Name A Book, Win a Prize!

Not long after the new year I opened PowerPoint 2013 to look for some clipart and found out that Microsoft had gotten rid of the Office clipart!  This was inconceivable to me since they'd had clipart for at least 20 years, back when I was first using Office in high school.  And then bam some pinhead accountant decides it's too expensive and it's gone!

But the other day I had the chance to use PowerPoint 2007 and for the hell of it decided to see if maybe it still had clipart.  Which it did...sort of.  There weren't nearly as many pictures and at least one had a stock photo watermark on it.  I did manage to download a few that might be future book covers.  Which is where you (possibly) come in!

There are a few I haven't thought of a use for yet, so I thought maybe I'd have a sort of caption contest.  Basically you come up with a book title inspired by the cover.  The catch is it should be for one of MY books.  As in gender swap erotica books.  Which maybe you have some moral hangup about that.  In which case, no one is making you play.

Anyway, if I like your title and use it then I'll give you a copy of the book and give you props inside.  And if you have some objection to that, you can always use a code name or something.

My titles basically fall into 3 categories:

Transformed Into a _______ (Girl)
My _____ Changed Me Into a _______ (Girl)!
I've Become My _______ (Girl) Fantasy!

You can always freelance too, but nothing too subtle.  Here are the images I haven't used yet:

Put your suggestion in the comments and if I pick yours I'll send you an email.  Good luck!

Oh and with one of the clipart images I got an idea for my next book:

I'm just kidding...or am I?  Who would sue me first, Laplume or Zooey Deschanel's camp?

Shifting Right or the Price of (Minor) Success

On most social issues I fall squarely on the Left, but doing my tax return this year made me see that maybe on finance the Right has a good point.

I finally got all my 1099s from Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords (at least I think so) so I could do my 2014 tax return.  When I added it all up I made almost $4,000 last year.  Hooray!  But as I entered the numbers into my tax program my projected return kept dropping and dropping until I was in the red.  Meaning I owe the Federal government money for the first time ever. 

Doing the math, essentially they want 25% of my book earnings.  A quarter of every dollar!  That's just crazy to me, especially for someone in my situation.  They might as well be stealing candy from a baby.

And so that's the price of even a moderately success year of business.  It'll probably only be worse this year.  Makes me wish I were a smarter accountant so I could find a way to get around all that.  Maybe set myself up one of those Cayman Islands offshore accounts like the big boys.

Anyway, a flat tax is starting to sound like a good idea now.

Expanding Expendables

Monday I was watching The Expendables 3 on DVD.  It's an OK movie for mindless action and explosions as with the previous 2 entries.  A primary thrust of the movie is that Sylvester Stallone decides to dump his old team to recruit some new blood of people you haven't heard of except maybe for UFC champion Ronda Rousey, who probably shouldn't give up her day job.

Anyway, one thing about the Expendables franchise is it's kind of like your local oldies station.  I mean when I was a kid "oldies" were 50s, 60s, and the occasional early 70s song.  As time as gone by, "new" oldies are added so that it won't be long until the songs I listened to in high school in the mid-90s will be "oldies."  In the same way the Expendables franchise started with mostly 80s action stars like Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis.  Then with the sequels they add more 90s ones like Jean-Claude van Damme, Antonio Banderas, and Wesley Snipes.

Which got me thinking then, what big action stars would you recruit from the 2000s?  When I thought about it, it's kind of a depressing list.  The only two real old-school type action stars I could think of are the Rock and Vin Diesel of the Fast & Furious franchise.

After that you get to mostly guys who were in superhero movies like:

• Hugh Jackman
• Tobey Maguire
• Christian Bale
• Robert Downey Jr.
• Matt Damon
• Daniel Craig
• Mark Wahlburg
• Viggo Mortensen
• Orlando Bloom

The thing is most of those guys are dramatic actors who bulked up (steroids!) and thanks to modern fight choreographers and CGI could be action stars.  They really don't belong in the same room as Stallone and Schwarzenegger and the old-school muscleheads.

That kind of actor is pretty much a dying breed, at least among the A-list.  Nowadays I guess we want someone who can act in addition to just punching people and blowing shit up.  That's a good thing but in some ways it's a bad thing too.  I mean with the old-school types it's really simple; you don't need to have complex character arcs and motivations to mess things up.  I suppose as with your oldies station time moves on.

