The SoapBoxers

Note to my RSS and email subscribers: an unfinished version of this slipped out a few days ago, so this is going to appear to be a duplicate article. My apologies.

In recent months, I am often having urges to re-read books that I read long ago – or pick up a copy of a contemporary classic that I’ve missed along the way. So I’m taking a short break from my typical diet of mystery novels to indulge myself a bit. Here are some of the books I will be reading.

To Kill a Mockingbird – I don’t remember exactly when or why I first read Harper Lee’s classic, but Mockingbird is probably the first book I read that had a substantial impact on my life. The message of tolerance and to avoid judgment without the facts really hit home – and I hope has formed a foundation for my life. At some point, I know that I had two copies of the book, but I managed to lose them over the years. I have a tendency to lend books pretty freely, and it’s likely that the copies are in someone else’s collection now (hey, whoever has them – enjoy!). I recently bought a hardcover copy of the 50th anniversary edition and am reading it now for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Catcher in the Rye – I have never read J.D. Salinger’s classic.  In fact, if it wasn’t for the connection to the movie Field of Dreams (in the book, the angry 60’s author is Salinger) I probably wouldn’t have picked up a copy.  But now that I have a copy, I should really give it a read, especially with the passing of Salinger to that great rye field in the sky.

The Day of the Jackal – This book probably wouldn’t make most people’s list of classic, but it was one of my earliest introductions to suspense novels.  The protagonist in the novel takes the job of assassinating French leader Charles DeGaulle.  I originally read this in a Reader’s Digest condensed collection, and I wonder what I missed by reading the abridged edition.  I recently snagged a copy for six bucks at Barnes & Noble and it’s on my must-read list.

Fahrenheit 451 – Until recently, I really wasn’t very familiar with the subject of this book.  I picked up an audio version at the library and really liked it.  The main character in the story is a professional book burner – it now illegal to possess books.  His wife lives in a fantasy world surrounded by electronic screens that immerse a person in the lives of soap opera-like dramas.  Abandoning the learning opportunities of books in favor of the cheap thrills of reality TV?  That could NEVER happen …

The Thirteenth Trick – Another gem that I first read in a Reader’s Digest condensed volume.  The novel is based in England and features a paraplegic archer who trades barbs with a detective investigating the murders of several young women.  I’m betting that the abridgement left out a lot of the story.  This is by far the least famous book I’m going to mention in this article – but it’s a very entertaining read.

The Fountainhead – I have been reading this book since 1992 – at a glacial pace.  Time to jump back into the life and times of Howard Roark again.  When I finish, I can grab Atlas Shrugged.  I’ve been waiting to finish Fountainhead before starting Atlas.  These books explain Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism and are pretty heavy reading – but I hate to stop reading a book halfway through.  (I haven’t stopped, I’m just enjoying an intermission.)  Note – I’m not attempting to promote objectivisim, I’m simply trying to finish reading the books …

War and Peace – Maybe.  I probably won’t get to it in this cycle of reading (and probably won’t finish the Ayn Rand novels either), but I’ll put it on my to-do list.  I tend to like novels that teach me some history, and I suspect that I would learn an awful lot about Russian history by reading War and Peace.

I have most of these books, but will need to pick up copies of Fahrenheit 451 and War And Peace at some point.  I’m thinking of setting up reading cycles for my lifetime, with goals of reading certain books at age 35 (now), another set of books at age 40, etc.

If you are interested in buying any of these books, I have provided links below.  Yes, I’ll make a small commission if you buy one of the books (this does not increase the price you pay).

So, what are YOU reading these days?

To Kill a Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye
The Day of the Jackal
Fahrenheit 451
The Thirteenth Trick
The Fountainhead / Atlas Shrugged (Boxed set)
War and Peace

Around the office, I’m know as a guy who generally has a smile on his face, but am not widely regarded as a practical joker.  This made the setup for this practical joke even better.  I have been a remote worker for several years, with most of my team at another location out of state (where I previously worked).  This out-of-sight, out-of-mind aspect also aided in my escapade.

