Uncategorized

I’ll be having another free giveaway weekend for the first book in the series, Origins on June 12th and 13th.  I’ll post about it again once the giveaway has gone live.  This will be the second giveaway weekend for Origins, and I’ll still have one day left that I can use after that, so I’ll do a one day giveaway next month as well.

Yesterday I was writing, and the group was just walking through the woods trying to get to the next village, and it occurred to me how boring that would be, so I had Jarrod ask Derek to tell everyone a joke.  The funny part is, the joke he told is actually one I dreamed up one night.  I was laying in bed in a sort of a lucid dreaming state, and this joke ran through my head just completely out of nowhere.  I woke up with the punchline solidly locked in my brain, but then I had to remember the rest of the joke, which I eventually did.

Now here’s the funny part.  Not only was the joke completely original, but…I didn’t get it.  Honestly, somehow I came up with a joke that I didn’t get!  Now here’s the really funny part.  I told it to my wife and she actually explained it to me, and when she did I was like, “OH DUH!!!” *insert facepalm here*

That was actually one of two times that that’s happened to me.  I actually started out having him tell the other joke, but it wasn’t as funny and didn’t work as well, so I switched.

Anyway, it stuck with me, so I threw it in there.  At least a couple of the characters got it, so it didn’t fall totally flat, but still… 😉

So a couple of days ago I installed some caching and security plugins on the server that runs both this site and the film magazine I run called Rogue Cinema.  Rogue was just recently converted over to WordPress, and this site’s been running on it since the beginning.  Well after I installed the plugins on both sites, I started having problems with them.  Everything from forbidden messages to nothing more than a directory listing.  It wasn’t even anything that was reproducible, which made it even more frustrating.  Everything would run fine, and then boom, it would start doing it for no apparent reason.  A restart of the server software would get it working again for a while, but then later, it would start all over again.

I spent the last two days cleaning out the databases of all the old options, getting rid of file system locks, cleaning up .htaccess files and everything else I could think to do, but nothing seemed to work.  Finally I gave up and upgraded both the web server software and PHP to their current versions, which was a total pain because the Apache upgrade was a major revision, so I had to comb through all the config files making sure I had all the settings there that needed to be there, and I had to do that for PHP as well.

The long and the short of it is, after two days of massive frustration, I think I finally have it fixed now.  I’m crossing my fingers anyway, but it seems to be running ok.  Now I can finally get back to my writing.

My apologies for the downtime.  I was experimenting with some security plugins for WordPress and was having some really serious problems with them.  I’ve stopped using the last one I tried now, so hopefully there won’t be any more down time.  Crossing my fingers anyway. 😛

I’ve added a newsletter subscription to the official website.  You’ll see it over on the right side in a widget right below the search widget.  You can subscribe if you’d like updates about book releases as well as contests and such.  So if you’d like to keep up with the series and know what’s going on, go ahead and subscribe.  Everything is local to the official site, so your e-mail address will go no further, nor will it be used for any other purpose.

Here’s a stupid little fact. “The Creators” race in the Unseen Things series are called the Zethichtalarin. I wanted to give them a funky name so I could kinda use it as joke in the books that it was so hard to say, which I did. However, I kinda screwed myself over, because I can never remember how to spell it, so every time I use their true name in one of the books, I actually have to copy and paste it from a text file I have where I keep a list of the different races. It’s a pain, but it’s also kinda funny. 🙂