Sunday, August 31, 2014

I'm Going on Vacation!


I'm leaving for New Orleans on a week long vacation today. I plan to hit a casino, and take a couple of plantation tours, among other things, including jotting down lots of notes for an upcoming book. 

Stay tuned, as I'll be posting pictures here and on my Instagram account if you want to follow.



Saturday, August 30, 2014

What Kind of Swag?



Readers, what type of swag do you like? What kind would you like to have if you had the chance to ask and receive?

Authors, what type of swag do you prefer to give away? If you've gone to a convention or book signing, what kind did you prefer?

Friday, August 29, 2014

Women in Science You Should Know


1) Mary Somerville translated many scientific texts and brought the achievements of her scientific contemporaries to a wider audience. Along with Caroline Herschel, Somerville was one of the first women members of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. The word “scientist” was coined in a review of one of her books, though it wasn’t applied to Somerville herself.

2) Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet — and went on to find eight in total. She also discovered several deep-sky objects, including the Sculptor Galaxy. King George III granted Caroline a £50 salary for her work, making her the first woman to earn a living from astronomy.

3) Mary Anning was a fossil hunter whose finds made an important contribution to the understanding of the Earth’s history during her lifetime. She found the very first ichthyosaur skeleton when she was just 12 years old, and the first two plesiosaur skeletons, among many others.

4) Emmy Noether was a leader in developing early abstract algebra. And she proved a theorem, which now bears her name, that links symmetries of nature to physical conversion laws. Einstein called her the “most significant” mathematician of her time.

5) Leavitt gave us the first step on a ladder that we still use to measure cosmic distances today. Working at Harvard College Observatory in 1912 she showed a link between the brightness of a Cepheid variable star and how long it takes to brighten and dim. This property means Cepheid variables are immensely useful for measuring distances in the universe.

6) Alice Catherine Evans was a microbiologist who championed the pasteurisation of milk, after discovering that microbes in unpasteurised milk could sicken humans. She was working at the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the time, but her work was only taken seriously when it was confirmed by other scientists.

7) Annie Maunder was top of her class when she studied mathematics at Cambridge in 1889. But she didn’t receive a BA — they were only awarded to men at the time. She went on to study the sun, in particular the solar cycle, with her husband. They documented what is now known as the Maunder minimum, a period of extreme quiet on the sun in the late 17th century.

8 ) Dorothy Hodgkin developed the technique of protein crystallography and confirmed the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12. She won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964 and was the second woman, the first being Florence Nightingale, to receive the Order of Merit.

9) Meitner was the first woman physics professor in Germany. She was working on nuclear physics with her colleague Otto Hahn when she was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938. While in Stockholm she received news from Hahn that their experiment had produced an unexpected element. Meitner realised it meant fission had taken place while Hahn was still trying to figure out what their data meant. He went on to win a Nobel prize for the discovery, while Meitner was left out.

10) Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsar, a fast-rotating, radiation-emitting star made almost entirely of neutrons, when she was a graduate student at Cambridge. Her Ph.D. supervisor Antony Hewish, along with Martin Ryle, went on to win a Nobel prize for their work on the discovery, but Bell Burnell was not included. She went on to be the first female president of the Institute of Physics. Now she is a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford.

11) Mildred Dresselhaus is often called the “queen of carbon science” and has been studying it in various forms for over 50 years. Now, graphene is hailed as a wonder material and using carbon in electronics is on the horizon. At 82, she’s still a professor at MIT and recently won the $1 million Kavli prize in nanoscience.

12) Rosalind Franklin earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University. She learned crystallography and X-ray diffraction, techniques that she applied to DNA fibers. One of her photographs provided key insights into DNA structure. Other scientists used it as the basis for their DNA model and took credit for the discovery.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Now You Know - Bell Peppers


Terrific Tip: Flip the bell peppers over to check their gender. The ones with four bumps are female and those with three bumps are male. The female peppers are full of seeds, but sweeter and better for eating raw and the males are better for cooking. Isn’t that cool?

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Trompe l'oeil - Incredible Art


Vancouver-based art student Fiona Tang creates large-scale trompe l’oeil drawings of animals that appear to burst forth from the paper upon which they were so expressively rendered. She uses a variety of materials to create these awesome optical illusions, including charcoal, acrylic paint, conté and chalk pastels.

We love the photos in which Tang poses with her pieces, emphasizing the effectiveness of her illusions. A large stag, with birds perched on his antlers, looks so solid that we’re still waiting to see steamy breath leave his nostrils. An enormous salt water crocodile raises its head from the rippling grey water in order to receive a gentle pat on the snout. A ferocious shark and powerful humpback whale emerge from opposite walls for an underwater face-off.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Re-released! PETER AND HIS WOLF, a Sensuously Erotic Retelling of the Classic Fairy Tale

Re-released! 

PETER AND HIS WOLF
A Sensuously Erotic Retelling of the Classic Fairy Tale
ISBN 978-1-941321-18-8
Word Count: 4.3K
$0.99

Do you remember hearing the musical story of  “Peter and the Wolf” by Prokofiev when you were in elementary school? About the boy who lived with his grandfather, and who captured a wolf by the tail? Did you ever wonder if the story was real? Did you ever wonder whatever happened to the wolf? More importantly, did you ever try to guess what happened to Peter after he captured the wolf?  

This is the true story of what happened. A story that has never been told...until now.

Click here for excerpt and buy links.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

World Scratch Map



 
World Scratch MapA classic world map where the continents are topped with a scratch-off foil surface so you can show off the places you’ve visited.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Now Available as an Audio Book! RUNNER'S MOON: JEBARAL

Now Available as an Audio Book!

RUNNER'S MOON: JEBARAL
Book 1 of the Runner's Moon Series
Sensuous Erotic Sci-Fi Romance
Narrated by Guy Veryzer
Running Time: 7 hrs, 43 min.

Click here to listen to an excerpt, and for buy links.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Xavier Axelson Returns as my Guest Author Tonight on "Other Worlds of Romance" on Blog Talk Radio

Good news! Xavier Axelson returns as my guest author tonight on "Other Worlds of Romance" on Blog Talk Radio! Come listen as he reads an excerpt from his new release, Lily, a paranormal romance.

Show time is 11 pm et/ 10 ct
You don't want to miss it!

* * *

What does one say when they realize their child is gone? Better yet, what does one say when that child returns, but is different?
This is the question Pryor must ask himself after his daughter, Lily, is dragged into the woods by a wolf and her body is never found. It isn't until he sees a wolf in the woods with eyes that resemble Lily's that he feels hope. And then something is whispered from deep within the woods, a promise for him to see Lily again.
One day...
But which day and for how long?
And then Pryor meets Ned, a silversmith who brings out desires that Pryor hasn't felt in years and helps him hatch a plan to keep Lily with him.

Now the question isn't about how much time Pryor will have with Lily, it's about how far he'll go to keep her with him.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Unwoven Light








 
Soo Sunny Park (b. Seoul, Korea) - Unwoven Light at Rice University’s Rice Gallery in Houston, Texas. Composed of 37 individual sculptural units, the installation uses iridescent plexi-glass embedded in pieces of a chain link fence to cast shimmering, colorful reflections across the spacious gallery.