Like a Bug on a Windshield

For those of you who missed it in previous posts, my new novel Serving Murphy is now available as an ebook at amazon.com. I'm proving the link below. www.amazon.com/author/scottstephen Those of you on the east coast will want to hurry and download it now, so you'll have something to read while the power is off. I hope you come through the storm without a scratch, whether you buy my book or not. --Stephen P.

Life is what happens while you're neglecting your blog. The Kendle edition of my new novel, Serving Murphy, is now available on Amazon.com. It's a dystopian-futuristic suspensish story about a guy who has a kind of dull life serving warrants, until things start to fall apart and it gets complicated. You can "look inside" or download a sample for free. Also, on the subject of my novels, Eaters will be free to download Sunday and Monday, October 21, 22, 2012, so get your copy and read it. Eaters II will be out in a couple of months. Like most of you (big assumption there), I'm looking forward to the season premier of Southland, coming soon. Michael Cudlitz does a fine job of anchoring the cast and C. Thomas Howell plays the biggest jerk I've ever seen anywhere. The show makes me want to stay the hell out of south LA, but it's entertaining to visit there every week. I'd be sad that Lucy Liu is off the show, except that she is Dr. Watson on the new ser

It's not easy juggling career changes, job hunting, lurking about on Facebook, writing novels, neglecting a website and maintaining a blog. This probably is not the first time I've used the excuse that I am currently preparing one novel for publication while writing two more, but these are actually different novels. Serving Murphy has moved from being written, to the preparation for publication stage, Eaters II is now at 40,000 words and growing every day, and Terry's Rise, the sequel to Jordan's Fall, is in the early stages of note taking and research. If I don't find a full time job in the next few weeks, I will probably be blogging from a homeless shelter, but whatever. Life is good. In the wonderful world of television, if you have BBC America you must be fully engaged in the new season of Doctor Who by now. If you don't have BBC, you'll have to wait for this season to come to PBS next year, but you're likely watching previous seasons. If you aren&

Sorry, it's been a long time since my last post. I've been overwhelmingly busy starting and ending a new career and finishing my latest novel. I won't even go into the career, but I spent months taking classes and getting licensed before finding it just wasn't for me. The novel, on the other hand, I've likely referred to in previous blogs as Murphy, Sean Murphy and Serving Murphy. The current title and most likely for the novel to be published under is The Last Alias. I will wait a few weeks before rereading it and doing final revisions and rewrites. After that I will publish it on Amazon.com. My next novel, Eaters II, is already in the works and will likely be finished sometime next spring. In my last post, I promised to comment on all the television shows on my viewing list for the summer season. So much for that. If you've been paying attention, you probably know that most summer shows have already had their season finales, so I'll just provide a

Where have I been lately? I'm glad I asked. It's been so long that I've forgotten what I've shared and what I haven't, but this is my second month of unemployment and I still don't like it. I swear I had more free time when I was working. I spend at least thirty hours a week online looking for jobs (in case you've been gainfully employed for the past decade or so, all job hunting is now done on the internet). The few times I've ventured out asking for applications, they told me to go home and apply at their websites. Applying for a job online takes about three hours, including the personality profile. After spending all that time filling in little boxes, you get a message that says "thank you for revealing all your personal information, now click here to fill out the application for the company you thought you were applying to." Another three hours of filling in boxes and answering psychologically tricky questions and you get a message that

I can't believe it's already that time of year when I go off on my rant about the television industry and all the great shows that have been cancelled. As I think I've pointed out before, it's kind of silly for the networks to refer to this as the end of the "season," when there are so many interruptions during what was supposed to be a continuous thirteen weeks. The networks show a couple of episodes, then take a couple of weeks off because it's near the end of the football season and they don't want their ratings affected by the loss of a few people in cheese hats. Then they show an episode or two and it's the beginning of the college basketball idiocy, so they take four weeks off. A season of primetime television looks a lot like really good Swiss cheese because it has so many holes in it. In the past year alone, my ten hours a week of television viewing has required that I start recording and watching half a dozen new shows and/or shows I never

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. Then again, maybe not. Spring started out pleasant enough: I found myself unemployed against my will for the first time in more than 40 years in the work force; much of my neighborhood was terribly damaged in a tornado; and the weeds have overtaken my garden as never before. The hellish part is my novel. It seems that when the creative juices flow and the novel is practically writing itself, every little detail of life gets in the way and prevents me from actually writing. When I have time to sit down and write, I struggle to find the right words, I write whole chapters that don't fit with the plot and have to be scrapped or my characters simply sit around chatting to no particular end. This may not sound like hell, but being that writer, in that moment, it begins to seem like The Twilight Zone. Perhaps you'd have to be there. At the moment, I do have time to write, so I'd better get back to it before my phone begins to buzz wit

Writing a novel is not a spare-time endeavor, as we traditionally think. You know the old cliche where the newspaper man is hammering out the Great American Novel in the few hours a week he is both not working and sober? Well, at that rate he'd finish his tome in about three hundred years. Of course, there are those few writers, like Jack Kerouac, who load up on stimulants and crank out a novel in one sitting, but most writers have to think something before they write it. For me, writing is a process of translating what's in my head into written word on the page. Imagine, for example, watching a movie and simultaneously transcribing it into the most interesting prose possible. That's what it's like for me. While I'm creating a novel it exists in my mind as mostly visual information, with a few snippets of memorable dialog. The visual information must be described and the dialog must be fleshed out into a natural seeming conversation between characters. Once the fi

