December 21, 2008, 8:49 pm : Sailor the Dog Makes the Front Page

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Cool! My writing partner, Sailor the Dog, made the Cafe Press holiday front page in the Yellow Lab category, with this little goodie, that also comes in a smaller size and has a matching mug for humans:

December 12, 2008, 9:35 am : Boomersaurus is extinct…

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Ok, so I knew all along it couldn’t last forever, just thought maybe a little longer. A little over a year ago, a virus did a bit of nerve damage regarding my vocal chords. I worked with a marvelous speech pathologist who brought me back a long way - unfortunately a five hour show is out of the question. Thing is, I did 90% of the vocals for Boomersaurus. The band guys decided they didn’t want to find another singer, so after a long hiatus, we decided to furl the flag.
Boomersaurus.com will be intact for a little bit yet, then will live on only in the Way Back Machine.

October 26, 2008, 1:26 pm : Realistic Characters - REALLY Realistic

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Every day something new comes at me from the websphere that I hadn’t thought of (and me a strategic kind of guy). Today is certainly no exception.

I write a lot of stuff that has corporate executives at the core of the story. OK, not too uncommon in these times. The place it gets interesting is that a number of my “executives” and even their companies are starting to show up in on-line business directories. Damien Grade, Chairman of Damien Holdings; Geoffrey Fynch, CEO of BeriCraft Aviation and Hugo Spengler, CEO and Head of Security for Acolytica all showed up this morning while I was doing an unrelated Google search. Can Patrick Donleavy, Vice President of Davis/Utley be next? (Stage aside: all of the “Spenglers” from Ghostbusters Inc also showed up in the same business directory with Hugo.)

Every one of my pages contains a “fiction” disclaimer. Apparently these directory scraper programs haven’t been trained to read disclaimers. Who knows, after my organizations and executives show up in enough directories I can set up some IPOs.

Ron

September 6, 2008, 8:10 am : Learn to Write A Friggin’ Synopsis

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Jeeze Laweeze! Again it’s been forever since anything new has appeared on this page. Why? Is Ron one lazy SOB or what? Nope! Probably the opposite. But being the guy that I am, I’m going to lay the blame specifically on [somebody else]. It’s all about that last post, wa-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay back on the 30th of May. That darned deadline. That June First Deadline!

So, Ron – I can hear you asking this question – why did you wait until the day before the deadline to get started?

Ha! I have an answer. Because the day of the deadline I had other stuff to do. Like commute 100 miles to work – barefoot – in the snow – uphill both ways. [OK that last part is Bovine Scatological material, it’s only partly uphill both ways.]

Anyway, that day in fourteen hours of hell taught me an important lesson. I’ve got to get faster at making stuff up. [Better yet to take one of Pam McCutcheon’s synopsis classes.]

To top it off, that fourteen-hour exercise showed me that I did indeed have some holes in the story. Nothing major, but the synopsis exercise coupled with a conversation I had at Pikes Peak Writers Conference with a major thriller-writer-guy planted the seed of a new plot line to make the story a lot more interesting. Bottom line is that the entry went in as is and the next morning I began a massive rewrite on the project. [We’ll ignore the fact that I’d told an agent a few weeks earlier “You bet, done and all ready to go.”]

Three hundred rewritten pages later, the manuscript was “in the mail.” [email whew!] I have a new book underway, and ten minutes to update my blog.

ttfn, Ron

May 30, 2008, 6:40 pm : How to HATE a Book!

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I never thought I’d say this. I LOVE to read, I’m surrounded by books in my office and throughout my house. But in the past 14 hours, I’ve grown to hate a book. The tough part is that it’s one of MY books.  I’m getting it ready for the Colorado Gold contest, so I won’t say anything about the book except that I HATE IT!

Why, you ask? This book has been “done” for a while. I’m doing a little bit of tweaking, but hey, you know how it is. A writer can make a project last FOREVER if he (or she) wants to. My marvelous critique group (Nancy, Vicki, Mike, Rick, Jodie, Claire, Charlie, Dave, et al) have ripped it to shreds for rebuilding a number of times. It’s hot! It’s ready!

Now I need an 8 page synopsis. Therein, the discovery of how to hate a book. OK, so I shouldn’t have waited this close to deadline. My BAD. OK, you never, ever try to come up with a finished work on first draft. (OK, I do it hundreds of times a year. I LIVE for FINAL first drafts. - Maybe THAT’s why I don’t have a Maserati in my driveway.) Knocking out a synopsis in one sitting is not only STUPID, it’s INSANE. At the end of page 1, I felt good. Still going strong at three and four. THEN OMG! How can I call this a [genre censored] when it doesn’t have a [scene description appropriate to genre] scene in chapter 22. It’s gotta have it. The book is RUINED without it. Each word I typed in the synopsis made me hate this terrible, worthless book even more.

Then I came up with a solution. I got up. I put my computer into hibernate mode. I reached for a glass, some ice, and that bottle with all the red wax around the top.

I’m cooking!

ttfn, rlc

 

April 20, 2008, 12:41 am : Where the Hell… Episode Three

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Where we find out how Darth Vader came to be… sorry, wrong story.

