Please Stop Hitting my Forester

About five years ago, I bought a used 2006 Subaru Forester. The price was right, I needed a new car, and I wanted something versatile, because I have large dogs.

I think it's safe to say that it has been hit, more times, then all of the cars I have previously owned, combined. Thankfully none of the hits have been serious enough to require body work, but the car picks up one new dent or scratch, about every other month. It's been backed into at least once recently (the right fender is slightly bowed now) from the front, and twice from the rear (I had to replace one of the rear taillights, that was smashed, and the rear bumper and quarter panel don't quite match up anymore).

Then there are the shopping cart dents and scratches. The one from a home depot where someone let a bunch of something fall against my car and then fall over (dent above one of the doors, and a scratch in the window), hell I've even picked up two dents on the hood and a bunch on the roof of all places.

I don't know why people think it's okay to put dents in my car in parking lots, and then split. Yes, I know we have a lot of illegals here who can't drive (as well as a lot of semi-legals who also can't drive) who all have no ethics or morals at all, and who will run off whenever they damage someone's property. I know we also have a lot of regular citizens who do the same thing these days as well (but at least they tend to be better drivers, so getting hit by them isn't usual).

But please, really, stop hitting my car. I don't need anymore dents and scratches in it.

Free Stuff!

Well, I finished the short excerpt that covers what happens with Laria when she first visits earth in book 6 of Portals of Infinity. If you go to my author website (www.vanstry.net - link on the right sidebar) you'll see a tag on the left side of that page, for 'Free Stuff'. Click on that and you'll go to the new page I put up a few days ago, that contains mobi and epub versions of that short.

I figured as long as I was putting that up, I'd add a few other things! The 'Origin Story' for Will's sister Nikki is up there as well (25,000 words - it's a novella). I am giving that away for free, because a lot of the events in that story are covered, more or less, in book 3. This just gives it all from Nikki's perspective.

I also added to 'fanish' stories I wrote a while ago, about the 'Banner' character in Lisanne Norman's Sholan Alliance series. The first one is fairly short, (Recruitment) the second one is considerably longer, more of a novella than a short story.

If you haven't been to the website in a while, please check it out. As I mentioned a few months back, I added maps and sub-pages for each of the series that I write. Take a look and let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks,
-John
(PS, sorry about the way the mobi versions look, I need to find a different converter than Calibre for mobi files. I only just found out it has spacing issues.)

Server Died

My server (snowcloude.com, what the link on the right there points to) died about an hour ago.
Right now, it looks like a total loss, but we'll have to see.

I have a RAID5 in it, which we decided to go to a while ago, because they're more robust and we wanted to protect the data on the system. Well, checking it today, and one of the drives had died and  another one was throwing errors. So out to the store to buy two new drives.
We replaced the one that had died and let it rebuild, which it did just fine, and I guess it removed the bad sectors on the one throwing errors, because that one said it was now OK.

So, once that is all done we powered down the system, to put in a new backup drive (even with the raid we'd been doing backups, but the drive we had was no longer up to the task, so not everything was getting backed up). And apparently that killed the system. The raid is fried, apparently the raid card (very expensive raid card) decided to crap itself, and we've lost everything on the system. Some of it was backed up, but a lot of it was not.

I don't know when I'll get the system back up, we may be able to throw something temporary up for a while, but the server is 5 years old, so it may just be time to trash it and build a new one. I think if we do a raid again, we'll do a software raid, because then at least you're not spending a fortune on a fancy hardware raid controller, that only lasts a few years. Unlike the motherboard, which lasted a good long time.

EDIT: We were able to recover the system late last night. Still no idea why it crapped out on us. I immediately did a system wide backup to the new backup drive (now that we have one large enough). Not sure what the long term plan for that server is going to be right now though. Probably will have to start thinking about replacing it.

Yea, Bike's done

So, the part I've been waiting for came in a couple of days ago (stupid o-ring) and I got the bike back together and just ran it. Changed the clutch cylinder fluid while I was at it (hasn't been changed since I bought the bike in '03), found that whoever installed the bleeder valve clogged it, which was a surprise. Easily fixed though.
Cleaned and re-oiled the K&N air filter. Not sure how long it's been since I've done that last.
Put in fresh radiator fluid and bled the cooling system, now I'll do an oil change and put the fairings back on and it's done.

Now as long as that oil leak is truly fixed...

Portals of Infinity, Book One, on Sale 5th thru 7th!

Book one of the Portals of Infinity series (Champion for Hire) will go on sale tomorrow, at 99 cents for two days (Thursday and Friday) then $1.99 for two more (Sat & Sun).
So, if you're interested, but weren't sure, now you can check it out for just 99 cents!

http://amzn.to/1GLHGU4

A Few Comments on the New POI Book, Reprisal

A few things seem to have come up in the comments on the new book.

One is that there was little time spent talking about Laria's time acclimating to some of the changes she went through. To be honest, I had thought about writing on that, but I honestly didn't think people would be interested in reading it. Apparently that may have been a mistake, so I'm considering writing a short story, to go over the few weeks she and Will spent at the faire. If I do write it, (and I probably will) it will go up on my website, for free.

The other has to deal with Laria being able to bring something back, that William was not allowed to. Fel made the simple comment that 'she was carrying it, you weren't'. Which in this particular case is true. Now there has been some debate over this, and while I find it kinda cool that there are people into my writing enough to debate some of the aspects and plot points, there is actually more to it than was let on by Fel at that point.

