Power Hour Victory

I got some great news a few days ago and was sworn to uphold a code of secrecy on the matter. For the last several years, my friend Ali Spagnola has been embroiled in a long and nasty legal battle over the name of her drinking game/album, the Power Hour. Well, the courts finally came down with a decision, and ruled in Ali's favor. Yay!

That would be cool enough on its own, but Ali's chosen method of celebrating makes it even more awesome. She's running an Indiegogo campaign to fund a Power Hour tour, and she has made her whole Power Hour album $0.99 on Amazon's MP3 store. As a major supporter of lowering the barrier to entry by lowering or eliminating prices, I think this is a great move on her part.

Part of her campaign makes it cheap to try out the rest of her body of work, too. She has recorded three other albums over the years and you can get digital downloads of all four of them by kicking in $15 to her campaign, and by donating anything, you're casting a vote for your city to be part of the tour. Not such a bad way to celebrate a victory.

The core of Ali's battle was over a trademark dispute; specifically, a trademark bully was giving all sorts of people grief over the term Power Hour, and Ali wouldn't stand for it. He was getting her album removed from Amazon, her videos from YouTube, and there didn't seem to be much of anything she could do about it, except to go to court and spend insane amounts of money fighting a battle with no end in sight. Her ultimate victory is great news for anyone, musician or writer, who could use a little inspiration and hope in the face of trademark bullies.

Congratulations, Ali!

POWER HOUR IS FREE! Let's make this party happen! Check out the plan and cool stuff you can get here: http://www.indiegogo.com/powerhour

Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge

So it's time to consider challenges for the year again. Last year I failed miserably in my challenge to read 30 books. I had thought 30 was a safe number, given that in 2011, I successfully read 100 books. Shock/surprise; it turns out that writing a lot and reading a lot are kind of mutually exclusive. Who'd have thought it?

This year I'm going to go for 15 books. I did successfully finish reading 16 books last year, so this might sound like a soft target, but I plan to write more this year than I did last year, so the difficulty of finding reading time will only increase. This will become especially true once I'm working full time again.

2013 Reading Challenge

Gord has read 0 books toward his goal of 15 books.

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0 of 15 (0%)

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So here I sit at 0. Let's watch this counter tick upward as the year progresses! Thanks to shows like The Sword & Laser and This Week in Science, I'll face no shortage of books to read.

Another Experiment

I'm having some serious trouble getting things rolling again with The Price of Entanglement, and I think the reason is that I'm just not that thrilled with the current chapter. The whole bit at the clinic with Dr. Toure and Philip and all that, it's material that needs to make it into the story, but the way I've written it just rings a wrong note for me.

I'm thinking I may try alternating works, see how that impacts my view of the story. I banged my head against this one today, and got nowhere. Tomorrow I'm going to try heading back into The Diffident Hero and see how that one treats me; right now it's feeling like a more inviting journey. I was having a lot of fun writing that.

I also have some ideas for short stories I'm going to have to get out of my system soon too.

Losing the Thread

Sometimes I really regret that my method of writing pretty much requires me to write in a linear way. I never used to write strictly linearly; it has always felt fairly confining. Tonight I feel like I'd rather skip a little past the current section of The Price of Entanglement but that wouldn't work out so well for posting what I've written.

I'm going to let it stew a bit more tonight and post tomorrow.

CES is Just About Done

CES has been crazy even though I didn't set foot anywhere near the States, let alone Las Vegas. It's almost done though. The show is pretty much over, everyone's coming home, all the video that's going to be shot has probably been shot. All that's left is to keep on working through the backlog.

There is quite a backlog, but I've also long since found my groove with all of it, as I did last year, so I think it's going pretty well. And this means I can probably start writing fiction again in the next day or so. I can't wait; the long pause is not sitting well with me. I suppose it's probably just as valuable as I've found the genre-switching though. A cleanse of the palette to revive and refresh.