Writing is a Personality-Based Skill

For skills (and hobbies, etc) there are two types: Ones that rely on the base of the skill, and the other on someone's personality.

Steve is a lumberjack.

He chops wood with his bare hands.

Steve has a very warm personality with a hint of self-depreciating humor in the form of sarcasm. Now, can he chop wood warmly? Or sarcastically? No. You can't apply personality to the skill of lumberjacking.

Ellen is a hopeless romantic with a love of cowboys and Irish Wolfhounds.

Who doesn't love dogs that can eat entire sheep?

Ellen's personality is going to factor into her writing in big ways. Even if she's not writing romance books she'll be writing, say, murder mysteries with elements of romance and maybe modern cowboys who are the love interests of plucky heroines who own massive Irish Wolfhounds.

There are more obscure skills, but the fluffy ones (painting, music, arts and crafts) are going to be personality-based whereas industrial (plumbing, electrician) aren't generally. There are some blurred lines (carpentry, clothing) but you should get the picture.

Why bring this up? Because along with personality affecting your writing, it will also affect your writing habits, which I will bring up next. Consider this the introductory post to the upcoming one.

The "Everyone is Pirating my Book" Freebie Event!

I've Googled my book several times, and you know what I found?

Lots of people are pirating my book.

I know I'm not a special snowflake. In reality I recognize that Dusted is but a blip in the 31725744359543I3436819436 other books also being pirated (a number so large that I bet you didn't even notice I threw a letter in there, eh?) But I've always not only recognized the fact that Dusted would be pirated, I am entirely comfortable with it thanks to two people.

Cory Doctorow (Ye Olde Lorde of Ye Internete) has offered his book, Little Brother, for free ever since it was released over six years ago. He provides a compelling reason on his website for it that I have followed in much the same vein.

Neil Gaiman, meanwhile, started out as a grump about piracy but, after a few experiments in giving away one of his books for free, now sees it in a new light. The details are in this video (which is 4:30 for you time-sensitive types.)

The information and opinions in both links are ones I have followed closely in my own writing. Dusted is as DRM as I can possibly make it while selling through Amazon, and I have made the price of my book as cheap as it will allow while offering freebie events.

If I were guarenteed the safety of various websites that have pirated copies of Dusted, I would actually provide links (remember, kids, nothing is ever truly free)

They have Smarties and M&M's, and Twizzlers, and fun size Twix, and...

Probably the most legit one would be Lendle. Which sort of "cheats" in how it pirates. Instead of allowing a free download it lets you list which books you own and people can lend each other Kindle books from there. I discovered it through Googling Dusted.

Don't feel like going through shady, back-alley websites so that you can finally get your fix for YA urban fantasy-comedy?

I tried looking for a picture with the word "shady" but I just get getting Eminem so, following logic, he... pirates copies of my book?

Luckily, Dusted will be free this weekend starting May 23rd and going through May 26th, Get It Here!

Happy pirati- er reading!

Get a Free Book From a Local Author!

Hello readers! I've come out of my hidey-hole of posting every ten days (a schedule that is working out beautifully, I might add) to tell you about a local author!

S.M. is a someone that I discovered only a couple of days ago. Her novella, The Circus in Me will be available for free May 17th, you can get it Here! Don't forget to write a review, us wee indie authors need reviews!

Here's the book description from Amazon:

The Circus in Me confronts a girl’s outcast journey. Amish to the bone, born and bred to be as such, Tracey Aliza discovers a magical land outside of her traditional community. On a quest for solitude amongst the vagabonds. She comes as a drifter transforming into a better version of oneself called by the name Trae Lae.

Outside the safety of confinement Trae Lae learns hands-on experiences being an adult in modern society. Struggles to let the past remain behind her she concentrates on performing as part of the team. Back and forth motions bring her to a whole new level of acceptance. College in due course calls to her. Off she flees to the next adventure on the map marked with an X.

Welcome to BYU-Idaho! A Mormon college located on the southeastern region of the great potato state. Trae Lae traces a path in-between a religion she was forced to vacate and another indulging her capacity to a newfound faith that contradicts her soul further. The journey grimy and gray toward the new beginning of endearment. On a mounting podium to seize control of the wild beast conformity. She becomes an acquaintance of a young man by the name of Briggs who is also in torment of historical demons. Their lives intertwine into courses neither of them accused as possible. One girl’s bonnet for another man’s briefs. Do our conclusions meet requirements previously posted? Turn the pages to find out if Trae Lae and Briggs can find a way out of fate’s fortitude. With every whimsical there is a wish, with every star there is a shine, where there is a shunned Amish girl there is bonnet about to be burned.


You can also check out Bjarnson's blog. 

The Deckle Edge

I love books.

I can hear your blatant sarcasm, you know.

What I mean to say is that I love books. The actual, physical being of them. I love that there's an entire world closed up into one little orthotope, that they come in different sizes, that they often have beautiful pictures on the cover. I can spend a long time just shelving and reshelving books until I get the "feng shui" of them just right.

I let a hipster and a New Age woman battle for the honor of being my feng shui picture. She choked the hipster to death with a string of beads.

Because of my love of books I like to learn lots of little things about them. I know why there are those little backwards-counting numbers on the copyright page (it has to do with the edition number, in case you're too lazy to look it up and want a quick, glossed over answer), and how there is a difference in the binding of hardbacks.

I learned only recently about something called the deckle edge.

It started with looking at different formats for Andrea Cremer's Nightshade I noticed the hardback edition specified deckle edge. Curious, I looked it up. Here's an image as well as some text stolen from Wikipedia, because I'm not in school anymore and can be as lazy as I want with my sources.

I will, however, provide a link for the lazy-but-curious reader.

In manual papermaking, a deckle is a removable wooden frame or "fence" placed into a mould to keep the paper slurry within bounds and to control the size of the sheet produced. After the mold is dipped into a vat of paper slurry, excess water is drained off and the deckle is removed and the mold shaken or "couched" to set the fibers of the paper. Some of the paper slurry passes under the deckle and forms an irregular, thin edge.

The Wiki continues saying that, as technology progressed, the cutting of paper became much easier and cost-effective. However, suddenly deckle edges became "fancy", making people think it was made with a higher-quality paper or was more "Artisan" in its craft. These days machines are built specifically to reproduce the old-timey deckle edge in books, though uninformed people believe deckle edges on their books means the book was made cheaply, or the printing process was defective. For a long time I thought some of my deckle edge books were defective, until I started seeing a lot more of them, then I started to think publishers were getting cheaper with their printing process, resulting in crappily-cut paper. But it's worse...much worse.

They're hipster books.

The hipster recovered, because dying is too mainstream.

Knowing what I do now, I'm still not a fan of deckle edge, and have actually waited for certain books to come out in paperback in order to avoid the deckle edge hardbacks. I just feel like, with their rough edges, they'd be more prone to tearing. Still, it's good to know there's a reason.