Growing up, there were times I felt like the black sheep of the family, at least when it came to music. Sure, I played the tuba and performed in the pit and all those other necessary high school activities, but it was never my passion. I couldn’t list off the names of every member of the original London cast of Les Miserable, I didn’t keep…
Sundays can be rough. Waking up at 7 am to sit in church for hours is going to be tough on anyone, but it hits young kids the hardest. We manage to get Kella through the first hour–full congregation, no breakout for kids–only with a constant stream of snacks and quiet activities to draw her attention away from the person at the lectern drawling on…
I once read an article that claimed young children believed their parents knew everything that happened to them. Even if the parents were miles away. The article went through some song and dance about how children thought they were connected with their parents, as if the parent could see through the child’s eyes. Is it true? I have no clue. But it may go a…
Last week, I had a great opportunity to attend a presentation by Tom Rath, the author of such books as StrengthsFinder 2.0, Eat Move Sleep, and, most recently, Are You Fully Charged? And oh man, for that last one, I am absolutely not. Fully charged, that is. I’m more like the battery of an old phone where the promised 12+ battery life at purchase date has…
Ah, crap. I’ve missed a week. Up until this post, I’ve kept pace to write a self pub review every two weeks. It turns out that the government changing the partnership filing deadline screwed up my self imposed goal. *Sigh* Now you all know my failure. Ah, well, let’s get to it. This week’s adventure is Gravity: The Gravity Series #1, by A. B. Bloom. I…
Even though I was a huge nerd growing up, the one thing I didn’t do was play Dungeons & Dragons. I’m pretty sure that’s because none of my friends were playing it at the time, but I’ll admit there’s a possibility that I just wasn’t invited. So now that I’m older with children, I’ve been given the opportunity to jump into the strange world of…
I’ve just finished my fourth book in my Self Pub book review tour, and I’ve come to an important conclusion: Amazon’s book finding system sucks. It really, really sucks. I have the Kindle Unlimited membership, and it seems like all they want to do is upsell me to other books not covered by the subscription. If Scribd had more Self Pub books on its roster,…
We’re very much in the children’s movie phase of our lives, so we end up watching nearly everything that scores higher than “total crap” on the Rotten Tomato meter. If a movie looks like weird and plotless garble, we may not watch it until we get it free on our T-Mobile Tuesday or as part of our Netflix subscription, but we will end up watching…
When I started reading Emergence (The Rise of House Iax) by Chad Hench, I was in the hospital. Every tenth page the Kindle app would get stuck between two pages, forcing me to restart the app while I growled in rage. All this during busy season, with the world tumbling down around me and the Dungeon Master of the Universe smiling down with sinister eyes, daring…
Sometimes, the best thing we can get in life is perspective. There’s no more well worn trope than to have a character realize what’s important in life due to a birth/death/disease/zombie apocalypse/extra five minutes of movie trailers/etc. It’s an easy-to-use fallback because, at least for most people I’ve met, there’s a lot of truth to be found in that lazy writing. These past few days,…