget?  You can try it out here, but if you have a Web site and your hosting provider offers PHP, you can have complete control!  Bwah-ha-ha-ha!  </Diabolical Laughter>  Enough of that.  Here's the code if you want to host it, customize it, etc.  It's free under a Creative Commons BSD license, which means you can do pretty much anything with it.  Unzip the files and make sure the directory of writable.  There are still a few things to work out, some browser CSS differences.  Enjoy.  Email me if you have questions: [email protected]

bookWidget.zip

Here's what you get in the zip:

PHP files

index.php	Step 1 - add your book info
WidgetDisplay.php	Step 2 - Displays the widget
WidgetPublish.php	Step 3 - Publish your widget
WidgetHelp.php	Some really crappy help

Templates

GetWidget.txt	template for the "Get this Widget"
template.txt	Widget template

Images

amazon.jpg	a little Amazon.com logo
CoverImageHelp.jpg	Help stuff
ISBNHelp.jpg	Help Stuff
WidgetBack1.png	Widget background images
WidgetBack2.png	Customize these...
WidgetBack3.png
WidgetBack4.png
WidgetBack5.png

Top ten signs a book was written by me

Got this from Stacia Kane via Fangs Fur & Fey:

Top ten signs a book was written by me (Chris Howard).

1. Half the book takes place underwater
2. The other half is no more than three miles from the coast, on board a ship, close to the water, you get it.
3. There's at least one good line in ancient Greek ...têi kreagrai tôn orchipedôn helkoimên es abysson.
4. At least one of the families--the protag's or some other major characters'--is really messed up, capital D Dysfunctional. 
5. Someone commits suicide--usually for a cause.
6. There's a brutal internal struggle going on--I love plot lines around characters fighting themselves, fighting some change in themselves.
7. Female protag.  I haven't written a male protagonist in the last three novels.
8. Someone is brought back from the dead--sometimes many someones, sometimes many times, sometimes armies of them.
9. One of the characters is from the Azores. (I can't say why this is, some deep fascination with the islands, I'm thinking).
10. Aristotle is mentioned in a favorable light, if not all out gushed over.  "Greatest hacker who ever lived, man."

Pass it on: Skott, Craig, Jeff, Lee, Sonja, and Lee.

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Most unread books meme

Skott's passed it over to me, via gwynnega.  LibraryThing provides a list of the books most frequently tagged as "unread," and I'm supposed to mark the titles in the list in,

Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those you own but haven’t read yet.

LibraryThing provides a list of the books most frequently tagged as "unread," and I'm supposed to mark the titles in the list in,

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22 
One hundred years of solitude 
Wuthering Heights
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose **
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses 
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey  *** (many times)
Pride and prejudice *
Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The brothers Karamazov * (at least 3 times)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies 
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife
The Iliad *** (many times)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations 
American gods : a novel * (twice)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged *
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver 
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West …
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man 
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead *
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys : a novel
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables *** (many times)
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune *** (many times) 
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon 
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces –
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved : a novel
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas : a novel
The confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame *** (many times)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist ...
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance * 
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s rainbow
In cold blood : a true account ...
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

Next up: Matt, Stacia and Paula (if you have time).

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rememble.com

Interesting...People who use rememble.com are Rememblers.  Rememble is,

a 'washing line' for your digital bits and pieces. Thread together texts, photos, videos, sounds, scribbles, scans, notes, tweets... so they're not drifting a digital wasteland.

Free sign-up (promised to be under a minute) and away you go, adding clips, video, audio, from your phone.  I'm kind of liking Nina the intern's idea of creating "a Souvenir Shelf timeline and took a picture of everything one-by-one before she threw it out and Remembled them all. Now her flat (and her head) is clear and her junk is virtual!" 

I'm a total packrat, never throw anything out, and keeping things virtually is very tempting.

via Amazon Web Services Blog

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The Rain in Maine...

...falls humanely in the drain.  Okay, so me and Alice and the kids drove around southern Maine for a few hours this afternoon.  Let me back up and say this all started on my birthday when Alice--kind and wonderful--gave me a zoom lens for my Nikon D40X.

 

We've been busy and haven't had time--until today--to run out to take a bunch of close-up shots of long range things--and the best place to go for that?  That's right.  We hit the road for Maine, which is like 8 miles away from us, so not really a journey, but more of a way to spend a few hours, catch an early dinner at Wild Willy's Hamburgers, one of the best hamburger places around, and cruise along the beautiful York coast, snapping photos.

Brenda's Bloomers (http://brendasbloomers.com)

Whaleback light...in the pouring rain:

Looks like a really bad dinghy, skiff and rowboat pile-up...

