Quite the Life (and all in Times New Roman 10pt!)
Kits.
Can’t get enough of them.
Can’t get enough of any wildlife, really.
Except perhaps ticks.
Which is a pity, you know? I mean, ticks are just doing what they’re designed to do, and if you believe everything has a purpose, ticks are suppose to be here.
Ever wonder what the world would be like if there weren’t ticks?
What would fill their niche?
What did Nature pass by because ticks were a better fit?
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Makes me wonder, anyway.
And in the meantime, enjoy some kits.
Once again the Great and Wise C.G. Hatton, gracious editor of the Harvey Duckman Presents series, has deemed me worthy to be included in the latest publication, Harvey Duckman Volume 6
The included story is The Boy in the Giant, previously published with LadySparrohawk’s amazing artwork.
You could read the story on this blog, and you’d lose out on all the other amazing stories by fellow Harvey authorssuch as Mark Hayes, Peter James Martin, C.G. Hatton, Andy Hill, Alexandrina Brant, and Ben McQueeney, and you wouldn’t want to do that…
And thanks to #weareallharvey for accepting me into the fold.
I researched “blog tours” for the past six months, polling some 1,500 authors (self, indie, small house through major house (note: not Big5) publishers) and received responses from 793. The majority of responding authors are USA based (368), second high being Canada based (297), and a conglomerate minority (128) making up the Europe, Australia, South America, the Middle East, and a few African nations. No responses came from any Asian countries.
The question set was:
I followed these up with further email exchanges and, in some cases, Zoom chats.
Note that this survey occurred during 2020, “The Year of COVID.” Personal appearances, conferences (cons), book signings, and public interaction in general stopped. This caused people who had not considered blog tours to rethink their marketing strategy as blog tours became one of the few ways an author could socially safely publicize their book.
What is a Blog Tour?
One thing that turned up was confusion re what a blog tour is, exactly. Is it being interviewed on a blog? In writing? Video? A podcast? Is guest posting part of blog touring?
There was no clear definition and I’ll offer one based on commonalities arising in the responses: Any author intentionally selecting and contributing post content to one or more blogs (not their own) per week for two months or longer for the purpose of self-promotion (they are not paid for their content) is on a blog tour.
It doesn’t matter if the contribution is video, audio, text, images, Q&A, interview, excerpts, et cetera, so long as it’s part of the main post (rather than a comment or pingback) and for the purpose of self-promotion, it’s part of a blog tour.
Be advised: a book review is not a blog tour. A blog tour is when you and your work are the show and has more marketing power than only your work on show. People pay more attention to people interacting than they do when someone writes about a book.
Big TakeAways
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The Goatmen of Aguirra is one of my favorite stories and, based on comments, popular among my readers (thankee!). It appears in my self-published Tales Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires, as an individual ebook The Goatmen of Aguirra: A Tale Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires, and was serialized in Piker Press in 2019.
I’m sharing it here because a friend is having some challenges using 1st Person POV, and The Goatmen of Aguirra uses 1st Person POV throughout.
Read The Goatmen of Aguirra, Part 5.
Hope you enjoy.
The Goatmen of Aguirra (Part 6)
795015:500 – We have not seen the Goatmen for four days, although the casters clearly showed them going into the brush on the steppes rising to the Towers. I’ve run several linguistic routines through the computers, but there wasn’t enough conversation to develop much lexicon, grammar, syntactical rules, etc.
Sanders just called me up. A Goatman is outside and the computers have identified him as Gomer. It is just as well. This morning Sanders handed me another communique from Robin, this one Private. I left it unopened on my desk.
795015:620 – He started in the standing talking posture. “Come to see our homes, Journeyer.”
So I was ‘Journeyer’. A name I could live with and one which made me laugh. Robin, I think, would agree with that name.
So be it! I would be ‘Journeyer’ and I would go with them. For once, I told myself, Robin could be right.
I mimicked their talking postures and said yes, I would come but had some things to do first. He’d have to wait until I returned.
His left hand came forward. “Just you. Not the others…” and again the program returned that impenetrable word.
“What others?” My first mistake. Just because they’re simplistic doesn’t mean they’re simple.
Gomer stood up straight and stationary. The only indication of life the occasional flecking of nictating membranes over his eyes and slight steam jetties rising from his nostrils. If he pawed the earth I would have run.
Slowly he leaned towards me and his left hand came forward. “The others like you who are in the home who wants to be a rock.” Then, as if weighted with finality, “Are there those like you other than those in the home who wants to be a rock?”
Greetings! I’m your friendly, neighborhood Threshold Guardian. This is a protected post. Protected posts in the My Work, Marketing, and StoryCrafting categories require a subscription (starting at 1$US/month) to access. Protected posts outside those categories require a General (free) membership.
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Ah, rabbits.
If you have one, you have a hundred of them.
Or five or six.
We’re not sure.
We recognize most of the rabbits who visit us.
Some we know frequent us and don’t know their names.
This little beauty, for example.
We’re not even sure if we’ve seen her before or if she’s a completely new visitor, never before seen.
Keeps it interesting, don’t you think?