The other thing I was thinking was who else could you add to the Expendables franchise?  I broke my list down by time periods like this:

Geriatric Set:

• Clint Eastwood
• Robert de Niro
• Al Pacino
• Sean Connery

80s/90s:

• Tom Cruise
• Brad Pitt
• Nic Cage
• Steven Seagal
• Jackie Chan
• Will Smith
• Ben Affleck
• Liam Neeson
• Brendan Fraser
• Samuel L Jackson
• Pierce Brosnan
• The Matrix (Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss)

2000s I pretty much went through.

2010s:

• The Avengers (Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Scarlett Johannson but not Mark Ruffalo because he doesn't fight anyone in the movie)
• Channing Tatum
• Tom Hardy
• Jennifer Lawrence
• Liam Hemsworth
• Henry Cavill
• Chris Pratt

What names do you think are missing from the list?

Movie Roundup 2/16/15: Gone Girl, Fury, Lucy, John Wick, and more!

I've had the Roku working for over a week, so I could have watched movies through that, but newer ones are like $5 on Amazon, Google Play, etc.  I decided then one day at the grocery store to hit the Redbox and then I went back a few times to catch up on some recent movies I had missed.

Gone Girl:  The way this movie starts, a man (Ben Affleck) finds his wife missing and house messed up and of course he's the prime suspect.  Only I never believed Affleck did it, not even for a second, because that would have been too obvious.  The real explanation starts out pretty messed-up and only gets more so from there.  What this movie does really well is illustrate how people are demonized by Nancy Grace and the like before they can even get a trial.  Think Casey Anthony and so forth.  My main criticism is that the end is one of those that keeps going when it probably could have ended 10-15 minutes sooner. (3.5/5)

Fury:  Did the world need another World War II movie?  Not really, but what the hell.    This is a pretty gritty story about a tank crew in 1945 as the Allies are pushing the Germans back towards Berlin.  The tank ultimately gets stuck and has to do a 300 against a bunch of SS goons.  As far as war movies go it's not really breaking any new ground, but it's still a good war movie if you're into that. (3/5)

Lucy:  This is another actioner from the Luc Besson factory, only Scarlett Johannson, aka Black Widow from the Avengers, takes over for Liam Neeson.  The premise of the movie is pretty silly.  The eponymous main character's drug courier boyfriend gets her mixed up with guys who manufacture something called CPH4 which is something newborn babies produce in small quantities to grow.  In a large quantity, like when a bag of it in Lucy's intestines breaks open, gives her superpowers and turns her into the Terminator, who has to get the other 3 bags of CPH4 before the bad guys.  Morgan Freeman cashes a paycheck as the dopey scientist who gives credibility to the idea that people only use 10% of their brain and if they use more they'll get magic powers, sort of like the Star Child in 2001, which all the trippy stuff at the end is I'm sure supposed to invoke.  I'm not all into science like other people, but I don't think that 10% thing is true and that all this "extra capacity" is really just storage.  Anyway, my main criticism is that after she hits 20% Black Widow has less personality than when she played a computer in Her.  But it got me thinking that Luc Besson could probably do an OK version of Chance of a Lifetime, so long as we set it in France and take out most of the middle to focus on the action. (2/5)

The Drop:  This was notable for being James Gandolfini's last movie and not much else.  It's written by Dennis Lehane of Mystic River fame and that's the sort of gritty attitude it's going for, only Brooklyn instead of Boston.  Tom Hardy, aka Bane and soon Mad Max but not Rick Flagg, runs the bar while his cousin Marv (Gandolfini) supervises.  The bar is really a front for the Russian or Chechyan mob, who routinely drop payments there, hence the title.  It's kind of a slow movie, but there's sort of a twist at the end.  Still, it's kind of a forgettable movie. (2.5/5)

Justice League: Throne of Atlantis:  Aquaman wasn't in the first rebooted Justice League animated movie (War!) perhaps because this sequel focuses largely on him as the bastard son of the Atlantean queen who has to take over when his evil half-brother tries to take over Earth.  It's OK but at 72 minutes some of the characters like Shazam (aka Captain Marvel), Flash, Green Lantern, and Batman get short shrift.  The Superman/Wonder Woman flying kiss is thrown in at the beginning where it has no dramatic impact at all.  And, well, it focuses on Aquaman.  Nuff said. (2.5/5)

But even though this movie didn't exist and I hadn't read the comics it was based on, some of the stuff in there got into my Girl Power books.  The Aquaman character in that series was named Lord Neptune, who then becomes a woman named Queen Neptune.  Anyway, he had an evil brother who adopted the nickname Killer Whale.  There was also a magic trident that only the royals could wield just like the Atlanteans.  Only the trident in mine magically folds into a seashell for portability.  Suck on that, Geoff Johns.

