Back home

I've got a little catching up to do.  365 Jobs will resume soon.

Meanwhile, for the rest of July, all my ebooks are on deep discount.  Like, 100% discount.  They're free.  This offer is good for the month of July.  Simply "purchase" the ebook from Smashwords.com.  Use the "buy" button, then enter the discount code SSWSF.  The ebooks are available in all ebook formats including Kindle.

Besides my previous titles, I'm pleased to announce that Four Dog Riot is newly available as an ebook.  Like the other titles, you can get it at Smashwords.  For July, it's free.  After that, it will cost 99 cents.

Some links:

Four Dog Riot  at Smashwords.

Clear Heart  at Smashwords.

Babcock  at Smashwords.

Boone Barnaby  at Smashwords.

Famous Potatoes  at Smashwords.

Remember, use the "buy" button, then enter the discount code SSWSF.  July only.

On Vacation

Gone fishin'...


Be back in a couple of weeks.

I've been posting every day for 182 consecutive days and loving every minute. 


If you're relatively new to this blog, here's a chance to catch up.  You can sample a few of the more popular posts by going to the 365 Jobs blog and looking at the right hand sidebar.  The list of "popular posts" on this Clear Heart blog tends to feature items that show up in search engines (such as "Scooter Board Ramp"), which makes for a rather strange list.  For some reason the 365 Jobs blog doesn't show up in search engines, so the list of "popular posts" is showing true popularity.


There's no internet access at the Blue Heron on Silver Lake, where I'll be.  No cell phone service.  No television.  Just stars...  Which is exactly why we're going there.  Peace.

Clear Heart podcast had a glitch

A very kind listener notified me that the last 6 episodes of Clear Heart couldn't be downloaded from iTunes nor directly from podiobooks.  Meanwhile I noticed an obnoxious loud "pop" at the beginning of many episodes of the Babcock podcast.

The missing episodes are now available.  There was a problem with Libsyn, the host.  They've fixed it.

The "pops" remain.  We'll find a solution...

Am I Still a Criminal?

In September of 2009 I became a criminal in Italy. My crime was to speak my opinion about an incompetent Italian prosecutor named Giuliano Mignini. Mignini responded by saying he would indict me for defamation and further that he would indict the journalist who quoted me and the newspaper that printed it.

Last week, Giuliano Mignini was found guilty by an Italian court of illegal phone tapping, abuse of high office, and dereliction of duty. He was sentenced to 16 months in jail.

Sound and Screen Combined

Mark Coker discusses the future of ebooks on GalleyCat.

Here's my two cents:

In all the prognostications about the future of ebooks, nobody seems to mention the obvious: Sound. Sound and screen combined. The audiodisc (formerly the audiotape) will be just as quaint as the printed book. Instead, the print and sound will converge into one. You can read the story, or you can listen to the story, or you can do both at the same time—on the same device.

Authors and publishers haven’t realized the implications of this convergence. As an author, I’m just beginning to figure it out. I stumbled into this intersection when I embraced podcasting a couple of years ago and, more recently, started converting my titles to ebooks. Two years of podcasting my novels has taught me how to use my voice dramatically, how to adapt my writing to the best features of my voice, and—perhaps the most exciting—how to integrate music into the story. I’m not talking about background music. I’m talking about music that is an integral piece of the plot.

In my first two podcast novels, Clear Heart and Boone Barnaby, I used music as an intro and outro to each segment. For my third podcast novel, Babcock, I continued the intro and outro music but also found a few opportunities to use music within certain episodes. I could do this because it was the story of a rock band, and their songs were part of the plot. I like the result, but I’m also frustrated by the fact that I wrote the novel in 1992 with no awareness that I might one day be singing parts of it to an audience, so it is written for the printed page, not taking full advantage of the possibility of musical drama.

I’m now writing a new novel about blues musicians. For the first time I’m creating a story with an awareness of how the music will be integrated into the podcast. I hope more authors try this. Soon I hope to post a rough draft of a sample chapter so you can judge for yourself.

