Monday, June 30, 2014

Posting my titles on Google Play or what the heck am I doing?

Yeah I found the page to list my links but I am not sure how to market these.  Google play is basically a way for those who read on their phones to access amazing new titles (like mine) to read on their google phones.  So I have doing my best to figure out how to market over here

.To Save Face or Family, a novel on Google Play





So far I have only two of my titles up but I hope to have the rest up by the end of July.  Not the simplest thing to do but the more places people can buy my work the better.  In fact as a shock I found I had two sales over on the Kobo Writers Life page.  I don't get a lot of sales on Kobo and in the past year the majority of them were titles on my D2D or Smashwords books, so it was nice to see.  So if you can go check out my titles on GooglePlay

Monday, June 23, 2014

Alone: an Acrostic poem | Lisa Williamson | Sad | Poem | Storyenet.com

Alone: an Acrostic poem | Lisa Williamson | Sad | Poem | Storyenet.com

Look what I got for my anniversary?

Yup I have been happily married now for four years.  My sweet hubby decided when he was in Toronto for business to pick me up a new little kit to put together.  If you had told me four years ago that I would actually be happy to receive a gundam to put together i would have given you the old stink eye but these guys are actually kinda fun to put together.

Now this little kit was on the easy side for me.  As you can imagine after building these for the past year with the hubby I am getting better at them.  I didn't need any help putting it together and managed to do it in about an hour(ish). This was one of the simpler kits I have done and I actually didn't mind that at all.  As you can see by the photos, he is a zaku style SD in green with some fun pop on armor...and I do mean pop on.He was very simple to put together with a minimum of stickers and joints.  Mostly a pop me together little guy.






Not the best pics I have taken but well you can see that he is a little guy.  That is the salt shaker from my dinning room table next to him.  He is just about four inches tall and he has this huge battle axe that makes him almost tip over when you put it into his hand.  Simple, silly but sweet, IMO.  I enjoyed taking a break from being a mom and baker to make him.  Hopefully next week I will finally sit down and work on the 1/144 models that Fox set aside for me.  One of them is so old that we have to actually use glue with it.  And that is why it isn't done yet.  That glue gives me a headache pretty quick.

So enjoy my little friend here and hopefully soon i will have some more...and of course someday soon I will do a little action battle type photo series of my little guys playing.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Read a biography or hey I do read other stuff!

During the past week or so I have of course read a lot of things.  From my usual fantasy to paranormal romance to a biography...yes I said a biography.

See we had a day where storms rolled through and power was very iffy.  What is a woman to do but pick up an actually hardcover that has been sitting around on the shelf since I moved to Canada.

That book was I am Jackie Chan.  Yup that Jackie Chan.  See my hubby is a huge fan of the man, as am I.  We all know his amazing movies and I used to own some of his earlier works before i moved to Canada.  So I thought, what the heck and i dove into the book.

It is filled with lots of photographs from his life and it is told from his point of view. You learn all abut his growing up in Hong Kong and in one of the troops of the Chinese Opera.  Now this tale really starts in 1956 when his parents signed him over to the school he was to spend the next ten years at. Times were very different as was the world he was living in.  Mr Chan was not a scholarly child, a bit of a brat by his own telling and a boy who needed to move. 

The school he entered was a very harsh one.  In the world of today he would have been considered abused horribly by the school and his parents would have been brought up on charges but in China at this time they were doing there best to give him a chance at a better life.

While the book needs the steady hand of a good co-writer and editor to match today's standards, this book is actually quite enthralling.  You find yourself gasping in horror and rooting for the young Jackie and saddened at times by the losses in his life and cheering at the good things.  Unlike reading fiction, this book it true.  The master actor/comedian/stuntman and more lived this life and this book makes you believe it.  It is a snapshot of a world that very few know of.

I am told that the book out there now is very different from the copy I have.  It has been rewritten and edited but I wonder if it lost the feel of reality that this copy has?  Sometimes editing and rewriting should be avoided.  This book is one man's view of his life, from a point of view very different than the westerners who read it.  This westerner felt that disconnect but still could not put down the book.  It is a great read and made me glad i knew these things about a very fine man.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Re-reading a master

While I have spent a lot of time reading the new and amazingly talent crop of indie authors out there, I do from time to time, pull out some of the older fiction.  Over the past week I have been working my way through Roger Zelanzy's Chronicles of Amber books.

Now anyone who knows these series, knows that it is one of the very best written bits of fiction out there.  There is political intrigue, back biting, fantasy creatures, magic of a type not commonly seen, religion and a whole lot of other things that make series great.

The first five books of this series are from the point of view of Corwin of Amber.  One of a dozen or more brothers and sisters who are heirs to the throne of Amber, which is the center of all reality.  It starts off with him not knowing who he is and we are taken through a lot of ups and downs and confusion as he learns who he is, where he belongs and just who should be the kind of Amber.

He father is missing, the magician who was both tutor and master of the courts is rumored to be mad and is also missing.  Everything to drag you along into a world that is rich and well written.

While it has been well over a decade since I last read the series I found myself pulling for Corwin and really interested yet again in the mechanization that the brothers and sisters go through in these books. There are parts that drag to me and they did drag in the first reading way back when but they don't distract from a masterful telling of these interconnected books.  If you are a fan of fantasy you really should pick up these books and read them.  There is a reason that he was considered a master and this book series is it.

Now I am currently reading the second series of the Amber books.  This time the main character is Merlin, Corwin's son.  We met him literally at the end of the first series of books and here we find that Merlin is facing a lot of the same things that his father did.  There are forces outside of Amber this time that want to destroy the kingdom and we get to meet other relatives that we did not know about before.  It seems that this family is more twisted than even the family we see on Game of Thrones.  So folks, do yourself a favor, pick up all ten books and settle back for a wild ride through Shadow.