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(Python Diary) The Art of Letting Go and the Art of Holding On

At this point of my read-thru of Michael Palin’s Diary, after many struggles and turndowns from almost every major American movie distributor, "Time Bandits" has been released to the English cinemas. The money made is only moderate, and critical reception (like my own opinion of the movie) is mixed. It seems the movie will sink away into obscurity., and Palin goes to a viewing and thinks perhaps they have created a turkey of a movie that doesn’t fit in anywhere, and he is sad for Gilliam, the director, and feels a little guilty since he was the primary writer.

But at last a distribution deal comes through. The movie opens in the States and takes in 3 million the first weekend. It becomes number one, overwhelming several major, legendary pictures, like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Mel Brook’s History of the World, Part 1". Unexpected, blazing success, right out of nowhere.

Simultaneously, Palin is revising his script for "The Missionary" (NOTE TO READERS: This is NOT "The Mission", staring Robert DeNiro — though I would love to see Palin do a send up of THAT movie!), and getting mixed responses from the Director and Producer on it. His confidence in the film comes and goes quite a bit, but he presses on.

Essentially, he is holding on for dear life as the minecars of life go crashing down the tracks, barely in control, but he is also having to let go, too. He’s letting go of the final cuts for "Time Bandits" and the scripts for "The Missionary", and he knows they’re not perfect, but he has to let them into the world, and this, my friends, reflects strongly on me, because I am infamous for not letting a story go until it is perfect, and I need to learn how to.

But the letting-go and holding-on doesn’t end there, it also applies to his family life. Tom and William, his children, are getting older, just entering their teens, and they are moving more and more into their own private worlds, but his youngest child, his daughter, is still 7. He goes to the park with her and realizes that he hasn’t been there for months because the other children are grown, and he recriminates himself for forgetting that she is still small and still needs him, needs time like this. So he has to let the boys go, but still find a way to hold onto time with her.

My daughter is three, and I wonder if I, too, forget she is small. I will make an effort to go to the park with her more, and I do play games with her every night, but I’m sure it’s not enough, that she would be happy to play with me for hours, and that I should enjoy it while it lasts, before she’s tired of me. But life is so hard to balance, and I am so short of sleep already.

I don’t think there is a good answer, but I don’t want to glance up one day and realize I haven’t been to the park with her for a whole year, when she so much wants to go. I think I would feel like the worst kind of failure if that happened. I, like Palin, need to learn how to hang onto these moments while they last.

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(Python Diary) The Great Personalty Switch of 1981

I have gotten to the point in Michael Palin‘s 1980-1988 diary, in the vast, viking-riddled, uncivilized wasteland of 1981 England, where John Cleese (the doing-it-for-the-art guy who briefly disbanded the group in 1972) and Eric Idle (the loner musician who always seemed to be doing it for the money and who was often out for a fast buck) switch roles.

Cleese wants to push forward with the script for “The Meaning of Life”, despite artistic concerns and a lack of direction, because he needs the cash quickly, and Idle is throwing up red flags, saying he doesn’t want to move forward unless they keep their artistic integrity.

It’s like a great stop-motion space ship full of clay aliens has come down and switched their brains. The entire world has reversed itself! Gravity now pulls up, and you better get off the toilet, and quickly!

This is the most novel-like element to the the Diaries, where we get to watch two characters grow, change, and, eventually, come to embrace positions they previously found abhorrent (for a couple of minutes, anyway). The best part is that this IS a a diary, not a biography, so it’s mostly devoid of the “sense” people tend to make of their lives, the “story” they spin. To quote Palin himself, “It is a narrative in only its most basic sense,” meaning that events happen in an order, but there is no meaning. You see real, day-by-day change, as close to the real thing as possible. Really fascinating.
Amazon links:
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On: Seeing a Field For the First Time

When you look at a field, what do you see? Do you see “green” or “grass” or even just “field”? If so, you’re not really looking.

I am looking at one now, and I see at least five to ten different shades of green, at least 3 different shades of tan and brown, and everything bit of grass, living or dead, at a different length. Even grasses of the same species look unique. They clump together, run in strips or curves, and the leave huge open spaces. Fate and randomness has textured like the rind of an orange.

This field was once a building, a vast warehouse, and the foundation of it is still there underneath, and there are tiny bits of rubble just beyond sight, The bulldozers scraped the whole surface clean once, long ago, and so the field always looks like it has been plowed for crops and then overgrown even though it has never been plowed before.