Yes, I’m freakin’ allergic to antihistimines. Ain’t that a drag? When I have a serious reaction, I have two available meds. An Epi-pen, which is a spring loaded syringe of ephinepherine that hurts like hell, and prednisone. Predisone is a corticosteriod that works against allergic reactions by shutting down the immune system.

Huh?  Yep, shuts that sucker right down. All the little guys in there raisin’ hell and trying to kick the allergens out just go right to sleep.  Not a bad deal.

If you live in a bubble.

I work with a katrillion people in an office building with ventilation from Alcatraz. Somebody gets sick, everybody gets sick. Got any idea what happens to somebody on immunosuppressants - somebody with NO immune system - in an environment like that?

Pneumonia, with a capital PNEU, that’s what. So I see my doc, and she sends me to my allergist, who says - “let’s try Benadryl.  Nobody’s allergic to Benadryl.”

(to be continued)

April 12, 2008, 11:04 am : You Gotta Love Those Spiders

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You are so not going to believe this!  (wow, that sounds like my 25-year-old)

Internet search engines use programs called spiders to snoogle (how do you like that for a word?) around websites collecting information and building directories.  Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and a kazillion other web indexes use the little bugs.  Anyone who uses the internet for marketing should use these search engines frequently to establish the depth of your brand penetration.

Among the items I Google and Yahoo on a regular basis is “ron chalice” which normally returns 7,500 or so pages that reference my brand.  (I use the double quotes around “ron chalice” so I don’t get 356,000 pages about cups.) Today I stumbled across a new one that just started a rolling giggle.

There is an online business directory called Hot Frog. (The name comes from the old adage that if you toss a frog into a hot skillet he’ll jump out. If you put him in a cold one and turn on the heat, he’ll stay in the skillet until he cooks. — Kind of describes a groundswell marketing effort.)

Anyway, HotFrog.com lists RonChalice as a business — OK with me. The chuckle comes when they list my “products” — in the following order:

Cops
Fiction
God
Thriller
Writer

 

If that’s not enough, Hot Frog lists God as a “product”.  I show up on page 8 as a place to find “God”.

April 11, 2008, 6:13 pm : Where the Hell… part deux

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Before I continue with the story, check out my new bio page — just click up in the right corner — up a little higher, there you go — where it says “About Ron Chalice.”  We’ll return after the word from our sponsor. 

The story continues…

It never pays to be in a hurry. Before I get to the end of this page, you’ll probably hear that again. I have some allergies. Most are the normal kind, pollen, dust, nuclear waste and such. But then I’m also allergic to onions. Have you ever tried to AVOID ONIONS? Most of the time, I’m pretty good at it. I’m, uh, motivated. You see, onions make me stop breathing. Breathing is motivation — and after the last few months, not nearly as overrated as I thought it was.

So I’m in a hurry, coming out of one meeting and on my way to another. Yeah, you’ve been there. I pop in my work cafeteria and grab a sandwich, and yell at the deli guy.  “This have any onions?”

“Nah, only the wraps.  The sandwiches never do.”

One word in that response was very important, when taken in context. Never. They NEVER do.

I unwrapped it, opened the top just to be sure and — pause for suspense — what you you think I saw.

FRESH, JUICY, JUST-SLICED RED ONIONS!

So I did the smart thing.  I took it back and told him to make me another one, from scratch.  That’ll be the day. Remember, I’m late for a meeting here. A meeting about somebody’s television programs - can’t get much more important than that.

RIGHT!

So I take off the onions, and a couple of pieces of lettuce for good measure and take a bite.

(Did he really say TAKE A BITE? Your mind is wondering.)  YES, I TOOK A BITE!

Did I tell you I was allergic to onions?  Did I tell you I stop breathing?

So, what normal people do when they have an allergic reaction is to take antihistimines.

Did I tell you I was allergic to antihistimines?

(to be continued…)

March 25, 2008, 6:30 am : Where the Hell Have You Been?

Filed Under: Miscellany
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Ok, most people did put it a little more politely than that. The last few months have been a challenge. Heck, it might even be something to write about. Not nearly as funny as the dog-broken ribs or the cookie-broken foot, but maybe somebody will get a chuckle.

Vaguely related to the cookie incident, by way of involving food, the latest travails began in mid-October last year, with a couple drops of onion juice…

(to be continued…)

December 3, 2007, 7:39 pm : A Pleasant Surprise While Buying Books - Robert Spiller!

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As I wandered through my neighborhood Barnes and Noble - with one of MY books on the shelf by the way - a familiar voice said “what are you doing here?”  The voice belonged to Robert Spiller, a YA author from Colorado Springs, at the store for a signing of his second book A Calculated Demise (Medallion).  How could I not walk away with a signed tome?  However, being the sort of person who begins at the beginning, the book I took home was Bob’s first novel, The Witch of Agnesi.  Robert has a wonderful way of combining mathematics and math history as ways to solve mysteries.

I urge you to visit Bob at http://www.rspiller.com and see what he’s all about.  Good writer and a great guy.  He is the Director of Youth Programs for Pikes Peak Writers, and has some great ideas surging from that head of his.