(By the way, I'm sorry about the lack of posts to this blog recently, but as I said, I'm writing a novel. It takes all my time.)

Book Signing

I'll be selling and signing copies of my books this coming Sunday, December 6 at the Peninsula School Crafts Fair. Is a writer a craftsman? I think so. I'll be there among the wooden toys, the hand-dipped candles, the jars of honey, the tie-dye shirts.

I'll have a big stack of Clear Heart and another stack of Quake! and a few copies of my other books as well, including the hard-to-find underground classic, Famous Potatoes.

Peninsula School is on Peninsula Way in Menlo Park, California. The Crafts Fair runs from 11 to 4.

Stop by and say hi.

Interview

You can hear a new interview of me by a nice lady at Podioracket.com. I'm on the first 8 minutes of the show, talk a little about my background and about the making of Babcock.

Brick Blog!

If you like brickwork, and if you enjoyed one or another of my posts on the subject, I recommend this wonderful blog: St. Louis Mosaic.

As for my readers, if I have any, I apologize for the lapse in posting lately. We've had serious health issues in our family and have seen quite enough of Stanford Hospital for a long while. My wife is now fine (biopsy benign!) and I am slowly mending from various bodily insults. Enough said.

Babcock: The podcast

I have to apologize. I had the podcast of Babcock all ready to go a month ago with a theme song called "Papa's Blues" that comes straight out of the book. Just as I was getting ready to upload, I happened to be talking to my songwriting partner and we had one of those "aha!" moments - and suddenly a new song emerged, called "Dragonfly." If you're a creative person, these are the moments you live for when it seems like all the meandering threads of your life, and your partner's life, converge for one moment and something divine happens.

As with "Papa's Blues," the song "Dragonfly" also comes straight out of the book. Now I have to integrate it into the podcast. Sorry, but it's worth waiting for.

If you follow the links, you can listen to a preview of the songs:

Dragonfly

Papa's Blues

That book cover, by the way, is by a very talented artist named Shane Evans.

Great Review of Clear Heart

Last night I returned from Italy feeling sleepy and idiotic after eleven hours cooped up in an airplane. My muscles needed exercise while my brain needed sleep. Now I've had both, and when I check out the Internet after a three week absence, first thing I see is this great review of my book Clear Heart. The reviewer is Kari Hesse of The Village Carpenter. Here's part of what she said:

Well I didn't like his book....I LOVED his book. In fact, I couldn't put it down and sped through it faster than it takes me to read a magazine.

It's about a 55 year old ex-hippy carpenter named Wally—his bond with his workmen, love for his work, respect for wood, relationship with a "perky Presbyterian" and her kids, Job-like patience, and determination to build the perfect house, despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

But more than that—it's about the connection and interaction between men who are true craftsmen, their good-natured joking, routines and habits (like sometimes getting too friendly with female clients), temperaments, and respect for one another's capabilities. It's male bonding at its finest.

And it's filled with endearing characters like Juke, FrogGirl, Abe, Opal (okay, Opal kinda drove me crazy--that chick needs a chill pill!), and fast-paced, nail-biting mishaps.

It's about second chances, belief in the things that truly matter, mentoring, teaching, and friendship.

And it made me want to ask Wally: "You hiring?"

As for Italy, I have a lot to say. Not about tourism, but about craft, something the Italians know best. Instead of taking snapshots of statues and art like all the other tourists, I would be walking through some ancient village saying things like "Look at the size of the gluelam they used as a header over that garage door!" This is why my wife sometimes has to pretend she doesn't know me.

Let me sort through my 350 photos of Italian bricks, doorknobs, windows - and let me get a little more sleep - and I'll try to make sense of it all.

Reading tonight!

I'll be reading at Moon News Book Store in Half Moon Bay tonight, starting 7:30 p.m. at the open microphone. Come down and say hi.

Brag

Stephen Shepherd likes my book!

