Tag: humor

Chris James Announces New Release

Indies Unlimited contributing author Chris James is pleased to announce the release of his new comedy/picture book The B Team and Me, or How five adorable puppies nearly ruined my life.

The B Team and Me

When a struggling writer reluctantly agrees to give a home to a stray dog, he gets far more than he bargained for. The dog gives birth to a litter of pups that turn the writer’s life upside down and threaten to ruin him.

A hilarious comedy-picture book that shows five cute, adorable puppies as you’ve never seen puppies before!

Chris says that he was encouraged to take a break from writing his current science fiction novel by two Twitter friends, “When my dog had the puppies in the spring, I put up a few jokey blog posts with pictures and these friends suggested I publish them in a book. At first I thought that copy-and-pasting the posts into a book would be unfair, in that I would charge people for something I’d previously been happy to give away, but then I realised that I could take the idea one step further. I created characters, a proper story arc, then sifted through the hundreds of pictures I’d taken of the pups, so the reader not only gets a funny short story of the chaos the pups cause, but also over 50 of the best photographs I took.”

Although the humour is a little racy in places, Chris believes The B Team and Me would make the perfect gift for animal lovers and anyone who has a soft spot for cute, adorable puppies.

The B Team and Me is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK, and in print from Lulu. In addition, Chris decided to put this book into Amazon’s KDP Select programme, something he’s always said he’d never do with his books, and he is now wondering what the appropriate dressing is that one should have when one eats one’s own words.

A Failure to Communicate

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

Everyone knows that readers have subject preferences. Not everyone will like a story even if it is very well written. It is not literary failure if someone doesn’t like your story because they don’t like that kind of story. It is failure if a reader normally likes the kind of story you wrote, but doesn’t like yours. They don’t have a beef with the editing or the grammar or the genre or even the idea of the story—they just did not like what you wrote or the way you wrote it.

Where most writing fails, it does so because the original idea of the story the author wished to convey to the reader gets lost in translation.

Remember that writing is one form of communication. There are four parts to communication in writing: Continue reading “A Failure to Communicate”

Of Knights and Knaves – by Perry Wilson

Author Perry Wilson

I like a good debate. There’s nothing better than challenging assumptions over a bottle of wine. What I like most about it is that you walk away afterward and the discussion can be over. Not so on the old Interweb. Things can get crazy when people polarize around an argument. Take the argument for, or against, traditional publishing.

What does it look like?

A knight stands at a fork in the road. His armor is dented, some of it hanging by hinges. He holds a nicked and rusty sword.

Approaching the knight is a man dressed in running gear, black spandex running pants, the latest running shoes and a sweat wicking tee shirt with ‘best seller’ scrawled across the chest in permanent marker. He comes to an abrupt stop as the knight raises the sword. Continue reading “Of Knights and Knaves – by Perry Wilson”

9 Signs Accredited Online Colleges are Out of Control

In case you missed it (and there is a good chance you did), a blog called Accredited Online Colleges ran a little article called 9 Signs Self-Publishing is Out of Control. I am firmly of the belief that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, even when that opinion is stupid and completely wrong.

This article begins with these well-balanced lines: “To paraphrase the immortal words of Truman Capote, there’s a difference between writing and typing. And, to put it gently, we can say with a good amount of confidence that most self-published books were typed, not written. Because communicating with letters assembled into words is a skill most learn by the age of 5, and because written communication has become so ubiquitous in American life, everyone now thinks he’s a writer.”

Why, with such impervious reasoning as that, one might also wonder if anyone with a computer now thinks he’s a blogger. I won’t quote anything further from the article (the link is there if you’d like to have a look). Neither will I conduct a line-by-line vivisection of the deeply flawed reasoning put forth in the article, tempting as that may be.

I do find it fairly dripping with irony. Here the anonymous author takes exception to the technology that has allowed the Philistines to call themselves authors. Presumably, the author is all right with the same technology when put to the purpose of creating accredited online colleges. Yet, the preponderance of the author’s arguments can be applied equally against accredited online colleges. All of this begs the question: Are accredited online colleges out of control? (McNally, did you notice I capitalized after the colon there?) The sad answer to this question is an unqualified yes.

9 Signs Accredited Online Colleges are Out of Control Continue reading “9 Signs Accredited Online Colleges are Out of Control”