The Sparrow's Nest

Here is one fundamental tip for selling books: Know Your Audience. I wasn't selling anything until I sat down and thought really hard about my audience. Knowing your audience means knowing WHO they are. After three days of serious thinking, I realized who my audience was, and after that, I made more sales in a month than I have in two years struggling on Twitter, Facebook, and all the social platforms. Drawing your audience to you doesn't mean you follow back every single person on Twitter or Instagram or anywhere else who follows you. It means sharing only content that is relevant to your book. Follow trains and link-to-your-book trains in the writing community won't do anything for you. It might get you one sale after you plug your book 30 something times. It'll definitely get already annoyed, annoying people annoyed with you. Then you'll get little rats tagging you in derogatory posts that you're advertising your own books and that it's a bad thing. I had...

The stories I've gotten published in The Scarlet Leaf Review have been updated to their proper websites, so now you can click on them and actually get to the stories. These stories are: Tiger, Midnight Dreams, Moon Dancer, and Keepress.

Cheesecake flavored coal cookies, only I make 'em! You might think you can make these exquisitely crafted cookies, but there is magic in these cookies. They are created directly from a certain cheesecake recipe stuck to the bottom of a spring form pan, which comes from the expensive kitchen store. There's nothing quite like these. How does one make a cookie out of a cheesecake recipe without changing the recipe, you ask? Magic and love, my friends, magic and love. You might think of a million ways to do it, and you might succeed in making a certain kind of cookie, but only when the smoke is belching from the oven and the coal you scrape out of it is glowing red will you have made these unique coal cookies. They burn your floor, they peel your fingers, they set off the fire alarms, but how lovely do they taste! They are worth the trip to the hospital guaranteed!

Cheesecake! What a lovely thing to celebrate on Valentine's Day! I've been wanting to try Japanese Cheesecake. I got me a very good recipe, at least I think I did. I bought the right sized spring form pan. I got all the ingredients and set them out on the counter, but then I got into the nitty gritty of the recipe. Apparently, my eggs were supposed to be a certain weight in grams. Eeeeeehhhh? Everything was measured in grams, and weight conversion to cups and tablespoons and ounces were like 500 grams equals 2.64759837r736t49ojf83 cups. The oven was supposed to be in Celsius degrees, not Fahrenheit. 100 degrees Celsius was 212 degrees Fahrenheit. How am I supposed to make my oven, which only hops around in fives, become 212?! Also, I'm over 7000 feet above sea level. People in the comment section of this video were asking about that, but the guy wouldn't answer. So I guess I was supposed to move down to the Valley, buy me a Celsius oven, a food weigher thing, and then c...

For the short story collection, I have finally choses which stories will go into it. There is one rare one published back in 2013 and three new stories that  have never been seen before. All together, there will be ten stories in the collection. What's fun is that they're all in the same universe, so I've left little Easter Eggs in some of the stories. Also, the official title is now "Haunted Mountains: Chilling Tales of Apache Land."

The other day, I put on a shirt I've had for a few years. As always, it was short and I couldn't lift my arms without it rising up. My pants have no respectable pockets and they like to slide off my hindquarters, as if they think I want to flash the public. The pants also think I want my shoes hanging out of skinny jeans for all to see, much like the butt crack it keeps trying to promote. When I'm in search of a dress, they're too short and immodest. I am so sick of this. Well, I have found the solution to my problems. I shall buy a bunch of short dresses and use them as shirts. E-shakti will provide me with the long dresses I want because they're customizable, and Duluth Trading Company will give me pants that don't slide off my butt and has a lot of pockets. AND they have pants that aren't those skinny jeans that make people look like apes. Their shirts are also nice and long. Both pants and shirts are made strong. HOORAY!

February 10, 2021 On the evening of February 9, 2021, a gray laptop computer was found dead in its room. Apparently it had been dead for several days. When authorities attempted to revive it, the power button would not respond, although the battery was at full power. The cause of death has been speculated to be a cup of water which fell on the keyboard last Saturday. It was working well afterward and its friends and family didn't see that anything was wrong. When the computer was dried out and put to sleep, it never woke up. The green button was glowing to indicate that there was still some brain activity, but after some serious reflection on the part of the family, they decided to pull the plug and let the computer go. The gray computer was a rebuilt dell laptop born on e-bay. It spent the last few years as a trusty assistant to horror author Julia Benally. It has produced a number of short stories, some of which are not yet published, and two books. The first book, the gray compu...

Making a ToC, or Table of Contents, WITH NUMBERS: First and foremost, you need to do your chapter headings. So after you have them all named and just right, with correct pagination, meaning chapter one starts on an odd number on the right hand side page, you need to go to HEADING ONE at the top of the page. HEADING ONE refers to this in the HOME tab: Right click "Heading 1" and click on "modify." It will open a window like this: This is the place where you design what you want your chapter heading to look like. Centered, colors, fonts, and everything. Now go down to "format" and click on "paragraph." Here you can mess with the spacing. Click "Okay." You can rename heading one so you can find it. Click "Okay." Now we apply the "heading one" which I have renamed "hello." This is how it looks before we apply the heading:  Make sure your cursor is on the line with the chapter heading, and then go up to your new...

June is coming and "Renzhies" will be ready to drop! It's so exciting! Zhin Zhin is the main character for this one. We get to see his backstory told in epistolary form, introducing new characters, hobnobbing with the old, and we shall be hating the new villain with the passion of a thousand supernovas.