But what really amazes me are the bushes. You don’t even see them when you look at this place at first — you look and you see “field” and that’s all, and all the bushes disappear from your eyes because you see a category, a shape, an abstract object instead of the thing itself. It is cruel and heartless dominance of the abstract over the real.

Really, it’s like Plato and Aristotle had it all backward, that the abstract, perfect world of “forms” is not a thing beyond or behind reality, but an instinctive creation of the mind, a simplification that the brain resorts to in order to be able to process all of the data and sort it and organize it in a useful way. The “shadows on the wall of a cave” are not the physical world at all, but the cognitive system of grouping, classification, and ordering that our mind uses to construct meaning.

Reality is always complex, textured, nuanced, with layers of history right there, visible under the surface, between the bushes and the blades of grass, but the mind cannot handle all of this information at once. It is too much. It is not useful, not relevant to survival or thriving, and it is discarded. And that is the way it should be. Usually. But sometimes you need to turn that filter off, and you need to see what is actually in front of your eyes. In detail.

Because sometimes the “perfect form” is not enough.
Because sometimes you need the truth, with all its various shades.
Because… sometimes… the world is beautiful.

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“Master of the Five Magics” and Me: A Peaen on Being a Rouded Individual

Once upon a time I was a twenty-year old in College and I read a book called “Master of the Five Magics” by Lyndon Hardy, and it was good. In it, young apprentice Alodar travels across his world, learning each of the five magics there, but consistently being defeated by his enemies. He doesn’t give up, though, and eventually overcomes adversity…

Fast forward to today, and here is me, S. Boyd Taylor, struggling to learn Mandarin, dedicating myself to 8 different martial arts — Baguazhang (Liang and Cheng Styles), Xingyiquan (Hebei Style), and Taijiquan (Chen, Wu, Wu-Hao, Yang and Sun Styles) — and doing my best to master the art of writing fiction. I am trying to be the Master of 10 Magics, and that doesn’t even count Spanish or any of the other languages that I want to learn.

This, I believe, is a noble pursuit: the pursuit of a better, more rounded self. Admittedly, I still need to learn music, but I have at least made a passable attempt at learning guitar, and one day I shall return to it.

There is a serious problem with this path, however. I am spread very thinly. I have very little time for each individual endeavor, and many skills that must be maintained or the fade quickly. And I also have a day job. And money problems. And, most importantly, I have a family, and I treasure every moment with them.

Arguably, it will take a long, long time to become a master at any of these skills, but my answer to this is that I have been doing several of them a very long time. I have been writing and alayzing fiction since I was 11. The internal martial arts I have been doing since 2005 (however, with a 3 year hiaitus — I am really in “getting my skills back” mode here). Chinese, of course, is new. And, accordingly, it is getting a lot of attention —  Pimsleur every day on the commute, Rosetta Stone in the morning.

But there is anther, more insidious problem with all of these hobbies: Opportunity Cost. I could focus on one of them (presumably writing) and become absolutely as good as I can be at it, more fully developed, more fully skilled. And from there, if I get lucky, I could possibly, one day, in a perfect world, in a dream, make enough money not to need the day job.

I am deeply conflicted about this. I really love my martial arts, and this drive to learn languages is almost an illness. But, though I really do like my job a lot and love my boss, and I am reading the Michael Palin Diaries: The Python Years, and it is amazing how much brilliant work he cranked out by the age of 35.

I am 38 now. And what have I done?

This troubles me greatly, in a very fundamental way. How can I achieve my dreams if I do not focus more tightly, more intently? But can I really be satified if I leave my other dreams behind?

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My story, “Teddy Bears and Tea Parties”, NOW FREE on Amazon Prime, LTO

My dystopian/horror/surreal/weird post-apocalyptic ebook “Teddy Bears and Tea Parties” NOW FREE on Amazon Prime for a limited time!

And a 67% discount for we non-prime mortals.

NYT Best Seller David Brin calls it, “Way unconventional, dreamlike, and fun.”

Nebula Award Winner Eugie Foster says, “Homicidal teddy bears, man-eating houses, a really creepy clown, and one scary little girl. S. Boyd Taylor has crafted a seriously sinister and unforgettable tale.”

Lots of great illustrations, by my good friend Jorge Rodas too.

Check it out here!