John Wick:  This is like a modern, stupid version of Road to Perdition.  The story is pretty much the same where a hitman turns on his former employer because the employer's idiot son killed everything the hitman loved.  Only in this case it's a dog the eponymous character's dead wife left to him.  (And stole his old Mustang.)  Because of that I'm not sure if we're supposed to take the movie seriously or not.  Anyway, after that it's pretty much just assassin movie cliches. (1/5)

November Man:  speaking of assassin movie cliches!  This is one of those movies that could have gone straight to the Redbox.  It follows that formula of casting an aging but still recognizable star (Pierce Brosnan) surround him with no names and film it in a cheap Eastern European location.  The details of the plot aren't really important.  Anyway, it's a fairly well-made shopworn cat-and-mouse spy movie. (2.5/5)

The Brothers Bloom:  After I finished Breaking Bad on Netflix I watched this, which was directed by Rian Johnson, who directed a few episodes of that series and has now landed the next two Star Wars movies.  Anyway, this is about two conmen.  The older is the current Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and the younger is that guy from the Pianist who's down to doing razor commercials and History Channel movies (Adrien Brody).  The thing is that Adrien Brody has been in a number of Wes Anderson movies and that's how this movie feels for the first 2/3 before shit gets real.  So that 2/3 was more fun than the final act. (3/5)

The Throw Aways:  This is the pilot for a series on Crackle, one of the things I have on my Roku.  Anyway, it's supposed to be like the A-Team only if Hannibal were a computer hacker played by Sam Huntington who recruits a bunch of losers (but not THE Losers because that was a different movie that's sort of the same thing) to stop someone with an encryption key that could let the highest bidder destroy power grids or something.  A decrepit James Caan cashes a paycheck as the team's Bosley.  The production values and acting are comparable to regular TV.  I have to say it was better than TNT's The Librarians but I wouldn't really care to watch a whole series of it. (2.5/5)

Love is in the Air! And in Books!

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day or as I call it, just another lonely Saturday.  Sure you can buy candy, flowers, teddy bears, or jewelry, but why not a sexy or romantic read too?  I'm all over that front.

An obvious choice is Transformed for Valentine's Day.  When Cupid's arrow goes astray, a man finds himself changed into the hot girl he hasn't had the courage to talk to.  He spends the day searching for his true love with a few different partners, but will he find THE ONE?

Of course I have all sorts of other gender swap books that have different themes.  Maybe you'd like something a little naughtier like say, Transformed Into a Dominatrix.  Or you might want a little role playing with Transformed Into a Maid.  Or maybe you're into larger women, in which case Transformed Into a Fat Girl would be up your alley.  I wrote these so I ain't going to judge!

The gender swap thing probably is a little too extreme for some people, which is fine.  I got more mainstream romances too.  If you like tragic romances like all those nauseating Nicholas Sparks books, try Virgin Territory, where a guy finds a girl washed up on a beach and they fall madly in love, but staying in love is the really hard part.

Or you could try Higher Power, where a blind guy has the supernatural ability to see into people's dreams and uses this to try to help a woman in a coma.  In the process they inadvertently fall in love, but a love taking place in a woman's dreams isn't exactly the most stable thing in the world.

You want something more grown-up?  Try The Best Light.  Jaded nature photographer Frank Hemsky goes to a small New Mexico town where the woman he loved died.  As Frank tries to piece together what happened to her, he finds himself drawn to her daughter.

Maybe you couldn't get tickets to 50 Shades of Grey and have already thrown your copy of the book into the fireplace.  In that case, why not read The Last Conquest?  It's about a real jerk who finds himself falling in love with a woman for the first time.

If you want something poorly written (and again have thrown your copy of 50 Shades of Grey into the fireplace) try A Light From the Darkness.  It's about a woman who becomes the head of a crime syndicate and then burns it all down to be with a daring reporter.

There's always that old standby Where You Belong which isn't especially romantic, but there are some damned sexy scenes in it.

All those and more are available on the Planet 99 Publishing website!  And also Amazon.  Most of the ones I listed are still on other retailers through Smashwords.

