Welcome Fellow Scrivener Users

Nathan Makan via Compfight

Scrivener mentioned my blog posts about their software on Twitter yesterday and I got a ton of visitors. Thank you Scrivener for the mention! If you are new around here as a result of that, welcome to my humble little blog.

This blog has many fine articles on writing and using programs like Scrivener, so if you enjoy that kind of thing, I hope you’ll come back on a regular basis. I also talk about my kid’s sports a bit depending on the season. Sometimes I also blog about Open Source programs and my habitual use of Linux. Those posts can get kind of nerdy. I use a MacBook that runs Ubuntu and Mac OS, so I swing both ways. I’m chained to Windows at my day job, so I use it all.

Mostly I post about some aspect of writing as it relates to my own fiction. I try and post about three times a week. Usually they are more interesting and useful than this particular welcome mat.

 

Platform Plans

My evil plans to never use Facebook or Twitter from their respective websites is coming together. All my social networking will be conducted via my blog and Seesmic. The current wisdom about your weblife is to concentrate on a central location. For me, that will be my website. I own the domain and I control what goes on the server. I run my own copy of WordPress and MySQL. I repost my tweets to the website, so I can always go back and pull out whatever I said on Twitter, years from now. My blog posts are sent to Twitter and Facebook and if anyone comments back to them, they are captured in my blog database.

Seesmic is a web based social network client that I use to make Tweets and FB posts. But don’t look for me on Facebook just hanging out and playing games or giving updates on my life. Life’s too short to hang out on the computer all the time. I’m too involved with my kids and my writing community. But if you post to Facebook and I feel the need to comment, I will.

Anyway, all of this leads me to concentrate on the blog and website. Which hopefully will get updated more and perhaps people will comment directly on my blog from Facebook. If you want to keep up with my poignant comments on life and writing, you should be following me on Twitter. Or at least checking in to this blog and looking at my Twitter comments off to the right hand side of the blog.

My goal is to try and blog two to three times a week here at the website. My Twitter posts will probably be about that many per day, depending on what’s going on.

Blogger Contest, Win a FREE Book!

I have a new novel coming out next month in paperback.  You can go read it right now for free on Scribd.  It’s called Null_Pointer and it’s a mystery about a programmer who must figure out how someone is killing his fellow programmers with code.

In order to get people to read the book and start talking about it I’m offering a contest of sorts to bloggers.  If you have blog about books, preferably mystery books, or about technology, preferably about programming, you qualify to enter the contest.

You must first read the PDF of Null_Pointer and post a review of it on your blog.  If you can prove, via a link in the comments to this post, that ten (10) people have left comments on your post about the book, I will send you (the blogger) a free autographed paperback version of the novel for your troubles.  Everyone has at least ten friends who can post a comment to their blog, so no excuses.  Also, in case you didn’t realize it, this kinda helps out your blog too.  Cool that.

I have five (5) books available to send out.  So the first five bloggers that meet the criteria, get the books.  When they are gone, the contest is over.  There is no deadline to complete the requirements.  But in order to get the word out at the time of the book’s release, act soon.  Null_Pointer is a quick read, only just over 200 pages long, so there is no excuse not to read it sooner than later.  You can download the book at the link to Scribd above.

Here is a little glimpse of what you are getting.  The books are quite beautiful and sell for $12.96. (Click to enlarge)  ( This contest is only good for those who live in the continental United States.  I can’t go broke on postage, that would be uncool.)

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