The whole thing started when I heard about a co-worker get a bit agitated when someone accused him of being a graduate of the University of Colorado.  He is actually a proud graduate of Colorado STATE University.  This is a completely separate – and in his eyes, superior – institution of higher learning.

Shortly after Christmas one year, I spotted a University of Colorado window sticker on sale for 99 cents.  I sent it to an accomplice that placed it on his desk.  Shortly afterward, I bought a small toy buffalo and had the accomplice place this on the victim’s desk when he was away.  Ralphie the Buffalo is the mascot for the University of Colorado (which, again, is NOT this person’s alma mater).

At this point, I had the idea the next phase of the practical joke.  I would have Ralphie the Buffalo’s girlfriends send him notes from all around the country.

I asked a friend of mine in Colorado to pick up some buffalo themed postcards.  She wasn’t able to find any, but provided something even better – she took some nice photos at a buffalo ranch.  She also wrangled up some card stock which allowed me to insert photos and create an instant buffalo-themed greeting card.  At this point, I’ll admit to a bit of deception.  I needed to tread lightly in case she was also a CSU grad (and thus might not be very amused by this) and was vague about the reason why I needed buffalo post cards.

Once I had the cards in hand, I needed to line up writers.  I lined up a few women in the office in order to give the writing a nice feminine look (my own handwriting is nearly illegible).  Many loving notes were written to Ralphie.  Cards that featured photos of baby buffalo made mention of children missing their daddy.  Other photos were included for comic relief – such as ones with photos that included large mounds of buffalo poop.

So now I had the stockpile of cards.  I couldn’t simply send them from the post office.  The postmark would point the finger at me.  I happened to be in a simulation baseball league (the best league ever) with 32 people spread out across the US and Canada.  I enlisted the aid of many of these individuals.  Some of them were even kind enough to take drop off cards while they were on overseas trips.  I engaged the service of a few other friends in remote locations as well.  Over the span of several months, the cards slowly drifted in, with nothing to point back to me as the culprit.

Finally, at long last, I admitted that I was responsible for this lengthy, well-coordinated prank 🙂  If my memory is correct, this would have been about 15 months after the start of the activities.  Suffice it to say that patience was a key skill in pulling this off.

A while ago, I was discussing my short story One Man’s Dream with Bob Inferapels.  I made the comment that the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream concept was inspired by a quote from Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang Zu).  A short, loose translation of the quote is this: “Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly.  Now I do not know if I am a man who dreams he is a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams he is a man.”

Understandably, Bob’s response to this was “What kind of sh*t are you into?”  And buried behind that question was the unspoken one – “… and how did a farm kid from Iowa get to the point where he is pondering quotes from Chinese philosophers?”

I’m actually not a student of philosophy, per se.  I own hundreds of books, including substantial collections of crime and baseball related volumes, but just a single philosophy book.  That sole book is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which I finally purchased after seeing it mentioned in a sports article for the millionth time.

While I don’t necessarily study philosophy, I do stop to ponder interesting quotes that present themselves to me.  In the case of  Zhuangzi, I wonder what exactly is “reality.”  Our perception of reality is based largely on our memories and the accounts given to us by others – but how accurate are these accounts?  We see cases where people repress memories and other situations where stimuli can cause people to create completely false memories.  And how much does our own personal lens distort our view of everyday events?  What, exactly, makes an event a piece of genuine reality?

Another of my favorites is from Nietzsche’s The Abyss – “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”  This quote is actually the inspiration for the title of FBI profiler Robert K Ressler’s book Whoever Fights Monsters.  In Ressler’s situation, he was dealing with many serial killers who were the embodiment or pure evil.  If was important for those who tracked the killers to not be consumed by the evil themselves.

Most of us, of course, will never have the opportunity to track down serial killers.  Most of us will, however, encounter people who engage in the spreading of hatred in its many forms.  If you hate those that spread the hatred, you are yourself adding to the hatred in the world.  In other words, my advice is to hate the bigotry, not the bigot – as difficult as this may be in many cases.