—

Okay, now that the mandatory promo part is over, let me ramble on about why I love this story so much — think of this as a self-review of my own book, but with a twist — rather than just telling you everything I like in the story, let me tell you what I was TRYING to do, and why I loved the PROCESS of writing it.

First, let me say — TBTP is the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything. It’s way beyond my normal boundaries of self, and I had to grow to write it.

I pushed the surreality and the creepiness as far as I could (and I’m a pretty surreal guy, ask my friends!). I pushed my writing into a completely new shape and style. It’s kind of like looking back at climbing your first real mountain — this is when everything clicked, when all the skills came together.

It’s also a big milestone for me — the first pro-sale I ever had, ChiZine back in 2009. A real milestone, just when I was giving up hope after submitting it for a year.

When I wrote this, I was trying to come up with something new, something I’d never seen before, and (while this goal itself is arguably impossible), I think I got close. It doesn’t fit into any shoebox. When I read it, it still sneaks up on me with a knife and drips grape jelly all over me.

And that’s the best feeling you can have, IMO, loving something you have written so long ago.

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The Interconnectedness Of the 1970’s – Monty Python, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Timothy Leary

I’ve been reading quite a few books; in case you haven’t been reading my other posts, here are just a few:

The Life of Python
Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979
A Liar’s Autobiography (Graham Chapman)
Timothy Leary: A Biography
John Lennon: The Life

What strikes me about Lennon (and the Beatles), Timothy Leary, and Monty Python is how they intertwine through the years, indeed how all the icons of the era — including the Rolling Stones and the WHO — all seemed to hang out together on a relatively constant basis.

Leary shows up in Chapman’s autobiography, and mentions of him meeting Eric Idle are present in Leary’s biography. The Beatles, especially George Harrison, became very close to the Pythons — GH funding five million pounds of “The Life of Brian” at extreme personal risk.

Per Chapman and Palin, Eric Idle starts to hang out with the Stones constantly and was very close to George Harrison, Chapman hangs out with the Who and helps train the fledgling Douglas Adams, Palin becomes very close with George Harrison as well and is friends with the whole world, and Pink Floyd helps fund “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

It’s like some vast, tangled web of interwoven causality, where the whole counter culture (especially in Britain) conspires to lift itself higher and higher, until the whole period is still iconic today.

It really does echo down, even to Gen-X icons. Johnny Depp and Wynona Rider were very close to Timothy Leary (Rider was his god-daughter), and Uma Thurman was the daughter of one of Leary’s ex-wives and a Buddhist monk that had interacted with Leary on several occasions.

An aristocracy was formed during this period, a clique of people and hedge-maze of relationships that helped create modern entertainment and came dominate the last quarter of the 20th century, especially many pop-culture icons.

Is there anything similar happening in the world in the present? It makes me wonder if this aristocracy continues, or if our isolative technological culture that make each person into an unassailable island fortress has turned even this network of entertainment cognoscenti into a group of lonely hermits.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Monty Python, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Pink Floyd, and Depp, but I never realized exactly how tightly locked together all these gears were in the turn of the years.

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Monty Python is the Meaning of Life

Well, I’ve done it. To improve the silly, Monty Python-esque, surrealism-inspired book I am currently writing (in truth, I’m currently writing two books simultaneously, and only one of them is silly) — I’ve determined that I need to come to a greater understanding of stand-up, skit, and other forms of comedy. Essentially, I need to rapidly, efficiently develop a high level of expertise in something I’ve never done. Yay! MORE impossible goals!

So, how do you graduate from being just a snarky writer and entertaining guy/gal in a crowd to a full humorist? No idea! But here’s my current strategy:

1) Read books by and on Monty Python:
– The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words (Vol 1 and Vol 2) (reading one episode a night and acting out key scenes to practice movement, elocution, and emotion)
– Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years (the full 700 page book, not the abridged audio (which is also good) for an inside perspective of Python in it’s heyday and the personalities involved)
– Monty Python Speaks (for the opinions of the other members)
– Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography (I only have the abridged audio read by Chapman, I’d love a hard copy so I can get past the abridgements but they are rare and expensive! I re-listen to this regularly to try and get that madness back in my words)

The goal of this research is to be able to build a sort of mental armature or model of each member of Monty Python as they were back in the old days, to try and estimate how each of the six members might think. Not sure if this will prove to be of any value, but I’m hoping it will give an extra perspective and polish to my work. As a note, I am finding Terry Gilliam to be a particularly fascinating individual, and John Cleese is a strange type of hyper-analytic genius.

