April 2014 – John D Reinhart

Back on Examiner Again

Writing online for certain publishers is always a great rush. I enjoy watching the number spiral up at ScienceRay.com whenever there’s a chance to post an exoplanet piece. And getting published at Examiner.com is always a delight.

Examiner does a great job of making you feel like a part of their writing team. You get the job title of “Examiner” for whatever city you live in – I am the Santa Barbara NASA Examiner. At $.12 in earnings, the title hasn’t quite justified the expense of business cards, but it is nice to have one. Here’s the latest of my pieces published by them, the first in three years!: http://www.examiner.com/article/nasa-announces-forum-on-manned-missions-to-mars-1

The world for writers has changed, and will remain so just as long as the Internet stays free. When access to the world wide web is taxed, this wonderful opportunity to share your thoughts with the world will be lost.

On a slightly different note, the folks doing all that exoplanetary research have made an outstanding discovery: an Earth-sized, rocky-core planet orbiting another sun. You can find more about it here: http://scienceray.com/astronomy/earth-sized-exoplanet-discovered/

The Laughtrack is Not Dead

You remember those sitcoms from the 60’s and 70’s, don’t you? The ones with the canned laughter, like Bewitched and Gilligan’s Island?

Try out this experiment and see what you think… watch Edie and Eddie Open House, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCNUVClEp8w, and then watch Edie and Eddie New House, here: http://youtu.be/iQWdxj3pgKE.

Which one did you like better? The laughtrack comes from a pantomime video made by a Spanish fellow, and has just enough audience ambiance to make you think that maybe, maybe, someone really is watching.

In theory, you are supposed to like the laughtrack version better, because someone else is laughing. I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Don’t judge the quality of the video: it’s crummy. The point of the exercise is the audio, not the video. Concentrate, would you?

Let me know what you think!

What’s in a Name?

While we write our novels one at a time, we writers have to think about each book as part of an enterprise. How many books are in the Harry Potter series? Septimus Prime? The Name of this Book is a Secret? If a publisher is going to look at you, of course they’ll look at your talent as a writer, and at the ideas in your book. But they are looking beyond it, too. Is this an idea that has legs? Will there be more than just this one book? Do we want to invest our publishing machinery on a single book?

To that end, my book, PHINEAS CASWELL, is now titled MARIGOLD’S END. It ties in with the story, has a dramatic hook, and has the legs to be part of a series, which it will be. Number one in a series.

The energy behind the new title bled over into a new cover, which I think is exciting and intriguing at the same time. Now we’re getting somewhere!