One of my very favorite quotes lacks the deepness of the others –  “Luck is the residue of design.”  It is commonly attributed to baseball pioneer Branch Rickey, but actually originated from writer John Milton.  Rickey, not surprisingly, recognized a great quote when he saw one, and started using it.  The gist of this quote is easy to determine – “good luck” doesn’t happen randomly, but is often a results of years of preparation.  In other words, many cases of “overnight success” were really due to a decade of hard work.

The next time you see a quote – be it in a book, magazine article, or even someone’s email signature – stop to consider it.  That doesn’t necessarily mean to blindly follow what the quote espouses, of course.  In the words of Aristotle,  “It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.“

When I discuss the differences between short stories and novels, the stark contract in setting scenes tends to come front and center.  I have launched Tip of The Iceberg and Other Stories, and have also sent in my submission to the Iowa Short Story Award.  I’ll continue to write short stories every friday, but a major focus in the next 3-6 months will be renewing focus on my novel, Casting Stones.

I’ll definitely need to alter my mindset and spend more time focusing on the details of a scene.  Today’s article is really more for my benefit than for yours.  The scene I am delving into could be covered in a single sentence in a short story – Kirsten spent the afternoon reading Moby Dick and ate a turkey sandwich for dinner. I’m going to take this one sentence and expand it into several hundred words that will allow you to gain greater insights into the characters and the scene.  Honestly, it’s not a very action-packed scene – and therein lies the challenge.

Warning: nothing of any importance happens in this scene – it is merely a writing exercise.

Kirsten

The daily assault of the sun’s gentle rays had long ago caused the curtains to fade from virgin white to a yellowed tint.  It was late afternoon, and the rays peeked through the window once again and flooded the living room in a gentle glow.

Kirsten sat down the glass of iced tea and took a seat in the antique rocking chair.  As it squeaked in response to the rocking, she opened the cover of a dog-eared copy of Moby Dick.  She stopped for a moment to ponder the first line – “Call me Ishmael.”  She found this to be an interesting name.  She had never actually known anyone named Ishmael.  She remembered Ismael Valdez with the Dodgers and remembered that her dad had mentioned Rocket Ismail returning kicks for Notre Dame.  But never an Ishmael.

Kirsten pushed her glasses back up on her nose and delved deeper into the protagonist of Melville’s classic.  A few of her friends were school teachers, and many of them held summer jobs – working retail, carpentry, and on farms.  Kirsten couldn’t imagine any of them spending time on a whaling ship.  Ishmael certainly had an adventurous spirit.

Kirsten was fully engrossed in the adventures of adventures of Ishmael, Ahab, and Queequeg when she suddenly realized that the room had grown dark.  It had been several hours since she had begun reading, and her stomach began to cry out in agony.  She rose from the rocking chair, slipped on her shoes and began her pursuit of dinner.

Kirsten’s scarlet stilettos drummed out a melodic series of clicks as she strode purposefully across the hardwood floor. When she arrived at the mahogany table in the dining room, she flipped the switch on the ancient lamp. The compact fluorescent bulb fluttered for a short moment before realizing its full potential and bathing the room in light.

Kirsten reached above her head and opened the cupboard door.  One of the screws from the hinge fell to the counter top with a clatter.  Kirsten sighed.  She loved the old house, including the beautiful glass-front cupboards, but it seemed that one thing or another was constantly in need of maintenance.  She grabbed a screw driver from the junk drawer, slid the foot stool into place, and fastened the screw.  She opened and closed the door several times, assuring herself that the screw was tightly in place.

Kirsten took a dinner plate from the lower shelf and had to step on her tip toes to grab a glass from the top shelf.  She wondered why she hadn’t gotten one down while she had been on the step stool.  Some of the features of this house were certainly not built for someone as petite as Kirsten.

To her great delight, she discovered that the breadbox still held a single croissant.  She thanked her lucky stars that she wouldn’t have to settle for the bland alternative of whole wheat bread.

