B. Justin Shier's Blog, page 2

Swing wide your crane, Swing wide your crane, And run me through.Bon Iver, The Wolves
Quick announcement.
I'm not dead, I'm still writing, and I'm gonna be working on Zero Tango full-time until the dang thing is done. Progress on this project has taken about twice as long as I had anticipated. A new narrative voice provoked some of these issues, creating a society for functional demi-god sociopaths added a few more, but caring too much for my characters was what ran me through.
I...

If you are B&N fan, The 7-inch Nook Tablet (8GB) is now $179 and the 16GB version is $199. (That's down from $199 and $249 respectively.) The price of the standard Nook Color is also down, from $169 to $149.

The Nook e-ink devices remain at $99 and $139 as before. There's been no love for e-ink so far this season.

Be aware that refreshes of a number of different lines are in the pipeline. Amazon's Kindle and Fire lines are looking to have a total refresh, and Micros...

My personal favorite reading device is Amazon's Daily Deal. The massive Kindle DX is on sale for $269.00 ($110 off). If you've ever wanted a e-reader that can double as a cudgel, now is the time to buy!

This sale also indicates that the new line of Fire tablets is getting cued up for launch. Hopefully, this doesn't mean that the Kindle DX will soon be discontinued. I want Amazon to keep something like the DX in its stable. I am happy with Google and Apple designing my color tablets. What...

There was a big dust-up in the ebook world this week.
First, some background. Some ebooks on websites like Amazon and B&N can be legally lent to other Kindle and Nook users. On Amazon, you can tell if a book is lendable by looking on the yellow purchase strip on the product page. It will say something like "Loan this book to anyone you choose." Some big publisher ebooks do not permit lending. Most indie published ebooks do. Each lending agreement has specific terms. Some only permit a few...

Watching wave after wave of Coca Cola and McDonalds commercials throughout the Olympics coverage has been, to say the least, distressing. More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese. Not overweight. Obese. In 2008 alone, medical expenditures associated with obesity cost us somewhere on the order of $150 billion dollars. This gargantuan price tag continues to rise yearly.

Our childhood obesity rates reveal an even greater tragedy. In the past three decades, obesity rates have tripled. Som...

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B.

sourceI'm testing out an embedded tal.ki forum onsite. You can click on the above "Forum" tab or follow this link. Feel free to monkey around with it and offer feedback.  I'll decide whether to plunk down some cash on the service based on your opinions.

One of the major pros of tal.ki forums is that you can use any of your social media logins as your username. (You would not need to create a new user ID for this site.)

The forum will remain in beta for now. Posts may be...

"Data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that the venerable deep-space explorer has encountered a region in space where the intensity of charged particles from beyond our solar system has markedly increased. Voyager scientists looking at this rapid rise draw closer to an inevitable but historic conclusion - that humanity's first emissary to interstellar space is on the edge of our solar system." —NASA

Or put more clearly...


Dark was the Night, by Blind Willie Johnson
The story of the...

I've received several Emails alerting me to the fact that the comments section of the Zero Sight fan page just suffered the technological equivalent of an acute left main stem MI. You can still enter comments--and I still get each one in my inbox--but all entries beyond May 12 cannot be seen. (There is a 'load more comments' button at the bottom but it is nonfunctional.)

This snafu appears to be due to some issue within Blogger. I've checked the admin side of things, but I can't figure out to...

Taken straight from Amazon.com's front page...


I've never submitted a piece of fiction to a publisher before, so I can't say I relate to the rough times Jessica Park details in her column on Indie Reader. I can only say that my experience working with Amazon has be fantastic. The KDP team has gone out of their way to promote my content, and they respond to my questions and concerns with the same speed and courtesy that people have grown to expect as Amazon customers.
You can check out Jess...