I'm Interviewed by Eden Baylee

Eden Baylee

I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by author Eden Baylee. I've done several of these interviews and while I've enjoyed them all, I really enjoyed this one because Eden asked some of the toughest questions.

For example, how would you answer "What is your idea of perfect happiness?" Perfect happiness? Sheesh. I had to work on that answer alone for a month.

Thanks to Eden for asking the tough questions and featuring me on her blog.

Eden writes erotica and has published several books. HERE is her book page with buy links.

Review of "The Rose Hotel" by Rahimeh Andalibian

I recently finished reading a book titled "The Rose Hotel" by Rahimeh Andalibian. It's worthy of a review and post. 

The story begins in Iran shortly before the Islamic Revolution in the late-1970s and follows a family who owned a hotel called, you guessed it, The Rose Hotel, into the present time. Much has been written about Islam by both friends and foes since 9/11 and I thought this book might give me some insight into the life of an Islamic family unaffiliated with terrorism, or with what I think of as "militant" Islamic beliefs. It did and I'm glad I read it.

The family is thrown into turmoil when the oldest boy is arrested after the revolution and is sentenced to death for crimes he didn't commit. He's only sixteen. The grief and remorse his death causes traumatizes the family for a generation. 

The book details the family's journeys to England and the United States, how the parents face the challenge of their children becoming westernized, how the children deal with what happened to their older brother, and how they eventually realize they must face what happened together if they wanted to survive as a family.

At first I was a little annoyed that everything in this family's life revolved around the oldest boy, I mean everything. The mother nearly killed herself with grief and I am, frankly, surprised the parent's marriage survived considering the depth of her grief and the depth of the father's guilt. I would like to think that, God forbid, if something so tragic happened to my family we would find a way to move on quicker than the family in this book moved on. It nearly destroyed the parents marriage, drove one brother to drugs and another to reckless financial behavior, and caused many years of grief and, likely, illness, as chronic stress usually leads to illness.

But, I've never walked in their shoes and have no idea what it would be like to lose a child or loved one like that. He was taken from them unjustly and condemned by people who should have been honest and upheld the law.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, the eBook can be found on Amazon HERE, as can the paperback, which, oddly, if you don't mind a used copy, can cost less than the eBook.

I rate the book four stars out of five.

“Seven Dwarf Stories” Released!

I was privileged to be involved in an anthology for Twisted Core Press called "Seven Dwarf Stories"; a grown-up take on the 7 Dwarfs. I chose to write a character named “Medicus,” a twist on Doc.

It was an excellent mental exercise for me as I’ve never written anything in what I would call Old English (or what I hope was Old English).

It’s a terrific anthology with terrific authors. Take a minute to check it out! At least download the sample and give it a read.

In case you missed the link above:

Seven Dwarf Stories

Why I Bought a 27" iMac

From Apple.com

As I wrote in my last post, there was a time years ago when I considered getting one of those tiny Macintosh computers. The one with about a 9"-screen. (Here's one, supposedly still working!)

I was attracted to the machine because, I suppose, they were trendy. I was attending professional college in Sunnyvale, a couple of miles down Highway 280 from Apple Computer's home in Palo Alto, so I was right near the heart of Silicon Valley. It also fulfilled my fantasy of owning a portable computer. It wasn't a laptop, of course, but it looked light enough to pick up and carry to school. And there was that WYSWYG. Pretty cool stuff back then.

But practicality led me to buying what was called a "PC clone" back then. A no-name desktop computer put together in a rented storage room. This was followed by many years of buying new Windows machines when the old one no longer served our needs, or when I had the money and wanted to upgrade.

I've been a self-published writer for two years now and have written on Windows desktops, laptops, and an iPad. Drafts were printed on my trusty HP LaserJet 1320. I'm on my second 1320. After the first broke I bought a refurbished model for $120, with credit for the broken one I traded in. It's fast, reliable, and will print duplex.

I wrote my first two novels in Word 2003. Print versions were set in an old version of MicroSoft Publisher. I got my first iPad, an iPad 1, in early 2011. On the iPad I wrote mostly in iA Writer, which writes in .txt format only.

 I started my third novel in 2011 but didn't publish it until October 2012. By then I was working in Scrivener for Windows and no longer used Word except for uploading to some publishing sites. DEATH OF A MATADOR was written entirely in Scrivener for Windows. The ebooks were prepared using Scrivener, and turned out very nice. So nice that I went back and reformatted CANALS and THE MIGHTY T in Scrivener. 

Fast forward to March, 2013. I sold the license for an expensive piece of medical software, and because I didn't like the Dell laptop I'd bought in October 2012, I included that in the sale. (The software runs on Windows machines, not Mac.) Finding myself without a modern computer, I decided to get a Mac.

You'd think that a writer who enjoys writing in different settings, like cafes and libraries, would get one of the great Mac laptops, wouldn't you? But, I had gotten so used to hooking up an old Acer 22" monitor to my laptop that I couldn't bear going back to working solely on a tiny 15" screen.

I did my research online before making a trip up to the Apple Store in Murray, a fifty-minute drive to the north of us. I chose a 27" iMac. Here's why.

The new iMacs are gorgeous machines. So are Apple's lineup of laptops. Once you see one, and you've got the cash, you want one. I thought the 21" unit would be big enough for me, and it would have. I was already used to working on a 22" monitor. But the "little" iMac has two limitations I couldn't live with.

One, it's not possible for the average user to upgrade the RAM themselves. It comes with 8GB, which is okay for now, but two or three years down the road it might be barely okay. I keep my computers as long as I can. I could've ordered a 16GB model from Apple but it would've taken a couple of weeks to get it. Maybe longer. I was pretty sure I didn't have that kind of patience.