When Kirsten ducked her head inside the refrigerator, she was disappointed to see that Sam had eaten the last of the ham.  She stuck out her tongue and resigned herself to turkey.  She was happy to see that Sam had at least left a single slice of Swiss cheese behind.  She inhaled the aroma of the cheese.  Kirsten could be frugal with many of her purchases, but not with cheese.  The difference in flavor between a high grade of Swiss cheese and a bargain basement substitute was incalculable.

Kirsten grabbed the carton of milk from the bottom shelf and filled the glass nearly to the brim.  She replaced the carton, closed the refrigerator door, and carried the plate and glass to the table.

She took a long drink of the milk before taking a big bite from the sandwich.  The house was quiet, except for the faraway sounds of crickets chirping and the occasional creak as the house continued the century long process of settling onto the foundation.  Kirsten missed Sam when he was traveling on business, but she didn’t miss the ever-present blare of the television set that plague the house when he was around.

Every time I have a bad customer service experience (which seems to be increasingly frequently these days), I am reminded of my worst customer service experience ever. We turn back the clock to the year 2000(ish), when I was set to ditch my 56K modem for DSL.  I contacted my local phone carrier, Verizon, to get the ball rolling.

Several days later, I had everything in place.  I fired up the DSL modem and … nothing.

I gave a call to tech support.  They couldn’t figure out the problem, so they gave me the number of someone else to call.  This cycle repeated itself for an entire weekend, at the end of which I had twenty different numbers for Verizon scribbled on a sheet of paper (I’m not exaggerating).  Once, someone referred me back to the same area that referred me to them – but used the acronym for that area instead of the full name and gave me a different number than the one I had.  I’m not sure if this was out of spite or incompetence.

This entire experience was frustrating for many reasons.  Some of the troubleshooters were apparently hired off the street five minutes before the shift began.  Yes, the DSL modem is plugged into the power outlet, just as it was when the last person asked me. I work in IT, so I wanted to bang my head against the wall in response to some of the possible root causes they suggested.

The most frustrating aspect was the obvious fact that they had no way to track problems.  Every time I called, I had to repeat every single detail of my experience to the new “customer service” rep – by the end of the weekend, this took a lot of time.  I work for a company that utilizes a tracking system for problems.  If I route your call to another area, the new person immediately has the entire history of the problem.  This is a very, very good thing.

At the end of a very long weekend, I told them to just forget it and cancel my account.  I was just going to stick with 56K.  I couldn’t even justify getting cable internet.  At that time, I received free cable in my apartment, and getting cable internet would have meant switching to a different provider – meaning that I’d be paying for cable TV in addition to cable internet.  Regardless, the joy of high speed internet was not worth the hassle of fighting with Verizon.

While I was on the phone, the customer service rep gave me two options to return the modem.  I could have them send me a postage paid box, or I could simply drop it off at my local Verizon Phone Mart.  In an attempt to make things easier for them, I said I’d drop it off at the Verizon Phone Mart.  Hey, why incur shipping fees when I could easily hand it back to a member of their organization?

Well, apparently the folks at the Verizon Phone Mart didn’t realize that they were being used as an outlet to return DSL modems.  They had no idea what to do with the modem.  I told them I’d call Verizon back when I got home and have those folks touch base with the brick and mortar store.  The Phone Mart people agreed to give this a shot.

When I called Verizon back, they assured me that they would touch base with the Verizon Phone Mart and process the return.  Wonderful – problem solved.

About ten days later, I got a call from the Verizon Phone Mart, wanting to know what to do with the modem.  I told them that a Verizon representative should have contacted them about the details of the return.  Unfortunately, the customer service rep hadn’t actually followed through and contacted them.  Again, this wasn’t a case of me randomly showing up at the Verizon Phone Mart with the modem – I had been given this option by a customer service rep.

I drove to the store and picked up the modem.  The people at the Verizon Phone Mart seemed to be as much of a pawn in this as me, so there was no point getting upset at them.  I called Verizon again and had them send me the postage paid box and finally sent the modem back.  Wonderful – problem solved.