Putting My Eggs In One Basket

OK really I'm only putting most of my eggs in one basket.  Seeing how well my erotica books have done with the Kindle Unlimited thing, I decided to put the Chances Are, Tales of the Scarlet Knight, Girl Power, and Children of Eternity series all on KDP Select.  Each book will now be $2.99 or free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

Besides the relative success of my erotica books on there, a couple other thoughts went into this:
1.  I don't really sell much on Smashwords or B&N.  The ones that sell the most, the First Contact series of crappily-written sci-fi books, are still available through there for the same price so I can maybe pick up a few cents off them now and again.
2.  Chance of a Lifetime, Girl Power, and A Hero's Journey had been free on Amazon for a while.  Chance of a Lifetime for something like 2 1/2 years I'd say.  I used to move upwards of 1,000 copies of it per month.  Now it has slowed to maybe 100 per month.  The other two don't even make that.  So it just seemed like, "Why am I still giving these away?"

Which it may take Amazon a few days to catch up to the price change, meaning that if you haven't got one of those books and you were on the fence about reading it, grab a free copy now before it's over!

Amazon has pissed me off recently, but it's still the biggest source of my income, so there's no sense being petty about a couple of slights.  Business is business.  If I'm not happy with how this goes I can pull the plug on the KDP Select in 3 months and then republish them on Smashwords and B&N with just a few clicks.

Besides the series I listed above, I also put Where You Belong, The Night's Legacy, and Sisterhood on the KDP Select.  The latter two because they kind of go with my superhero series, so I might as well.  And the former just to see if it reinvigorates sales a little because I haven't sold many of that in a while.  I'll just have to see how this experiment goes.  As far as I'm concerned, though, I'm not really losing much since again I don't move much inventory through Smashwords & B&N.  It's really very little risk for me.

The Scarlet Knight ones I decided to do new covers.  They're much simpler than the old ones.  I just took Rusty's image from the first book and ran it through different color filters:

 I don't know if that's an improvement or not, but maybe then people will think those are new books.

And in the meantime you can get my latest holiday-themed gender swap story:  Transformed for St. Patrick's Day.  I think it's the shortest of these stories I've written to date, which is somewhat intentional.  The gist of the story is that there's some bad green beer going around.  I was going to put it up for pre-order but then I forgot to click the right options, so it'll just release now.  Whoops.

Now it's on to Transformed for Easter!

The Art of the Swap

I mentioned in my previous entry that I was rewatching Breaking Bad, in part to prepare for the premiere of Better Call Saul and in part because there's not tons of other stuff on Netflix I want to watch.  In a Season 3 episode Walter White, the chemistry teacher-turned-meth cook, says in reference to making crystal meth, "You have to respect the chemistry."  The idea being that for Walter even though he was making a criminal product there was still a certain beauty and perfection to it.

Respect the chemistry, yo

I think a lot of people would see the gender swap erotica books I write as a literary version of crystal meth:  an underground, taboo substance sold to grimy, scruffy people.  I'm sure "important" authors with big publishers and midlist authors who just want to think they're important would like to stamp out books like mine the way the DEA wants to stamp out Walt's meth.

And yet you have to respect the chemistry.  Even these stories are artful in their own way.  They operate on different rules from mainstream fiction, but the basic principles are still much the same, at least for me.

The basic idea here is that these stories are still stories.  The base version of these has a pretty simple formula:  dude gets turned into a chick through some means, has a few moments of awkward adjustment, gets fucked (most often consensually), and that's it.  Because the getting fucked is so awesome that he wants to be a chick forever!  I'm not sure any women reading this would agree with that assessment.

As a big fan of the old Twilight Zone, my favorite way of doing these is the Rod Serling-style comeuppance.  Like in the first story of Transformed Into a Schoolgirl, a guy murders a teenage girl, gets shot by the cops, and then finds that through some Victor von Frankenstein science his brain is now in the body of the girl he shot!  Or in Transformed Into a Whore, a modern Jack the Ripper is captured by a bunch of prostitutes and turned into one of them!  Or in Transformed Into a Geek Girl, a football jock is turned into a geeky girl who lives with the nerds he tormented.  Sometimes I like to get a little political, like in Transformed Into a MILF when a Rush Limbaugh-style shock jock becomes a 50s housewife to realize it wasn't so awesome.  And of course the Transformed for Christmas was a whole riff on A Christmas Carol, where a jerk got his comeuppance.

The other most popular way I have to do these is accidental change.  Basically some poor schmuck drinks something he shouldn't or takes a wrong turn to run afoul of a witch or something and ends up as a girl, who may or may not find out that it's awesome.  Like in Transformed Into a Bimbo, a scientist's lab is broken into and he ends up getting doused with the wrong chemicals that eventually turn him into a bimbo.  Or in Transformed Into a Cougar where a kid makes a wish on a comet and finds himself turned into his hot female teacher.  Is there really a message to those?  Not so much, though some turn more into love stories than erotica.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that even a genre that might seem inferior or scummy has its own internal logic.  It has its own chemistry that you should respect.