Note: I would really like to read The Pythons: Autobiography, the classic Monty Python’s Big Red Book (which is blue, of course), and Brand New Monty Python Bok, but I haven’t been able to find them for a reasonable price — and I’ve spent so much money already, it’s really hard for me to justify it.

2) Read books on Comedy:
– The Comedy Bible by Judy Carter (very interesting insights to modern joke and sitcom structure)
– The Comic Toolbox by John Vorhaus (Vorhaus wrote “Married With Children”, but I can forgive him, there are some great brainstorming techniques in here, but his plot advice is pretty rudimentary)
– Step by Step to Stand Up Comedy by Greg Dean (not very far into this one, but it gives you a lot of information about the classic punchline that is missing from the Comedy Bible, as CB focuses on “Act-Outs” and performance.)
– Signed up for Dean Lewis’s Comedy Workshop, where I will have a last performance at the Dallas Improv. (I sat in on one of his Level 2 classes, and everyone was HILARIOUS; if there is any hope for me to really learn this, this may be it)

The goal of this is to learn performance and modern joke structure, to give me more insights into the old Monty Python mindset. This is far outside my normal limns and safety zones, a dramatic shift for myself personally, and the stage work especially is a stretch for me — and fills me with a terror of a uniquely gut-clawing and nauseous breed. A bit like gas, really. Or a chestburster.

3) Listen to Watch Comedy
– Eddie Izzard’s Dressed to Kill (he is the heir apparent to Python’s style, and it’s amazing how effortlessly it all comes together; especially trying to work out when and how he does his faces and changes in intonation)
– Steve Martin’s Wild and Crazy Guy (some obvious influence on Izzard, love his body mechanics)
– Steven Wright I Have a Pony (great surrealism, but I crack up when I try to be that stonefaced)
– Comedy Central Presents and Comedy Central Death Ray, whatever other stand up I can get used/cheap
– I’d say Flying Circus and all the movies (Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Meaning of Life), but I’ve seen them so much they’re almost memorized.
– Beyond the Fringe (A strong influence on Monty Python, where Dudley Moore got his start; really kicked off the wave of satire that Python later rode)
– Do Not Adjust Your Set (Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle) and At Last the 1948 Show (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle) (both series are Monty Python pre-cursors)
– I’m Sorry I’ll Read that Again (John Cleese and Graham Chapman radio show, another precursor)
– The Compleat History of Britain (Palin and Jones) (another precursor that I’ve only found on youtube)
–The Goon Show — Spike Miligan, Harry Seacombe, and Peter Sellers (a strong influence on the 5 British Monty Python members when they were kids)
–Fawlty Towers

The goal of this is to identify what I like best and to analyze it, to see what is being done. For instance, how to Martin and Izzard fill time when they’ve forgotten what’s next? What do you do if a joke fails? How do you make the audience accept surreality in their humor? And HOW IN GOD’S NAME does Martin walk around on his toes with his knees bent without falling down?

4) Constant Practice
– Carry notebook to jot down ideas constantly
– Carry Digital Voice Recorder to record act-outs and ideas and test runs of jokes and anything that gets a snicker during the day
– Do brain storming exercises every day (this also helps with serious writing)
– Somehow learn to have no shame on stage, practice Act-Outs as part of every day stuff, but only if appropriate
– KEEP WRITING BOTH OF MY NOVELS (this has been difficult and slow since I broke my thumb (hey, did I mention that my right hand is in a cast? typing now requires gymnastic effort), but it is critical; this is all about making me a better writer.)

This is the part where the rubber meets the road, practice, reciting jokes aloud, opening up myself and uncoiling the stresses that keep me mousy and quiet during the crushing banality of ordinary life. I don’t LIKE being quiet and mousy, and I’m NOT, not with my friends or on my own time. While I obviously find this freeing — downright revolution-inspiring — there’s one part I don’t like a about it: Comedy is built on negativity in an almost universal manner. Comedians talk about what scares them, annoys them, upsets them, weirds them out — jokes about things they like usually flop for the same reason long periods of happiness with no conflict flop in fiction… Conflict is central.

In fact, what I’m finding out is that the elements of comedy — even stand-up jokes — have a lot in common with fiction writing. Minimalist verbiage, good hooks in the setup, universal themes, punchy pacing, the importance of being unexpected. My hope is that my expertise in one area will transfer easily to the other.