Well, not exactly.  For about six months afterward, I kept getting charged for DSL service.  It took a lengthy phone call each month to finally get charge taken off the bill.  Each time, I was assure that the system showed that I did not have DSL service and would not be charged in the future.  Each month, the charge reappeared.

The story does have a happy ending, though.  One customer service rep managed to actually stop the charges from appearing.  However, even this was not mistake free.  When the representative applied the credits, she credited something twice.

At this point, I had an ethical dilemma.  I had money that rightfully belong to Verizon – around $20, I believe.  Should I call to inform them of their mistake, or just keep my mouth shut?

After six months of battling with them on billing issues, I decided to just keep my mouth shut.  I didn’t really want to waste more of my time arguing with them in an attempt to return their money.  Even worse, I feared that the process of reversing this credit would cause the whole mess to start up again.

To this day, I refuse to consider Verizon when I make purchasing decisions.  Over the past decade, I’ve also told this story to a great many people in order to explain my hatred for Verizon.

I’ve been juggling a few balls lately – so what is the status?

I am happy to announce that Tip of the Iceberg and other Stories is complete!  The 99 page PDF will contain copies of every of my fiction stories this year, as well as a 5500+ word story Tip of the Iceberg.  Tip of the Iceberg will only appear in this PDF.  The only bad news is that this is one of the rare occasions when we will be charging for content.  However, our most loyal customers will receive a price break.

How long did it take to write Tip of the Iceberg?  About six months, I guess.  I started kicking around ideas for the anchor story for the 4th volume of my fiction around the time volume 3 hit the shelves.  I generated and abandoned quite a few ideas along the way.  While I’m confident that I settled on the right story for this volume, it’s conceivable that some of the other ideas will become the capstone stories in future volumes or that scaled down stories will find their way onto the blog.

I also finished the audio version of Tip of the Iceberg.  This is the audio for just the one story – not the entire collection.  The audio runs about 30 minutes and features Kosmo as the reader.

I will be selling this collection in three different ways:

• The PDF of Tip of the Iceberg and other Stories
• The MP3 audio version of Tip of the Iceberg
  
• A combo version that contains the PDF and the audio, at a reduced price

The official launch date will be on August 12.  As always, I’ll provide a few hundred words as teaser in order to lure you in and fork over a few of your hard earned bucks.  I expect the pricing to be about 15 cents per story.  So I’m trying not to nickel and dime you too much.  Oh, wait – 15 cents is a nickel and a dime.  So I guess I AM trying to nickel and dime you.

I’ve also been working on Mountains, Meadows, and Chasms, my entry for the Iowa Short Fiction Award.  The mountains, meadows, and chasms are not literal but rather metaphors for life – the good times, the bad times, and the everyday experiences.  Entries for the contest must be 150 pages, and I had no trouble collecting enough of my work to hit that page count.  After removing some stories that I wasn’t particularly proud of, the page count stands at 236.  This could fluctuate slightly, but at this point, I’m pretty much set on those stories being included.

During the next few months, I plan to scale down to six articles a week in The Soap Boxers.  This should allow me to focus a bit more attention on my novel, but unfortunately has been languishing lately.  I’d love to get more written in the novel, but I simply haven’t had time in recent months.  Hopefully skipping an article every week will free up at least a bit of time.

No, we’re not going to talk about the impact of discrimination on victims.  Nor or we going to talk about the effects of programs intended to level the playing field.

Instead, we’ll take a look from the other side – what is the impact of those doing the discrimination?

When you discriminate in the workplace, you are immediately throwing out qualified candidates.  Sometimes you might even be throwing out the most qualified candidate.  What does this cost you?  Money.

I really can’t grasp to concept of discriminating in the workplace.  I am a team coordinator for my company.  When we bring new people on board, the main focus is to add competent people.  There’s no hidden agenda to add only Caucasians, or men, or tall people.  It’s all about the skills.  And why not?  Competent people make your life easier, regardless of their gender, race, or sexual orientation.