Mixed Nuts

Wednesday I mentioned I had two books for free until Sunday.  There's this:

and this:

So far Lipstick Lesbian Elixir is outpacing the other by about 20 units.  Which probably means something, though I couldn't tell you exactly what.  If you haven't yet, go download those!  Even if you never read them, it helps keep me on the bestseller list--the free version anyway. 

I noticed someone had given my book Transformed Into a Bimbo 1 star because it didn't get him "sexually excited."  From looking at the dude's other reviews, I guess this is how he grades books.  That's kind of fucked up, though I guess for erotica books it's kinda appropriate.  How creepy would Siskel and Ebert have been if instead of thumbs-up or thumbs-down they rated it boner-up or flaccid?  Which makes me wonder if anyone ever did a film review show for pornos.

Speaking of movies, sort of, before I started rewatching Breaking Bad on Netflix I watched the Jon Favreau movie Chef.  It was OK, but the problem was there was never really an "all is lost moment" where you felt like things wouldn't work out.  You know, there just wasn't enough conflict, except at the beginning when he yells at a food critic.  The only problem was this was supposed to be like an indie movie except it co-starred Scarlett Johannson, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Downey Jr.  All indie movies should be that lucky, right?

One thing that movie will do is make you hungry.  One thing that sucks when you're living on the road is that it's hard to cook.  I mean you can go to extended stay motels where they have a stovetop, but none of them have like an oven.  For a couple months I've really wanted to cook a frozen pizza.  I know it won't be that great, but I just haven't done it in a while.  The other things that might be nice are fajitas and grilled cheese.  Anyway, you get sick of restaurant and microwave food after a while.

It's too bad I'm not still doing the Box Office Blitz thing because it'd be fun to guess how much Jupiter Ascending is going to bomb.  I'm not sure, is one of the Wachowskis married to a big wig at WB or something?  Or maybe they have dirty pictures on someone.  Or I guess whoever is in charge at Warner Bros is a moron.  I mean after the debacle that was Speed Racer they handed them the checkbook again?  Really?  Come on, The Matrix was 16 years ago.  Since then the closest they've had to a big success is all those Occupy protestors wearing Guy Fawkes masks.

You know how I write all those gender swap books?  On one of my Roku channels I found this movie called Zerophilia which is a gender swap movie of sorts.  For some reason this dude turns into a chick when he gets sexually excited.  But I don't think it'd be steamy enough for erotica Ebert mentioned above.

Do you suppose this whole Bruce Jenner becoming a woman thing would make this subject more mainstream?  I could just see a year or two from now Stephen King or James Patterson or some big name coming out with a gender swap book and people saying, OMG, what a genius to think of that!  And then I'd be like, hey I've been doing this for like 5 years!

Since I'm not moving around so much, maybe I should think more of what to do with blog entries.  I'm not sure people like the random shit approach.

Free Books, Free Rants, and Free Household Tips!

Today through Sunday you can get two of my erotica books for free.  These are two that I wrote back in December that aren't gender swap ones, which is why they aren't my best sellers.  They're great if you like girl-on-girl action with a paranormal twist.

In The Lipstick Lesbian Elixir, a butch female detective gets sprayed with an illegal drug and finds herself slowly turning into a super-girly bimbo with an insatiable appetite for other girls!

My Roommate Changed Me Into a Goth Girl! is exactly what it sounds like.  A bitchy sorority girl's new roommate is a Goth girl who out of revenge for a terrible prank turns sorority babe into a Goth girl too.  Mayhem ensues.

Even if you don't want to read them, please go download them to help me move onto bestseller lists.  I mean come on, they're free so you aren't out anything.

Free rant time:  WTF was up with the Super Bowl ads this year?  Gawd, what a bunch of stinkers.  Pardon my sexism here, but apparently the Mad Men think the only people watching the Super Bowl are women on their periods.  How else do you explain the spate of schmaltzy ads with lost puppies and "The Cat's in the Cradle" and all that?  Look guys, the point of the Super Bowl is for people to eat a bunch of junk, drink tons of beer, and watch a violent game where men get paid millions of dollars to knock the snot out of each other.  Amidst all that do I really want to watch an ad guilt tripping me about a kid drowning in the tub?

