Wednesday, July 29, 2015

New Book - Hamelin

I've been neglecting my blog. My last entry was last year, 27 May 27 2014 to be exact. A lot has happened in 14 months of course but I probably won't be writing everything down. Some things need to stay private.

What's new?

Well, for starters, I retired from my job starting 1 July 2015. Yes, I finally took the plunge and filed for early retirement. I'm only 53 but I've got 21 years of service with the company. I've been wanting to concentrate on programming, training, and writing for sometime and I didn't want to wait for normal retirement. If I did, I'd probably be too old to start.

Next, I finished reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I started reading it in January of this year and turned the last page a few days ago. Why'd it take six months?

I only read in the mornings when I'm in the factory canteen eating breakfast. I'd get in a chapter or two but sometimes a friend would join me at my table forcing me to stop to give him/her my undivided attention. 

I'm not going to talk about Les Miserables here. I'm going to make a book review about it in the next installment of this blog.

Finally, I've got another book out!

Hamelin in Smashwords

Hamelin is a short (7,140 words) story about the return of the Pied Piper to Hamelin, seven hundred years after the events told in the original folktale. Like all of my other books, it started out as a series of notes in my Facebook account. What was supposed to be about three notes long turned into twelve. I compiled all the notes and pasted them to a Word document. After a little editing and formatting, I uploaded it to Smashwords yesterday and that was it. 24 hours later it has 29 downloads. If you want to check it out, go to:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/564065?ref=dejmarcelo and download it. It's free, by the way.

The cover was created using MS PowerPoint. I think it turned out quite well, even if I say so myself. I considered going to a professional book cover artist to make one for me but they're expensive. I have some talent working with drawing so I decided go DIY.

That's it for this entry. I hope I can be more productive in the future. It'll be easier if someone makes a comment every now and then. :-)