And here's the cause.  The light's always green!

Finally, some important information for those mooring (or planning to dive from the boats) in Kittery Harbor. Click any of the pics to see them larger.

It was the best of times...

No, that's it.  Best of times.  As far as technology and communication go, we live in a universe changing era.  A million examples of this, but let me give you one tiny detail that somehow makes all of this technology glow:  I got an email from Terry Martin, the managing editor of the new British quarterly magazine Murky Depths, thanking me for subscribing, telling me that issue 0 (promo) and issue 1 were in the mail and should be in my hands shortly.  And then to thank me for posting about MD here on the blog.   I paid for the one-year subscription with PayPal, which--of course--handled the conversion to British Pounds seamlessly.  I found out about Murky Depths from an article I read online at SFScope, to whose RSS feed I subscribe, and through my feed reader, Bloglines, I read articles when the reader tells me there's something new.

Trite tech commentary aside, the whole world really is right outside my door, on the other end of the Internet pipe, etc.  And with everything else going on here and around the world, I still wouldn't trade living in this time for any other.

So, go order that two pound Spanish Cheese Assortment from Amazon.com, have it delivered to your door, browse the art at the Met, and you better go pick up a sub to Murky Depths.

IF: Captain

Here's a quick sketch I did this afternoon of a mermaid guiding a sea captain through the storm.  Did this for Illustration Friday topic: captain.  It's a bit rough, but here you go.  Click the pic to see the detail/much larger version.

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Where do I think I will be in five years?

I posted my "Where will you be as an author in five years?" question here and on MySpace, and the first two comments on my blog on MySpace made me step back and take a second look at my own goals. 

The first comment from Lorraine C. Ladish was more along the lines of my own response, a general view of the future with some details sprinkled in, but then WriterGal76 commented with twelve very specific goals, including, "submit a book-length collection to the Yale Series of Younger Poets" and "teach a college course in poetics or literary novels/analysis and any other aspect or form of creative writing."

So, I went back and rewrote my follow-up post to be somewhere between Lorraine's and WriterGal76's level of specificity.

I'll start by saying that the one thing I don't see me having more of in the next five years is time.  Always need more time.

I know I can complete at least one novel a year for I don't know how many years.  I have enough ideas, outlined novels, first three chapters of stories to last me a decade.  I come up with several story ideas worth pursuing every year, so I'm set for a long long while.  Again, it's that time thing that will always get in the way.   

I've created a few fiction writing lessons for my own kids called Saturday Morning Writing Club, but teaching or participating on the panel side of a writing workshop would be something new and fun.

I will continue to go to conventions, even more than I do now.  I can't see myself ever missing Boskone or Readercon unless something more urgent comes up, but I'd like to take in more cons, world and regionals.  I don't know how things might change.  I mean, right now, I'm like, OMG!--no way, there's Elizabeth Bear!  Okay, I don't say OMG, but it is really cool to see authors walking around, talking to fans, talking about their experiences.

I would love to win an award, say a Hugo.  Just one, thank you.

I will continue to draw and paint, and I'm going to work on a graphic novel or three over the next five years.  Has to happen.

Movies?  Yes, lots of them, my stories turned into screenplays and big screen productions, red carpets, tuxedos...Really, I'd be overjoyed to get an option or two in the next five.

I want to see my novels translated and published all over the world.

I've made one novel, Nanowhere--a YA thriller, available for free reading and downloading (CC licensed), and I can see myself doing it again.  I've already written a short story that I plan to post for free when my novel Seaborn is released sometime in 2008.  Also planning a short graphic version of the story.

There's my list. Where's yours?

www.lorrainecladish.com
http://www.myspace.com/writergal76
http://www.myspace.com/the0phrastus
http://www.elizabethbear.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award

Your writing future

Writers look into your futurescopes and tell me what you see? 

Where do you see yourself in five years?  Another two, three, four novels completed, a whole new series, short stories, anthologies, awards, movie options or whole movies made from your stories and premiered by then?  Do you see yourself entering new genres or focusing only on one?  Agent changes, publisher changes? Any unexpected turns in your writing career? 

Where will you be as an author in five years?

I have to think about this myself.  I'll follow up with a post on where I think I'm going.

breastsummer

This week's theme at Wordsmith.org A.Word.A.Day is red-herring words, and today's word is:

breastsummer

It's not a word with which I'm familiar, and my first impression was that it was going to be something sunnier, more uplifting, maybe even with a nice tan. 

breastsummer (BRES-sum-uhr, BREST-, BRES-e-muhr) noun; A horizontal beam supporting a wall over a large opening, such as a shop window.

A bit of a let down, really.