A little tongue-in-cheek at 5:30 am on April 23.

So the agent says, “300 sales wouldn’t even pay for my morning latte.” OK, probably true. But it might have done something for the 300 people who bought the book that a decade’s worth of Venti half-caf-half-decaf-two-percent-low-cal-hazelnut lattes could never do.

Bogart once said “you got a message, send a telegram.” That was before lightning fast world-wide communications and the freakin’ Xerox Docutech laser printer.

Go for it, Lisa!

ttfn, rlc

For someone who spends hours in a car every day, audio books weigh in right up there with the microprocessor in the advancements of the 20th century. I listen to at least one every week, sometimes two.  A lot of my driving is late-night from Colorado Springs to the northern Denver Metro area, and the first thing I learned about late night audio books is that “literature” doesn’t cut it. Yes the words can be beautiful, engrossing sirens that pull you into the world the author has created – right off the freakin’ side of the road!

Gimme Action! Give me a complex plot and a lot of things that keep my brain cranking along throuht the winding highway through Monument Hill.

Coben is GREAT at that. Ok his first couple of audio books were self-narrated (hmmmm, ‘nuf said) but this guy Scott Brick is a true master of his craft. Coben always has an array of important characters, many more than most of the genre I feel, and Brick is able to bring each of them a unique and highly identifiable audio personality. [Stage aside: A fellow Colorado writer, Charlie Callaway, once asked Coben how he kept all the complex details of his stories so well organized, and Coben's response was a nine-word classic I will remember forever - "I just do, don't know how, I just do."]

OK, I can read your minds. What does this have to do with your opening line? How the freak did Coben break your heart?

I just finished The Woods, saw a lot of myself in Ira by the way, and in the middle of all this great action, intrigue and deception Coben hangs up on the concept of hayseeds. OK at first I thought, yeah it’s just Lauren Muse’s personality. Then over a period of a couple chapters everbody in the freakin’ book is talking about hicks and hayseeds and open space.

C’mon Harlan – Newark for crap’s sake.  Indianapolis has a Newark, Akron has a Newark. Even Denver has a Newark (we call it Commerce City, but the distinctive aroma is the same.) But what the hell, I guess there’s a lot of that going on lately.  The people in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado only produce food. No big deal. Duh, New Yorkers, even the food in DELI TAKEOUT comes from somewhere!

The people in Wyoming and Texas provide fuel for the SUVs jammed into the spaces on Lex between 24th and Gramercy Park (and who knows how many parking garages).  Ok, not sure I understand the need for off-road vehicles in Manhattan, but what the hey, I’m a hick.

Boomersaurus.com will be intact for a little bit yet, then will live on only in the Way Back Machine.

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

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

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

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)

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”.