I love this part: "I liked the way it was laid out with small easy to read chapters. Short chapters in a book are great for being able to put the book down at the end of a chapter, then pick it up again with continuity. Well that didn’t happen, once I started the book, I just couldn’t put it down. I ended up ‘wasting’ a weekend to finish the book, but the weekend wasn’t wasted, it was well worth the time. It was a great read."

And this: "Now I have met many of the people in Joe’s novel, well not the real people but his characters represent the types of people I have met; quirky sub contractors, stupid clients and the like. As I would read through the pages, I began to associate people I know with characters in this work, so I could visualize them in my head, the characters came to life. At one point in the book, I found myself (I believe for the first time) actually rooting for fictional characters. The book is gripping."

Oh. And also this: "I wouldn’t have my (prude) sister read the book."

The full review is here.

A Death in the Family

I've posted about my brother before: first here, and then here.

He died yesterday morning. He was 66 years old.

Luz, the caregiver who adored him, was with him at the end.

After a day of sleep, full of morphine, Ed opened his eyes, saw Luz, laughed, and closed his eyes. Then gradually, he stopped breathing. It was 3 in the morning. He died at home, in his bedroom, surrounded by posters of trains. He always loved trains.

Later that morning, I came to his house and said my goodbyes. He was still in bed, looking peaceful and gaunt. His flesh was cold. His spirit was everywhere.

Ed was a rebel, a non-academic scholar, an original thinker. As the younger brother, my relationship with him was an endless adventure, a trying-to-catch-up.

Later that same day, I learned I have pneumonia. No, thank you, I don't think I'll catch up to Ed's latest move quite yet. It's "minor" pneumonia. I'm supposed to rest - which I will do later, I promise. Right now I have to go out and inspect a couple of houses.

Let's just say it's been a tough weekend so far.

Here's a photo of Ed performing Wagner's Die Meistersinger with the San Francisco Opera. He's the one in the center holding the staff.
Ed's life was something of an opera, too. I'll write about it when I gather my thoughts.

Clear Heart available on Kindle

If anybody out there has a Kindle, I have a favor to ask of you. Would you tell me how well the book survived being run through the digital grinder and sent to your Kindle screen? Does it look okay?

Here's a link to the Kindle edition: Clear Heart.

I don't have a Kindle, and I don't know anybody who has a Kindle. So I have no idea what's being sold to the world in my name. And it's my name, my reputation that will suffer if they did a bad job.

I already know it's a little different from the printed book, because I had to make some changes to the manuscript before they would accept it. Kindle won’t accept Unicode, if you know what that is (I didn’t). My manuscript contains a couple of Greek characters set in unicode (the symbol theta used in sine and cosine equations), so I had to rewrite a couple of sentences leaving out the equations, which is a shame. I wonder how many other books had their content rewritten to be published on Kindle?

Reading tonight

I'll be reading at an open mic at Moon News in Half Moon Bay tonight. It starts at 7:30 pm. It will be a warm and well-lit refuge on a dark and rainy night. Y'all come!

Boone Barnaby on iTunes

The podcast of Boone Barnaby is up and running on iTunes. Search the iTunes store for "Boone Barnaby" and then click on the "subscribe" button. The price? It's free.

Now how do I alert all the 10 to 12-year-olds of the world that this story is available and that they would like it? And that their parents will enjoy it just as much? (The great secret of children's books - the better ones, anyway - is that grown-ups usually enjoy them even more than their kids do.)

Seriously - how do you publicize to fourth, fifth, sixth graders? And how do you do it without spending any money?

For a free PDF of Boone Barnaby, click here. For a used paperback copy of the book - for the price of one penny (how do they make a profit?) - click here.

Update: Boone Barnaby podcast is live! (but not on iTunes yet)

The headline says it all. The podcast should be live on iTunes in a few days. I'll post here as soon as I learn that it's up and running. For those of you who are smarter than me, you can subscribe right now through podiobooks.com at this link: http://www.podiobooks.com/title/boone-barnaby/

I love podiobooks for hosting my podcasts, but I simply cannot figure out their subscription mechanism. If you're under 30, you don't have to figure it out—you were born knowing how to do this. For the rest of us, we have to wait for iTunes.