Special thanks to my writing friends (Jonathan Wood (author of No Hero), Michelle Muenzler, William Ledbetter) and to my wife for supporting me on this crazy project. Especially to my wife; she has to put up with most of it.

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A Fun Stylistic Analysis of Monty Python, and a Request for Help

If you know me at all, you know I like Monty Python. It would not be far from the truth to say I was raised on a steady diet of Python (and, of course, Doctor Who. But that is off topic — GET BACK IN THE BLOODY BLUE BOX, TIMELORD!! It’s not your post!)

The result is that I have a zany, surreal sense of humor, and I tend to like my humor British. Despite the fact that I have lived most of my life in Texas. You can imagine the complications (the skits write themselves, don’t they?)

So… When I decided that I should write something funny for a change (instead of all this dark stuff I’ve been struggling to sell, as full of irony as it may be (i.e., “Teddy Bears and Tea Parties: A Horror Story”)), funny to me meant Monty Python.

This left me with quite a problem on my hands (and when I say problem, I mean a twenty-foot tall electric penguin with green tentacles shooting out.) So I did what any self-respecting only-child of two college professors WOULD do — I started studying.

I downed the whole Python series again in one go (doing my best to keep an eye on how things worked), and then all of the movies. This of course was not enough. I needed something I could analyze at a much more leisurely rate. Rather than driving my wife mad by rewinding skits and sketching out scripts for them, I dived into the written materials out there… (Pardon me while I elide time for convenience and pacing — if I had the skills, I would insert a Terry Gilliam-style animation, probably about monkeys using books as wings, but at some point turning into monkey-headed cherubic angels all shooting plungers off their harpstrings at each other, while a large, decapitated head of Graham Chapman (he’s dead already, he won’t mind) eats large parts of Parliament in the background. However, I do not have any animation skills whatsoever, so there is no animation, and you’ll just have to deal with it.

Ahem… I seem to be rambling. Let’s hope I keep it up, it’s a downsight more interesting that me actually saying anything.

Python then kicked me to the “Goon Show”, and the “Goon Show” to “Firesign Theater”, and then back to Python (Graham Chapman’s “Liar’s Autobiography”) who — with a sharp pass to Westminster Cathedral — sent me spinning under the feet of “At Last It’s the 1948” show, then to Kingsley Amis who gets the ball stolen from him by Cyril Connolly and book on Pythons and Philosophy — who shoots — and SCORES! GOOOAAAAL! And all the books and TV and radio series are all hugging each other now, in this, the first FIFA finals in untaming one man’s sense of humor.

It’s been quite an adventure so far, and I guess I will see if it pays off with the new novel, but the new novel is not what this post is about.

It’s about something I didn’t expect to find. Way down deep in the dank, cavernous mazes of Michael Palin’s Diaries (somewhere between the plastic skeletons chained to the wall and the fake rats squeaking and trying to nibble my toes off with their little rubber teeth) — and simultaneously in Graham Chapman’s “Liar’s Autobiography” — and simultaneously-again in “Monty Python Speaks” and again-again in the audio-commentary for the Monty Python Autobiography, I stumbled into a strange sort of perspective:

Success rarely happens in a day. It’s random. It is, in a way, luck.

These guys were good — really good — arguably the BEST at what they did, but they were still “lightly paid writer/performers” until one day… They just suddenly realized they weren’t. They didn’t expect it to happen. They were just plodding along, and then, all the sudden, they were hanging out with famous people, making a little more money, and then a LOT more money.

When I go back and look at “The Complete and Utter History of Britain” and “At Last the 1948 Show” and other things, I see that they were doing very Python-style stuff before Python. Not as extreme, no, not as experimental, not free from the constraints of format or punchline — but still very Pythonesque. In effect, Python was just another logical step in what they had been doing all along — and it went big.

…And this makes me think it can happen to anyone. Most of us work hard at our arts and never get noticed. But it CAN happen, and it does happen, and you don’t even realize it’s happening, usually, until — BOOOOM! — you’re being shot out of a cannon with a raving maniac shouting, “You better learn how to land, son, or this is really going to hurt!” up at you.

And that thought… Well, it gives me hope. (Not the cannon one, the one before that — oh, you know!!)

