I am an expert witness because I say I am*

Moriah

Album cover of Don Henley’s ACTUAL MILES, on which is the previously unreleased “In the Garden of Allah”Someone sent me to an interesting article on a book I haven’t read, The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset. I hesitated to write this because I haven’t read the book, but I’m actually commenting on the post itself.

“The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published in 1929. How José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses helps us understand everything from YouTube to Duck Dynasty.”

Are you, like me, puzzled to learn that Popular Science magazine recently shut down comments on its website, declaring that they were bad for science? Are you amazed, like me, that Duck Dynasty is the most-watched nonfiction cable show in TV history? Are you dismayed, like me, that crappy Hollywood films about comic book heroes and defunct TV shows have taken over every movie theater? Are you depressed, like me, that symphony orchestras are declaring bankruptcy, but Justin Bieber earned $58 million last year?

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One day I started writing a book.

Moriah

That day was November 6, 2013. I finished it December 8, 2013.

I haven’t done THAT since I was working graveyards at a convenience store, but Sabrina Darby kept poking at me.

Whatcha workin’ on?

NOTHING! I’M DRY AS A BONE! DUNHAM DRAINED MY WELL! I’LL NEVER WRITE AGAIN!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

So … what’s in your idea folder?

OH, FINE. Here’s a list. I don’t know what to do with ANY of this stuff.

Tell me about THIS one. It seems most fully developed.

It’s just sketches. I have no idea what to do with it.

Hmm. *reads* So, um, why does X character do Y thing?

And that was pretty much all it took Read more →

“Heroine decapitates someone in the first scene”

Moriah

I am proud to announce my first 1-star review for Dunham, which you can find here. But I will quote it in its entirety for your convenience.

This book contains some shocking and gory scenes of violence that, for me, were difficult to get past. It seems more like historical fiction masquerading as romance, which isn’t my preference as a reader. I found little to recommend the heroine (she decapitates someone in the first scene), and the hero’s introspection was clouded by odd lines that were stream of consciousness? Bad poetry? I’m not sure what it was, other than that I didn’t like it. I’m surprised that kind of thing got past an editor, as it should have been punctuated or scrapped entirely. In all, I just didn’t like the book–it seemed a little too in love with itself and was weighed down by too much needless dialogue that I couldn’t be bothered to wade through. This one was a DNF for me, unfortunately.

(bold is mine)

Read more →

Dunham: The Past

Moriah

It is finished. I will now wring out my brain.

Now, you! Go go go! Get it and enjoy Revolutionary War swashbuckling on this Independence Day!




Tales of Dunham #4
© 2013 Moriah Jovan
280,000 words (740 pages)



READ THE EXCERPT

Side note: A bit of this book occurs on the Barbary Coast. Celia, the heroine, has spent some time in Egypt. So I am finding the Egyptian uprising today particularly poignant. Independence Day for Egyptians too?

Not that I blame them …

Moriah

Emoji with a zipper for lips.After hours and hours of XY Tax Deduction running his mouth and being told repeatedly to be quiet:

Me: “Look. You need to get some imaginary friends and talk to them.”

XY: “I don’t have any.”

Me: “Make some.”

XY: “Well, I did have some, but they ran away.”

Me: “Why?”

XY: “I talked too much.”

A professional milestone

Moriah

It may or may not be common knowledge that, under my real name, I run B10 Mediaworx, an author services / digital formatting company, which I’ve been doing for the past … mmm … four years. I think. Anyway, before that, I was an at-home medical transcriptionist for six years. I haven’t worked out of doors in ten years.

Well, doing this with babies/toddlers isn’t easy, let me tell you, but once they started going to school, my work life got a lot more productive. And it was so blessedly QUIET. I love(d) working at home. Free and breezy. But a couple of years ago, I found I had a lot more work to do AND I was slacking on the internet during the quiet time. So I started going to the UMKC library on Sundays to work, Read more →

Back to blogging, maybe

Moriah
  • Dunham’s wrapping up and going into production, which means I’m right on track for my July 4 release date.
  • I have the attention span of a gnat, and I’ve always thought/spoken in bullet-point lists. It just got worse since I fell in love with Twitter oh so long ago. 140 characters is just about perfect.
  • I had a midlife crisis recently when I turned 45, realized I might not actually die young like a lot of people in my family do, AND realized I’d done everything I intended to do and that Dunham is the culmination. It’s the book I’ve worked on sporadically since I caught the idea in 1990 and had no idea what to do with it. That may have been a miscalculation.

    • Read more →

Of artists and assholes

Moriah

Meme with a cat sitting at a table like a human. Text: “Sit down, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, I ate your hamster this morning.”Orson Scott Card doesn’t make a hill of beans’ worth of difference to me. I never read him until I was an adult (and haven’t read Ender’s Game), I was underwhelmed with the Alvin Maker series, and aside from his strong views on homosexuality, he has some other truly whacko ideas that also thoroughly and completely offend my libertarian sensibilities.

I weighed in on the controversy over his short story “Hamlet’s Father” because I can’t stand it when people rant about books they haven’t read. That is intellectually dishonest, and the people I saw doing this promote themselves as intellectually honest. Sorry, nope. Get off your fucking high horse and read the fucking book, then come back and talk to me. Read more →

Magdalene and Publisher’s Weekly

Moriah

For an author, a Publisher’s Weekly starred review is one of the holy grails of reviews. It’s one of those things that, for a writer, is right up there with The Call (“Hi, Mojo. I want to offer you a contract for your book.”). I’ve had pretty close brushes with getting The Call, which (three times, to be precise) ended up to be “I love this book and I want to buy it, but I can’t because of Freak Things 1, 2, and/or 3.” What I have never dared aspire to (especially once I started down the self-pub path) is a review in Publisher’s Weekly at all, much less a starred one. But then Tuesday, this happened: Read more →

Economizing

Moriah

…as the folks in Regency romances would say. With an “s.”

I’ve hosted a bunch of websites for years and never really thought much of it until I started listing how many and for how much money. It was the first time I’d seen it in one place before because they’re all spread out through the year and I get the bill and pay it.

So I’ve consolidated a bunch of my websites down to two: moriahjovan.com and b10mediaworx.com. The site where I had planned to host the serial was theproviso.com, but it wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify keeping it. Yet I still wanted a site where all my Dunham-related work was consolidated. Ah, the beauty of subdomains.

When you go to theproviso.com, you will be redirected to moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham. I’m not quite finished with it yet (is one ever?), but I’m happy with the clean look and the ease of editing the theme. Now, there are three links out there to free downloads that were hosted off theproviso.com. I have no idea where those links are, but as of last night when I canceled the hosting, they were still getting hits. Sorry about that, but money’s a little tight. No, not that tight.

Meh. The truth is my head got a little scattered and I had to declutter, consolidate, and reorganize.

I have assimilated. Sorta.

Moriah

I have/had a Dell laptop I’ve had for 5 years. That thing has been a workhorse, but it had been having a couple of problems I either found a workaround for or put up with. It was on and cooking 12-18 hours a day every day. It had been reformatted twice, hauled around on vacation and to the library to work on it.

I go through keyboards like crazy because eventually the letters wear off and the fingernail grooves get too deep. That’s not why I get rid of them. I wear them out until they stop working. But I have an external monitor and wireless keyboard and mice. The most vulnerable parts of the machine were protected. Read more →