#GiveABook

Sometimes it's kind of overwhelming how much need there is. You want to help, but your resources and disposable income just can't keep up. And then there are times when people make it easy for you. You can sign up for Survey Monkey, for example. For every survey you complete, they'll donate 50 cents to a charity of your choice. And not only that, but you get a chance to win an Amazon gift card or other prize. The money starts to add up after a while (you get a running total every time you log on). If you're interested, here's where to sign up.
This Christmas, Penguin Books is sponsoring their second annual book giveaway. For every tweet and Facebook post using the hashtag #giveabook between now and December 24, they'll do just that--up to a total of 35,000 books (which is up 10K from last year's giveaway). How fantastic is that? With just a couple of keystrokes you can have a book donated on your behalf. Go Penguin!!

Criminal Element runs a promotion for Whipping Boy!

I've been working as a "Fresh Meat" reviewer for Criminal Element," the crime fiction blog hosted by Macmillan publishing for a little over a year now. (And I learned about the paid gig via Twitter, which is something I tell my clients who see no value in social media because they don't think "anyone wants to know what I ate for breakfast.")

I am a proud indie author but it's still kind of fun to drop the phrase, "My editor at Macmillan," into casual conversation.  The editor in question is Clare Toohey, and she is awesome. She set up a great promotion to celebrate the publication of my debut mystery novella, Whipping Boy, and is running it in conjunction with an excerpt on Criminal Element today.  She's also helped me hone in on a description of the book that fits my brand of crime fiction, which is not that easily defined. Did I mention she's awesome?  Here's how she describes Whipping Boy:

Whipping Boy by Katherine Tomlinson is a California cop mystery novella, the debut of a female criminalist whose strange existence swings from the darkest crime scenes to life among Hollywood royalty--no wonder she has such a bad attitude (available March 12, 2014). 

 

If you love crime fiction in all its varieties, you should be checking out Criminal Element. And you should definitely stop by today because if you leave a comment about the excerpt, you can win excellent swag! Here's a link to the excerpt.

Science Fiction Movie Infographic

I love infographics. Over at Pinterest, one of my most "repinned" and "liked" pins is a Shakespeare infographic. I was steered toward this infographic by a tweet on a completely different subject but as is often the case, I got distracted and started clicking around looking for other bits of information to amuse myself.

This is your brain on Twitter

I love trivia. My father collected it and at his death, I inherited his box full of notes for a planned book on Virginia trivia. (I was the only person in the family who could actually read his handwriting.) There isn't much of a market for trivia in real life, unless you write trivia questions for bar games (which I have done), although you probably rock at Jeopardy. One of the things I really enjoy about Twitter is that you can "follow" all sorts of Tweeps who offer daily tweets filled with interesting factoids. Most of this information is totally useless but it makes me happy to know all this stuff. It enters my imagination and churns around with everything else in there and sometimes it comes out in a story and sometimes it comes out in a conversation and sometimes it's just there for me to know and you to find out.

Some of the accounts I particularly enjoy are:
@TheWeirdWorld (weird hacks and facts)
@Factsionary (hidden facts)
@FactBook

and the great thing is that once you follow one of these Twitter accounts, the AI will suggest even more. I will NEVER again be without a supply of utterly useless facts at my fingertips.

Friday Fiction Feed from Twitter--Blood Street

I enjoy social media. As someone who works at home, it helps me feel connected to a wider world. One f the things I really like is when a tweet points me in the direction of a book I might like to read. (Even though my TBR pile now has its second bookcase, my motto is "no book left behind."

Today I ran across Carl Alves' novel Blood Street, which is currently on sale at Amazon.com for 99 cents.  You can sample Alves' fiction for free on his website, which I did, and now I'm about to click over to Amazon and spend a whopping dollar sampling his book. (It actually doesn't look like he updates his website very often but all the links still work.)  Ah--did some digging around and he has a new site here.

The book combines vampires and Mafiosi and I can't wait to read it.

I admire a writer who isn't afraid to kill his darlings.

Social Media is Our Friend

I joined Twitter kicking and screaming. And found I LOVED it. Now I am pretty obnoxious about urging my friends to join the party. I'm still learning my way around, but I have my own personal social media consultant in my long-time friend Janette Kotichas. (Follow her @janettekotichas.) I've read John Locke's book on marketing, and I just ran across Chris Brogan's "An Author's Plan for Social Media." He put it out there a year ago but everything he suggests still makes sense. Writing is a solitary occupation. Get social!

It's a numbers game

I am lately obsessed with numbers--my weight (lower is better), my followers on twitter (higher is better) and two lists of things have attracted my attention. I've been adding movies to my NetFlix database so the AI can make recommendations (they keep telling me I'll really, really, really like Speed, and I so don't believe them). I have close to two thousand films listed.

Meanwhile, over at GoodReads, I'm trying to fill out my list of books because I'm now obsessed with listing EVERY SINGLE BOOK I EVER READ. And that is a really large number. I've read several books a week since I was a kid and that hasn't changed. (Except nowadays, people PAY me to read books) I've only got 671 books listed on my GoodReads shelf. Around a quarter of what I listed for movies. (And it's not that I am ashamed of admitting I've read a lot of crap. I read Gothic novels as a teen, and moved on to romance. I read every vampire book ever written except the The Shiny Metal Grin.

I just can't remember every author. I went through my mother's Nero Wolfe books and her Agatha Christies and kept going. Robert Barnard and Liza Cody and more.

But what this enumeration exercise has done is remind me of all the writers I stopped reading but who haven't stopped writing. Why didn't I read all the George Chesbro novels about Mongo? (Because they started getting really odd and fanciful around number 7.) What about all those Elvis Cole books I haven't read? This is definitely a summer to catch up with old friends. And then I'll list the books on my GoodReads shelf.

Good enough to Tweet

I have recently opened a Twitter account to promote NoHo Noir and in the process of looking for twitter-folk who might be interested in random thoughts of a noir nature, I have run across foodie tweets. Yes, bite-size bits of info about food and eating requiring less commitment than watching an episode of Iron Chef America (one of my guilty pleasures).

Here are the ones I like best (bonus points for clever names):

@beyondthepeel (a foodie in Vancouver)

@goddessofbaking (all about the bake)

@myfoodthoughts (philosophy of food)

@lifesafeast (foodie in France)