Quoth Og Mandino

"Never be satisfied with yesterday's accomplishments."

My Authorial Debut

The Thrilling Sequel

«  
  »

Try it before you buy it!

So it’s Friday already. I’m not quite sure how that happened. I think it has something to do with the rotation of the earth around the sun, but that’s a dangerous concept to be bruiting about so I think I will keep mum on the subject.

A subject I will not keep mum on is the impending release of my debut novel! Jesus, I know, right? It’s getting insufferable. But hang on, little tomatoes, only a week more until THE NATIVE STAR actually comes out and then I’ll shut up forever make these last couple of months look like sweet blushing virginal reticence by comparison.

Anyway, I wanted to mention the fact that the Prologue is available free on my website. Did you know that? I don’t think I’ve posted about it. And I’ll be posting Chapter 1 next Friday. And then the week after that (launch week!) Chapter 2 will be up in podcast form on Podcastle. So there you have it, three whole chapters of the book, which I sweated out of my forehead in the form of blood, right there for you. Free. Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?

Speaking of the Internet, at some point I need to post about my upcoming blog tour which will be happening in September. But that day is not today.

P.S. Attentive readers will note that not once in this post did I use the incredibly annoying construction “for free.” Because you don’t get something “for” free. You don’t exchange “free” for something. You get something “free” [of charge]. This moment of pedantry brought to you by THE NATIVE STAR, coming soon to fine booksellers nationwide!

August 20th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Marketing, Publishing, The Native Star
  • Rachel K

    RE: “for free” … perhaps you should look at the phrase “for free” as the logical conclusion to a series of similar statements like: “for a dollar” and “for 50 cents”. Sort of like when children, following the unspoken rules of grammar, say “buyed” instead of “bought” and “catched” instead of “caught”. Wrong but smart … not to mention internally consistent. PS: do you have the same gripes about “for nothing”?

  • http://www.demimonde.com M.K. Hobson

    Are you seriously going to defend the use of “for free” with me? You
    don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, Sister. Put in your
    mouthguard, I’m comin’ at you.

    “For free” is just plain indefensible, that’s all! “Fifty cents” or “a
    dollar” are discrete amounts. They are not the *absence* of amount. I
    cannot give you “free”. I cannot exchange “free” with you in return
    for some other thing.

    And as regards your comments about internal consistency … um, yeah.
    This is English we’re talking about, right? ;-P

    “For nothing” bothers me only in that it can have contradictory
    meanings. “I will exchange this thing in return for nothing” could
    mean “I will exchange it for nothing” (that is, I won’t exchange it at
    all) or “I will exchange it for nothing” (that is, you can have it
    without recriprocation.)

    It reminds me of that old Saturday Night Live sketch where the
    dayshift nuclear power plant technicians left a cryptic note for the
    night-shift nuclear power plant technicians: “You can’t let the
    reactor core get too hot.” They spent the whole skit trying to puzzle
    out whether that meant “don’t let it get too hot,” or “don’t worry,
    there’s no level of heat which it cannot withstand.”

    This was right after Three Mile Island. Given that I remember a
    Saturday Night Live skit from those days, you can see why I am
    becoming curmudgeonly.