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First lines meme

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Here are the first lines from the first post of each month.

I finally got in from my Amtrak train, only 37.5 hours after the original scheduled arrival time.

I didn’t know Melissa Mia Hall, but I do know this: she didn’t have to die.

So, Random House has switched over to agency pricing for its ebooks.

The back story.

I realize this is naive of me but would rather he’d been captured and put on trial.

today’s my wife’s birthday.

Well, really it’s my not-birthday (ob repetitive explanation: My wife and I share a Bday, which sucks, so I bumped mine back a month).

Last night our elderly neighbor, Dolores Snootheim-Jagger, was visiting to borrow some flour and harangue us about going to her church, the Holy Ministry Of The Unlanced Boil, when she asked me to show her this “internet thing” she’d heard so much about.

Here’s an interview with me at The Quillery, for those who like to read this sort of thing.

I’m going.

Everything I want to say about NaNoWriMo would be a repeat of my advice from last year.

The plugin I was using to sell Twenty Palaces directly from my website wasn’t working correctly, so I’ve switched to something else.

[sings] Typos, self! Typos!

I would, in fact, jump off a bridge if everyone else did

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A lot of bloggers have been posting lists of their most popular posts for 2011, so I thought I’d do it, too. What the hell, right? Google Analytics makes it easy and it beats thinking. So. From least popular to most for 2011, the top five:

5- Patrick Rothfuss lights a cigar with a $20 bill The funny thing about this one is that I found the first episode of HOLMES AND YOYO on YouTube and wow, it’s even worse than I remember. (Okay, I thought that was funny.)

4- My “Judgement Day” Plan for 5/21 Usually I think of jokes when it’s too late to tell them. This one time I came up with something before the actual thing, and it landed in the four spot. Hmph. Anyway, these two are the only humor posts on the list, and I have plenty of other joke posts that never went anywhere, so don’t worry, you won’t be getting a lot more of these.

3- Twenty Palaces The announcement of the prequel’s release, with that great cover.

2- Ten Things Writers Shouldn’t Do Really? Writing advice takes the second spot? I rarely give writing advice on the blog because who am I to be telling people about writing? But this one was linked around quite a bit. Should I write more of this stuff (assuming I have more to say)?

1- It’s Official: The Twenty Palaces Series Has Been Cancelled (long) Not surprising, really, but it’s not a post I particularly want to talk about.

Keep in mind that my little corner of the internet is a quiet place. Actually, it’s practically a hermit’s cave, so these don’t represent huge numbers.

Ten Days

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I’ve just put Lord of Reavers up for sale on B&N and Amazon. It’ll be a while before it’s cleared for sale there, but in the meantime you can still buy it directly from me.

Also, my wife and son are out of town for ten days to visit her family. I’m at home, and I’ve borrowed a number of DVDs from the library; they aren’t great movies, but they’re for grownups, and if you have an account on LiveJournal (they’re free), you can vote for which ones I’ll watch.

In the meantime, here’s my plan for the next week and a half:

1- To bed every night before midnight. Before 11 would be better but lets be realistic.

2- Vegetables every day.

3- Get back on the Livestrong calorie counting, which I set aside during the holiday.

4- A helluva lot of walking

5- Personal hygiene, apartment hygiene.

6- Set Freedom for six hours every night before bed.

7- 2500 words a day at least.

It will take focus, but this is going to be a productive holiday season.

Reminder: If you’ve bought a book directly from me, but

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… you haven’t received a link to download it, please drop me an email to let me know. You can use the one in the PayPal screen or the one on my bio page. I will do my best to get you the file you purchased as quickly as I can.

If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a wonderful holiday. If you don’t, I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

New story, email issues, party party partay!

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My email is being cruel cruel to me, so don’t be surprised if it takes me a while to respond.

Also, I’m going to have a S&S story online very soon, hopefully today.

But first I have to go home and attend my son’s birthday party. It’s not his birthday, but it is his party. The little guy has everything planned out.

Also, I met my small goal today, even though it’s a big goal day. It’s weird; I used to thrive in a sleep-deprived trance. I’d come at my writing in a weird exhausted state when everything felt heavy, and that would help me silence my internal editor.

But over the last year I’ve been trying to get enough sleep as part of my plan to live past 50, so today, one of the first trance-days in months, I feel utterly useless. It’s weird.

Randomness for 12/13

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1) Children’s drawings painted realistically.

2) Sketchy bunnies. To each and every screaming child in those pictures I say: Kid, I am on your side.

3) The Ten Most-Watched YouTube Videos Of All Time. I’ve seen exactly one of them (the one about Charlie).

4) Rules of 50 Magical Systems In Convenient Chart Form

5) Robot Monsters With Breasts! Screenwriter and low budget film aficionado Bill Martell on two of the weirdest movies he’s ever seen.

6) 13 Punctuation marks you didn’t know existed. Actually, you know some of these, but probably not all.

7) One does not simply walk into Mordor.

Suvudu Cage Match is coming in 2012

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And Ray Lilly is in it.

Comments disabled

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For the last few months, spam has gotten worse and worse on this blog. It’s at the point where I’m spending way too much of my day looking through the spam trap and cancelling out crap that got through.

So I’m turning off comments for a while. You can still talk to me on LiveJournal, Twitter, or on some other site, and my email address is in my bio post (if you really have to).

With luck I’ll be able to turn them back on again in the future. Sorry folks.

New site bookstore, and other things

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1. The plugin I was using to sell Twenty Palaces directly from my website wasn’t working correctly, so I’ve switched to something else. This new thing is quite complicated, almost like getting an iPhone just so you can tell the time, but I hope soon to have more fiction to sell from my site, so here it is.

The only problem is that I can’t make the PayPal Sandbox work so I can’t test drive the whole thing first. It’s annoying, but if someone wants to buy Twenty Palaces through the site, would you let me know how it goes? I assume I’ll hear from people who have problems, but… you know. It’d be nice to be sure all this works. (Added later: It doesn’t.)

2. [Deleted]

3. I have the first eight(ish) chapters of A Blessing of Monsters ready to send to my agent. My wife is reading them first to catch anything deeply stupid (not that… ahem… there’s anything… oh hell). She’s not what you’d call a fan of epic fantasy, but she’s giving it a go anyway.

4. And having the new book is helping me deal with self-publishing Twenty Palaces. I can’t say I’m pleased to be releasing it this way. Yeah, I’m glad readers who love the series get this story, too, but it also makes me mourn a bit more.

Which is why it’s good to have something fun and cool to work on.

5. If I can get decent cover art together, I’m going to add short fiction to my online bookstore. Assuming the bookstore is any good.

6. And yes, I’m up late. My son is having a bit of trouble getting to sleep.

Error messages

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I’ve received a sudden influx of error messages. If someone out there is having trouble buying the book through my site, please shoot me an email at harry at harryjconnolly period com. I’m not sure what’s happening and I’d like to find out.

Thanks.