Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
I am very pleased to tell you that the hardcover, hardcopy, nearly 600-page beast Solid State is hot off the press and ready to ship. I would be delighted to send you a signed copy via Priority Mail, if you live in the good old U.S. of A. This was my final rewrite of the novel, and I am very proud of it.
I grew up in the deep south of the United States, and as such, I have a certain allegiance to Truman Capote. Here, in its entirety, is his short story, A Christmas Memory. Merry Christmas, Slopers.
Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!”
(more…)My experiment with publishing my first work of fiction, Solid State, is complete, and I’d say it went well. My main mission was to see if this 73-chapter monster could actually sustain the attention of my readers or not.
Judging from the daily view count chart, shown below, it seems that the number of actual readers day to day, as each chapter came out, was quite steady, so I’m pleased to see this chart didn’t simply slope down over time to zero. (The big dips early on were due to the fact I wasn’t sending out chapters on weekends, which folks insisted I change, so after that the graph is steady).
A small favor, if I may: if you read the book and enjoyed it, please leave a nice review on Amazon. It’ll only take a minute, and it’ll really help me out. Thank you!
I guess most folks found themselves in the same shoes as I’m wearing: that is to say, the computer they’ve got is all they need, and there’s no reason at all to upgrade until it breaks.
My personality doesn’t really lend itself to change. I guess that’s the nicest way I can put it. After I sold Prophet, my wife bugged me for weeks about doing a blog (yes, Baby Bear, blog; but that was then). I kept shunning the idea, decrying it as a fad. I finally gave in, starting a new livelihood that has persisted for two decades. I have no clue what I would have done without the birth of Slope.
