Book 2 Wrap Up

After countless cases of Mt. Dew, Mocha Frapachino, Gatorade and Shaklee Energy Tea drinks (a.k.a. creative juice); after dozens of late-nighters, all-nighters and giant night-crawlers (a.k.a. "fangworms" in the book); after hours of blood, sweat, tears (yes, we did cry) and good ol' fashioned writing, rewriting and re-rewriting, Allan and I have at long last managed to put the wraps on the final draft of Hunter Brown and the Consuming Fire. Phew!

We shot the file off to our loving editors at Warner Press who will now begin the process of making us look good through the magic of editing.

If all goes well on the illustration side of things our book should be coming out 9.9.09. Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers.

As soon as we get the greenlight to share the first chapter we'll give those of you who helped with our blog tour (or those who bought the medallions) FREE access to read the first chapter extra "special" early!

Hunter Brown and the Secret of the Shadow is #1 Book on Blogs

According to Technorati, Hunter Brown took the #1 spot as the most popular book on blogs today. Thanks to all who have been chatting about our book out there...please keep spreading the word!

http://technorati.com/pop/books/

Customized Product Display!

A couple nights ago I spent several hours overhauling a standard book display to customize it with graphics for our Hunter Brown books. It was a fun project and the end result turned out alright. Let me know what you think. (Click the images to enlarge)

The picture of the second Hunter Brown book cover is attached to the header with velcro so that I can remove it and replace it with whatever the newest book cover will be.

The hardest part was lining up the giant tiled image that makes up the header. It took nine 8.5"x11" sheets of paper to create the image (which I mounted on black foam board with spray glue). The tiles were unforgiving when it came to lining them up perfectly. It was difficult to to make the image turn out right - but I think it turned out okay despite the difficulty.

Posting from your cell phone is fun! :-)

Ping.FM - A great way to update social networks!

I have to admit. Keeping up to date on my blogs and social networking sites has been a bit overwhelming at times. That's why I started looking for a tool that would allow me to better manage my time, by posting once to all of them.

My search turned up several solutions like Fuser.com, Minggl.com and SocialMedian.com but none of them did exactly what I was looking for. I was about to give up, when I came across Ping.fm and I have to say this is the closest thing to perfect as I can imagine.

Imagine, being able to post messages to all of your blogs and social networks with one click. Now, imagine being able to update your moods/statuses with one click as well (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn). This is what Ping.FM offers...but it's only the beginning.

With Ping.FM I can even create customized groups of social sites that I can post to using special tags that I assign. This way, I can update my facebook and myspace blogs without updating my professional accounts on LinkedIn or my company blog.

It's a fantastic service that promises to provide quicker access to my many points of contact with friends, regardless of where they check for updates from me.

Pictures and video can also be included in your messages/blog posts, but they didn't stop there. Ping.FM takes things a step further by allowing you to post to all of your sites/blogs via txt message if you would like. Blogging on the go!

Oh yeah, did I mention its FREE! I for one am pretty excited about this tool. A must have for multi-blog, multi-profile people who are losing their minds.

I just joined the Ping.fm movement. I'm updating my blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter posts all from one place! Suh-weet!