Two, it comes standard with a hard drive that spins at 5,400 rpm. It's a hard drive meant to be used in a laptop, not a sleek new desktop computer. I'll skip the discussion about the fusion drive Apple offers because it would have meant waiting two weeks.

The 27" iMac has user-upgradable RAM (I've already upgraded the RAM to 24GB) and a faster hard drive. Instead of fretting whether my old-fashion "spinning" hard drive is fast enough, I have enough RAM that I simply leave all the apps I use in memory, ready for instant use. 

It took a few weeks to get used to the huge screen. Menus on some programs have text so small I have some difficult reading it. Some programs can be customized, but most can't. 

I purchased Scriveners for Mac, which is a year or two ahead of their Windows version. I also downloaded and installed Bean as my general word processor. 

Scriveners for Mac will sync files in Dropbox, and will sync them as .rtf or .txt. This means I can use iA Writer, which will sync with Dropbox, on my iPad. Or I can use an editor that writes in .rtf, like Storyist. Storyist also syncs with Dropbox. 

Since I bought the big iMac, however, I haven't done any writing on the iPad. It's hard to tear myself away from the big gorgeous screen!

My 27" iMac

As you can see, I opted for the wired keyboard with the ten-key keypad (I already have a wireless Apple keyboard) and the Magic Trackpad instead of Apple's mouse. Using the trackpad all the time was giving me a nasty case of tendonitis so I plugged in my cheap MicroSoft USB mouse. The scrolling is awful on the mouse, the trackpad does great there, but it's much easier to edit pictures and click on tiny on-screen buttons with the mouse.

Am I happy I switched to Mac? So far I am. The iMac works seamlessly with my iPhone and iPad everything I've plugged into so far has worked without having to download a new driver. Windows XP was a hassle when it came to plugging in a new device. 7 was a little better, but not as easy as the iMac.

Now that I'm fairly used to my new computer, I've got to stop fiddling with it and get back to work writing and promoting my work!

Man I've had a lot of computers

I remember when I got my first computer, a Texas Instrument 99/4A. My dad got it for me for Christmas (I was a poor student then) for about $125 when TI was getting out of the computer business. It must have been in 1982 or 1983. Here’s a picture:

As you can see, it’s just a CPU with an attached-keyboard. I hooked it up to a 10-inch black and white TV and a standard tape recorder, so I could save stuff, and bought an Advanced C programing cartridge that plugged into the port on the upper right of the computer.

Learning to program on that little computer became my hobby. I wrote a program that simulated a basketball game. I bought a book that listed basketball statistics for the prior year, plugged the data into the program, and played ball. I had a blast but my wife didn't like it because I spent so much time on it.

But, that wasn’t my first experience with computers. While attending junior college in 1976 I took a “computer programming” class. All I can remember is lining up punch cards that got fed into a "computer." Ancient of days.

Then, in professional school, around 1984, I bought a PC with a twenty megabyte hard. Yes, you read that right. Megabyte, not gigabyte. I paid for it with student loan money and as I recall it cost about $1,200. I might be wrong. I remember debating getting the PC or a Mac. The Mac was cool looking but cost too much for my student budget and had only like an eight-inch screen. I bought the PC from a guy who put them together in a storage locker. Here’s what the IBM PCs looked like back then (mine was nowhere as fancy):

It had a 5¼-inch floppy disc drive and an amber monitor, which sat atop the gray metal box that held the computer’s guts. I had to have a printer, of course, so I picked up a Panasonic dot matrix printer with a box of pin-feed paper. It might have looked a little like this one, except I don’t remember it having so many buttons on the front:

The computer ran on DOS but I remember when my brother-in-law gave me a copy of Windows, I think version 1.2, on a floppy disc. I was fascinated by the graphical OS but it ran so slow it was useless to me. 

I used that computer until I went into practice for myself. When I started making a little money, I updated my own computer as well as the billing computer. The next computer I got was a Packard Bell, from Costco, which had just opened up in town. That was about 1991. I used the PB until it broke.

Next up was an all-in-one computer from a local store, in 1998. I needed something portable but didn’t want to shell out for the still-high price of a decent laptop. It had an LCD screen and ran Windows 95, and was one of the most reliable computers I’ve ever owned. It was fast, for those days, portable enough to take on the road when I did out-of-town treatments, and even had a USB port. I just barely threw that computer away.

The company I bought it from offered lifetime free labor. And they came through. They actually replaced my hard drive two years after I had bought the computer, a year out of warranty, for free. The guy who owned the store ran a bang-up business. He sold out to a guy who looted the business’s assets before fleeing to China.

Next was a Dell desktop I still own, running Windows XP. The fan has gotten loud but it’s served me well. I love the Dell keyboard from that time, about 2004. It has a nice click feeling.

After the Dell was an Acer laptop. I wrote most of my second book, THE MIGHTY T, on that computer. I still have it but haven’t turned it on for a few months. The WiFi hardly works and I somehow damaged the “V” key. 

I purchased a Dell laptop running Windows 7 from Costco last October because the Acer doesn’t have enough horsepower to run my new testing software. And, there was the broken “V” key. I liked Windows 7, though I thought XP is easier to use. Probably because I used it for years. I sold that laptop with my testing hardware and software to an acupuncturist this month.

And now I have a 27" iMac. Yes, I’m now a Mac guy. And I’m loving it.

It’s been fun, this trip down memory lane, but it has to come to a close now. On my next post I’ll write about my current computer and writing setup.