I hadn't planned on posting three times in one day, but things just happen sometimes. I just wanted to make a few flimsy excuses and justifications while this was fresh in my mind. First of all, I try very hard not to start a blog post with "I," so, sorry for that, but this is a special case. Second, I know I used to indent the first line in my paragraphs, but the interface changed and the tab key doesn't do it and I can't for the life of me remember how I did it before and just don't have a whole heck of a lot of time to spend learning yet another word processing program and why the heck can't they make these things a little more obvious like on a Mac? Next, quotation marks: I know I'm using inch symbols for quotes and foot symbols for apostrophies. Can't help it. Same answer as number two. And why? Why are those the defaults? Who ever uses foot and inch symbols in a text document anyway? Okay, fourth, missing hyphens: I caught those too late an

Writing is really hard, sometimes. Like when your computer thinks it's smarter than your are. My computer has been driving me crazy since I got it. It's a low-cost laptop (I'm not going to call it "cheap" for fear of offending it), with Windows 7 and Office 2010 installed. The little scroll pad has all kinds of enhanced functions that I didn't ask for. I just want a good old fashioned mouse-type thing that let's me scroll and select and maybe right click once in a while. This thing jumps back to the beginning, cuts and pastes, deletes, changes views, changes text formatting and targets long range missiles against countries I've never heard of, all while I'm just trying to type. Earlier today I was working on a new novel when Windows decided to update and reconfigure itself without even asking me. As if it wasn't bad enough having an alien entity take over the very machine I need to get something done in the precious little time I have availab

Today I'm happy to announce three big happenings in the world. First, I'm writing a new one of my inane blog posts (the one after this one, not this one); second, my third novel, Eaters, is finally available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.com; and third, tomorrow, Sunday, April 1, 2012, is free download day for my second novel, Jordan's Fall. Please feel free to read any of these (although reading Eaters wouldn't actually be free, but it wouldn't be very expensive and you'd help support me while I write my next novel, which is coming along nicely and will probably be available some time in the future). http://www.amazon.com/author/scottstephen So there you have it--a great weekend in the history of literature written by me. Enjoy! Or heck, enjoy your weekend even if it has nothing to do with me. I'm not as vain as you seem to think. Really. --Stephen P.

Thank you so much to all the nice people who downloaded copies of my digital novel My Year in the Barrel this past weekend. If you haven't downloaded it yet, better hurry before Amazon.com runs out of digits. I hope that most of you will read and enjoy the book and that the rest of you will "kinda like it." And I hope that you now want to read Jordan's Fall . And that you recommend them both to everyone you know. And that you will feverishly anticipate the publication of my next novel Eaters .  I'm doing the next-to-the-last edit of Eaters-- that's my top priority project. Next I have a shortstory to finish (titled "Warmest Regards, J") but that shouldn't take too long. Then my fourth novel, a thriller, is in the research phase. I had a title idea for it but I didn't write it down and I can't remember it, so the working title is Murphy. I have a few other concepts floating around but they'll have to wait 'til I clear a few oth

Tomorrow is a big day. Starting at 12:00am and running until 11:59pm, downloads of my novel My Year in the Barrel are free on Amazon.com. That means that potentially several people will discover the joy of reading over 50,000 of my words all in one place! https://www.amazon.com/author/scottstephen As the late, great Douglas Adams once told me:  "How did you get this number? Don't bloody call here again!" by which I think he meant that an author's work is in and of itself a gift of love to the reader with nothing more required. Just as we understand that when a cat leaves a small dead rodent on our doorstep it is intended as a message of love, we can only wish that it had been understood that when I left that large dead rodent on an old girlfriend's doorstep it was a message of love, not a threatening gesture requiring all those damn police police cars, a night in jail and that restraining order. But I digress. I think what I'm trying to say is that I hope

It's been a while since my last post, but it couldn't be helped. I've been busy getting two of my novels ready to publish on Amazon.com, as Kendle ebooks, and doing a final rewrite on a third novel. The first two, My Year in the Barrel and Jordan's Fall are now live and available for download. The third, Eaters , will be available in the next month or two. I'm also working on a new website, but more about that later. I hope to get back to writing my smile-worthy humorous blog posts (or at least not groan-worthy) in the near future. Until then, I hope you'll read free samples of my books at Amazon.com. www.amazon.com/author/scottstephen Stephen P.

My in-laws are trying to have me put away. I’m not paranoid, but I hear them whispering behind my back, spreading their lies, claiming I believe in the existence of Bigfoot, Mothmen, Unmarked Helicopters and Elvis Presley. They exaggerate, mind you--I’ve never believed in the existence of Elvis Presley. This whole thing is because I’m a writer. Decades of sitting sequestered in front of a keyboard has led to atrophied social skills. During a lull in conversation at a recent family function, the awkward silence provoked me into expounding on some of the latest conspiracy theories to my brother-in-law--something about the previous president being a pawn of the American Beef Council, just as his father was a pawn of the pork producers and William Jefferson Clinton was a pawn of the poultry industry. Before I could insert my own personal disclaimer on the whole thing, my brother-in-law was looking at me the way a chicken looks at a raccoon. You know, sideways out of one big round frighte