Money Management and Living on a Budget for Freelancers – Part 1: Income
This not going to be a series of posts where I tell you to stop buying lattes at Starbucks (though I will talk about what I do instead). Nor am I going to magically fix your budget with a few suggestions – wish I could, especially in these times when many people are facing budget strain, freelancers not least. But over the past few months, as I’ve advised a number of new freelancers, I realized there numerous tips I wish I’d taken sooner, and which seemed new to my friends....
Read MorePrint-on-Demand Formatting for Better Royalties
CreateSpace is one of the most popular POD (print-on-demand) choices for self-publishing authors and small presses. Each time a book is ordered through Amazon or another retailer, CreateSpace prints the book and ships it. Each month, CreateSpace sends the author accrued royalties, after it takes its printing and distribution costs. The author doesn’t need to worry about managing an inventory of unsold books-all one needs to do is write the book and upload it with proper formatting. And...
Read MoreStory up at Perihelion! “Equations in the Mirror”
My science fiction story “Equations in the Mirror” is up at Perihelion Science Fiction. This is one of the few stories that ever required me to whip out a calculator (another is Ayema’s Fleet in the Battlespace Military Science Fiction anthology) and was based on a number of cool medical techniques I’d learned about. Being for a time a Paleolithic history/pre-history fan, I was delighted to learn that obsidian stone blades are still used by surgeons in the modern day....
Read MoreCurrently Reading: William Goldbloom Bloch, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel
This is a book that, fittingly perhaps, I am reading because I discovered it in the library. The library at American University, that is. Not the Library of Babel. Although this book could, conceivably, be discovered in the Library of Babel. I wouldn’t give much for your chances of finding it, but it’s possible. The central challenge Jorge Luis Borges poses to any writer is that he has, at least on a meta level, surpassed and completed us. Any story we can ever write has...
Read More