For decades, the professional sports leagues were for whites only.  Then pioneers like baseball’s Branch Rickey realized that there was a large untapped potential.  Rickey signed Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier, and other teams followed suit.  Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947; the last team to integrate were the Red Sox when they added Pumpsie Green in 1959.

Even after the racial barrier were broken, stereotypes prevailed.  African-American players were not allowed to play the more cerebral positions (quarterback in football and pitcher in baseball) – with the reasoning that the race simply didn’t have the intelligence necessary for those positions.  Some teams were quicker than others to realize that this was hogwash (Bob Gibson?) – and those teams reaped the benefits of being a step ahead of the curve.

As pretty much everyone knows, I am a huge sports fan.  This really helped foster an idea of racial equality (or at least ambivalence) at an early age.  My first introduction to players was often on the radio.  The players were simply a name and a stat line.  I liked the players with the good stats and disliked the bums with the bad stats – race had nothing to do with my decision.

Not even writers have been immune from discrimination.  British novelist Mary Ann Evans wrote under the pen name of George Eliot to make sure that her works were taken seriously.  More recently, a female writer on Men With Pens used the pseudonym James Chartrand for the same reason.

The world of politics in the US has long been dominated by white men.  Inroads have been in recent decades, but minorities and women are still under-represented in the federal government.  This, of course, defies all logic.  We’re not even talking about “haves” and “have nots” in these cases.  We’re often talking about people with impressive academic credentials.  Why would an African-American woman with a law degree from Harvard be less qualified than a Caucasian male with a law degree from Yale?  (Unless, of course, you’re of the opinion that Harvard is vastly superior to Yale).  Certainly, they have are more alike than different.

Is there still room for a glass ceiling in the 21st century?  Certainly.  But it should be used appropriately – to keep the incompetent from rising to positions of power.

Yes, you read that correctly.  The Casual Observer will cease to exist in the near future.

In the beginning, the site was a lone Casual Observer (kosmo) expounding on topics that interested him.  Over the past 18 months, the staff has grown, and we have people jumping up on their soap boxes to talk about all sorts of topics.  That’s not exactly what I had in mind when I started the site.

What was I to do?  I had no choice.  The Casual Observer is dead.

However …

In its place, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, is The Soap Boxers.  All of the existing content from The Casual Observer has been carried forward to The Soap Boxers and the site’s design is remaining largely unchanged.  If you notice any problems with the site, let me know.  Please update your bookmarks.  We will be re-directingt traffic for a little while, to

RSS subscribers and email subscribers should not be affected.  I use a 3rd party (Feedburner) and handle the underlying RSS feeds, and I should just be able to redirect content from The Soap Boxers to be delivered to the subscribers.  However, if you noticed that you don’t receive anything new for a few days, this may indicate a problem.  In this case check the web site for a status. I don’t expect any problems, though.

How will the content change?

It won’t.  We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing now.  If you loved The Casual Observer, you should love The Soap Boxers.

Why The Soap Boxers?

One of the things I disliked about the old site was that the formal name of the site differed from the URL, due to my inability to get the corresponding .com address.  Because many of us are often on our virtual soap box, I kicked around a few related terms before settling on TheSoapBoxers.com.

You may notice that I’m using the term “soap box” instead of “soapbox”.  Why?  Because our writers don’t pull punches – they are Soap Boxers!  Using the two word variation of the term allows us to use both meanings 🙂

We will be back to the regular schedule on Monday.  Remember – update your bookmarks and tell all your friends.

We’re going into a short quiet period here at The Casual Observer.  Changes are afoot in the near future.  What sort of changes?  Well, if I told you, that would ruin the surprise!

We get a LOT of spam comments at The Casual Observer.  What is the point?  When people leave a comment, they can include a link to their own site as a “thank you” for commenting.  Spammers are trying to boost the number of links to their sites in order to boost the search engine rankings.

Thanks to our spam filter (Akismet), you rarely have to see any of them.  Some of them are pretty funny and/or weird – so todayI’ll share some with you.  The spam comments are in italics, my editorials are in bold.

