I’m hitting the road early today, so today’s post has got to be short and sweet. But I wanted to tell my readers about something exciting I recently came across. If you know me, you know I like free. I constantly post about free Kindle books at my Facebook, so if the idea of free Kindle books appeals to you, please come and friend/follow me (https://www.facebook.com/adamblumer for free nonfiction and https://www.facebook.com/AdamBlumerNovelist for fiction). But free phone service, not free books, is why I’ve come calling today (pun intended). A few years ago, I came across Google Voice, and I can’t speak more highly of it. Google Voice gives you a free phone number, and you can send and receive free local and long-distance calls—even send text messages—within the US and Canada completely for free using your computer (via Internet access). Read more about it here: http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html. If you have Internet in your home (and most of…
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Note: From time to time, I plan to feature a handy gadget I enjoy using on my computer, since I spend so much time there anyhow. When possible, I will tie the gadget into my love of fiction writing. I’m sure someone’s thought of it, but so far, I haven’t seen anything burst on the scene for books like Spotify is for music. Oh wait. Some of you may not even know what Spotify, one my favorites free services, is or how it works. Here’s a quick description (minus the gobbledygook), thanks to Wikipedia: Spotify is a commercial music streaming service…Music can be browsed by artist, album, record label, genre or playlist as well as by direct searches. In short, one can listen to basically any music available in Spotify’s gargantuan library. And yes, it’s legal and free. The only drawback of the free service, of which I’m a subscriber, is the…
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A while back, several fans responded to a query on my Facebook author page about what I should write about at my blog. One response was: What do you like to read? Who are your favorite authors? Narrowing down the list is very difficult, because I frankly love to read so much (from suspense fiction to history to devotional books to young adult novels). But in my estimation a few novels/authors stand above the rest. Keep in mind that I’m starting with childhood and that I had a very active imagination then (still do). Today I want to talk about the highly underrated five-book series, The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander (published in the 1960s). The five books are The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron (Newberry Award Honor Book), The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King (Newberry Award Winner). Before there was The Hobbit. Before there was The Lord of…
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Several years ago, I discovered Erik Larson’s engrossing book Eric’s Storm about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas. When I read his The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (which weds the 1893 World’s Fair and serial killer H.H. Holmes), I was hooked. So it was with great expectations that I recently read his latest book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. Once again, Larson didn’t disappoint. Since college, where I minored in history, I’ve always loved books that wed history with suspense. Perhaps that’s why history has always played a major role in the suspense novels I like to write. If you think history is boring, you’ve never read Larson, who is a master at writing engrossing historical suspense. What adds to the intrigue is that his novels are true. Every line of dialogue in his…
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