Even the "funny" ads were crap.  Like the Fiat one that made it seem like their car was on Viagra.  Because people want a car that's like an old man's erection.  And hey I'm a huge Breaking Bad fan (I've been rewatching it the last few days since the Roku is working) so it was cool to see Walter White again, but the punchline for that ad was lame.  I can't even remember what company it was for.   Live action Pac-Man is neat, but it was another lame punchline.  Then again, Bud Light ads are always lame.

When I think about it, probably the last Super Bowl ad I really remember was the Frito-Lay one where Dan Quayle asked for some potato chips.  And that was what, 1993 or something?  I guess it's hard to create an ad that really sticks in the memory for a long time.  I suppose that doesn't matter to the Mad Men; they only care if it sticks with you long enough to buy their product.  I'm never sure how effective those ads are.  Except if McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's or wherever has a new sandwich; then I might stop by to try it once if it sounds interesting.

I think that's the problem with most ads:  they don't really tell me why I should buy the product.  A lot like Apple, Nike, etc try to sell you on the lifestyle associated with the product.  If you have this, then you'll be cool!  Which matters not to me, but I guess it matters to others.  I suppose that's what Bud Light is trying to do:  if you drink our beer you'll have fun and be cool!  (Because really our beer is swill.)  So many ads are just style over substance, usually because the product is shit.

Like recently I saw this ad for the Schick Extreme 3 Sensitive razors.  In the commercial a guy waiting for an interview sees the owner is bald and so buys a razor and quickly shaves all the hair from his head.  I was not all that impressed with the Gillette ones I had been using so I decided to give these razors a try.  The result was pretty pathetic.  I mean every couple of swipes I had to clean the gunk out from between the blades so they'd work.  And it's not like I had Duck Dynasty facial hair going either.  Unfortunately they sell these 4/$5 so now I've got four shitty disposable razors.  Seriously the ones I bought from the 99 Cent store in Phoenix worked better and they were 2/99 cents!

When I bought my car, I didn't buy it because I saw a commercial where the car was injected with Viagra or driven by some celebrity; I bought it because it had the features I wanted for a reasonable price.  And Ford was the only one of the Big Three not in bankruptcy at the time.  So there's that.

Anyway, a lot of people loved the stupid Budweiser puppy one, which means we'll get more schmaltzy bullshit next year I'm sure.  Ugh.  The people who like that are probably the same ones who buy Nicholas Sparks books.  No accounting for taste.

I just wanted to mention one other thing.  We're such a throwaway culture these days where you basically get a new phone every year because the screen is slightly bigger.  Recently the hook on the strap of my netbook case broke off.  I could have just bought a whole new case, but that seemed wasteful since the actual case was fine; it just needed a new strap.  My first temporary repair was to get some rope from the dollar store and cut off a length to tie to the loops on the bag.  But then later I was at the Salvation Army store and they had a whole bin of old laptop cases, backpacks, duffel bags, garment bags, etc.  Anyway, I dug through there until I found a couple that had a strap like my netbook case with the right kind of hook.  Then someone said over the speakers that blue tags were half off.  So I found a blue tagged bag with the right strap that was $4.  With the discount it was only $2.  So basically I spent $3 to fix the bag when I could have gone to Amazon or Wal-Mart or something and spent $10-$20.  Plus I had a new bag that I put my Nintendo Wii in, so that was a bonus.  The point being that you don't have to automatically throw something out just because one little thing on it breaks.  A little ingenuity and sometimes you can fix what's wrong for a lot less.

Here's another pearl of wisdom:  my brother was moving recently and since it was a two-story we had to carry a bunch of shit down the stairs.  One day of that and I was waking up with cramps in both legs.  So I looked online and read that what movers sometimes do is cut a box up and use it to make a slide.  That seemed like a really economic solution, so I got a couple of moving boxes from Lowe's for like $3, cut them up, taped 1 1/2 together and we could just slide shit down from the top floor to the bottom.  No more climbing, plus it's fun, unless the box falls open or something.

Since I mentioned it, I've really enjoyed rewatching Breaking Bad, first on AMC and then lately on the Roku.  Now that the series is over, when you watch it again, you have a better idea of where things are going and how they fit together.  I think it works that way for books too, where sometimes you reread a book and you can get a better idea for the story because you already know what happens, so when you reread you see better how things fit.  So there, some writerly-type advice at the end.

Now go download my books!  And you can buy others.  I mean come on, I still have no real job so this is the closest to an income that I have.  Maybe I just need a schmaltzy ad to sell myself and my books.  Or I could figure out how to cook meth.