I'm sorta debating how much I really want to go into it here, because I was thinking of using this as a minor plot point in Nikki's story, but yes, it is more complicated than people seem to be thinking. Yes, Laria was able to bring back an item that Will could not. Something that Will had not considered. Which may perhaps be a little surprising when you think how often he's trying to game the rules, but we all have our off days, and he had other things on his mind. Yes there are tech limits on what you can and can not bring into a world, but those limits are often about physics and the laws thereof.

Though not always. There is the rule about champions bringing in items/devices/etc of excessive tech, or higher tech, so you've already seen. There also appears to be a rule about bringing devices of significantly higher tech as well, but its only been hinted at, I don't think you've seen it applied yet. The rule on champions has affected Will in subtle ways in the previous books that you may not have noticed, otherwise all of the gods would simply recruit champions from high tech worlds and have them come to theirs and build high tech wonders and death machines (and then there would be no low tech worlds, or developing worlds).

This is why you haven't seen Will use his engineering skills to 'do great things'.

Also, most god's champions can not travel through portals. Will is Fel's first champion with that ability. Eveon is also the first of her god's with that ability. Tantrus, has had several, but then he is a very powerful and old (by that sphere's standards) god. The ability to sense portals is very rare. Until Will showed up in Hiland, no one in the kingdom, or any adjoining ones, had it. So random people stumbling in, with specialty items is going to be a very hit or miss proposition.

And therefore, because of all of this, you are going to see some very byzantine plots and behaviors by the gods revolving around or involving portals. Sometimes it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

Amazon owes me money...

Yeah, so Amazon screwed up and didn't pay out their royalties this month.

To anybody.

When you're a full time writer, and that's your income, that's kind of rough. Now they did pay out for all of the foreign stores, so that was enough to cover all the small bills, but things like the mortgage, my car payment?
Yeah, those are gonna be late.

Hey all of you who pirate my stuff! How about tossing me a little cash via the donate button so I can eat next month?

And Jeff, I'm willing to go back to QA work for a while to fix your problems, I sent you my resume, give me a call! You obviously need a QA director at KDP, because you have live production servers linking to dev ones. That's a pretty bad problem. But so is not paying people.

The Latest Portals of Infinity book is now available on Amazon

Portals of Infinity, Book six: Reprisal is now up on Amazon!
For those of you in the KU program, it WILL be enrolled in that program, as soon as I can submit it. So hopefully later tonight, but by tomorrow I'm sure.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017CI4BGQ

Portals of Infinity, Book Six: Reprisal Cover Photo

Hi all,

Well, Dane from ebooklaunch.com just delivered the cover for the new book to me, so I'll be submitting it to Amazon here in the next hour. That means it should be up for sale in about six hours from now (maybe sooner, these days you never know!)

Here's the cover:

First Draft done, halfway through the first rewrite

So book 6 of 'Portals of Infinity: Reprisal', is in the rewrite stage, and I'm about halfway through it.
Tonight it should go out to my beta readers, and Monday or Tuesday it will probably go out to my editor.
I'm still hopeful that it will be up for sale before Halloween, but I need to make sure everything in it is right. There are still two small scenes I've flagged for a rewrite, but those shouldn't take more than an hour to do.
But it will be out soon, it's in the final stages. Then I can take a few days to fix that annoying oil leak on my bike, gonna have to take the exhaust headers off to get at that one, probably check the valves and a few other things as long as I'm in there.

Some Comments about Lost Souls, the first of my Shrean Fantasy Novels

I decided to write this today, because I was thinking about one of the reviews of the novel. Someone was upset that it wasn't a Portals of Infinity book (which was why I but the 'Shrean Novel' tag on the cover, I didn't want there to be any confusion). But also because I think they missed some of the byplay that takes place in the novel. Maybe I didn't write it well enough? It is a book I wrote a while ago, maybe I should have reworked it more. But whichever, that is the reason for the comments below.


**Contains Spoilers**

First of all, yes, the Shrean books are NOT Portals of Infinity Books. They're meant to be different, and yes, aimed at a younger (and different) audience - generally speaking.
The lead character in the first one is one of those people who are all about 'duty, honor, country.' The kind of soldier who lives by the book, and lives and breathes the honor of his Queen. When he gets ordered to leave, and exiled, the idea of disobedience is alien to him, because everything he is, has come from his 'following the book'.

Ever seen 'Hot Fuzz'? (it's funny, you should if you haven't). The main character in that movie is actually the same sort of person. It's not until he gets shafted over doing what he's supposed to, that his eyes are (eventually) opened.

And in Lost Souls, that is what has happened to our hero. He's not really 'our hero' anymore. Oh, he's still a good person, he still tries to do right, and be honorable, but that book he lived by? Yeah, he's burned it. That code? Torn it up.

When it comes to the end of the story, what he does there is something he would never have done in his previous life. Instead of following the rules, he makes the rules follow him, he changes them for the one he loves, to get what HE wants and screw the rest if they don't like it.

I'm not sure everyone got that. Oh he still looks like he'll do whatever he's told, but at that point, he's just humoring them so he can get his revenge. Think of the several run ins he has with the King and the Queen in the short time he's around them in the book, the queen realizes that she's lost him, but shes feeling remorseful because she screwed herself when she screwed him, so she just gives him power cuts him loose. The King just doesn't want to see it, but does Jareth really show either one of them the kind of respect that you'd show your monarch?

Need Sick Days

The problem with being an indy is you don't get any sick days. I think I wrote a thousand words today (I needed to write about 7000). I think I'll try to write some more before bed, but I'm not so sure I'll be able to finish the first draft tomorrow, unless I can really rock it.

Guess we will just have to see.