Posted on March 8, 2021
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This is part of the Compassion in Action series. If you just found this and are wondering what's going on, click here for chapter 1. Chapter 2 - Agitation Training   "When your mind is narrow, small things easily agitate you. Make your mind an ocean." - Lama Thubten Yeshe   In the previous chapter, we discussed a specific example of agitation: a member of our circle was sitting next to someone with a nervous bounce in his leg. As time went on, that little...

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Posted on March 8, 2021
What's New

Years ago, back before I was an "official" author, I had a very strong urge to write a book on spirituality. I've learned to listen to those urgings, so, with some time on my hands, I jumped in and started writing. When I was done with it, I wasn't sure what to do, so figured I'd send it off to a few spiritual book publishers and see what they thought. Unfortunately, I didn't really know how to write a query...

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Posted on March 7, 2021
What's New

Ok, I know this is supposed to be a blog about books and writing, but since I'm currently in the waiting-for-an-editor purgatory zone familiar to all authors, let's talk about something else. How about pillows? :-) I am usually a pretty easy-going guy, and usually don't have a lot of likes and dislikes to navigate in an average day. However, I tend to be awfully finicky when it comes to pillows. I have always had a ton of trouble finding a...

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Posted on November 19, 2020
What's New

Earlier this year, the audio rights to Killing Adam and The Earthling's Brother were acquired, and I've been waiting patiently for the production process to complete. Just yesterday, I was checking out the Amazon pages for these two books (authors are totally OCD with this stuff, didn't you know?), and I saw that there's now a placeholder for the audiobook version of The Earthling's Brother! It's due to be released Jan 7! I haven't heard anything yet, and am super excited...

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Posted on June 4, 2020
What's New

I've been a self-published author now for about two years, and, as other authors will confirm, the hardest part about this is finding a way to promote your work. You can spend 10 years writing the most amazing book, but no one will read it unless you figure a way to get people's attention. There are lots of ways to do this, and over these last two years I've tried quite a few. Some were great, and others weren't, but...

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Posted on February 25, 2020
What's New

Ella from @wonderouspages, a book review blog, is hosting a giveaway this month featuring The Earthling's Brother! She'll be accepting entries over the next couple weeks, and then will randomly select the winners. The grand prize is a personalized and signed physical copy, and the alternate prizes are 10 copies of the ebooks. I love the touch about adding a picture of an octopus on the Instagram thread! And yes, I know that this isn't going to make any sense...

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Posted on December 29, 2019
What's New

My second sci-fi novel is coming in January! It took about a year to put this together, and I'm super excited about finally being able to release it. Strangely, the hardest part about it was getting the the back-cover blurb right. I lost track of how many of those I wrote, but I'm guessing around twenty. Sometimes writing is easy and just flows, and other times it feeling like pushing a buick up a hill. I guess I've felt a...

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Posted on August 16, 2019
What's New

Pointe Patrol just hit #1 in Amazon's Disaster Relief category, and #21 in the hugely popular Memoir category! Time to celebrate! Ebooks have been discounted to $0.99 through August 23. If you've seen this book around and have been thinking about checking it out, please take advantage of this sale. And if you have been one of the people who have helped propel it up the charts, let me stop here and give you a huge THANKS. :-) Here's the link...

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Posted on May 29, 2019
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The Press Democrat is Santa Rosa's local newspaper. Although it's a smaller paper than in larger metropolitan areas, they really stepped up their game around the Tubbs Fire, and were honored to win a Pulitzer based on their coverage of that disaster. After weeks of pestering them to try and get some coverage for Pointe Patrol, I was surprised when one of their journalists reached out independently. It turns out that she was browsing through the books at the local...

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Posted on April 10, 2019
What's New

I'll be visiting Copperfield's in Santa Rosa on May 17th to give a talk about Pointe Patrol. I plan to share some slides, tell a few stories, and invite the audience to ask questions as well as share their own stories about what they went through during the Tubbs Fire. Pointe Patrol is a book that tells the story about what our neighborhood went through during the Tubbs Fire in October, 2017: "On October 9, 2017, California suffered one of the most...

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