Promotedness, Copasetic, and Glaukenstucken

From what I’ve read in publishing, author, and reader forums, a lot of folks utilize the “Liked” counter when making their decisions to purchase books at Amazon. It seems to me that the people so influenced would be the ones who arrive at my book’s Amazon page after searching for books of a certain genre. In my case, they might be searching at goodreads or Library Thing or Amazon or the like for genres or subgenres such as mystery, thriller, suspense, or romantic suspense, or niches such as serial killer or high quality murder books destined for decades of greatness.

If you have read By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide and liked it or have not yet read it but would like to help promote it, I am providing the following guide to register your “promotedness.” (I like to make up at least one new word for nearly everything I write. Who knows? One day I might earn reference in the Merriam-Webster for a word such as copasetic, meaning “very satisfactory” and often erroneously attributed to Bill Robinson (AKA Mr. Bojangles) or glaukenstucken, meaning “feelings of guilt for having had previous feelings of schadenfreude and fictitiously attributed to the Melanie Lynskey’s character, Rose, on the TV sitcom, Two and a Half Men.)

To exercise your “promotedness,” go to this address:

http://www.amazon.com/Light-Novel-Serial-Homicide-ebook/dp/B004IK9BI0/

Then click on the “Liked” button at the right of the 4.5 stars and the link to 11 customer reviews. You can see the orangish button with the thumbs-up icon on it in the example below
Your kind assistance with the promotion of my novel will be most earnestly appreciated. Please have a lovely day on me.

A History of Lies

Many of you have heard or read my rant about that lying rag, The Weekly Reader. They sold that trash to us when I was in school. Some of my teachers would use the arrival day each week to fill something close to half of the school day. It took years to determine, but the facts make it obvious that facts were not necessarily The Weekly Reader's stock in trade.

Let me rehash and update my rant:

They told me that I would spend my adult years driving a hovercraft, that a four-day workweek would be the norm during my years of employment, and that Prince Charles would be the King of England. As you can see, their batting average ain't too hot on these three items.

The façade of truth continues to deteriorate. A few years ago, it was determined by astronomers that though Pluto still has full status at Disney, not so much in the universe. So we dropped from nine planets to eight. Just recently, it has been reported by astrologists that the periods of birth associated with the twelve houses of zodiac have been incorrect all of these years. My daughter, Erin, who is an esteemed educator, reminded me I needed to be agitated about that one.

Now there are rumblings in mathematical circles that pi might not be a number on which we can hang our hats. (Link to article about math dudes who want to dump pi for tau.)  Instead, they say, we should worship the square of pi, a number bearing the new moniker, tau. Well, excuse me, but if pi ain't right, why should multiplying it times itself make it better. Isn't that sort of like saying that two wrongs make a right. I have always had a problem with pi anyway, because they say it is square, as in "pi r squared." All who are Southern by the grace of God know that pie are not square, pie are round. Cornbread are square.

In summary, given the continual surfacing of falsehoods, I'm beginning to think that The Weekly Reader might be a front organization for politicians. We all know how devoutly they embrace the truth. What do you think?