March 2007

My friend Bill says there is probably a twelve step program for compulsive website builders.

That’s me!

I saw “MojoWriter.com” available and had to snag it. It fits in perfectly with my GroovyMojo Media web empire. I think I’m going to try and corner the market on “Groovy” and “Mojo.”

Another website that will spring up soon is a branch off this one. I’m thinking of creating a MojoWriter Workshop, a place for aspiring writers to practice and show their works. Hopefully one that will moderate itself.

I’m starting a new job next week, one that with any luck will last a long, long time.

I’m taking a break from the Internet all weekend to work on my novel.

(Though I might check my email once or twice.  And I may keep the WriterCAM on.)

I’ve been writing for longer than I want to think about, and finally, TODAY, just now, I pinpointed my true writing voice:

Jon settled into a comfortable position and then closed his eyes, wondering if it were possible, wondering what sleep would be like here.  One could argue he was already asleep, sleeping the dream of death.  The dream he’d been in ever since his big maroon Caprice Classic had gone into that hydroplaning slide, turning his car tires into water skis.  The machine stopped obeying the steering wheel and began a slow spin, all the way around to the point he was going backwards, and the road curved but the car kept going straight, right over that steep muddy drop.  In those last few seconds, plummeting toward a hundred cars coming at him in the opposite lanes, he knew he was going to die.  His life didn’t flash in front of his eyes.  He didn’t cry out.  He just held on to the steering wheel and thought…

This is it.

The front of the big red semi truck came at him like a steel wall with shining headlight eyes, then he went to sleep.  A sudden, abrupt sleep.

(From Daytime for the Dead)

This is how I write when I’m not thinking about how I should write.  And I can go back through some of my older stuff I can see I’ve been doing it all along.

Weird.

So, in a monkey-see monkey-do turn of events, the second place Leaperfunken shows up is on Microsoft’s Live search, and the source was … of course … their own blogging platform, Microsoft Spaces.

I don’t think Microsoft ever claimed to be unbiased, though.

On March 10th I made up a new word:  leaperfunken

What does leaperfunken mean? The sadness you feel on the way down. “Bubba felt serious leaperfunken the moment he jumped, because in that first spit second of freefall, he’d changed his mind.”

When I made up the word I did a search for it on all the major search engines to make sure it didn’t already exist.  It didn’t.  There were no search results at all.

I released it on all the major blogging sites, where I keep accounts for research and promotion, and within minutes you could see just about every one of them on the blog search engines.  Nothing, however, appeared on the major search engines until this morning.   Google (and only Google) has picked it up so far, and the one it picked up was from it’s very own blog service, Blogspot.com.

So much for Google being unbiased it its search results.  And it goes to show, if you want something from a blog to show up on Google, go to Blogger.com and start a blog on Blogspot.

More research to follow…

In the last post I talked about putting up a site with my original fiction, peppered with ads and a donations box to see if I could perhaps make a few dollars directly from my stories. I mean why not, we’re doing it with other people’s stories over on Dark Energy SF and Quantum Kiss. The end result is a eclectic website I call “The Living Room” which now sits on a subdomain on JJDavis.net.

Yes, that is a picture of my living room. I took it with that camera I won in the photo contest … it had a feature that would knit several pictures together to form a panorama. I always thought the picture had an open, surreal feel to it, and I am in essence inviting people right into my house, so I thought it both appropriate and eclectic at the same time.

If you’re so inclined, please feel free to check it out. I’ll be adding a few more stories to it, methinks, by the end of this month.

Any of you out there (if anyone at all!) watching WriterCAM.com will see that I’m working at home a lot lately, doing technical writing for The Very Big Computer Corporation.  Today I took a lunch break and my older daughter and I went out on the balcony and blew bubbles.  It’s very zen watching all those bubbles float off into the neighborhood.  It’s fun, too, when they weird people out.

I had an idea today.  Time to try another experiment.  I’ve got quite a backlog of short stories, some that I’ve been shopping around for quite a while without finding a home.  Hopefully it’s not because they suck … I like to think it’s because I write for myself, not for a specific market, and so it’s just not “matching” any established markets out there.

What I do is I write a story and then submit it to the highest paying markets first.  As the list of rejection slips grow, the story starts making its way down deeper into the list of less-paying markets, until finally it strikes a chord with someone who’s either willing to buy it, or who doesn’t pay at all but likes it enough to publish it. I’ve had stories in circulation for over ten years before they finally found a home. 

So I thought … hey, I’ve got these websites where I’m writing content and supporting it via context-sensitive ads … why not do that with some of my original fiction?  Then maybe they might actually be read by someone and — if the Gods are kind — I might make a few pennies off it (as opposed to spending dollars in postage shipping it out over and over again). And so that is what I’m going to try.

I’m not sure if I should put it right here on JJDavis.net or if I should put it on its own domain.  Hmm…  Will have to think about that.