And now we come to the dream-portion of this post. Terry Gilliam once described several of the incredibly lucky events in his life as, “It was like I was willing them to happen.” That he knew such crazy strings of coincidences were possible, so he put himself out there in the way of big events, where they might be, and — well — they just hit him.

I want to be like that. I want to put myself out there in the middle of things, so this is my dream:

I’d like to meet all of these guys (the living ones, obviously.)

I know a lot of them are tired of Python. They’ve moved on (and rightly so!), done huge bodies of wonderful work — Terry Gilliam has some absolutely astounding and amazing movies, Terry Jones has his documentaries, Palin his innumerable series, Cleese as always is a genius, and heck, Eric Idle has even written a Science Fiction book called “The Road to Mars”!

But that’s my dream, to one day meet all of the living Pythons. Why? I really don’t know. They just seem like they’d be a blast to hang out with, really. Who could ask for more than that? That I’ve found their work hilarious, moving, and even inspiring may also enter into it.

The problem is, I don’t know these guys, they don’t know me, and, really, what chance does a minor-league-short-story-writer-wannabe-novelist really have of meeting (much less shaking hands with and sharing a pint of beer or a cup of tea) with mega-stars that live anywhere they want to live and do whatever they want, when they want?

Here comes the hard part, and if I don’t say it now I won’t ever say it:

I need your help — specifically, your brainpower, your voice, maybe a little bit of your time.

I want to meet these guys, and the way I grok it, the only way they’re going to want to meet me is if the situation fascinates them. So what I need is the crazy, the surreal, the absolutely impossible:

I need an internet movement.

Specifically, an “S. Boyd Taylor wants to meet Monty Python” movement. With buttons! Fliers! Silly goings on!

If you want to help — post a link to this, retweet it, talk about it at work, facebook it, tell your budgie, or call up John Cleese if you used to share a toothbrush with him at University and are still close, or even post YouTube videos of you in a Gumby outfit with a handkerchief on your head chanting, “S. Boyd Taylor wants to meet Monty Python.”

Anything harmless and humorous, really.

Then we’ll see if it works.

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How to Read eBooks on Your PC – A Friendly Guide

After coming out with my eBook, I discovered that a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors don’t have an eReader and don’t know how to read eBooks on their PCs. This didn’t surprise me, since, up until 3 weeks ago, I didn’t either.

Buying an eReader is WAY too expensive for me. I just can’t justify it. But once I had my own eBook, I needed a way to read it, to proof the design — and once I started buying eBooks, I realized how cool it is and how great the experience can be. There are so many books out there for a dollar (or even free) that I can’t even begin to guess at a total of them. And some of them are downright cool.

This gave me a brilliant idea — why not write a quick guide for those slow adopters, just in case they want to catch up but don’t know how.

What follows is that guide:

1) For Amazon eBooks (.mobi format — Amazon has their own format because they are special):

a) If you use Chrome or Safari as a web browser, instead of IE? If so, you can use Amazon’s Cloud Reader — a web app that accesses any ebooks you’ve ever bought from Amazon, anywhere — here:
https://read.amazon.com/

Note: Safari is the Mac browser, this is the best way to read Amazon ebooks on Mac.

b) If you use a PC but don’t use Chrome for some reason (you madman!), you can download and install Amazon’s Kindle for PC right here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

2) If you prefer standard .epub eBook format, such as found on a Nook or an iPhone or a Sony eReader (basically everyone except Amazon), you can download and install Adobe Digital Editions on your computer for free — it’s quite a nice tool, zehr modisch.
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/

—
If you enjoyed this post, you can give eReading a shot via my eBook “Teddy Bears and Tea Parties: A Horror Story”, available AT B&N or AT AMAZON.

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Paul Jessup’s Weekend Novel-A-Thon

Ever wondered how the words get written, the magic gets summoned, the real heart of a book gets made? Here’s your chance.

One of my favorite writers of the strange and surreal, Paul Jessup, is going to a weekend-novel-a-thon. This weekend (and the two days prior), he will crank out a whole novel — that’s 40-50 THOUSAND words. That’s a LOT, ladies and gentlemen.

…But wait, there’s more.

He will also blog about it as he writes it! You will be able to follow along, near-live, as he spins a novel whole-cloth from his head. And, better yet, you can vote on the title.

More info, here:
http://pauljessup.com/2011/07/26/my-weekend-novel-a-thon/

Go Jessup go!