Exactly a week ago, my father-in-law and I tackled a two-day project to cover the old basement floor of my home office with a product called DRIcore subfloor. Last Friday, I blogged about the history of the home office and detailed the ongoing struggle to keep the floor painted and dry. I finally concluded that based on counsel from others, DRIcore appeared to be the best product for me. The fact of life is that for many older basements (our basement floor was poured in 1926) there simply is no easy way to eliminate all moisture. As the DRIcore website says, “98 % of basements will have a moisture problem.” Lifting my house and pouring a new basement floor simply isn’t an option for me, and running a dehumidifier around the clock is costly as well. The benefit of DRIcore is that it actually raises the floor by about three-quarters of an…
Read more
See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8. What Is Unclean Speech? This past August, Kaitlin Nootbaar, a high school valedictorian in Oklahoma, realized she’d made a big mistake. During her May graduation speech, she’d used a curse word inspired by one of the Twilight movies. Now, because of this infraction, the school was withholding her diploma. According to the high school superintendent, Kaitlin had “used language that was inappropriate for a graduation exercise.” Why do I bring up this surprising story? Because it shows that even the world sometimes reveals a collective conscience, at least when it comes to bad language in certain contexts. I’ve observed this in my own experience. During my brief stint at FedEx in 2006, I heard language that would curl your hair. But once fellow employees learned I’d worked at a Bible college for a decade, they cleaned up their act in a…
Read more
A month or so ago, I had a one-hour phone consultation with Thomas Umstattd at Authormedia.com. This site offers Web guidance for authors and provides a number of fee-based services to make the most of one’s Web presence. Tom asked a lot of questions and talked through my author website and my marketing strategy (or lack thereof). What I learned wasn’t all that surprising. I’m not doing nearly enough online to promote myself as an author. He said my website didn’t even rank on Alexa.com (I had no idea what that was). I checked this morning, and now I rank. Now that I’m informed, I’m taking steps to improve. Because other authors (or really anyone trying to do online marketing) may be in the same boat, I’m happy to pass on some important things I learned (Authormedia.com didn’t pay me to say any of this). 1. Purchase the Domain for Your…
Read more
See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. #5: If a publisher accepts my novel for publication, I’ll be rich. Ha! Don’t quit your day job just yet. This is one of the most ridiculous myths of all, and it’s fueled by those glossy back covers of New York Times-best-selling authors in their expensive clothes and watches, hair perfectly coifed, wrinkles air-brushed away. For whatever reason, this image propagates in the general public, including newbies who don’t know better, the notion that anyone who publishes a novel must get paid a lot of money. The fact is, most published novelists aren’t rich—not even close. Once in a while, we hear about a struggling author like J. K. Rowling suddenly making it big. But those stories are definitely not the norm. The Reality Most published novelists I’ve gotten to know online (because I know few up here in the woods) continue the rat race…
Read more