Hello,
I am Lincoln and I am a Summer party Planning coordinator.
I realize, alot of people encounter quite a difficulty, finding the suitable Inspiration for their next Gathering!
Well, how about Bungee Basketball to make it a real success?

Take a look at Casino Party Pennsylvania! You be able to lease Bungee Basketball for nice prices!

Have fun at your upcoming Summer party, Lincoln

Bungee basketball? That sounds like fun.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, we think strongly this and love learning much more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, can you mind updating your weblog along with an increase of information? It is very useful for me.

Uh, but the article was 10 Things About Jamie Moyer.  I have no idea what they “learned” from a tongue-in-cheek article.

Percocet 93-490….

Percocet addiction recovery. Percocet. Percocet vs vicodon. Percocet extract how to shoot….

OK, the title of the article was Sick and Tired – but not that sort of sick.

Ihr habt eine schoene Webseite hier, und vielciht schaut Ihr euch auchmal meine an, ok Sex im Internet ist nicht jedermans Sache, aber eben meine erste Homepage. Danke und macht weiter so!

OK, it’s  been a few years since I took German in high school, but I can muddle through enough of this to figure out that it’s a very odd comment to leave on an article about baseball

Howdy, just a short note to say that i am new to your site however I am definitely the latest fan. Oh also to CHEER ON BRAZIL FOR WORLD CUP 2010!! GO BRAZIL!!

Swell, but this is relevant how?  Not only have we given the World Cup very little coverage (sorry) but this was left in response to an article that chronicled a day in the life of a chef.

These are the best of the comments, unfortunately.  The vast majority are simply lists of URLs to sites that sell prescription drugs.

I haven’t released a volume of my fiction since January.  With two little ones at home now, it has been more difficult to make progress on the longer story that I try to include as a bonus.  However, I have been making progress lately, and should be ready to deliver a new volume later this month or in early August.  I’m pushing for late July.

Instead of the naming convention I have used in the past (The Fiction of Kosmo: Volume X), this volume will be titled The Victimless Crime and Other Stories.  Not surprisingly, the main story will be The Victimless Crime.  I’ve had a lot of ideas for the centerpiece of the edition before settling on this.  Some of the other ideas may very well make their way into the centerpiece of a future edition.  At the beginning of this story, police are interviewing a man they believe witnessed a crime.  The witness misunderstands the situation and confesses to a murder.  The rest of the story chronicles the efforts of the police department to piece together the crime.  In an effort to be as true to life as possible, I have engaged the services of a former law enforcement officer to serve as a technical consultant.  His assistance has been very valuable so far.

Of course, I’ll also bundle a bunch of other stories with The Victimless Crime.  At this point, twenty six other stories will be included.  The shorter stories have all appeared on The Soap Boxers, but their inclusion in the PDF allows you easier access to them – not to mention the fact that I have proofread them a second time.  The final version will likely have at least 30 stories (including The Victimless Crime).  How long?  I think we’ll be look at 100 pages and around 30,000 words.

I’m also going to make an effort to simultaneously launch the audio version of The Victimless Crime.  There will be three different purchase options –  The PDF eBook, An MP3 Audio book narrated by Kosmo (just The Victimless Crime, not the other stories), and a combination edition that may include a small bonus.  What’s that bonus?  Kosmo doing a very short stand-up comedy routine.  I’m not guaranteeing this, but it’s a strong possibility.

I’m still working on the pricing.  As usual, I’ll try to keep prices low enough for anyone to afford.  Also as usual, regular readers and RSS subscribers will get a discount on the basic edition.

This is the fourth volume of fiction I have released. The combined word count will be around 80,000 words.  This should go a long way toward quelling any doubts I might have about my ability to write a novel.  Essentially, I have created a novel-length work – I’ve just done it one story at a time.

The audio book edition of The Cell Window continues to get good reviews.  If you haven’t bought it yet, purchase it today.  I’ll happily refund your money if you’re not satisfied.