The image shows the original hardcover of Boone Barnaby published by Scholastic in 1990.

Boone Barnaby: the PDF

In 1990 Scholastic published my novel The Adventures of Boone Barnaby. In a few days my podcast of the novel will be up on Podiobooks.com. I'll announce it when it's out. For a podcast, I had to shorten the title to Boone Barnaby so it would be visible on those tiny ipod screens.

The book is out of print. I had planned to republish it just to make it available, but I see that Amazon is selling used copies for one penny! (Then, of course, they charge $3.99 for shipping.) I can't beat that price, so if you want a printed book of Adventures of Boone Barnaby (Apple Paperbacks), just click on the link.

Or if you want a PDF or any format of e-book of Boone Barnaby, it's available at Smashwords. And Amazon has it available as a Kindle edition here.

Speaking of pennies, they tell me Boone came within a hair of being a Newbery Honor Book that year but that one voting member was outraged by its "controversial subject matter." Twenty years later, that controversial subject matter** seems remarkably tame. It's a lighthearted, joyful, down-to-earth story—the only kind I seem capable of writing. Oh well. I made about $5,000 on the book. With a Newbery, I would've made about 100 times that much. Writing books is like buying a lottery ticket. And the odds are about as good.

For the record, the Newbery Honor Book (which means second place) that year was The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi. In first place, the Newbery Medal winner was Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. Good books, both of them.

**Controversial: There's some discussion of the Vietnam War as a less-than-noble endeavor. There's a father who smoked marijuana, didn't go crazy, and didn't go to jail. The word "fart" appears once. And one of Boone's friends has a "stepmom" who is living unwedded with a man. Shocking, isn't it? None of these items have much to do with a story that actually promotes rock solid family values. The book is in school libraries everywhere. Teachers read it aloud to their classes. Kids—and parents—send me e-mail saying "Thank you for writing this," and sometimes asking fascinating questions. It's for these things that I write, and keep on writing...

Fame

So I walked into a bar last week. The bartender squinted her eyes and said, "Hey! Are you Joe Cottonwood?"

"Yes."

"I knew you from your book cover. I just bought Clear Heart to give my boyfriend for Christmas."

Now that's fame. Earlier this year, I got an email from a bartender in Liverpool, England who'd read Famous Potatoes.

And speaking of honors, I woke up this morning to read:

2008 Founders Choice Awards

This year’s five Founders Choice Awards for excellence in serialized audiobook production for titles here on Podiobooks.com go to:

• Joe Cottonwood for Clear Heart
• Nathan Lowell for Double Share
• Basil Sands for Faithful Warrior
• Scott Sigler for Infected
• Peter James Froning for Letter from China

About the Founders Choice Awards

The Founders Choice Awards are given annually — well, they will be given annually — to serialized audiobooks of impeccable quality.

Hey. My podcast wins awards. And bartenders all over the world are buying my novels.

Impeccable quality and a happy new year, everybody!

Attention, shoppers...

For those of you who hate Amazon, I'm pleased that my novel Clear Heart can now be purchased at several fine establishments, including the San Gregorio Store in San Gregorio, CA (pop 287), serving the bicycle and surf trade. The store itself is well worth the trip. Good live music on weekends. You might even spot me somewhere near the bar, and you might spot my son playing guitar with John Fuller.
Mountain Made, seen in the above photo to the left of Alice's Restaurant in Woodside, CA, also has copies of Clear Heart. If you're out on your motorcycle and suddenly must have some good reading, stop by and check it out.
If your taste runs to the more conventional book store, Moon News in Half Moon Bay is a friendly, well-lit place which happens to sell Clear Heart. I go to the open mic there every couple of months and join other local writers for 10 minutes of whatever we feel like reading aloud.

I'd like to make my book available in at least one store in San Francisco, and the East Bay, and San Jose, and maybe in Marin - stores with friendly management who welcome local authors. Any suggestions on where I should go?