Back in the 19th and 20th centuries, if you wrote murder mysteries for a living, which my Dad and two uncles did during and just after the Great Depression of the 1930s, you probably used the expression “Murder most foul!” at least once in the course of your main character’s investigation and of course, the inevitable sitting-room “reveal”, where we learn that the villain had done nothing suspicious throughout the first part of the book.
It was in fact a given that the key clues would typically not appear until the next-to-the-last page of the aforesaid mystery novel. Continue reading →
Practicing guitar is always an option. Play softly.
If you’re operating a shop, storefront, booth, kiosk or busking station, you’ll want to know what to do with those interminable waiting periods between customers, and there will be plenty of them, believe it.
Many retailers and service personnel lose a LOT of precious productivity, and when you own your own business and want to be your own boss — well, you’ll have a LOT of time on your hands.
If you’re ever in a department store where customers are not actually engaged in sales, you’ll see the salespeople adjusting things, dusting things, re-arranging things, pricing things — basically, doing something, anything, to appear busy.
It’s widely believed, and perhaps it’s true, that if customers see salespeople loafing about, they won’t buy a thing, which certainly matches my extensive experience in retail.
Heck-darn, when you’re talking Retail, you’re talking Planet Earth. Why, back home, we NEVER pay retail — nobody pays retail anywhere except here on Planet Earth.
Humans of Planet Earth are so ignorant, they call it “bartering”, not “bargaining”, when you make offers and counter-offers.
Bartering is where you trade a laying hen for a carpenter’s work fixing your wagon, and I don’t mean that figuratively at all. Continue reading →
Hotter than a pistol, I’m building my ass off in the Ashram!!!
This urban disaster area is just one of my latest building efforts to provide a background for the PLS adventures on which you’ll be going in the near future. I can assemble a complete city with all the trimmings and extras, but more than that, I’m able to build a world that can’t exist in this time-space but does exist in another one just beside this one.
You’ll note that there’s new My Life as a Boy material that’s been posted, and more to come. The respite was strictly temporary, because there was a lot of work needed in the Ashram. You will note that the number of working shops, stores and food services in the Ashram are growing at the rate of between one and three business places per day, with plenty of new shops featuring the L$25 price tag for all items in the shop, making learning how to dress oneself, buy clothing and other accessories and handle objects somewhat easier.
Please note that we’re talking baby talk here — dressing yourself is a major issue in Second Life, as you’ll discover upon undertaking the task of removing one item of clothing and replacing it with another, or taking something off and putting something else on.
Even more confusing and disorienting is the process whereby one changes one’s avatar entirely. This can cause bizarre disruptions in reality.
Then there’s the question of WHY??? Why buy electronic fashions, binary cosmetics and digital jeans?
It’s not the thing itself, it’s what you learn by doing it.
If there are any Official Secrets to Music, these are they:
1. Tell a Story — this simply means any story about the simple nursery song that you’ve selected for this exercise (such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, or “Jack & Jill” or “Sing a Song of Sixpence” — any story will do, including that there isn’t one, ie; a rambling exploration of random notes and measures. Usually it means a story, pure & simple, describing the song’s major points, such as the fact that the farmer lived in a dell, had a wife, many chicks, ducks, geese, horses, cattle, swine, and a couple of wild and crazy dogs with a penchant for handouts. A story like that generally begins with a beginning, goes on a while in the middle, and stops at the end. The MIDDLE part is generally about the obstruction, the pain, the misery or the angst of it all. A typical song story is “my baby done left me”, whether you hear it in blues, folk, pop, ballad, country-western, jazz or classical, it’s always about relationships of one kind or another. That’d be human/human (read as: “human over human”) and bottle/human and a whole chain of seductions that read more or less the same. The story is told verbally before the instrument is sounded. The STORY should NOT take more than 1 minute to tell, especially the “Boy Meets Girl, Girl Gets Drownded, Boy Gets Hanged sort of murder-ballad you’ll find commonly in folk music.
Frank Herbert, author of Dune, on the left, EJ Gold, author of RetroVisions, SlimeWars and Suaron v. Baggins, on right, at 1976 Westercon.
Writer, proofreader, editor, publisher, illustrator, designer, storyteller, publicist, marketer. Those are the skills I bring to my writing. If you don’t have all those skills, you can’t be an interdimensional author like myself; how many writers do you know who’ve had book-signings at Maskull’s Books & Tapes on Arcturus. On Vega IV, SlimeWars has gone viral, but then, they’ve never been to Urth.
What ever happened to Charles Dodgson’s wonderful children’s masterpieces, written under the pseudonym (look it up, what am I, a walking dictionary???) Lewis Carroll — Alice’s Adventures Underground & What She Saw There, and Through the Looking Glass??? Continue reading →
