John Zeitler

I got to thinking a little bit about some of the things that have usually happened around this time of year. As August winds down and the fall begins, my mind tends towards the past, and thoughts of home. Three years ago, as August was ending, I was struck by an amazing amount of inspiration, and wound up writing what would eventually metamorphose into the beginnings of the universe in which A Civics Lesson is set. The musings therein spawned the title of this post, in point of fact, and while it no longer fits the story, it’s still appropriate. Because now, in this week or so, I’ve managed to be struck with more inspiration, in particular to finish up Frangible Time and hopefully start on a formal outline for the sequel to ACL.

Which is great news, considering I thought I’d be too busy to work on any writing for the foreseeable future.

Folks, I don’t advertise too much on my site, particularly not for A Civics Lesson. Granted, that may be why it’s garnered almost no attention whatsoever, but I think there’s another reason: it’s really hard to get caught up. Fortunately, I’ve managed to change that aspect.

You can now read each chapter in linear order as they are completed.. I recommend spending the next couple of days getting caught up through to the end of Chapter Five (it’s a doozy); Chapter Six will be done in a week or so, so you can catch it there then (or start here, now with the “next segment” tag), and from there I really recommend using the RSS Feed to stay current.

I’d also appreciate it if you folks could spread the word about the book again. Thanks.

Happy New Year, everyone.

I’ve spoken at length about my noveling, and to be honest for many of you it seems to be just an informed ability– I talk about it constantly but nobody’s ever read my work. That changes today.

Starting today, and running throughout 2009, you can read my (for real) first novel, A Civics Lesson, at Linguankery. The catch is, of course, that it’s not all up at once– you’ll get anywhere from 200-400 words of the novel per day. In short, if you have about three minutes to spare each day, you’ll have read the novel by the end of the year. I encourage you to bookmark the page and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

A business note: Linguankery’s RSS feed is going to be different from how I’ve done feeds in the past. Since it’s my primary “earning” site, I’ve put up a simple Google ad on the page. If I were to give away the entire novel via RSS, well, that would be nice, but unfortunately it would render the ad useless. (Not that I don’t expect everyone to have ad blocking anyway, but I’m being optimistic here.) Therefore, the feed for Linguankery will have only the first sentence or so of the day’s post, to encourage readers to drop by. I don’t like resorting to that, but short of embedding the ad in every post (which I don’t want to do), it’s the only way I can see it being even close to profitable. Keep in mind that it’s a tactic I’m promising you now I will never use for my personal blog.

Anyway, the novel’s just getting started now, so I hope you have the time each morning to take a look. New posts go up every day at 3:30a EST, or you can let the feed tell you when to go. I’d also appreciate it if you could spread the word about it– I’m doing some very minor marketing on Twitter, but beyond that I honestly don’t know how else to promote this.

Wish me luck, folks.

In between movies tonight, I got everything ready for the big reveal of the 2009 project. I’ll post the links and everything tomorrow, once there’s actual content up, but rest assured that it has a lot to do with the tags on this post. Which reminds me– I love tags.

Beyond that, life is peachy. See you all in 2009.